While you’re in Santa Fe for Indian Market, don’t miss these Native art experiences featuring Cara Romero, Fritz Scholder, Diego Medina, Skye Tafoya, and more.
SANTA FE—This year’s Santa Fe Indian Market welcomes over 1,000 Indigenous artists in ten juried classifications and representing over 200 tribal nations. The Southwestern Association for Indian Arts has been the event’s driving force since its founding in 1922, making this the 103rd edition of the annual event. Indian Market takes place on the Santa Fe Plaza on Saturday and Sunday, August 16 to 17 from 8 am to 5 pm MDT.
Official SWAIA programming begins several days prior to Indian Market up to twelve blocks around the Plaza, including previews of the market, panel discussions, a fashion show, and much more. (Keep in mind that many of these events are ticketed.) However, the rest of the city—and Northern New Mexico—spotlights Native and Indigenous artists during the festival, so it’s vital to venture beyond the market.
Indigenous arts journalist Dan Ninham (Oneida) presents his top eleven picks for must-see Indigenous art shows and events that coincide with Indian Market 2025. They span from Plaza-side venues such as the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts and Hecho a Mano, to Santa Fe Railyard spaces Form & Concept and the Institute of Contemporary Art Santa Fe, all the way to Albuquerque’s Indian Pueblo Cultural Center. Ninham’s guide is arranged by district and includes links to other notable shows, and the Southwest Contemporary calendar features even more highlights.
Santa Fe Plaza
Breaking Ground: Art & Activism in Indigenous Taiwan
August 15, 2025–January 4, 2026
Museum of Contemporary Native Arts
Breaking Ground unites contemporary Indigenous artists from Taiwan whose works speak to the environmental and cultural consequences of colonization. Through themes of identity, self-representation, and resistance, the artists confront the impact of assimilationist policies, including the loss of Indigenous rights, homelands, language, and cultural knowledge that are concerns echoed by Native communities in the United States. In conjunction with the exhibition, Bulareyaung Dance Company presents a contemporary Taiwanese dance performance in MoCNA’s Art Park on Saturday, August 16, at 4 pm. From August 15 to 21, the museum screens Dancing Home, a newly released documentary about the company.
Margarita Paz-Pedro
August 1–September 1, 2025
Hecho a Mano
Margarita Paz-Pedro’s work draws from ideas of time, place, material, and culture, and their intersections with her Mexican-American, Laguna Pueblo, and Santa Clara Pueblo ancestries. Her solo exhibition Foundations: Land and Sky features a broad range of media with a focus on adobe, which she uses in wheel-thrown functional ceramics, hand-built sculptures, ceramic jewelry, painted and tiled murals, multimedia installations. She explores how the materiality of clay connects myriad facets of history and identity. In Foundations, Paz-Pedro debuts an installation incorporating adobe bricks and other handmade adobe forms, porcelain clay, personal and archival photos, a mural, and lighting elements.
Nearby: Margaret Tafoya: The Early Years and 2025 Santa Fe Indian Market Show at King Galleries; Tony Abeyta at the Owings Gallery on Palace.
Santa Fe Railyard
Reservation for Irony: Native Wit and Contemporary Realities
August 9–30, 2025
Institute of Contemporary Art Santa Fe
Produced and curated by Los Angeles–based Native art gallery Trotta-Bono Contemporary, this group exhibition explores how satire and humor serve as powerful tools in contemporary Native art and storytelling. Through painting, sculpture, photography, and installation, the artists traverse the absurd, embrace satire, and employ irony to navigate layered identities, confront colonial narratives, and reflect on social and political realities. Comedy becomes a strategy of resistance and revelation, cutting close to truth when language falters. The star-studded show includes Kent Monkman (Fisher River Cree Nation), Cara Romero (Chemehuevi/Southern Paiute), Nicholas Galanin (Sitka; Lingít and Unangax̂), Diego Romero (Cochiti Pueblo), Tony Abeyta (Diné), TC Cannon (Kiowa), Kathleen Wall (Jemez Pueblo), and George Alexander (Muscogee Creek), among others.
Indigenous Humor as Resistance: A Panel Discussion
Friday, August 15, 10:30 am MDT
Institute of Contemporary Art Santa Fe
Featuring artists Kent Monkman, Cara Romero, and Nicholas Galanin, and moderated by Tony Abeyta, this conversation expands on themes from the exhibition Reservation for Irony: Native Wit and Contemporary Realities—offering insight into how Native artists use wit to confront political distortion, reclaim narrative agency, and disrupt outdated legacies.
With All Due Respect: Stand-Up with Ricardo Cate & Friends
Saturday, August 16, 5-8 pm MDT
Institute of Contemporary Art Santa Fe
This one-night only stand-up comedy revue is organized by legendary cartoonist and comedian Ricardo Cate (Santo Domingo Pueblo/Kewa) and features a full slate of Indigenous comedians. Using contemporary art as a frame, they will irreverently explore how Indigenous humor shapes aesthetic practice and social critique.
