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Join authors, healers, horticulturists, artists, chefs and more at a two-day symposium co-hosted by the New Mexico History Museum and the New Mexico Committee of the National Museum of Women in the Arts. “Women Planting Seeds: Home, Healing and Horticulture" takes place from 9:30 am to 4:30 pm, on Monday, July 25, and from 9:30 am to 12 pm, on Tuesday, July 26, in the History Museum Auditorium. The event is part of the exhibit Home Lands: How Women Made the West. Tickets are $25 at www.ticketssantafe.org, or at the door. (Seating is limited.) 

"For centuries, New Mexico women have combined a knowledge of the natural world with how they see themselves in that world,” said Susan Berk, president of the New Mexico Committee of the National Museum of Women in the Arts. ”Through this workshop, we hope women will gain the tools to explore a sense of place and their own knowledge of how contemporary women in the West contribute to our understanding of home.”

Participants can attend any or all of the sessions. The conference schedule:

Monday, July 25

9:30–11:00 am: Beyond Four Walls: How Women Shape the Idea of “Home” in the West

Moderator Victoria Price, designer, art historian, author, screenwriter

Jan Hale Barbo, freelance garden columnist

Robin Gray, architect and rug designer

Carol M. Olmstead, author and feng shui master practitioner  

Beverley Spears, architect and landscape architect

11–11:45 am:  Writing the Patchwork of our Lives

Poet Elizabeth Raby

12-1:45 pm: Optional luncheon at Amavi Restaurant with a presentation on “The House of the Three Wise Women,” by Bunny Huffman, director of Acequia Madre House (Tickets $35, available at www.ticketssantafe.org; advance reservations only)

2-4:30 pm: Cultivating the Inner Garden

Moderator Rosemary Zibart, playwright, journalist, and author

Robyn Benson, energy medicine, traditional Chinese medicine, acupuncturist, herbalist, and founder of Santa Fe Soul Health & Healing Center

Sandra Ingerman, author and international teacher of shamanism

Naomi Lake, healer and founder of Full Circle for Conscious Health

Janet Schreiber, medical anthropologist; program director for the Grief, Loss, and Trauma Certificate Program at Southwestern College, author and researcher

Tuesday, July 26

9:30–11:30 am: Women Making Roots

Moderator Sharon Niederman, author, journalist, and photographer 

Lois Ellen Frank, chef, author, teacher, food historian, culinary anthropologist, and photographer

Anne Hillerman, author, journalist, and restaurant critic

Agapita Judy Lopez, director of Abiquiu Historic Properties, and Rights and Reproductions manager at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum

Barbara Buhler Lynes, Emily Fisher Landau director of the Georgia O’Keeffe Research Center, curator at the Georgia O'Keeffe Museum, art historian, and author

12-1:45 pm: Optional, Dutch-treat luncheon at the Inn of the Anasazi

Formed in 1981 out of the collections of Wilhelmina Cole Holladay and Wallace F. Holladay, the National Museum of Women in the Arts is the only museum in the world dedicated exclusively to the contributions of women artists. Set in a former Masonic Temple in Washington, D.C., the museum boasts a permanent collection of more than 3,000 works from the 16th century to the present.

Home Lands: How Women Made the West, through Sept. 11, is the centerpiece of the History Museum's summer-long exploration of women. Originally organized by the Autry National Center in Los Angeles, it features additional materials from the History Museum’s collections. The exhibit is generously supported by Cam and Peter Starret, Ernst & Young, Eastman Kodak Company, the National Endowment for the Humanities, Unified Grocers, Wells Fargo, KCET and the Friends of the Autry. Local support is provided by Stanley S. and Karen Hubbard, the Museum of New Mexico Foundation, the Palace Guard and the Montezuma Ball.