Courtesy Alas de Agua
Scenes from the Alas de Agua Art Collective’s Barrio Art School program. The collective celebeates Dia de los Muertos this weekend.
When most Santa Fe tourists think of art, they picture Canyon Road galleries, Georgia O’Keeffe or museum gift shops. But on the city’s south side, the Alas de Agua Art Collective continues to define creative spaces on their own terms.
“We prefer the alley walls,” co-founder Israel Francisco Haros Lopez says. “That’s where the real stuff happens.”
Started in 2017 with a $5,000 grant from the Kindle Project, Alas de Agua emerged as a direct response to Santa Fe’s mainstream art scene. The collective deliberately positioned itself as an alternative space created by and for BIPOC artists.
“Constantly we’ve been told, from a Western lens, a white or colonized lens, how art should look, how art should be taught, how it should be instructed,” Lopez explains. “It’s because single-handedly, they don’t see us, right? But together, then they see us. Together we matter.”
Today, Alas de Agua runs any number of programs and workshops, but their main focus remains on the Barrio Art School, a program through which artists from the community teach neighborhood youths. The approach is intentionally free-form—no rigid curricula, just skilled artists sharing their craft in workshops and exhibitions.
“You’re the curriculum,” Lopez tells the teachers. “You have three hours a day for five days. Be you. That in itself is decolonizing and healing. “
This philosophy stems from recognizing what Lopez calls “the multiverse of knowledge,” the countless ways art and creativity manifest in BIPOC communities.
“When you think about paños [prison art] and someone says, ‘this pen saved my life,’ it’s not a metaphor,” he says. “That person has knowledge and understanding we don’t have. For an artist in prison to hold a pen and educate another artist, that knowledge is their knowledge. It’s the same with lowrider artists – getting that perfect cherry red and silver, that’s passed down through generations. And it’s still evolving. It’s a living thing.”
The collective sees these art forms as dynamic traditions that resist commodification and institutional frameworks. Take lowrider murals, for example. As Lopez points out, they’re connected to a long history of Mexican muralism, which revolutionized social realism and public art globally. Those car artists were “the first spray paint taggers,” Lopez notes, adding that they used automotive technology to paint massive murals.
Selina Fernandez, who joined Alas de Agua in 2021, brings her linocut printmaking expertise to the collective. She learned her craft, “In an anarchist bookshop down an alley...in the attic, using a spoon.”
Now she teaches others these accessible techniques at the Barrio Art School.
“I think that [bookshop] experience opened up the idea of how to make it with the things you have, and how to make it with the things you get once you start advancing in your art process,” Fernandez asserts. “We started talking about having an art school for the barrio, by the barrio. Let’s get artists from the barrio to teach our kids how to make things with whatever supplies they have.”
The collective is now expanding into music education with a community mariachi program after a performance of an all-girl mariachi band left many of the students asking the performers how to do what they do musically. Perhaps most surprisingly, Alas de Agua branched into farming a few years ago. During COVID-19, when their newly acquired building had to close, the collective pivoted to agriculture by kicking off Full Circle Farms—a small plot adjacent to Reunity Resources down Agua Fría Street now led by Santa Fe-based woman-run Indigenous activist group Three Sisters Collective.
“Something that was always there, that was dormant, quantum leaped forward,” Lopez says, adding that Alas de Agua will continue to contribute to Full Circle.
Now the collective is seeking more land in Santa Fe County with water rights to create a sustainable base for art, music and farming.
The collective maintains its independence through community funding rather than traditional nonprofit structures.
“People thought I was crazy,” Lopez says. “They were like, ‘You can’t have a building on the Southside without grants!’ But, if the people don’t want it, then I don’t want it. Every year the building is funded by the people through GoFundMe or events.”
This grassroots approach reflects Alas de Agua’s broader mission to create spaces where BIPOC artists can fully express themselves without institutional constraints.
“You want to throw everything on the floor? Great.” Lopez says. “We just want people to say, ‘I got to do whatever I wanted in that space, and they accepted it as a person of color.’”
In our era of AI art and mass production, Alas de Agua’s members insist upon human connection and cultural authenticity. They’re not interested in competing with mainstream institutions or chasing traditional success metrics. They’re building something far more vital: a self-determined creative space to sustain and celebrate their community’s rich cultural traditions.
Dia de Los Muertos with MAriachi Gran Victoria: 4:30 pmSaturday, Nov. 2. Free. Alas de Agua Art Collective. 1520 Center Drive #2, alasdeagua.com
