Dixon Studio Tour

Behind the Dixon Co-Op on State Road 75, the Community Center is filled for one weekend in November with work by the artists on the tour. This is the Artists’ Preview Show, stop 22 on the 2026 map. It holds samples from the studios, local show attendants, stacks of maps, and posters and books from past tours for sale. The 2026 tour is the 45th. It runs Saturday and Sunday, November 7 and 8, from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., and admission is free. A reception at the Community Center opens it on the Friday evening before, November 6, from 5 to 7. Not every artist takes cards. The Co-Op has an ATM, and free wireless reaches the grounds around the Embudo Valley Library without a password.

The tour spreads out from that room over the Embudo Valley in Rio Arriba County, an hour north of Santa Fe and 30 minutes south of Taos on Route 68, a few miles off the High Road. Dixon has under 1,000 people by the organizers’ count. It is the largest of several villages settled along the confluence of the Rio Embudo and the Rio Grande, and the stops reach into Embudo, Rinconada, Apodaca, Cañoncito and Questacitas. Many of them sit along the two rivers. The Embudo Valley Arts Association presents the tour and calls it the longest continuously running studio tour in New Mexico. The 2026 map carries on its cover an image of Eli Levin’s studio by Abby Mattison, who has her own stop. Levin has spent more than five decades on Social Realist painting and printmaking, and his work is in the Smithsonian Archives of American Art and the New Mexico Museum of Art.

Studios along two rivers

Stop 1 belongs to Lee Akins. He grew up in Texas and Taiwan and makes coil-built terracotta vessels. He taught ceramics at the college level for more than 45 years, most recently at UNM Taos. The organizers suggest asking him to show the small models he works from before building the larger pieces; they guess there are hundreds. At stop 3 is Robin Stanaway, who has lived in northern New Mexico for more than 20 years and makes glass and light installations that have been shown at MoMA PS1 and the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Rift Gallery and Southwest Stoneworks share stop 4, where Tim Lehmann combines found stone with carved shapes and teaches stone-carving workshops. Betsy Williams, at the same stop, makes pottery for daily use from local clays and glazes.

Sheena Cameron, at stop 5, has taken part in most of the tour’s 45 years. She made jewelry in its first decade and now makes raku-fired ceramic “Messenger Horses” with gemstone manes and inner chambers. Visitors are told to ask her to “open” one. Brian Barreto, at stop 7, works in stone, light, ceramics and metal, sometimes gives tool demonstrations, and offers cookies according to the 2026 map. He also runs the Alluvial Project in Rinconada, an artist-run gallery and sculpture residency. Kay Weiner, at stop 10, grew up outside New York City, worked as an art history researcher, and taught herself jewelry and sculpture. She lives on the banks of the Rio Grande. One longtime visitor told her, “Please don’t stop being innovative.”

James Archuleta has worked in stained glass for more than 37 years, in Victorian, geometric, modern and abstract styles. He sets many of his windows in frames rescued from older buildings around New Mexico. A woodworker who signs as Mayo inlays mesquite and cottonwood with turquoise, jet and orpiment. Rebecca Crowell co-authored Cold Wax Medium: Techniques, Concepts & Conversations, and the organizers count the mountain view from her studio among the tour’s favorites. Kate Raphael builds collage paintings in a home studio in Dixon’s bosque along the Rio Embudo. Her papers include old family letters, newspapers from historic dates, and handwritten ledgers from the family business. In early October 2026 she posted a sunflower still life made from those letters, nearly finished for the tour. Sylvia Ernestina Vergara offers poetry books, music, art photography and heritage apples. Harper Wood, painter and printmaker, is an official stop for the first time in 2026.

Chile, wine and the library book sale

Chiliman sells dried chile, beans, ristras, atole, blue corn flour and piñon nuts. In 2025 the Taos News called it a family business of more than 50 years. La Chiripada Wines & Vineyards is listed as the oldest winery in New Mexico and shows pottery, paintings and textiles among its bottles. Vivác Winery pours its own wines alongside New Mexico beers on tap and sells handmade chocolates. Embudo Valley Vineyards keeps a small-batch tasting room. Zuly’s Cafe serves New Mexican food, espresso, ice cream, beer and wine. Sugar’s has reopened as Aly’s @ Sugar’s, with burgers, gyros, ice cream and savory pies.

