Welcome to the latest episode of Behind The Print, where we bring you the creative stories of industry leaders shaping the world of professional printing. In this episode of Behind the Print, we’re joined by Deborah Fritz, the creative force behind, not one, but two Santa Fe art galleries: Giacobbe-Fritz Fine Art and GF Contemporary. Deborah walks us through her passion for fine art and her journey that led her to Canyon Road Santa Fe.

Below, you’ll find the transcript of our conversation, edited for clarity to ensure easy reading. If you want the full, authentic experience, make sure to check out the video attached below.

Connor Shields: Welcome back to Behind the Print Podcast, where we feature industry leaders and uncover the creative minds and their businesses within the world of professional printing. Our mission is to provide you with inspiring actionable resources that elevate your business projects and accelerate your journey to excellence and profit and in print. 

Today’s episode is Canvas, Culture and Canyon Road, Santa Fe, Debra, Fritz Unframed. Joining me here today is the creative force behind, not one, but two Santa Fe art galleries. Deborah Fritz, welcome to the podcast. 

Deborah Fritz: Thank you. Thank you for having me, Connor.

 Connor Shields: If you’re ready, let’s just dive right in. Sound good?

Deborah Fritz: Sounds great. 

Connor Shields: So tell me a little bit about yourself and what you do. 

Deborah Fritz: I run two art galleries on Canyon Road in Santa Fe. Canyon Road is a very historic district in Santa Fe. It’s about a mile long and there’s about a hundred art galleries, restaurants, and shops.

It’s really super sweet. It’s really old. Our buildings are from the 1800’s. So think like Billy The Kid running around, grabbing a drink at the local bar here. And it’s just turned into an artist community and art galleries all along the road. I started in 2000 and so it’s just celebrated 25 years.

Connor Shields: Congratulations! 

Deborah Fritz: Yeah. Thank you. It’s been really awesome. I started GF Contemporary, 18 years ago and I’ve just plugging along. I pinch myself every day. It’s a really, really fun gig. 

Connor Shields: So how did you get into the business of fine art? 

Deborah Fritz: Well, I have a degree in Art Studio, and my dad was like “I spent a lot on that education. You better get a job.” And so I got a job at an art gallery and it was the booming 90’s. I was just writing up these dotcoms these $200,000 sales. It was just a really exciting time. And my sister, the Jacobi part of Giacobbe Fritz, she was working at Microsoft in Seattle.

Her and her husband actually ended up moving to Italy – he’s Italian – so we thought this would be a really good marriage of our skills because she had the business background and I had the art background. We would marry our skills and then they moved off to Italy and she started a family. I kind of learned the from “the school of hard knocks” but it’s been really fun. I employ eight people and we have no artist turnover. I really enjoy it. 

Connor Shields: What was the first art gallery you started working at? 

Deborah Fritz: It was called the Downey Gallery. They’re not a business anymore. It was a bootcamp for myself, but it was a really great place to learn. I was young, I was like 26 and learned so much and met a lot of artists too. I found out I’m a better administrator of the arts than like a creative force in the arts, and so I create the galleries.

Connor Shields: Was this also on Canyon Road in Santa Fe? 

Deborah Fritz: It was. Back in the nineties, I think I started there in 95. 

Connor Shields: Oh, wow. So you’ve been in the business for a while. 

Deborah Fritz: Hah, yes a while. 

Connor Shields: So when it comes to your art galleries, is there any specific art form that you tend to focus on?

Deborah Fritz:

“Well, I’m lucky there’s two different galleries. One is more traditional and representational, and the other one’s more contemporary and abstract. Sort of both worlds. One’s in an old Adobe house, it’s really, sweet. The other one’s got concrete floors and super high ceilings. So it’s a little more showy and we can highlight the more minimalist hanging that we do. And then at the other gallery, Giacobbe Fritz is more like a salon style gallery. It’s nice to be in both worlds.”

I even tried for a hot minute to do more of a super contemporary installation based, more conceptual gallery that was in the rail yards here in Santa Fe.  COVID shut that thing down,  and doing three galleries is just a little too hard for one person. 2 is hard, but I make it work.

Connor Shields: Yeah, I can imagine. So I guess you could say one is more of like an American Southwest theme type gallery, and the other is more modern, more contemporary. 

Deborah Fritz: Yeah, I would say that. 

Connor Shields: So what can you tell me about your typical clients? 

Deborah Fritz: Well, we’re really lucky because Canyon Road is such a mecca for our people to come looking for work for their home, for their office, for their third home, and it’s really fun. We had a really fun story that happened when they were filming Oppenheimer here in Los Alamos. One day Robert Downey Jr. Came in and he bought a bunch of art.

Connor Shields: I bet that was a surprise when he walked in. 

