The fatigue Sergio Lugo shared was a familiar and remarkably relatable experience for anyone who has ever visited the Santa Fe Indian Market.
“This is the fourth trial for this piece. I’m so relieved that it came out,” Lugo said, with tears next to the coil-built clay bowl he created in his family’s Santa Clara Pueblo pottery style. The piece, titled the Floating Melon Bowl, was awarded Best in Show by the Southwestern Association for Indian Arts (SWAIA) at the 2026 Santa Fe Indian Market last week.
“I’m really tired. I didn’t get much time with my wife, but we’ll make it up,” he said.
Lugo burnished the piece with mica slip he stone-polished during overnight work shifts between midnight and noon, when his Northern New Mexico home would cool down from the summer heatwave temperatures that reached above 100 degrees in the weeks leading up to Indian Market. He had to keep his air conditioner off when carving and polishing the piece to maintain integrity. And to make matters worse, his home was near the Frijoles Fire, an active wildfire that has burned 13,000 acres in the Santa Fe National Forest.
The four-sided melon bowl is topped with a Kiva step lid, a traditional symbol with real-world applications by contemporary Native Americans that is showcased in art and ceremony.
“My issue was the bottom would dry quicker than the top because of the hollow inside. The air was reaching all the way around,” Lugo said to describe his struggles. “I later discovered I can wrap the bottom and let the top dry completely before I unwrap them off. It was successful. I’m really happy that I pushed past those failures. Because, honestly, I don’t think I would have done it next year.”
A week after the Santa Fe Indian Market, Lugo is making good on the promise to his wife for more rest and quality time. It’s the same for other artists, who are now also counting inventory, calculating debt and revenue or taking a break from it all to decide what to create next.
Tourists and other visitors are also resting with the experience that consistently brings in an annual economic impact of more than $160 million dollars between direct art sales, hospitality and gross receipts tax.
The enduring hub that maintains the community calendar is SWAIA and its judged market that features 10 distinct art categories for more than 1,000 artists from over 200 tribal nations. However, in recent years the weekend has evolved into multiple separate events with cultural programming overgrown into a time many effectively call, “Santa Fe NDN Market”.
The Santa Fe NDN Market doesn’t exist in an official capacity; rather it is the nickname for an amalgamation of multiple Native American art markets and events happening at the same time that includes gallery openings, cultural education seminars, fashion shows, film screenings, concerts, political and business meetups.
But it all flows back to SWAIA and its enduring historical presence on the Santa Fe Plaza that has introduced millions of visitors to Native American communities and culture through planned tourism and art investments that encourage traditional expression.
Felix Vigil (Jicarilla Apache) won the top SWAIA honor for sculpture with his cast bronze piece of a spirit holding a lightning bolt, thunder in front of a rainbow and parrot feathers. The entire piece, titled Realm of the Rainmaker, is a reflection of Vigil’s traditional language.
“The traditional language is very visual and it’s very abstract. English, to me, is more of a utilitarian language. It’s something that helps me describe my work, but deep down, my traditional language has such beautiful imagery,” he said. “There’s some things in my language that you can’t constrain into English because it doesn’t sound connected. This is how this piece came about.”
As artists like Vigil navigate their own cultural expression through traditional teaching and craft, tourists are in their own tradition that follows the American-heritage to encounter the unknown in the Western United States. Traditional settlers forged Santa Fe before hospitality barons during the Industrial Revolution created the American Southwest tourism economy that brought forward events like the Indian Market.
The overwhelming consumption of culture and commerce is palpable in the air. The vibe and energy in the historical setting has existed in war and peace for such exchange activity since the 1600s — first between Pueblo Indians and Spanish colonists, followed by Mexican generals and English settlers. An 1880 visit to Santa Fe by United States President Rutherford B. Hayes and Generals Ulysses S. Grant and Tecumseh Sherman laid claim to the New Mexico territory.
Sherman had choice words for the cultural exchange he observed in Santa Fe. In the book, Santa Fe’s Fonda: The Story of the Old Inn at the End of the Trail, by Allen Steele, Sherman is quoted as saying, “I hope ten years hence there won’t be any adobe houses in the territory.”
The famous Civil War general did not get his wish, as Santa Fe committed to revitalize and uphold the traditional adobe style in the late 19th century to attract tourists.
