Los Alamos High AP English students explore Tewa art, culture in Santa Fe

A Los Alamos High School AP English Literature and Composition class walked into the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe and into a deeper reading of northern New Mexico itself, studying Tewa Nangeh/Tewa Country with Hailey Duran, a student from Tesuque and Nambé pueblos, in a setting that made Indigenous presence impossible to ignore.

Teacher Catherine Puranananda’s class used the museum visit as an extension of the classroom, linking literature, visual art and cultural history to the land and communities that shape the region. For Duran, the experience carried added weight because the exhibition centers the histories and voices of the six Tewa Pueblos, including Tesuque and Nambé.

Tewa Nangeh/Tewa Country is the first exhibition of its kind at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Co-curated by Jason Garcia of Santa Clara Pueblo and Bess Murphy, the museum’s Luce Curator of Art and Social Practice, the show includes more than 30 newly created works by 12 artists, scholars and culture bearers from Nambé, Ohkay Owingeh, Pojoaque, San Ildefonso, Santa Clara and Tesuque pueblos.

The museum has said the exhibition addresses the erasure of Tewa presence from the Georgia O’Keeffe story in northern New Mexico and re-situates that narrative in Tewa Country. It also says the land has been the continuous home of the six Tewa Pueblos from time immemorial to the present, placing O’Keeffe’s art and personal objects in dialogue with contemporary Tewa artworks.

The exhibition opened on November 7, 2025, with a community celebration, and the museum’s listing says it runs through November 1, 2026. Public programming around the show has included curator talks and family days, underscoring the museum’s effort to frame it as a living community project rather than a static display.

For Los Alamos students, the trip tied classroom analysis to the cultural landscape just down the road in Santa Fe. It also placed a major regional institution inside a broader conversation about representation, belonging and who gets to define the story of this place.