The Gallery at Hotel Willa

May 1, 2026 – August 16, 2026

The Paseo Project and The Gallery at Hotel Willa Present “DC Allen: Faces of Our Land”. A solo exhibition by artist DC Allen (Baaa t’ – chlish, Del Curfman, Crow Tribe of Montana), opening May 1 at The Gallery at Hotel Willa in Taos, New Mexico.

Opening Reception: Friday, May 1st, 4-7 PM is free and open to the public.

Working across painting, photography, digital sketching, and film, Allen collaborates with Indigenous cultural leaders, artists, educators, activists, and community members. The resulting works move beyond traditional portraiture. Gesture, posture, regalia, contemporary clothing, commercial logos, archival imagery, and elements of popular culture appear within the compositions as narrative, revealing layered stories of identity and presence.

A number of the works on display begin with a recorded conversation between Allen and the individual depicted—an exchange rooted in story and lived experience. These interviews become part of the exhibition itself, presented as video recordings that allow viewers to encounter not only the painted image, but the voice and narrative behind it.

“The work is about informing,” Allen explains. “I’m not making paintings to make a statement—I’m using them to help people understand.”

Through these works, Faces of Our Land explores themes of tribal sovereignty, cultural resilience, commodification, appropriation, food justice, land, and identity. Allen’s work reflects the lived tension between ancestral traditions and contemporary realities, between Indigenous identity and the ongoing legacy of colonial narratives.

A number of works in Faces of Our Land highlight artists and cultural figures connected to Taos and the surrounding Pueblo communities, grounding the exhibition within the living Native cultures of Northern New Mexico. Among these is a large-scale portrait of Santiago Romero.

Romero—whose heritage spans Cochiti, Taos, Santa Ana, and Santa Clara Pueblos—has built a multidisciplinary practice that moves between ceramics, painting, performance, and mask-making. His work reflects a journey between urban Los Angeles, where he grew up, and his Pueblo homelands, exploring cultural duality, resilience, and reinvention through vibrant symbolism and layered forms.

Allen’s portrait, titled The Trickster Broadcast (2025), depicts Romero alongside the coyote—an enduring trickster figure within Pueblo storytelling traditions and a recurring motif in Romero’s own work. Painted in oil on canvas, the composition places the artist and the coyote against a vintage television “test pattern,” referencing childhood memories of learning about Native identity through popular media. In the painting, the trickster archetype becomes both mirror and metaphor, reflecting Romero’s playful, subversive artistic voice and his ongoing exploration of identity across time, place, and culture.

By highlighting figures such as Romero, Faces of Our Land situates Taos within a broader network of Indigenous cultural expression—connecting local communities with Native artists, leaders, and storytellers from across the region. The exhibition underscores Taos not only as a place of historic artistic legacy, but as a living center of contemporary Native creativity and dialogue.

Faces of Our Land is presented by The Paseo Project as part of its ongoing arts programming at Hotel Willa, which features rotating exhibitions by artists connected to Taos and the broader region.

For more information about the exhibit and The Paseo Project.