SITE Santa Fe’s citywide exhibition Once Within a Time is about surreal flow—not completionism. Here’s your primer, with tips from insiders Cecilia Alemani and Brandee Caoba.
If you’re overwhelmed by the scope of the twelfth SITE Santa Fe International, opening Friday, June 27, you are not alone. It’s a head-spinning proposition: seventy-one contemporary artists, over three hundred objects, and fourteen venues across Santa Fe. “It is the most ambitious exhibition I have ever worked on,” says Brandee Caoba, SITE’s curator. “It has so many nuanced complexities.”
Caoba plays host to guest curator Cecilia Alemani for the International, which is titled Once Within a Time and explores threads of Southwest history and storytelling. Engaging a local-to-global slate of contemporary artists, the show aims to “present not as a history book but a visual symphony,” as I wrote in my in-depth preview featuring Alemani and six of the artists.
Once Within a Time is tightly under wraps until Friday, and there’s a compelling reason for that: the show is all about chance collisions, time-bending discoveries, and “fluidity” of experience, Caoba explains.
Visitors are positioned as participants as they traverse the spaces.
“There’s a beautiful constellation between all the fourteen venues, because [they’re] embedded with their own layered histories,” Caoba says. “Visitors are positioned as participants as they traverse the spaces, because they’re traversing geographically across the city, but also mentally through the entwined arts and history and stories.”
Completionism is therefore beside the point in Once Within a Time—the show is exuberantly non-linear, like an ornate wheel in spin. Here’s how to dive into the SITE Santa Fe International, which debuts with a full slate of weekend events, from any angle.
You can pick up a free map at SITE, which includes ticketing info for partner venues. All venues offer free admission on Saturday, June 28, and Sunday, June 29, and some have extended hours all weekend. SITE offers a free shuttle service between venue clusters on those dates as well.
Three Things to Know
- SITE Santa Fe’s biennial is foundational. When the SITE Santa Fe International debuted in 1995, it was one of just a few contemporary art biennials in the world, and the first with an international scope in the United States. “SITE started the idea of launching an international biennial… during the globalization of the art world,” says Alemani. “[It] proved to be a very prolific trampoline—a launching pad—for curators and experimental curatorial practices.”
- Cecilia Alemani has global presence. Alemani is an Italian curator based in New York City, and is the chief curator of High Line Art. She is the fourth curator to organize both the Venice Biennale and the SITE Santa Fe International, but the first to work with SITE after Venice. Her 2022 exhibition in Venice, The Milk of Dreams, included five capsule exhibitions of historical artworks that contextualized the contemporary art around them. Similarly, Once Within a Time will feature historical artworks and artifacts that trace “genealogical threads,” says Alemani.
- Once Within a Time is a family affair. In her curatorial process, Alemani chose twenty-seven regional “figures of interest”—real and fictional people from Southwest history—to weave into the show. This “family album,” as SITE has dubbed it, served as inspiration to the contemporary artists who made new works for the show, along with local scholars who wrote about the figures. The show’s familial spirit was influenced by the cyclical storytelling techniques of two longtime Santa Fe residents: experimental filmmaker Godfrey Reggio (whose 2023 film Once Within a Time inspired the show’s title) and the late Kiowa novelist and poet N. Scott Momaday.
Venues
Santa Fe Railyard
SITE Santa Fe
1606 Paseo de Peralta
SITE hosts the largest passage of Once Within a Time, featuring sixty-six names including contemporary and historical artists. Many of the living artists in the main exhibition also contributed to other displays across town, and about half of them made new works for the International. SITE occupies an extensively renovated former beer warehouse in Santa Fe’s Railyard District, which ushered in the railroad in 1880.
