The Pojoaque River Art Tour

SCRATCHING THE SURFACE OF POJOAQUE; Reflections on the Pojoaque River Art Tour.

By Trevor Burrowes, July, 2008

“Explore our loca lartists' nests in the Pojoaque River Valley, an eclectic and beautiful old farming community off Hwy 84/285 and Los Alamos Highway 502 north of Santa Fe, with a side flight into Pojoaque Pueblo and Nambé. Both native and introduced species enjoy its proximity to Santa Fe as well as the beauty and solitude it affords”. (Excerted from the Pojoaque River Art Tour web site.)

Pojoaque promises to be the next big thing on Santa Fe’s rural horizon. Although a land-conservation ethic pervades among its artists, as is the case elsewhere in New Mexico, the difference in Pojoaque is how this land ethic butts up against the monumental urbanizing thrusts within the Pojoaque Pueblo territory. Casinos, hotels, restaurants, some as part of the Southwest’s largest resort (Buffalo Thunder), are springing up without necessarily displacing the traditional produce-growing and animal husbandry here.

According to the New Mexico Tourism Department, “Buffalo Thunder is comprised of a Las Vegas-styled casino, state of the art conference center with 66,000 square feet of meeting, pre-function and event space, luxury themed spa, outdoor tennis facility, and Hale Irwin designed golf at Towa Golf Course (already open), Homewood Suites by Hilton (already open) and the Hilton. The Resort will feature seven fabulous restaurants, bars and lounges, including the Red Sage Restaurant by renowned Chef Mark Miller.”

But there’s a lot more to Pojoaque than this. Centered on the artist and farming communities, it is the world of the Pojoaque River Art Tour.

The quality of the rural landscape has attracted prominent residents – poet Arthur Sze and writer Sheri Tepper, for instance. Mrs. Tepper is a famous science-fiction writer, but Rancho Jacona, the property and horticultural oasis that she and husband Gene created and manage, also is renowned. I later found the Teppers to be gracious hosts, and Rancho Jacona full of stories. It was once the home of the McCulluch Chainsaw Co. and, earlier, part of the Roybal property that extended from Jacona to Agua Fria in Santa Fe. Its exotic farm animals -- goats, sheep, rabbits, peacocks -- fertilize the luxuriant plantings with “cool” compost. And I wish I had asked the significance of giving animal names to the “Twelve Rental Vacation Houses…set in a 35 acre oasis of gardens, trees and acequias.“

My introduction to Pojoaque artists (referred to in the tour guide as “nesting species”) came through Marianne Hornbuckle She is the soul of the Pojoaque River Art Tour, which she co-founded fifteen years ago. A tall, plainspoken Texas native, she and husband Bill Preston have lived for 25 years on what is now County Road 84.

Marianne’s own home was my first visit, and there I met husband Bill, a retiring man and sumi-e painter. He wore a T-shirt decorated with praying manti images that he had painted. He paints cactus flowers, one of which I saw and loved. It was dashing and assured. Marianne sculpts lovely little clay nudes, but her abstract paintings are of precise rectangular forms that contain and are surrounded by painterly atmospherics. Art is her job, and they both display work in Artistas de Santa Fe, a cooperative gallery in Santa Fe.

The front wall of their property has an Aztec feeling – adobe brick walls with rectangular cut-out openings. The front yard slopes gently down, past a cattle grate and massive, graceful Honey Locus and Rosa Rugosa trees, to their house. All around the house is their no-fuss, low-maintenance garden, despite which, the whitest ever iceberg roses bloom near a fence. Behind the back yard, an old apple orchard was cleared and is, it seems, a de facto part of their property. The house is 125 years old, and, they keep it going through ingenuity and an ethic of radical conservation that goes something like this: if it ain’t broke, don’t mess with it.

Marianne also facilitated my meeting with tour artist T.C. Williams, an exuberant ex-Marine who is extremely knowledgeable about the international art world. He refers to some of his large canvasses as “political cartoon murals.” Got Water appropriates a popular milk advertisement. Under the large letters of the title is a skeleton wearing a dunce cap and holding out an empty tumbler. Beside that figure is a giggling cactus. Large red and white drops of liquid rain down without having destination or utility. An historic landmark on the property is the quaint “Old Roybal Shop.”

THE OTHER POJOAQUE

While the art tour rightly celebrates its rural heritage, there is as yet no effort to weave together the urban aspects of the Pojoaque Pueblo developments with the tranquil heritage of the “traditional communities.” Many people I have talked with seem nonplussed. These developments fall outside their purview, rendering them helpless. But there may be potential for dialog between the two communities.

Pojoaque Pueblo (Background)

Pojoaque Pueblo is one of six Tewa-speaking villages in the northern Rio Grande Valley whose inhabitants date back to A.D. 900. It has continually been a nucleus of Indian settlement and a Pueblo center. Disruptions from Spanish, Mexican and other incursions, as well as from disease, caused repeated diminution and dispersal of the population. After a period of disorganization between 1912 and 1932, the Commissioner of Indian Affairs issued a call, based on the Indian Reorganization Act, for all tribal members to return to the reservation. In 1936, the Pueblo became a federally recognized Indian reservation encompassing 11,603 acres. Its comparatively small population is growing rapidly.

