Before Photocopiers

BY PENELOPE HUNTER-STIEBEL

I went to visit Tom Leech, curator and director of the Palace Press, in hopes of learning more about the huge, historic printing presses and cases with different typefaces that fill the rooms beyond the Palace of the Governors courtyard. Instead, Tom directed my attention to a tabletop object he identified as a “copy press.”

But for its heft, this iron device could have passed for a Victorian gewgaw, something along the lines of door knockers adapted from Renaissance bronzes. It is cast with back-to-back dolphins, their tails swung upwards to support between them a short, fluted pillar. They rest their heads on flared columns above a shaped base with classical egg-and-dart molding. A wheel rising above these forms denotes the mechanism’s function. It turns a massive screw that penetrates the graceful dolphin yoke to raise and lower a plate that forms the top of the base when not in use.

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Tom pointed out that the dolphins were not a random decoration, but rather a direct reference to Aldus Manutius, who started a printing office in Venice in 1495, and published Greek classics in portable, paperback-size format. Manutius’ printer’s mark was a dolphin wrapping itself around an anchor. It was the long-recognized symbol of the classical adage festina lente (make haste slowly), which later became a motto of the printing profession.

But this press was not for book printing: it was the original copy machine. As I learned from the informative pages of the tome Tom thrust upon me, Before Photocopying, by Barbara Rhodes and William Wells Streeter, the process was used for over 150 years—longer than any other, except copying by hand. The engineer James Watt, famed for his steam engine, patented the invention in 1780. His patent detailed the procedure of moistening a thin sheet of paper and placing it on top of the document to be copied: “squeeze the said papers placed respectively…in a screw press…part of the ink of the writing intended to be copied shall press into and upon and through the said thin moistened paper.” With Matthew Boulton, the noted designer of silver plate, as his financial partner, Watt opened a business to market his copy presses, which he sold with bags of powdered ink. It was essential for the process that water-soluble ink was used in order for the original to be replicated. The original could make a maximum of five copies before it could no longer bleed ink.

The migrating ink would leave a slightly blurred and reversed copy on the contact sheet. The sheet had to be thin enough to be read from the other side to make the mirror image legible. By 1805, special tissue paper was manufactured for the purpose in France. Over time, various fibers were introduced to strengthen the paper. The problem of the fragility of the loose sheets led to the marketing of bound copy paper books.

From 1782, Watt’s presses were sold in the United States, where they caught on quickly, as the need for duplicating documents grew with the expanding territory. Ben Franklin had already ordered three in 1781 when he was stationed in France. Thomas Jefferson owned several, and was the first to bring the device into government use when he purchased one for the State Department in 1789. Presidents from George Washington to Calvin Coolidge used these presses, though Washington was so concerned with the possibility of forgery that he commissioned special copy paper bearing his personal watermark.

The ornate dolphin press was patented in 1860 by Francis Hovey of New York City. The Palace Press has an example of Hovey’s first model, which he soon simplified, eliminating moldings and fluted pillars. Still, it succumbed to market competition by the 1880s, due to its relatively high price.

Originally the tools of gentlemen, copy presses became required business equipment, particularly for railways. The Palace Press also has a massive version cast with the initials “AT & SF” of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway.

Although the photocopier finally took over its function, the copy press was an inexpensive and legally recognized method of accurate duplication well into the twentieth century. More than an outdated artifact, the dolphin press and its elegant symbolism connects it to the long and multifaceted history of printing. n

Penelope Hunter-Stiebel was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Portland Art Museum, Oregon, and recently curated Mirror, Mirror: Photographs of Frida Kahlo for the Museum of Spanish Colonial Art.

Penelope Hunter-Stiebel was a curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Portland Art Museum, Oregon, and recently curated Mirror, Mirror: Photographs of Frida Kahlo for the Nuevo Mexicano Heritage Arts Museum.

Building a Photograph

BY KATHERINE WARE

Photographer Patrick Nagatani (1945–2017) didn’t just take pictures, he made pictures. While most art photographs are the result of careful choices about subject, framing, lighting, and other factors, Nagatani went to even greater lengths to get the image he wanted. With experience working in Hollywood special-effects and an MFA from the University of California, Los Angeles, Nagatani created models and constructed scenes specifically for his camera beginning in the mid-1980s. For this image from a series of collaborations with his friend Andrée Tracey, they put together a complex tableau that doesn’t have a firm narrative, but rather embodies the cultural dissonance of being Americans of Japanese heritage. Tracey refers to the signature architecture of both countries in her painted backdrop—a temple and the Golden Arches. The cut-out figures and live people (the artists!) in this scene are navigating their identities as Americans with facial features and family values that connect them with a place of which they have little firsthand experience. Underlying the visible duality are powerful historical disruptions between the two countries, including the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II and the detonation of atomic bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The vibrant red of the photograph and the flying hamburgers suggest danger and turmoil, even if we aren’t sure what’s going on.

Katherine Ware, curator of photography at the New Mexico Museum of Art, is the organizer of Patrick Nagatani: Invented Realities. She, along with so many others, misses Patrick Nagatani greatly.

Acts of Love and Protection

A half-century ago, savvy political and ideological alliances forged two federal conservation acts that transformed New Mexico

By Catalina Vicente Archer and Sherman Hogue

BY CATALINA VICENTE WITH PW CHATTEY

What’s the longest hike you’ve ever been on? A few hours, maybe a day or two? How much ground did you cover? Did you enjoy the scenery?

Now imagine a hike that’s a bit longer. Perhaps twenty to thirty miles—in one day. Now repeat—every day—for five months. Add in about 450,000 feet of elevation gained and lost, plus unpredictable bouts of dangerous weather, rattlesnakes, grizzly bears, scarce drinking water, thin air, and some of the most spectacular views on the planet. Now you’re beginning to have a sense of what it’s like to hike the Continental Divide Trail (CDT).

Stretching 3,100 miles along the spine of the Rocky Mountains and traversing five US states between Mexico to Canada, the CDT is one of the world’s most challenging hikes. As the highest, longest, and remotest of the nation’s three long-distance hiking trails, it’s the most coveted jewel in hiking’s fabled Triple Crown, a prize only 400 or so people have claimed since the early 1990s: hiking the full lengths of the Appalachian, the Pacific Crest, and the Continental Divide Trails.

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Luckily, you don’t have to hike the entire CDT to appreciate what this formidable national treasure has to offer. That’s because the CDT, as part of the National Trails System, benefits from ongoing, dedicated public and private support to provide outdoor recreation, education, and opportunity for elite hikers and ordinary human beings alike.

The National Trails System Act (NTSA) turns fifty this year, alongside the Wild and Scenic Rivers Act (WSRA). President Lyndon B. Johnson signed both landmark conservation laws on October 2, 1968. In New Mexico, both laws have created new jobs, boosted tourism, attracted public and private financial resources, and generated important scholarly research into the state’s rich past and present physical, biological, social, and cultural landscapes.

Over the past decades, these changes helped transform mid-twentieth-century New Mexico from one of the nation’s best-kept secrets to a world-class home for its residents and a destination for visitors and people who aim to move here. One of the most notable people from the latter category was former US Secretary of the Interior Stewart L. Udall, who moved to Santa Fe from Arizona in 1989. He spent his final two decades here, working—with increasing conviction and urgency—to educate others about local and global environmental problems, activism, and justice. (His son Tom is currently the state’s senior US Senator.) [Read more in Jack Loeffler’s El Palacio article “Remembering Stewart Udall”: bit.ly/udall_loeffler]

During his service for the durations of both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, Udall positioned himself as a consistent—and persistent—champion for conservation ideas. He played a key role in the story about how the National Trails System and Wild and Scenic Rivers Acts became laws, together with a veritable cascade of related proposals, including the Wilderness Act and the Land and Water Conservation Fund (both of 1964). Over the ensuing decades, the consequences of those achievements reshaped our understanding of and relationship with the environment.

