Everything meets everything. Somewhere. This I choose to believe. In all things, there is connectedness. I envision a point where all manner of opposites intersect, collide, and explode. The persistent “same/opposite” notion that trails me, accompanies me, and leads me, has its roots in that afternoon vision. It is at those intersections where great energy occurs. Where stillness moves. Where fear exhibits bravery. Where anger dissolves into peace. Where emptiness is filled.
Where “One” becomes “The Other.”
Where life meets death and death gives rise to life.
I have discovered and abandoned and rediscovered and lost and embraced—over time or in an instant—the fathomless distance from inclination to realization and the measureless proximity of the lost to the found.
Linda Durham with children Rocky and Daisy, and Toronto, the cat, at the Canyon Road Gallery, Santa Fe, NM 1985
(Painting by Richard Hogan) Photo: Santagto
Linda's StoryLinda Durham, human rights advocate, adventurer, and author of Still Moving and The Trans-Siberian Railway Journey, an Art and Friendship Project, earned an advanced degree in contemporary art through a thirty-three-year immersion as a gallery owner and Art and Artist's consultant in one of the world’s top art markets—Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Born in Philadelphia, Durham is a lifelong journal writer, founder of the Wonder Institute (a visual- and performing-arts think tank and salon), lecturer, and workshop presenter who collects experiences and cultural encounters the way others collect souvenirs.
A former Manhattan Playboy Bunny in the 1960s, and mother of two world-traveling humanitarian children she talks to herself—onstage and off—and to the birds at her high-desert home, where she prizes her personal library almost as much as her freedom, her cats, dog, chickens, and the love of her life. The self-professed ageless quester recharges her inventive and spiritual batteries by wayfaring in faraway places.
She is currently at work on a new book, Naked Women: stripped and teased, a bold exploration of creativity, memory, aging, and identity, told through the lives of a few ancestors, several soul sisters, and four fictional women she might have become—had she chosen different paths.
Linda Durham’s professional and personal life centers on art, artists, global travel, and humanitarian causes. She is 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.