For Episode 3, I wanted to tell a story that starts in the world-famous “atomic city” of Los Alamos—a place that’s been back in the spotlight recently, thanks to Christopher Nolan’s film Oppenheimer—but that doesn’t end with with the usual mushroom cloud. It’s about how Los Alamos National Laboratory and one of its spinoffs, UbiQD, pioneered safer and cheaper ways to make quantum dots, and how these remarkable light-shifting materials are helping practitioners of controlled environment agriculture improve crop yield and quality.

I met with UbiQD’s founder and CEO Hunter McDaniel back in May to hear how quantum dots really work, how the company got spun out of LANL, and how it makes the materials for its agricultural films (and many other products) from its facility at the edge of the Pajarito Plateau. The company is living proof that R&D at Los Alamos can generate benefits well beyond nuclear weapons technology. It’s also evidence that there’s a booming ecosystem of innovative startups right here in New Mexico. (Driving that boom is the willingness of LANL’s tech transfer office to license the lab’s intellectual property for commercial development, plus enlightened venture capital investment fueled by New Mexico’s $30 billion sovereign wealth fund.)

I also met with Kevin Barrows, co-founder of La Capilla Farm in La Cienega, NM, to hear how UbiQD’s quantum dot films for greenhouses actually work in the field. The company’s UbiGro product is designed to shift the energy in sunlight, which peaks in the green part of the spectrum, toward the reddish-orange wavelengths that chlorophyll can absorb and use more readliy. Barrows says that in a side-by-side comparison—with identical lettuce beds planted in greenhouses with and without UbiQD’s UbiGro covering—he and his wife Shawn noticed a significant difference in the speed of growth and the color richness of their crops. It’s a prosaic but compelling example of the ways science from the nation’s flagship national lab, where the usual headlines are about clashes over weapons production and environmental cleanups, can also benefit businesses and consumers. (The full transcript is below.)

Featured Voices

Hunter McDaniel is the founder and CEO of UbiQD, an advanced materials company powering product innovation in controlled-environment agriculture. Hunter earned a Ph.D. in Materials Science and Engineering at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, before joining Los Alamos National Laboratory in the Chemistry Division. He founded UbiQD, Inc. in 2014, and the company has raised more than $10M, and employs ~40 full time workers. Hunter has more than fifty publications and patents, and more than 2000 total citations, h-index: 20.

Kevin Barrows is the co-founder and co-owner of La Capilla Farm in La Cienega (formerly known as La Capilla Hops Farm). In its two “high tunnel” greenhouses, completed in 2020 and 2022, La Capilla grows a variety of fruits, vegetables, and flowers for local farmer’s markets, restaurants, and grocers. In 2025 La Capilla was one of the first New Mexico farms to adopt UbiQD’s UbiGro quantum dot film in place of traditional polyethylene greenhouse covering.

Wade Roush, PhD, is the creator and host of Turning Corners. He’s an MIT- and Harvard-trained freelance science and technology journalist, editor, and audio producer who has written for publications such as Science, MIT Technology Review, Xconomy, and Scientific American. From 2017 to 2025 he produced the tech-and-culture podcast Soonish. He’s the co-founder of the Hub & Spoke audio collective, the author of Extraterrestrials from the MIT Press, and the editor or co-editor of three volumes of hard science fiction: Twelve Tomorrows (2018), Tasting Light (2022), and Starstuff (2025).

More Resources

UbiQD

La Capilla Farm

Santa Fe Community College Controlled Environment Agriculture Program

Los Alamos National Laboratory Richard P. Feynman Center for Innovation (LANL’s tech transfer office)

New Mexico State Investment Council (managing the state’s sovereign wealth fund)

Transcript

Sonic ID: Hub & Spoke Audio Collective.

Kevin Barrows: It is a little unfortunate that the lab has got the bad image of being the place of the nuclear weapon and so forth, but my father actually worked up there. And, um, over the years, I’ve seen all the other kind of things that come out of there and they should like try to improve their image, I would think with, with the community and, you know, with the, the country or whatever, and show that they do all these other kind of things up there.

Wade Roush: Today on Turning Corners, a look at the other side of Los Alamos, the national lab and the town around it are infamous as the birthplace of the atomic age. But few people realize how many other kinds of things the lab works on, including tiny glowing particles called quantum dots, that are changing the way some farmers in New Mexico raise their crops.

Cillian Murphy as Robert Oppenheimer: Welcome to Los Alamos. There’s a boys school we’ll have to commandeer. And the local Indians come up here for burial rites. But apart from that, nothing for 40 miles in any direction. The perfect spot for success.

Wade Roush: My first extended visit to New Mexico was in 2022. I stayed with my friend Ellen in Santa Fe, and one day I borrowed her car and drove up to Los Alamos. I’d been reading about the Manhattan Project Ever since I was a grad student studying the history of science and technology. So the town had a pretty big place in my imagination, but I’d never been there. So it was a treat, in a weird way, to see the place where scientists first figured out how to adapt the phenomenon of nuclear fission into a bomb. Now, interestingly, on the cold March day when I visited, Christopher Nolan and his film crew happened to be in town, and I learned that they were shooting scenes for a movie version of the Robert Oppenheimer biography American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin. I glimpsed a tent full of extras, dressed in 1945 clothes and hairstyles, getting ready to stamp their feet for what turned out to be the big climactic rally scene inside Fuller Lodge. That’s when Cillian Murphy’s Oppenheimer has a hallucinatory vision about the human cost of the lab’s success.

Wade Roush: Later, I talked to a volunteer at the local history museum. She said everybody in town was excited about the movie, but she also said they were worried about whether it would be historically accurate and whether Oppenheimer himself would come off as a hero or a monster. In the end, it was a little of both, just like in the book. But what I don’t think anybody expected was that Nolan’s movie would so brilliantly capture the epic, tragic, almost mythological scope of the Manhattan Project and of Oppenheimer’s own life. Los Alamos is the locus of that myth. To drop a more current Chris Nolan reference, it’s like Ithaca and Troy rolled into one. And honestly, when you live here in the state like I do now, you start to feel like the lab plus the Trinity atomic test site. Give New Mexico a dark historical vibe that the state wouldn’t have otherwise, and that history seeps into the present. Los Alamos National Laboratory is still the place where many of the plutonium pits for the nation’s nuclear arsenal are assembled. And when you read about Los Alamos in the local newspapers today, more often than not, it’s because of the environmental mess left by decades of weapons research and construction.

Newscaster 1: Nearly 20 years after a large plume contamination was identified in the ground near Los Alamos National Lab, the state and the feds are still trying to figure out the best way to clean it up.

Newscaster 2: A government report says a radioactive water spill at Los Alamos National Lab was the result of workers failing to close a cooling system valve.

Michio Kaku (physicist): The good news is that at Los Alamos, they no longer store atomic warheads, so we no longer have to worry about explosions or anything like that. The problem is radioactive waste, essentially plutonium contaminated waste because plutonium is found at Los Alamos.

Wade Roush: So the legacy of the atomic age is obviously something New Mexico and the nation will have to grapple with for a long time. But here’s what I want to talk about today. There are plenty of other stories about Los Alamos that also deserve to be told. About 30% of the research at the lab is unclassified, and I bet you didn’t know, for example, that it’s the birthplace of the modern geothermal power industry. Starting in 1974 at a technical area about 35 miles west of the main lab, scientists drilled some of the first wells designed to test whether it was possible to inject cold water into hot, dry rock 2 to 3km below the surface and bring it back up at a temperature high enough to power a steam turbine and make electricity. Now we know that it is possible, and that there’s enough heat energy underground to power the entire country for centuries. If we just decided to build enough plants to tap into it. And there are so many other kinds of R&D going on inside the lab that the town of Los Alamos is now home to a number of high tech spin off companies, including one led by this guy.

Hunter McDaniel: My name is Hunter McDaniel. I’m the founder and CEO of UbiQD. We are an advanced materials manufacturer spun out of Los Alamos National Laboratory focusing on quantum dots, technology and manufacturing.

Wade Roush: And you pronounce it ubiquity, the same as the actual word ubiquity.

Hunter McDaniel: Yeah. That’s right. I mean, it’s short for ubiquitous quantum dots. Originally people started saying Ubi-Q-D and it just sort of stumbles in your mouth a little bit. And ubiquity rolls off your tongue. And that’s really what we’re trying to achieve. Ubiquitousness, which is ubiquity.

Wade Roush: Hunter McDaniel told me his father worked in another ubiquitous industry, oil and gas, which meant the family moved around a lot. He was born in New Orleans and went to high school in Bangkok, Thailand, then majored in electrical engineering and physics at UC Santa Barbara, and then got his PhD in material science at the University of Illinois, where he studied ways to control the synthesis of nanocrystals.

Hunter McDaniel: And my advisor at University of Illinois had written a chapter in a book that was authored by one of the leading scientists here at Los Alamos National Laboratory, Viktor Klimov. He’s kind of a, you know, sort of the godfather of spectroscopy of these kinds of materials. He’s a physicist who’s known for being able to do ultrafast spectroscopy so you can measure dynamics of electrons and electronic states in these materials and also the optical properties. And so it was really a wonderful opportunity to be able to come here as a postdoc and continue that along that path of research that I had started at University of Illinois and really dig into quantum dots.

Wade Roush: For people who don’t even know what a quantum dot is. And this might be the first time they’re even hearing about quantum dots. Can you give the thumbnail explanation?

Hunter McDaniel: So there’s two words there. Quantum and dot. The dot part is pretty easy. These are tiny little specks of material vanishingly small particles of semiconductor typically. And it’s kind of hard to imagine just how small they are. I like to give the analogy of the ratio of a golf ball to the planet earth is about the same size ratio as a quantum dot to a golf ball. So a quantum dot sitting on a golf ball is like a golf ball sitting on the earth. And I like to play golf. So I like to use that analogy, but tiny, tiny bits of material, which we call dots. The quantum part is where it starts to get interesting. This is where we’re able to sort of create new properties by controlling the size, in some cases, the shape of these nanoparticles. And it’s a quantum effect, so-called quantum size effect.

Wade Roush: I should tell you right now that we’re really going to nerd out about quantum dots in this episode. So it’s worth hearing more of McDaniel’s explanation of what quantum dots are and why they’re useful. It all has to do with controlling the color of the light the particles give off when they’re releasing energy.

Hunter McDaniel: If you take quantum mechanics in college, one of the very first examples they’ll give is called the electron in a box. And it’s a hypothetical example of where you put an electron in this very small box, and you change the size of the box. When you change the size, smaller and smaller of the box, the energy levels of that electron start to go up. So in the past, if you wanted to make a certain color of material, you’d have to come up with a new combination of atoms to create that new color, a new phosphor, a new molecule, whatever it is. And maybe that molecule will have a blue color. Maybe it’ll have a green color and you’re sort of stuck with whatever those combination of atoms ends up giving you. But with quantum dots, now we can control that color of material by changing the size of the particle. In other words, the size of the box in a very continuous way. And this only happens when you’re down at the small enough size scale, but it tends to be around ten nanometers, five nanometers, which should be on the order of a couple thousand atoms, maybe per particle. When you make materials at that size scale a little bit bigger, they’ll have a little bit more of a red color, a little bit smaller. They’ll have a little bit more of a blue color. So the classic kind of example of quantum dots is we make a rainbow of colors, all the same composition of matter. And the size of the particles are just changing slightly in each of the vials. And we can control that in the manufacturing process.