Participants: Louise Lawler, Shui Wang, Maryam Hoseini, Helen Cordero, Dominique Knowles, Simone Leigh, N. Scott Momaday, Patricia Ayres, Gustave Baumann, Louise Bonnet, Santiago de Paoli, D.H. Lawrence, Mire Lee, Greg Mac Gregor, Sidsel Meineche Hansen, Katja Seib, Penny Siopis, Doña Tules, Gisèle Vienne, Norman Zammitt, Yunyao Zhang, Willa Cather, Maureen Gruben, Dionne Lee, Pop Chalee (Merina Lujan), Ruyi Zhang, Godfrey Reggio, Awa Tsireh (Alfonso Roybal), Julian Martinez, Heechan Kim, Vladimir Nabokov, Eliot Porter, Uman, Ximena Garrido-Lecca, Joanna Keane Lopez, Terran Last Gun, Diego Medina, Agnes Pelton, Florence Miller Pierce, Maja Ruznic, Rebecca Salsbury James, Francis Schlatter, Luis Tapia, Ana Vaz, Will Wilson, Candice Lin, Nora Turato, Minerva Cuevas, Autumn Chacon, Frederick Hammersley, Diego Maron, Will Rawls, Marilou Schultz
Events: The opening weekend festivities include a free opening celebration (June 27, 6 pm) and a by-registration curator talk and artist panel (June 28, 2-3:30 pm).
Santa Fe Railyard Park
740 Cerrillos Rd
The Railyard Park, which borders SITE’s southern perimeter, hosts art by Ximena Garrido-Lecca. The Peruvian artist is known for her work on postcolonial land use—a rich line of inquiry in a park that sprung from intensive development efforts in the early 2000s, which transformed the former industrial zone into an arts district.
Santa Fe Plaza + Downtown
New Mexico History Museum
Palace of the Governors, 113 Lincoln Ave
Directly facing the historic Santa Fe Plaza, the New Mexico History Museum features works by Brooklyn-based conceptual artist (and 2025 Guggenheim Fellow) Charisse Pearlina Weston and Santa Fe–based artist Daisy Quezada Ureña. Their work appears in the Palace of the Governors, a historical seat of government dating to 1610 and held by Spanish, Mexican, and American colonial forces.
New Mexico Museum of Art
St. Francis Auditorium, 107 West Palace Ave
Bosnian American contemporary artist Maja Ruznic, who is based in New Mexico and appeared in the 2024 Whitney Biennial, occupies the New Mexico Museum of Art’s St. Francis Auditorium. The hall’s site-specific history paintings about the Spanish Conquest are ripe for contemporary intervention. NMMA is the oldest art museum in the state, founded in 1917.
Shiprock Santa Fe
53 Old Santa Fe Trail, 2nd Floor
Chinese contemporary artist Zhang Yunyao, known for haunting, large-scale felt portraits, occupies the second floor of the Silver Building on the Plaza, which has a long mercantile legacy.
Doodlet’s
120 Don Gaspar at Water St
David Horvitz, a Los Angeles–based conceptual artist known for poetic, Internet-inflected gestures, fills a window at a beloved downtown toy store founded in 1955.
Best Daze Cannabis Shop
128 West Palace Ave, Suite C
Weed shops have dotted downtown Santa Fe since New Mexico legalized cannabis in 2021. Omari Douglin, a Jamaican-born, New York–based painter and installation artist, activates one such establishment.
Santa Fe Village Shopping Mall
227 Don Gaspar, Unit 13
Santa Fe Village is a rambling and ramshackle tourist haunt two blocks from the Plaza—the perfect spot for Indian artist Amol K. Patil to critique caste, labor, and movement from local and international angles. Patil exhibited at Documenta in Kassel, Germany, in 2022.
Las Palomas Hotel
Water Street Shed, 492-423 West Water St
Las Palomas is a family compound-turned-boutique hotel—a signifier of Santa Fe’s late-1900s transformation into a cosmopolitan art center. Vancouver-based artist Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill (Cree and Métis) illuminates Indigenous and colonial legacies among its mid-19th century casitas.
Museum Hill
Museum of International Folk Art
Lloyd’s Treasure Chest, 706 Camino Lejo
Chinese artist Zhang Xu Zan blends Taiwanese and global folktales into haunting new media art and sculptural installations. Alemani worked with him early this year on a High Line project, and now she’s bringing his “fairytale underworlds” to the Museum of International Folk Art. The museum is famous for its 1982 Girard Wing, which draws from the collection of midcentury modern design duo Alexander and Susan Girard. About 90% of their 10,000-object amassment is entombed in the museum’s underground archives.
Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian
Klah Gallery, 704 Camino Lejo
In one of the most populated displays outside of the main exhibition at SITE, six participants stir the energy in the Wheelwright’s 1937 architectural marvel, an eight-sided structure inspired by a Diné/Navajo hogan. Featured artists include experimental filmmaker Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk Nation/Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians), a current museum-world dynamo, and Emmi Whitehorse (Diné), who appears in the brand-new exhibition Abstracting Nature at the Albuquerque Museum.
