In September 1898, Ernest Blumenschein and Bert Phillips were driving a wagon from Denver toward Mexico, intending to sketch landscapes along the way. On a rough road north of Taos, a wheel broke. Blumenschein loaded the wheel onto a horse and rode into town to find a blacksmith. What he found instead stopped him entirely.

He later wrote about looking north from a hilltop and seeing the Taos Valley for the first time: the Pueblo, the mountains, the particular quality of the light. He went back and told Phillips. They agreed to stay through the winter. Phillips stayed for the rest of his life. Blumenschein kept returning, eventually settling permanently in 1919.

They told everyone they knew in New York and Philadelphia. The light, the Pueblo, the landscape unlike anything they had painted before. Painters started arriving.

By 1915 enough painters had settled in Taos to form the Taos Society of Artists. The founding members were Blumenschein, Phillips, Joseph Henry Sharp, E.I. Couse, Oscar Berninghaus, and Herbert Dunton. They mounted traveling exhibitions that circulated through major American cities and introduced Taos and its Pueblo community to a national audience.

The Society ran until 1927. Its members produced thousands of paintings documenting Pueblo life, the landscape, and the Hispanic village culture of northern New Mexico. The work ranges from genuinely excellent to romanticized and paternalistic. Both things are true simultaneously, and the best museums in Taos will tell you so.

Joseph Henry Sharp was the first of the group to paint in Taos, arriving in 1893 before Blumenschein and Phillips made it famous. E.I. Couse produced some of the most widely reproduced images of Pueblo subjects. Their homes and studios are now part of the Couse-Sharp Historic Site on Kit Carson Road.

Mabel Dodge Luhan arrived in Taos in December 1917. She had run the most talked-about literary and political salon in Greenwich Village, had been married three times, and was looking for something different. She found it in Taos and in Tony Lujan, a Taos Pueblo member she married in 1923.

She built a rambling adobe compound called Los Gallos at the edge of Pueblo land and spent the next three decades writing letters to everyone she knew in American cultural life, insisting they come to Taos. Many did. D.H. Lawrence and Frieda Lawrence came in 1922 and returned twice more. She gave Lawrence a 160-acre ranch north of town in exchange for the manuscript of Sons and Lovers. He called it Lobo Ranch, then Kiowa Ranch.

Georgia O'Keeffe came in 1929, sketched the back of the Ranchos church, and began the paintings that would define her reputation. Ansel Adams came and photographed. Willa Cather came. Carl Jung came. Robinson Jeffers came. The list is genuinely surprising for a remote New Mexico valley in the 1920s and 1930s.

Mabel wrote four volumes of memoirs about her life in Taos, collectively titled Intimate Memories. They are gossipy, self-mythologizing, and indispensable for understanding what the colony actually felt like from inside.

After the Taos Society dissolved in 1927, a second generation of painters arrived who were less interested in documenting the Pueblo and more interested in abstraction, modernism, and the formal properties of the landscape itself. The Taos Moderns, a loosely defined group active from the 1940s onward, included Emil Bistram, Andrew Dasburg, Agnes Martin, and others.

Agnes Martin moved to New Mexico in 1967 after a period of psychological crisis, built an adobe house in the desert south of Taos, and spent the final decades of her life making quiet, luminous grid paintings that are now in major collections worldwide. The Harwood Museum in Taos has a dedicated Agnes Martin gallery with seven large paintings from the 1990s. It is one of the better small gallery experiences in the American Southwest.

The Taos art colony never ended. It shifted, absorbed new people, changed its character, and continued. The population of working artists in Taos today is disproportionate to the town's size by any reasonable measure. Painters, sculptors, photographers, weavers, jewelers, ceramicists, and writers have continued to arrive throughout every decade since Blumenschein rode in with a broken wheel.

The dynamic that attracted them in 1898 is structurally the same: the light is real, the landscape is real, the proximity to the Pueblo and the Hispano village culture provides a subject that is simultaneously ancient and alive, and the town is remote enough that the people who live there chose it intentionally.

The Taos Center for the Arts presents contemporary work in visual art, film, theater, and music. SOMOS supports the literary culture with readings, workshops, and residencies. The annual Taos Studio Tour, held each fall, opens working studios to the public. The colony is not a historical phenomenon. It is a current one.

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