Olive Rush's historic Santa Fe studio bursts into new life on Canyon Road.

In the early part of the 20th century, New Mexico was a fairly remote, freshly ratified state in the Union that attracted health-seekers, entrepreneurs, and artists. It became a place of quiet retreat and solitude, a world apart from the bustling urban centers across the country.

In 1966, the small Quaker meeting in Santa Fe, New Mexico, was bequeathed its current home, the historic house and garden of the painter Olive Rush. It is already an unlikely occurrence for a Quaker meeting to have a patron, and even more so, for the benefactor to be an artist, given Friends’ long history of disparaging the arts as frivolous and vain. Thus, Santa Fe Meeting’s relationship with our “patron” is unique and has been a source of pride, as well as of controversy.