Udall’s conservation values were distilled from the principles of natural resources stewardship espoused by rugged big-game hunters and the Boone and Crockett Club, which Theodore Roosevelt founded in 1887. The traditional American conservationist believed in responsibly managing natural resources and harvesting them sustainably to ensure ongoing supplies and long-term human use.

At the other end of the spectrum, preservationists, such as Sierra Club founder John Muir, argued that natural resources need protection from human interference. Muir and other preservationists also argued that the aesthetic value alone of certain landscapes merited their preservation. For example, nineteenth-century photographs helped transform the land in Yosemite into a landscape—an object to be looked at. Distributed widely, these spectacular photographs helped pave the way for Yosemite National Park in 1890.

Broadly speaking, throughout the first half of the twentieth century, the progressive conservation philosophy won the day, not least due to Theodore Roosevelt’s newly established Bureau of Forestry and his robust expansion of federally protected lands and monuments, including the El Morro, Gila Cliff Dwellings, and Chaco Canyon monuments in New Mexico Territory. In the 1930s, Franklin Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration harnessed natural resources through infrastructure development, building enormous dams for irrigation, flood control, and hydroelectric power for booming Western cities.

After World War II, so the standard narrative goes, America’s rising middle class bought homes, appliances, and cars with powerful, gas-guzzling engines. They lived in tidy, suburban neighborhoods, and they took long weekend drives for pleasure. The US highway system provided mobility and access to remote lakes, mountains, rivers, beaches, and trails. But existing national parks and recreational sites strained under increased use.

As part of a nationwide initiative to satisfy the nation’s growing recreational appetite, Congress passed the Outdoor Recreation Act (1963), which in turn led to the establishment of the important 1965 Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF). Udall was instrumental in shepherding both into existence. The LWCF’s broad purview still provides crucial funding for major recreation sites, as well as for protected parks and wilderness areas. However, by the end of the decade, unchecked toxic industrial waste, dangerous pesticides, radioactive fallout from nuclear weapons testing, and simple garbage had so polluted the environment that the federal government could no longer insist that it was merely a state or local problem. The detrimental effects of these pollutants were making their way up the food chain, and mainstream Americans began to recognize the importance of ecology, the relationship between living things and their environments.

At around the same time, marine biologist Rachel Carson’s three books about ocean conservation and ecology caught Udall’s attention. Senator John F. Kennedy, whose own love for the sea helped shape his environmental consciousness, read them as well.

In what was to become her final book, the 1962 bombshell Silent Spring, Carson threw down the gauntlet against the unregulated, widespread use of the pesticides as well as radioactive fallout. Carson’s hauntingly persuasive argument became the crucial link that irrevocably tied conservation to public health. Both Udall and Kennedy anticipated the backlash, but nobody was better prepared for the it than Carson herself, who rallied hard despite suffering from terminal cancer. The chemical industry launched a vicious counter-attack on Carson’s research, her character, and her gender, but she retaliated by using her substantial Democratic Party connections to work directly with Udall and Kennedy to defend her findings. Kennedy was cautious to appear neutral and instructed his Presidential Science Advisory Committee to launch an investigation into Carson’s claims. By May 1963, the resulting report was very carefully worded:

Until the publication of Silent Spring by Rachel Carson, people were generally unaware of the toxicity of pesticides. The government should present this information to the public in a way that will make it aware of the dangers while recognizing the value of pesticides.

Congressional hearings on federal pesticide regulation began literally the next day. A week later, Udall testified before a senate subcommittee: “Carson has awakened the nation and has reminded us with compelling urgency that man is part of the balance of nature, and no matter how much we alter that balance, we still are a part of it.” By late 1963, momentum had shifted toward a more aggressive federal response to growing environmental problems. But with Kennedy’s assassination in November and Carson’s death the following April, Udall tragically lost both members of his environmental team.

Luckily, beginning in 1964, Udall found in First Lady Claudia Taylor “Lady Bird” Johnson a potent conduit to the president’s ear. They shared an unabashed love for the outdoors and the beauty of the natural world. A series of trips to federally protected sites—including a photo-op float trip on the Snake River, during which Udall pitched what became the National Trails System Act—created a personal and political bond between them. Their alliance helped keep the president focused on making measurable, visible progress toward his Great Society dream, even as Vietnam, domestic unrest, racial tensions, and the anti-war movement reached new levels of intensity.

As First Lady, Johnson actively shaped and promoted administration policies. She helped create and lobbied Congress for the Highway Beautification Act of 1965, which sought to reduce blight from billboards and junkyards on highway landscapes and replace them with native wildflowers. In this sense, Lady Bird reiterated John Muir’s advocacy for the natural landscape’s aesthetic value by including visual pollution with environmental pollution.

Udall’s ideological and political alliances with Kennedy, Johnson, Carson, and Lady Bird, together with a remarkably bipartisan Congress, helped shift environmental policy and mainstream values. The resulting legislation created a major legacy and opportunity for New Mexico and the country.

As we mark the golden anniversaries of the NTSA and WSRA, fierce debates over how to respond to today’s environmental challenges, as well as proposals to severely cut or eliminate the very agencies tasked with conservation and environmental protection programs, have led to an unprecedented ideological standoff. It’s unclear what this legislation’s legacy will look like in another fifty years, but this anniversary is perfectly timed to remind us of what we have gained, what we have to lose, and the importance of preserving America’s landscapes.

Catalina Vicente Archer is a writer and historical consultant. PW Chattey retired from the National Park Service to pursue the light as a part-time photographer and writer.

SELECTED SOURCES

Brinkley, Douglas. “Rachel Carson and JFK, an Environmental Tag Team.” Audubon (May–June 2012). bit.ly/2pVvIm0.

Johnson, Lyndon B. “Special Message to the Congress on Conservation and Restoration of Natural Beauty, February 8, 1965.” The American Presidency Project. bit.ly/2GuhpPC.

Larabee, Mark. “How the Wife of a President Helped Create the PCT.” Pacific Crest Trail Association (February 27, 2017). bit.ly/2uEZfF4.

Smith, Thomas G. “John Kennedy, Stewart Udall, and New Frontier Conservation.” Pacific Historical Review 64, no. 3 (August 1995): 329–62.
doi:10.2307/3641005.

Udall, Stewart L. The Quiet Crisis. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963.

Catalina Vicente Archer is a writer and historical consultant.

Sherman Hogue (opens in a new tab) has been a photographer, videographer, and graphics artist for twenty-seven years, primarily working for a variety of U.S. government agencies.

An Adapted Excerpt from Chapter Three: “History and Architecture of the Santa Fe Scottish Rite Temple”

By Khristaan D. Villela

BY KHRISTAAN VILLELA

From its inception, the Santa Fe Scottish Rite Temple was a touchstone in the debate over what architectural style was most appropriate for Santa Fe. A short article in the “Society” section of the Santa Fe New Mexican on November 16, 1912, the day before the grand opening of the Scottish Rite temple, noted that the Alhambra was a symbol of the beauty and romance of Old Spain. The columnist said that several people had described the new temple as entirely foreign to Santa Fe, in connection with the question of modeling all buildings in the city after Mexican or Spanish precedents. But the writer disagreed and noted that Moorish-style architecture could be considered the grandsire of New Mexico architecture.

The Scottish Rite Temple exterior color drew attention even before the building debuted. The same article noted that the entire building was tinted in the soft pink of the original Alhambra. Painted sections inside the tower, as well as early colored photo postcards, show that the building was a much more muted shade than it is today. Regarding the color of the temple, we should recall that the Spanish name Alhambra derives from an Arabic word that means “the red one.”