Wade Roush: Quantum dots aren’t a brand new discovery. Glass makers knew for centuries that they could make different colors of glass by mixing in different dusts and powders with the exact color, depending in part on the size of the particles. But scientists didn’t realize that quantum mechanical effects were at work until the 1980s, which is also when they came up with the name quantum Dot. And they didn’t figure out how to synthesize the dots until the 1990s. For that discovery, MIT professor Moungi Bawendi and two other scientists won the Nobel Prize in 2023. And since their work, quantum dots have found their way into a variety of products, including TVs.

Hunter McDaniel: The beachhead market has been the display industry, and quantum dot displays have been on the market for about 12 years now. Sony had a line of TVs that used quantum dots in there to make basically very pure reds and greens from a blue backlight. And fast forwarding to today, there’s been about 100,000,000m² of TVs deployed cumulatively, thousands of different SKUs. Every major brand from Samsung to Hisense, TCL, LG, all have quantum Dot displays on the market. It’s part of the reason why I started the company is I was very inspired by those first products coming out.

Wade Roush: Can you explain the Los Alamos connection? So was it Viktor Klimov? So what’s the connection between his work and your post-doc and the company being here?

Hunter McDaniel: So Viktor is a lab fellow. I think he’s been at the lab for more than 30 years now. And that you’re starting to get up into, like, the earliest papers on quantum dots. So he was collaborating with some of those folks, like at MIT. And so he has this at the time, and actually still today, a very large research group at Los Alamos National Laboratory in the chemistry division. So he’s kind of a physicist leading a research group in the chemistry division. So naturally, he’s going to do a lot of chemistry. My background was more in chemistry, more materials. So he kind of let us, you know, go run amok a little bit, play around and try different things.

Wade Roush: One of the things McDaniel started playing around with was the question of whether quantum dots could be made from safer materials. The first generation quantum dots used in TVs were mostly composed of cadmium or indium phosphide, which are both pretty toxic.

Hunter McDaniel: You can get away with maybe a gram of material in a TV. It’s embedded behind layers of plastic and it gets kind of diluted down. But if you wanted to go into a lot of these other applications that people have talked about for many years, like solar panels and cosmetics and diagnostics, um, you would really have to have something that was inherently safe and also much lower costs.

Wade Roush: While he was in Klimov’s lab, McDaniel developed a body of papers and patents showing that it was possible to make quantum dots from one of the safest and most abundant materials on earth silicon, and also that it could be done simply and cheaply.

Hunter McDaniel: And I think that new synthesis method ended up being what makes this work so well. Um, it gives rise to better properties, but it’s a very low cost, scalable method. I’ll show you some of the tooling that we’re using, but it’s a heat up method. Simply just add your stuff in there, heat it up, stir it. There’s a little bit more to it than that. But you know, so-called bucket chemistry, we get made fun of by the organic chemists because they’ll have like 50 steps in their process. But we just throw our stuff in a bucket and heat it up. And, you know, you need good patents to be able to defend that. But it’s it’s very elegant synthesis method.

Wade Roush: Mcdaniel says much of the work in Klimov’s lab had been funded by a Japanese company that expected to take the new synthesis method and scale it up commercially, but that company fell on hard times and decided to waive its licensing rights.

Hunter McDaniel: And that was the sort of founding moment. And so I was talking to the tech transfer office and, you know, they were supportive in principle of me starting a company and potentially getting a license. It was around that time that I started to do some diligence on, you know, what would that actually look like? I didn’t have any background in this, and I found that there were some patents that had been filed by MIT and some by University of Washington in this area that predated our work at Los Alamos. And so I reached out to them and I asked if the patents were available for licensing. Lo and behold, they were. And so I was able to kind of piece together a portfolio of licensed IP from Los Alamos, MIT, and University of Washington. That was the sort of founding technology of the company. And then, you know, since then, we’ve filed many, many more patents and expanded, you know, in our own ways. But that core technology came out of actually those three research institutions. I mean, at the company, we figured out a bunch of other things. Yeah. I think we’ve we’ve figured out some manufacturing methods that enable scale and reduce cost.

Wade Roush: Mcdaniel says he decided early on that he didn’t want to try to compete against Samsung and its supply chain partners to make quantum dots for TVs. Instead, the company started hunting for new markets where ubiquity could become the dominant supplier from the beginning. One of those markets is anti-counterfeiting. It’s possible to make currencies and even pharmaceuticals, with quantum dot watermarks and other security features that are very difficult for counterfeiters to copy. Another market is new materials for the roofs of greenhouses. And that’s how this story loops back around to farming. Now, as we’ve been saying, the most useful thing about quantum dots is that they can absorb light at one set of energies or wavelengths and re-emit it at a different energy depending on the size of the dots. And it turns out that one kind of light you might want to optimize this way is sunlight.

Hunter McDaniel: So you have this very broad band spectrum, all this energy coming from the sun. But things on earth are absorbing only certain colors. That’s why things don’t just look black and white. And I think plants give us a great example of this, because the chlorophyll plants look green. Chlorophyll doesn’t absorb green light very strongly. It absorbs mostly red and blue photons, especially red photons. And so when a plant looks green to you, it’s because it’s you’re you’ve subtracted the red and blue and what’s left over is the green. So the green gets reflected back and that’s the peak of sunlight. So it is kind of an interesting question. Why don’t plants, why didn’t chlorophyll evolve to absorb green light better? Because it’s at the peak of sunlight. But that’s maybe a story for a different day when you’re talking to a biologist. I’m the physicist on the podcast today. So And so if you’re going to build an indoor growing operation, like you’re not going to use sunlight at all, you’re going to build your spectrum up from the bottom. You’re going to use mostly red LEDs and a little bit of blue LEDs, or there are certain types of lighting fixtures, lighting bulbs like high pressure sodium lamps that have more red in the spectrum.

Hunter McDaniel: The ratio will be about 5 to 1 or so. Red to blue is what you’ll want to use in those kinds of setups. So what that’s telling you is that plants prefer red light and photosynthetically. It’s about 30% more efficient red light than blue, and then about 50% more effective than green. So what we’re talking about is basically creating that spectrum from sunlight directly, rather than having maybe solar panels next to your warehouse and then powering lights inside your warehouse, or adding lights into your greenhouse to add more red light, we just shift the spectrum of sunlight passively to where it’s no longer centered in the green, but centered in the red, and just by making the roof glow. So very simple concept glowing roof glowing with red photons. Red orange photons makes the plants more effectively using that light, and then they grow more vigorously. Vigorously. You get more crop yield between 10% and 30%, but we’ve seen as high as 40 to 50 in some trials that we’ve done.

Wade Roush: If you’ve ever been to a farmer’s market here in New Mexico or any other state, you know how much beautiful produce comes out of small farms, especially during the summer and fall. A lot of those farms aren’t growing their crops outdoors. A better way to protect them from weather and pests is to grow them in greenhouses covered with plastic or glass. The practice is known as controlled environment agriculture, and it’s small compared to outdoor farming. The area of all greenhouses in the world would add up to just one quarter of 1% of the planet’s cropland. But this kind of farming is incredibly productive. About half of the fresh tomatoes that Americans eat are raised under glass or plastic. Americans spend over $1 billion a year on food grown this way, and that number is up 44% in the last five years. So giving farmers a better way to convert the energy from sunlight into commercial crops would be a big deal. UbiQD’s film for greenhouse roofs goes by the brand name UbiGro, and to show me how the company makes it, McDaniel gave me a tour of the company’s headquarters building in Los Alamos. Every quantum dot that goes into every product UbiQD makes is manufactured here, and agricultural films are just the beginning.

Hunter McDaniel: I didn’t talk about it, but you can use our technology to generate electricity from a window. We have a brand. A trademark called window WENDOW, and it uses fluorescence in the glass. We put the quantum dots into a layer of laminated glass as a polymer layer in between two sheets of glass on the outer pane, and then the light that’s emitted by the quantum dots gets guided to the edges of the glass. And we have solar cells hidden in the frame. In this case, it’s powering a smart blind. So this is going kind of up and down depending on what the settings are, but you could use that to optimize around energy efficiency and ultimately power portion of the building.

Wade Roush: So this is a case where you’re using the quantum dot technology to channel light into conventional photovoltaics that are just kind of around the edges.

Hunter McDaniel: The silicon around the edges. It’s light in, light out. Um, and then we’re purchasing just strips of solar cells basically that go along the edge. Um, so now we’re going to enter an actual, um, lab space. So the folks are doing um chemistry in here. There are some hazards. Um, they’re all listed here. Just try not to drink any vials or um, eat anything that you find on the countertops.

Wade Roush: I’l try not to get bit by any radioactive spiders.

Hunter McDaniel: So this is more of like a polymer lab. So we’re taking the quantum dots and combining them into different compositions where we’re mixing them into polymers. You can do that either with a monomer that then you cure into a resin with photo initiation. Um, but yeah, we’re combining the dots into sort of prototypes. And usually it’s in two types of polymers. One is where you mix them into a liquid and you cure it with UV light, so-called photo initiated polymerization. The other is where we melt the polymer. And then we’re adding quantum dots into the liquid melted. And then as it cools, it solidifies. That’s a more scalable process, more of an industrial process. And so we’ve evolved kind of away from monomers. We still do that with some products, but towards this extrusion melted polymer.

Wade Roush: That’s the one you were talking about the heat injection. Yeah, yeah.

Hunter McDaniel: So there’s two screws that kind of come out of this and they’re going in opposite directions mixing. You can control the temperature along this path. So you can set the temperatures here. And then we’re adding in quantum dots, feeding them or other additives and mixing it in. When it comes out the other end, you get a strand kind of like this. And then this strand can be chopped into small pellets, and that the industry. Most polymer industries know how to accept those pellets so-called master batch. It’s a concentrated form that then they can let down into injection molding, cast, film, blown film, different kinds of standard polymer manufacturing processes.

Wade Roush: So that’s the these little strands are what would leave this facility. That’s the end product here.

Hunter McDaniel: Well, it would end up being more like these pellets. Oh.

Speaker 10: Okay. So that’s like a little vial full of like little, um, they look like sprinkles from an ice cream store.

Hunter McDaniel: Yeah. If we find a UV light sitting around somewhere, I’ll shine some on there and you can see the glow. Hey, rarely do you know where the, uh, rainbow demo would be.

Wade Roush: Oh, wow. Okay. Wow. That does it. So there’s five vials lined up on a a UV emitting sort of table. It really makes the liquid just like pop immediately. And these neon colors like blue, red, green, orange and blue again. That’s super cool. Thanks for showing me this. Um, yeah, sort of like the highlight of the tour. I love it. It’s supposed to be.

Wade Roush: A few minutes later, McDaniel showed me an area where the company stores the films that are ready for deployment.

Hunter McDaniel: So we have a couple different colors. Um, you’ll see like this looks like a little bit darker red. This is a little bit more of an orange color. And then, you know, as we’ve been developing the extruded film, so that’s that cast, uh, UV cured one that I was talking about earlier, a monomer that gets UV, um, polymerized. This is more like from the melted polymer and it’s more flexible, more durable. And this is the kind of polymer that they’re using on a traditional greenhouse. Whereas this is a little bit more exotic for them. It’s a little bit more rigid um unusual.

Wade Roush: You can just lay either one of these down on top of the existing glass or polymer.

Hunter McDaniel: Yeah. We hang below the existing glass, but about 85% of greenhouses in the world have this kind of, um, roof material. It’s just a, it’s a metal scaffold. And then it’s all polymers like this. Mostly polyethylene, just over a metal structure. And then this gets recycled. So the life of this and the the in the field, typically these types of polymers would be about three years. Ours is like a five year film. So it makes it more durable adding the quantum dots, but they’re having to recycle that and replace it. So it’s a, you know, it’s a lower cost point or lower price point type market, but it’s also a steady sales cycle, which is good for a business like ours.

