Linda Durham has been one of the most influential people in the Santa Fe contemporary art scene for over 30 years.
Her professional and personal lives center on art, artists, global travel, and humanitarian causes.
She's the founder and director of Santa Fe’s Wonder Institute, which sponsors art exhibitions, lectures, workshops, and salons focused on discovering and implementing creative solutions to contemporary social and cultural issues.
For more than three decades, Durham promoted New Mexico-based artists as the hands-on owner of a contemporary art gallery with seven exhibition locations through the years: six in Santa Fe, and one in New York.
In 2012, the New Mexico Museum of Art acquired her extensive gallery archives.
A prolific writer and speaker, she has been guest lecturer or workshop presenter at Brigham Young University, the University of Wisconsin, Ohio Wesleyan University, Yale University, the Sundance Institute, the College of Santa Fe, Santa Fe Community College, and the New Mexico Museum of Art.
For her seventieth birthday, Durham circumnavigated the world in seventy days, meeting Indigenous women, educators, artists, entrepreneurs, and peace activists, and planting “Seeds of Peace” in gardens, schoolyards, and parks in South Africa, Lesotho, Madagascar, Thailand, Myanmar, and Hawaii.
Linda's fascinating life is chronicled in her memoir "Still Moving."
In this episode, she and Melanie share an intimate conversation sitting at Linda's dining room table. The two riff on beauty as a healing balm, transitions and transformations in a life well lived, and some personal acts of generosity on Linda's part that've meant a great deal to many friends and acquaintances.
They also talked about courage, one of the hallmarks of Linda's professional and personal lives. She quotes the following in her memoir:
Long before morning, I knew that what I was seeking to discover was a thing I’d always known. That all courage was a form of constancy. That it was always himself that the coward abandoned first. After this all other betrayals came easily.
–Cormac McCarthy, All the Pretty Horses