Apart from the large number of words of Arabic origin in Spanish (such as albóndiga, adobe, almohada, and Guadalupe), Islamic influence can be clearly traced in the art and architecture of Spain and its former overseas colonies. Examples of Moorish, or mudéjar, elements in Spanish colonial arts include tile work, ceramics, and complex wooden ceilings in the artesonado style.

The plan for the Scottish Rite building went through at least two style iterations and a change of venue before creation of the Moorish fantasy inaugurated in 1912. How did the Scottish Rite Temple go from mission revival style to neoclassical revival to Moorish revival? Enter Edgar Lee Hewett. [Architect Isaac Rapp and Hewett] became Freemasons in Montezuma Lodge No. 1 in 1908, and they both joined the Scottish Rite in the class initiated on April 26, 1909. Santa Fe’s Masonic groups counted as members a large number of the community’s most influential figures, including Hewett and Rapp and also archaeologist Sylvanus G. Morley, photographer Jesse L. Nusbaum, and, later, architect John Gaw Meem.

The Santa Fe Scottish Rite Temple: Freemasonry, Architecture, and Theatre, edited by Wendy Waszut-Barrett and Jo Whaley, was published in May 2018 by Museum of New Mexico Press.

Khristaan D. Villela is the associate director at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles and is a former executive director of the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He holds an MA and a PhD in Art History from the University of Texas at Austin.

Neon Signs of Life

Taking art from–and to–the streets

By Amy Groleau

BY AMY GROLEAU

Gráfica Popular Limeña (the folk graphic tradition of Lima) was born in the streets. It has roots in working-class neighborhoods, on hand-lettered signs for small businesses. Swooping letters in bright colors announcing locksmiths, hair salons, and cevicherías line the market stalls and sidewalks of the city. This graphic tradition blossomed into the fluorescent artwork that has become synonymous with Lima, seen on the ubiquitous posters for chicha (a musical style that blends Colombian cumbia rhythms, Andean folk instruments, and electric guitars) concerts. The aesthetic of these posters, like the music, springs from migrant culture: a unique blend of highland and rainforest traditions in an urban context.

By the 1980s, nearly 1.5 million people from the provinces had migrated to Lima, fleeing poverty and the violence of the Shining Path conflict, changing the face of the city. Informal housing in shantytowns or pueblos jovenes began climbing the hillsides around the city and, over time, became established neighborhoods. The migrant graphic tradition references the bright colors seen in highland embroideries and the favored synthetic dyes used traditional Quechua dress. The criollo identity of Lima so firmly associated with viceregal Spanish traditions has had an uneasy relationship with migrant culture, with many considering it low-class and unrefined, in contrast to the baroque colonial heritage of the city.

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Artists place fluorescent inks on black backgrounds to make the images reverberate visually. It is an art of persistence and resistance in which communities make space for themselves within a reluctant Lima. It demands to be seen. While the first waves of this style were less political, more focused on celebrating the strength of provincianos, the current makers, second- or third- generation Lima residents are using their work to call attention to pressing social and environmental issues. One such group is the art collective Amapolay, founded by Carol Fernández and Fernando Castro.

Of migrant heritage themselves, Fernández and Castro were drawn to Peruvian folk culture and studied anthropology in college. After finding the academic discussions too distancing from the people themselves, they left the discipline to pursue a path of promoting cultura popular—the culture of common people—among their fellow Limeños. Castro says, “We sought a new language for communication, and this was the language of graphics.” True to the democratizing ethos of chicha style and migrant culture, Amapolay prints their images on posters and T-shirts, common media that are accessible to everyone. Amapolay’s prints and T-shirts can be seen in the exhibition Crafting Memory: The Art of Community in Peru at the Museum of International Folk Art through March of 2019.

These media also allow their images to be mobile, spreading out across public spaces in Lima. Their work addresses issues such as ethnic and racial discrimination, toxic runoff from mining operations, and the struggle for seed sovereignty in the face of industrially engineered GMOs. In acts that they call “urban interventions,” Amapolay makes inexpensive offset reprints of their original silkscreened designs to produce hundreds of copies that can be wheat-pasted to walls and sidewalks around the city.

Their method of selling their work also takes inspiration from migrant culture. Rather than renting a storefront, Fernández and Castro organize street fairs that are held every few months in green spaces of various Lima neighborhoods. These fairs run from Friday through Sunday and bring together small independent producers of clothing, jewelry, graphics, and crafts, along with street performers and musical acts. Amapolay also conducts mobile workshops, where they collaborate with people to create designs that speak to their particular community’s concerns.

They are embarking on a similar project here in Santa Fe for a week in late June, at which time they will design with local screen printers. Their visit will culminate in a free chicha concert in the Santa Fe Railyard on the evening of Saturday, June 30. The following day, join us at the Museum of International Folk Art for gallery talks and hands-on activities with Amapolay. For more information, see page 33, visit moifa.org, and check the museum’s Facebook page.

Amy Groleau is curator of Latin American Collections at the Museum of International Folk Art.

Amy Groleau is a curator at the National Museum of the American Indian, part of the Smithsonian. She is a former curator of Latin American Folk Art at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Amy holds a PhD and MA in Anthropology from SUNY Binghamton and a BA in Anthropology from teh Unviersity of Massachusetts Amherst. Amy’s work focuses on contemporary and ancestral Andean history and material culture, craft traditions and popular arts in Latin America, post-conflict memory work, and art in service of community.

A New Lease on Light

Take a peek behind the (busy) scenes of the Museum of Art’s epic centennial renovation

By Michelle Gallagher Roberts

When the New Mexico Museum of Art opened its doors as a purpose-built art gallery for the Museum of New Mexico in 1917, the building exemplified a new/old style of architecture that helped to define Santa Fe Style. As the celebration of the New Mexico Museum of Art’s 100th anniversary approached, museum staff prepared to give the architecturally significant building a thoughtful renovation. Our challenge was two-fold: to reveal and restore the original elegant simplicity of the interior public spaces, and improve the visitor experience by creating a more welcoming entrance with brighter galleries.

This would build on a series of substantial improvements to the historic building that staff have overseen in the past few years, including the restoration of the courtyard garden; repair of the museum foundation and west wall; reroofing to protect the interior spaces from water penetration; and improved security systems, environmental systems, and fire detection and suppression.

Closing to the public for a little under 10 weeks, museum staff were faced with a monumental task: de-install the current exhibitions, undergo renovations, and then reinstall the entire museum. We were determined to accomplish our goals and open for the museum’s 100th birthday party with the building looking its best.

The most complex and least predictable part of the planned renovations was the restoration of the floors throughout the building. When the museum first opened its doors in 1917, the hand-poured concrete floors were a light color which helped to reflect light up onto the walls and ceiling. A detailed examination of the concrete throughout the museum showed a mix of challenges. After 100 years of use and various treatments, the floors had become dark, discolored, and uneven. While the floors had some remedial treatment in the 1980s, by 2017, the floors were again in acute need of attention. In various areas, the surface of the concrete was spalling (partially deteriorating and separating).

For over 18 months prior to the start of the renovation, museum staff worked with our general contractor, J. M. Evans, Inc., and various concrete specialists to find a method that would both restore the floors to their original appearance and stabilize the areas in need. We tried several methods, including chemical and mechanical removal. Due to the various surface treatments used over the years, all attempted chemical treatments failed. We also had concerns about using chemicals near the historic plaster walls. Working with the Museum of New Mexico Conservation Bureau and the New Mexico Historic Preservation Division, we identified the best solution to achieve our goals with the least amount of risk: grinding, polishing, and sealing 13,200 square feet of floors, plus 420 square feet of stair treads and risers. It was clear from the start that every section of the floor would offer a unique challenge, as the concrete mixes in different areas had various colors and textures. We wouldn’t know exactly what we would be facing until the discolored surface treatments were removed.

