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More than a hundred and fifty years ago, probably in 1866, a photograph was taken of two Navajo men during a deeply traumatic event for the Diné: the Long Walk, when the United States imprisoned over ten thousand Navajo people (click on the image above for full size).
Jennifer Nez Denetdale (opens in a new tab) is professor of American Studies at the University of New Mexico and the author of Reclaiming Diné History: The Legacies of Navajo Chief Manuelito and Juanita.
The name of Alexander Girard’s permanent installation at the Museum of International Folk Art is Multiple Visions. As we put the finishing touches on the fourth summer issue of El Palacio I’ve had the privilege to wrangle, Multiple Visions strikes me as an apt phrase for what goes into publishing this magazine. Writers, editors, designers, photographers, museum curators, and the publisher contribute multiple visions for stories that must meld into a finished product. Alexander Girard’s vision for the permanent exhibition was singular and subjective, but each maker of any of the 10,000 objects created from an individual vision, too—one also formed by their cultural traditions.
after-dinner remarks (after dinner with
guillermo gomez-pena and the sisters)
we are uncommon peoples with much in common
for starters, mutual oppression
we are not the half-time show
for the whiteman’s redskins game
or his taco-bell-selling chihuahua
we do not resemble
frito bandito or chief wahoo
we are not the pastoral peons
of the americas
or the idiot children
of juan valdez and
the indian butter maiden
we get the same sleazy propositions
from california, chiapas
and washington
and all the states
of mind-control
we catch the same nafta nasties
and gatt gnats
from sleeping
with too many dogs
and fleas
we speak the language of the heart
but with europese in between
do they really think we cannot recognize ourselves
just because they shot out some windows and mirrors
we have our own borders to cross and crosses to bear
and that is family business
we are related by blood by red hands and red dirt
by blood of the sun
by blood on the streets
by blood on the feet of lives on the run
we have toasts to make with sangria
and that is thicker than wine
in sangria to mexico, the u.s. and all the rest:
you are the documented illegal aliens
never forget, you still are guests
in our red quarter of Mother Earth
name of the game
i never went to
john wayne movies
and never played
cowboys and indians
because i couldn’t stand
seeing indians
lose all the time
so, i devoted fifth grade to jacks
and became the champion player
the runner-up called Grandma
“blanket ass”
and i never felt the same
about winning
or even playing the game
In a 1953 letter to friends back in Michigan, designer Alexander Girard enumerated what appealed to him about Santa Fe, his new hometown. Tellingly, his description engaged all the senses. He spoke of New Mexico’s “crystal clear, crisp air,” the feel of the hot sun, the fires “that smell like incense,” the views of horses, goats, and cows from their home portal, the sound of singing processions, and the multisensory allure of nearby bonfires. Girard also gravitated to northern New Mexico because it was home to Native American, Spanish Colonial, and Mexican communities, whose arts he avidly collected.
On September 20, 2019, Suzan Shown Harjo (Cheyenne, Hodulgee Muscogee) will be honored with a symposium at the National Museum of the American Indian on the National Mall in Washington, D.C., co-sponsored by the Institute for American Indian Arts’ Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe. On the same weekend, the NMAI celebrates the fifteenth anniversary of the opening of its museum on the National Mall, and the fifth anniversary of the NMAI exhibition and its corresponding book, titled Nation to Nation: Treaties Between the United States and American Indian Nations. Harjo served as guest curator of the award-winning exhibition, which will be open through 2021, and edited the 2014 book.
America’s land is at the heart of our national visual character. In the attempt to construct an identity for the young country, early Anglo-American artists aligned with the idea that ours was a nation without history—an idea that dismissed the validity of Native American history—and looked at the land as a fertile source to construct a national character.
Cameron Gay (opens in a new tab) is a professional photographer.
In the Museum of International Folk Art, curator Laura Addison opens a nondescript flat file among aisles of others in the collections vault. From it, she pulls a delicately rendered watercolor by one of the most remarkable artists of the twentieth century. It shows a columbine flower—not in the abstracted style that brought Georgia O’Keeffe fame, but as a wildflower-identification guide.
Back in 1917, John Pickard had a problem. A renowned art historian and archaeologist at the University of Missouri, he was leading the charge to commission murals, statues, tapestries, stained-glass windows, and bas-reliefs for the new state capitol in Jefferson City. (more…)
Kate Nelson (opens in a new tab) is a longtime New Mexico journalist who retired as managing editor of New Mexico Magazine where she earned numerous awards from the International Regional Magazine Association.
Jess Mullaly writes about art and design for various publications.
New Mexico has long been world-famous as a place where people have made many important dinosaur discoveries. Fossils from our state have helped paleontologists learn much about dinosaurs, including how they evolved, how they lived, and how they became extinct. (more…)
Dr. Spencer G. Lucas is a curator of paleontology at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science. He received a BA from the University of New Mexico and his MS and PhD from Yale University. As a paleontologist and stratigrapher, he specializes in the study of late Paleozoic, Mesozoic and early Cenozoic vertebrate fossils and continental deposits, particularly in the American Southwest. Lucas has extensive field experience in the western United States as well as in northern Mexico, Costa Rica, Kazakhstan, Nicaragua, Soviet Georgia and the People’s Republic of China. He has published more than 1000 scientific articles, co-edited fourteen books and authored three books.
