The 2017 Mayor’s Arts Awards
Since 1991, Santa Fe’s mayor has been honoring members of the arts community with annual awards for excellence in the visual arts, literature, performing arts, philanthropy, and more. The awards celebrate Santa Fe as an arts destination that plays a crucial role in preserving and expanding local and regional culture and history and in supporting the city’s economy. The awards, presented this year by Mayor Javier M. Gonzales and the City of Santa Fe Arts Commission, are given out at a dinner and ceremony. The event starts at 6:30 p.m. on Friday, Oct. 27, at the Santa Fe Community Convention Center (201 W. Marcy St.). Call 505-955-6707 for ticket availability.
Groups and individuals who have received the award in the past represent a diverse selection of members of Santa Fe’s vibrant arts scene, such as flamenco dancer and choreographer María Benítez (1995), painter David Bradley (1997), Theater Grottesco (2006), and the Santa Fe Symphony (2008). Last year’s recipients included sculptor Arlo Namingha, New Mexico School for the Arts, and SITE Santa Fe’s Phillips Director Irene Hofmann, among others.
The lineup for 2017 is a similarly eclectic group. This year, Entreflamenco receives an award in the category of Performing Arts. The company, founded in Madrid, Spain, by Antonio Granjero, has been an active presence in Santa Fe since 2011, offering educational programs and giving dozens of annual dance performances.
Novelist, television writer, philanthropist, and longtime Santa Fe resident George R.R. Martin, author of the fantasy book series A Song of Ice and Fire, on which the popular HBO series Game of
Thrones is based, accepts the award for his work as a major arts contributor and supporter of the Wild Spirit Wolf Sanctuary and The Food Depot, a group dedicated to helping end hunger in New Mexico. Martin brought the Jean Cocteau Cinema back to life when he purchased and reopened the theater in 2013. He bought the former Silva Lanes Bowling Alley as the headquarters for local artist collaborative Meow Wolf, which established an art complex on the site that opened to the public in 2016 with the exhibition The House of Eternal Return. Meow Wolf Art Complex has since seen tens of thousands of visitors.
Kiowa author and poet N. Scott Momaday receives a literary award. Momaday is credited with bringing Native American literature into the mainstream with his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1968 novel House
Made of Dawn, and has written numerous books of poetry, short stories, children’s stories, and memoirs. He was presented with a Lifetime Achievement Award at this year’s Santa Fe Independent Film Festival, where his daughter Jill Momaday’s film
Return to Rainy Mountain, about her father and their Kiowa heritage, had its world premiere. Momaday has taught at Stanford University, the University of Arizona, University of California, Berkeley, and