Wade Roush: Before I left UbiQD, I asked McDaniel to put me in touch with some local farmers who were actually using the company’s quantum dot films. And the person he thought of first was Kevin Barrows, together with his wife, Sean, and their daughter, Kelly. Kevin runs La Capilla Farm in the La Cienega Valley, about 12 miles south of Santa Fe. In his day job, Barrows is a machinist and a tool and die maker. He’s also a former volunteer firefighter and EMT. But seven years ago, he and Shaun found this property on La Cienega Creek, and now they put in about 60 hours a week raising crops for local farmers markets.

Kevin Barrows: There is a spring fed creek that’s all in this area. La Cienega means wetlands. Um, and that creek basically runs most of the year, which is a great thing for agriculture in the La Cienega Valley here because there is a decent water supply for for some farming out here.

Wade Roush: So you built these, um, high tunnels, as you call them. And I’ve never heard that term, but I’m assuming that’s your name for basically a greenhouse.

Kevin Barrows: Yes. It’s a, it’s, it’s more like a hoop house.

Wade Roush: What have you got growing in the two in the two high tunnels.

Kevin Barrows: Well in, in, in this first one we have, uh, the citrus, which is the tangerine, lime, orange and lemon. And then we have I can look at a lot of lettuce and tomatoes at this time of year. And then we have, uh, my wife grows a lot of herbs. We have oregano, thyme, and we have the figs in here. We have collard greens, some kale, some mustard greens, um, some arugula.

Wade Roush: So I’m assuming that there’s, uh, like a trade off when you build a high tunnel or a greenhouse. Like the plus is you’re getting stability and temperature control, but then everything that’s under the roof obviously has to be watered, and you’re not going to get any rain. Not that we get much rain anyway.

Kevin Barrows: Right, right. Um, well, we use drip irrigation so it doesn’t use a lot of water in these greenhouses. Plus there’s not a lot as much evaporation. Um, there’s a lot of, uh, a lot of talk about now with doing what’s called CEA, uh, agriculture, which is a controlled environment, agriculture. Um, a little plug for the Santa Fe Community College has a great program over there. And the benefits of having this, the greenhouses, you can control the weather mostly. Um, you know, last year we had a hailstorm that wiped out all our peppers outside and, uh, you have wind and, and insects and all that stuff that’s outside that you don’t have or you have better control of inside the greenhouse, you know, especially the wind in New Mexico. It’s the humidity is so dry, it dries out the plants.

Wade Roush: Now, does this high tunnel have UbiGro film on it, or is that a different one?

Kevin Barrows: This particular one has the UbiGro film on it. Okay. And we just purchased that, I guess August or September of last year. It’s a new product and we’re one of the first ones that, uh, got the product in its full form that was in a poly, that you could put a whole roll of it on a greenhouse. So the decision was we needed to replace the poly on this because it usually only lasts six years or whatever. So, um, and, and I saw, I saw the product, I guess through the internet because I keep tabs on the community college website. Um. They have a lot of, of media that they put out about their greenhouse and, and what they do over there, their high tunnel and, um, that was on there and it was interesting and sounded space age, I guess you could say, or new or you don’t have to have lighting for it. It just automatically the sun shines through it and you get better light for your plants. So financially it is more expensive, But, um, one of the things that we do, we grow all winter, all year long. So in the wintertime, there’s not as much sunlight because the sun is lower in the atmosphere or lower on the planet. So plants don’t get as much sun in the winter to grow. So we said, oh, if we get better growing in the winter, then our plants will grow faster and we could have more to sell in the winter.

Wade Roush: Okay, we’re standing under the UbiGro. The light in here, to me feels a little more yellow than the light you would get just standing outside.

Kevin Barrows: The product is a little orangish color because, um, the quantum dots for this particular product is a orangish looking.

Wade Roush: Yeah. So it’s casting this kind of diffuse orangish light. Um, that makes the, I don’t know, it makes the greenhouse feel greener somehow. I mean, like the plants kind of light up in that in those frequencies, in those wavelengths, and they look almost more plant like. They look more they look happy. I guess that’s all I can say.

Kevin Barrows: You could say happy. I mean, if that’s the kind of light they like to grow in, that’s what they like.

Wade Roush: And have you been able to kind of like make any comparisons yet and, and make form a judgment, an early judgment about whether the product is doing what what ubiquity said it would do?

Kevin Barrows: Well, we don’t have any scientific data, but we did a trial since we have two of the exact greenhouses. Um, we did a trial when we first got it, we planted the same lettuce and basically tried to build the same bed to plant them in at the same time. We did, uh, some in one greenhouse and some in the other greenhouse. And we did notice a significant difference right away.

Wade Roush: In the speed of the growth or in...?

Kevin Barrows: Um, in the speed of the growth. And actually there’s a little bit different coloring of the lettuce for some reason.

Wade Roush: It’s super cool. I think what’s fun about this story, and the reason I wanted to tell this story at all is that here in New Mexico, obviously Los Alamos is famous for one thing, and it’s for being the birthplace of the nuclear age. And even people here in New Mexico aren’t necessarily aware of how much other kinds of science is going on at Los Alamos all the time, including material science and chemistry and some of the quantum dot technology that, um, ubiquity is built around. And here it is being used in an agricultural setting where you guys are making the most prosaic, most beautiful, most hands on possible stuff like farmers market vegetables, right? And that to me is a beautiful story. And I just, I wonder whether you see that kind of poetry in it too.

Kevin Barrows: Yes, I do. It is a little unfortunate that the lab has got the kind of a bad image of being, uh, you know, the place of the the nuclear weapon and so forth. But, uh, you know, I’ve lived in Santa Fe most of my life since 67. Um, and my, my father actually worked up there over the years, I’ve seen all the other kind of things that come out of there and they should like try to improve their image, I would think with, with the community and, you know, with the, the country or whatever, and show that they do all these other kind of things up there, a lot of science. And it is kind of unfortunate that they have that bad image and, and it be be great for them to do more of other things, you know, to help out with society. I guess you could say.

Wade Roush: Um, have you ever driven over to Fenton Lake State Park on the other side of Valles Caldera? So on the way there, I don’t know if just off the road there’s a place called the Fenton Lake geothermal experimental site, and it’s from way back when, from the mid 70s I think. And it’s, it’s one of the places where um, the government was funding very, very, very early studies of geothermal energy and.

Kevin Barrows: Not to get political, but we know what happened there. Yeah. My dad actually worked on, on that, that big hole that they dug up there.

Wade Roush: No kidding!

Kevin Barrows: Yes. Yeah.

Wade Roush: Amazing. What was what what was his role?

Kevin Barrows: Well, he was a machinist up there and, um, he, he used to work at this company called the Zia Company, which is a contractor. And they, they used to make things for, for the lab. And my dad worked at the lab for a little bit. I’m not exactly sure what he did up there. Probably some kind of machinist stuff or whatever for the drilling rig or whatever. But I remember that quite well back then when they were digging that and they just left. Left it be. That’s kind of what it’s kind of upsetting about the science up there. Sometimes they they invent or whatever this this really nice stuff and it doesn’t go anywhere.

Wade Roush: Right. And other times they invent cool stuff that, uh, does go somewhere and maybe this is on its way to going somewhere.

Kevin Barrows: Yeah, hopefully. Um, you know, uh, like I say, this controlled environment stuff seems to be a way to help, you know, with the changing climate and what have you droughts around and such, um, if you believe in that kind of stuff. But, um, you know, here it is. Here’s some food coming, you know, growing right here.

Wade Roush: It seems to me like you’re the kind of farmer who is pretty positive toward innovation. Like you’re willing to try new things. You read about stuff on the internet. You know, when it comes time to replace your plastic, you’re, you know, you’re actually thinking about using quantum technology instead, right?

Kevin Barrows: So if it helps, if it helps the plants thrive and it helps helps you, uh, you know, give a good product out, then, you know, why not give it a try?

Wade Roush: Jumping back to my conversation with Hunter McDaniel at UbiQD, we talked a little about where the real markets for a product like UbiGro might lay. And in the end, it’s probably not New Mexico.

Hunter McDaniel: I wish there was more agriculture because the climate is actually pretty decent for it. I mean, especially down in the, you know, by the Rio Grande, you have the right kind of, uh, you know, soil to, to do agriculture. Um, but what we like to give the example of, you know, the highest concentration of greenhouses in the world is in Almeria, Spain. It’s on the southern tip of Spain. Um, it’s a, you know, along the coastline there. You can see it by eye from space. It’s one of the few man made structures you can see from space by eye. There’s this big white spot basically, and it’s all the greenhouses down there. It’s almost the exact same latitude. At least it has been effective in terms of, um, the results that we get with the product in this region, as in the highest concentration of greenhouses in the planet. And we have done some trials there too. One of them’s 28% yield improvement with tomatoes. So the product works quite well there. It’s because it’s so sunlight rich, really.

Wade Roush: But McDaniel says that even if New Mexico isn’t the best place to sell quantum dots, it’s still a great place to make them.

Hunter McDaniel: You know, I’m very passionate about New Mexico. I think we have our place in the ecosystem here, and Los Alamos obviously does. I think I hit on this a little bit earlier. Um, just how exciting of a time it is for New Mexico right now. Um, I saw a figure that was just talking about venture capital and the state. Um, that was something like 75% quarter over quarter growth in the first quarter of this year at a time when last year was really a tough year for the venture capital community. When I say venture capital, I’m talking about those investors that are putting money into companies like ours. So it’s a really good leading indicator for economic growth and kind of innovation translating into commercial activity when VCs are active. And the reason why is because the state has developed this, um, huge sovereign wealth fund that is all funded by oil and gas revenues, right? And they’re deploying it in a handful of different ways. First of all, they’re investing it in a portfolio of assets. And one of those is venture capital. So they’re deploying a ton of capital into VCs that are in California and other states, but they’re telling them, hey, you, you need to come into New Mexico and make some investments here.

Hunter McDaniel: So some of our investors had gotten support from the State Investment Council. And I think that’s true across the board. A lot of the other companies in the state that are doing exciting things are getting more and more support right now because of this, um, basically sovereign wealth fund that we have. I think it’s been a big help for us as a business in multiple ways. How the state has basically transformed their oil and gas wealth into economic growth and support for companies like ours. And it’s happening right now. There’s a big boom that’s happening in the state. Maybe people aren’t seeing it quite yet, but I think in the next few years, like New Mexico is destined for greatness. There’s a lot of, uh, things to be positive about right now in New Mexico. And we’re part of that story. I mean, a small part of that story. Um, but I think you’re going to see more UbiQD’s sprouting up and, you know, more UbiQD’s growing to the scale that we have.

Wade Roush: Turning Corners is reported, written, produced and hosted by me, Wade Roush. Thank you so much to Hunter McDaniel at UbiQD and Kevin Barrows at La Capilla Farm for spending so much time with me. Thank you also to Julia Wilson Williams and her colleagues at Spark PR for helping me to set up my visit to UbiQD. Our theme music is by Joel Roston of Title Card Music and Sound in Boston, with Amelia Hollander Ames on violin and viola and Eden Raiz on cello. The opening audio clips were from Christopher Nolan’s film Oppenheimer. I’m always in search of new stories about people making a difference in their communities, bridging old divides and finding innovative ways to bring people together anywhere in New Mexico, Colorado, Utah or Arizona. If you know somebody like that and you think their story needs to be told, please write to me at wade@turningcorners.org.

