The 12th edition of the Site Santa Fe International biennial, titled Once Within a Time and opening on 27 June, will include over 300 works by more than 70 historical and contemporary artists—half of whom have been commissioned to conceive works specifically for the exhibition by the curator Cecilia Alemani. Additionally, she has selected around 25 figures—both real and fictional—with roots in New Mexico to serve as inspirational and thematic nodes throughout the sprawling exhibition to be installed in more than a dozen venues across the city.

“These people will function as punctuation in a show that is very much about storytelling and uses the lived experience or existential adventures of these characters as a starting point,” says Alemani. She named the exhibition after an experimental film from 2022 by the Santa Fe-based artist Godfrey Reggio. His Once Within a Time is a surrealistic fairy tale that will be shown at Site, the central hub and largest venue of the International, in a section about the uncanny anchored by a puppet of a witch called Doña Mala, made around 1940, from the collection of the New Mexico Museum of Art.

At Site, the show will open with a room grounded by the late Santa Fe-based Indigenous writer N. Scott Momaday and his poem “In the Telling” about the circular possibilities of stories. “I thought it was a powerful metaphor for the show,” says Alemani. Here, clay figures of storytellers with children scaling their bodies, by the late Pueblo artist Helen Cordero, will be grouped with three new ceramic-based works by the New York-based sculptor Simone Leigh and a panoramic site-specific scroll by Dominique Knowles, the youngest artist in the show—he was born in 1996 in the Bahamas and is based in Paris.

Santa Fe’s 19th-century “queen of sin”, a saloon owner known as Doña Tules, serves as the catalyst in a section about the erotic. Little-known paintings of amorous scenes by the writer D.H. Lawrence, from a collection in Taos, will be clustered with paintings of fleshy, distorted figures by the Los Angeles-based artist Louise Bonnet and riffs on Italian Baroque-era anatomical Venues by the Danish artist Sidsel Meineche Hansen.

The theme of energy revolves around several characters including Francis Schlatter, a 19th-century Frenchman who moved to New Mexico and drew crowds for his supposed powers to cure people. His magic rod will be in dialogue with mystical paintings by Agnes Pelton, the earliest artist in the show (1881-1961) and a leader of the Transcendentalist movement, and landscape paintings on glass by Rebecca Salsbury James, Georgia O’Keeffe’s best friend in New Mexico. New commissions from Maja Ruznic, Diego Medina and Terran Last Gun, all based in New Mexico, engage with spiritualism and the region as a land of enchantment.

In the same room, the idea of energy as related to nuclear history in New Mexico will be oriented around Lilli Hornig, one of the few female scientists who worked on the Manhattan Project at Los Alamos. Here, the Peruvian artist Ximena Garrido-Lecca will show a new piece looking at copper as a material used in technological industries as well as in sacred ceremonies. The artist Will Wilson, who is based in Santa Fe, will pair aerial photographs of uranium mines with images of land art projects like Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty and James Turrell’s Roden Crater.

For the first time since its founding in 1995, the International is partnering with a broad range of venues. “Our goal is to expand in a very dynamic way throughout the fabric of the city,” says Alemani. At the little-known New Mexico Military Museum, she will present artists including Karla Knight, John McCracken and Joseph E. Yoakum. The Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, housed in a building in the shape of an octagon, will host works by Raven Halfmoon, Nora Naranjo-Morse, Sky Hopinka, Cristina Flores Pescorán and Emmi Whitehorse. The VIP lounge at the Best Daze Cannabis Shop will have a new installation by Omari Douglin.

Overall, roughly a third of the participating artists come from the Southwest, a third from other places in the US and in Canada, and a third from the rest of the world, with around 60% identifying as women or gender nonconforming artists.

“I wanted the exhibition to come from the site, to be a show that could only happen in Santa Fe,” says Alemani. “That’s how I started going deep into research on both institutions and people that have left their mark on that region.”

• Site Santa Fe International: Once Within a Time, 27 June 2025-13 January 2026, various sites, Santa Fe, New Mexico