Saying Grace

In 1991, within months of arriving in Taos, artist Wes Mills opened a gallery inside a former barbershop. One room, which he named, without much strain, the Barber Shop Gallery. Artist Marc Baseman, who moved to Taos County the same year, had his first show there, and the two became close friends. Marc’s son, Max, grew up around this DIY culture. 

Galleries, Max learned, were a thing any person could simply decide to make, which led the younger Baseman to begin in a similar way some years later—in a Galisteo Street kitchen within a casita he was renting; Unit 5. The numeral by the door became the sign. 

At the time, Baseman had just left Taos for Albuquerque, where he studied philosophy and religious studies at the University of New Mexico. He graduated in 2014 before landing in Santa Fe. Crashing on a friend’s couch in a city he thought of mostly as the space between Albuquerque and Taos, Baseman began putting up art and hanging work based on how thick the walls were. Then the landlord shut it down.

Working long shifts at a local restaurant to raise money, Baseman snagged a warehouse on Fox Road, right at the cusp of Midtown and the Southside. He spent four months turning it into a refined white room capable of properly showcasing the art and artists he admired. And he carried the numeral with him. Baseman’s first show at then-new 5. Gallery went up in August of 2016. 

He sent out invitations typed on paper napkins, and the space held works by Mills, whose Barber Shop Gallery had led Baseman down the gallery path. Now, 10 years later, the process has ultimately been a good one. Still, Baseman says, he is keenly aware of what the Fox Road address costs him. 

“If we were on Canyon, or in the Railyard,” he explains, “we would have more walk-ins, I’m sure.” 

How, then, with so little foot traffic, does 5. survive? 

“Stubbornness,” Baseman says with a chuckle. “Every day that we’re open is a victory.”

Ten years of gallery business has run primarily on handshakes—no contracts; no inventory outside of Baseman’s memory, at least until a much needed Excel sheet mercifully intervened; no one but Baseman to guide his devoted audience down the minimalist trail of substantive contemporary art.

To celebrate his decade-long aesthetic enterprise, the gallery will this week host the celebratory exhibit gratia, which highlights 16 returning 5. artists including Stuart Arends, Marc Baseman, Helen C. Beck, Michael Diaz, Christine Taylor Patten, Mary Peck, Utako Shindo, Darrell Wilks and more.

Each and every artist represented in the show deserves applause, and gratia has no shortage of outstanding works. Wilks, for example, previously hung his boisterous tarp paintings in the 2018 show Wilks \ Cousineau, and his impish mixed-media pop-art works for 2019 exhibit DISCO CHRONICLES and 2023’s DEATH IN A CORNFIELD remain memorable. Meanwhile, Desiree Manville’s silver gelatin prints, sometimes smaller than a playing card, of a vacant midwest with immeasurable skies, quietly haunted 5. in the 2021 show watermark, and she’ll return to celebrate Baseman’s anniversary. 

It hardly ends there. David McDonald brought his mischievous sculptures made from construction materials in To Wander is not to be Lost last year, not to mention a showing of abstract shelters built with hydrocal (a type of cement) and cold wax in 2022’s Shelters From the Storm. 

Shindo alone has presented three notable solo shows at 5. over time. Her exquisite—and touchable—stoneware vessels and understated paper pieces with sumi ink (a traditional East Asian black ink made from soot, animal glue and water) appeared in the night falls and the day breaks | 日が暮れて | 夜が明ける  in 2022. She also presented Form Poem the following year, which featured the roaring diurnal descent of her titular video work. In 2025, her works of paper and sumi ink flanked delightful porcelain and clay shapes in Liminal in hand: paper curls like the form of clay 閾の手: 紙は陶影 のように丸くなる.

And the list goes on. Peck offered pensive photographs from a trek to the path of the Keystone XL pipeline in the 2019 show Spaces in Between: Following the Route of Keystone XL, as well as achingly beautiful images of afflicted landscapes in Apologia, circa 2024. Gloria Graham showed photos of archaic tools from the Taos plains with graphite silhouettes tracing the daily movement of their shadows in 2017’s Earth Moves Shadows, and her incendiary photos of discarded library index cards adorned the walls for INDEX CARDS REDRESSED in 2024.

Not to put too fine a point on it, but Baseman has obviously adopted a heady level of eclecticism in the shows he’s produced at 5. Gallery. Since 2016, he has shown Agnes Martin prints, 19th century albumen photographs of Egypt and even Louise Bourgeois and Marcel Duchamp. He’s hosted live events, too, like poetry readings and music, including a concert by the renowned classical guitarist David Leisner.

That Baseman continues at all feels notable. Certainly he’s due his flowers, though the gallery’s patronage is strong as well. When 5.’s doors closed briefly during the 2020 pandemic lockdowns, Baseman penned a heartfelt letter to his network:

“5. Gallery simply does not exist without you,” he wrote. “Without artists, the gallery is an empty room, and when everyone comes together the space becomes a temple.” 

That was the second time a room of his had gone dark, but 5. Gallery not only survived the shutdown, Baseman has flourished in the years since with his space becoming one of Santa Fe’s most cherished hidden gems—perhaps even one less prone to the financial subterfuge of more prominent galleries and, instead, steeped in a message about loving art simply for the love of art. That is at least how Baseman tends to curate, as he has right from the start.

“The only hard and fast rules for showing work in the gallery are things that I think are important, things that I respond to,” he adds. “I don’t know how to do it any other way.”

Gratia Opening: 5 pm Friday, Aug. 21. Free. 5. Gallery, 2351 Fox Road No. 700, 5pointgallery.com

August 19, 2026

12:00 AM