Uncover Farmington’s Arts Scene

I’m in the crowd with my brother, Zack, a metalhead who learned to play guitar via Black Sabbath’s “Iron Man.” We’re at the epicenter of the DIY music scene called rez metal, a growing subgenre that’s interpreted by mainly Diné practitioners. The Four Corners Metal Fest’s center-stage presence among the otherwise quiet Farmington streets seems to confirm a cultural shift in this oil and gas stronghold of northwestern New Mexico.

The music scene isn’t the only one fueling this shift—at least not on this June weekend, which seems packed full of possibilities for our visit. Nearby, on Navajo Street, a Pride talent show is just getting started at No Worries Sports Bar and Grill. Earlier, I watched a small but rollicking LGBTQIA+ parade march down Main before we diverted to take a dappled afternoon stroll through riverside willow and cottonwood bosques on the Among the Waters Park and Trail in the center of town. Over at San Juan College, the Navajo Film Festival has been in full swing all day.

“There’s so much to do. I’d raise a family here,” says my brother, a bachelor who lives on the other side of the state, when we take an afternoon break from the fest to check out the new aqua water park at Lake Farmington. The next morning, we wake early to catch the mass ascension of the San Juan River Balloon Rally, watching a conference of hot-air balloons drift among pink mesas in the dawn light.

In Farmington these days, it feels like all kinds of creative expressions are not only coexisting, they’re also riffing off each other in this cultural crossroads.

IT HASN’T ALWAYS BEEN EASY TO EXPRESS yourself in Farmington, especially if you’re Native. Ancestral Pueblo people first came to the region known in Navajo as Tóta' or Totah, “between the waters,” in the seventh century; in 1868, the Navajo Nation took over the western half of San Juan County and became the first permanent settlement. White settlers incorporated the agricultural community they first called Farmingtown at the turn of the century, planting flourishing apple orchards fed by the confluence of the San Juan, Animas, and La Plata waterways.

While oil and gas investment ramped up in the 1920s, it wasn’t until 1950 when a pipeline built to carry San Juan Basin methane to California began the boom-and-bust cycle that’s marked Farmington’s fortunes through the 20th century and into the present. The population exploded with the new industry, going from 3,500 people in 1950 to more than 23,000 in 1960. The retro buildings that line Main Street and Broadway Avenue today—including the recently renovated Totah Theater, a shining 1949 example of the Pueblo Deco style—reflect Farmington’s biggest era of construction. The center of town thus has a uniquely out-of-time charm, including a few antique and thrift shops that carry treasures from each of the region’s interesting pasts.

Although oil and gas jobs shored up many Indigenous families in the area, the boom-based influx of Anglo transplants revved racial tensions. In Whiskey Tender, her acclaimed 2024 memoir about growing up in Farmington during the 1970s and ’80s, Deborah Jackson Taffa (Laguna Pueblo, Quechan [Yuma] Nation) recalls family fishing trips spent on the Animas in the summer of 1974. The escapes were an antidote, she writes, to “the violence, pressures, and confusion of being a Native girl in a northwestern New Mexico town where cowboys still hated Indians—three white teenagers had murdered three Native men just before my family and I moved there for my father’s new job, when I was six years old. Navajo people marched in the streets that April, and though we missed the protests and backlash, the town’s tension remained consistent, even after the Civil Rights Commission came in to keep the peace.”

Half a century later, Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham recently told a local group that the area’s current oil and gas boom should continue for at least five more years. In the meantime, the thriving rez metal and other music scenes, newer galleries, art spaces and venues, public murals and sculptures, Native-owned businesses, a growing weekly Makers’ Market, and a community dedicated to inclusive arts education are contributing to an increasingly lively arts and entertainment landscape. Lured by the wealth of opportunities for outdoor recreation, as well as comparatively modest home prices, a steady stream of young families and retirees alike are pouring into the town, which also regularly sees a swell of weekend visitors thanks to its status as the retail center of the Four Corners region.

“Everyone I’ve met in Farmington has been so supportive and so interested in what I’m doing,” says artist Rosemary Meza-DesPlas, who moved to the city in 2016 when her husband took a job at San Juan College. “In such a small and spread-out art scene, compared to Santa Fe and Taos, the locals really support the newcomers and are interested in having people add on and bring some vibrancy.” The region is also home to some rising young Diné innovators, including James Beard Award–nominated chef Justin Pioche, acclaimed jazz musician Delbert Anderson, and teenage entrepreneur Kamia Begay, whose Nizhóní Soaps, a three-store empire of Navajo Nation–made bath products, has a downtown flagship.

