Beyond the Tourist Shop: Inside Pojoaque’s Indigenous Art Market

Twenty miles north of Santa Fe, the landscape opens into the broad high desert of northern New Mexico, where adobe colors seem to rise naturally from the earth and the Sangre de Cristo and Jemez mountains frame communities whose histories reach back centuries before New Mexico had its present name.

This weekend, more than 350 Indigenous artists and creative entrepreneurs are gathering here for the Pathways Indigenous Arts Festival, held August 14 through 16 at Buffalo Thunder Resort on the Pueblo of Pojoaque.

There will be pottery and silverwork, paintings and textiles, beadwork and contemporary design. There will be musicians, dancers, Native and regional food, and an Indigenous film program. Collectors can meet the people whose hands made the objects in front of them and buy directly from the artists.

Admission and parking are free.

Pathways is presented by the Pueblo of Pojoaque’s Poeh Cultural Center, and the setting matters. This is not an arts festival that happens to feature Indigenous work. It takes place within a Pueblo community that came remarkably close to disappearing and rebuilt itself.

A Pueblo Rebuilt

Pojoaque is one of six Northern Tewa-speaking Rio Grande Pueblos. Its Tewa name, Po-suwae-geh, is generally translated as the water drinking or gathering place.

People have inhabited this landscape for well over a thousand years. Archaeological evidence dates settlement to around 500 AD, with a substantial population living here during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries.

The centuries that followed brought warfare, disease, displacement and enormous population loss. Eventually, the Pueblo’s survival itself was in question.

Then, in 1934, a call went out asking Pojoaque people to return home. About a dozen came back. They reclaimed land and began rebuilding a community from a population small enough to fit around a dinner table. Today, roughly 2,700 people live on Pueblo lands.

Drive through Pojoaque now and that revival is visible in institutions, businesses, art and architecture. Buffalo Thunder Resort itself contains hundreds of works by Native artists. Nearby, the Poeh Cultural Center has become both a repository of Tewa history and a working place for its continuation.

The Pathway

Poeh means “pathway” in Tewa. The Poeh Cultural Center approaches Pueblo history from within the community rather than looking at it from the outside. Its programs include traditional arts education and the Nah Poeh Meng permanent exhibition, which traces Pueblo history and culture through a Pueblo perspective.

One of the center’s collections has made a much longer journey home. The Di Wae Powa collection contains historic Tewa pottery that spent generations away from the communities where it originated before being returned to northern New Mexico. Pots once removed from their cultural landscape can now be encountered near the descendants of the people who made them.

The distinction between preservation and contemporary creation becomes increasingly difficult to draw. Santa Clara Pueblo artist Roxanne Swentzell has a namesake tower gallery here. Former Pojoaque governor and artist George Rivera was instrumental in establishing the Poeh Center. Traditional arts classes continue to transmit techniques and knowledge to another generation. Then, for three days each August, hundreds of working artists arrive.

Meet the Maker

Across the Southwest, Native imagery appears on everything from hotel interiors to T-shirts and mass-produced souvenirs. Objects can travel a long way from the people and communities whose cultures inspired them.

Pathways shortens that distance to a conversation across a table. A potter can explain the clay beneath your fingertips. A jeweler can discuss stone, silver and technique. A textile artist can describe where a pattern came from. A painter can tell you that the assumptions you brought to the work are entirely wrong.

Visitors are not simply shopping for something “Southwestern.” They are meeting individual artists with their own aesthetics, businesses, influences and ambitions.

Some work within artistic traditions carried through families and communities. Others push those traditions into contemporary painting, fashion, photography, multimedia work and political commentary. Many do both.

The economic relationship is equally direct. The person telling you the story is also the person who made the work and the person receiving the sale. That changes the experience of buying art.

350 Different Versions of the Contemporary West. The scale of Pathways makes wandering part of the pleasure.

More than 350 artists and creative entrepreneurs mean there is no single visual definition of Indigenous art waiting inside. Traditional pottery might sit several booths from contemporary painting. Fine jewelry can appear alongside beadwork, textiles and experimental design.

Music and dance move the experience beyond the market stalls, while Native and regional food adds another expression of place.

Film has also become an important part of the festival. Indigenous filmmakers are presenting stories involving land, culture, identity and contemporary Native life, shifting the camera to the other side of a history in which Native people were frequently photographed, filmed and interpreted by outsiders.

The 2026 featured artist is Chad “Little Coyote” Yellowjohn, a Shoshone and Spokane artist and graduate of the Institute of American Indian Arts.

Yellowjohn works in a contemporary visual language and has described his approach as “optimistic activism,” using art to address Indigenous visibility and representation without allowing Indigenous identity to become confined to the past.

His work sits naturally within a festival where ancestral techniques and twenty-first-century cultural production occupy the same ground.

Take the Road to Puye

Pojoaque also sits within one of America’s richest cultural landscapes. From here, a journey through northern New Mexico can move backward and forward through centuries in surprisingly short distances.

A particularly worthwhile extension is Puye Cliff Dwellings, associated with the ancestors of today’s Santa Clara Pueblo people.

The National Historic Landmark preserves cliff and cave dwellings along with Pueblo architecture and an original Harvey House. The landscape itself is part of the experience: broad views, volcanic rock, high-desert vegetation and the physical remains of communities that flourished here long before the arrival of Europeans.

Visit Puye and then return to Pathways.

At one stop are dwellings associated with ancestral Pueblo people. At the other, their descendants are making films, running businesses, selling jewelry, creating paintings and continuing some of the pottery traditions for which the region has been known for centuries.

The distance between the two is measured in miles, not eras.

August in Northern New Mexico

August brings an unusual concentration of Indigenous art and culture to the Santa Fe region, and travelers should plan accordingly. Hotels fill, restaurants become busy and collectors arrive from across the country.

Pathways offers a reason to venture north of Santa Fe itself. Give the festival time. Moving rapidly through hundreds of booths misses much of what separates an artist market from an ordinary retail experience. Stop when something catches your attention. Ask how it was made. Ask about the material. Ask about the artist’s other work.

Photography deserves similar consideration.

The colors of contemporary pottery and jewelry against the northern New Mexico landscape can be extraordinary, as can public music and dance performances where photography is permitted. Pueblo communities, however, maintain their own cultural protocols. Some people, ceremonies and activities should not be photographed.

Ask before raising the camera.

Before the Highway

There is a familiar version of the American Southwest built from Route 66 shields, trading posts, neon motel signs, cowboy boots and long highways disappearing toward the horizon.

Pojoaque begins the story much earlier.

Long before asphalt crossed New Mexico, Pueblo communities were building settlements along the Rio Grande, cultivating the high desert, making pottery and establishing trade networks across enormous distances.

Those traditions survived Spanish colonization, Mexican rule, incorporation into the United States, railroads, highways, tourism and the transformation of Santa Fe into an international art market.

They did not survive unchanged. Cultures rarely do. At Pathways, continuity and change occupy neighboring booths. Clay becomes pottery. Silver becomes jewelry. History becomes film. Traditional knowledge becomes contemporary business.

And a Pueblo that was reduced to roughly a dozen returning members in 1934 now welcomes hundreds of Indigenous artists to its land.

Santa Fe’s galleries are only twenty miles down the road. Here, you can meet the people who made the art.