High Desert, Big Things
This is Part 2 of a series written from the road while my wife, daughter, and I take a long, rambling road trip around the U.S.
By the time we reached the turnoff sign with the three bullet holes, we knew we would be heading back to Albuquerque.
This was the day we left our idyllic little casita on a farm outside Santa Fe (with donkeys, chickens, cows, and a ram named Max) and meandered down the Turquoise Trail to stay in a yurt in Estancia, New Mexico.
Before I go further, you must understand that it was 93 degrees on this day, and that the yurt had no air conditioning and the bathroom situation was an outhouse with a compost toilet.
To reach Estancia, you must drive through a place called the Chilili Land Grant. This is an area where land was granted to landholders by the Mexican government in the 1840s and battles over ownership have been waged ever since. It’s quite possibly the least hospitable place I’ve ever been. Every sign on the side of the road says “Keep Out” or “No Land Sales” or “There Is Nothing Beyond This Fence Worth Risking Your Life Over.”
After that experience and a very long drive along dusty two-lanes, we reached the turnoff for our yurt. The road sign bore three bullet holes, at which point my wife started laughing, my daughter muttered a curse word, and I grumpily proclaimed, “It’s too hot to stay in a tent without air-conditioning and sh*t in a bucket.”
Yep.
And we turned around and headed to a very fancy Albuquerque hotel.
If you take a long trip with your family and you want not to be miserable for at least half of it, you learn to be flexible and you embrace improvisation. No matter how enjoyable Colorado’s legal recreational treats may be, they won’t get you through a 16-day, 3,000-mile family trip if you can’t let go of your expectations.
It’s hard to leave the high desert of New Mexico and begin the gradual trek east. Not because we don’t love the east, but because it’s June and the humidity has set in with a vengeance … and it’s a cicada year.
As we drove through New Mexico, Texas and Oklahoma, there was plenty (plennnnnty) of time to reflect on the past 11 days of travel.
The most exciting art experiences we’ve had on this trip have been immersive — this is in part due to traveling with a 15-year-old who is an artist but hates museums. The City Museum in St. Louis, Meow Wolf in Santa Fe (and beyond), and Factory Obscura in Oklahoma City aren’t just effective because they’re variants of deeply immersive art, which happens to be very popular right now. They’re successful because they are collaborative art projects that pull in multidisciplinary artists and embrace big, weird ideas fearlessly.
The alternate realities they create are so thoughtfully and joyfully constructed that they work for visitors with every level of expectation. Casual visitors can enjoy the secret passages, the psychedelic rooms, the gravity-defying walkways and disorienting caves. Guests who come for a story are presented with enough to keep them busy for weeks. Everyone who comes, whether as an art lover or a casual passerby, is gifted with a multilayered, deeply textured world built by a collaborative cohort bent on doing the best art they can and presenting it in the funnest way possible.
No wonder my daughter prefers them to museums.
I did get her to visit the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe, where I absolutely fell in love with the work of Linda Lomahaftewa, a Hopi/Choctaw painter with a 6-decade career embracing styles from abstract expressionism to psychedelia to folk art and well beyond. We also saw the BFA exhibition of IAIA (Institute of American Indian Arts) students, titled “Manifesting Our Destinies” featuring bold and visionary work.
All of the work at MoCNA remind the visitor that Indigenous art isn’t only pottery and beadwork, and that Indigenous people are contemporary people, not anthropological specimens relegated to history — in spite of American governmental and cultural attempts to do just that.
I could live in Santa Fe, but the cats and my stuff are in Nashville. So… back on the road.
Driving across big-shouldered America, we’re presented with a constantly changing menu of perspective, depth and experience.
We pass Cadillac Ranch and the Patriot Peace Garden in Texas — two examples of the blurred boundaries between art and roadside attraction.
We listen to Willie Nelson, Tobe Nwigwe, Bob Dylan, St. Vincent.
We discuss our best meals (Izanami in Santa Fe, Lulu’s Noodles in Kansas City).
We start planning our next trip.
When we arrive at our Oklahoma City rental (a little red caboose), I get out of the Jeep and my glasses immediately fog up. Welcome back to the humidity.
We still have three days left on our trip — visiting Crystal Bridges museum in Bentonville, Arkansas, taking a cooling river break in Van Buren, Missouri, then boogying home — but I’m already excited to get back to Nashville and start exploring how to build collaborative, multi-disciplinary art groups that make new work.
As we move forward out of COVID (fingers crossed) and into a post-pandemic, divided, tumultuous new now, how can we build inclusive art communities that call upon the strengths of different disciplines to build a robust whole that presents new, exciting work that adds value to people’s lives and pushes art forward? What can we learn from the Meow Wolfs and Factory Obscuras, from collaborative arts experts and new artists just starting out with little experience but lots of ideas? How can theatre makers and choreographers and composers and painters and poets collaborate on new ideas and new work? How can we embrace flexibility and improvisation to make new art that brings people together?
These are the things I’ve been chewing on as we meander from the Sangre de Cristos to the Ozarks, the Rio Grande to the Mississippi, crossing and re-crossing Route 66.
America is big. Its problems are big. But we have the capacity to do big things. Let’s do them together.