Advanced Concrete Design, the floor subcontractor, completed the first stage with a terrazzo grinder, which uses different grades of stones (from coarse to polishing) to achieve a glossy finish. ACD workers also hand-cleaned about 15,000 linear feet of joints. The grinding and polishing process removed approximately ¹⁄³² inch of floor surface, and in some areas, exposed the sand and stone aggregate below. ACD applied a water-based densifier to the surface in order solidify and strengthen it. They consolidated voids and areas of spalling with a color-matched concrete epoxy, and applied a final two coats of a clear low-sheen sealer throughout the museum.

The grinding process created a lot of dust, and while workers sealed the floors, no one was allowed to walk on them. There was a running joke among the staff about finding new and imaginative pathways around the building in order to avoid the floor rehabilitation process; it was not an uncommon sight to see people using the roof to get from one side of the building to the other.

The two staircases in the museum had the potential to derail the renovation schedule. The large terrazzo grinders couldn’t be used on the stairs, so workers had to use small, hand-held grinders. At some point in the past, someone had covered and then painted the surface of the stair risers. We knew the plaster was hiding something; we just didn’t know what. Since the plaster had started to crack and chip off in large sections, leaving it alone wasn’t an option.

After the grinders removed the paint and plaster, we finally saw what had been hiding. It appeared as though an additional two inches of concrete had been added at some point in order to make the stairs taller. The point at which the two pieces of concrete met, which was clearly visible on the stair riser, had a very noticeable crack, with significant voids. Some stairs had bigger cavities than others. The general contractor and the New Mexico Historic Preservation Division staff hypothesized that perhaps when the stairs were first poured, they were too short to reach the second floor, and an additional two inches of concrete was added. Over the years, the seam had cracked and separated. To solve this problem, workers filled the voids and cracks with a bonding agent, and painted the risers with a neutral matching color. We chose not to paint the stair treads, letting their natural concrete color shine through a clear sealer mixed with grit to provide traction.

When the museum first opened its doors, natural light was an integral part of the architecture. Windows and skylights provided illumination throughout the building. Our goal was to reintegrate this key feature while still allowing the museum staff to control the light, as it is damaging to the artwork and historic woodwork located throughout the museum.

The windows’ existing UV film, which had been added at some point in the past, had deteriorated to the point that edges were peeling and curling, and it no longer served its purpose. Sol Solutions, a Santa Fe-based window tinting company, replaced the existing UV film with new film to reduce the visible and UV light in the spaces, with minimum intrusion of the historic architectural features. The new UV film also increases the energy efficiency of the windows. A great deal of heat enters the building during the summer months through the windows. As a museum, it is imperative that we maintain, to the best of our ability, a stable interior climate in order to preserve the artwork. We also want to minimize the amount of electricity required to cool the building during those high-heat months.

We also replaced the non-moveable window covers with roller screen shades. These shades offer additional unobtrusive UV protection for the artwork, historic woodwork, and furniture. The sheer material allows light to enter the room while reducing glare and softening the view to the outside. We have the option of raising the window shades and allowing visitors to view the building architecture and surrounding cityscape when light control isn’t mandatory for an exhibition, or during different times of the year when the sun doesn’t shine directly through a window.

The lower floors of the building have skylights in almost all the bays. They historically allowed natural light into the spaces, as windows are limited in this area. Over the past 100 years, various directors have made the decision to cover or reopen the openings. New Mexico’s light is very intense, and difficult to deal with in an exhibition space. The skylights also leaked repeatedly. Taking advantage of current technology, staff worked with J.M. Evans, Inc., to reintroduce this feature back into the galleries in a limited fashion. Workers rebuilt three skylight bays with new insulation, and increased the pitch and slope so they would drain better and reduce the chance of leaking. Unfortunately, given the manufacturing lead time and the limited time frame of the renovation, they were not ready for the November reopening. Three Kalwall S-Line skylights were added in March 2018. The new skylights allow a diffused and muted light into the spaces that changes throughout the day and with the weather.

Over the years, walls had been added throughout the building to accommodate the needs of various projects and exhibitions. Even after their original purpose ended, they remained in place. We identified these walls and removed them. Once they came down, the very modern nature of the original architecture shone through. One notable example is the alcove near the back doors to St. Francis Auditorium, at the top of the ramp to the New Wing. When we took down the wall and removed the water fountains hidden behind it, it exposed a window overlooking the courtyard which had been covered up for more than thirty years. This window now reveals a beautiful vista into the garden, and helps visitors spatially place themselves within the building. During this process, removing walls also restored sightlines to windows, doors and across galleries.

New Mexico is a state of talented craftspeople and makers. The museum has used locally sourced, handcrafted items whenever possible since its inception, and we aimed to uphold that tradition. All of the contractors who worked on the project were based in Santa Fe or Albuquerque. Additionally, we worked with local artisans when replacing fixtures and furniture. Alchemy Lights, a Santa Fe-based company, designed and handcrafted the museum’s new stairway light fixtures. The chosen material, tin, is reminiscent of historic fixtures and compliments the museum architecture, but would not be confused with an original element. Punched tinwork is a traditional craft in New Mexico that is often used to create wall sconces and chandeliers. The museum lobby has punched-tin chandeliers created in the 1930s and in the 2000s. The new stairway sconces pay homage to this tradition, but with a thoroughly modern design. They replace frosted glass and chrome stairway sconces from the 1980s.

We also worked with talented craftspeople when updating the museum’s versatile lobby, where we greet museum visitors, host receptions, and receive people who are on their way to events in St. Francis Auditorium. In addition to the dramatically lighter floor, we installed new recessed LED lights that mimic the undulations of the latillas, and help to increase the overall illumination of the space. The recessed lights replaced mismatched track lighting added over the years, reducing visual clutter near the ceiling. As a result, many longtime visitors now comment on the carvings on the corbel ends, having never noticed them before.

The two reception desks have been replaced with one custom-designed desk. Ulibarri Construction of Albuquerque worked with our designer and staff to handcraft a unique desk for the museum. Materials, design elements, and colors were specifically chosen in order to complement the historic features. The quartz counters’ appearance echoes the concrete floors. The cherrywood is similar in color to the woodwork throughout the lobby. As the wood in the desk ages, it will further darken and take on a similar patina as the columns. The panel design evokes the panels on the historic doors.

We also moved the desk farther down the lobby towards the gift shop, which gives our visitors more space in which to adjust to the light change from outside, and to decide on whether to purchase tickets. We added new, ultra-high definition digital monitors to entice people deeper into the space to view ticket prices, current exhibitions, and upcoming programs. The digital signs eliminate the need to reprint signs every time prices or information change. The glass doors off the lobby into the gift shop have been replaced with a locally created wrought-iron gate which is easier to see, and folds more compactly. A new coat rack and bag check has been designed in the same style as the reception desk, and will be produced as soon as the necessary funds become available. All of these changes add up to a lobby that now feels lighter, bigger, and more welcoming.

Given how quickly we needed to turn around the exhibitions for the reopening on November 25, 2017, renovation tasks had to happen simultaneously. Once the floor refinishers left a space, the painter would enter. We also painted areas not usually altered during an exhibition change-out, including the ceilings in the Roland, Goodwin, and Clarke galleries, stairways, and the lobby. Once the paint was dry, exhibition installers moved into the space.

The floor refurbishing process created a lot of dust that lodged in the museum’s windowsills, doorways, ceiling latillas, and vigas, and so a crew of security staff trained and led by the museum’s collections manager, Erica Prater, went to work to refresh the historic wood, which needs ongoing attention in New Mexico’s arid climate. They also used cotton swabs and rags to clean more than 24 pieces of historic furniture. Gently cleaning woodwork with archival soap, and then waxing it helps to preserve it for future generations.