Wade Roush: Turning Corners is a proud member of the Hub & Spoke Audio Collective, and I want to take a minute to tell you about one of the latest shows to join the collective. It’s called Stories of Sound and it’s curated by Riccardo Giacconi at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University. Riccardo finds creators of audio documentaries, radio dramas, Podcasts, soundscapes and sound art installations and invites them to talk about why sound is such a unique medium for art.

Voice 1 from Stories of Sound: What I’m thinking about is like, what is the equivalent of white space in audio? And the closest thing that I can think of is silence. And I wanted to create something that felt almost as if somebody had taken a huge bucket of white paint and just, like, splashed it over this like very colorful, like portrait, but did so violently.

Voice 2 from Stories of Sound: Stories of sound conversations on sound art and audio storytelling.

Wade Roush: You can learn more about Stories of Sound at our website at hubspokeaudio.org. I also want to make sure you know about another project we launched at Hub & Spoke this year. It’s called Sounds Like America, and it’s meant to spotlight independent audio producers by inviting them to send us sonic postcards that capture the sounds of their state. So far, we’ve got submissions from more than 30 states, and you can hear all of them on our podcast, The Hub and spoke Radio Hour, or at hubspokeaudio.org. I use AI to help me research my scripts, but I never use AI in the writing or production of this show. Thank you for listening and I’ll see you next time.

You’ll forgive me, then, if I’m less enthused about the 2026 sequel. We could have paused this year to reflect once again on our big, complicated nation’s past and future. But our country’s current leader personalizes and tarnishes everything he touches, and the official semiquincentennial celebration has devolved into little more than canceled musical performances, MMA on the White House lawn, and an empty and dystopian “Great American State Fair” flanked by an algae-filled reflecting pool.

I seem to remember that Declaration of Independence had something to say about what happens when a government inflicts to too many injuries on its people. Oh yes, here it is: “But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security.”

Well, some folks are working on that. The elections of 2026 and 2028 will be opportunities for U.S. voters to peacefully throw off their current despots. And to rally hope and keep up the pressure for that kind of change, millions of people have turned out for the three No Kings protest events held around the country, including here in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

The best way I can think of to celebrate the real meaning of Independence Day is to bring you some audio tape I collected here in Santa Fe at the March 28, 2026, No Kings event—which, put together with its counterparts in over 2,000 other locations, turned out to be the largest single-day protest in American history. I originally made today’s piece for Hub & Spoke’s Sounds Like America project, but I also wanted to share it with you here.

For Sound Like America we’re inviting independent audio producers all 50 states to send us short pieces that capture the unique sounds of the places where they live. The project is designed to bridge our divides, explore our vast differences and commonalities, and draw out the kind of audio we might not hear on the radio. We’re putting these wonderful and inspiring pieces out there via our podcast, Hub & Spoke Presents, and you can browse all of the submissions (or submit one yourself!) at our website.

Meanwhile there’s a new, full episode of Turning Corners coming very soon, so stay tuned! And may you enjoy Independence Day in your own way.

Transcript

Hub & Spoke Sonic ID: Hub & Spoke Audio Collective.

<Cue theme music>

Wade Roush: Okay, so you’ve got an upside down American flag. What does that mean to you?

Protester:: Uh, to me, this means America in distress. Um, I, I don’t love what this country is doing. I don’t feel represented by it. And I feel like we’re heading in the wrong direction. So that’s kind of my, my message here.

Wade Roush: Today on Turning corners, a sonic postcard in honor of Independence Day. It’s a short piece I recorded here in Santa Fe, New Mexico, as part of a year-long Hub & Spoke project called Sounds Like America. I like to think of the project as our way to celebrate the original meaning of the 4th of July, in a nation where the voice of the people should matter more than the voice of the man who’d like to be king.

Wade Roush: Hi. This is a great sign on both sides.

Protester: Thank you.

Wade Roush: So I’m with a project called Sounds Like America. It’s a podcast collective, and we’re making sonic postcards. And I’m here today documenting this. I love to ask people to just read their signs to me.

Protester: Oh, fabulous.

Wade Roush: Would you mind? Are you are you game for that?

Protester: Yeah. Michelle should read this side and I’ll read the other side.

Wade Roush: Okay, okay. Okay. So what are we looking at?

Protester: We’re looking at a six foot by three foot banner that we had especially made for today. And on the front of or on one side of the banner, it says, stop spending money on violent attacks and harming the earth. Stop taking over sovereign nations and U.S. voting rights. Stop oppressing our immigrant neighbors and anyone who is other. Stop pretending that this is for the good of all. Use the 25th amendment. Impeach now.

Wade Roush: Thank you. Nice rendition.

Protester: Thank you.

Wade Roush: It’s a great sign. So much good content. Let’s do the other side.

Protester: When the people are strong in their inner direction and firm in their attitudes, evil in government and in society can find no place in which to grow. Number 18 working on what’s been spoiled.

Wade Roush: And this is from the I Ching?

Protester: The Carol Anthony version. Yeah. And again, use the 25th amendment impeach. Now.

Wade Roush: Can I ask, are you from New Mexico?

Protester: Absolutely.

Wade Roush: What does it mean to be here today?

Protester: It feels very good and it feels really important. Totally essential.

Wade Roush: You found a perfect spot to stand and hold your sign so visible right here.

Protester: Thank you so much.

Wade Roush: Yeah. Thanks for doing this.

Protester: Yeah. Thank you for doing this.

Wade Roush: Okay.

Speaker: This is not who we are.

Speaker: Esto no es lo que somos.

Speaker: It is not who we dream of being.

Speaker: No es lo vamos de ser.

Speaker: These are not the actions of the America that we love.

Speaker: Estas no son las acciones de la America qué amamos

Speaker: They invaded Los Angeles, they raided Chicago. They surged in Minneapolis. But in every case, the American people showed up to meet them, and they were not armed with guns and knives. But in the words of the Boston of the band here with whistles and cell phones.

Protester: So we hold our signs up and our flags every Saturday morning. And I’m telling you, the number of people cheering, flashing, their lights, beeping their horns has grown tremendously in the last 12 months. And the people giving us their finger has decreased in the same proportion. It’s like people are waking up.

Wade Roush: That’s great. What is it? Can you read the sign for me?

Protester: Turn that one around. That one says our lands, not your loot. Loot LOOT.

Wade Roush: So what does this sign mean to you?

Protester: It means that we have to stop these assholes from stealing our public lands. Succinctly put. Is that succinct enough?

Wade Roush: That’s succinct enough. Thank you.

Wade Roush: Would you mind just reading your sign for me on on mic?

Protester:: No Turd Reich. T-U-R-D. In Santa Fe, New Mexico or America.

Wade Roush: Are you from Santa Fe?

Protester: Yes, I live here. Yes.

Wade Roush: So what does it mean to you to be here today?

Protester: Doing my civic duty, trying to get rid of this bullshit that’s going on in our country right now. It’s going to take us years to recover from this and the damage that this man’s doing and his administration, not just him. Uh, it’s it’s beyond ridiculous already.

Wade Roush: Ma’am, I love your sign. Which one? This one. The resistance sign. Thank you. So I’m with a radio project called Sounds Like America. We’re making sonic postcards today. Would you mind just reading your sign to me?

Protester: Absolutely. Join the resistance.

Wade Roush: And what’s that symbol in the middle?

Protester: It’s the Rebel Alliance symbol from Star Wars.

Wade Roush: It absolutely is. That’s why I love it. I had a sign at one of the previous ones where I quoted Mon Mothma’s speech from the Senate at length. So great.

Protester: I have a magnet on the back of my car that says I have friends everywhere with the symbol. Yeah. I’m like, if you if you know, you know, that’s that’s how I look at it.

Wade Roush: Exactly. We can spot each other in the crowd. What does it mean to you to be here today?

Protester: It’s so special to me to live. First off, to live in New Mexico and to know the the value that native New Mexicans place on the diversity of cultures and, and, and peoples that make up this state. I’m just really proud to be here and to, and to join in that. Um, that, that defense because I feel like everyone, all of us need defense now. We need to be defended against our own our own government.

Wade Roush: Thank you so much. Thank you. All right. May the force be with you.

Protester: And with you.

Wade Roush: Thank you. Thanks.

Protester: Thank you.

Wade Roush: Would you mind reading your sign for me?

Protester: My sign says Ante Naranja Social Club. It’s a spoof on a a brand called Antisocial Social Club. It’s just simple. It’s fun to look at. And I, you know, added the words that I wanted to add.

Wade Roush: And can you translate it?

Speaker 12: It means Anti-orange Assholes Social Club.

Wade Roush: That’s what I thought. Yeah. I love it. Are you from here? Are you from New Mexico?

Speaker 13: Yes, I live here in Santa Fe.

Wade Roush: Awesome. What does it mean to you to be here today?

Protester: Being part of a community and raising our voice and joining energy, you know, and making our voices heard that way.

Wade Roush: Absolutely. Yeah. I’ve been to every rally so far, and this is this one feels a little more like, like people are here and are determined at this point. It’s like not the novelty has worn off and people are just here to show the ongoing resistance in a way. Right?

Protester:: Yeah. No, absolutely. You know, it’s it’s interesting that this is third, fourth and we’re all still here. Yeah. We’re not going to be quiet and sit down and say, okay, this can, you know, be what it is. We’re more outraged and we’re going to keep showing up.

Wade Roush: Hell yeah. Thank you so much. Enjoy the day. Okay. Bye.

Wade Roush: Can you just read both sides of your sign for me?

Speaker 14: Yeah. The first sign or first side is wars. Expensive. Peace is priceless. The second side. The power of the people is stronger than the people in power.

Wade Roush: Amen.

Protester: Amen.

Wade Roush: Are you from here?

Speaker 14: Yeah, I live in Pojoaque.

Wade Roush: Awesome. So what does it mean to you to be able to be here today?

Speaker 14: Um, we’ve come to all of the No Kings protests and it just feels really good to gather with like minded people and people who are also concerned. And it’s really encouraging just to see everyone out here.

Wade Roush: I see you’ve got an upside down American flag. What does that mean to you?

Protester:: Uh, to me, this means America in distress. Um, I, I don’t love what this country is doing. I don’t feel represented by it. And I feel like we’re heading in the wrong direction. So that’s kind of my my message here.

Wade Roush: Good way to show it.

Protester:: Yeah. Getting an arm workout.

Wade Roush: Okay. Maybe take a break.

Protester:: Exactly.

Wade Roush: Thank you so much. Thank you. Enjoy the protest. Okay. Thank you. Bye. Yeah. Thanks. Yeah.

Speaker 15: An evil man will burn his own nation to the ground to rule over the ashes. Sun Tzu, who wrote the Art of war.

Wade Roush: That’s from the Art of War?

Wade Roush: Yeah.

What does that sign mean to you?

Speaker 15: It means I think Trump is a selfish enough human being that he’ll do whatever it takes to get what he wants, in spite of what it costs everybody else.

Wade Roush: Thank you. So what does it mean to you to be here today?

Protester: Just to show that people care and they don’t like what’s going on. Hopefully it’ll lead to maybe a huge turnout for the for the midterms. That’s the one chance we have to really put the brakes on all this. If the turnout is so massive, so unprecedented, people go to the polls that politicians in office have to look at who’s out here and they have to do their bidding. They work for us.

Wade Roush: I love your sign. Okay, so what is it showing?

Speaker 16: So this sign shows the illustration from Charlotte’s Web and the Charlotte’s Web reads: Resist.

Wade Roush: And Wilbur is looking up at Charlotte there.

Speaker 16: Wilbur is looking up at the Resist.

Wade Roush: That is really cool. Thank you. Are you from New Mexico?

Speaker 16: I’m from New Mexico.

Wade Roush: So what does it mean to you to be able to be here today?

