Some properties on Canyon Road are defined by their architecture. Others are defined by the artists who lived and worked in them. 1524 Canyon Road belongs emphatically to the second category. Over the course of its notable ownership, this classic Pueblo adobe estate was shaped by two of the most significant visual artists to call Santa Fe home: a painter whose work earned national museum recognition, and a sculptor whose public monuments stand in Washington, D.C. and Philadelphia.
Architecture and Setting
The property is built in the classic Pueblo adobe idiom: organic massing, earthen walls, shaded portals, and grounds that expand into a garden relationship with the site. The architecture does what Santa Fe’s best residential adobe does at its most resolved: it settles into the land rather than imposing on it, and it creates interior spaces that feel genuinely sheltered without feeling closed.
The most architecturally significant addition to the property is the large artist studio added by Dick Jemison, the home’s first notable owner. Artist studios on Canyon Road are not unusual; the road has sheltered working artists for a century. But extraordinary studios, sized and lit for serious work, are rarer. Jemison built for his practice, and the scale of what he produced reflects the scale of his ambition as a painter. The studio became one of the defining features of the property, a room with a purpose that gives the entire estate a specific orientation.
Ownership History
Linda and Dick Jemison brought the property its first chapter of notable ownership. Dick Jemison was a renowned artist whose work was known beyond Santa Fe. When the Jemisons eventually decided to return to Birmingham, Alabama, they left behind a property substantially shaped by Dick’s vision, and particularly by the studio he built for his work.
The buyer who followed was Glenna Goodacre, and her acquisition of 1524 Canyon Road placed one of the most publicly significant American sculptors of the late twentieth century at this address.
Goodacre’s reputation rests on two monuments in particular. The Vietnam Women’s Memorial, dedicated in Washington, D.C. in 1993, stands on the National Mall near the Vietnam Veterans Memorial Wall; it depicts three women nurses tending to a wounded soldier and is one of the few monuments on the Mall dedicated specifically to the service of women in wartime. The Irish Memorial in Philadelphia, dedicated in 2003, commemorates the Irish Famine of the 1840s with a bronze grouping of thirty-five life-sized figures. Both works speak to a sculptural practice engaged with collective memory and historical witness at the highest level of public art.
Goodacre worked from her Canyon Road compound during the years she owned the property, using the studio that Jemison had built and eventually relocating to Santa Fe’s northside. Her ownership of 1524 Canyon Road places the address within the history of American public sculpture in a way that no subsequent transaction can diminish.
The current owner is Marilyn Lafie Beresford, who has continued the property’s life as one of Canyon Road’s notable private residences.
Canyon Road as an Artistic Address
The concentration of artistic provenance along Canyon Road is not incidental. The road’s history as the address of choice for working artists in Santa Fe extends back to the early twentieth century, when the founders of the Santa Fe art colony began acquiring the adobe compounds along the acequia that runs parallel to the street. Over generations, the artist studios, galleries, and live-work compounds multiplied until the road became what it is now: a mile of cultural density unique in the American Southwest.
Properties on Canyon Road that carry genuine artistic provenance, actual studios built for actual practice by working artists of national significance, occupy a distinct tier within this already distinctive market. They are not interchangeable with residences that happen to be located on the same street.
Webster Estates has represented Canyon Road properties across five decades. The team’s fluency with this particular market runs as deep as any in Santa Fe.
A Note on the Rendering
The pen and ink rendering reproduced here is part of Webster Estates’ Artistic Renderings series. For a property defined by the visual arts, the choice of pen and ink as a medium carries particular resonance. The rendering captures the compound’s forms and light with the same fidelity to place that the artists who lived here brought to their own work.
To inquire about Canyon Road estates or properties with notable artistic provenance, please contact the Webster Estates team. Our full portfolio is available at websterestates.com/properties.
The Webster Estates Team Chris Webster · Patti Webster · Christopher Webster III · Paisley Mason Webster
Webster Estates is the real estate brokerage arm of Webster Santa Fe, a team of Associate Brokers at Sotheby’s International Realty. The team has operated from 54½ Lincoln Avenue on The Plaza since 1976.
