Becky Smith Ford paints still lifes and writes historical novels out in a juniper forest in Santa Fe, New Mexico when not gawking at the moon. How she got here is a a twisty tale.

She left art school in 1986 to go on tour with her band The Cynics. After three albums and three years of constant touring, she eventually gave into her fate and returned for an MFA at Carnegie Mellon. While there she asked her teachers which grad school was hardest to get into. They all said “Yale!” so she absolutely had to go there. She graduated with an MFA from Yale in 1998. The next year she cast about from residency to residency—Skowhegan to The Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown—trying to postpone the inevitable: New York City. A job being Lisa Yuskavages’s studio assistant lured her with visions of parties and hobnobbing with important collectors, critics and gallery owners. She was promptly fired. 

When she stopped crying she decided to create her own scene by opening a gallery in Brooklyn modeled on indie record labels (think Sub Pop, Creation and Dischord) where musicians released their friend’s albums. She called it Bellwether, after the sheep that wear a bell and indicates where the flock is heading. Little Bellwether grew and grew eventually forcing her to decide between painting and business. Business won and Bellwether became a “fancy” Chelsea gallery with a hot pink neon sign lighting up Tenth Avenue. 

Becky spent ten years rubbing cashmere-clad elbows with all the big collectors—the guy who owned Rockefeller Center, the producer of Lord of the Rings movies, and the man behind the word “truthiness”. Her shows were critiqued each month in The New York Times and the sexy art glossies. Indeed, her career was bookended by a feature in The NYT Magazine by Deborah Solomon and an Op-Ed by Sheelah Kolhatkar. Sadly, it went to hell in 2009 when her whole generation of art dealers were cut off at the knees, which made her cry again. Eventually she went back to painting, mostly wishing she had never quit in the first place but grateful for the art business experience. 

From 2014-2019 she was the manager of Dogwood Books and Gifts, director of the Courage and Faith Speaker Series and an occasional columnist for the Greenwich Sentinel, in Greenwich CT.

Becky moved to Santa Fe in 2023 to study Zen, but stayed for the land and the amazing community of artists and writers. Her current novel is about Trappist monk Thomas Merton and the life changing love affair he had with a young nurse named Margie Smith two years before his tragic death. 

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Instagram: @becky_smith_ford

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