The Language of Place
July 25–October 18, 2025
Form & Concept
Co-curated by Shaarbek Amankul (Indigenous Kyrgyz) and Heidi Brandow (Diné and Kanaka Maoli), this group exhibition offers a case study of the diversity of contemporary Indigenous art that coheres through shared worldviews informed by the cultural knowledge passed down through Indigenous languages, which, like the land, are fighting to stay alive. The exhibition features mixed-media painting by Brandow, photography by Amankul, and beadwork and photography by Tom Jones (Ho-Chunk). Brandow and Amankul debut textiles made in collaboration with Kyrgyzstani and Uzbekistani artisans, and Clementine Bordeaux (Sičáŋǧu Lakótapi [Rosebud Sioux Tribe]) contributes a pair of handmade moccasins.
Nearby: New Mythos at Cara Romero Gallery; Once Within a Time at SITE Santa Fe; Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation) at LewAllen Galleries; Sasai Fumie at TAI Modern; a new group exhibition at Blue Rain Gallery featuring Jeff Suina (Cochiti Pueblo), Jesse Littlebird (Laguna/Kewa Pueblos), Ryan Singer (Diné), and more.
Canyon Road
Diego Medina + Marcus Xavier Chormicle
August 15–September 21, 2025
Smoke the Moon
Smoke the Moon unveils solo exhibitions by Diego Medina (Piro-Manso-Tiwa) and Marcus Xavier Chormicle (Agua Caliente Band Of Cahuilla Indians, Lineal Descendant). Medina’s Shew Stone, his first solo show with the gallery, appears in the main exhibition space and features new oil paintings on linen. Scrying the natural world, his paintings communicate something transcendent and essential about the land. Medina’s work is currently on view at SITE Santa Fe as part of the twelfth SITE Santa Fe International. In an adjoining casita space, Las Cruces–based artist Chormicle presents new photography in Say Uncle. The body of work is an intimate portrait of the reciprocal ties between a land and its people. The gallery hosts multiple programs, including artist talks and a poetry reading, over the weekend.
Nearby: Patrick Dean Hubbell (Diné), Steven J. Yazzie (Diné/Laguna Pueblo), and The End of Nature at Gerald Peters Contemporary; San Ildefonso Pueblo National Treasures, 1850s–1970s and Contemporary Hopi Katsina Dolls at Adobe Gallery.
Albuquerque
Fritz Scholder
May 16–September 12, 2025
Tamarind Institute
The survey exhibition Fritz Scholder: 1974–1984 showcases twenty rarely seen lithographs created by the late Luiseño artist Fritz Scholder (1937-2005). Spanning a decade of his printmaking practice, the selected works reflect Scholder’s increasing confidence with bold color, layered imagery, and expressive mark making on the press, and chart his evolving balance between figuration and symbolic abstraction. Through his collaborations with Tamarind, Scholder navigated a space between Pop Art and the mythic, the known and the enigmatic. Lithography became a critical medium for Scholder, offering new avenues for experimentation in color, form, and narrative, and reflecting his deep interest in serial processes.
Skye Tafoya, SABA, + Arrowsoul Art Collective
August 9–November 2, 2025
Indian Pueblo Cultural Center
Skye Tafoya (Eastern Band Cherokee/Santa Clara Pueblo) and SABA team up in the exhibition Sentient Structures, on view in IPCC’s Artists Circle Gallery. In their Art Through Struggle space, Arrowsoul Art Collective presents the mural Indigenous Freeways: Southwest Wildstyle from North to South. Both exhibitions share new stories of the centrality of Pueblo architectural designs to Pueblo art. They incorporate Pueblo understandings of material, organization, and design into their processes of paper weaving, printmaking, and painting.
Nearby: Soundings: An Exhibition in Five Parts at 516 Arts; hazel batrezchavez at Richard Levy Gallery; Abstracting Nature at Albuquerque Museum.
Even More
There are plenty of important exhibitions to explore outside of Santa Fe’s main gallery districts during Indian Market. Seek out CENTER Santa Fe’s new exhibition space on Pacheco Street for Shayla Blatchford’s (Diné) Anti-Uranium Mapping Project. Head to Museum Hill to see Makowa: The Worlds Above Us at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, and a potent display at the Wheelwright Museum featuring Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians), Raven Halfmoon (Caddo Nation), and Nora Naranjo Morse (Tewa), among others. The aforementioned New Mythos at Cara Romero Gallery is co-curated by Romero and Jaime Herrell, and features Leah Mata Fragua, Diego Romero, Robert King, and more.
