After 103 Years, SWAIA Santa Fe Indian Market Still Full Of Surprises

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The third weekend in August brings roughly 1,000 Native American artists from across Indian Country and 100,000 visitors to Santa Fe, NM for the annual Southwestern Association for Indian Arts Indian Market. Debuting in 1922, Santa Fe Indian Market has grown to become the largest, oldest, and most prestigious showcase of Indigenous art anywhere in the world.

The 103^rd edition of the event held August 16 and 17, 2025, featured the best of what has come to be expected from Market, along with notable surprises.

Regina Fee (Chickasaw): The First Timer

Regina Free had never even been to Indian Market before submitting her artwork to participate in 2025. She wasn’t even sure what it was all about, but friends encouraged her to give it a try.

Free had spent most of the past 25 years helping her husband run his veterinary practice in little Newkirk, OK. Now that the kids were older, though, she had the time–and still had the passion–to create art. That never went away from childhood, but as the old saying goes, “life gets in the way.”

With life out of the way, Free returned to artmaking: watercolors, oil painting, drawing, ceramics, sculpture. Her sculptures are unlike anything you’ve seen. Hyper-realistic, mixed media, life-size animal recreations produced with a combination of foam, felt, plaster, acrylic, air dry clay, watercolor, natural and commercial dyes, reclaimed driftwood, weathered metal sheeting, and paper towels. Yes, paper towels.

Working on an assignment to create a three-dimensional paper sculpture for a community college art class she was taking for fun, Free wanted to make a great blue heron. As with all perfectionists, the time and energy she put into the project was out of all proportion to what the task called for. She just couldn’t get it right.

“It went way off the rails; I got halfway through and got to the neck–because you have to work backwards–and it wasn’t working, the paper wasn’t laying right,” Free told Forbes.com. “It was getting clumsy looking. I don’t like this.”

What to do?

What to do?

“I had this stack of paper towels we just got out of a building we were helping someone clean out, and it was sitting there, and I was using it to clean up the studio, and I was just kind of brainstorming,” she continues. “I looked at that paper towel and I went, ‘I wonder if that would work.’”

Paper towels for bird feathers?

Giving them a try, experimenting with various dye patterns, low and behold, “Oh my gosh, this is fantastic. This will work,” she remembers thinking.

Puskawo, “heron” in Chickasaw, not only worked, it would go on to win numerous awards at shows Free entered in 2023, 2024, and 2025.

Better than that, she realized if paper towels could replicate bird feathers, they could probably be used to replicate other natural surfaces, like bison fur.

At the SWAIA Best of Show ceremony on August 15, Free sat shocked, then shaking, as her life-sized bison head sculpture, Windswept, was announced as the Best of Show winner.

She’d only arrived in Santa Fe the day before having driven with her husband straight through from Oklahoma pulling a 32-foot trailer housing her artworks, stopping for naps at convenience stores.

After winning Best of Show, the achievement of a lifetime, Free was about to experience firsthand the scale of Indian Market.

“I had an idea it was going to be big and overwhelming and grandiose, you can prepare yourself for one thing, but until you’re hit, you don’t know how you’re going to react,” Free said, spoken like an athlete. She was a scholarship softball third baseman at Oklahoma State. “I just got hit. Then it started to sink in. It was probably good I was a little ignorant because the stress level would have been over the top.”

Is she planning to come back for 2026?

“I am,” Free said. “I had a pretty good result this year so how could I not?”

Nocona Burgess (Comanche): The Hot Dog Man

Nocona Burgess lives in Santa Fe. He seems to know everyone in town by their first name. He’s been showing at Indian Market for 23 years.

Burgess is on the other end of the spectrum from Free: been there, done that. The Market veteran did forget one new wrinkle about the Best of Show competition, and that was that event organizers recently began allowing artists to submit three entries for judging, not just two. He had only prepared to bring two.

“My son jokingly said, ‘Dad, you ought to paint a fry bread on that paper plate,’” Burgess told Forbes.com. “I thought fry bread is kind of cliché, it popped in my head, (expletive deleted) it, I want to do a hot dog. Nothing Native, just hot dog. I was literally using that paper plate to eat chips on earlier. I gessoed it, I painted it on there, varnished it, and was like, ‘This painting is pretty cool, man.’”

