The Continuous Path

Pueblo Movement and Archaeology along the Northern Rio Grande

When Juan de Oñate journeyed north up the Rio Grande valley in the summer of 1598, he found, to his dismay, nobody at home. As the spearhead of a colonial expedition into the heart of the Pueblo province, Oñate had hoped to march into each village, secure its allegiance to the Crown and Christ, and gain valuable allies and material support for his newfound kingdom. Instead, as he passed though the Piro and many of the Tiwa-speaking Pueblos between Socorro and Albuquerque, he encountered villages that had all of the trappings of vibrant, thriving communities, but not a soul could be found amongst the courtyards or adobe houses, and the food stores were stripped bare. Where had the people gone?

The Pueblo people had been deeply scarred by Coronado’s expedition some half-century prior, and the blood and destruction of these early skirmishes with the Spaniards were seared in Pueblo social memory. As word traveled up the Rio Grande that yet another band of horsed and armored Spaniards were moving north, many Piro and Tiwa-speaking villagers decided to evade the invaders’ steel by simply leaving their homes. They packed their precious maize and belongings and joined their friends and families at other, more remote villages. For these Pueblo people, residential mobility was a form of resistance, and a strategy for survival.

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Archaeologists and anthropologists increasingly acknowledge that this fluidity of movement wasn’t a newfound strategy; it was instead part of an established tradition with deep roots in Pueblo culture. Historically the Pueblo people moved frequently to visit relatives, to participate in ceremonial practices, to engage in trade, and to conduct raids. Extensive social networks that allowed Pueblo people to join distant friends and relatives facilitated their mobility. Because of a continuous ebb and flow of people, communities continuously reformed. In fact, this pattern of fluidity was so pronounced that anthropologist Robin Fox once characterized the Pueblo people as “urbanized nomads.” By this, he meant that even though they have been practicing a village-based agricultural lifestyle for well over a millennium, they have constantly been on the move.

The Puebloans’ residential flexibility frustrated and bewildered the Spanish. They had assumed that the Puebloans, like the Europeans (and later, Americans), valued residential stasis; that their normal state of affairs was to settle down to make a home in a fixed placed for a long period of time. From the Spanish perspective, people only moved when they had to, often for dramatic reasons (drought, conflict, or the search for a better life). In fact, many archaeologists studying Pueblo history have also made this same assumption, and regarded instances of movement, such as the thirteenth-century migration of people from the Colorado Plateau to the northern Rio Grande valley, as an anomalous disruption of normal village life. Previously, archaeologists regarded these moves as adaptive responses to environmental and social stress, and they saw abandoned villages as parts of failed cultural systems. Archaeologist Severin Fowles has recently proposed that we begin to flip this idea on its head, to view Pueblo history as Pueblo people do, with the understanding that movement, rather than stasis, is the desired and normal way of life. Movement was the rule rather than the exception, and settling down in village life was simply a pause—a break—along a continuous path.

As two Anglo-American archaeologists committed to collaborative and indigenous archaeologies, we are intrigued by how Pueblo Indian perspectives can inform our research about the nature and significance of Pueblo mobility. How might Puebloan perspectives help us to rethink our historical views about movement and social being and becoming? How can we begin to write a Pueblo history that incorporates two often diverging viewpoints? Both of us have greatly benefited from our ongoing relationships with Pueblo Indian scholars and elders, and this essay is an attempt to share some of what we have learned.

The Tewa people, for example, regard all life as movement along a path or road, poeh in their language. Alfonso Ortiz, a noted anthropologist from Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo who taught at the University of New Mexico, wrote that at the beginning of life there is a single path for all people. At the initiation ceremony, the child begins upon one of two parallel paths associated with the Summer and Winter peoples (two complementary and coequal groups within the village). Upon death, the two paths come together and become one in the afterlife. The central importance of this path idea is commemorated by the name of the Poeh Center at Pojoaque Pueblo, and is the reason why the museum’s first exhibit was titled Nah Poeh Meng, or The Continuous Path.

