Abiquiú Studio Tour

The map for the 32nd annual Abiquiú Studio Tour numbers its stops 1 through 26. Fifty-eight artists stand behind those numbers, and they open their doors on October 10, 11, and 12, 2026, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., across the village of Abiquiú and the Chama River Valley around it. Visitors drive themselves along US Highway 84, about an hour from Santa Fe or Taos, and then onto side roads. The Abiquiú Arts Council warns that some studios sit on unimproved dirt roads that can be rough or steep and turn muddy when wet. It recommends sturdy vehicles. Monday the 12th is a shorter day, with only some stops open. The map is printed as a full-color brochure, available at local businesses and at the stops. It also comes as a black-and-white sheet to print at home and on the Toureka phone app. The council’s own description of the season names golden yellow cottonwoods, mountain views, and geologic formations. A Taos News guide to the 2025 tour wrote that golden cottonwoods line the roads.

From a chicken coop to a Byzantine dome

The stops range from one person’s workshop to crowded group halls. Stop 1 is Raul Manzanares’s woodworking shop. At stop 6, Liz Manzanares shows Queen Bee Stained Glass, and at stop 4 Hilary Lorenz runs Stonetrigger Press. Stop 10 is Studio One Thirty Nine, an old chicken coop along the Rio Chama. Debra Fritts and Frank Shelton renovated it into two studio spaces and a contemporary gallery, and it also serves as a teaching place for ceramic sculpture. Fritts works intuitively in red clay, and Shelton paints and sculpts.

The largest gathering is at stop 11, Dar al Islam at Plaza Blanca, open two of the three days. The council lists eleven artists there, working in functional pottery, ceramic art, painting, and weaving; Warp Zone Weaving is among them. The Parish Hall at stop 19 holds six more, including a hatmaker, Christelle Burns of La Chapeliere. At stop 20, Charles M. and Debbie B. Carrillo paint santos and retablos under the name Santos of New Mexico. Stop 25, Las Parras de Abiquiú, gathers eight artists, including Janice B. Quinn’s lunadanza quilts and Shiri Klein’s weavings.

Four galleries are open all three days. Bosshard Gallery, stop 18, sells art and antiques from around the world and the Southwest in a historic adobe compound across from the O’Keeffe Home. Nest Gallery, stop 21, shows the work of studio jeweler Tamara Kay alongside artisan-made objects. The Purple Adobe Lavender Farm is stop 14. The last stop, 26, is the Abiquiú Dome. It is a square adobe joined to a semicircular dome, and the council says it was inspired by 6th-century Byzantine architecture. The Abiquiu Area Guide calls it a roadside structure. Mother and daughter run it together: Connie B. Burkhart makes Southwestern metal art, and Becca Fisher paints in a folk-inspired manner.

Horno bread and fire-department pizza

Five map stops serve food:

• Dar al Islam Kitchen (stop 11): Middle Eastern dishes.
• Lavender farm teahouse (stop 14): gluten-free pastries, gelato, and tea.
• Café Abiquiu at the Abiquiu Inn (stop 16): breakfast, lunch, dinner, and a bar.
• Boxed Bakery (stop 20): small-batch baking by Nina Armijo at the Carrillos’ place.
• Las Parras (stop 25): bread cooked in an horno, and the Abiquiu Volunteer Fire Department serving wood-oven pizza and coffee drinks.

Off the map, the council points visitors to Café Sierra Negra, to Bode’s Mercantile for groceries, gas, to-go food, and restrooms, and to the El Oasis food stand in Bode’s parking lot for tacos.

The historic village sits up the hill, across the highway from Bode’s. There the council asks visitors to park only in designated areas and not to go beyond public points. Commercial photography needs a permit. The council asks for courtesy most of all near pueblos, churches, and burial sites.

