Art on the Rise
A guest peruses the artworks on display in September during the Taos Fall Arts Festival opening reception at the Guadalupe Sports & Recreation Center.
When it was announced in May of 2018 that the Couse Foundation of Taos had been given a $600,000 grant to create an archive and research center in the Mission Gallery building on Kit Carson Road, hopes were elevated that Taos might again take center stage as an art center. The foundation’s benefactor, the Lunder Foundation of Portland, Maine, will name the center in honor of Dean Porter, a former director of the Snite Museum of Art at Notre Dame who has extensively studied the Taos Society of Artists, which is the focus of the Couse Foundation.
Over the past decade or so, the arts in Taos have taken hit after hit, mostly from the national economy. The downturn, known as the Great Recession of 2008, was noted for a fairly rapid recovery elsewhere, but not for places like Taos, where the effects lingered for several years. This was evidenced by art gallery after art gallery closing, some of which were well known and seemingly recession proof. Now, though, there are signs of an arts revival in Taos with the Porter Research Center on the horizon and the opening of Studio 107B (a gallery on Taos Plaza owned by artist Maye Torres in the vein of her late mother Cecilia Torres’s New Directions). Plus with a new venue opened by Pat Woodall across from The Taos Inn along with the enormously positive press garnered by last Fall’s PASEO and the summer’s appearance by Meow Wolf, Taos is generating some solid buzz.