Protester: Um, it’s very important. New Mexico, um, has a long tradition of resistance going back to the Pueblo Revolt in 1680. And we’re just carrying that on today.

Wade Roush: I was going to ask if you’re from around here, but probably not, huh?

Protester: No, we just come in peace to help earth. We hear you, earth. We hear you.

Wade Roush: We need all your help. Can you read your sign for me?

Speaker 17: Fine. Aliens will trade a cow for your wannabe king.

Wade Roush: That’s awesome. Thank you. And you’re looking very green today. All right.

Song: No Kings in the USA: Because no one, no one will take our dreams away. And no man owns the USA. Stand up. Fight back! There ain’t no king. Ain’t no king in the USA. We’re rising up. He ain’t God. He ain’t no fool. No matter what he says the truth. He says, hell no, he won’t say. Not today, not today. Cause there ain’t no kid. Ain’t no kings in the USA. Usa. Usa.

<Cue theme music>

Wade Roush: Turning Corners is written, produced and hosted by me, Wade Roush. I want to say thank you to all of the concerned citizens who showed up at the most recent No Kings Rally in Santa Fe, New Mexico and agreed to talk with me for the piece you just heard. As I said at the top, this little dispatch was part of a much bigger project from the Hub & Spoke audio collective called Sounds Like America, where we’re celebrating America’s semiquincentennial by inviting producers from all 50 states to send in audio that captures the spirit of the places where they live. We’ve already got dozens of submissions, and you can hear them all on our website at audio.org, America, or in our podcast hub and spoke presents. I’m working on a full new episode of Turning Corners, and I’ll be back with that very soon to make sure you never miss an episode. Hit follow or subscribe in your favorite podcast app, or just sign up for our newsletter at turning corners.org. I’m always in search of new stories about people making a difference in their communities, bridging old divides, and finding innovative ways to bring people together anywhere in New Mexico, Colorado, Utah, or Arizona. If you know somebody like that and you think their story needs to be told, please write to me at wade@turningcorners.org. Okay, that’s just about it for today. Our wonderful theme music is by Joel Roston of Title Card Music and Sound in Boston with Amelia Hollander Ames on violin and viola and Eden Reyes on cello. Thanks for listening, everybody, and happy

For this first full episode of the show, I went inside Santa Fe’s Georgia O’Keeffe Museum to talk with artists and curators about a daring new exhibit called Tewa Nangeh/Tewa Country. The exhibit is an act of community storytelling, meant to both illuminate and soften some of the old boundaries and tensions between indigenous artists and the Anglo art establishment O’Keeffe represented.

The exhibit features the work of a dozen artists from the six Tewa-speaking pueblos of northern New Mexico. All express in different ways their love of the vibrant land their people have inhabited for hundreds or thousands of years—and all grapple with the way O’Keeffe, still America’s most famous female artist, repeatedly framed the landscape around Ghost Ranch and Abiquiu as an empty, silent realm that she alone could properly interpret.

“It’s my private mountain,” O’Keeffe once said of Tsi-p’in or Cerro Pedernal, the striking flat-topped mountain visible from her home. “It belongs to me. God told me that if I painted it enough, I could have it.”

In point of fact, the mountain is on U.S. Forest Service land, and is the site of Tsi-p’in-owinge, a ruin that was the ancestral home of the people of Nambe, Ohkay Owingeh, Pojoaque, San Ildefonso, Santa Clara, and Tesuque pueblos. So O’Keeffe’s quote—even if it was meant in a poetic or tongue-in-cheek way—rings in modern indigenous ears as a provocation.

And indeed, for Jason Garcia, the Santa Clara Pueblo artist who co-curated the Tewa Nangeh exhibit, it served as an organizing theme. He worked with curator Bess Murphy at the O’Keeffe Museum, and with the contributing artists, to gently but irrevocably overturn the idea that any one artist can speak for an entire region.

To find out how that happened—and how Tewa Nangeh/Tewa Country is stirring up some long-overdue conversations—listen to the podcast here, or find it in your favorite podcast app. The full transcript is below.

Images from the Exhibit

Featured Voices

Jason Garcia, who also goes by Okuu Pin (Turtle Mountain), is an artist from Santa Clara Pueblo in New Mexico who specializes in clay tiles and printmaking. He co-curated of the Tewa Nangeh/Tewa Country exhibit (2025-2026) at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. Garcia’s work documents the ever-changing cultural landscape of his home, including cultural ceremonies, traditions, and stories, and also draws on 21^st-century popular culture, comic books, and technology. Garcia’s juxtaposition of traditional and contemporary materials and techniques connects him to his Ancestral past, landscape, and cultural knowledge. He studied fine arts at the University of New Mexico (Bachelor’s, 1998) and the University of Wisconsin (MFA, 2016).

Bess Murphy, PhD, is the Luce Curator of Art and Social Practice at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She joined the O’Keeffe Museum in 2022, and Tewa Nangeh/Tewa Country, which she co-organized with Jason Garcia, is her first curated show at the museum. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Bard College and a PhD from the University of Southern California, and from 2015 to 2022 she was the creative director and curator of the Ralph T. Coe Center for the Arts in Santa Fe.

Michael Namingha is a photographer and silkscreen artist who hails from Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo in New Mexico and the Hopi tribe in Arizona. His work, which often features surrealistically altered images of the natural landscape, has been featured in solo and group exhibitions at galleries and museums around the world, from New Mexico to Arizona, California, Indiana, Maine, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Texas, and Virginia, as well as Canada, Germany, and Japan. He splits his time between Santa Fe and Brooklyn, where his studio is located. He studied strategic design and management at the Parsons School of Design.

Wade Roush, PhD, is the creator and host of Turning Corners. He’s an MIT- and Harvard-trained freelance science and technology journalist, editor, and audio producer who has written for publications such as Science, MIT Technology Review, Xconomy, and Scientific American. From 2017 to 2025 he produced the tech-and-culture podcast Soonish. He’s the co-founder of the Hub & Spoke audio collective, the author of Extraterrestrials from the MIT Press, and the editor or co-editor of three volumes of hard science fiction: Twelve Tomorrows (2018), Tasting Light (2022), and Starstuff (2025).

More Resources

Tewa Nangeh/Tewa Country — the exhibit’s official page at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum website, with the full list of participating artists.

The Indigenous Histories that Georgia O’Keeffe Forgot — a thoughtful review in Hyperallergic, with many more images from the exhibit.

Indigenous Artists Reframe the ‘Ownership’ of Ancentral Lands — a review of the exhibit in the Santa Fe New Mexican’s Pasatiempo weekend magazine, with profiles of several participating artists.

The Abiqueños and The Artist — a similar exhibit at the Tacoma Art Museum in Washington state, but with a focus on the Genízaro people for whom Abiquiu is an intergenerational home; O’Keeffe’s work is placed in dialogue with photographs by Diné and Ho-Chunk photographer Russell Albert Daniels.

Transcript

<Hub & Spoke sonic ID>

<Cue theme music>

Jason Garcia: And the image is a portrait of Georgia O’Keeffe standing within the Tewa landscape with the mountain Tsi-Pin, also known as Cerro Pedernal. And there’s a sign that’s a billboard that says welcome to O’Keeffe country. And then over the top of O’Keeffe it says Tewa Country.

Wade Roush: Today on Turning Corners, a visit to Tewa Country. That’s the name of a new exhibit at Santa Fe’s Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, where Jason Garcia from Santa Clara Pueblo is one of the show’s stars and curators. He says the exhibit’s designed to change the way we think about New Mexico’s most famous artist and the people who actually live on the land she painted.

< theme music>

Georgia O’Keeffe archival tape: When I got to New Mexico, that was mine. As soon as I saw it, that was my country. I had never seen anything like it before, but it fitted to me. Exactly. That’s something that’s in the air. It’s just different. The sky is different. The stars are different. The wind is different. I shouldn’t say too much about this, because other people may get interested and I don’t want them interested.

Wade Roush: Georgia O’Keeffe’s paintings of giant flowers had already made her a popular figure on the New York art scene by 1929, when she spent her first summer in northern New Mexico.

She came here because she was looking for an escape from the social whirl orchestrated by her famous husband, the photographer Alfred Stieglitz.

And later she told interviewers over and over that she realized right away that New Mexico was special. It was where she would find everything she needed to reinvent herself as a painter. Specifically, a painter of landscapes.

Georgia O’Keeffe: The cliffs over there. You look at it and it’s almost painted for you. You think. Until you try. I tried to paint what I saw. I thought someone could tell me how to but I found nobody could. They could tell you how they painted their landscape. But they couldn’t tell me to paint mine.

Wade Roush: That very first summer in New Mexico, O’Keeffe bought a Model A Ford. One day she was taking driving lessons near the village of Abiquiu when she got her first glimpse of a rugged, picturesque canyon called Ghost Ranch. She recalled thinking that day, “This is my world.”

Years later she bought an adobe house at the mouth of the canyon, and in 1949, after Stieglitz had died, she started living there full-time.

Now, I’ve been to the Ghost Ranch house, and here’s the thing. From the central courtyard there’s a view of a mountain with a striking flat-topped silhouette.

The Spanish called this mountain Cerro Pedernal and the people of the local Tewa-speaking pueblos call it Tsi-Pin, which means Flint Mountain or Flaking Stone Mountain.

O’Keeffe started painting the mountain, from different vantage points and in different light. In fact, Pedernal became such a potent symbol for her that she ended up painting it 29 times.

And many years later, in 1977, she was speaking to a reporter from Newsday when she said something interesting about Pedernal. She said, quote, “It’s my private mountain. It belongs to me. God told me if I painted it enough, I could have it.”

You can understand why she felt this way.

It’s very common for modern artists to fall in love with a subject, to paint them endlessly, and to end up feeling a kind of poetic but authentic ownership of this subject they know so well in every season, at every time of day.

Just ask Claude Monet or Paul Cezanne what it’s like to fall in love with a mountain.

O’Keeffe’s connection to Pedernal was so strong that she chose to have her ashes scattered over it when she died in 1986.

To her, she was its spiritual owner.

But of course, she wasn’t.

To get legalistic about it—the mountain is on U.S. Forest Service land.

More importantly, It’s the site of a ruin called Tsi-p’in-owinge that’s one of the ancestral homes of the people of the six pueblos of northern New Mexico that share the Tewa language—namely Nambe, Ohkay Owingeh, San Ildefonso, Santa Clara, and Tesuque.

The point is, indigenous people have been calling the lands around Tsi-P’in home and representing the mountain in their own traditions for a very long time.

But the fact is that O’Keeffe’s fame as a painter grew to eclipse that of just about every other artist in New Mexico. In that context, a phrase like “My private mountain” becomes the grist for some understandable tension and resentment.

And that’s why I was standing recently in the middle of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum with artist Jason Garcia from Santa Clara Pueblo, looking at a piece of clay tile that he painted in the style of an old comic book cover.

Jason Garcia: So we talk about O’Keeffe country and this terminology, this myth, mythological term, uh, for this area. And uh, one of the pieces that I do have in the work is, uh, you know, greets the visitor as they come into, uh, this gallery space, which is a, uh, entitled tales of suspense number 134. And the piece is called Welcome to Tewa country. And so the tile is made from hand processed clay hand gathered clay that’s been gathered near Santa Clara Pueblo. And then it’s painted with different mineral pigments that have been gathered in different areas of northern New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado and some Utah as well. And then it’s traditionally fired outdoors using traditional Pueblo pottery techniques. And the image is a portrait of Georgia O’Keeffe standing within the landscape with the mountain Tsi-Pin, also known as Cerro Pedernal. There’s a sign that’s a billboard that says welcome to O’Keeffe country. And then over the top of O’Keeffe, uh, says Tewa Country. So, you know, this refers to, uh, Georgia O’Keeffe’s, um, quote that appeared in Newsday, October 30th, 1977. And she said, “It’s my private mountain. It belongs to me.” The mountain is the starting point for the exhibition and the idea of the exhibition as well.

