Taos has been an artists' colony since Bert Phillips and Ernest Blumenschein broke a wagon wheel here in 1898 and decided to stay. Their accidental arrival triggered a century of creative migration that shows no sign of slowing. Today, Taos contains a disproportionate number of working artists, serious galleries, and exceptional museums for a town of its size — and the tradition of engagement between Pueblo culture and modernist art that began with the original Taos Society continues to generate work of real originality.

The Taos Society of Artists Legacy

The Taos Society of Artists, founded in 1915, established the town's reputation with romantic but rigorously executed paintings of Pueblo life and the surrounding landscape. Their work set the aesthetic and commercial framework that still shapes Taos's gallery market. If you want to understand the tradition, the Taos Art Museum at Fechin House — the restored home of Nicolai Fechin, one of the Society's most technically brilliant members — is the essential stop. The Harwood Museum of Art, operated by the University of New Mexico, provides the broadest historical survey.

Contemporary Galleries

Blue Rain Gallery Taos is the most important contemporary space in town, showing artists who engage seriously with the landscape and indigenous visual traditions without retreating into nostalgia. The Santa Fe location has the larger program, but the Taos space holds its own.

Parks Gallery focuses on a curated selection of contemporary Southwest artists — painters and sculptors whose work is in conversation with the land without being merely representational.

Inger Jirby Gallery shows the work of a single artist — Swedish-born Inger Jirby, who has lived and worked in Taos for decades. Her expressionistic paintings of Taos Pueblo and the surrounding landscape are among the most collected in the region.

Native American Art

Navajo Gallery is an essential stop for collectors of contemporary Native American art, with a focus on Navajo artists working in both traditional and contemporary idioms. The Millicent Rogers Museum provides the deepest historical context: an extraordinary collection of Pueblo pottery, Navajo weaving, and Hispano santos built by Standard Oil heiress Millicent Rogers in the 1940s.

Practical Tips

  • Taos Plaza is the geographic center; most galleries are within walking distance.
  • The Kit Carson Road area north of the plaza has several important studios and smaller galleries.
  • The Taos Fall Arts Festival (late September) is the town's premier gallery event, with studio tours and openings across the district.
  • Ranchos de Taos, four miles south, has additional galleries worth the short drive.