Cool enough to win a first-place blue ribbon.

Cool enough to be the most talked about artwork at Market.

What is a hot dog painted on a 7-inch paper plate in a matter of minutes doing winning an award at one of the most prestigious art fairs in the world–Native or otherwise? Many of Burgess’ colleagues were not as amused by the irreverent painting as he was. The judges “got it,” though.

Burgess’ hot dog was deliciously against-type. That’s good. No offense to landscapes and wildlife painting and portraits of ancestors–Burgess does all of that, too–but here was something different, provocative. Contemporary Native art has always leaned on humor. It’s funny. That’s good. The hot dog had oodles of personality, sharing insight into Burgess’ fun-loving, gregarious personality. It’s not a self-portrait, but little could reflect the artist’s own personality better than his hot dog painting.

Something more, as well.

“In the last month, I’ve been having these conversations with (Altamira Fine Art gallery owner) Jason Williams and one of my collectors about what is ‘Modern West,’ or contemporary Western art. Jason credits the Institute of American Indian Art movement in the 1960s with this new Western art, not just Natives painting it, but modern cowboy art all comes from (IAIA),” Burgess explained. “We were talking about that. They were talking about T.C. Cannon and T.C. Cannon did a painting in the ‘70s called the Mile Long Hot Dog. It was an homage to Wayne Thiebaud, because Wayne Thiebaud influenced T.C. Cannon. Thiebaud did all the cakes, but Thiebaud did a lot of hot dog paintings, and in homage to that, T.C. did the hot dog.”

Thiebaud (1920-2021) is one of the most celebrated American painters, likewise Cannon (1946-1978; Kiowa/Caddo), who also stands as one of the most influential contemporary Native artists.

As for the title of Burgess’ hot dog painting, Pow Wow Glizzy, what’s “glizzy?”

Credit for that again goes to the artist’s teenage son. Nocona Burgess would hear his son and his son’s buddies talking about “glizzy guzzlers” and wanted to know what they meant. “Glizzy” are hot dogs. Why? In the hip-hop world, Glock handguns are referred to as “glizzys.” The clip is about the length of a hot dog.

Voila.

From Wayne Thiebaud and T.C. Cannon to hip hop, “glizzys,” and a blue ribbon at Indian Market.

Kathleen Wall (Jemez Pueblo): The Unexpected

Kathleen Wall’s booth at Indian Market is always one of the most popular, and not just because of her effervescent personality. Collectors wanting to purchase anything other than Wall’s largest, most expensive, museum-bound ceramic figures know to be lined up at her table by 8:00 AM Saturday morning when Market opens or be shut out.

Such was the case again in 2025, but Wall showed off another side of her creativity and personality at a satellite exhibition hosted during Indian Market at the ICA Santa Fe (906 S. St. Francis Dr.). The presentation, “Reservation for Irony: Native Wit and Contemporary Realities,” focused on how humor—a vital tool in Indigenous storytelling, teaching, art (see Pow Wow Glizzy), and resilience—can serve as an act of resistance and remembering and survivance.

What Wall produced for “Reservation for Irony” couldn’t possibly be less like her customary smiling, joyful, ceramic figures. A photograph about 4-feet wide shows a grinning white couple– new mother and father–facing the viewer. Seated on a green kitchen table facing the “parents” is an Indigenous baby dressed in a stereotypical Native “costume” Wall purchased on Amazon.com. The new parents dote on their new… what? Possession?

The setting is mirrored in a tableau beneath the painting with the same table, Jello salad, and plate of white bread sandwich triangles. The crust has been cut off the bread, removing the “brown,” leaving only the white.

Wall skewers America’s adoption industrial complex which has worked to take Native babies and children by force or funny business from Native families and communities and place them in white homes for 100 years. The Indian Adoption Program which begat the Indian Child Welfare Act. White couples taking Native kids out of Native homes and communities against the wishes of Native families and tribal representatives. This was the subject of a 2023 Supreme Court ruling favoring Native families.

Fetishized Native kids and the “perfect” white families who adopt them. Who strip them of their Native heritage. Who keep them from their Native families and communities. Who maroon them in strange, suburban places, not white, unable to be Native.

Genocide doesn’t only come from the barrel of a gun.

“Reservation for Irony” can be seen through August 30, 2025.

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