Wade Roush: So what is the idea of the exhibition?

Well, of course it tells the story of the art and the artists Jason Garcia recruited for the show. I’d say a lot of it is about this landscape they all love and the question of who gets to represent it through art.

And at the same time I think it’s fair to say that Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, as an institution, is saying something of its own through this exhibit. They’re using it to very publicly rethink their role in the larger community. And they’re beginning to present O’Keeffe’s work as part of a much longer story about the Northern New Mexico region that starts way before O’Keeffe ever got here.

Bess Murphy: I think for a museum like the O’Keeffe to be situated in Santa Fe, in northern New Mexico, it’s our duty to think about how the history goes beyond just this one individual figure.

Wade Roush: That’s Bess Murphy. She’s the Luce Curator for Art and Social Practice at the O’Keeffe Museum, and she worked alongside Jason Garcia to put together the exhibit. You’ll a lot more from her later.

Bess Murphy: And, um, for me, it was definitely like, how can we, how can we give away some of that, like authority and that room, that space, where she’s been so mythologized and open that up so that it’s like the O’Keeffe Museum takes a step back, right?

<sonic interlude>

I first saw Bess Murphy and Jason Garcia talking about the Tewa Country exhibit at a panel discussion last October. And as soon as I understood what they were trying to do, I knew that I wanted to use the first episode of Turning Corners to talk about it.

If you listened to the trailer for the podcast, you know I moved to Santa Fe a few years ago.

Now, in a lot of ways my personal story puts me in the same category as every other seeker who’s moved to northern New Mexico in the last 180 years, including Georgia O’Keeffe herself.

There’s a very long tradition of people, showing up here from Boston or New York or San Francisco or Austin, in search of artistic inspiration or spiritual fulfillment or maybe just because they feel something different in the air and the sky and the stars and the wind.

You can definitely feel this testing and stretching of perception in O’Keeffe’s work.

I’ve always loved her paintings of mountains and dead trees and bones.

Seeing them over the years gave me a kind of premonition of how magical this part of New Mexico must be.

But I still figured she must be embellishing or imagining or even hallucinating a lot of it.

When I actually moved here, I was astonished to see that nope, she was being pretty literal.

She saw this area not just for how it affected her personally, but for how it really was.

But she only saw part of it. Not the whole of it.

And the more time I’ve spent here, the more I’ve come to understand how many other people have their own ways of seeing and representing this land, some of them going back hundreds or thousands of years.

And that brings us back to the O’Keeffe Museum.

It’s the custodian of O’Keeffe’s estate, including her historic houses in Ghost Ranch and Abiquiu.

And its public collections are housed in a sun-filled, Pueblo Revival-style building that opened in downtown Santa Fe in 1997.

Exhibitions there over the years have celebrated everything about O’Keeffe, from her photography to her relationship with the land to her iconic black wardrobe.

And you better believe the larger community around Santa Fe gets on board with that celebration, which helps to fuel the regional tourism-industrial complex.

When I wandered into the local Trader Joe’s last week it was both a surprise, and kinda not, to see a huge wall mural of O’Keeffe at her easel, painting a flower.

Right below that, cleverly positioned above the actual flower section, there’s a line from O’Keeffe. It says, quote, “If you take a flower in your hand and really look at it, it’s your world, for the moment.” Unquote.

Now, millions of TV viewers got a close look at one of O’Keeffe’s flowers recently when the show Pluribus sent its main character Carol inside the O’Keeffe Museum to steal a famous painting called Bella Donna, 1939.

But long before Pluribus was even a twinkle in Vince Gilligan’s eye, back in the pivotal year of 2020, when it felt like George Floyd’s murder and COVID-19 were turning everything in the country upside down, the real O’Keeffe Museum organized an online panel discussion called “This Is Not O’Keeffe Country.” And I think this is where the story of the Tewa Country exhibit really starts.

The chair of the panel was Dr. Alicia Inez Guzman. She’s a journalist from New Mexico who covers the nuclear weapons complex and many other subjects vital to this part of the state. And she kicked off by panel by framing some more of the history that O’Keeffe stepped into in 1929.

Guzman: When she arrives, of course, like many others who are coming from elsewhere, she falls in love with the landscape and the light, and she starts painting. And she moves to New Mexico for summers at first, and then eventually permanently, right around 1940. And so one quote that I think is especially important…for giving some context is, is she’s painting out in the Navajo Nation and which was one of her favorite places to paint. And she camps out there and she says “it’s such a beautiful, untouched, lonely feeling place. Part of what I call the faraway.” And in fact, O’Keeffe did a really great job of depicting this feeling of isolation and faraway-ness. And in fact, one of her paintings is called The Faraway Nearby. And I think this is what helps contribute to this idea that New Mexico is on the periphery, and that we start to see it through this lens in which it is isolated, and it is beyond the kind of, um, cosmopolitan frame that she was coming from. And so she reframes New Mexico yet again through this lens of isolation. And this is incredibly we have we have inherited this legacy of O’Keeffe. And so I think it’s really important to push back and to give context, because New Mexico is amidst change. When she arrives, the national laboratory is being built, there’s a new technology getting introduced into the landscape or the infrastructure is changing. Roads are getting built to allow materials to move to the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Um, we see the damming of the Chama River into the Abiquiu Dam. So the landscape is actually changing. Not only that, we have our native relatives who’ve been here for millennia. We have our, um, Hispanic and Chicano populations who’ve been here for the last 400 years, and it’s been an incredibly dynamic, vital, changing space. This is the New Mexico that O’Keeffe enters as a guest.

Wade Roush: The other panelists that night represented other parts of New Mexico’s indigenous and Chicano communities. They talked about how when O’Keeffe showed up here, alongside her contemporary Robert Oppenheimer, it was a huge boost for New Mexico on the national scene. But one of the results was to sideline the people who were already here. One of the speakers was Corinne Sanchez. She’s the head of an advocacy group called Tewa Women United that’s focused on environmental, gender, and reproductive justice.

Corinne Sanchez: You mentioned Los Alamos National Laboratory, and Oppenheimer fell in love with the scenery here in New Mexico. And I think that’s the first thing that really draws people into our state. Right? The land of enchantment, the land of entrapment, um, has those connotations. Um, but it is the beauty, um, and so within that, falling in love with nature, falling in love with the isolation, the ruralness of our, our communities, um, I think there’s also this unintended consequence that people tend to not realize the occupancy that was here. Right. That’s been here for hundreds and thousands of years.

Wade Roush: Jason Garcia was also a panelist that night. He told the story about how O’Keeffe saw Pedernal as her private mountain. And toward the end of the evening, he responded to one audience member’s question about what tangible steps the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum could take to build bridges back to the communities who feel left out of the conversation. Listen close, to his answer, because this is where the idea for the exhibit starts to be born.

Jason Garcia: And I’m aware that O’Keeffe Museum opened in 1997, which has been 23 years. And in those 23 years, you know, I’ve never been in the actual exhibition space. I’ve been into the gift store and that’s it. So, you know, I think that’s part of it, of being, you know, there are some exclusivity to the museum. Um, I’m not too sure. I in my research, you know, I looked at how much tours were $45 a person to take a tour of the museum, that’s a little bit out of my price range, you know?.… So I think that’s something that should be, um, something to thought about or even, you know, do like the, uh, Indian Pueblo Cultural Center or the um, or Institute of American Indian Arts Museum, where, you know, you offer a free admission to Tewa people. You know, maybe you have to show your tribal ID card, you know, but that’s something that might be an option as well.

Corinne Sanchez: Like, I feel like in this country, we get stuck on the past of where we’re we’re honoring these personalities. Right. Um, you know that for any of us, we’re we’re all contributors to our wellbeing in our communities. And so we highlight certain leaders or we highlight certain people, um, when it’s really all of us that are really contributing to the realities of our community. So, again, how are we rethinking and having these conversations?

Wade Roush: I think it’s fair to say that 2020 panel was one of those moments that gets people fired up around an idea. The idea, in this case, being that the O’Keeffe Museum could be doing more to welcome, and honor, and highlight the indigenous people of this land O’Keeffe herself had loved so much.

<sonic interlude>

That idea didn’t burn out – it stuck around. And after the pandemic, Jason Garcia learned about a grant opportunity with the potential to fund a partnership between a native artist and a local nonprofit.

I had a chance to sit down with Jason and Bess Murphy and I asked them to tell the whole story from the beginning.

Jason Garcia: Yeah, yeah, in the beginning. It was a dark and stormy night. Call me Ishmael. Uh, so I think, uh, the original idea or some of the original seeds that were planted for Tewa Nangeh come out of the, um, 2020 “This is not O’Keeffe Country,” panel presentation and kind of talking about some ideas, uh, as the museum, uh, moves forward, moves into the future. And, uh, about two plus years ago, uh, I had looked into a grant opportunity that had a native artist that would partner with a nonprofit institution and knew Bess from some previous work. Had heard that she had moved over to the O’Keeffe as the Luce Fellow Curator. I know you have a long title. Uh, and so knowing that you were here and then saying like, hey, I have this idea. And so we did all the paperwork, applied for it, did not get the grant, but had already created that ball. That seed was already growing. So then we kind of took it from there. And the museum said, yes, let’s do it.

Jason Garcia: And and then also that energy, like you said, is kind of that ripple effect…How does this idea carry forward into doing a collaborative exhibition and not and you know, of like originally your first idea being like, oh, there’s a grant. So it’s like, okay, it’s Jason Garcia at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum. But then like, okay, I can’t fully carry this full project on my back, or it can’t just be a solo artist. It has to be multi generational intergenerational voices and then Tewa voices, and then all the six Tewa pueblos wanting a minimum of four from each pueblo.... And then some of the ideas also grew out of, you know, our two year planning session as well too.

Bess Murphy: Jason brought this group together, and I think it was the trust that everyone had in Jason that allowed for those first conversations to be had, because there wasn’t necessarily trust with the institution. Um, in fact, there was a lot of distrust and some discomfort, I think really, when folks first came to the table to sit with us and hear about this initial idea, and there was a lot of questioning as to whether or not the O’Keeffe was really ready for this. Was there going to be, you know, censorship, or was the museum going to get upset if there was critique of this mythology? And so I think I don’t think we could have done this project any faster. I think all of that had to happen, um, because we needed to have time where we could get to know each other, where we could sit together and eat food and tell jokes and then do the hard work and do the, you know, bureaucratic work and make all of those steps meaningful. And that is slower work.

<cue Turning Corners theme music>

Wade Roush: Let’s pause for a minute for a mid-show announcement.

For more than eight years now, I’ve been part of a collective of independent audio makers called Hub & Spoke. And in every episode of this show I’m going to take a minute at the end to tell you a little something about what’s going on with other shows and producers in the collective.

Today I want to talk about my friend Erica Heilman, who makes a Hub & Spoke show called Rumble Strip.

Erica’s genius is finding unique and interesting people in her corner of Vermont and drawing them into intimate, honest conversations that inevitably, in every episode, teach you something new about our tenacity and daring as humans.

Erica’s show has been a huge inspiration for me in my own work, and now she’s involved in an important collaboration with Jay Allison at the Transom Story Lab in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. It’s called The Listeners. And It’s an effort to get more audio producers to make stories that grapple with the massive challenges facing Americans today by, in a sense, going small and local.