Meza-DesPlas frequents the northside Lauter Haus Brewing Company, a large barcade and music venue that former Three Rivers Brewery head brewer Brandon Beard opened in 2019 as only the second craft brewery in town. It quickly became much more. The night before the metal fest, I watched as New Mexico–based country singer Austin Van held down the second night of a residency while a diverse, multigenerational crowd of two-steppers swirled around the dance floor till the last note. “It’s such a cool place to hang out,” Meza-DesPlas says. “Everyone coexists in the same space. They’re all just there to listen to music.”

THE ROOTS OF FARMINGTON’S CURRENT cultural flowering might be found under the high ceilings of Artifacts 302, a 25-year-old collective of artist studios, an art gallery, a gift shop, and a coffee kiosk housed in the former 1918 Farmington Lumber and Hardware building, in the heart of downtown. There, among a crowd of artists at work, friends catching up, and tourists browsing the open studios, I meet Flo Trujillo for a lavender latte.

“Our city and our county want us all to work together,” says the tireless president of the Northwest New Mexico Arts Council. “They offer so many opportunities for so many organizations now.” That’s helped to spur interest in the arts among young people. “Music is a big part of it,” Trujillo adds. She also mentions regular Jazz Jams at Orchard Park, film screenings for Hispanic Heritage Month, and the recent announcement for a new eight-acre, $13 million all-abilities park and playground to offer accessible play structures, rehabilitation equipment, and nature-based and sensory gardens for adults and children.

I ask about a recent national news story out of Farmington, when a Native high school student’s beaded graduation cap was removed by faculty during the commencement ceremony. Trujillo winces but doesn’t miss a beat. “We’re working with those issues,” she says. “We offer Navajo adornment classes that talk about not only the rocks and minerals but the humanities value behind our diverse cultures.” Before I leave, she gifts me with another recent arts council project, a suite of Navajo code talker trading cards beautifully printed with local artists’ portraits of the World War II heroes.

On the way out, I pick up a flyer to vote on the city’s newest public art initiative. Several sculptures by New Mexico artists are temporarily on display in downtown Farmington, and the city council is seeking input on how to spend the project’s allotted $77,000. The current favorite seems to be D’jean Jawrunner’s Sun Lion, an imposing bronze horned toad that sits outside Artifacts 302.

Down West Main Street at HEart Gallery, co-owners Karen Ellsbury and Patrick Hazen are also carving out new opportunities. “We have nine spaces and 10 artists renting in the building,” says Ellsbury, who grew up locally. The couple recently received an AARP grant to finish a mural-covered outdoor venue behind the gallery that will host performances and happenings. “People don’t realize how fabulously beautiful our landscape is and how inspiring it is for artists,” she adds.

OF ALL THE LOCAL CULTURAL touchstones, the rez metal scene feels like the most homegrown artistic response to the region’s tough history. After the Four Corners fest, I call the lead singer of the Diné metal band Signal 99, Chuck Haven, who grew up in Farmington. “You’ve got a lot of different cultures here, with oil-field workers coming from different states,” he says. “In Navajo, Tóta' is like a gathering of rivers. And that’s a center point for cultures coming together.”

At 47, Haven is an elder statesman of rez metal, having begun Signal 99 as a solo project in 2006 before recruiting band members to play live shows and tour the country. “It was more or less do-it-yourself when I started,” he says of the struggle to find local music venues, which would usually result in a setup on a mesa or in a backyard on the reservation.

“I was the first person to put on a metal show at Locke Street Eats,” he adds proudly. The outdoor food-truck park, playground, and venue opened new opportunities for the scene’s visibility when it launched in 2022. His band recently headlined its own SigFest there, featuring a long lineup of up-and-comers.

He calls the continuing rise of rez metal “an outlet for anger,” while his music also draws its power from a collective rage. “Growing up in an area with poverty, alcoholism, domestic violence, racism, and so forth, there’s a part of us that has that angst,” he says. “I think a lot of people growing up on the reservation can relate to that.”

While he describes the younger generations getting into his music, I think about the black-clad concertgoers bobbing their heads downtown. “From my experience,” he says, “hate is really just a learned trait that’s taught to kids. Music, for me, was just kind of bridging that gap.”

Read more: The artist and owner of Artifacts 302 Gallery has helped elevate previously unseen artists in Farmington.