Crestone Artists Open Studio Tour

The Crestone Artists Open Studio Tour has no gate and no hall. Its route is a custom Google Map on the group’s tour page, with a pin at each artist’s door. The Open Studio Tour Guide sits beneath a row of short videos that introduce some of the artists. The 2026 tour is the fourteenth annual under CrestoneArtists.com and falls on Saturday and Sunday, October 3 and 4. Studios stand open from noon to 5 p.m. both days, admission is free, and no one books ahead. Two of the artists, Allison Wonderland and Kim Roberts, wrote the announcement, which invites all “to visit artists’ spaces, experience their art and learn about their creative processes and imaginative insights.”

Twenty-one studios in 2026

Twenty-one members take part, by the count of the tour page, the Valley Courier and the state tourism listing. The home page of the group’s website gives 22. A group photograph by Lori Nagel shows thirteen of them. In front are Ziggy Eilets, Noah Baen, Stephen Austin, Kim Roberts, Jeff Beard, Alan Sutherland, Jane Kwan and Shirley Motz. Behind them are Rose Burek, Allison Wonderland, Teresa Dunwell, Amy Jo Arndt and Andre Sirois.

The weekend opened the evening before. On Friday, October 2, from 5 to 8 p.m., the artists held a preview reception at the People’s Pub and Kitchen, 120 West Silver Avenue, and showed samples of their work over light refreshments and a cash bar. The Saguache County tourism council’s listing calls the tour a chance to “connect with our amazing Crestone art community, have a snack, share and be inspired.”

What a visitor finds inside depends on the year’s roster. The 2019 announcement in the Valley Publishing papers gives that year’s spread:

• Jeff Beard’s figurative sculptures in a “Gaudi inspired studio”
• quilts by Pat Tullos and tapestry weavings by Kathy Strathearn
• Adam Kinney’s handcrafted wooden pieces
• Josefina Gordh’s hand-printed silks and Kimberlee Best’s stained glass
• Allison Wonderland’s sculptures and drawings “crafted from native grasses and soils”
• Peter Ismert’s photographs of animals native to Colorado

For “wit, whimsy and delight,” the same piece pointed to the studios of David Nelson, Stephen Futral, and Al Sutherland and his late wife Julie. In 2015 the work ranged from Shahna Lax’s copperwork illuminations to Rose Burek’s recycled wind art. Burek appears again in the 2026 photograph.

Camino del Rey, first house on the right

The studios are scattered through Crestone, in Saguache County. The 2015 guide shows how visitors found them, by house number and by turn. Rose Burek’s studio was at 468 Camino del Rey: “Camino Real to Camino del Rey then left, first house on right.” Beatris Burgoin’s was a right turn off the same road onto Corral Trail. Jane Kwan’s was reached by Willow Creek Way to New Meadow.

Emmy Savage, a painter on the tour rosters of 2012, 2015 and 2019, wrote about what drew her and many other artists to Crestone and the adjoining Baca Grande subdivision: “the landscape’s sublime and terrible beauty as well as the affordable land and housing.” She laid out the view: “To the east of Crestone, the 14,000-foot Sangre de Cristo mountains rise almost vertically from the San Luis Valley beneath. To the south, Blanca, sacred mountain to the Navajo, guards the valley’s sand dunes, winds and intemperate moods and to the west, dwarfed by the sky above and the distance of the plain, the San Juan Mountains offer their mysterious presence in shades of pale blue and purple.”

Outside the October weekend, the group set up a program called ON CALL. Under it, a dozen or more artists working in copper, paper making, watercolor, oil, pastel, encaustic and upcycled finds would receive visitors in their studios. Its notice advises guests to ask the price of a piece that catches them, since “the artist may not bring it up if you don’t.” It also sets one condition: “We are very private beasts, however, so you do have to call first.”

Deana Wilfong’s tour, 2005

Savage arrived in 2011. By then Crestone already had the Crestone Artisans Gallery and a newspaper, The Crestone Eagle. It also had Shumei International Institute, which offered exhibit and lecture space to local artists through a program founded by photographer Bill Ellzey and administered by artist Deana Wilfong. Wilfong had founded the annual open studio tour in 2005. The county, the fiscal sponsor and the newspapers all still date the tradition from that year.

Two more artists came in 2011. Robin Ross and Noah Baen moved from New York City, where Baen’s work had entered the Smith College Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art and can be seen in the 59th Street subway concourse. By Savage’s account the pair founded CrestoneArtists.com that year. The group’s own home page gives its founding as 2012. Within a year they had taken over running Wilfong’s tour.

The earliest tour in the group’s archive took place on October 6 and 7, 2012, from 1 to 6 p.m., and listed twenty-three artists. Among them were:

• Bob Adler in wood
• John and Posey Nelson in stone
• Nancy Onizuka in stone and leather
• Shahna Lax in copper
• Ross in oil painting and book arts
• Baen in environmental installation and painting

Its stated aim was “to enhance recognition of the wonderful art community in Crestone and to allow locals and visitors to enjoy the visionary quality of work being produced here.” By 2015 the same sentence read “contemplative art community.”

The archive lists a tour for every year from 2012 through 2025 except 2020. The preview moved from place to place:

• 2017: the Collected Works Show at the Desert Sage Restaurant
• 2019: a free reception at the Crestone Charter School, when the eighth annual tour ran October 12 and 13

The 2019 announcement gives the head count as both twenty-one and twenty-two. In 2025, 18 artists showed at 16 locations.

A dedication to Robin Ross

Ross was the lead organizer of the three tours from 2012 through 2014, and she died in February 2015. That October’s tour, held on the 10th and 11th, was dedicated to her as “founder, guiding force and energizing spirit of crestoneartists.com.” Her studio at 131 Skyview Way was stop four in the guide, with Noah Baen showing her oil painting, book art and sculpture.

That fall, POINT Gallery in Denver hung Robin Ross: Graced Momentum, a retrospective of her paintings on canvas and paper, in altered books and on wooden cigar boxes. The series included Spiritual Portraits, Animal Postures and Numinous Marks and Remarks. The group’s website lists her as a legacy member, 1954–2015, and her page carries a line of her own: “Sometimes drawing is imbued with the ancientness of heavy stones, of light that floats, of paint melting my hands into a new surface.”