Trinidad - The Next Santa Fe?

Commerce used to drive culture in Las Animas County. Now, culture is returning the favor.

For the first time since the mining industry started packing up in the 1950s, the arts have a true home in Trinidad. It’s the third floor of the massive A.R. Mitchell Museum, and the Trinidad Area Arts Council is using it as a launching pad for jobs, education and recreation, says executive director Joe Reorda II.

The Council, a nonprofit corporation, has existed since 1978, but really started making an impact in early 2005, as a $14,600 grant from the Colorado Council on the Arts sparked a financial chain reaction. CCA’s involvement convinced the Mitchell Museum that the arts council was stable enough to warrant renting space to; that vote of confidence in turn led the local Kiwanis club to embrace the Council as a key player in the city’s economic life.

The Council’s earned income and private contributions will handily outstrip its state funding in fiscal 2005, yet without CCA, “We couldn’t have done anything we’ve done. Nothing,” Reorda says. “I think the organization is brilliant at proving how you can spend just a little amount of money and accomplish a lot of things.”

Before moving into the Mitchell building, the Council was viewed as somewhat “fly by night” by the community, Reorda says. That’s because it mostly brought in traveling performers who, by definition, went away again. To borrow from Lincoln, such performances were for Trinidad, but not by Trinidad or of Trinidad.

That era suddenly seems as remote as the 19th-century mineral boom that created the city. In the first 10 months in its new home, the Council mounted eight art shows. Seven featured local artists such as photographer and printer Dave Frank, a transplant from Minneapolis.

“We sold a couple thousand dollars’ worth of work,” says Frank. “There is a market for my work, and I’ve been doing a lot of printing for other artists in the community.”

Special as the local-artists shows were, the most recent show was a standout for being the region’s first-ever, honest-to-goodness “museum show.” It was the University of New Mexico’s Jewish Pioneers of New Mexico 1820-1917, and it had a local angle: Trinidad’s own Temple Aaron Congregation, in continuous use since 1889, was featured prominently in the exhibit of text and photos. (Trinidad was part of the New Mexico Territory before it was part of Colorado.)

Members of Pueblo’s Temple Emanuel came to share a Sabbath service at Temple Aaron and see the exhibit in the fall. “I think it cemented a lot of good friendships. Maybe it’s going to be an annual event,” says congregant Kathryn Rubin, who runs a general store with her husband in nearby Raton, N.M.

With the Kiwanis’ help, the Trinidad Area Arts Council is also making a big push into education. Children’s drawing, painting and pottery classes over several previous summers proved so popular that the community clamored for more. The newly named Kiwanis Youth Arts Academy takes the concept year-round. Schoolteachers recommend kids for acceptance, and classes are taught by local artists.
The program has changed potter Lora Nava’s life, allowing her to live as an artist rather than a waitress, and pursue a master’s degree.

Without the Kiwanis academy, “I’d be working in my own small studio, which I love, but there wouldn’t be anything for the kids,” she says. “It would be a rather dismal arts scene.”

If the Trinidad Area Arts Council is helping to transform individual lives, it’s also helping transform Trinidad itself, says Kiwanis past president Roz Heise. The club made an extraordinary $20,000 grant to launch the art academy, to be followed by smaller operational grants for at least three years, because the arts group is doing what has long needed doing.

“Just the other day I was reading a master plan for the city of Trinidad for the year 1962, which was pretty amusing. In 1962 the designers of the master plan kept saying the thing Trinidad needs to focus on economically is tourism, and the arts are a significant piece of that. That has been coming up in master plan after master plan after master plan,” Heise says.
“And now, having the arts council in an actual physical space that is brilliant and golden, that simply enhances their position in the community and can do nothing but encourage more artists, more community activity around the arts, thus impacting economic development -- and the beat goes on.”

The local school system’s unfortunate funding situation may give the partnership an unexpected opportunity to prove itself: The school board voted to trim the school week to four days for half the year, so the Kiwanis Youth Arts Academy might step in and offer Friday art classes. Weekend and holiday classes are also planned.
Once half-deserted, Trinidad’s historic downtown now hosts a new crop of specialty stores and private galleries selling some of the same artists that the Council displays. A repertory company has launched. Joe Reorda says the Trinidad Area Arts Council deserves much of the credit.

“It feels completely different. There is culture in Trinidad now, or at least a rebirth of culture,” he says.

Then, playing the pitchman for a moment, Reorda explains why he thinks Trinidad is poised for even more cultural-economic growth: Homes with land go for the same price as a home alone in Denver or Santa Fe, and there remain hundreds of thousands of acres of privately owned, undeveloped land.

“You can still get the most incredible deal,” Reorda says.