Beyond Santa Fe 2015

A journey to tickle the senses led by culture expert Carole Douglas

Join us as we enter the creative heart of New Mexico and follow its beat through the enduring worlds of American Indian, pre-Columbian and Spanish colonial heritage all the way to Mexico. Explore pueblos, ‘painted’ deserts and ancient sites. Follow the muses of DH Lawrence, Georgia O’Keeffe, Ansel Adams and their likes in Taos. Enjoy a fun-filled night at the opera and experience one of the world’s great confluences of colour, creativity and culture at the Santa Fe International Folk Art Market. Delve into contemporary and traditional arts and crafts in markets, museums and artists’ studios. Uncover the folk inspiration behind Frida Kahlo’s style. Weave the Zapotec trail in Oaxaca and try your own hand under the guidance of traditional artisans. Travel with local knowledge while enjoying sensational cuisine, exciting rhythms and flamboyant fashions influenced by tradition, migration and the passage of time.

‘It’s all very beautiful and magical here – a quality that cannot be described. You have to live it and breathe it, let the sun bake it into you. The skies and the land are so enormous, and the detail so precise and exquisite that wherever you are, you are isolated in a glowing world between the micro and the macro, where everything is sideways under you and over you, and the clocks stopped long ago’
Ansel Adams writing to Stieglitz, 1937

‘All the earth colours of the painter’s palette are out there in the many miles of badlands. The light Naples yellow through ochres – orange and red and purple earth – even the soft earth greens.’
Georgia O’Keeffe on the red sand hills in New Mexico