What does it mean to find the sacred in everyday life?
For Santa Fe artist Erin Currier, this question has guided more than two decades of artistic exploration. Her newest exhibition, From New Mexico to the Mediterranean: Motorcyclists, Mystics, and Milongueras, on view at Blue Rain Gallery through July 9, continues that journey with a remarkable series of mixed media paintings that celebrate artists, travelers, dancers, saints, visionaries, and independent thinkers from across cultures and throughout history.
Currier’s work exists at the intersection of portraiture, storytelling, travel, and collage. Working with discarded ephemera collected from markets, cafés, museums, streets, train stations, and cities around the world, she transforms everyday materials into richly layered compositions that become both portraits and visual archives. Torn packaging, transit tickets, playing cards, religious imagery, advertisements, maps, and handwritten fragments all become part of the narrative, carrying the histories of the places from which they came.
“I transform profane materials into works of sacred beauty,” Currier writes. It is a philosophy that extends beyond her materials to the people she chooses to portray.
Rather than focusing on traditional heroes or historical power figures, Currier is drawn to individuals whose lives embody compassion, courage, creativity, and spiritual conviction. Her subjects often exist outside conventional systems of recognition, yet their dedication to their work and beliefs has left lasting cultural impact.
This latest body of work is rooted in Currier’s exploration of “immanence versus transcendence”—the idea that the divine can be encountered not through institutions alone, but within everyday human experience. Across the exhibition, artists, mystics, dancers, motorcycle riders, architects, and saints become expressions of this philosophy, demonstrating that creative practice itself can be a form of spiritual devotion.
Several paintings illustrate this vision particularly powerfully.
In Tres Graces of the Mediterranean, Currier reimagines the classical Three Graces through three contemporary women riding Vespas across Greece, Turkey, and Sicily. The monumental composition celebrates feminine strength, artistic expression, and cultural interconnectedness. Hundreds of pieces of collected ephemera—from Palermo and Athens to Buenos Aires and New Mexico—form a visual tapestry that reminds us that despite differences in language, religion, or geography, humanity shares common aspirations for beauty, creativity, and hope.
Her portrait of Pamela Colman Smith pays tribute to the visionary illustrator behind the Rider-Waite Tarot deck, whose artistic contributions transformed modern visual culture while remaining largely unrecognized during her lifetime. Layers of vintage tarot cards, circus posters, travel ephemera, and found objects surround Smith, honoring both her imagination and her resilience.
Currier also turns her attention to remarkable women whose stories cross boundaries of religion and culture. Saint Sara-la-Kali, revered by the Romani people, emerges through an intricate collage of Indian, Mediterranean, and Catholic imagery that reflects centuries of migration and cultural exchange. Likewise, her portrait of Saint Marie Alphonsine Danil Ghattas honors the Palestinian educator and founder of the Rosary Sisters while acknowledging the complex contemporary history of the region through carefully selected fragments of modern ephemera.
Throughout the exhibition, Currier demonstrates an extraordinary ability to weave togethe biography, history, travel, spirituality, and contemporary life into unified visual narratives. Every fragment has a story; every object carries memory. The resulting works reward close looking, revealing new discoveries with each encounter.
What ultimately distinguishes Currier’s practice is her belief that art can illuminate our shared humanity. Her subjects come from different countries, faiths, and traditions—Catholic, Muslim, Hindu, esoteric, artistic, secular—but they are united by lives lived with authenticity, curiosity, compassion, and purpose.
As Currier reflects:
“Their art—that is, their honoring of and connection to God, the gods, and the Creator—is one and the same with their lives, and is a transformative force celebrated in these works.”
At a time when differences often dominate public discourse, From New Mexico to the Mediterranean offers another perspective. It reminds us that across cultures and generations, creativity remains one of humanity’s most enduring forms of connection—and that the sacred may be found not only in extraordinary places, but in the lives of ordinary people who choose to pursue their passions with courage.
Erin Currier: From New Mexico to the Mediterranean: Motorcyclists, Mystics, and Milongueras is on view at Blue Rain Gallery, Santa Fe, through July 9, 2026.