Throughout the renovation process, we were repeatedly asked what our Plan B was if we didn’t finish on time. Our answer was always the same: “There is no Plan B.” We would open on time, and looking good. There was no way we wouldn’t be ready for our own birthday party!

With over 7,600 people showing up on November 25, 2017 to see our hard work and efforts, we couldn’t disappoint. Based on the comments we have received, it seems unanimous that we succeeded in our efforts to make the building shine.

Michelle Gallagher Roberts is the deputy director of New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs and previously served the department as Chief Registrar then Head of Registration and Collections at New Mexico Museum of Art, and also served as the Acting Registrar at the Museum of International Folk Art. Prior to moving to New Mexico, Michelle was the Collections Manager at Palm Springs Desert Museum/Palm Spirits Art Museum, Curatorial Assistant at Foothills Art Center in Golden, Colorado, Assistant Registrar at the University of Denver Museum of Anthropology, and an Archaeologoist at Central Washington Archaeological Survey in Ellensburg, Washington. She has written multiple publications on museums and cultural institutions and received the “Heritage Preservation Award: Architectural Heritage” from the Cultural Properties Review Committee in 2018. She was a Next Generation 2017 Fellow at the Getty Leadership Institute, Claremont Graduate University and holds both a BS in Anthropology from Central Washington University and a MA in Anthropology/Museum Studies from University of Denver.

Spheres of Influence

Like most inveterate world travelers, beads have fascinating stories to tell

By Marsha C. Bol

BY MARSHA C. BOL

Extraordinary how a small glass bead from the Italian island of Murano or the mountains of Bohemia in the present-day Czech Republic can travel around the world, entering into the cultural life of peoples far distant. Glass beads are the ultimate migrants: Where they start out is seldom where they end up. The Museum of International Folk Art’s exhibition Beadwork Adorns the World (through February 3, 2019) shows what happens to these beads when they arrive at their final destination. Along with glass beads, this exhibition also features beads made from metal, cloth, stone, and other materials.

So completely have imported glass beads become embedded into various cultures throughout the world that, for example, people commonly associate the Plains Indians in North America with their beaded buckskin clothing. Each cultural tradition has differentiating color preferences and its own design aesthetics and sewing techniques, and beadwork adornment conveys many culturally specific messages to members of those groups. Even so, looking at beadwork around the world reveals many parallel uses among various societies.

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Much of an object’s meaning is associated with how it is used in its society. In most parts of the world, beads are often used at peak moments in life. As an adornment, their luster and sparkle help to heighten effect, impact, and meaning. They draw attention to the wearer during life stages and passages; they affirm power, position, or status in the community and the high meaning of the occasion; and foster communication with the spirits, who are attracted to the beads.

A blue and green faience bead-net dress was found in an Egyptian tomb on a female mummy during a 1927 expedition. This finery surely identified a woman of high status during Egypt’s Old Kingdom. Faience beads were made from powdered quartz covered with a transparent blue or green glasslike coating. The threads holding the beads together had disintegrated; yet the beads and their impressions were still in place, allowing the dress to be reconstructed some 4,500 years later.

“In a traditional context, whatever else objects may be and do, they are first of all perceived as making statements about the self-identification of their makers and users,” Arnold Rubin stated in the 1975 Artforum article “Accumulation: Power and Display in African Sculpture.” Identity looms large in this exhibition. Ndebele beadwork from South Africa provides a clear example of this concept. When uprooted from their territory and scattered far from other members of the Ndebele community, the women reclaimed their group identity via beadwork by reviving their distinctive beaded apparel. As Ndebele women continue to make and wear the special-occasion beaded garments for which they are renowned, every member of Ndebele society is able to identify the life stage of an Ndebele female simply by looking at her traditional beaded clothing.

Eva Mirabal enlisted in the Women’s Army Corps (WAC) in 1943, saying that since there were no sons in her Taos Pueblo family, she felt that she should join in the fight. In the photograph of her image in the mirror, Mirabal sees herself dressed as a WAC, yet her Lakota beaded vest shows she identifies with her Native American heritage. Moreover, even though she is a Puebloan from Taos Pueblo, not a Lakota, her pueblo has long been an important center for trade between tribes from the Plains and the Southwest United States.

While beadwork has a lengthy history, it is truly a living art. The majority of the art works in this exhibition date from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. Beadwork today comes in many forms—it may be a continuation of an unbroken tradition, perhaps with contemporary innovations, or it may be a revival of a lost form.

Lakota beadworker Thomas Haukaas sews beadwork in the traditional Lakota way, which he learned from his elders. However, Haukaas recombines traditions in new ways, allowing him to focus on social issues that confront his people. His baby cradle, entitled Immigration, is worked in nineteenth-century beads, yet reminds us that “We [the Native people] did not cross the border, the border crossed us.”

It takes an international museum such as the Museum of International Folk Art to be able to mount an exhibition of this scope, which includes beadwork from wide-ranging continents and eras. The exhibition cuts across geographic boundaries to examine this single art form as a doorway into the life of many societies. Each of the 260 objects has a story to tell.

Marsha C. Bol is a curator, author, and director emerita of the Museum of International Folk Art.

Marsha C. Bol is a former director of the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Over the past four decade she has wored as a director or curator at the Museum of International Folk Art, the New Mexico Museum of Art, the Carnegie Museum of Natural History, and the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology. She was formerly associate professor at the University of Texas at San Antonio and holds a PhD in Art History from the University of New Mexico. She is a specialist in Native American art and architecture and Spanish Colonial art and architecture.

Turning Toward the Taproot

Small, yet mighty indigenous seeds are restoring pueblo culture and health.

By Emily Withnall

Roxanne Swentzell’s kitchen does not have a refrigerator. Instead, books and large glass jars line wooden shelves. The jars are filled with dried beans, many varieties of corn, dried wild spinach, currants, pumpkin seeds, and grasshopper flour.

A bicycle flour grinder sits in the center of the large, open kitchen. Its chain connects to the mill’s flywheel that, once in motion, grinds corn or other grain. The mill rests on a small kitchen island, the hopper heaped with freshly ground cornmeal. Rows of small mason jars crowd the rest of the island, popping periodically as the jars seal.

Roxanne’s kitchen is as much a place of experimentation as the rest of her home, where three-dimensional faces protrude from wood cabinets, and in the living room, the carved stone bodies of nude women emerge from the adobe walls. They appear to be on the verge of stepping out of the walls to join the conversation. Her adobe home is surrounded by more of her sculptures and a small forest of piñon, peach, and apricot trees. When she moved back to Santa Clara Pueblo in 1989, however, she says, “There was nothing here but ants.”

She comes from a long line of artists at Santa Clara. Her sculptures fill Tower Gallery, her own gallery in Pojoaque, and her work is represented in galleries and museums throughout New Mexico, the United States, and overseas. The creativity that drives her art also fueled her desire to try to grow a sustainable forest system in the high mountain desert. Her thirty-year experiment with various aspects of permaculture—a whole-systems gardening technique that mimics the natural design of a self-sustaining ecosystem—led her to what she calls the Pueblo Food Experience. It was her experiment to get to the bottom of a burning question: What would happen if we ate only what our ancestors ate?

Five years later, Roxanne is still uncovering answers, and has co-edited a corresponding cookbook with Patricia M. Perea, The Pueblo Food Experience Cookbook (Museum of New Mexico Press, 2016) describing her journey, and the foods she discovered during her experiment.

It all began in 1989, when Roxanne, her then-husband, Joel Glanzberg, and their friend Brett Bakker decided they wanted to find out if they could feed themselves entirely off an eighth of an acre. It’s the same land Roxanne’s home occupies now. And so they founded the Flowering Permaculture Tree Institute.

