The Collectors Are Coming! A Party for Grand Cornelia

Collector ExperienceSanta Fe ArtistWomen in the ArtsTaos New Mexico Art ExhibitionsArt Exhibitions
Written By Robbi Firestone

July 18. Taos, New Mexico.

My first solo show. The Long Horizon. Gallery 215, 203 Fine Art.

Private. By invitation only.

My collectors are coming.

New York. Seattle. Miami. Dallas. Scottsdale. Santa Fe. Chicago. Houston.

Dear friends. Devoted collectors. People who have lived with my paintings for decades. In homes. Offices. The rooms where days begin and end.

They did not need to be convinced. They simply saw.

I am overjoyed. These are my people. This evening is for them.

Gallery 215 is a restored 1850 Spanish Colonial adobe hacienda. 215 Ranchitos Road, Taos, New Mexico. Thick walls. Ancient wooden floors. Hand-carved furniture. A koi pond in the atrium. Outdoor sculpture garden.

A space that holds work the way very few spaces can.

Curated by Maureen Sarro, Executive Director of 203 Fine Art. A woman of precision, integrity, and joy.

The Long Horizon is thirty paintings. Jewel-sized to large scale. Oil, acrylic, watercolor. Landscapes. Sky. Light and color of New Mexico, where I have worked for decades.

Where I later discovered my great great grandmother, Cornelia Veronica Trujillo, was born in the mid-nineteenth century.

I paint the same skies my ancestor grew up under.

Not a metaphor. A fact that took a lifetime to find.

If I could throw Grand Cornelia a party, these are exactly the people I would invite. Chosen family. Collectors, friends, women in my lineage who created and endured and never stopped. We are the New Mexico creators. All of us, across every generation, under the same sky.

The best weekend. All the chosen family. None of the obligatory ones.

I wish Cornelia Veronica Trujillo could be here.

Perhaps her spirit will imbue those ancient adobe walls. Perhaps she will be there, laughing with us.

I believe she will.

Serious collectors may request an invitation.

Inquiries: maureen@203fineart.com, 917-518-0430.

Robbi Firestone

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.

Her paintings, in oil, acrylic, pastel, and graphite, emerge from sustained observation of landscape and sky, rooted in the high desert of New Mexico. These are not depictions of place but states of being: the land as inner weather, the horizon as meditation on presence and the radical act of sustained attention.

Her conceptual practice, most notably the 2026 series Existential Snacks: Food for Thought, deploys mass-produced consumer materials as a Trojan horse, seductive in their familiarity and disturbing in their implications, addressing ecological collapse, cultural numbness, and the human tendency to consume without thinking.

These are not two separate bodies of work. They are one philosophical position expressed in two registers: feeling as the ground from which thought becomes possible; thought as the ground from which action becomes necessary.

Firestone's work has received formal recognition from leading figures in the contemporary art world.

Louis Grachos, Executive Director of SITE Santa Fe, writes: "Robbi Firestone's Existential Snacks project is a brilliant contemporary extension of the longstanding tradition of Satirical Artworks. Innovative in her use of materials, Firestone's paintings/sculptures reveal a sense of humor, are clever and reveal a substantial insight into her subject matter which makes this series so successful."

Merry Scully, Head of Curatorial Affairs and Curator of Contemporary Art at the New Mexico Museum of Art, wrote of The Infertility Project: "You are telling a powerful story...this project may take on a life of its own and take years to unfold," drawing comparison to Judy Chicago's The Dinner Party. The National Museum of Women in the Arts described her work as "a testament to the power of transforming personal pain into a benefit for the greater good."

The Infertility Project premiered at the United Nations in parallel with the Commission on the Status of Women. The project became the subject of a documentary film by Betsy Chasse, director of What the Bleep Do We Know, available on Amazon Prime.

Her work has been featured in The New York Times, Worth Magazine, the Boston Herald, the Huffington Post, and the Santa Fe New Mexican.

Firestone's work is held in distinguished private collections across the United States. She is currently represented by 203 Fine Art, Taos, New Mexico.

Studio visits are by appointment in New York City and Santa Fe.

https://www.FirestoneArt.com
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