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Kathleen Key decided that retirement wasn't going to be a series of leisurely lunches and afternoons spent playing bridge.
She had tried imagining that version of life, the one where the calendar gradually emptied and the days settled into a comfortable routine, but it never fit. Teaching did. Research did. Standing in front of a room of people and watching them discover something they hadn't noticed before. That still felt like the right way to spend a day.
Kathleen Albers wasn't wired much differently. After decades leading the Doña Ana Arts Council, she knew how organizations were built, how programs survived and, perhaps most importantly, how communities formed. When the Arts Council left the Rio Grande Theatre in 2017, it suddenly needed new ways to draw people together and generate revenue. One board member suggested an acquaintance who had recently returned to the area, an art historian named Kathleen Key.
Would she teach a class? It was supposed to be one or two. Instead, it became the beginning of something neither woman had planned.
"It was a lot of fun," Albers recalled. "And we hit it off. I started just absorbing all this art history. I knew some but not like I learned. And we have students now who joined us then. So they've been with us for eight years."
The classes, originally called Feed Your Mind, began with subjects familiar to anyone who has wandered through an art museum: Impressionism, Renaissance masters, World Art, Art Nouveau, Baroque painters, fashion history, the great museums of Europe. They looked, in many ways, like university survey courses, except the students weren't chasing degrees. They simply wanted to keep learning.
Then something unexpected happened. The classes stopped being just classes.
"We've become friends with a lot of these people over eight years," Key said. "People want engagement. They like the community. I think people form friendships and they look forward to seeing each other."
That realization quietly reshaped what would eventually become ARTE Institute of Lifelong Learning. When Albers retired from the Arts Council and the two women launched ARTE in 2021, they certainly carried the curriculum with them. But they also carried something less tangible: a growing understanding that the lectures were really an excuse for people to gather around a shared curiosity.
The timing, in retrospect, couldn't have been more revealing. When the pandemic forced classrooms onto computer screens, Key's first reaction was immediate.
"I said, 'Over my dead body,'" she laughed. "And she said, 'You do realize that if we don't teach on Zoom, it means no teaching.' I said, 'Okay. I changed my mind.'"
They spent months teaching three, four and sometimes five days a week. Later, students would tell them those Zoom sessions had become much more than art history lectures.
"You are my only connection to the outside world," some confessed, reluctant to leave home during the uncertainty of COVID.
"That was very humbling to me," Key said. "That they would find comfort and solace in art history."
If there is a philosophy that ties everything ARTE has become together, it may be one that Key arrived at years before.
"When you study art," she said, "you're studying the best of a culture. You are not studying the worst of a culture. War, as far as I'm concerned, is the worst of a culture."
It explains why her own interests have never remained still. The curriculum that once centered largely on European masters now wanders comfortably across continents and cultures. One semester might explore Georgia O'Keeffe, Monet and Van Gogh. Another turns toward Native American artists, Black American artists, Chicano painters, Japanese influences on Western design or the arts of Asia. Guest lecturers have introduced students to music history, literature, wine, French culture and even the intersection of soil science and art.
For Key, the expansion reflects her own continuing education as much as anyone else's.
"I love the research," she said. "And then the teaching of it. People get excited."
Sometimes those discoveries challenge the assumptions built into traditional art history itself. Reflecting on Native American art, she began asking why certain artists never appeared in the textbooks she had studied.
"If Native Americans are Americans," she said, "then it's American art."
That willingness to keep asking questions has become contagious. Students who once sat quietly in the audience now lead discussions of their own. A former wine society president teaches tastings that approach wine academically rather than socially. Another member shares his knowledge of France. A retired educator fills waiting lists with courses on music history. A book club has grown from within the organization. New instructors continue to emerge from the very community ARTE helped create.
Learning has become self-sustaining. It doesn't end when class does, either.
The lectures frequently become the first chapter of a journey rather than the last.
After studying Georgia O'Keeffe, groups travel to Abiquiú and Ghost Ranch. Lessons on Crystal Bridges become visits to Bentonville, Arkansas. Courses on Vermeer precede museum trips to Amsterdam. Native arts lead naturally to Chimayó, Taos and Santa Fe's Indian Market. Italy, France, New Mexico and beyond have all become classrooms without walls. The destination, though, is almost beside the point.
"The students really like that it's a small group," Albers said. "We know our customers."
Perhaps more accurately, they know their friends. Many arrived in Las Cruces after careers that took them across the country. Some were looking for intellectual stimulation. Others simply wanted connection. Along the way, they discovered both.
For Albers, it has become difficult to imagine retirement any other way.
"I can't imagine what I would be doing with my time," she said.
For Key, the answer was probably settled long ago.
"I find retirement…" she said with a smile, "I think there really are people who can go to lunch every day and play bridge. I'm not one of them."
Five years after ARTE's founding, and nearly a decade after one volunteer art history class unexpectedly turned into something much larger, that may be the institute's greatest lesson.
Curiosity has a way of bringing people together. Sometimes all it needs is a room, a teacher and a reason to keep asking what comes next.
