If you could amass a collection of your favorite things and surround yourself with them, what shape would your life take under their influence? For these four Santa Feans, the answer was, and continues to be, quite simple. They were led inexorably to these favorite things. Coin silver cutlery, textiles, folk art, and artisan skull mezcal bottles, continue to enchant them and enrich their lives. They might inspire you to start your own collection… or deepen one you already have.
Meet the Collectors of Santa Fe
Coreen Cordova, Folk Art Collector
Coreen Cordova’s middle name should be color. Her rainbow passion may have been launched during multiple Crayola moments drawing on the floor with her dad, who would alter Mickey Mouse with a purple face, orange ears, and chartreuse pants. At the age of four, Coreen knew this was blasphemous. Her father’s response: “Doesn’t it look better?”
That “better” could have been due to the dopamine coursing through his brain, an idea Coreen embraces. She has surrounded herself in a colorful kaleidoscope of folk art, predominately from Mexico. “It is honestly my happy place. It doesn’t matter if I’m depressed, if I’m sad, if I’m melancholy. When I walk into this house, I can’t be any of those things. I have to be happy. This stuff is my drug of choice.”
Read the rest of Coreen Cordova’s Story.
Patrick Mehaffy, Coin Silver Cutlery Collector
Patrick Mehaffy is a self-described history junkie. He’s also an artist, writer, short film director, gardener, antique furniture buyer and restorer, furniture maker, and anthropologist. Blend all those nouns and you can understand why he has a 50-piece collection of coin silver cutlery
Speaking with Patrick schools you—in a good way. We start with the early days of the American colonies. There was no direct access to silver mines and limited access to raw silver resources. What you could find in circulation were foreign silver coins, rated at .900 purity, while British sterling silver was 925 parts per thousand. Though coveted as currency, colonists also began to melt and recast these coins into tools for daily life—cutlery, teapots, and candlesticks. Just imagine silversmith Paul Revere’s advertising slogan. “Come hither with coins and go forth with forks!” How’s that for financial security? A kind of portable and utilitarian wealth that folks could use time and again. In a luster fight, the sterling silver would win, but who really cared when they could eat their mutton with a nice implement?
Read the rest of Patrick Mehaffy’s Story.
Suzanne Sugg, Textile Collector
It’s rather delightful to square International Folk Art Market Placement Committee and Board member, and former International Folk Art Alliance Advisory and Museum of New Mexico Foundation Board member Suzzane Sugg with the Oklahoman child who sewed for 4-H club competitions at state and county fairs. Her mom also sewed and collected remnant fabrics, and as hobbyists they made their own clothes, sometimes reworking existing patterns. Years ago, Suzanne also owned a needlepoint and knit shop, and early on she collected dolls from around the world,
“It’s all connected,” she says, but the textile tipping point was inheriting part of her husband Joel’s aunt’s textile collection in the late 1980s. The aunt had traveled the Silk Road in the 1920s, collecting reams of textiles. “She was interested in everything!” says Suzanne. (Spoiler: There’s a remarkable similarity between the two of them in that regard!) Collecting was not necessarily new to Suzanne and Joel as they loved and accumulated other collections—European antiques and fabrics, American illustrations, and since, Mexican Tlaquepaque and Spanish Majolica pottery, and Chinese children’s hats. But the Silk Road textiles were a welcome base upon which to build. A Museum Foundation trip was her first chance to do that.
Read the rest of Suzanne Sugg’s Story.
David Arment and Jim Rimelspach, Mezcal Skull Bottle Collectors
It was David Arment and Jim Rimelspach’s penchant for Tequila and Dia de los Muertos that resulted in their collection of 50 artisan skull bottles of mezcal. David says, “It’s organic with me. It doesn’t start with a plan. It just starts with me buying a couple of things, and then I want a few more.”
It might give one pause to see David and Jim’s Tequila and mezcal bar in their home—a host to dozens of skull bottles—but if you embrace the fact that the skull in Mexico is associated with celebration, remembrance, and the continuity of life—not something morbid—and you absorb the other fact that these alcohols are routinely used in offerings and ceremonies, you can begin to tap into the beauty of the special traditions. David and Jim also consider the social aspect of their collection—the desire to make the world a little smaller by developing a relationship with the maker. “It’s not really just about acquiring these beautiful things. It’s about connecting with people in a different part of the world.”
Read the rest of David Arment and Jim Rimelspach’s Story.
Story by Cullen Curtiss
Principal Photography by Tira Howard
Subscribe to TABLE Magazine’s print edition.
