It was the kind of morning best spent in a worn chair next to a lamp reading a good book. Rain pelted at the roof. Its percussive rhythms accompanied the lulling language of Fray Angélico Chávez who wrote: “The angel had simply vanished, slipped out of his hand the way sparrows or trout usually do, only much more swiftly.” Huddled around a broad table, fingers warmed by mugs of coffee and tea, we were in the Reception Center at the School for Advanced Research (SAR) listening to the first three short stories in Fray Angélico Chávez’s “New Mexico Triptych.” Published in 1940, the beloved Franciscan padre born in Wagon Mound, NM created his own illustrations. In 1938 and 1939, he read his poetry aloud at the White Sisters’ “Chapel.” On May 19, 2023, in honor of the second annual Santa Fe International Literary Festival, twenty-four tour guests learned about the literary connections at SAR as an organization, a collection, and a place.
Growing up in the middle of Alaska, there was a window to another world on the wall of my living room. It was like no place I’d ever seen. There was a church that seemed to be made of clay pinched together by someone’s fingers. And there was a woman with a flared skirt, shawl, and scarf over her head. No one dressed like that in Alaska. I enjoyed stepping back to where it appeared to be a photograph or passage to another land and then move slowly forward to find just that point when the optical illusion fell away and I could see the leaves, the moss, the bark.
We invite you to take a virtual tour of El Delirio. Learn about the origins of the buildings and the historical significance of the sprawling estate that is now SAR’s campus. Join your guide, SAR scholar-in-residence Nancy Owen Lewis, for a delightful online tour complete with archival and contemporary visuals from SAR’s collections.
Community lives not only in people, but in places. Places like El Delirio, originally home to Amelia Elizabeth and Martha Root White and now the home of the School for Advanced Research. Thanks to the vision of so many people—beginning with the White sisters and...
In 1977 Doug Schwartz, who was then the president of SAR, hired Art Wolf to be the curator of collections. Wolf’s task was to oversee the building of the facility that would become the IARC, which now stewards a collection of nearly 12,000 artworks.
Although we now use the Dobkin Boardroom for lectures, meetings, and social gatherings, it still includes the original “choir loft” at one end, and this loft hides a curiosity.
Elizabeth and Martha White established Rathmullan Kennels in 1930, when they decided to start raising Irish wolfhounds and bought a breeding pair: Gelert and Edain of Ambleside.
