Santa Fe artist's work features smiles from all over the world
Mar. 15—Twelve years after Santa Fe-area artist Linda Guenste began work on Peace Begins with a Smile, she feels it has aged into even greater relevance.
The project consists of hundreds of 6-by-6-inch oil paintings of smiling faces Guenste has seen — and taken pictures of — on travels around the world. They're arranged in a large rectangle in a display area at the home and compound where Guenste and her husband, sculptor Jonathan Hertzel, spend most of their days toiling.
"I think this piece is really important now because we are so divided," Guenste says. "The country is like, 'If you're not on my side, I'm not talking to you anymore.' Before, I could have my opinions and they could have their opinions, and we could be friends."
In Peace Begins with a Smile, everyone featured is on the same side, facing the viewer. Their skin tones vary, as do the dominant colors in the background of each painting. Guenste was intentional about not grouping images according to any metric, including apparent ethnicity.
"We had ideas like, let's put all the orange ones together and the green ones together," she says. "I want it to be more random than that. People have said, 'Why don't you frame each one?' I'm like, 'No, that's a border. I don't want a border.' I want to show that everything is connected."
Guenste estimates that she has spoken to about 90 percent of the people featured in Peace Begins with a Smile. She includes some personal connections — family members and friends — as well as people with connections to issues that are personal for her.
The face behind 'Peace Begins with a Smile'
Guenste and her husband, Jonathan Hertzel, moved to Santa Fe in 2015. She grew up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, earning a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the Philadelphia College of Art in 1982.
Peace Begins with a Smile is one of many projects and series Guenste has created. She showcases a number of these works on her website, including a series of New Mexico landscapes; Fun With ... depicting children and dolls sporting gas masks and guns; and The Idea of Protection, with themes similar to those in Fun With ...
The artist's home and studio is about 6 miles southeast of Santa Fe. To make an appointment to see Peace Begins with a Smile or other works, visit lindaguenste.com.
"I wanted to include people who were killed by unnecessary violence — people of color like Breonna Taylor and Emmett Till," she says. "I wanted to celebrate them by showing them smiling like everyone else."
Taylor, a medical worker, was shot and killed by police officers in 2020 in Louisville, Kentucky, during a botched raid on her apartment, fueling protests. Till was tortured and lynched in Mississippi in 1955 at age 14, after he was accused of offending a white woman. George Floyd, who was killed by a police officer during an arrest in 2020 in Minneapolis, also is in the piece but isn't smiling. Guenste used the best image she could, saying she wanted to ensure Floyd was represented.
In 2019, Guenste got permission to interview artists with the International Folk Art Market and take their photographs. The timing proved fortuitous, given the pandemic was on the horizon.
"I did about 75 portraits of them, which was great, because then traveling was over," she says. "I couldn't go anywhere, and I didn't see people."
Those who examine the piece closely will see a couple of anomalies. One face is upside down — because the child featured in it was hanging upside down when photographed. Another shows a dog.
When Guenste began creating the square images, she didn't yet know she'd be combining them into a singular piece.
"Once I started doing more and more of them," she says, "I would tell people, 'My goal is to do 500 smiling faces; can I include yours?'"
Generally, people anywhere in the world are happy to be featured in the piece. Haiti is an exception; Guenste knows this because she was part of an art show on that famously volatile island a few years ago. She was one of about 15 international artists involved, staying two weeks at a hotel. About 35 Haitian artists came to the hotel to paint every day.
"It was dangerous," she says. "In Haiti, you can't just take pictures of people. We weren't given any freedom to go out on the streets; we were kind of prisoners in the hotel."
After encountering resistance, Guenste was able to paint some fellow artists from Haiti. They're featured in a series she created called Digesting Haiti that's separate from the Peace Begins with a Smile project. The series appears on her website.
Peace Begins with a Smile is also on her website, and Guenste and Hertzel were part of the Santa Fe Studio Tour in 2023. If Guenste had her way, people using New Mexico's largest airport would be exposed to the work. She experienced heartbreak in 2023 when the piece was a finalist for display at Albuquerque International Sunport, but ultimately wasn't selected.
So the project remains housed on the couple's property, allowing Guenste to view and contribute to it anytime. Looking at pieces she created a dozen years ago, she can compare her earlier work to more recent creations.
"I definitely got faster," she says, pointing out an older work next to a newer one. Otherwise, "I don't really see a difference."
