Artists’ paintings and old photos in books capture the soft forms of adobe houses, melding like loaves of horno bread into the New Mexico landscape. Their scale and proportion in these depictions are balanced with their context and surroundings. They represent the uniqueness of the state’s architecture, cultures, and people. I am fortunate to have lived my life in homes constructed from adobe. There is something about a house built out of earthen materials that connects its inhabitants to la tierra sagrada, our sacred Mother Earth.
Since the 16th-century rumor of the Seven Cities of Cíbola—a legend that arose when the shimmering materials on a pueblo’s earth-plastered