“It was an experiment of sorts,” says Roxanne. “Nobody that we knew of had done that in this kind of climate.” Roxanne, Joel, and Brett began recording their experiments with growing food, building adobe houses and hornos, and raising animals like sheep, chickens, and turkeys. Beginning in 1994, they shared their discoveries in a handwritten, photocopied newsletter. They also began to offer workshops to Santa Clara Pueblo community members who wanted to learn about things like farming, land restoration, and water harvesting. “We were an oddity,” Roxanne laughs. “Most people were looking at us and asking, ‘What are you doing?’”

At the same time, she began collecting and saving any seeds she could get her hands on. When a few kids at San Juan Pueblo accidentally burned the seed bank down, she asked for some of the salvaged seeds and began to plant them to ensure their continued survival by collecting and saving more seeds from the mature plants. Roxanne also reached out to other tribes, seeking different types of corn, squash, and other crops no longer available at Santa Clara. “Some of it I got from the Hispanic community,” she says. “They’d gotten their seeds from the Pueblos and kept those species alive when the Pueblos lost them.”

Roxanne’s motivation to save seeds followed a trend across the Pueblos. Everywhere, farmers were aging and Native youth showed little interest in seed saving or farming. The elders and farmers of each community had the knowledge and seeds but often had no one to pass their seeds down to. Following a conference in Gallup in 1992, organized by Arizona-based Native Seeds/SEARCH, these concerns led to the formation of the Traditional Native American Farmers Association (TNAFA). TNAFA is an affiliate of the Seventh Generation Fund for American Indians and is made up of fifty families from eighteen New Mexico tribes. Since their formation in Gallup they have offered workshops every year to teach tribal youth the importance of their traditional seed saving and agricultural practices.

TNAFA Program Director Clayton Brascoupe, of Tesuque Pueblo, forges partnerships with other Native communities, advocates for policies at the local, regional, and national levels, and coordinates farming workshops in various locations across northern New Mexico. Interest in farming and seed saving from teens and young adults at Tesuque Pueblo is no longer a worry since they now make up eighty percent of farming workshops. Now, the Pueblo wants to strengthen the links between generations by recruiting more participants of all ages to create essential connections for all tribal members. “When an Elder dies it’s like losing a reference library,” says the former executive director of Native Seeds/SEARCH, Angelo Joaquin.

Like Roxanne and Clayton, Beata Tsosie Peña is working to recover old seeds and knowledge. Beata is from Santa Clara Pueblo and serves as the Environmental Health and Justice coordinator for Tewa Women United, an organization dedicated to ending violence against women, girls, and Mother Earth. When the Spanish brought wheat to the New World, it gradually replaced crops that indigenous people relied on for food and ceremony, including amaranth. The wild variety is commonly known as pigweed. “We have a big focus on amaranth right now,” Beata says, referring to Tewa Women United’s partnership with the Española Healing Oasis. “We do cultural exchanges with farmers from Guatemala every year and they come and teach us how to harvest and cook with it.”

A one-quart jar rests on the table in the Tewa Women United’s kitchen in Española. The jar is filled with amaranth seeds culled from eight flower heads. The seeds are round and tan and resemble tiny versions of quinoa seeds. Knowing where food will be coming from next year or in seven years’ time can be hard to predict in light of burgeoning populations, climate change, and the threats that genetically modified organism (GMO) crops pose to indigenous seeds. Though agricultural corporations like Monsanto frequently tout GMO crops as the solution to world hunger, drought and pests continue to wipe out them out. Indigenous seeds, on the other hand, tend to survive, with a resilience developed over centuries of adaptation to their landscape and a genetic diversity that allows some plants to thrive even if others are wiped out.

“What’s driving Monsanto nuts right now is what they call a ‘super weed,’—but it’s actually amaranth,” Beata laughs. “It’s the only ‘weed’ that isn’t getting killed by Roundup.”

Amaranth greens can be cooked like spinach. Its seeds can be ground into flour and used in atole and other Native recipes. The grain from mature plants is a so-called superfood because it is a complete protein and contains B-complex vitamins. And, like other indigenous crops, amaranth’s resilience makes it much better suited to withstanding the erratic weather conditions that climate change has provoked.

“Amaranth could replace all these GMO cornfields and feed the world,” Beata says. “If we just listened and paid attention to what the plants are telling us, we would have our solutions.”

The Pueblo Food Experience was sparked in 2012 when Porter Swentzell, Roxanne’s son, visited his doctor. In his mid-twenties, he was obese and headed for a heart attack. And at age six, Roxanne’s second youngest grandchild received a diagnosis of pre-diabetes. As is the case across the United States, Native Americans in New Mexico face a disproportionate risk for diabetes, death from diabetes, obesity, high cholesterol, and high blood pressure.

As a historian, Porter became curious about what their pueblo ancestors ate and decided to try eating pre-Spanish-contact foods as much as possible. He lost weight and gained energy within a month, excited about getting healthier and reconnecting with his roots. Roxanne was excited, too. She reached out to twelve other members of Santa Clara Pueblo ranging from six to sixty-five, all of whom agreed to join her in an experiment that she called the Pueblo Food Experience. For this experiment, the fourteen group members agreed to eat a diet of pre-contact food for three months.

To begin, each member received blood tests and health assessments. “We all came home depressed,” Roxanne says.

It was rough going initially, as they quit sugar, wheat, coffee, alcohol, chicken, beef, pork, and dairy at once. They met regularly every week or two for potlucks to share recipes and food, offering one another moral support to avoid temptation. They experimented with traditional foods by inventing new processing and cooking techniques and tracked down old recipes.

One recipe, included in the Pueblo Food Experience Cookbook, is for buwah, which calls for cornmeal, ashes, water, and mashed brains (from any of the pre-contact animals listed among the cookbook’s “Food List”). “The Hopis call it piki and we call it buwah, but it had been long forgotten,” Roxanne says. “My grandparents didn’t make it, but some of us had our families’ cooking stones. And some of the Hopi women still make it, so we brought them over to help us and learn these methods again.”

Despite the surprising ingredients, buwah is tasty, and the dancers at Santa Clara have begun to request it for their traditional ceremonies. “It tastes wonderful, like crunchy, light, smooth corn flakes,” says Roxanne. “Part of the fun of eating buwah is the way it falls apart in your mouth as it dissolves quickly with moisture.”

At the end of three months, the group’s members went for a follow-up medical exam. Their doctors were astounded. Two people had lost over fifty pounds each, one woman with severe arthritis could close her hands fully again, and each had far more energy than before. Other community members wanted their secrets, prompting Roxanne to create the Pueblo Food Experience Cookbook, which is filled with essays about their experiences and recipes for foods including corn tortillas, squash chips, turkey tomatillo tamales, and buffalo tongue.

It’s healthy, and therefore tempting to others, but Roxanne says there is danger in people outside the Pueblos wanting to commercialize indigenous plants and recipes.

“It’s not the ‘cool diet’ to be on; it’s about cultural identity,” she says. “The Pueblo Food Experience wasn’t meant to say, ‘Everyone eat this way.’ No, find your original food because it might really do something for your health and your identity.”

She is excited by the prospect of people from other cultures trying their own “hardcore” versions of the Pueblo Food Experience, exclusively eating their own traditional foods. She wants to find out if their results are comparable, because she believes that the foods that are best for us are matched to our DNA. Admittedly, this is complicated for people who don’t know their ancestry, or who have a large mix of ancestries. And although she worries about the commercialization of Native cultural heritage, Roxanne sees her experiment as being valuable for everyone.

Helping to restore native plants is one way to connect with the landscape and eat in a healthier way. “Grow a forest of indigenous plants that are edible,” Roxanne says. “Grow your own piñon and currant trees. Make your yard a source of food and beauty.”

