Desert altars
CThe All-Santa Fe Jirl Qalleri^
The Plaza of Santa Fe and adjoining streets becomes one big art gallery from August 25 to September 4. as a unique feature of the Santa Fe Fiesta of 1928.
Fifty etchers and painters in water colors and oil. of Santa Fe and Taos, exhibit their work in fifty shop windows of Santa Fe, turned over unreservedly by fifty merchants, to he decorated and filled with paintings, drawings and etchings by the artists.
The Taos and Santa Fe art colonies are among the most notable groups of artists in the world. They are credited with originating and developing the only truly American school of art.
This is a no-jury show, each artist selecting what he or she desires to place in the exhibition. It is a most unusual revue of the best work done by southwestern painters.
By Alice Corbin
I
This desert we see is a mask;
There are shapes that move here, invisible.
High noon, impassive,
Drops sun-seed and pollen into the waiting sand. Blue twilight piles mesas and pinnacles Into high head-dresses and waving plumes,
And the brown flanks of the dancers Ripple and change with a steady motion:
Earth sags to the beat Of the insistent drum.
Night, pierced with a monotonous broken chant, Brings wide black alias of dreaming silence.
II
Walk with me under the cloud-cliffs,
Under the White Rock house in the canyon;
Here we are lost in time, and eternity
Sits like a small bird poised on the edge of the mesa...
Beyond, on the last ridge of the sky,
Bronze shadows ride Into the sunset.
What is the song of the desert?
What is the drum-beat under the silence?
The bronze shadows go; but they remain.
IVe pass them, but they stay ....
How many moons have washed these walls?
How many moons have these cedars Clung to the earth for a foothold?
How many moons shall we Walk silent among these cedars—
Shadow against shadow?
The gods here endure Longer than sun-touched stone;
Altars of moonlight and desert sun Lift feathered plumes in the silence.
—Reprint from Survey-Graphic, July 1928.