August 30 – Paris in the 1920s, with all its creative brains, could not match Santa Fe at that time.
Sure, we didn’t have an Eiffel Tower or a Left Bank or a Kiki de Montparnasse dancing on bar tops. But what Santa Fe lacked in grand boulevards and smoky cafes in the 1920s, our artists and writers — a burgeoning art colony — made up for in creative collaboration and bohemian lifestyles. And with the likes of World War I survivor artist Will Shuster, Santa Fe’s art scene made up for it with a healthy dose of postwar joie de vivre.
The proof is in the burning man.
As the city celebrates Zozobra’s centennial, the Kiwanis Club of Santa Fe, which has run Zozobra since the 1960s, has put together a once-every-hundred-years production on Friday, August 30. An extra day of festivities at the Railyard has also been added.
To start, the New Mexico History Museum opened its new exhibit, Zozobra: A Fire That Never Goes Out, which runs through September 2025. Despite what the title suggests, it’s not just a timeline of Zozobra’s evolution. Rather, it chronicles how Zozo brought the Santa Fe community together and the creative collaboration that sparked Zozobra in 1924, when it began as a garden party, and into 1926, when it became a public event.
details
Zozobra: A Fire That Never Goes Out at the New Mexico History Museum (open through September 2025)
The museum is open from 10am to 5pm Saturday through Thursday and from 10am to 7pm on Friday.
113 Lincolnlaan
$7 New Mexico residents, $12 non-residents
505-476-5200; nmhistorymuseum.org
The exhibition includes more than 100 donated or loaned objects and memorabilia, such as drawings and small wooden skeletal Zozo models.
“I’m excited to tell this story,” says Hannah Abelbeck, co-curator of the exhibition. “When we looked at all the stories we could tell about Zozobra, a lot of people said, ‘Oh, Shuster, he’s such a creative spark.’ Instead of focusing on just one person, we tried to take a broader view of the kind of collaboration that goes into creating an event of this magnitude and repeating it annually. It couldn’t and can’t be one person. It had to and must be collaborative.”
Abelbeck says that the Zozobra we will meet this year owes its personality and existence to a self-invented myth.
She adds that the exhibit attempts to address many stories about Zozobra’s birth and evolution. “That was the whole point [in the 1920s]: to come up with a really fun myth,” she says. “So it can be tricky to figure out exactly who did what. But for me, the story is how collaborative the invention was. It wasn’t just one person — it was a lot of ideas, and a lot of people coming up with ideas every year, and then trying them out and seeing what stuck.”
She points to the burning of Judas during Holy Week, which Shuster is said to have witnessed while visiting a Native American community in Arizona, which many consider to be the main inspiration for the creation of Zozobra.
“I remember the Yaqui Village in Tucson,” Shuster said in a 1964 oral history interview with Sylvia Loomis for the Smithsonian Archive of American Art. “They carry a — of course, this is from Mexico — a figure, it looks like a scarecrow, really, filled with straw and fireworks, and it’s Judas. They put him on a donkey and lead him around the Stations of the Cross and then bring him back to the center of the plaza and set him on fire. They throw their only rockets up in the air, have a big to-do, you know. … But this idea of destroying something unpleasant is … very old.”
Abelbeck and her co-curator and their team studied Shuster’s journals and archival material. Their research helped them add lesser-known bits of information about Zozobra to the exhibition.
“Another kind of precursor is Cremation of Care — or Dull Care — which isn’t often mentioned, but is clearly a precursor to Zozobra,” Abelbeck says. “It’s in California, and it’s a private cremation game by the Bohemian Club. We thought that [connection] because Dana Johnson, who was the newspaper editor in the [19]20s, often came up with a series of names for Zozobra, such as the King of Darkness. … And often one of them was Dull Care.”
“Dana Johnson was, I think, the head of the Fiesta Council at the time,” Shuster said in the 1964 interview. “He was the editor, a very lively[ly] editor, of The Santa Fe New Mexican, full of fun. We got together and came up with this idea of making an Old Man Gloom, and he got the name of it out of a Spanish dictionary, [Zozobra,] what the gloomy one means.