“Well, we’re really lucky because Canyon Road is such a mecca for our people to come looking for work for their home, for their office, for their third home, and it’s really fun. We had a really fun story that happened when they were filming Oppenheimer here in Los Alamos. One day Robert Downey Jr. Came in and he bought a bunch of art.”

Deborah Fritz: My gosh. It was the funnest day of our lives. It really was. He’s such an amazing man and he got some really great art from us, and I hope he’s treasuring it. 

Connor Shields: What kind of art styles is he into? 

Deborah Fritz: He’s kind of the gamut.  You’d think a lot of the celebrities would want to buy this blue chip art at auctions, you know the fish in the formaldehyde tank kind of thing.  But he wanted to really support living artists that are working and making a living at their career. And it was so, it was just really touching so see the whole process, and I really love that one artist supporting another artist. That happens a lot actually. We have a lot of artists  that buy art. We even have an artist who, when she sells one of her paintings, she just buys art with the money. When I see her coming, I get excited because she just had a sale and she’s gonna give it back to the art community, which is really nice because. It can be a little slow at times. It’s a feast or famine business. It really is. A lot of people leave. We are go busy from March till January. So we all take our VA vacations in February. 

Connor Shields: It’s great to hear that you guys have that really close-knit community and you guys support each other. When it comes to your clients, what are some problems that you typically help solve for these individuals?

Deborah Fritz: Hopefully it’s not too many like problems, maybe like blank walls, which aren’t that bad of problems to have. If those are your pains, they are champagnes. But we’ve seen a lot of commissions lately where people are having like specific needs, like size needs. We actually just did a really big installation on a curved wall.  We have an artist who does these stick installations. His name is Pascal Piermé, his works has this really great fluidity and undulation.   It was perfect for a curved wall because if you think about it, it’s just a series of sticks on this curved surface and it was perfect. But yeah, we’ve had a lot of commissions this year. The Travel and Leisure Magazine voted Santa Fe the best city to travel to in 2025. We kicked Charleston off the top of the list. So that was really exciting and I think that’s gonna bring a lot of tourism towards the latter part of the year.

But right now it’s been really slow. I don’t know if tourism is down. I think just travel is down right now. I’m hoping it will increase in the fall, which is a really busy time for us anyway. Santa Fe is beautiful that time of year. We’re the high desert. A lot of aspen trees, a lot of changing of colors. You’re in Montana, right? 

Connor Shields: Yeah, I’m in Great Falls, Montana now. But, about five years before that I was out working in Steamboat Springs Colorado. So I can definitely understand the high desert, especially during fall, the foliage and everything. It is breathtaking.

Deborah Fritz: Yeah. We get that here in Santa Fe and it’s really nice. 

Connor Shields: So you kind of already partially answered this, but my next question is, out of all of the clients you’ve worked with, who would you say is the most interesting? I mean Robert Downey Jr is pretty hard standard to beat. 

Deborah Fritz: Oh, I know. That was really great. We’ve had some celebrities and we’ve had some non-celebrities. We have clients that have furnished their whole homes with our art.  At GF Contemporary, we do a whole section of different artists altogether. It’s always been my dream that somebody would come in and say, “I’ll take this corner”, or “I’ll take this room”. But that hasn’t happened yet. But you go to people’s homes and I experienced that where they have a lot of art from us and they develop these relationships with our artists.

My social calendar gets pretty full when I’m going out to dinner with a lot of clients and artists and that’s so fun. Like that’s the best part of the job is to see where the art lives. 

At GF Contemporary, we do a whole section of different artists altogether. It’s always been my dream that somebody would come in and say, “I’ll take this corner”, or “I’ll take this room”.

Connor Shields: So you mentioned that Canyon Road has around a hundred art galleries.  So that’s quite a few art galleries just contained within a one mile strip. Out of all the art galleries, how does Giacobbe Fritz Fine Art and GF Contemporary stand out from the others?

Deborah Fritz: We do curate a little differently and people do walk in a lot of times to both galleries and say, “wow, this is so refreshing. It’s different”. So I don’t know how that offsets me from the others. I mean, we don’t represent the same artists. We have a contract with our artists where they can just be represented by us in this community here. But they have other galleries in Los Angeles and New York, and a lot of them have, like Tulsa and Scottsdale and that sort of thing too. We always stand out. I think every day you make a sale, you have people coming in and you find out if they’re looking for art or you may not make a sale today, but you develop this relationship with them. You get their email, you get them on the artist lists. So when new work comes in, because the artists are constantly producing and they may not see something they want today, but in the future we want them to be able to have access to getting what they want. And 25 years in business, I’ve developed quite a nice mailing list of people from across the world that collect from us, which is really nice. 

Connor Shields: It sounds like a much more personal approach.

