cover image Santa Fe Fantasy: The Quest for the Golden City

Santa Fe Fantasy: The Quest for the Golden City

Elmo Baca. Clear Light Books, $34.95 (109pp) ISBN 978-0-940666-14-6

This beautiful album deciphers the mystique of Santa Fe, a city where the heritage of Spain and Old Mexico mingled with the powerful cultures of Native American peoples and the frontier ways of settlers pushing westward. Lured by the Spanish fantasy of Seven Cities of Gold, colonizers and adventurers instead found an elusive, magical quality in the air and light, a latent power and spirituality in New Mexico's landscape. In an informal, profusely illustrated text, full of lore on early Pueblo culture and Spanish colonial trading, Baca, director of the New Mexico Main Street Program, which carries out downtown revitalization projects, charts a visionary tradition extending from the Mimbres people's pottery (1000-1400) to the paintings of R.C. Gorman and Georgia O'Keeffe, Navajo artist Emmi Whitehorse and contemporary painters such as Douglas Johnson and Alyce Frank. He also surveys Sante Fe's bold postmodern architecture and furniture. (Mar.)