By Simón Romero
Photographs by Adria Malcom

The sun was setting over Santa Fe’s Canyon Road. An opening at Ernesto Mayans Gallery had attracted an assemblage of artists and collectors who were sipping wine from plastic cups and energetically discussing art and politics as cigarette smoke wafted overhead. The year was 1981.

“Not again,” I remember mumbling to my ten-year-old self. My mom, Janet Stein Romero, a Brooklyn-born artist who followed her star to New Mexico in the 1960s, had been dragging me to gallery openings for as long as I could remember. If it wasn’t a gallery, it was a sculpture garden, a private collection, someone’s studio, or, I learned early on, one museum after another.

Both of my parents were artists, but as a kid, all the exposure to art seemed to have had an underwhelming effect on me. I didn’t inherit their talents for painting, ceramics, printmaking, collage, or sculpture. Instead, I was obsessed with early video games (anyone still remember ColecoVision?), comic books (from Silver Surfer to Love and Rockets), and football. I dreamed of playing for the West Las Vegas Dons.

Still, my mom never gave up on exposing me to art. When I moved away from New Mexico and began working as a journalist in New York, no visit from my mom would be complete without taking in places like the Guggenheim or the Frick or the Cloisters. When my career took me farther afield, with postings in Latin America, visits from my mom included going to Rio de Janeiro’s ramshackle, falling-apart Museu do Índio, or the cavernous Museum of Contemporary Art in Caracas, which was often devoid of other visitors, allowing us to savor the work of Francis Bacon, Vasily Kandinsky, and Robert Rauschenberg in near isolation.

It wasn’t until I was well into adulthood that I realized what a gift she had given me. She was a diehard believer in the redemptive value of art and treasured art in all its forms with a special appreciation for work that was outsider, transgressive, naïf, or shocking to the refined bourgeois values with which she was raised. I may not have had my parents’ artistic gifts, but I did develop an incurable appreciation and fascination for art. When my mom died last year at the age of eighty, I was
reminded by many others of her significance as an artist, teacher, and community leader in shaping a broader understanding of art and nurturing the careers of artists across New Mexico.

Like so many others drawn to New Mexico, her story began somewhere else. Her father, Morris J. Stein, had arrived as an immigrant child in New York when his Jewish family fled the pogroms of Czarist Russia. Eventually, he became involved in New York politics, rising to become a judge and an elected member of the New York City Council. Her mother, Ella K. Stein, was born in Manhattan to Jewish immigrants from Hungary and devoted her life to teaching the visually impaired in New York’s public schools.

Janie, as she was known to many people close to her, attended Abraham Lincoln High School in Brooklyn before going to Connecticut College, where she studied art. She could have continued living on the East Coast, as was expected of her and many classmates. At the time, Connecticut College had long operated as a women’s college and was viewed as a matchmaking school for nearby Yale University.

Instead of staying put, she packed her bags and lit out for the West. In graduate school at the University of New Mexico, she obtained her master’s in fine arts and met my dad, Nicasio Romero, an artist and builder born in the village of Manzano. They married in 1969 and went off-grid in Northern New Mexico, living in remote villages like Chacón and Ledoux, before settling in El Ancón, at a bend on the Pecos River, in 1973.

While constantly making art and raising my sister and me, she also delved into teaching art at every educational level, from elementary school to university. In Las Vegas, she taught generations of students in the public schools, viewing the teaching of art as something akin to salvation for both pupil and teacher. She often noted that some of her favorite students were the cholos, gangbangers, and other nonconformists. At Robertson High School, everyone was welcome in her classroom, which was viewed as a refuge for students with troubled lives at home or on the streets.

She also taught at New Mexico Highlands University in Las Vegas, and at the United World College in Montezuma, in addition to holding private drawing classes with nude models at her studio in El Ancón, almost until she was physically unable to continue. For nineteen years, every Father’s Day from 1988 to 2006, she and my dad hosted the El Ancón Outdoor Sculpture Show at our family home, showcasing artists from across New Mexico. She was also exceptionally active in the New Mexico arts community, serving in organizations such as the Capitol Arts Foundation, where she sought to promote the work of artists in Northern New Mexico, and the Las Vegas Arts Council.

James Rutherford, a Santa Fe curator, museum specialist, and gallerist has curated a retrospective show of her work this year at the United World College where it will be on view from June 7 to July 7 in the Kluge Auditorium. He has situated her among the artists who relocated to New Mexico from the East Coast in expatriations starting in the late 1800s. Some needed an escape from oppressive cultural norms, Rutherford notes, while others sought relief from stifling climates in the region’s sanatoriums, or a romanticized vision of the Wild West.

“Janet was among the legions genuinely captivated by the welcoming and culturally diverse milieu at the University of New Mexico in the 1960s,” Rutherford says.

“In her work, we see an undeniable fondness for the land, light, and Indigenous cultures shared by many artists, but what distinguished Janet’s oeuvres was that she was not simply quoting existing conceptions,” Rutherford adds. “Her art-making practice uniquely coalesced the influences of her Jewish immigrant lineage, motherhood, and raising a family with the love of her life who also happened to be a native New Mexican, and a network of creatives the two nurtured for decades.”