Deborah Fritz: It is. These are all personality driven businesses 100%. The owners are in the their shops. It’s a really neat community. It’s very close knit. I know all of my neighbors and they’ve been around for a long time. And when a new person comes in, I think they’re welcomed. I’ve been in the business for a long time, so I’ve seen a lot of my contemporaries from when I started are retiring now.

I’ve also been seeing a lot of younger artists with an entrepreneurial spirit. They would come in and take the risk to start an art gallery. They have a high, high overhead and it’s a feast or famine business. 

“I’ve been in the business for a long time, so I’ve seen a lot of my contemporaries from when I started are retiring now.”

Connor Shields: So you mentioned the people j just starting out, the new entrepreneurs, the younger folks. What advice would you give to someone who’s trying to get into this business for the first time? 

Deborah Fritz: Anybody, anytime somebody says they’re going to start an art gallery, I get really excited and I hope that they’ve done a lot of research in our community to offer something that’s new and exciting. We have some really great new galleries that are run by young people. There’s like two but they offer things that maybe are missing in this community. Like one of them is $500 and below, and so you’re coming into town and everything’s $5,000 or $50,000 or $500,000. You can, start your collection pretty easily there. 

Giacobbe Fritz has a pretty wide range of art from different price points. We have things for $85 and you can start collecting. Because I think the younger generation does have a like a “no stuff culture”, but they want handmade things like precious things. They don’t want mass produced things. They really want authenticity and I think Canyon Road 100% offers that. We don’t have a Jamba Juice or a Starbucks. It’s very mom and pop the whole way up. And that’s part of our covenant with the city is, there’s place called Zoned to Arts and Crafts where it’s all handmade goods. It’s very historic, the sidewalks are raw there, the buildings are very unique little Adobe structures. The architecture’s very brown, but they used to be orchards. So there’s a lot of old orchard trees. We have a pear tree and an apple tree in front of the gallery that look like they’re out of a horror movie. We keep them alive because they’re hundreds of years old and we can’t bring ourselves to cut them down.

Connor Shields: Do they still produce fruit? 

Deborah Fritz: They do. It’s not very good. It’s a little mealy. I have to hire a guy to come and knock all the fruit down because it falls and it turns into like a soupy, smelly mess.

Connor Shields: Can you tell me about any major milestones or projects that have defined you or , your art galleries?

Deborah Fritz: Well I’ve been in the business for 25 years, I think that was pretty amazing to celebrate. 25 years in business. I still represent artists that I had right at that the beginning. That’s pretty wonderful. When I started, the rent was crazy high and I thought  “what am I doing?” I’d go to bed every night thinking “what if I never have another sale? What if I can’t make this work?” And you just keep putting your nose to the grindstone.  I think showing up is probably the biggest reason of my success is I don’t take a lot of days off. I do travel a lot, but I would rather be at work than anywhere else. I think having the doors open is a big, big thing. You know, you see a lot of people that don’t keep the doors open. They take Wednesdays or Mondays off, and I’m thinking, gosh, that’s a big portion of your income that you’re like giving away because you’re not open. Another big milestone was Starting GF Contemporary, that was a huge one.  In 2008 all the banks were failing and everything was going wrong in the world. And I was able to assume another gallery that existed, and the former owner wanted out. I think that was kind of a turning point in me too, as a professional as well. Because now all of a sudden you’ve got twice as much income. You’ve got twice as much work, you’ve got twice as many employees. So I had to learn a lot from that because the other one I could just manage all by myself.

And then when I did a third gallery, that was pretty huge as well. I got a lot of recognition on that. We did some museum shows, which was really fun. I think that’s kind of rare for a little art gallery to be able to be part of museums and, yeah. 

“Well I’ve been in the business for 25 years, I think that was pretty amazing to celebrate. 25 years in business. I still represent artists that I had right at that the beginning. That’s pretty wonderful.”

Connor Shields: That’s quite the list of achievements. Going back to what you were saying that you would just rather be working, it is so important to just enjoy what you do. I know this is cliche, but if you love what you do, you never work a day in your life. 

Deborah Fritz: My dad used to say that to me all the time. 

Connor Shields: So you did touch on this a little bit before, but what major challenges or obstacles or holding you or your businesses back right now?

Deborah Fritz: Well, it’s funny because I think what sets us apart from like being a big corporation is all of our things are handmade. I know exactly where they’re made. I go to the artist studios and I see them scraping canvas or sawing wood and they’re real people with something inside them that they need to get out. And, bringing that to people that maybe you wouldn’t be able to be exposed to that in a world where everything is so mass produced.  We don’t really have more fine art prints like etchings, Aquis, that sort of thing.  Monoprints where it’s like a kind of one-off and the artist is there with their hand and everything.

