Zodiacal Glow ©2026 by Lynn Lown

Stand Up for Nature: Starry Night

October 3, 2026 at 6:00pm
Santa Fe Farmers’ Market Pavilion

 

Join us on Saturday, October 3 at the Santa Fe Farmers’ Market Pavilion for an evening celebrating one of New Mexico’s most treasured resources: our dark skies.

Dr. Annette S. Lee — astrophysicist, artist, and founder of Native Skywatchers (full bio below) — will show us the vastness of the universe and the connections between Indigenous sky knowledge, science, culture, and conservation. Together, we’ll learn how caring for the sky is inseparable from caring for the land and our communities.

Enjoy inspiring conversation, dinner and drinks, and live music by Lone Piñon, as we celebrate our shared commitment to conservation. This sparkling evening is dedicated to raising support and awareness for SFCT’s mission, as well as our collective passion for nature and this special place we call home. We invite you to raise a paddle in support of conserving land and increasing equitable access to nature in northern New Mexico.

Save the date and help us Stand Up for Nature to protect the natural and cultural treasures that connect us all.

Tickets ($195) go on sale Monday, August 17.

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Shine bright with this year’s theme: Starry Night. Array yourselves in deep hues with big bling — rich velvets, shimmering metallics, luminous iridescence, and glowing, celestial accessories. Dazzle with gemstones, crystals, and rhinestones (NO GLITTER, please!) and win a prize for best dressed!

Astrophysicist | Visual Artist | Author | Educator | Indigenous Knowledge Keeper

Annette S. Lee, DSc, PhD, MFA, MFA, is an award-winning artist, scientist, and civic engagement leader whose unique talents connect ideas across seemingly impossible divides. Much of her work focuses on Indigenous Knowledges and epistemologies. She is a world-class researcher, professional artist, and keeper of traditional knowledge, with bachelor, master, and doctoral degrees in mathematics, physics, and astrophysics, as well as a bachelor and two master’s degrees in fine arts and motion media design, all from top universities, including Yale and Berkeley. Dr. Lee has worked as an expert consultant for UNESCO, curated prestigious exhibitions, served as a world-class science communicator, and presented keynotes to organizations and at major conferences around the world.
 
Accomplished in 2D art, Annette has continued to develop her practice of a multidisciplinary approach to art as social practice within areas of sensorial, digital, and 3D realms, such as intermedia soundscape installations, projection art, volumetric light sculptures, performance art, and data visualization. After nearly two decades of success in higher education including tenured full professor in Physics/Astronomy at St. Cloud State University and Planetarium Director, Lee recently stepped away from this position in order to work as a full-time independent artist-scientist. Currently she is the Executive Director (and Founder) of Native Skywatchers 501-c3 Nonprofit and continues as an Honorary/Adjunct Professor at the University of Southern Queensland in the Centre for Astrophysics in Australia. Annette is mixed-race Native American of Lakota, Irish and Chinese ancestry. Her communities are Ojibwe, D/ Lakota, and the Two-legged (Human Species).
Spirits Dancing: The Night Sky, Indigenous Knowledge, and Living Connections to the Cosmos
Travis Novitsky, Annette S. Lee

For millennia, humans have marveled at the night sky: the wonder of the aurora, the glory of the Milky Way, and the peace that comes with stargazing. In this remarkable book, Travis Novitsky’s photographs portray these marvels, while astrophysicist Annette S. Lee discusses how Western science and Indigenous knowledge can work together to provide a deeper understanding of our place in the universe.

Read Book

Lone Piñon is a New Mexican string band, or “orquesta típica”, whose music celebrates the integrity and diversity of their region’s cultural roots.

With fiddles, upright bass, guitars, accordions, vihuela, and bilingual vocals, they play a wide spectrum of the traditional music that is at home in New Mexico.

The musicians of Lone Piñon learned from elder musicians who instilled in them a respect for continuity and an example of the radicalism, creativity, and cross-cultural solidarity that has always been necessary for musical traditions to adapt and thrive in each generation. In 2014, Lone Piñon was founded as a platform for creativity around the oldest sounds of traditional New Mexico string music, sounds that had all but disappeared from daily life in many Northern New Mexico communities. Through relationship with elders, study of field recordings, connections to parallel traditional music and dance revitalization movements in the US and Mexico, and hundreds of local and national performances, they have brought the language of the New Mexico orquesta típica back onto the modern stage, back onto dance floors, into a contemporary aesthetic/artistic conversation, and into the ears of a young generation.

In August 2018 Lone Piñon was invited by the Library of Congress and the American Folklife Center to Washington DC, where they recorded a concert and an oral history of their work with New Mexican and Mexican musical traditions. In 2019 they were honored to teach and perform Northern New Mexico fiddle and dance alongside traditional masters from across North America and Europe at Centrum’s Festival of American Fiddle Tunes in Port Townsend, WA.  A documentary film about their work with traditional music, “En Donde los Bailadores se Entregan los Corazones,” premiered in 2019 and won several awards at film festivals in the US, Canada, and Mexico. In 2019 the band received the Parsons Award from the American Folklife Center, which brought them back to the Library of Congress in Washington DC in 2020 to study the Library’s collection of field recordings of Northern New Mexican musicians and to record another program of music they have learned and revived from the Juan B. Rael archive.

Want to be part of this special night? We’re seeking local sponsors to join us in bringing Stand Up for Nature to life — an evening of inspiration, community, and celebration in support of SFCT’s work to protect the landscapes, trails, and cultural heritage of northern NM.

Join us in making a lasting impact. Reach out to Blythe Crawford, , to learn more!

Sponsorship Opportunities

Thank you to our 2026 Sponsors!

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Polaris Platinum

Mary Laraia & Andrew Mooney

Supernova Silver

Cosmic Copper

Linda Osborne