She worked in a variety of media including watercolor, collage, fantasy shrines, acrylic paintings, retablos, clay figures, and monotypes. In a career spanning decades, her work has come to be featured in galleries, museums, private collections, and permanent public collections like the New Mexico Capitol Art Collection. With a passion for working with the figure as form and mystery in an anti-hierarchical context, she wanted her work to knock people out of their complacency. As a kid, in practical terms, this sometimes meant that my friends would express surprise at the number of paintings of nudes around our house. As I got a bit older, I realized that her approach to art was far more nuanced, mischievous, and subversive. Art had the ability to awaken new worlds, both in our surroundings and within us, she believed. The more paradigm-eroding and establishment-threatening, the better, for what else is art good for if not arousing in us the instinct to create something that transcends our ho-hum daily lives?

She was unapologetic about relishing in artistic freedom while reaching for the heights. Citing some of her many influences, she wrote in an artist statement in 2011: “I dance with the masters from Picasso and Matisse to Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. I reach out to Frida Kahlo and Xul Solar from Latin America. I seek to reveal the inner spiritual core and foundation, to touch the emotional nerve of the human body using form and line and orgiastic color in a flattened, anti-illusionistic perspective.”

She also drew inspiration from interacting with other artists and promoting their work. Spearheading artist-in-the-schools programs in Las Vegas, she exposed her students to creators such as the renowned santero Margarito Mondragon. She also had a special affection for Santa Fe’s Museum of International Folk Art, bringing her students from Robertson High School there nearly every year she was teaching.

These trips, and her aim of making art as accessible as possible, clearly resonated with many of her students. Later in life, it was hard for her to circulate in Las Vegas or Santa Fe without someone yelling “Ms. Romero! She was often amused when they would come up and speak to her; it may have helped that she was easily recognizable with her gray curls and oversized retro eyeglasses.

In the supermarket aisle, or in line at the bank, or while waiting to renew a driver’s license, some would tell her she was their favorite teacher of all time. Others thanked her for making them aware that it was possible not to fall into a life of crime or addiction. Some told her she was the reason they became artists as well.

I saw her fascination for connecting over art play out in yet another of her roles as a collector. When I was posted to Caracas in 2006, it was one of the world’s most dangerous, crime-infested cities. But that didn’t stop my mom and dad from frequently visiting us. Of course, the main draw was to see their grandkids. But my mom never hesitated to venture out on foot to see what gems she could find in the city’s markets. I’ll never forget when she returned beaming from one such excursion into the teeming Sabana Grande district with what she was told were spears dipped in poison and items that looked eerily like shrunken human heads. (On the trip back to New Mexico, she explained to inquisitive customs officials that these creations were pieced together from different animal fibers.)

Once in Caracas, I made the unorthodox decision to allow my mom to tag along on an interview. This turned out to be a bad idea. I had arranged to speak with Sofía Ímber, an eminence in the Venezuelan art world who founded the exceptional Museum of Contemporary Art, only to lose her position as the museum’s head in one of Hugo Chávez’s early purges. Suffice to say that Ímber found my mom a lot more interesting than talking to a correspondent from The New York Times. Over tea and biscuits, they hit it off, exchanging stories about their Jewish ancestry and ruminating about their favorite artists and art history.

As I think about it now, from my current posting in Mexico City, those visits from my mom during my Latin American wanderings, and all the museums she kept dragging me to, opened my eyes to other ways of understanding the societies I was covering. She taught me that describing places merely in political or economic terms provided an incomplete picture of the forces shaping country after country. I also learned that art could play a vital role in nurturing flickers of hope during times of authoritarian oppression, political upheaval, and ideological campaigns of vengeance.

My mom’s passion for finding far-flung museums, and collecting, continued when I was posted to Rio de Janeiro in 2011. She would spend hours at Museu da Chácara do Céu, the former mansion of industrialist Raymundo Ottoni de Castro Maya nestled in Rio’s hillsides overlooking Guanabara Bay, featuring work by Lygia Clark and Portinari.

Some of her favorite museums in Rio involved obstacles simply to get there, like the original site of the Museu do Pontal, on the edge of the city’s sprawling metropolitan area. Without speaking Portuguese, she hopped on a city bus, somehow was able to communicate with the driver and other passengers, and arrived ninety minutes later at the collection of Brazilian folk art assembled by Jacques van de Beuque.

The streets of Rio, especially during Carnival, were also a kind of museum for my mom. Dismissing warnings over pickpockets, she waded into the street parties involving hordes of participants like Santa Teresa’s Bloco das Carmelitas, in which revelers often dress as nuns and priests.

Once, on the way back from Santa Teresa, she expressed wonder at the discarded costumes, banners, and other Carnival-related detritus piled up on the sidewalk near the Arcos da Lapa.

“Is it OK to take some of this stuff?” she asked.

Looking around us, dozens of people were in various stages of inebriation. Idling street sweepers were chatting with one another. Music blared from speakers.

“Um, yeah, I guess,” I answered.

So, we rode the subway back to Ipanema, grasping the multicolored costumes which, of course, found their way back to her studio in El Ancón. She loved showing the pieces off to visitors, eventually incorporating them into a series inspired by trips to Brazil, Venezuela, and Colombia she called Altered States.

“I have a fascination with the mysteries of trance and its connection with dance,” she wrote about this phase. “Images of women in pairs, or alone, or within an interior jungle of the mind are reflected in my work.”

“I love to use screen, or lace, as a curtain to draw the viewer into the image with a feeling of intimacy,” she added. “Art gives me opportunities for pleasure on a daily basis.” 

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Simón Romero was born in Albuquerque and raised in Northern New Mexico. He graduated with honors from Harvard College before going into journalism. For The New York Times, he has served as Andean Bureau Chief, based in Caracas, and Brazil Bureau Chief, based in Rio de Janeiro. He is currently an international correspondent for The New York Times based in Mexico City.