That’s, been a challenge about  caling the business. I don’t know how that would even look. I don’t even know if my artists could like, keep up. Because during COVID we had such good years. I told the artists at the beginning of COVID  “You guys stay in your studios. Your life’s not gonna change too much.” You’re usually isolated anyway, so your lives aren’t gonna change. So keep producing. Keep producing, we’ll sell it we’ll, you know, and it was just awesome. People wanted something for their home. They wanted to support small business, they wanted art, they wanted something precious and artwork is very precious.

It has value. It’ll live beyond us and it represents us once we’re gone. It was just such a great time for us, the COVID years and now it’s slowed down. Maybe it’s gotten back to like normal. I didn’t realize my businesses could do so much business during those times, and that was not a challenge. It was good. 

Connor Shields: Going back to what you were saying about staying in your studios and keep producing. That’s kind of a opportunity for you. And I think it also might be accurate to say that during COVID people still wanted something precious, they wanted something handmade. But another reason it might be they want a connection. You can’t go outside. You can’t interact in person. So just having that art, having that connection might’ve been, might’ve been a, a factor. 

Deborah Fritz: Yeah, I think it was really like healing and helpful for a lot of people during that time and, and you know, art can do that. It just really is an amazing thing. And when people say, “oh, I can’t afford art”, I’m like, “you can go to an art fair in your community and support an artist”, pay a hundred dollars for something or $50 for something, and it’s going to change their life. And it’s where the rubber meets the road for, supporting a creative individual other than, you know.

Connor Shields: Yeah, I think that’s a good way to start your collection. So, how has Print , helped elevate your business? 

Deborah Fritz: Well, I actually, during COVID I decided to do a coffee table book for an artist. Because it was the downtime, I thought “We’ve got the time. Let’s do it.” I got a writer, I got the book maker. I got all of these things together and then everybody got busy and the world ran out of toilet paper. It was such a challenging thing. But we do these really great booklets with PrintingCenterUSA.

You have this really amazing online design tool so I don’t have to pay a graphic designer or anything. We have editions for 2024, 2023, so you can really see like the breadth of an artist’s work in these printed books that are really affordable. You guys are awesome with this.

Connor Shields: We appreciate that. 

“You have this really amazing online design tool so I don’t have to pay a graphic designer or anything. We have editions for 2024, 2023, so you can really see like the breadth of an artist’s work in these printed books that are really affordable. You guys are awesome with this.”

Deborah Fritz: Yeah, everything about it, even like  the cover material with that soft finish. 

Connor Shields: We appreciate that. And back to what you were saying, the soft touch finish. A lot of printing is primarily visual, but with the soft touch finish it has a more tactile feel. Gives it more and weight. It just feels good in your hands.

Deborah Fritz: Yeah, so much so that we got our business cards with it because people love to feel it. It’s like leather or something. 

Connor Shields: So, sort of a different question here for you. If you had a day completely free to spend however you’d like, what would you choose to do? 

Deborah Fritz: And I don’t have to do chores?

Connor Shields: No chores. You’re completely off the hook. No obligations. Just completely free to spend however you’d like. 

Deborah Fritz: You’re gonna laugh, but sometimes I take a date with myself. I’m on the board of the Museum Foundation here in Santa Fe and I love going to the museums. I really do. It is so fun and you don’t always get to go and the. And that’s what I do. I tell my husband, I’m like, I’m gonna go on a date with myself and go to the museums, and that’s what I do. Yeah, that’s. 

Connor Shields: That’s great. I do the same thing myself. When I first moved to Great Falls, the first thing I did is I went and I checked out the Lewis and Clark Interpretive Center.

Deborah Fritz: Well, fun. I would love to go there. 

Connor Shields: But yeah, just going to museums by yourself, that is, that sounds like a great day.

Deborah Fritz: Oh, I would encourage anybody to do that.

Connor Shields: So one last question for you. How can our listeners get in touch with you, learn more, maybe purchase some art or collaborate with you on a project? 

Deborah Fritz: Oh, so we’re really easy to find. , So it’s giacobbefritz.com and GFcontemporary.com. Those are our websites and all of our socials are those too. Giacobbe is with A-G-I-A-C-O-B-B-E. It’s the, Italian spelling. , But just Google, Deborah, Fritz, and you’ll come up with me. I even have Wikipedia. 

Connor Shields: Yes, I saw that. 

Deborah Fritz: That’s hilarious, huh? 

Connor Shields: So, did you have any questions for me? 

Deborah Fritz: No, thank you for letting me be on this. I’ve never been on a podcast before. 

Connor Shields: Yeah, absolutely. We’re glad to have you. Well, I’d say that’s a wrap on another episode of Behind the Print. Thank you to our listeners for joining us as we explore the artistry and innovation of the printing world. Remember, having a strong vision, building the right strategy, and using tools like Print to amplify your message, will make your brand stand out from the crowd.

If you enjoyed today’s episode, be sure to get your sample pack today from printing center usa.com. Until next time, keep those creative sparks flying. And remember, there’s always more to discover behind the print 

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