Patricia Schumann Kempe

Patricia “Patty” Schumann Kempe brought a distinctive sense of color, style and spirit to Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she built a career in fashion while embracing the artists, musicians and restauranteurs of the city she loved. She passed away peacefully this past weekend of complications from sepsis.

Born on December 5, 1946, in Salt Lake City, Utah -- as the daughter of German immigrants Fritz Gustav and Johanna Schumann Kempe --she came of age professionally in the great American department store era. She worked at JCPenney in Utah, then at Best & Co. and Bloomingdale’s in New York and later at Macy’s in Kansas City. These were the training grounds that shaped both her creative eye and her business acumen – but they were not to be her destiny. Patty’s independent life force was never meant to remain within someone else’s structure. She would eventually leave it behind to create something of her own.

That was Pinkoyote in Santa Fe.

Founded in Santa Fe on July 3, 1990, for more than a quarter of a century Pinkoyote served its community as more than a boutique. It was an extension of her sensibilities—intuitive, vibrant, and original. She served as her own buyer and often as her own designer, building not just a store but a world of its own. Inside, there was fashion-forward color everywhere, antique pine furniture worn into character, and background music reflecting her eclectic tastes and moods -- country, jazz, classical – amid a buzz of conversation and laughter. Pinkoyote drew clientele not simply shopping for clothing but looking for expression—for something that felt discovered rather than sold.

Santa Fe -- with its convergence of exquisite art, music, and food -- provided Patty with her ideal stage. She supported the arts not as a formal patron, but as a friend and participant in its life. She surrounded herself with people who, like her, lived at the intersection of creativity and independence. She never missed a Saturday morning at the Farmer’s Market, and she arrived bearing gifts for its vendors (fresh pastries, flowers from her garden, Pinkoyote t-shirts). As an expert chef, she would conjure the fresh food she bought into meals for herself and array of friends. She traveled widely over the years – Hong Kong, Seoul, Venice, Berlin, London, Paris -- searching for new textures, colors, and concepts that she brought back to Santa Fe.

She was, above all, a strong woman, a cancer survivor who spoke with trademark candor—courageous, independent, and a risk-taker in both life and work. Friends and relative strangers alike could find themselves the beneficiaries of her spontaneous kindnesses — small gifts, gestures, and encouragement offered without calculation to friends and relatives alike. She inspired many, including her family members, to think bigger and to live more boldly.

Earlier in her life in Salt Lake City, she married her college sweetheart and fellow Highland High School graduate Roy Richard Darke in 1968, and moved with him to New York, where he attended law school, and she began her life in the garment district and in the New York fashion industry, before the couple moved to Kansas City. After divorce, she ultimately landed in Santa Fe, and she rapidly became a fixture not just in its business life but also in its galleries, restaurants and music venues.

In her later years, she further developed her long-nurtured skill as a gardener, walking the lot at Agua Fria Nursery, where she knew all the roses by their names. For her, gardening was another form of design—working with color, texture, and time. It was a passion that required more patience and quiet than the rush of the fashion world. Where her earlier life moved quickly, the garden drew on her innate ability to tend and nurture. It became one more expression of her instinct to create beauty in the world around her. She was also an avid reader, preferring literary fiction. On her answering machine after she passed was news that her latest order had arrived at Garcia Street Books. As always, Patty favored independent, locally owned businesses.

Her home was a dense, vibrant, layering of objects and memories, existing comfortably alongside each other. Like her store, it was an environment shaped by love, whimsy and taste. For Patty, life was meant to be consumed boldly rather than arranged neatly.

Her last email sent collectively to her sisters, Jeanette Kempe-Ware and Teresa Kempe McKay, and her brother, Frederick Kempe, and two other close friends, Judy Delogu, and Klaus Kempe, came over Easter weekend, following a Saturday of gardening.

She wrote, in the characteristic all-caps style of her emails: “I LOVE EASTER IN SO, SO, SO MANY WAYS. IT IS A SIGNAL OF THE NEW

AND OF BIRTH -- IN THE PLANET WORLD, BLOSSOMS, IN THE ANIMAL WORLD, AND CHANGE IN THE SUN. YES POLLEN, BUT POLLEN ALSO CREATES NEW GROWTH. THE NEW BIRDS ARE A JOY TO WATCH IN THE TREES AND SIPPING IN THE BIRD BATHS. AND OF COURSE, IT IS ALSO A MESSAGE OF LOVE, FRESH STARTS. AWAKEN. SMILE. I LOVE BEING PART OF IT ALL – AS I PLANT AND OBSERVE.

SENDING LOVE TO ALL OF YOU.”

Those who knew Patty best, thank her for the love she gave in such rich measure, for challenging them to test their own limits, for instructing them to turn off their mobile phones and listen a little more closely to each other, for inspiring them to listen to more music, to read more books, and to study nature for its endless promise of new beginnings.

Patty is survived by her sisters Jeanette Kempe-Ware and Teresa Kempe McKay, her brother Frederick Schumann Kempe; her sister-in-law Pamela Meyer, her brother-in-law David McKay; three nieces Rebecka Rivers, Jennifer McKay, and Johanna Kempe; and three nephews Jonathan McKay, David Adam McKay and Jacob McKay.

Her family will celebrate her life with music and stories at a time in the near future at San Miguel Chapel, the oldest church in the United States, which she often visited during breaks in her work to light a candle for those she loved. If you knew Patty and would like to join, please contact her brother Fred at kempe.fred@gmail.com.