This notion of a path is also a part of a Pueblo moral universe. It implies purposeful, directed movement and, at the same time, acknowledges the possibility of straying or getting lost and then re-finding one’s way. The late Esther Martinez, an elder at Ohkay Owingeh famous for her work on the teaching of language (recognized by the Esther Martinez Native American Language Preservation Act of 2006), described the core of her community life as sharing knowledge with the younger generation. She wrote, “People still come to my house wanting help with information for their college paper or wanting a storyteller. Young folks from the village, who were once my students in bilingual classes, will stop by for advice in traditional values or wanting me to give Indian names to their kids or grandkids. . . . This is my poeh [path]. I am still traveling.”

A number of Pueblo Indian scholars have shared their views on the role of mobility in Pueblo society. Tessie Naranjo, from Santa Clara Pueblo, states that movement is one of the “big ideological concepts” of Pueblo thought, because it is necessary for the perpetuation of life. She links the movement of people to the movement of clouds, wind, and rain, and regards them as one. Rina Swentzell, Tessie’s sister, elaborates on these ideas. She observes that ancestral Pueblo people did not settle in one place for a long time. They emulated the movement of the seasons, wind, clouds, and life cycles by moving frequently in response to floods, droughts, and social tensions. She writes, “the movement of the clouds told them how they should move on the ground,” and “their sense of home was in the space between the earth and sky and not within specific human constructions.” In this cosmology, when summer clouds build up in the afternoon and bring rain, they are bringing blessings from the ancestors. These blessings circulate through the village and back to the sacred mountains in the cardinal directions, and are honored by the dances that take place on a regular schedule in each Pueblo’s plaza.

Pueblo philosophy leads to the conclusion that the fluidity of movement in many scales and forms must serve as the foundation for all of Pueblo history. This has led us to reconsider the primacy of movement in understanding Pueblo history through two dramatic events: the formation of Pueblo worlds in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, and the ways in which Pueblos responded to Spanish colonization before and after the Pueblo Revolt. Our starting point is that Pueblo history is not only shaped by people coming together and moving apart, but also by creating unique identities and philosophies tied to moving through social and natural landscapes. And conversely, these philosophies mold the actions of Pueblo people throughout their dynamic histories and up to the present day.

Seeking The Middle Place

The Pueblo people know their own history. While each village’s history is unique, they all share similar origin traditions. The people emerged into this world from a lower world through a spring or lake in the north. They were then tasked with traveling south to find the middle place where they were to build their eventual homes. Along the way, the Pueblo people underwent a series of trials and adventures, and stopped multiple times on their journey. The ancient sites where they rested are often described as footprints. Once arriving at the middle place, the people, often of different backgrounds, established villages with their own unique identities. Some of these villages, such as Taos Pueblo, have been continuously occupied for over 700 years; others were only occupied for a single generation. The idea of movement, in this case migration and the coming together of different people, is therefore the crucial concept in Pueblo history. Movement shaped the history of the Pueblos.

Archaeologists, however, have only recently begun to accept that movement was and is much more the rule than the exception. While the timing, scale, and impact continue to be debated, many archaeologists working in the northern Rio Grande region now believe that migrations of people from the north, described in the Pueblo origin traditions, in some way contributed to the formation of villages and landscapes lived in and recognized by the Pueblo people today. One such migration was from southern Colorado and the Mesa Verde area in the thirteenth century. These people left their homes and joined their distant kin in the face of the disastrous environmental and social impacts of the Great Drought, which caused their crops to wither and die. But the Rio Grande region was already occupied by people who had lived there for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. The negotiations and eventual joining together of these migrant and indigenous Pueblo people catalyzed the creation of new cultural traditions that closely resemble those of the modern Pueblo people.

Acknowledging migration is only part of the story. Archaeologists are left with a number of questions, including: who were these people who came together and how did they negotiate their perhaps disparate social and ceremonial beliefs to create new societies? Sam’s research explores the history of the Tewa Pueblos, comprising six villages between Santa Fe and Española. In the Tewa origin tradition from Ohkay Owingeh the people emerged into this world through a lake in southern Colorado and were subsequently split into two groups, the Summer people and the Winter people, who were both were instructed to travel south to find the middle place. The Summer people traveled along the west side of the Rio Grande and the Winter people along the east at the flanks of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. After twelve stops (where they built villages and lived for a short while) the people came together in the Rio Chama valley and built the village of Posi’owingeh. It was there that they created something new—one village inhabited by two people who alternated leadership seasonally—that distinguishes the Tewa from other Pueblos. The Tewa lived at Posi for a long time, but eventually left and established the other Tewa villages along the Rio Grande and its tributaries.

