At 403 Broadway in Truth or Consequences, Andrew Auten’s gallery stands out long before visitors step through the front door.
From the street, the building immediately commands attention. Its exterior is painted a glossy, electric yellow that stands apart from neighboring storefronts on downtown Broadway—a visual jolt that hints at the creative disorder waiting inside.
Once through the door, visitors encounter an entirely different kind of sensory overload. Televisions flash. Lights blink. Images pulse from screens. Hundreds of sketches, paintings, photographs, comics, graphics, and visual experiments crowd the walls in dense arrangements that feel equal parts roadside carnival, creative laboratory, and personal archive. Auten often moves through the space in a lab coat, looking less like a conventional gallery owner than a restless inventor conducting artistic experiments in real time.
He prefers it that way.
“This is the God’s honest truth—that prior to moving to Truth or Consequences, I’ll bet I had been in five art galleries my entire life,” Auten said. “I didn’t know from art, and I didn’t know how an art gallery worked.”
That unfamiliarity became freedom. Rather than mimic the polished galleries of Santa Fe, Auten built something stranger and far more personal.
“When I built this place, I was like, ‘I don’t even know how to build an art gallery,’” he said. “I went to Santa Fe and looked at a few and thought, okay—this clearly isn’t my scene either.”
So he created what might best be described as an anti-gallery: loud, playful, unpredictable, and deeply alive.
The building itself fought him at every turn. The former chiropractor’s office was carved into exam rooms and layered with decades of neglect.
“It was like a David Lynch movie in here,” Auten said. “Creepy water-stained wood paneling, multiple drop ceilings. I removed the first ceiling and there was another ceiling underneath that. There was another one underneath that.”
What he thought would take four months required nearly a year and a half of labor.
“I was in here 12 to 15 hours a day, six or seven days a week, just building everything you see.”
Even after covering nearly every available surface, he’s already running out of room.
“I probably do about 25 pieces a month,” he said. “And I still have tons of art in storage.”
That creative urgency traces back to childhood.
“My very first memory in life is making art,” Auten said. “When I was two years old, I was finger painting with toothpaste.”
Soon afterward came photography. He remembers his family camera as something almost sacred.
“It was kept on a shelf and brought down and presented to us like a finger bone of a saint,” he said.
By age three, he was taking photographs. Later, he bought his own camera while attending a performing arts high school in Houston.
Photography remains central to his work, though his methods are defiantly analog in spirit.
“I don’t do anything I couldn’t do in a traditional darkroom,” he said. “I know photographers that use AI and plug-ins, and that’s fine. I just don’t see where the fun is in that.”
For Auten, shortcuts dilute authorship.
“You may end up with a great picture, but it has very little to do with you,” he said. “You didn’t shepherd it to its final moment.”
His photography reflects a meticulous commitment to composition.
“Composition to me is everything,” he said. “Composition is king. The composition is the story.”
That philosophy has carried him into unusual corners of America.
He has photographed boxers, musicians, drag performers, retirees, roadside wanderers, and residents of forgotten towns. He spent time documenting poverty in Appalachia while traveling with missionaries and found himself shaken by what he witnessed.
“Sometimes it’s easy to take a shot of a decaying building,” he said. “Sometimes you see decaying life.”
He frequently disappears on long road trips through Montana and West Texas, driving hundreds of miles through empty highways and fading oil towns.
“There’s something about Montana,” he said. “I still can’t put my finger on what it is.”
His path eventually led him and his wife, artist and illustrator Christine Auten, to Truth or Consequences almost by accident. During a visit, they attended a local potluck and quickly felt an unexpected connection.
“I said, any town that has these people in it, I want to be in that town,” Auten recalled.
They bought a house two weeks later. The gallery now reflects both his artistic abundance and his internal wiring. For many people, flashing lights and visual clutter might feel overwhelming. For Auten, emptiness is the greater threat.
“Emptiness makes me anxious, and stimulation calms me down,” he said.
Even his home glows with blinking lights.
“A friend said my house looks like a video arcade,” he laughed. “I don’t think I get overstimulated because my brain is on fire pretty much constantly.”
Then he offered perhaps the clearest explanation of both his work and his life:
“If it’s on fire, feed it.”
That philosophy manifests itself in a gallery that feels deliberately unruly—walls layered floor to ceiling with drawings, paintings, photographs, comics, flickering screens, handmade signs, and visual detours that refuse neat categorization. The space is messy in the most intentional way: energetic, humorous, restless, and defiantly unconcerned with convention. It feels less like a gallery designed for quiet contemplation than a living extension of Auten’s imagination.
And that may be precisely what makes Andrew Auten’s anti-gallery one of the most memorable creative spaces in southern New Mexico.
For story ideas and suggestions, Brian D’Ambrosio may be reached at dambrosiobrian@hotmail.com.
