‘Take This and Eat it’ by John Diehl. Courtesy/ERAA

‘Dolly at Jim’s House. Photo by David McClister

ART News:

A New Mexico tradition since 1986, the 2025 El Rito Studio Tour and Mercado will be held from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday, Sept. 27, and Sunday, Sept. 28.

This year’s tour has expanded to more than 20 artists in studios throughout El Rito, including exciting newcomers such as:

• John Diehl, well-known character actor who has appeared in more than 100 films and TV shows, including the locally filmed Dark Winds, and is acclaimed for his sculptural pieces; 
• David McClister, music photographer and videographer whose images of musicians like  Dolly Parton, John Prine, and Taylor Swift have appeared in national publications; 
• John Rippel, known nationally for his sterling silver and stone inlay belt buckles; 
• Scotty Mitchell, Southwest plein-air painter; 
• Michele Byrne, Santa Fe impressionist, who will exhibit at the renovated Martin’s store, along with Martin’s new owner, Elaine Lockard;
• Jean Inglis and Amaryllis Khat, mother and daughter artists and lifelong residents of Los Alamos; and
• Josef Weese, creator of a series of unique and colorful interpretations of Euclidean geometric proofs.

Returning tour favorites include art photographer David Michael Kennedy, painter Lucia Vinograd, Shawn Demarest, Gina Binkley, Gedeon Santos and the El Rito Library Quilters Guild. El Farolito will be serving its award-winning food and displaying art. San Juan Nepomuceno, considered one of the finest examples of historical New Mexican churches, will be open for visitors, as will the Santa Fe Raptor Center.

The Community Mercado, held at the beautiful El Rito campus of Northern New Mexico College, will feature more than 20 local artisans, including students from NNMC’s Heritage Arts Program in Rio Grande weaving, Spanish colonial woodworking and traditional retablo painting. There will be a pottery workshop, live music, great food, and fun, free activities for kids and families on both days.

The El Rito Art Association traces its origins back to 1985, when a group of artists envisioned a studio tour to draw visitors to the village. The first tour was held the next year, and with rare exceptions, it has been an annual event ever since. In 2016, the El Rito Art Association was formally incorporated as a non-profit. In recent years, stops on the tour have been added to involve more of the community, the Raptor Center being a prime example.

Partial funding for this year’s event was granted by the Rio Arriba County Lodgers’ Tax.

To learn more, go to www.elritoartassociation.org/.

Work by Josef Weese. Courtesy photo

Josef Weese Bio

Josef Weese, 26, is an IT professional. A strong advocate for STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math), he has long had a passion for integrating art with other subjects. He began this work teaching a STEAM class at Moving Arts Española in 2018 and worked with Dr. Steve Cox and the Northern New Mexico STEM Mentor Collective, where he taught K12 students how to make physical media using 3D printing.

While studying at Northern New Mexico College, he began working with Charles Knight on a project that used artistic expression to evaluate Euclid’s Elements, a collection of mathematical proofs that laid the foundation for modern geometry. Many pieces have been created as a part of this project, such as The Pythagorean Forest which was accepted into the Bridges Math Art Conference in Linz, Austria in 2019. Pieces have been displayed at the Taos Town Hall, Abiquiu Inn, and at the Northern New Mexico College Center for Fine Arts.

Their latest project, Euclid Off the Wall — Proof Trees, aims to visualize every proof in the first book of Euclid’s Elements. This series will create a striking display of the thousands of ideas necessary to conceptualize one of the greatest laws in all of mathematics: The Pythagorean Theorem. Progress of this series will be on display at the 2025 El Rito Art Tour, Saturday, Sept. 27, and Sunday, Sept. 28.