The storyteller who paints brings his Wild West to Palace Avenue
Billy the Kid dances. Warriors play croquet. General Custer rides away from Appomattox with a table balanced on his head. For more than fifty years, Thom Ross has turned the legends of the American West inside out, and on First Friday he brings those stories to Santa Fe in person.
SANTA FE, NM: (October 10, 2026); Sorrel Sky Gallery welcomes Thom Ross on Friday, December 4, 2026, from 5 to 7 p.m. at the gallery’s Santa Fe location, 125 W. Palace Avenue. Ross lives and paints eighteen miles south in Lamy, in a house built to resemble the Alamo, and the evening is a chance to meet him a short drive from where the work is made.
Ross calls himself a storyteller who paints. He reads deeply on every subject before he picks up a brush, then sets aside realism for bold color and flattened, graphic forms that pull his figures out of a sepia past and into the present. The humor in the work always carries an argument about how Americans remember their history.
“Reality is the mask through which we must push ourselves to find the meaning,” Ross told the Wild West History Association Journal.