Angelo Joaquin favors white bawi beans, but lauds the health benefits of all beans. In his time working for Native Seeds/SEARCH, Joaquin was in charge of their diabetes project, which helped to educate people about how to avoid or manage diabetes. A bean’s seed coat contains pectin, which, once ingested, takes a long time to break down. “What happens is that it lets sugar into your blood at an even rate, so you don’t get a spike,” says Joaquin. “If the pancreas is still operating, it can process the amount of sugar that comes in.” And because smaller beans have a higher percentage of seed coat, bawi beans—as opposed to pinto beans—pack more of a pectin punch.

While some seeds remain difficult to find, seed saving and trading has become easier in northern New Mexico. Understanding the need for seed protection and the preservation of land-based practices, the New Mexico Food and Seed Sovereignty Alliance (NMFSSA)—made up of Tewa Women United, TNAFA, Honor Our Pueblo Existence, and the New Mexico Acequia Association (NMAA)—started the Ówîngeh Tá Pueblos y Semillas Gathering and Seed Exchange in 2006. The gathering occurs every spring, and is hosted in alternate years by pueblo and acequia communities.

“It’s a beautiful event, because it brings both cultures together around shared values about land, earth, and water,” Beata says. The seed exchange begins with blessings by the Tewa community and the Los Hermanos Penitentes, and demonstrates both communities’ “love and care for the land and each other.” In addition to providing a place for people to exchange seeds, farmers and seed savers from across northern New Mexico give presentations and workshops on cultivation strategies and seed protection.

Flowering Tree Permaculture Institute started as a large nonprofit dedicated to big permaculture ideas, but Roxanne says, “it swirled itself to really focus on this particular place.” When she and others who participated in the Pueblo Food Experience assembled their cooking stones to learn to make buwah, they realized they needed a place to keep them so they could grind corn together. This led to a community building project where kids and volunteers from Santa Clara showed up once or twice a week to mix mud and make adobe bricks. Two years later, women gather in the new cooking house to grind corn and perfect their buwah-making skills.

“Now we have a place that the farmers are coming to and saying, ‘What do you need us to grow?’ So we can say, ‘We need blue corn for our buwah,’ or ‘We need this squash,’ and they grow it,” says Roxanne. “And then they call us, and say, ‘Come help hoe,’ or ‘Come help pick it,’ and this brings the community together again in a really wonderful way. Then that produce can come to our building, that we built, to be redistributed to families.”

Mutual support, community, and cultural pride made the Pueblo Food Experience successful. Roxanne says she realized the day they had turned a corner as a group. “One of the older women called me saying, ‘I’m in front of Burger King in Española.’”

“I told her, ‘Marian, don’t! You can be strong. I know it smells good, but don’t go in!’”

“She said, ‘Shut up! There’s some ripe cactus fruit in front of their building.’ And I just laughed because I thought, we have done it, we have gone past the point where we see Burger King as food. Now we’re looking at their landscaping for food.”

Emily Withnall (opens in a new tab) is the editor of El Palacio and the host of Encounter Culture. Prior to stepping into the editor role, she wrote for the magazine for eight years. Emily has also been published in The New York Times, Al Jazeera, High Country News, Orion Magazine, Tin House, The Kenyon Review, Gay Magazine, Source New Mexico, and other publications. She lives and writes in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

An O’Keeffe Odyssey

Thirty-three years after its purchase, a painting as peripatetic as its creator comes home—for good—to the New Mexico Museum of Art

By Kate Nelson

BY KATE NELSON

I don’t think the Museum of Art could have asked for or received a better birthday present,” director Mary Kershaw said after black curtains parted to reveal a Georgia O’Keeffe painting on the stage of Saint Francis Auditorium. The 400 people packed into the pews applauded enthusiastically, but given that they were all at least Museum of Art members and, at best, some of its most trusted advisers and donors, the unveiling of Desert Abstraction (Bear Lake) hardly came as a surprise. The Museum of New Mexico Foundation purchased it in 1983 and placed it on long-term loan to the museum, where it has been displayed periodically ever since. Most recently, it graced a wall in the foyer of the Governor’s Residence, easily visible to anyone who entered. But in granting full ownership to the museum in honor of its 100th birthday, the foundation earned its applause, if only for capping a story that contains elements of intrigue, desire, the Santa Fe Art Colony, a Park Avenue apartment, an international fashion designer, an up-and-coming art dealer, and a brief controversy.

“We’re not in the business of collecting art; this is the only piece we ever owned,” says Jamie Clements, executive director of the foundation. “When we began having internal discussions about how to celebrate the museum’s centennial, we reminded ourselves that we have this painting on long-term loan to the art museum. Everyone agreed that giving it to the museum is the most meaningful gesture we can make.”

Why it took so long to turn it over is a question that baffles even those involved in the original purchase. To find the threads of a story most people have forgotten, you need to go back to 1932, when New York attorney Frank E. Karelsen II walked into An American Place, Alfred Stieglitz’s Madison Avenue showcase for modern American artists, including his wife, Georgia O’Keeffe. Karelsen’s twelve-year-old daughter, June, fell into the thrall of one work of art: Desert Abstraction (Bear Lake). It featured a layered landscape in slabs of burnt orange and brown with two silvery-turquoise embellishments that could represent snow, water, or even a necklace on the skin of a weathered neck. Karelsen was no art collector, and when Stieglitz quoted him a $4,000 price, he quailed. He only had $1,000, he told Stieglitz, who was already known for refusing to sell works to people he didn’t like. But the pigtailed girl’s adoration touched Stieglitz. He took the $1,000, and on February 24, 1932, wrote a note to Karelsen in a bold and flowery hand: Orders have been given to deliver the O’Keeffe painting to you to-day. And understandably you will have received it before this. I know it will give you and yours ever increasing pleasure.

It did, hanging above the Karelsens’ fireplace for the next thirty-two years, acquiring an almost foolproof provenance. (Years later, June Karelsen Goodman said her father even decorated the apartment around the painting.) That the actual Bear Lake nestles south of Wheeler Peak on Taos Pueblo land that’s now inaccessible to visitors makes the vista even more meaningful. O’Keeffe’s visits to it would have been among her earliest explorations of a New Mexico landscape that lured her every summer from 1929 until she established a permanent residence in 1949. Of her three known paintings of the lake, one now resides in the White House collection. Desert Abstraction may not rise to a signature work, but Cody Hartley, senior director of collections at the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe, says it holds significance as a bridge between her earliest paintings and her New Mexico achievements. “She’s really discovering and exploring the landscape and her interpretation of it,” he says. “What’s fascinating about the [Karelsen] painting is that it’s similar in color palette and composition to paintings she did of Lake George, in New York. You see her adapting the language she developed in New York to New Mexico.”

It wasn’t until 1968 that a New Mexico museum would acquire an O’Keeffe of its own, and it was one of those early Lake George paintings. The Museum of Fine Art, as the Museum of Art was then called, received the circa 1924 Landscape on Lake George as a bequest from O’Keeffe’s friend and fellow artist Rebecca Salsbury (Strand) James. Rendered in dark tones with more realism than abstraction, it could be seen, by someone with a particularly lively imagination, as a New Mexico-ish setting, with high hills, a few trees, and a remarkably small sky. But it isn’t New Mexico. As the artist’s fame in the state grew into a tourism attraction unto itself, the museum’s collection stayed right there, at a grand one painting.

By the 1980s, the foundation and the museum realized that they had a problem. O’Keeffe was becoming the most popular artist in the state, and they had little to show for it. Tourists snapped up her Santa Fe Opera posters, greeting cards, and tote bags. Many came to New Mexico primarily to soak up some of her essence. In 1982, the museum managed to exhibit her painting Summer Days—a grand slam of Southwestern O’Keeffe tropes: a skull floating in a New Mexico sky, above flowers and desert foothills. That gave Thomas B. Catron, the foundation’s founder, an idea. He floated the idea of purchasing it and was soon negotiating a $400,000 price with O’Keeffe’s assistant, Juan Hamilton. Both parties signed the contract, but when Catron asked how the artist would like the money delivered, the response flattened him. “Juan called me and said, ‘Miss O’Keeffe doesn’t get attached to her paintings too much, but she’s attached to this and doesn’t want to sell it.’”

