El Rito Studio Tour

The Mercado in Alumni Hall

Stop 1 on the El Rito Studio Tour is Alumni Hall, on the El Rito campus of Northern New Mexico College. The Community Artist Mercado opens the weekend there. For the 39th tour, held Saturday and Sunday, September 12 and 13, 2026, from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., the Abiquiu News counted 30 artisans in the hall. Among them were students from the college’s Heritage Arts Program in Rio Grande weaving, Spanish colonial woodworking and traditional retablo painting. A mother and daughter, Nanette Valerio and Dani Bustos, sold their work; Bustos had recently painted a concrete barrier in Los Alamos. Ryan Dominguez played from noon to 3 both days.

Food was outside. Chef Ray Naranjo parked his Manko truck near Alumni Hall. Naranjo, of Santa Clara Pueblo, had appeared that April on the Food Network’s Chopped as part of the show’s first all-Indigenous lineup. Manko translates as “come and eat” in Tewa, and Naranjo serves what he calls “comfort food with mild fusions.” Lazy Buffalo Catering set up near the Student Center. On campus a visitor picks up a brochure with a map of every stop. The association also posts an interactive Google map with a list of participants.

Stop 2 is on the same grounds: a pottery studio and a print shop, both home to continuing education classes and weekly open studios. Janeen Singer in ceramics and Andrew Furse and Vivian Jean in printmaking gave demonstrations for all ages and sold their own work. The print shop grew out of a three-week printmaking workshop held on campus in 2025. Both studios now run free open sessions on Wednesday evenings at El Pueblito, a building on campus. Vicky Broadus, speaking for the El Rito Art Association to the Santa Fe New Mexican’s Pasatiempo in September 2026, noted that continuing education classes were again being offered there and that students were once again being housed in the dorm. “The place is coming back to life,” she said, “which is good for the college and the town.”

The college is older than the tour by most of a century. The New Mexico Territorial Legislature founded it at El Rito on September 21, 1909, as the Spanish American Normal School, to train teachers for the state’s Spanish-speaking population. Broadus said that over the years it added vocational classes, among them adobe construction, weaving and woodworking. The college says its campus grounds and park are open to the public daily.

Eighteen stops through the village

El Rito lies up N.M. 554, 56 miles northwest of the Santa Fe Plaza, and is home to about 1,000 people. Broadus listed old adobe buildings, a ranger station, and the Mars Polar Lander, which she called a downtown landmark. “It’s definitely off the beaten path, and you have to drive a long way to buy groceries,” she said, “but that’s a small price to pay.”

Pasatiempo counted 18 tour stops in 2026. The association’s list numbers them 1 through 18 and adds the Santa Fe Raptor Center with an asterisk. The Abiquiu News put the number of artists at more than 20. Some work in traditional techniques: backstrap loom weaving, painting with local pigments, tin stamping and woodcarving. Others are abstract painters, ceramicists, landscape oil painters, photographers and mixed-media artists. Work is bought directly from the people who made it.

At Stop 4, painter, illustrator and graphic designer Lucia Vinograd, whose paintings and cards, in the association’s words, “celebrate the luminous, fleeting beauty of everyday life,” shared her space with National Geographic photographer Beth Wald and bookbinder Pam Fortner. Stop 3 was John Rippel, known for sterling silver and stone-inlay belt buckles. At Stop 10, Josef Weese showed colorful interpretations of Euclidean geometric proofs. At Stop 12, Tauri Lang, new to the tour in 2026, showed paintings built on botanical symbolism and dreamlike imagery. Stop 15 held several artists at once: photographs by Ted Harsha, and work by Sarah Grenzeback and by Jim and Lisa Baker. At Stop 17, ceramicist Barbara Campbell shared her studio with Alison Veit, also new.

The El Rito Library, Stop 5, uses the weekend as one of its biggest fundraisers of the year. The Quilters Guild, which meets weekly at the library, sells bed quilts, table runners, potholders and dolls. The whole community bakes homemade chocolate treats for a table called Death by Chocolate.

Stop 6 belongs to Larry Sparks, a painter and metal sculptor, whose compound is covered in signs. A Pasatiempo photo caption asked which of his signs was the right one and answered itself: “Nope, there is no right one.” An earlier account of the tour calls Sparks a former Santa Fe builder and designer and his place an outsider-art village. Just down the road, at Stop 7, is the Tiny Sofas Museum: more than 300 handmade miniature sofas under one roof. Broadus runs it and has made miniature sofas for more than 30 years. She opened it, she said, when she found herself with a building that “cried out — to me, at least — to be more than just a gallery space.” She has put “The one and only” on a bumper sticker. Outside the festival the museum is open by appointment.

