Surrealism and Abstraction: The Life Of A Cloud
Friday, April 24th, 2026 through Thursday, August 21st, 2026
Santa Fe’s blazing blue skies, summer sunsets and fantastical clouds have captured the attention of artists, residents and visitors alike. The first time you see lenticular clouds stacked like a graduated pile of pancakes you might think you are having a close encounter with a fleet of flying saucers. These naturally occurring cloud formations lend themselves to wild imaginings and artistic interpretation.
This collection of works by some of Santa Fe’s finest artists, invites you to watch a cloudscape drift across the sky and mine the depths of your own imagination. Contemporary composited portraits by Patrick Lysaght fill the East Wall with images of women in impossible desert landscapes. Music bursts from their minds, clouds and cacti float through the work with horns and keyboards and strings, speaking to the rich inner life behind each subjects’ eyes.
From Surrealism to Abstraction, the North wall is hung with curtains and clouds, calling up the connection between inner and outer space. Canyon Wind by Colt Seager with its rectilinear blocks of color, light and dark, plays with your perspective, shifting space toward you and away all at once. Nancy Scheinman’s mixed media piece, Hem of Sky Undone, brings a menagerie of flora and fauna into a magical landscape while blue velvet draperies ensconce a fiery cloudscape in Shawn Huckins’s Wildfire Sunset with Blue Curtains.
From the depths of Chris Roberts-Antieau’s fertile imagination, rendered in thread and fabric, Phantom Limb II deftly pulls you through the transparent to the apparent and playfully creates visual puns with layers of meaning woven into the warp and weft of the work. Clouds vanish into the outer realms in Kathleen McCloud’s Waiting for Aquarius where feathers dance as fingers in the wind.
Visitors are invited to indulge their musings as the imaginative, evocative and personal storytelling leaps from these walls. All pieces are available for purchase through their representing galleries, offering you a chance to bring a piece of Santa Fe’s dynamic artistic heritage home.
Recommended listening: Both Sides Now by Joni Mitchell
-Lisa Keating, Curator
How To Purchase These Works
Thank you for your interest in the Airport Collection. All work represented in this exhibition is available for purchase. Please contact the representing gallery or the Santa Fe Gallery Association to inquire: info@santafegalleryassociation.org 505/982-1648. Gallery representation website information is listed with each work in our programs, on the exhibit signage and here on our website.