The 1950s brought prosperity, conformity, and Cold War anxiety in equal measure. Tourism was expanding. The American middle class was mobile and curious. Santa Fe was becoming more widely known as an arts destination — and that growing reputation was creating a larger audience for Indian Market.
The post-war economic boom was accelerating. The art world was evolving rapidly — Abstract Expressionism was arriving in New York, and American art was beginning to assert itself on the world stage. In Santa Fe, a different kind of artistic seriousness was also deepening.
The GI Bill was reshaping American life — creating new homeowners, new college graduates, new suburban families with disposable income and cultural aspirations. Some of that newly mobile prosperity was finding its way to Santa Fe.
The Cold War was beginning to take shape. The Truman Doctrine was announced. America was settling into a new kind of global role — and New Mexico, home to both the atomic bomb and centuries of Indigenous culture, was living inside that tension more acutely than almost anywhere else.
Post-war America was optimistic, mobile, and prosperous in ways that the Depression and war years had made unimaginable. Tourism rebounded. Collectors returned. The art market had endured, and it was ready to grow.
V-E Day in May. V-J Day in August. The war that had reshaped the world was over. And forty-five minutes from the market, the scientists at Los Alamos were processing what they had made. New Mexico held an unusual weight in the history of the century — both its art and its weapons born in the same high desert.
D-Day. The war in Europe was turning. The end was still a year away, but the shape of it was becoming visible. Across the country, people were beginning to imagine what came after.
Los Alamos National Laboratory was established in 1943 as part of the Manhattan Project, consolidated under the leadership of J. Robert Oppenheimer to develop the atomic bomb. New Mexico — already home to a remarkable convergence of cultures — was now also home to the most consequential scientific project in human history.
Wartime rationing and travel restrictions reshaped daily life across America. In New Mexico, the presence of military installations and defense-related activity was significant. The state was changing, and so was its relationship to the rest of the country.
December 7, 1941: the attack on Pearl Harbor. The United States entered World War II the following day. The country mobilized with extraordinary speed — and the consequences for travel, tourism, and cultural life would be felt for years.
The war in Europe was in its second year. American involvement felt increasingly inevitable. The economy was recovering, but the national mood was one of tension and preparation. The art market would weather the decade ahead — but not without cost.
World War II begins in Europe with Germany's invasion of Poland in September 1939. The United States remained officially neutral, but the war's reach was long. The decade that had tested the market with economic collapse was ending — and the decade that would test it with global conflict was beginning.
In Europe, the political situation was deteriorating rapidly. In New Mexico, TEFAF — the European Fine Art Fair — would not be founded for another fifty years, but the world was about to change in ways that would test every cultural institution, including this one.
The New Deal programs continued. The economy was recovering unevenly — a recession within the Depression hit in 1937, briefly reversing some of the gains of the preceding years. But the arts infrastructure the WPA had created kept operating.
The New Deal was in full force. WPA murals were going up across the country. The federal government was, for the first time, treating art as public infrastructure. In New Mexico, that meant Native artists had more institutional support than at any point in the market's short history.
The WPA begins. Between 1935 and 1943, federal arts programs would employ thousands of artists across the country — including Native artists in the Southwest. The New Deal didn't just stabilize the economy; it created an infrastructure for American art that hadn't existed before.
The Indian Reorganization Act of 1934 — the "Indian New Deal" — restored tribal land rights and supported self-governance. For Native artists and communities, it was the first federal acknowledgment in decades that assimilation policy had failed.
FDR's first inaugural address promised a New Deal. The banking crisis was acute. The era of direct federal investment in arts and culture — including Native arts — was approaching, though it had not yet arrived.
The Great Depression continued to deepen. Unemployment reached roughly 24% nationally. The New Deal was still three years away. For Native communities already living on the economic margins, the crisis was compounded — and the market's survival was not symbolic. It was material.
The Great Depression continued. But 1931 was also the year Indian Market found its most essential form — direct, personal, artist-controlled. In the middle of economic collapse, the market became more itself, not less.
Unemployment climbed toward 25%. Banks failed across the country. In New Mexico, communities that had already been economically marginalized faced compounding hardship. The market's survival in these years was not incidental — it was an act of collective will.
The Great Depression begins. The crash of 1929 erased fortunes, collapsed banks, and sent unemployment soaring. It would cast a shadow over the next decade — and test whether a small Native art market in Santa Fe could survive what the rest of the country could not.
The late 1920s were the last gasp of a long boom. Stock markets were soaring, consumer culture was ascendant, and the warning signs were there for those paying attention. Shirley Temple was born this year. The roaring twenties would not last much longer.
Charles Lindbergh crossed the Atlantic. The economy was buoyant and American confidence was high. Few could see what was coming just two years away.
The mid-1920s brought growing national interest in Southwestern culture. Tourism was rising, and the Santa Fe Railway had actively promoted Native art and culture as part of its brand for decades. The market was operating inside a larger machine of romanticization — one it would spend years navigating on its own terms.
The Santa Fe Indian Market has gathered artists, collectors, and community on the Plaza every August since 1922. What began as the Southwest Indian Fair and Industrial Arts and Crafts Exhibition — organized by the Museum of New Mexico to preserve and promote Native artistry — grew into the world’s largest and most prestigious juried Native American art market. This archive documents the institutional history of that journey: every year, every organizing body, every venue, and the broader world that shaped each market in its time.