This was spurred in part by the Fred Harvey Company, a hospitality innovator that was founded in 1876 to give quality meals and lodging to railroad travelers from Chicago. It became known for its concierge system that employed single women from the Midwest, called “Harvey Girls”, at its hotels and on the trains and tour buses that would take curious visitors into Western U.S. sights like the Grand Canyon. Today, its ownership company Xanterra is the largest national and state park concessionaire in the United States.
By the 1930s The Harvey Company created experiences for tourists, including the “Indian Detours” which would bring people from the railroad into the redeveloped “New Old Santa Fe Plaza” and to its hotel the La Fonda Inn.
“Indian Detours” became a destination for visitors to experience Native American culture with guided tours and educational lectures of the things people were seeing from their railcar windows.
“When Detourists returned to La Fonda for the night, they could visit the room known as the lecture lounge, in the lounge were large maps, slideshows and lectures to help people understand what they were seeing,” Steele included in his book.
The Historic La Fonda Inn, remains central for the robust SWAIA-adjacent events like the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) benefit and auction.
This year the event raised more than $1 million dollars for student scholarships. The school is credited for introducing new Native American artists to the Santa Fe art scene. Alumni for the school make up a large portion of the artists working during the weekend. As the school elevates more artists, more space is needed. The biggest example of that is the emergence of the Pathways Indigenous Arts Festival a few miles north in Pojoaque Pueblo.
Abundant Santa Fe cultural markets remain vital to bring contemporary life into the New Mexico capital. Keeping with tradition, tourists from across the globe hopped off the New Mexico Railrunner last Friday to continue this tradition into 2026.
“I’m looking for a turquoise ring and places to take pictures. Santa Fe is just beautiful,” Jaime King, a visitor from Texas who boarded the commuter train in Albuquerque. “I love this time of year.”
For a first-time visitor to Santa Fe during Indian Market weekend, the experience can be immense. My advice for those people is to embrace the beautiful joy of missing. Yes, you will miss so much.
At the gallery opening for The Three Fires: Contemporary Anishinaabe Artists, several pieces from an exhibit at the Detroit Institute of Art traveled to showcase the work of tribes from the Great Lakes Region.
Potawatomi artist Holly Trevan showcased an image she reproduced to share family history tied to the Native American Boarding School era in Michigan. She took a picture of her daughter to recreate the image of an aunt who was known for setting a boarding school on fire.
A tribal hospitality professional, it was her first time attending the Santa Fe Indian Market. Moments before her gallery show Trevan said she ran into Cara Romero (Chemehuevi Indian Tribe), a photography idol who had a gallery opening next door.
“I fan-girled on her when we met,” Trevan said. “There can be a thousand artists here, but we’re all different. We’re all telling a different story. I’m looking forward to meeting some of the artists that have been celebrated. I’m really encouraged by this next generation.”
Trevan’s partner Jason Wesaw, a member of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi, was showing his land-based textile work at the gallery and then later in the main SWAIA show. He remarked that Santa Fe’s high-energy vibe can match Chicago’s because of the cultural presence of Native people.
“Chicago itself, the name for the city, comes from our Potawatomi language,” he said. “Zhegagoynakh means the place of the Wild Onion. Chicago has always been a center of commerce, because Potawatomi and other tribal people were there in Chicago and living, like, a really lush and prosperous life in the lower Great Lakes. Our history and our presence there has been diminished over the years. So I made this piece in thinking about how, even in the shadows, we’re still in the center of everything that makes Chicago what it is.”
Back at the La Fonda Inn, where ceremonial prayers from the Pueblo, Diné and Apache are depicted on walls in paintings, the arts collective Sovereign showcased Native contemporary art and fashion. Native fashion models prepared to showcase new looks of cultural heritage.
Model Lucy Nunez arrived in Santa Fe from the Kenaitze Indian Tribe in Alaska. Last May, she visited to watch the SWAIA Native Fashion Week festivities and was influenced to return.
“I really enjoyed the Indigenous fashion and feeling empowered by the representation, and so being able to walk the runway, this time is amazing,” she said. “It’s a way for us to express ourselves to a larger audience and share our struggles and the beauty of our culture.”
The message of connection to ancestors and cultural heritage that is attacked, yet celebrated during events like Santa Fe NDN Market was a common theme when artists shared their motivation. As she looked down at the corsage hand beaded by designer Ro Tree (Diné), she reflected on its importance.
“They say that every bead is a prayer,” Nunez said. “So, it is something you would want to preserve.”
