History as a Chorus: Reimagining Monumentality at SITE Santa Fe

A few miles outside of Santa Fe is a former foundry turned gallery space known as Finquita. In the main building, David Horvitz’s installation flock of wingless birds (2025) fills the floor of a large room with 4,555 glass marbles, representing the number of Japanese men incarcerated at the nearby Santa Fe Internment Camp during World War II. Containing sand from the camp, each marble is a reminder of each man’s life, providing, quite directly, a window into the historical layers of its location. During an artists’ panel discussion organized over the opening weekend of SITE Santa Fe, curator Cecilia Alemani asked Horvitz, “Do you think of flock of wingless birds as a memorial?” Horvitz replied, “What even is a memorial?” He then described how each of these glass marbles is a universe unto itself—the universe of each man’s life, their world—which was destroyed due to their kidnapping and detainment by the federal government. But, as Horvitz pointed out, a memorial can suggest a certain remove from the past. He acknowledged that ICE is perpetuating these same acts of kidnapping and detainment in the United States. The work offers proximity, not distance, a return, not a departure. Horvitz also noted that glass is a material capable of resonance—and that he sees the piece carrying the presence of these 4,555 men in Santa Fe.

Horvitz’s reservations about the traditional memorial structure in this era echo questions I had while exploring this edition of SITE Santa Fe, titled Once Within a Time. Namely, how can public monuments connect us to history when information exists in an algorithmically optimized echo chamber, polarization reigns, and attention is commodified? Stories provide a foundational framework for understanding history and one another, yet we live in deeply divided and ahistorical times. For me, this is the backdrop for Once Within a Time, which roots Santa Fe’s own complex history in the real or fictional stories of what Alemani calls “figures of interest” who have ties to the region. She invited seventy-one artists, many of them local, to reinterpret and unearth these figures through new commissions sited across fifteen locations in and around Santa Fe, which range from the New Mexico Military Museum to Best Daze Cannabis Shop. The project lifts up a plurality of voices, experiences, and stories that fundamentally reimagine the possibility of the public monument as a chorus of perspectives, rather than one single truth or figure. At a moment when artists and institutions are reconsidering how, why, and where monuments belong—see MONUMENTS at MOCA, curated by Hamza Walker and Bennett Simpson, or Cat Dawson’s recent book, Monumental: How a New Generation of Artists Is Shaping the Memorial Landscape—the decision to uplift not one person but persons as a curatorial framework feels both timely and generative.

Launched in 1995, SITE International Biennial was the first biennial for contemporary art in the United States. Over the course of its eleven editions, the organization has primarily focused on bringing international artists to Santa Fe. Alemani’s exhibition, by contrast, is thoroughly rooted in Santa Fe and New Mexico, through both the selection of artists and the local stories imparted by their commissioned projects. In her catalogue essay, Alemani cites New Mexico poet N. Scott Momaday, who writes: “There are many stories in the one. And indeed there is one story in the many. We roll on wheels of words and dreams.” Following this sentiment, she expresses hope that the exhibition’s people-centered storytelling connects individuals to the collective, particularly in a region defined by shifting borders and conquests over its eight millennia of inhabitance. The exhibition’s “figures of interest” intentionally foreground lesser-known characters—the witches, healers, and poets. This strategy thoughtfully challenges a conventional understanding of “the West” as depicted in American popular culture. Each figure is introduced through displays of archival materials and ephemera, presented in vibrant, color-coded areas designed by the firm A Practice for Everyday Life. This bright and distinctive design invites viewers to engage with lives like that of Francis Schlatter, a healer who roamed Colorado and New Mexico in the 1880s with a magical metal rod said to cure ailments.

The show is never overwhelming or disorienting, with informational rabbit holes that echo the surprise pleasures of scrolling. Visitors encounter a kaleidoscope of entry points, each framed by a figure of interest. Located in the SITE Santa Fe building, the section “A Good Line Is Hard to Beat” tells the story of Chester Nez, a Navajo code talker who was part of the “Original 29” who used Diné bizaad as a secret code on the battlefield in World War II. The experiences of Nez and other Navajo code talkers are relayed by a presentation of the original alphabet-code documents from these operations. Alongside this material, visitors view artworks that similarly investigate the role of code or encryption within linguistic systems. As discussed in the catalogue, New Mexico’s social and cultural history has long fostered a multiplicity of languages and, consequently, practices of translation. The story of the Navajo code talkers is just one example of the central importance of language and translation in understanding the state’s unique context. On display next to the alphabet code is Marilou Schultz’s large weaving, Integrated Circuit Chip & AI Diné Weaving (2024). A fourth generation Diné weaver, Schultz depicts a computer chip produced by Fairchild Semiconductor, which from 1965 to 1975 ran a plant on the Navajo Nation in Shiprock, New Mexico, that predominantly hired Diné women. During the economic downturn of the early 1970s, mass layoffs resulted in organizing and an eventual occupation of the factory by members of the American Indian Movement. At the top of the weaving, Schultz includes arachnid-like forms that reference the Na’ashjé’ii Asdzáá, or Spider Woman, a figure from Diné mythology who confers spinning, weaving, and storytelling. The work—and the link made to Chester Nez—conveys the longer interconnected history between computing, weaving traditions, and the female workforce.