The archaeological evidence for the settlement of the northern Rio Grande region appears to support the Tewa oral history of multiple groups of Pueblo people coming together to create new worlds in northern New Mexico. Archaeologist Scott Ortman proposes that thousands of migrants from the Mesa Verde region settled on the Pajarito Plateau (the landform now occupied by Bandelier National Monument) in the thirteenth century. Meanwhile, on the east side of the Rio Grande north of Santa Fe there is evidence of centuries of indigenous settlement. Perhaps these two distantly related groups of people are the basis for the Summer and Winter people, respectively, in the Tewa origin tradition.

According to the tradition from Ohkay Owingeh, the two people came together in the Rio Chama basin to eventually build the village of Posi’owingeh where they created a new Tewa society. Sam’s research shows that the Chama area was uninhabited until the thirteenth century, when it began to be settled by both migrant (Summer) and local (Winter) people. For approximately a half-century, these various people living in small villages must have negotiated their identities and beliefs. However, by the mid-fourteenth century, everyone had come together and began to build very large towns along the Chama and its tributaries. One such place was Posi’owingeh. Architectural analysis reveals that the site has two very large kivas (ceremonial structures), likely one for each group of people as they came together to establish a unified village. And the location of the village itself marks an important event in Tewa history. The site overlooks the Ojo Caliente hot springs, a local representation of the place of emergence. The people lived at Posi’owingeh and other villages for two centuries until they left the Chama and joined their relatives along the Rio Grande. But their descendants have never forgotten these places, and have, over the past four centuries, reengaged their history through visiting and caring for the land, and memorializing their past in story and song. For the Tewa these migrations shaped their cultural views and also allowed them to adapt to a changing environment and thrive in their middle places in northern New Mexico.

After the Revolt of 1680

The Pueblo world that was constructed and continually renegotiated through migration and the coalescence of disparate peoples was again transformed with the arrival of the Spaniards in 1598. The Spaniards introduced the mission system and the feudal practices of taxation (encomienda) and forced labor (repartimento). These practices restricted movement and created severe hardships for Pueblo families during a time when the crops were failing due to drought. In 1680, Pueblo people rose up in a coordinated attempt to overthrow Spanish rule. What followed was the perhaps the greatest reorganization of Pueblo people since the thirteenth-century migrations. Bob’s research has examined the social effects of this reorganization. His research, and that of his colleagues Matt Liebmann and Woody Aguilar, have identified a new kind of site, the mesa village, which served as a way station for people leaving their mission villages and moving to mountain camps.

When Diego de Vargas returned in his Spanish re-conquest of New Mexico of 1692, he found large groups of peoples had moved to villages on mesa tops for refuge in an unstable social situation. These groups almost never comprised an entire village, but rather consisted of some subset of individuals, likely extended families and clans. In some cases, disputes broke out within these communities, and people left to find new mesa homes. A good example of this is the San Felipe people, who quarreled with the Cochiti people and left the village of Kotyiti to establish their own mesa village, Old San Felipe. The San Felipe people later joined with Zia and Santa Ana peoples in allying with the Spaniards, and even assisted Vargas’ attack on Kotyiti. This period reveals a wholesale social reorganization, with political identity transcending village identity. The Pueblo people relied on their ancient philosophy of movement to navigate a changing social and physical landscape.

During this period, Po’pay and other Pueblo leaders initiated a cultural revitalization movement. According to some historical accounts, “the father of all the Indians, their great captain, who had been such since the world had been inundated” instructed Po’pay to tell the people to revolt, and if they would do so, “they would live as in ancient times, regaled like the religious and Spaniards, and would gather a great many provisions and everything they needed.” Here we see references to the biblical flood story, along with a god-the-father deity. Other references state that he had “the mandate of an Indian who lives a very long way from this kingdom, toward the north, from which region Montezuma came, and who is the lieutenant of Po he yemu; and that this person ordered all the Indians to take part in the treason and rebellion.” Poseyemu, Sun Youth, is a popular culture hero known to almost all the Pueblos.

