Take the US annexation of the Philippines. Around 1898, the US touted itself as an anti-imperialist nation, home of equality, but then it invaded a foreign nation under the auspices of white Christian duty: Save the heathen islanders. This, according to John Sayles, who visits Santa Fe to talk about his work, including the book A Moment in the Sun.

Local artist Jordan West reminded me of the John Donne poem containing “No man is an island” on my visit last week to West’s Second Street studio. We’d been talking about the difference between working in isolation and in a group.

The outsider artist closest to my heart is Leonard Knight. Formerly a mechanic in the US armed services with no artistic training or experience, Knight has spent the last 30 years or so building and maintaining a 150-foot-tall installation in Niland, Calif., on the banks of the Salton Sea. He calls it Salvation Mountain; you may recognize it from the films Into the Wild and Bombay Beach.

Media Hive organizer Jason Goodyear says that, though the first three or four Hives will alternate between open and facilitated sessions, he hopes for the monthly get-togethers to sustain themselves. Each month, a performance follows the workshop, pulling from that very event or the previous ones.

I envision a world in which we make no distinction between the arts and, let’s say, business or politics, the unifying factors being a sense of imagination and a desire for connection.

Haiku puts images out there—everyday images—juxtaposes them, makes a joke or cuts an image in an unsuspected way. Then we, the viewers, decide what, if anything, the poem means.

Regular moviegoers might think of holiday films as lighthearted animated features or celebrity-stacked rom-coms—ie nothing particularly thought-provoking or emotionally surprising.

Around 2:30 am, I finally turn off the digital recorder and go inside. I have just spent two hours by a gas fire pit in the courtyard of a Las Cruces condo with seven members of the Santa Fe art collective Meow Wolf, discussing how the group had grown from a grassroots organization throwing parties in an empty storefront to a formal business entity commissioned by New Mexico State University to create art. The artwork, titled Glitteropolis, is the group’s 14th immersive art experience—a 3,200-square-foot installation that serves as a fantastical diorama built by anthropologists of the future.

 This story bursts at the margins with names all connected to the great and short-lived experiment in arts education known as Black Mountain College.

Marla Allison’s paintings captivate me.

Art that grabs me tends to initiate a dialogue about identity as a product of internal self and external place.