Participants: John Chee Arviso, Cristina Flores Pescorán, Raven Halfmoon, Sky Hopinka, Nora Naranjo Morse, Emmi Whitehorse
Event: Artist performances at the Wheelwright Museum, Sunday, June 29, 11 am, 12-1 pm, 2 pm
Elsewhere
New Mexico Military Museum
1050 Old Pecos Trail
Another substantial—and particularly charged—display occupies the 1938 Old Santa Fe Armory, a key World War II storage compound and induction center. Six participants tangle with this radiating narrative, including multidisciplinary Lebanese artist Ali Cherri, who appeared in Alemani’s 2022 Venice Biennale, and the late Light and Space sculptor John McCracken, who lived between Santa Fe and New York for decades.
Participants: Ali Cherri, Karla Knight, Looking Glasses, John McCracken, Hira Nabi, Joseph E. Yoakum
Finquita
(Formerly Shidoni Gallery and Sculpture Garden)
1508 Bishops Lodge Rd, Tesuque, NM
In 1989, the Los Angeles Times called Shidoni Gallery and Sculpture Garden “one of the nation’s largest and most prestigious bronze-sculpture foundries.” Situated just north of Santa Fe proper in the census-designated village of Tesuque, the massive operation shuttered (following years of financial troubles) in 2022. Now the site of an art and land use project, the complex’s weathered and patinated surfaces form a stage for eleven International participants. That includes Thai multimedia artist Korakrit Arunanondchai (Venice Biennale 2019), Mexican American composer and artist Guillermo Galindo (Documenta 14, 2017)—and the mythological Fire Spirit who battles Zozobra each year in Santa Fe.
Participants: Korakrit Arunanondchai, The Fire Spirit (archenemy of Zozobra), Guillermo Galindo, Max Hooper Schneider, David Horvitz, Archbishop Nitten Ishida, Saodat Ismailova, Na Mira, Ni-huil, Pablo Romero, Agnes Scherer
Special Projects
Axle Contemporary
Mobile art space
Location varies, Santa Fe, NM + elsewhere
“I think the idea… is to spread [the International] across the city—and maybe outside the city a little bit,” says Matthew Chase-Daniel, cofounder of Axle Contemporary. He and cofounder Jerry Wellman, both Santa Fe–based artist-curators, are taking their portion of the International on the road in their gallery-on-wheels: a 1970 stepvan they renovated in 2010. They’re hosting three sequential mini-shows with artists from the larger exhibition, starting with Radio Tomada, a participatory community radio broadcast by Autumn Chacon (Diné) that opens June 27 in front of SITE. Subsequent projects by Guillermo Galindo and David Horvitz flesh out their schedule through January 13, 2026.
“We’ll be in Galisteo, in Pojoaque at the Poeh Center, at the Española Farmers Market, in Dixon for the 300th anniversary of their land grant, in Taos, in Talpa, in Questa,” Chase-Daniel says. Wellman adds, “Our intention from the beginning was to get art out there. I believe everyone likes art, you want to bring it out to them.”
Center for Contemporary Arts Santa Fe
1050 Old Pecos Trail
Despite its recent near-closure, Center for Contemporary Arts joins in the action with a free screening of Wael Shawky‘s I Am Hymns of the New Temples (2023). The Egyptian-born, Philadelphia- and Alexandria-based artist is renowned for his ambitious new media and performance works exploring historical narratives through puppetry and storytelling. He exhibited the short film Drama 1882—an eight-chapter libretto on colonial conflict—in the Egyptian pavilion at the 2024 Venice Biennale.
Event: Film screening by Wael Shawky, Sunday, June 29, 10:30 am
Galisteo Dam
82 Dam Crest Road, Peña Blanca, NM
In August, Autumn Chacon (Diné) presents Malinxe (2024), her opera featuring composer and violinist Laura Ortman (White Mountain Apache), musician and journalist Marisa Demarco as La Malinche, and artist Jeffrey Gibson (Choctaw and Cherokee) portraying the spirit of La Llorona. Chacon toured the piece to New York last year. This rendition unfolds at the Galisteo Dam, which was completed by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers in 1970 and dramatically altered the ecology of the area.
