Santa Fe – The evening fashion show on May 9, 2025, hosted by the Southwestern Association for Indian Arts (SWAIA) at the Santa Fe Community Convention Center, revealed a deeper shift into the world of Native models performing expressive “catwalking” on the runway. Featuring new wearable art from six Native designers, the night offered an immersion into the creative approaches that fashion designers now take for their runway events. Each designer gave audiences a production filled with a wide variety of nuanced Indigenous character and style. Dancing Storm Designs The evening began with a couple stepping together for Dancing Storm…
Author: Michelle Lanteri
On Sunday, August 21, the Southwestern Association for Indian Arts (SWAIA) concluded its Santa Fe Indian Market festivities with the Indigenous Fashion Show. The venue was the Santa Fe Community Convention Center. This is the ninth year that Amber-Dawn Bear Robe (Siksika), produced the event. Bear Rose is an independent curator and art history professor at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Presented to a full house, the SWAIA runway featured new designs by Orlando Dugi (Navajo), Lauren Good Day (Arikara/Hidatsa/Blackfeet/Plains Cree), Skawennati (Mohawk), Patricia Michaels (Taos Pueblo), Sho Sho Esquiro (Kaska Dena/Cree), Jamie Okuma (Luiseño/Shoshone/Bannock), and duo Catherine Blackburn…
Cara Romero (Chemehuevi) hosted an exciting reception at her studio on Cerrillos Road on Thursday, August 15, 2019. The new works on view include a six-foot-high portrait of an Indigenized “Wonder Woman” that features a female hero celebrated on a grand scale and commemorated by the dynamic lighting in the image that seems to radiate from her. Lively depictions of Romero’s Chemehuevi relatives, a group of young boys, also energize the space with their iconic and performative poses now saved for reflection in photographic prints. Many intersections come from Romero’s photo-portraits that bring together Native ways of being, pop culture,…
IM: Edge at Santa Fe Indian Market 2018 offers audiences excitement through its preview and opening as intertribal gatherings. The exhibition and fashion show provided audiences no shortage of diversity in perspectives, media, and styles. Through this mosaic of expression, bridges formed between paintings, photographs, and wearable art. Protecting the earth took a strong presence as just one line of critical thought at IM: Edge. This foundational way of life shone boldly in artists’ personalized visual languages employed in photographs, paintings, and fashion. Visit IM: Edge at the Santa Fe Convention Center (201 W. Marcy Street) between 9 a.m. and 5…
Santa Fe Beads: A Universe of Meaning Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian An exhibition by curator Cheri Falkenstien-Doyle, Beads: A Universe of Meaning (May 14, 2017–April 15, 2018), emphasizes the time immemorial concept of intercultural syncretism embraced by Native American and First Nations peoples. Layers of beads, shells, ribbons, hide, fabric, and fringe are infused with ceremony, dreams, rights to knowledge, and coming-of-age moments. Through available loans from collectors and artists, this show features brilliant beadwork pieces mainly made by diverse Indigenous peoples from the Columbia River Plateau and Northern and Southern Plains, with a handful of works by…