With feet planted in a morass of sand, overhead vision blocked by a blanket of blue and only theoretical understanding that we were being recorded, perspective was elusive. We had risen before 10 am to make our way—by bus, by bike, by foot and by carpool—to the San Ysidro Crossing.

To tell history as a single story leaves out many voices. El Otro Lado, or the other side, attempts to assuage the thankless void left by so many people’s untold tales by giving them a voice—and a visualization.

Total Disinformation Awareness is an exhibition about information: its proliferation and concealment in a computerized age. It’s also about a distinctly American shared mythos born out of 9.11, beneath the glare of then-tube, now-digital TVs.

I’m an unapologetic omnivore, but a nice sister and daughter. For Thanksgiving this year, my weird, painfully nontraditional, vegetarian family is flying out to Santa Fe. And I’m not going to sequester them, as the guests of honor—who are also traveling 3,000 miles amid holiday hubbub—to side dishes.

For your holiday shopping convenience, we present a few of Santa Fe’s holiday shows, as well as which types of people on your gift list we think they’d best accommodate.

Susan York’s handful of minimalist works are big, black and queer. They sneak around the space in corners, on the floor, in and on walls. Sometimes, they tiptoe barely a whit from the blank walls or hover just a finger’s length from the floor.

The process in both Yozo Suzuki’s Gambit: An Opening Move and David Kimball Anderson’s In Nature is laid bare. What the exhibitions are intended for is more nebulous—but definitely not the point.

Michael Sumner and his wife Melody Sumner Carnahan founded Burning Books in Oakland, Calif., in 1979. When the couple moved to New Mexico in 1989, what began as a publishing company evolved into an “artist-run, weirdness-driven organization dedicated to the production and publication of unmuzzled literature, music, and art.”

Art is often used as a stand-in for historical information. To be clichéd, a picture’s 1,000 words fill in, correctly or not, so many muted expanses of an ever-fleeting past. Historical information, on the other hand, rarely stands in for art.

When Bravo aired Work of Art: The Next Great Artist, the art world let out a collective groan. Criticism abounded, but we suspect the laments had less to do with critical upset and more reflect high-brow disdain for reality shows.