“Dan Eastman, Max Eastman’s son, was here at the time and he helped me build this first one… I remember we filled it with excelsior, which we had soaked in copper sulfate and dried and filled it with it. The idea was that we would get a beautiful blue-green flame. Gus Baumann made the head out of a cardboard box.”
Regardless of who did what in creating the myth of darkness in the 1920s, one thing is certain: we owe them all a debt of gratitude, especially Shuster, who moved to Santa Fe in the 1920s instead of Paris and who passed the Zozobra torch to the Kiwanis Club of Santa Fe decades later.
We also owe a debt of gratitude to Shuster’s nephew, Dr. Bill Crowley, back in Philly. Shuster’s lungs were damaged by mustard gas during WWI, and worse, in 1920 he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Crowley told him that if Shuster stayed on the East Coast, he would live a year, maybe two or three at best.
“He [Crowley] said, “But if I were you, I’d pack up as soon as possible and move to a dry place in the Southwest,” Schuster said in the 1964 interview. “You’ll probably die of old age, snake bites or drinking too much bad whiskey.”
“Within a few weeks I was here.”
The New Mexico History Museum is located at 113 Lincoln Avenue, 505-476-5200; nmhistorymuseum.org. For updates on all rules and regulations, including parking and road closures, visit burnzozobra.com.
The heat is on
To mark the 100th anniversary of the burning of Zozobra, the Kiwanis Club of Santa Fe organized several new festivities and commemorations.
Firepower: Earlier this month, the city unveiled an 18-foot-tall statue of Zozobra at Federal Place, near the Santa Fe Community Convention Center. The welded steel statue was created by Don Kennell and his team at DKLA Designs and features several nods to Zozobra’s past. The statue will soon get an augmented reality component (by Refract Studios) with a QR code that will allow visitors to see a figure of Will Shuster.
Flame Train: “Last year on the plaza, the day after Zozobra, we lit a torch,” says Ray Sandoval, the Zozobra event chairman. Sandoval watched over the flame at his home for a year, keeping it burning with the help of Judith Moir, the Zozobra event deputy, who, Sandoval says, went to every estate sale she could find to buy candles.
On Friday, August 30, Sandoval says: “We will take the torch to Lamy, where the flame will be transferred to a cauldron, and in that cauldron it will be taken by train to the city. [in the evening].” Once the flame arrives at the Santa Fe Depot station, he says, “We’ll relight a small torch from the cauldron and the Santa Fe High cross-country team will carry the torch up into the [Zozobra] location.”
Energetic Youth: This year, after negotiating with their insurance company, the Kiwanis Club of Santa Fe allowed children, dubbed Zozobra’s Gloomies, to participate in the crucial role of lighting Zozobra on fire — but only once.
Weekend Warm-Up: The fun doesn’t stop on Burn Night. On Saturday, August 31, everyone is invited to join in on the free Zozobra Appreciation events at the Railyard from 3:00 PM to 9:00 PM, after the Farmers’ Market closes.
Cool off at the water tower: Lensic 360 will be hosting performances all afternoon and evening on Saturday, August 31, including Grupo Divino, an acoustic band from northern New Mexico that plays traditional Latin music, at 6 p.m. and Cuarenta y Cinco, also from northern New Mexico, at 7:30 p.m. For more information, visit lensic360.org.
Sizzle reel: Violet Crown Cinema will screen the documentary Zozobra: 100 Years of Fire and Redemption (2024, 42 minutes), directed by McCall Sides, every hour from 11 a.m. to 10 p.m. on Saturday, August 31. Reserve a ticket online ($2) or purchase it for free at the box office. Violet Crown Cinema is located at 1606 Alcaldesa Street; 505-216-5678. More information at santafe.violetcrown.com/cinema.
Other activities include mini train rides for kids on the Sky Railway, a 2K Zozo Run for everyone and a Gloom Dash for kids ages 1 to 7. Learn more at runsignup.com/Race/NM/SantaFe/ZozoRun.