The Pojoaque Business District

The Pojoaque Business District is virtually a town which the main north/south corridor (Highway 84/285) runs through. I was struck with disbelief at what first appeared as an insensitive spread of pavement at odds with the rural beauty around it. This Pueblo-territory development which contains Cities of Gold Casino and Hotel and a sizable number of other businesses – a supermarket, banks, a police station, restaurants, two clinics, for instance -- bears no trace of Native American culture or of the region’s predominantly rural character.

Well, there is one conspicuous exception.

With landscape elements such as a rounded adobe tower, gigantic rock slabs, sculptures and other culture-specific iconography, the Poeh Cultural Center and Museum. is as exaggeratedly “cultural” as the rest of the business district is the opposite. The museum exhibits, which are quite elaborate, err on the side of caricature. But driving by the Pojoaque Business District one night, I saw the connection between the museum/center and its more drab surroundings. It struck me that the model for the nightscape of the business district might be Las Vegas, Nevada. Thus the plethora of night lights to produce a not-quite-successful glitziness. And so, caricature, Disney-fication, seems to lie at the heart of the park landscape, especially in the quality of the Poeh Museum.

The Business District could use a landscaping overhaul. Roads are too wide, traffic flow confusing, trees insufficient, asphalt paving excessive. Existing buildings would look better in a greener setting, and small renovations here and there might help. Rounding off the top edge of the supermarket would soften and calm it. And, among many doable interventions that might improve the area, there could be planted islands between narrower roadbeds, and roundabouts instead of stop-signs. Night lights could be shielded. Much asphalt could be removed to allow for the planting of drought-tolerant trees and shrubs and recharging of the aquifer. And these interventions are all aspects of the rural environment that encompasses the art tour. Maybe such improvements to the business district, softening its rough edges, could be the focus of a future art tour!

The Wellness Center

Revenue from tribal developments have also created a state-of-the-art community hub known as “The Wellness Center.” Located on a hill that seems impossibly out of the way, it’s like many good things in this area, somewhat shrouded in secrecy. This hub contains a public library, a Senior Center, an athletic track and sports field, a trail uniting the center with the Business District, a Boys and Girl’s (B&G) Club – one regularly sees about 20 brand new vans emblazoned with B&G Club insignia – and a pool.

The generosity of the tribal community, providing needed services for the general public, is at odds with the planning impasse between it and the non-Pueblo community. There are issues over water rights, mining and rural character that have yet to be resolved.

Travel

Highways often overlay two-lane roads, which in turn overlay old horse and foot trails. This might explain why Pojoaque has always been a Pueblo center, since the main north/south artery runs through it. This spine of Pojoaque Valley is the well-maintained, uncrowded Highway 84/285. Bordered to the south by Tesuque, Pojoaque Valley comprises the traditional communities and Pueblos of Cuyamungue, Pojoaque, Jacona, Jaconita, Nambe and El Rancho that took root by Nambe and Pojoaque river banks.

Like many local residents, I travel frequently to Santa Fe to work or to shop, and so this very lovely route has become part of my broader community.

Heading north from Santa Fe, hilly, shrub-dotted desert lands are interspersed with craggy, earthy cliffs. These are scenes out of a Western. The Sangre de Cristo and Jemez mountains, to the east and west respectively, form distant backdrops to this scenery. Tesuque, to the immediate north of Santa Fe, provides a five-acre-lot residential haven from California-style sprawl. Tesuque, through its exemplary land stewardship, has buffered Pojoaque Valley to its north. Its many expensive houses tend to blend into the undulating, muscular terrain. Tribally owned lands to the north of residential Tesuque and beyond as yet enjoy quasi protection against over-development.

Before leaving Tesuque you pass Camel Rock casino, fairly downplayed as casinos go. Then, boom, you get to Buffalo Thunder, located in the Cuyamunge area. This might be the largest resort of its kind in the nation. Applying my rose-colored lenses, I see it less as a set of gigantic buildings and more as artificial hills and cliffs. The adobe-colored Hilton Hotel pitted with dark arched openings, almost reminds me of Bandelier. I may be alone in this fantasy, however.

Pojoaque Business District comes soon after. It is the hub of the traditional communities of Jacona, Pojoaque, Jaconita, El Rancho and Nambe. East of 84/285, along with the traditional community of Lower Nambe, are tribal lands of the Pojoaque and Nambe Pueblos. The art tour, however, is an affair of the Pojoaque river course, which flows from east to west. and incorporates all the above communities except Nambe.

Pojoaque is about equidistant from Santa Fe and Los Alamos with nearby Bandelier National Monument. The High Road to Taos is one of the classic scenic drives in northern New Mexico and takes off from Pojoaque via SR 503 on the north side of town.
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Conclusion

The tour is the backbone of community identity and empowerment. There may not be another place in New Mexico with more potential to harmonize powerful urban, rural and wilderness landscape qualities that are immediately juxtaposed, and interconnected. One tool for this harmonization of landscape styles is the Pojoaque Community Strategic Plan that falls under the rubric of Santa Fe County Planning Department.

From the Tour website :
“The 16th annual POJOAQUE RIVER ART TOUR takes place On September 19 and 20,2009 Saturday and Sunday, from 10 am to 5 pm, eighteen studios located 16 miles north of Santa Fe in the pueblo of Pojoaque and along County Road 84 (parallels Hwy 502 to Los Alamos) through the traditional communities of Pojoaque, Jacona, Jaconita, and El Rancho.”