Clockwise: Sculptures and paintings at the Allan Houser Studio and Sculpture Garden in Santa Fe.
their family praying for ‘Our Lady.’” Santa Fe’s art museums include the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum with more than 1,100 of the artist’s drawings, paintings, abstracts, and sculptures, with depictions ranging from New York cityscapes to New Mexico’s rugged land- scape. Housed in a pueblo-like building, it’s the country’s only museum dedicated to a famous woman artist. On nearby Museum Hill, the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture has an incred- ible collection of exhibits showcasing the history and contemporary life of the Navajo, Apache, Pueblo, and Hopi cul- tures. Our guide points out 9,000-year- old spear points and, what I find most interesting, a 13th-century 150-foot- long net for catching rabbits made from human hair. Across Museum Hill’s wide plaza is
what the locals will tell you is Santa Fe’s best museum, the Museum of International Folk Art. Dioramas with ceramic model huts, houses, and carved figurines showcase cultures from around the world spanning different centu- ries—recreating a pueblo feast day, a 19th-century U.S. town, and a Chinese Village, to name a few. I leave Santa Fe on U.S. Route 84/285, turning onto State Road 503, the start of the so-called High Road to Taos. The curving road takes me along craggy hills of stratified rock layers before reach- ing the small town of Chimayó where I visit the Santuario de Chimayó, a simple adobe and wooden church where pil- grims talk of miracles and healing. The church was supposedly built on the spot where a crucifix mysteriously appeared to villager Don Bernardo Abeyta
in 1810. “Legend says the man who found the crucifix took it to the nearest Catholic church about ten miles from here, but it kept appearing back here,” says sanctuary spokeswoman Joanne Dupont Sandoval. “They’d take it back, but it kept reappear- ing back here again.” The church, completed in 1816, now houses the crucifix within the main altar. On the left of the altar is a small room with “holy dirt.” Pilgrims hoping and praying for miracles and healing can take small scoops of the sacred dirt home. “As the crucifix is inaccessible anymore for people to touch, the healing powers got attributed to the dirt,” Sandoval explains. “As human beings we sometimes need something tangible to be able to connect with God.” The next day, I head south of Santa Fe to see the bronze, steel and stone sculp-
14 COAST TO COAST SPRING 2015
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