Pojoaque Pueblo plans Native arts festival during Indian Market weekend

Teya Vitu, The Santa Fe New Mexican
·4 min read

May 28—Indian Market weekend is spreading far beyond the Plaza this year.

The 99th Santa Fe Indian Market will have its usual footprint on the Plaza and surrounding streets with perhaps as many as 500 booths.

But that, as it turns out, will be just one of the outlets for Native art on the third weekend in August.

Pojoaque Pueblo this week announced the formation of its own Native arts festival — also with about 500 booths — at Hilton Santa Fe Buffalo Thunder. The event is scheduled for roughly the same time frame as Indian Market and ...

... Free Indian Market, where yet another 500 booths will be set up at the Scottish Rite Temple, with an expanded site across the street to the east end of Federal Park.

In other words, the third weekend in August could be an Artapalooza like Santa Fe has never seen. It'll be a marked difference from a year ago, when the in-person Indian Market weekend and everything else for a year was wiped out by the coronavirus pandemic.

The Pojoaque Pueblo event, called Pathways: Native Arts Festival, will have 300 artist booths in the casino's two ballrooms and pre-function areas outside the ballroom doors and 200 booths in tents on the parking lot near the ballrooms. Parking lot booths will be at no charge to artists, while ballroom booths will cost $250, said Karl Duncan, executive director of Poeh Cultural Center, which is staging Pathways.

"We just kind of said through the COVID the artists were hit hard. We wanted to help out," Duncan said. "We promoted artists through Facebook. This is the next logical step. There are probably still some artists in need."

Kim Peone, executive director of the Southwestern Association for Indian Arts, which stages the Santa Fe Indian Market, said she accepted the addition of Pathways to the scene.

"Our mission is to bring the Native arts to the public," she said. "That's what they are doing. We are supportive of that. I feel the Santa Fe Indian Market brings opportunity for many organizations. We support that."

Duncan said 60 artists already have signed up for Pathways. Due to the pandemic, Peone said the Indian Market has scaled back to 500 hundred booths from the usual 800.

"It's definitely artists not able to get in the Indian Market and other artists in our network," Duncan said of the interest in the new outlet.

As of now, masks will be required indoors and outdoors at Pathways.

"We'll see how the COVID restrictions are doing at that time," Duncan said. "We will be monitoring the number of people going inside."

Duncan and Jake Viarrial, tourism coordinator for Pojoaque Pueblo, said Pathways is more about helping artists than building tourism.

"It's not so much for the pueblo," Viarrial said. "We're just trying to provide an opportunity to artists. For us, it's about helping out the community. The tourists that would usually be at SWAIA [the Indian Market], half of those artists will be at Buffalo Thunder. Those tourists will follow the artists to Buffalo Thunder."

The Indian Market on the Plaza will be enclosed this year and require advance tickets. Tickets for Indian Market — $20 for Saturday, $15 for Sunday — will go on sale Friday for SWAIA members and Saturday for the general public, Peone said.

"There just is a need for us to be in a place of caution," Peone said. "We are definitely enclosing that space so we can monitor the number of people coming in. It will continue to change. What that final number will be is still a moving target."

The Free Indian Market is back for the third time after starting in 2018 at the Scottish Rite Temple parking lot as an outlet for 68 elder artists in their 80s and 90s who could not secure booths at Indian Market, organizer Gregory Schaaf said.

The 2019 Free Indian Market had 305 artists, with the pandemic canceling 2020.

Free Indian Market has evolved into a mix of elders and other artists who couldn't get into Santa Fe Indian Market this year.

"We serve SWAIA as a safety net for artists who couldn't get into Indian Market," Schaaf said. "Indian Market is the shot in the arm that New Mexico needs. These artists are the stars that bring in the buyer."