Erica and Jay are gently pushing people in the radio and podcasting world to make more stories that are true, that are grounded in a specific place or community, that challenge our assumptions, and that listen generously and honor ordinary lives.

To quote from the project’s manifesto, “In a time when resources for local and public-interest storytelling are disappearing, this is a small act of resistance and of hope. It’s about listening across differences. It’s a project in democracy.”

Honestly that’s also the project I’m engaged in here at Turning Corners. So I wanted to give a shout-out and thank you to Erica and Jay for organizing the project and keeping the early values of true public radio alive. You can learn more about The Listeners project at transom.org, and you can hear Erica’s show at rumblesripvermont.com.

Okay, now back to my conversation with Jason Garcia and Bess Murphy.

<cue theme music>

Wade Roush: Could I get you both to say one more time how you would define this exhibit? Because it’s like, it’s also in conversation with Georgia O’Keeffe, and some of her work is hanging right alongside the work by the indigenous artists. So, like, how do you how do you how did you come up with the right balance there?

Jason Garcia: Yeah that’s interesting to think about, what’s the right balance of work. Then thinking within the theme of, again, the “my private mountain” quote. And that was kind of the starting theme. But then also, how do we move beyond it and how do we. How do we see our work? How do we see our work? I don’t know if you would say fitting in that theme or how does it relate to the theme,? And when I say our work, I mean talk to people in general, contemporary past, ancestral and the landscape

Bess Murphy: Not to be too like Santa Fe woo woo about it, but I think it was it happened because it was the time for it to happen, and it happened the way like it all came together because it was time. Um, the O’Keeffe was ready for it. But I think also the collaborating artists were so open, it was so beautiful to realize how much of themselves they were really willing to put out into this project. The. It was this space of vulnerability, like really deep vulnerability on every side. And I think that, you know, I think as like the co-curators, I think Jason and I worked really hard to make sure that people felt cared for, you know, and I think that was you can feel that, I hope, I hope you can feel that.

Jason Garcia: And then also, I think it’s something that the community as well, too, of just seeing the, um, uh, the opening event on November 6th, 7^th of how much people came out and, um, you know, the visitor numbers were out of the roof kind of thing. You know, we had the standing room, uh, waiting line to get in. And, you know, we had over a thousand plus visitors and, um, you know, having music, dance, food and just the kind of like a block community block party is essentially what it was, and having a lot of family, friends, colleagues, everybody come out for, for the exhibition was really was really amazing. So I’m really happy with the way everything turned out and, and is turning out. And the response that we are getting from visitors post opening.

<sonic interlude>

Wade Roush: I’m one of the visitors who loves the exhibit, in fact I’ve been to it a couple of times now. And now I really want to talk more about the art itself. It amounts to what the artists themselves describe in the show’s introductory panel as “an act of community storytelling.” And most of these stories are about the same land O’Keeffe painted, just from very different perspectives.

One of the storytellers is Michael Namingha. He’s a photographer and silkscreen artist who hails from the pueblo of Okay Owingeh and also from the Hopi tribe in Arizona.

His main contribution to the exhibit is a giant orange and yellow silkscreened photograph showing what looks for all the world like a nuclear explosion billowing over a mountainside.

Michael Namingha: So this is my interpretation, um, of a photograph that I took in 2023 of the Hermits Peak Fire, which was the largest forest fire on record for the state of New Mexico. And I became very attuned to a particular type of cloud formation during the duration of that forest fire, which lasted for five months. Um, and the type of cloud I’m talking about is a pyrocumulonimbus cloud. It is a cloud that is created by the intense heat of a forest fire, a volcanic eruption, or a nuclear explosion. So given New Mexico’s history with the creation of the atomic bomb. It just resonated with me. And so what we’re looking at is a photo silkscreen, um, that I created this past year. It measures 90 by 56 or 58in. Um, it’s colorations are intense orange and yellow and mixed in with a little bit of red. Um, the colorations in this piece talk about the air quality index, color chart. And so during the duration of this fire, I think most of us residents of, um, Santa Fe lived by the air quality index color chart, uh, determining our safety to engage with the outdoors. And so what happened was I’m a runner, and so I like to run almost on a daily basis. And so every day I would check to see where on the chart our colors were leading us, and the yellow, orange and red tend to be at the high end of the spectrum, which means the most particulates in the air, and so thereby not being safe to engage with the outdoors. And so a lot of my work from this series, which is titled my Disaster series, relate to that.

Michael Namingha: And so, um, in some ways, those are very beautiful colors to incorporate into the landscape, but also it’s a way of me making some scientific data visible through my art practice. Um, I’m primarily a photographer, and so a lot of my work is kind of photo documentary work of climate change, um, oil and natural gas extraction. I was, like I said, born and raised in Santa Fe, but I went to school in New York City at Parsons School of Design and moved there in 1999 and lived there until about 2007. And so during that time that I was away from New Mexico, I became to understand how quickly the environment in which I grew up in was changing. And so when I returned to the state, I realized just how quickly a lot of these ancestral homelands were being undermined by different oil and natural gas extraction, man’s intervention into this landscape. And so I wanted to create a way of documenting that.

Wade Roush: I mean, it looks to anyone who wasn’t here during the Hermit’s Peak Fire. If they all they knew was that this was a picture of somewhere in New Mexico, they might think it was a picture of the Trinity explosion at Alamogordo. Right. I mean, it looks like a nuclear explosion.

Michael Namingha: Right. And so my studio practice is actually based in New York City, um, in Gowanus. So I work with a print studio called Powerhouse Arts, where we can create these large scale silkscreens. And so, you know, members of the studio team were not sure exactly where this photo was taken or actually what it depicted. Um, and I think so when you’re not from this, this area, it is a little bit it takes a little bit of digging to, to figure out what it is you’re exactly looking at. And also the color variations add to that effect.

Wade Roush [voiceover]: For context here, you need to know that just few feet away from the silkscreen there’s an O’Keeffe painting called Pelvis Series, Red with Yellow, 1945. It shows a yellow sky viewed through the hole in a pelvis bone painted in shades of orange and siena. In other words, the same range of colors Michael used in his piece.

Wade Roush: We’re in a room full of paintings that some of which were conceived specifically in response to O’Keeffe and some of which sort of stand on their own completely. And I just wonder how you see yourself fitting into the larger argument here.

Michael Namingha: So this work, um, is specifically responding to a painting by O’Keeffe, which is this pelvis series that was painted in 1945. And I chose that painting specifically because of the date, um, 1945 and the creation of the atomic bomb. But what I also did a lot of my work is also very, uh, research based. Um, I like diving deeper into just kind of, um, stories behind, landscape stories behind other artistic practices. And so when I was looking at O’Keeffe’s Pelvis Bone series, I came across a quote, um, where she said that, um, I can read it to you. “When I started painting the pelvis bones, I was most interested in the holes in the bones. What I saw through them, particularly the blue, from holding them up in the sun against the sky, as one is apt to do when one seems to have more sky than earth in one’s world. They were most wonderful against the blue, the blue that will always be there as it is now, after all man’s destruction is finished.” So it was interesting that she was also looking at the destruction of this planet in 1945. Um, much that I am documenting it today, and also learned that she had a fallout shelter built at her home in Abiquiu that she ordered from the Sears Roebuck catalog. Um, wanting to paint the landscape after a nuclear detonation. Um, so in respects, that’s sort of where I’m coming from in relation to this exhibition. …she was very aware of her surroundings and she was from New York and came out west. Um, I kind of did the opposite. I went to New York. Um, but then coming back, you know, depicting this landscape. And it is a beautiful landscape that we’re lucky to be part of. Um, and, you know, there is a surreal quality to some of my work. And when you look at some of her pelvis bone series, you see that too. There’s a surrealism in influencing her, her compositions.

<sonic interlude>

Wade Roush: That surrealism shows up in a few more of the Tewa Country pieces, like a large bronze sculpture called Sandhills by Arlo Namingha, also of Ohkay Owingeh pueblo.

But many of the pieces are more literal expressions of the culture and land of northern New Mexico.

Maria Swazo Hinds from Tesuque Pueblo made a beautiful teapot out of red micaceous clay. She called the piece “Let’s Have Tea,” and says she was inspired by O’Keeffe’s own fondness for tea and wondering what the two of them would have talked about if they’d had a chance to sit down to tea together.

Elizabeth Naranjo Morse from Santa Clara Pueblo painted a large site-specific landscape that turns into an earthen path leading across the gallery. She also contributed a luminous painting called A Story of Stardust that shows tall cottonwood trees along the Rio Grande that have turned a rich golden-yellow.

The piece beautifully evokes the real feeling of autumn in New Mexico, but with a magical twist. Instead of a regular daytime sky there’s a starscape in the background. And the swirling reflections of those stars are visible on the back of a tiny stinkbug crawling below the cottonwoods.

Also for this exhibit, Jason Garcia went beyond his tile art to create a growing series of drawings and paintings of Tsi Pin or Pedernal.

Jason Garcia: I have 19 images of Tsi-Pin. And I’ll be adding, you know, another, uh, at least 11 to get 30 plus images. And then in that sense, you know, reclaiming, uh, the mountain for not my, you know, not only myself in terms of an artist, but then also, uh, just a reclamation, also reclaiming the mountain assertion of the mountain for Tewa people as well. And, um, it’s been a really, uh, interesting project of just kind of working on it, of looking at, uh, Visiting the mountain. I also did a residency at Ghost Ranch about a year and a half ago. And so, you know, seeing the mountain, uh, through different phases at dawn, uh, midday, evening, dusk, uh, sunset. And then, you know, nighttime as well, too, and different, um, variations of the mountain. And I and I’ve been taking pictures of the mountain prior to that, you know, and then, you know, would post on social media, say it’s my it’s my private mountain in quotations, you know, making kind of, you know, that dig at O’Keeffe’s, um, statement as well too.

Bess Murphy: Not to put words into her mouth, I think that she felt like this was a place where she could really, truly be herself. And she felt deeply, deeply, personally connected to the landscape here. I don’t think that she felt the same way necessarily about the cultures here. … Unlike many of the other artists from her time, like she wasn’t surrounded by indigenous art. She wasn’t actively collecting pottery. She did have textiles. So we know that she had, like, Diné textiles for sure that she lived with. So there were things definitely, um, she brought some of those textiles back to New York. So it it hit her for sure. And I think in her work we do see that like she was obsessed with this landscape. She painted one mountain over and over and over and over again. Um, and I think. It’s hard. Like, I constantly feel like I’m in this place where I’m like, I don’t actually feel like I want to be sort of apologizing for O’Keeffe. But I think the more time that I spend, like with her, like learning about her career, I do feel like, I mean, there’s something there that she there was love for that place. And then it got so complicated because she felt she had the sense of entitlement around it.

Wade Roush: Yeah. I mean, that was just part of her personality in a way.

Bess Murphy: She had a lot of entitlement! In many… Yes. So much of this is also how she was managing her identity, but also how the media created this identity and fed off of how what she was providing for them, then amplified it even more. And I think it is interesting to think about what it means to be a successful, like, 20th century female artist, and how she would have had to have been very actively involved in how her identity was being constructed. And, um, it worked very, very well for her to lean into this idea of like the the woman alone in the desert.

Jason Garcia: There’s a very disconnect from the community, from the landscape of saying like, this place is is desolate. There’s the animal life forms, there’s clouds, there’s, you know, ancestral spirits that are here. So you’re not alone. As a Tewa person, that’s how I see it. You’re not alone, you know. And then you do have your community, whether it’s your local indigenous community that you’re a part of or your family or, you know, as a person that lives here, you have artist community, you have work community, um, you know, that you have like maybe your bowling team community, you know, there’s so many different things …But it is part of that where, you know, she is creating this image and she is creating this brand in a sense, you know.