Local institutions take part as well. The Embudo Valley Library holds its annual book sale, and La Segunda Store sells clothing and household goods for the library’s benefit. St. Anthony’s Parish and Mission Embudo fill with booths of local crafts, and the parish sells food. The Dixon Elementary Mercado shows work by local artists and Dixon students, with food available. At the Carnelian Center, a holistic health nonprofit, visitors in 2025 could get short massage treatments. In 2024 the Taos News noted that the tour also passes historic buildings and churches, some from the 18th century, among them the Presbyterian Manse, home to the first hospital in northern New Mexico.

A talk about the Impressionists

The potter Nausika Richardson, one of the founders, told the Taos News in 2010 that the idea came in the 1970s. At that time there was little tourism in the valley and few chances for artists to meet the public. She and her friends were talking about how the Impressionists had invited people into their homes to see their work. She remembered the first Dixon Studio Tour in 1982: “We were just astounded at how many people came to it.” The organizers describe that first year as a small gathering of local artists. Mark Saxe had founded Southwest Stoneworks three years earlier, in 1979.

By 2010, Richardson’s 29th year on the tour, 33 artists and 13 businesses opened their doors, among them the new Blue Heron Brewery and Zuly’s Cafe. She admitted there had been a time when they wondered whether putting Dixon on the map was a good thing, “but I think it’s just gotten more alive.” That year the oil painter Jim Vogel joined for the first time, after 11 years living in Dixon. He painted woodcutters, farmers and mothers with oversized hands and feet. “One of my very deliberate ideas is to bring people out who are normally not celebrated … People who are often not seen who work with their hands,” he said. He and his wife, the tin worker Christen Vogel, also showed “Rusty Anachronisms”: miniature stage sets with marionette figures, housed in 1940s and ‘50s radio cabinets.

Since 2003 the tour has issued a poster each year featuring one artist’s work. Peter Dougan and Jeff Spicer made the first, Richardson the 2010 poster, and Vogel the 2012 poster. In 2024 the tour reached 46 artists, its largest by the Taos News account. Eleven of them worked partly or wholly in clay, in a valley long known for micaceous pottery and first inhabited by people connected to nearby Picuris Pueblo. That year a blacksmith joined for the first time. By 2025 Kate Raphael was coordinating the tour, and she gave visitors an errand: “ask the artist how long they’ve been on the Tour. See if you can find someone who says 44 years and find an artist for whom this is their first year.”

Garlic braids and a last open studio

Mark Saxe has died, and in 2026 Rift Gallery and Southwest Stoneworks marked his contribution to the arts in Dixon; the 26th annual Saxe Stone Carving Workshop was held that year. Miles Smith was a potter for more than 50 years and took part in the tour for over two decades. He brought a love of Japanese sumi brush painting to his ceramics. In 2025 the Taos News reported that his daughter would open his studio one last time. The 2026 map lists it again, “In Memoriam – Last call for Miles’ functional pottery, tile, and raku,” and the organizers name his daughter, Heather, as the one opening it. Métier Studio Gallery, a weaving studio that the organizers call Dixon’s oldest gallery and that shared the 2008 poster with Irene Smith, will close at the end of 2026.

Stanley Crawford, the author of Mayordomo, a chronicle of the valley’s acequia, and of A Garlic Testament, farmed El Bosque Garlic Farm. The farm opened during the tour to sell what remained of the harvest. In 2019 the Albuquerque Journal reported that he marked time by the tour. It also described the garlic braids and ristras his wife RoseMary once arranged, which a neighbor later took over. Crawford devoted a book chapter to the clay medallions tied to the braids. He imagined a day when someone digging a garden might turn up “a thick, rough ceramic disk with the words El Bosque Garlic Farm.” He died in January 2024. The 2024 tour, the first without him, was dedicated to him, and his daughter and son held a memorial at the farm. The passage he wrote about the medallions ends: “And on the mesa above, there lie pottery shards pre-dating the Conquest by hundreds of years.”