The Insider’s View: Studio Tours Across New Mexico

Artist studio tours across New Mexico illustrate the enduring power of creative exchange—and give visitors an insider’s view of the artistic process.

Tania Marines has Lisianthus on the mind. The funnel-shaped flower, native to the Southwest, Mexico, and parts of the Caribbean, is quietly incubating in her greenhouse at One Straw Farm in Dixon. She planted the seeds in February, and when we spoke in mid-March, they were already seedlings. She was thinking about potting them up, tending them, moving them to one of the farm’s flower fields, and eventually, drying the pink, white, and blue blooms in silica sand to craft into one of her signature creations.

“It’s the start of the process,” Marines, who works under the moniker Season’s Muse, says. “And with the tour in November, the process comes full circle. You know how they say ‘plant a seed’ as a metaphor for a new idea? For me, it’s literal, too.” Marines’s art—elaborate dried arrangements of both cultivated and wildcrafted plants—is one of more than thirty-five stops on the Dixon Studio Tour, which takes place the first week of November.

As the longest continually running studio tour in New Mexico, the Dixon tour is emblematic of the range and tenacity of studio tours throughout the state, of which there are more than nineteen, ranging from the northernmost stretches in Questa to the more southerly reaches of Las Cruces. In Dixon, artists who work in diverse media like Marines’s dried floral arrangements, as well as ceramics, textiles, jewelry, and paint, all throw open the doors to their studios one weekend a year to share their processes, their space, and the work itself with visitors from across the state—and even, Marines notes, from across the globe. For visitors, the experience is part driving tour, part scavenger hunt as they follow a map to participating studios in far-flung rural spots or nestled in the heart of the city.

Marines, who has been participating in the Dixon tour since 2013, sees it as an occasion to connect more deeply with her community of patrons and collaborators and share flashes of inspiration. “It’s an opportunity to welcome people into our world, our home, our space,” she says, meaning the small-scale organic farm, which she runs alongside her partner Ric and their children. “With a farm like this, people can come and view the work, but they can also see the flower room where everything dries, and they can walk in my footsteps through the fields, down to the river, and along the acequia that irrigates our fields. It’s an intimate look at an artist’s life, and in my case, you can see the art, as well as where my inspiration comes from, which is the natural world around me,” she says.

For some artists, like Laura McIndoo, a ceramicist participating in the Sandia Heights tour on the northeastern edge of Albuquerque, the tour isn’t just about connecting with new patrons—it links together fellow artists in a shared mission that can be truly galvanizing. “I’m astounded at the level of talent in my own neighborhood,” she says. “It really defines the personality of the Heights. And in the last few years, I have been more and more involved with planning the tour, so I’m much more aware of how much goes on behind the scenes… It takes a tremendous amount of work and organization to pull this event off. It requires collaboration for things to run smoothly.” McIndoo, who makes delicate yet functional hand-built and wheel-thrown ceramic pieces laced with botanical motifs and geometric shapes, sees artists working in concert every year during the tour in September. “At each stop, between two and four artists are showing together,” she says, offering up an example of what she means when she waxes poetic about the friendship and mutual support that plays out every year during the months of planning as well as the weekend itself.

While creating inroads with one another and their community, many artists are also empowered through the tours to sell their work directly, bypassing a sometimes claustrophobic representation and gallery process. Instead, they create informal—yet intimate—networks of exchange. “A lot of people come back year after year,” Marines observes. “Women tend to connect strongly with my work, and I see a lot of women coming in, purchasing things for other women, like their mothers. I’ve always felt called to bridge gaps between generations like that. The stories that we each have to tell help us unfold knowledge, generation after generation, and also between generations.”

The dozens of studio tours that happen throughout New Mexico, starting in spring and extending through late fall, are a flashpoint for such unfolding. With every tour weekend, stories, processes, and inspirations are made not just more tangible, but more durable. New Mexico’s studio tours illustrate the simple fact that what is most enduring tends to be what’s shared. And we’re all invited to participate in the exchange.