The showcase at the Abiquiu Inn

The tour starts a week early at the Abiquiu Inn, stop 16. The 2026 opening reception was held on the Inn’s terrace on Friday, October 2. It was free, with live music by Ryan and Rubén Domínguez. That evening the council drew its raffle baskets, made up of donated art and goods, and auctioned a third basket live. The council says past baskets have been valued between $2,000 and $4,000. A sampling of work by tour artists hangs for sale in the Main Salon of Café Abiquiu. The council gives the run as October through December, and Southwest Contemporary lists it through January 1, 2027. The Inn also has an upstairs gallery and a sculpture garden of 20 works set out in a park-like setting.

A volunteer council since 1994

The Abiquiú Arts Council has curated the tour since 1994. It is an all-volunteer 501(c)(3), and the tour was its only event until it added the Gathering of Artisans, a juried mercado, in 2024. Each participating artist commits at least ten volunteer hours, and the artists attend meetings through the year. Teresa McClure serves as president and treasurer, Becca Fisher as vice president, Mark E. Ritchie as secretary, and Carol Martinez as volunteer coordinator. Several of those names also appear on the 2026 map. A Becca Fisher paints at the Dome, a Mark Ritchie shows printmaking at stop 8, and a Carol Martinez shows at stop 22.

The council links the artists’ presence to Georgia O’Keeffe. She made the village her permanent home, and the council writes that the landscape that inspired her has drawn “a steadily growing community of traditional and contemporary artists.” A Wikipedia entry quoted on the state historical marker’s page says she lived there from 1949 until shortly before her death in 1986, at 98.

One early coordinator went on to found the local newspaper. Carol Bondy and her husband Brian moved to Abiquiu in 1999, when she began working as a coordinator for the studio tour. She also kept the books for a farm-share program and sent out its weekly newsletter. Neighbors started asking her to add their news. “’Oh — can you announce my event in El Jardin.’ Or, ‘I found a dog — can you get the word out?’” she told the paper. That newsletter, a two-page PDF sent to 187 addresses, became the Abiquiu News in January 2013. The paper is now changing hands to editor Michael Tashji.

The tour’s dates have shifted over the years. The 30th edition ran October 12 and 13, 2024, over two days. The 31st ran October 11 to 13, 2025. The council’s artist calendar places the tour usually around the Indigenous Peoples’ holiday weekend, while the state tourism listing calls it Columbus Day Weekend and counts “more than fifty” artists.

Wild chokecherry place

The village library gives the Tewa name for the place as Phé shúu ú, meaning “wild chokecherry place.” It records remnants of 11th- and 12th-century communities that were the ancestral homeland of the Pueblo people of Santa Clara and San Juan, now Ohkay Owingeh. The writer Jessica Rath, writing on the council’s site, notes that the accent on the final u marks the stress: a-bi-KYU.

By 1744 some 20 families had settled at the Plaza de Santa Rosa de Lima. Ute and Comanche raids drove them out in 1747, and in 1750 the Spanish founded a new settlement at the present site. The founding grant has two versions. Intermountain Histories says Governor Tomás Vélez Cachupín made a grant in 1754 to thirty-four Genízaro families, who were formerly enslaved Native people and their descendants. The library says he gave it jointly to Spanish and Genízaro families. Both agree on what followed. Abiquiú served as a buffer against raids, and after Cachupín’s treaty with the Ute it hosted Ute trading fairs, especially in late autumn. It was also the source of witch trials that spread through the region.

The state marker at Bode’s records that Fray Francisco Atanasio Domínguez and Fray Silvestre Vélez de Escalante visited in 1776. In 1830 the settlement became a stop on the Spanish Trail to Los Angeles. The library says Antonio Armijo’s caravan left Abiquiú on November 7, 1829. Bode’s itself opened in 1890 as Grants Mercantile, which was a store, post office, stagecoach stop, and jail. Martin Bode bought it in 1919.

The United States validated the Genízaros’ 16,000-acre grant in 1894. In 1969 National Forest lands went back to Genízaro families, and in 2008 New Mexico returned another 32.5 acres. La Merced del Pueblo Abiquiú manages the grant to this day.