‘Once Within a Time’ Takes Storytelling Seriously

Set under the crisp blue sky of a New Mexico summer, ‘Once Within a Time’ – a show about storytelling with a storybook title – might at first appear whimsical. But the stories it shares pertain to issues that have fired public debate in the US since at least the beginning of the Cold War – from militarization to ecological crisis to technologization. The SITE Santa Fe International’s 12th edition, which features 98 participants and spans 14 venues with additional locations for special projects, treats local narratives as a metonym for humanity’s greatest struggles. It deftly interweaves past and present to explore how societies and individuals have sought – and created – meaning through fable, parable and myth.

The exhibition compellingly engages with serious topics in a manner that is neither overtly political nor moralistic, through a cast of characters that curator Cecilia Alemani has called ‘figures of interest’. Lending the show a staunchly local feel, these include both fictional characters and former residents of New Mexico, many of whom are women; Chicano, Kiowa and Diné people; and spiritual leaders. Alemani took a curatorial gamble: would the objects (and exhibition didactics) associated with more arcane or historic characters – among them, the writer Willa Cather and gay bar owner Claude James – come together coherently with a cacti-themed installation by Ruyi Zhang or an interactive doll factory by Omari Douglin? That gamble paid off: for an undertaking of its scale, ‘Once Within a Time’ is a show of astounding clarity and focus.

At the New Mexico History Museum’s Palace of the Governors building, Daisy Quezada Ureña’s site-specific commission Past [between] Present (2025) plumbs ideas about the construction of history and remembrance by displaying borrowed historical artifacts – guns, scales, ceramic shards – and her own delicate porcelains in Plexiglas boxes, suspended from shoring posts installed in the state’s former seat of government. Similarly successful in its intervention of space is Amol K. Patil’s installation at the Santa Fe Village shopping centre, The Piled Up Traces (2025), where his small bronze sculptures and fragment-like drawings on wood hang from dusty, whitewashed brick. The work ties in with a ‘figure of interest’ label elaborating on the Ladies Auxiliary of Local 890, a group of Mexican American women who were arrested for supporting their striking family members in 1951. Minerva Cuevas’s Dust Rising from the Dances (2025), a mural in SITE Santa Fe’s inner courtyard, explores notions of the sacred in the local landscape and the legacy of the region’s nuclear programme. Horizontal bands of uniform colour – radioactive yellow, sand, deep blue – brilliantly contextualize and incorporate the New Mexico sky overhead.

The exhibition is not completely without misses. Alemani has a taste for the bizarre, and some of her choices stand out awkwardly in the context of the show’s curatorial brief. Diego Marcon’s animated video Dolle (2023), in which a family of moles adds up numbers, borders on the extraneous, while Mire Lee’s stumpy Black Sun: Asshole sculpture (2023) adds precious little to the show’s section about the uncanny, where it wheezes wearily on the floor. A number of the artist’s other fleshy works from the same ‘Black Sun’ (2023) series might have fared better in the space afforded.

Like all complex and expansive shows, ‘Once Within a Time’ rewards repeat visits. It might even necessitate them: artist David Horvitz has installed Easter eggs, in the form of small sculptures, in three venues, and the video works alone take a whole day to get through. The main reason to return to ‘Once Within a Time’, however, lies in its timely and poignant invitation to recognize Indigenous perspectives, religious syncretism, pluralism and a search for meaning as key aspects in the history of New Mexico, yes, but also America, and the world.

The 12th SITE Santa Fe International, ‘Once Within a Time’ is on view at various venues in Santa Fe until 12 January 2026

^{Main image: Korakrit Arunanondchai, Nostalgia for Unity, 2024. Courtesy: 12th SITE Santa Fe International; photograph: Brad Trone}