Herein enters one of the first points of intrigue. Jerry Richardson, a foundation trustee, had worked for O’Keeffe in the 1970s, helping with her landscaping. She often invited him inside for lunch; sometimes, she asked him over for holiday meals. “She used to change out all the paintings in her house once a month,” Richardson says. “Ladder to the Moon was the one painting that never changed. It was always on her living room wall. All the others? They’d go into storage. She had a new favorite every month.”

Maybe O’Keeffe’s attachment to Summer Days had a more fiscal quality. According to news reports, fashion designer Calvin Klein bought it from her in 1983 for $1 million—a sum well beyond the means of the foundation.

Into that milieu, that same year, stepped David Turner. He had accepted a position as the museum’s assistant director at a particularly opportune time. The museum had just reopened after a lengthy renovation that added the new wing, restructured interior walls, and resurfaced the courtyard. To Turner, it marked a change from old to new, a sort of chrysalis emergence similar to the one the museum is now making as it raises money to convert the Halpin Building into a contemporary art wing. New as the renovated museum was, it seemed a tad backward to many visitors.

“Everyone who came in asked, `Where are the O’Keeffes?’” Turner says. “And we’d have to say, `Uh, we don’t have any.’” Well, they didn’t have any of the Southwest. No bleached cow skulls or macro flowers—the proto-O’Keeffe images that visitors craved. “We realized it was long overdue that we do something about Georgia O’Keeffe, both in our exhibitions and in our collections,” Turner says.

During Catron’s failed courtship with Summer Days, he had managed to persuade O’Keeffe to donate $100,000 toward a future purchase. Turner learned of it and formed a plan. He built relationships with people who owned O’Keeffes, and put out a quiet word among dealers that the museum held an interest in purchasing a New Mexico-specific painting. Soon, Nat Owings called. The son of Nathaniel A. Owings, one of the nation’s most significant architects, Nat grew up on the family’s Jacona ranch near San Ildefonso Pueblo, rubbing elbows with locals whose ties to the Santa Fe Art Colony showed up in their DNA—people like Alice Henderson Rossin, a member of the foundation board and daughter of artist William Penhallow Henderson and poet Alice Corbin Henderson. Owings was a professor at Montana State University, but longed to be an art dealer (his Owings Gallery on Marcy Street in Santa Fe is now in its third decade of representing some of New Mexico’s finest artists). His family connections soon built a path to O’Keeffe through a Jacona neighbor, and to Catron through his father, who had just hired him on as the architectural firm’s attorney. Owings heard a tempting tidbit about a bequest by a New York attorney whose only major art purchase had come about in Stieglitz’s gallery. Frank E. Karelsen II had died, and his will included a bequest of the family’s O’Keeffe painting to New York University Hospital. The gift had only one condition: The painting must be sold to benefit research into immunology. Owings talked to the hospital and obtained a color transparency of the painting and a photo of it in the apartment, which he sped to Turner.

He and Owings looked at how the family hung the painting, but then something odd happened. “We started turning the transparency one way, then the other,” Turner says. “If you turn it the way it shows up in that photograph, the mountains are at the bottom, and the sky is filled with great, edge-to-edge clouds. But if you turn it the other way, it looks like rolling hills toward the lake valley, then mountains and sky. Complicating it is that on the back of the painting, in big, two- to three-inch-tall letters, it says, ‘Georgia O’Keeffe 1931,’ painted with a paintbrush. That’s unlike anything we could find, and it oriented the painting to how it was hung in the apartment.”

Questions and doubts arose. Is this a real piece? How do you explain the orientation? Why is her name that way on the back, but on no other pieces? “Then we found two other paintings that were a lot like it,” Turner says. “One was the 1922 Lake George, then a 1930 Bear Lake in blue and purple with a fine line of blue in the middle. You can tell she had gotten herself in a position to see the lake in the distance. That helped us understand how it fit into the oeuvre of O’Keeffe in New Mexico and her developing abstraction.”

June Goodman insisted, though, that the painting could only have been properly hung the way it had in the family’s apartment, because that’s how Stieglitz had it in the gallery. Turner and Owings sent the images to Hamilton and asked for advice from O’Keeffe. “She replied back through Juan, and I think she said, `Yeah, this was my painting.’ It wasn’t clear if she said it goes this way or that way—which isn’t surprising for her.” Turner finally concluded that Stieglitz himself caused the confusion by playing with how he hung the painting, just to demonstrate the widening boundaries of abstraction.

With O’Keeffe’s endowment and another $250,000 from other museum supporters, the foundation obtained the painting in July 1984. And kept it, as decades crept past.

Desert Abstraction (Bear Lake) premiered in 1984 at a gala commemorating the Museum of New Mexico’s 75th anniversary. It accomplished what Turner and foundation officials had hoped by breaking a logjam of O’Keeffe donations. Helen Miller Jones soon donated Pedernal with Red Hills (1936), Chama River, Ghost Ranch, New Mexico (1937), and In the Patio, II (1948). “All of a sudden there were four paintings with a nice range of New Mexico influences, and Desert Abstraction really held its own,” Turner says. Other donations followed, including Spring Tree No. 1 (1945) and the eternally popular Dark and Lavender Leaves (1931). Some of the donations came directly from the O’Keeffe estate after her death in 1986. In all, the Museum of Art now counts twelve of O’Keeffe’s paintings and two photographs that she took, all of which enjoy occasional display.

The tally would be one higher but for the still unsolved theft of Special #21: Palo Duro Canyon, on December 16, 2003. Painted in Texas in 1916, O’Keeffe’s estate gave the 14 × 16-inch oil to the museum in 1995. Its disappearance baffled investigators; it has never resurfaced.

As for why the foundation retained ownership of Desert Abstraction,Jerry Richardson speculates that its finance officials were reluctant to show such a large loss on the books, so held on to it as an asset. Catron expresses skepticism, saying it was always the intent to let the museum own it outright. That the hand-off didn’t occur led to a skirmish in 2000 that could have settled the matter in a way that both Richardson and Catron opposed. Some foundation board members proposed selling it for $1 million and dividing the proceeds among the four Santa Fe-based DCA museums. When it came before the full board, Richardson says, “People like me were upset. We knew it was always intended to go to the museum at some point. There was community push-back, too.” The proposal fell to its doom, although attached to the decision was an intent to “revisit it at a less inflammatory time,” as Richardson recalls.

That time arrived in 2017, when the foundation and its board began discussing a way it could deliver a splash of a donation, one that might inspire other collectors to show similar generosity. “This seemed like a good opportunity for us to emphasize what the foundation does for the museums in Santa Fe,” Richardson says, “and to do so at an appropriate time, since we’re asking for community support for the museum.”

Catron applauds the ownership change. “That’s where it should have been all along,” he says.

Kate Nelson is managing editor of New Mexico Magazine and a freelance writer whose works include the artist’s biography Helen Hardin: A Straight Line Curved.

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.

Sacrifice Lost…and Found

New Mexico’s diverse, profuse role in World War I finally gets its due

By Dr. Devorah Romanek

BY DEVORAH ROMANEK

Only a few years before the United States joined the Great War as it was raging in Europe, New Mexico achieved statehood. (more…)

Dr. Devorah Romanek received her PhD in visual anthropology from University College London. She is an anthropologist and art historian and Curator of Exhibits at the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico. Daniel Kosharek is retired as photo curator at the New Mexico History Museum, Palace of the Governors, Santa Fe.