At Stop 8, Christie Garcia and Michael Martin run the Chuckwagon of El Rito. They share the ways of the pioneers and serve “chuck,” cowboy slang for vittles, and they sell recycled metal art. The village restaurant, El Farolito, served its award-winning food that weekend and hung paintings by Christina Sanchez, Stop 13. The Santa Fe Raptor Center has cared for injured birds around New Mexico since 2004, with volunteer rehabbers across the state. It opened its doors for the weekend. “El Rito is full of interesting characters,” the association posted. “Come learn about some of the avian ones.”

The last numbered stop, 18, is the studio of David Michael Kennedy. He is a portraitist of Bob Dylan, Debbie Harry and Willie Nelson, and he prints in platinum and palladium in the darkroom of a historic adobe compound. The sources differ on when he came. The association says he moved to New Mexico in 1986. Curator Mary Anne Redding, writing in the Abiquiu News, says he moved back and forth between New York and New Mexico from the 1970s, spent two and a half years on the road in a 1960s Airstream with a 4x5 camera, and has made El Rito his home base since 2008.

The town’s adobe church, San Juan Nepomuceno, stands apart from the numbered stops. Broadus dates it to 1830 and says its bell is still rung by hand. The El Rito Library’s history project gives a longer account: construction began in 1827, because the parish church at Abiquiú lay roughly fourteen difficult miles away, and the church was completed in 1832. During the 2025 tour it was open to visitors.

A meeting in 1985

The association’s own account begins in 1985, when a group of El Rito artists met informally to discuss holding a studio tour. The first tour followed in 1986. The association says it “has continued until the present day.” The Los Alamos Reporter adds “with rare exceptions,” and the Abiquiu News says “almost every year since.” The library’s history project records that, from the late twentieth century on, artists opening their studios brought cultural tourism and outside money into the village. Broadus says the El Rito tour is several years older than the one in Abiquiú, 20 minutes away.

An earlier account of the tour names some of the people who held it up over the years. One was Julie Wagner, whose studio, built by blacksmith Michael Hennerty, had then been on the tour for 25 years. Another was santero Nicholas Herrera, who works in carved wood and handmade watercolors to make bultos, retablos, altars and doors. A third, musician and instrument maker Cipriano Vigil, joined the tour for the first time that year.

In the fall of 2016 the artists formalized a board and incorporated the El Rito Art Association as a nonprofit. Since then it has sponsored the festival, the studio tour and the Mercado together. It has also sponsored classes in traditional micaceous pottery, paper clay, tin stamping and children’s mask making. Andrew Furse organized and built up the Mercado for years, adding music and food. Barbara Campbell chaired the board for a number of years. In 2026 Victoria Broadus was president, and Nicholas Herrera sat on the advisory board. The Los Alamos Reporter noted in 2025 that stops had been added in recent years to involve more of the community, the Raptor Center among them.

May, then September again

For several years the tour moved to May, Broadus said, “partly as a result of COVID.” One spring edition, on May 20 and 21, enlarged the Mercado to more than 35 artisan, music and food vendors from neighboring villages. Weaver Jane Kramer asked that a weaving exhibition be added, and Heather Lynn Howard’s weaving students from the college showed and sold their work. Bernard Jaramillo of Los Granjeros played Northern New Mexico-style music, and Busker Joe played Spanish and English folk tunes. Ramona Oaxaca sold homemade tamales, tacos and liquidos. The state tourism department’s listing still names both the third weekend in May and “Every September.”

“Most people wanted to go back to the fall,” Broadus said, “which is when El Rito’s tour has always been.” The 2025 tour ran September 27 and 28. Newcomers that year included character actor John Diehl, who has appeared in more than 100 films and television shows and makes sculptural pieces, and music photographer David McClister. Santa Fe impressionist Michele Byrne showed at the renovated Martin’s store alongside its new owner, Elaine Lockard.

The 2026 tour fell on what Pasatiempo called the second-to-last weekend of summer. That same weekend the Blossoms & Bones Music Festival played at night at Ghost Ranch, though not on Sunday. “I like to think we complement each other,” Broadus said. On September 14, 2026, the association posted that the 39th festival was “now in the books” and that, “with the fall studio tour in full swing, we’re looking forward to getting out and seeing what other artists have been up to!”