Wade Roush: If you were if you were doing a show about Ansel Adams or D.H. Lawrence or Marsden Hartley, a lot of what you’re saying would resonate, right? And to some extent, you can you can say, “Oh, these people were all just a product of their time.” But I’m curious, like, um, you know, what do you lose if you just stop there with that question? And and what would you lose if you didn’t ask that question?

Bess Murphy: Yeah, I think about that a lot. I mean, she absolutely was working in a period of, you know, American art history that was full of this, um, profound engagement with the southwest, with northern New Mexico very, very specifically, you know, like our place is so central to that larger history of American modernism. We can’t take New Mexico out of that story at all. And different artists approached it in different ways. Some people were deeply, deeply engaged with local communities and depicted them. And some of that is highly problematic. That’s where, like, there’s the levels of appropriation, there’s the level of sort of being really paternalistic in their approaches to indigenous communities and indigenous cultural practice, um, and extractive. And so I think, yes, we need to see them in their historic moment and we need to have that framework. But also history isn’t static. And so if we only ever read it as if it is okay because it was okay in the, you know, like 1920s, 1940s, then we’re not going to continue to evolve that history, right? We’re not going to be able to learn for it, from it and with it.

Wade Roush: And yet it seems to me like this exhibit isn’t really working to, it’s not trying to pass judgment. It’s not trying to render a verdict on O’Keeffe and whether she was right or wrong. It seems like what you’re trying to do is just kind of re-situate her within a much richer narrative.

Jason Garcia: Yeah, it is that we’re not passing judgment or condemning her or, you know, sometimes that’s too easy, if you’re just like “F O’Keeffe” kind of thing, or if you had it painted in red paint on the exterior of the of the museum, it’s like, uh, boring, you know? Okay. Yeah. Shocking. Yawn. You know, next. You know, and but, you know, the exhibition does draw up a lot of different themes of place, identity, language, uh, love of land, culture. And then does question does O’Keeffe have did she have these things in her work as well?

Bess Murphy: I think there’s absolutely space for critique of O’Keeffe in the exhibition, and that appears at various moments. But I also feel like it’s so much deeper than that. I think Jason’s right. It could have been very simplistic to gather a group of artists to just lay out everything that they saw as problematic with her. Um, but also, I think that wasn’t what the collaborators were interested in this group, and part of that is, I think. Not an implicit critique of O’Keefe as an individual, but maybe an implicit critique of the idea of having one iconic figure speak for an entire place that for this group of artists and culture bearers and creators and thinkers, O’Keefe shouldn’t be the only one telling the story of this place.

<sonic interlude>

Wade Roush: Jason, do you see the show as like an ending? I know you’ve been working on it for like 2 or 3 years. Is it a culmination for you, or what do you hope to see happen next?

Jason Garcia: I don’t see it as a culmination. I just see it more of like the germination of of ideas. The creation of ideas were just growing from this, of, you know, this is just one step and it’s kind of has it’s it’s creating that imprint. It’s it’s creating that footprint. And this is inspiring future Tewa generations as well too. Um, so that’s I that’s how I see it as, as just it’s a huge ripple. Ripple effect.

Wade Roush: Ripple effects. I love watching that kind of change.

It’s an extraordinary thing for a museum dedicated to a single artist to take the time to reconsider aspects of her legacy, and to ask what wound up getting hidden behind the long shadow that legacy cast.

Nobody involved in this story is trying to tear down Georgia O’Keeffe.

But there’s an understandable level of tension and distrust between the native artists of the West and Southwest and the people and institutions that represent the established Anglo-American art world.

O’Keeffe herself may have been a fierce individualist, but she was also undeniably part of that establishment.

And this tension could have persisted forever.

But in at least this one case something different happened, thanks to a shared vision that emerged across years of careful, patient collaboration between Jason Garcia and Bess Murphy and all the artists who contributed to the Tewa Country exhibit or served the planning committee.

I think that’s a beautiful thing. It’s just as beautiful as the exhibit itself. And I think it will have ripple effects that change the way people see this part of New Mexico.

The same way the brilliant sun and the shifting shadows make Tsi-Pin look like a different mountain at every hour of the day and to every pair of eyes.

<cue theme music>

Tewa Country is on exhibit at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico, through September 7, 2026. And for the duration of the show, admission to the museum is free for members of indigenous tribes, communities, and nations.

Turning Corners is reported, written, produced, and hosted by me, Wade Roush.

I’d like to take a minute to thank everyone who bought into the idea of the show and helped me get this first episode out the door.

That especially includes artists Jason Garcia and Michael Namingha.

At the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, I got amazing support from Colleen Kelly, Renee Lucero, Bess Murphy, and Cody Hartley.

For their help recording the bowls, bells, and chimes I’d like to thank GinaMaria Opalescent, Catherine Smith, and Ellen Petry Leanse.

Ellen deserves a few extra thank-yous as well for introducing me to Santa Fe, taking me on my first visit to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, and introducing me to the staff there.

Now, just a few words about the show itself.

This is going to be a once-in-a-while, catch-as-catch-can kind of podcast, meaning I’ll put out new episodes as often as I can in between my other gigs. If you hit follow or subscribe in your favorite podcast app, you’ll never miss a new episode. And if you go to turningcorners.org you can sign up for our newsletter, and read full episode transcripts.

I’m always in search of new stories about people making a difference in their communities, bridging old divides, and finding innovative ways to bring people together anywhere in New Mexico, Colorado, Utah or Arizona. If you know somebody like that, and you think their story needs to be told, please write to me at wade@turningcorners.org.

Our theme music is by Joel Roston of Titlecard Music and Sound in Boston, with Amelia Hollander Ames on violin and viola and Eden Rayz on cello.

The clips of Georgia O’Keeffe’s voice are from the documentary Portrait of an Artist by Perry Miller Adato.

I got valuable edits and notes on this episode from Tamar Avishai and Mark Pelofsky. Thanks you so much!

And I just want to say, because I think we’re in an era when this needs to be said: no AI was used in the making of this podcast.

Thanks for listening, and I’ll be back with a new episode … as soon as I can.

Turning Corners is a new podcast offering inspiring stories about the people and organizations working to make life better in the Four Corners states of New Mexico, Arizona, Utah, and Colorado. It’s reported, written, produced, and hosted by Wade Roush. The theme music is by Joel Roston of Titlecard Music and Sound, with Amelia Hollander Ames on violin and viola and Eden Rayz on cello. You can learn more about the show at turningcorners.org. We’re a proud member of the Hub & Spoke audio collective.

As I say in the trailer: I feel like we’re immersed every day in discouraging news about how our broken politics and failing institutions are keeping us from accomplishing real change. You know, the kind of change that could lift people up and remind us that we really are in this together. But here in the West and Southwest there are a lot of real people doing creative, groundbreaking work to strengthen communities, bridge old divides, reduce inequality, and save the planet.

They’re bringing their unique cultures and histories to bear. They also bring a uniquely Southwestern type of courage and public spirit, along with a can-do, no-bullshit attitude. They’re tackling hard problems—and so they don’t always succeed. But I think their stories can be an inspiration for people all over the country. And I’m starting this show because I want to bring those stories to you.

Episode 1—about a groundbreaking new exhibit at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico—is coming very soon. (Update 2/6/26: It’s out now!) Subscribe to Turning Corners on Substack to get that episode and every future episode (plus full transcripts) in your email inbox, or hit follow or subscribe in your favorite podcast app.

TRANSCRIPT

Georgia O’Keeffe archival tape: When I got to New Mexico, that was mine. As soon as I saw it, that was my country. I had never seen anything like it before, but it fitted to me exactly. It’s something that’s in the air. It’s just different. The sky is different. The stars are different. The wind is different.

Wade Roush: That was the voice of Georgia O’Keeffe. She was the most famous painter ever to depict the southwestern United States, and probably the most famous woman painter in American history, period.

And when it comes to New Mexico, I kinda know what she was talking about.

My name is Wade Roush.

I’ve been writing for the last 30 years or so about science, technology, innovation, history, and culture.

The three places I’ve spent the most time in my life are Michigan, Massachusetts, and California. But a few years ago, for my first real vacation after the pandemic, I decided to visit Santa Fe. And just like Georgia O’Keeffe, I immediately fell in love with the place, and felt like it fitted me exactly.

I moved here permanently in 2023. And the more time I’ve spent here trying to absorb the complicated history of my adopted home city, the more I’ve come to see that what defines this land today and makes it so special isn’t just its air and its sky and its stars but its people.

There’s something special about the mix of people and ideas here in the Southwest and about the way communities here think about big challenges.

You know how people say that New Englanders are a little frosty, and Midwesterners are super polite, and Californians are friendly, at least in a superficial way? Well, having lived in all those places, I can tell you that those stereotypes are all just…stereotypes. But they’re also based on something a little bit real about the cultures of those regions.

And here in the West and the Southwest, I think what you can say is that people are generally no-nonsense and maybe a bit cantankerous, with an independent streak and a deep attachment to the land. That’s true here in New Mexico and I think it’s also true in the other Four Corners states of Colorado, Utah, and Arizona.

Now, from 2017 to 2025 I made an indie podcast called Soonish that was sort of about technology and sort of about national politics. But after I moved here to Santa Fe I felt an urge to start a different show that’s more tied to this region and this community.

I feel like we’re immersed every day in discouraging news about how our broken politics and failing institutions are keeping us from accomplishing real change. You know, the kind of change that could lift people up and remind us that we really are in this together.

But here in the West and Southwest there are a lot of real people doing creative, groundbreaking work to strengthen communities, bridge old divides, reduce inequality, and save the planet.

They’re bring their unique cultures and histories to bear. They also bring a uniquely Southwestern type of courage and public spirit, along with a can-do, no-bullshit attitude.

They’re tackling hard problems -- and so they don’t always succeed. But I think their stories can be an inspiration for people all over the country. And I’m starting this show because I want to bring those stories to you.

The Four Corners monument on Diné land is the only place in the country where the boundaries of four states all meet up at one geometrical point. In fact there’s a bronze marker there where if you stand right on top of it, you can be in all four states at once.

What I like most about the Four Corners monument is the way it unites four states with such amazing people, such beautiful landscapes, such ancient cultures, such a huge role in America’s westward expansion in the 19^th century, and such unique ways of adapting and innovating for the 21^st century.

That’s why I’m calling the show Turning Corners.

Our first episode is coming very soon, and when you hear it you’ll understand why I wanted to start with Georgia O’Keeffe.

There’s an exhibit running right now at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum here in Santa Fe that does something remarkable.

It acknowledges that, from one perspective, O’Keeffe became almost too famous.

Her images of New Mexico grew so familiar over the decades that tourist agencies started calling the land she painted “O’Keeffe Country.”

But as you can imagine, the label didn’t sit well with the people who have actually occupied that land for thousands of years—meaning members of the six Tewa-speaking pueblos of northern New Mexico.

The new exhibit starts to reverse decades of erasure by spotlighting a dozen Tewa artists, each with their unique way of expressing their love of the landscape.

Bess Murphy (curator, Georgia O’Keeffe Museum): I think there’s absolutely space for critique of O’Keeffe in the exhibition…Not an implicit critique of O’Keefe as an individual, but maybe an implicit critique of the idea of having one iconic figure speak for an entire place.

Wade Roush: That’s all coming up in Episode 1 of Turning Corners. To hear it, just go to turningcorners.org, or hit subscribe or follow in your favorite podcast app.