Your Invite: Last Chance to See The Long Horizon
You’re invited. Two final open viewing dates remain for The Long Horizon at Gallery 215, Taos:
Saturday, August 29th | 1–3pmSunday, September 6th | 1–3pm
The Long Horizon is an exhibition of paintings, pastels and watercolors inspired by the intertwining of Robbi Firestone’s life in Northern New Mexico with her ancestral connection to the land. In the mid-nineteenth century, Cornelia Veronica Trujillo was born in Santa Fe. She fell in love with a merchant from St. Louis and had the courage to leave everything she had ever known to follow her heart east along the Santa Fe Trail into an unknown life. She never returned. The memory faded. The land remained.
Arif Khan, Executive Director of the UNM Art Museum, visits Robbi Firestone's The Long Horizon this week.
Generations later, Robbi Firestone came to New Mexico chasing a different kind of love. A love for the light itself. The same light, the same dust, sage and impossible sky that stopped Georgia O’Keeffe in her tracks in 1929 and kept Agnes Martin in Taos until she drew her last breath.
Upon arriving in Santa Fe in 2010, Firestone set up her studio and began to paint. For fifteen years she painted that light, season after season, always feeling an inexplicable pull toward this land, this sky, this particular quality of afternoon that makes everything in New Mexico look slightly more real than anywhere else on earth. Firestone only recently discovered that her great-great-grandmother Cornelia was born and raised in Santa Fe County. The light that has fed her paintings for fifteen years is the same light that once fell on her ancestor’s face. The once inexplicable pull is now definable. It is lineage, and it was in her bones all along.
On July 18, 2026, Robbi Firestone opened The Long Horizon — the first solo show of her three-decade practice — at Gallery 215 in Taos, a painstakingly restored 1850 adobe hacienda. It is the same Spanish Colonial world that Cornelia Veronica Trujillo was born into. The same thick adobe walls, flagstone floors, and quality of light falling through the windows. Thirty paintings in oil, acrylic, and watercolor, from small jewels of light to large-scale gestural canvases, are installed throughout the rooms of the hacienda.
Marsha Jones, Chairwoman of SITE Santa Fe, and Andy Wallerstein, former Chairman of SITE Santa Fe, photographer Mary Sloan, and Lili Pierrepont visit Robbi Firestone's The Long Horizon at Gallery 215.
In this newest body of work, Firestone ponders Cornelia’s journey. She contemplates it topographically, in abstracted line, from an aerial view: the boulders, the passages, the treacherous stretch of ground Cornelia must have crossed, and Firestone’s own journey laid over hers. These paintings trace a story about blood, bones and the landscapes that live in us long before we arrive in them — a story about women who had the courage to follow what called them, whether it be a man, a horizon, or a light they could not explain.
She didn’t wait for the call. She built the room.
Robbi Firestone is a contemporary American painter and conceptual artist working between New York City and Santa Fe, New Mexico. Her practice spans three decades of sustained inquiry into how beauty, urgency, and ethical responsibility coexist in a fragile world.
With deep thanks to Maureen Sorro of Gallery 215 for opening this room.
