Santa Fe Fantasy - Quest for the Golden City (Hardcover, 1st ed)

"This beautiful album deciphers the mystique of Santa Fe, a city where the heritage of Spain and Old Mexico mingled with the powerful cultures of Native American peoples and the frontier ways of settlers pushing westward.... In an informal, profusely illustrated text, full of lore on early Pueblo culture and Spanish colonial trading, Baca charts a visionary tradition extending from Mimbres pottery to the paintings of R. C. Gorman, Emmi Whitehorse, and Georgia O'Keeffe". (Publishers Weekly)

"The Santa Fe fantasy... has roots that lie much deeper than modern metropolitan angst. In fact, for every contemporary version of Santa Fe's allure -- shopping, art, architecture, spiritual nourishment or the landscape -- there's a historical precedent, and Baca explores all of these in his new book.... A large format, visually handsome book ... as eye-catching as it is interesting to read". (New Mexican)

Writer Elmo Baca shows why "The City Different" has had such powerful effects upon people of different times, races, and cultures, and why its allure persists to the present day. Elmo Baca has captured the dazzling contemporary ambience created by light, landscape, architecture, Spanish and Native American culture, New Age visionaries, and postmodern fashion and design as no one has ever done before. The text is interwoven with historical and contemporary photographs and with paintings by New Mexico's greatest artists, including Georgia O'Keeffe, R. C. Gorman, T. C. Cannon, Fremont Ellis, and Pablita Velarde. Douglas Johnson's cover painting, created especially for this book, illustrates the different cultural and historical attractions on which Santa Fe Fantasy is based.