Several projects respond directly to their location, such as Daisy Quezada Ureña’s installation at the New Mexico History Museum’s Palace of the Governors, a 1610 building originally erected by the Spanish for colonial administration. The building itself is a simple one-story adobe structure with open wood beams and a central hallway that connects the gallery rooms, which are former offices and living quarters for governors spanning the centuries—Spanish Colonial, Mexican, Territorial, and the United States. In one of these rooms, Quezada Ureña displays transparent Plexiglas boxes of artifacts from the museum’s collection that speak to the colonial legacies of violence and exploitation at this specific place and within the region—such as a selection of firearms from its extensive trove of weaponry. These boxes are suspended by shoring posts used to stabilize buildings when their foundations are not secure, revealing the impermanence of colonial regimes that can—and do—fall. Quezada Ureña’s porcelain sculptures are interspersed throughout the room alongside the museum’s holdings. They are made by dipping fabric garments in porcelain slip and firing them at high temperatures so that only traces of stitching and folds remain on the surface of the clay. For the porcelain pieces, Quezada Ureña used clothing collected from people she met at the US-Mexico border, tracing their stories into these delicate works, freezing the sedimentary layers of migration, place, and history in time and inviting the viewer to contemplate their intricacies. Placed at the heart of the Palace of the Governors—also a major tourist destination—this project embraces many voices and narratives, which not only deflates the power of this museum’s colonialist past but also makes its grand narratives appear obsolete.

Among the highlights of the show are Korakrit Arunanondchai’s new commissions, Nostalgia for Unity (2024) and Unity for Nostalgia (2024), which carry a message of hope and rebirth that further counters hegemonic narratives. Installed in Finquita, the artist’s environment delves into the mythology of the Zozobra, or “Old Man Gloom,” an effigy burned annually as part of an arts festival in Santa Fe. Initially created as a homespun tourist attraction in 1924 by the artist Will Shuster, Zozobra has come to symbolize the ritualized burning away of sorrow. An antithesis to Zozobra, the “Fire Spirit” was introduced in 1939 as a character who embodies hope and renewal. This marionette dances around the Zozobra and eventually ignites him, symbolizing the triumph of light over darkness. The torch used in this ceremony is presented at the entrance of Arunanondchai’s installation—the only item on display. Walking onto a floor made from ash from the Zozobra’s ritual burning mixed with soil, housepaint, and medium-density fiberboard, I was initially struck by the earthy and charred scent of this material. The cracked, muddy surface was inscribed with a prayer to the phoenix written by the artist. A throbbing light and sound score that booms throughout the space makes the installation feel mystical. In the second room, the film Unity for Nostalgia is projected onto an opaque screen placed before a ring of large, lit candles. Arunanondchai’s profound response to this long-standing community event dismisses notions of “the West” as a place for individual self-realization, showing how charged and alive collective reimagination has always been and continues to be.

Among the first artworks you encounter is Helen Cordero’s small, painted ceramic sculpture Storyteller (1972). The work depicts a grandfather who sits with his mouth open and eyes closed, telling a story as children gather around him. Red, black, and white pigments, created by the artist from clay and plant materials, delineate his clothing and face. Cordero, a Cochiti Pueblo potter celebrated for her figurative ceramics, treats both clay and storytelling as modes of creation that produce shared visions. During a tour, assistant curator Marina Caron noted that Storyteller was the first artwork chosen for the exhibition because it distills the local practice of telling and retelling from generation to generation. Once Within a Time foregrounds these imaginative, world-building traditions specific to the Southwest and, in doing so, elevates their potential to guide us through the uncertainties of the present. With its rich cacophony of entry points, the exhibition monumentalizes plurality itself, operating as a tribute to the multilayered and multicultural identities present in Santa Fe. Stories create history, and this curatorial project reminds us that to tell stories is to make history. This is the monument.