The form and layout of many of the mesa villages exhibit standardization, implying a shared ideology. Four of the mesa villages, Kotyiti, Patokawa, Boletsakwa, and Cerro Colorado, share a common architectural plan. Bob has proposed that this village form is associated with the emergence of the cultural revitalization movement. The architecture can be seen as a cosmogram of sacred places and the homes of important deities of the Keresan and Towa Pueblos’ pantheon. At Kotyiti, the gateways between the houses likely referred to specific mythological places. For example, the gateway between the two northern roomblocks may have referenced the gate of Shipap, the place of emergence located to the north. In this way, village architecture would have participated in the popular Revolt-period ideology of living in accordance with the laws of the ancestors. Peoples would have reenacted their history as they moved through the gateways into the village.

Pueblo people laid the foundations of the modern Pueblo world during the thirteenth through sixteenth centuries, when they congregated in their villages along the Rio Grande. However, becoming Pueblo is an ongoing process, and the events of the historic period are critical in understanding the identities, organization, and lifeways of the Pueblos today. The movements that followed the Pueblo Revolts of 1680 and 1696 set the social character for the modern villages. Pueblo people are likely to have relatives in many different villages. Movement enabled the Pueblos to be flexible in the face of dramatic environmental, social, and historical changes.

Always Becoming

Most people engage with the Pueblo past by visiting ancient villages and ponder what life would have been like centuries ago. We can imagine smoke rising from kivas, turkeys and children running through plazas, women crafting beautiful pottery, and families working the fields. The village is a vibrant and central place—the literal middle of the world—where people come together, regardless of their individual journeys, to strive for balance and harmony. But when we begin to think about the fluid nature of Pueblo life, we can start to imagine how these places were transitory, and always in a state of becoming. The village is simply a stop on a long and ongoing journey, where people with diverse histories look forward to an unknown, but hopeful, future.

As archaeologists, we are starting to take the long view of Pueblo history to understand the Pueblo past as a historical process that is ever changing, but one that shows striking continuity and persistence through the centuries. We are collaborating with our Pueblo colleagues to better appreciate the multiple dimensions in which they conceptualize movement. And this processes of movement is never complete, for today Pueblo people move frequently between their villages to socialize, for feast days, marriages, and baseball games. They also attend universities, serve in the military, and work in major cities. In short, the same concepts of movement that guided the actions of Pueblo people in the past continue into the present, and will do so into the future.

Robert Preucel is the director of the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology and a professor in the Department of Anthropology at Brown University. Samuel Duwe is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Oklahoma.

Robert Preucel (opens in a new tab) is James Manning Professor of Anthropology and director of the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology at Brown University. He joined the Brown faculty in 2013 after holding positions in the Departments of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania and Harvard University.

Samuel Duwe is an assistant professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Oklahoma. He holds a BA from the University of Michigan and a PhD from the Univeristy of Arizona. Samuel focuses on integrating archaeology, oral history, ethnography, and historical documents to understand the development of worldview and society.

Manson’s Mission

Once upon a time, Charles Manson prowled New Mexico’s counterculture scene in search of free digs and devotees. A former communard reveals her close call.

By Denise Lassaw

BY DENISE LASSAW

In 1967, I turned twenty-two years old at New Buffalo in Arroyo Hondo. I loved living in tipis and working outside with other people. We shared a vision of a future on the land that was empowering and spiritual.

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Denise Lassaw grew up in the New York art world and later lived and traveled many places including Mongolia, India, Nepal, Europe, California, and New Mexico.

The House of Mirth

Living with the itinerant genre of tramp art

By Kate Russell and Les Daly

BY LES DALY

Meet James Holmes, “Compulsive Artistic Humorist.” That wouldn’t all be on his business card, of course. But if he had a full-disclosure card, it could legitimately say, at least, “Sculptor, artist, woodworker, cabinet-maker.” Maybe “art on impulse.” Maybe “collector of the curious.” And on the other side, a view into his whimsical mind: a full-sized pie, the kind Mother used to make, except Holmes crafted his in detail from sheet-lead, patterned in the crust, scalloped at the edge, with a servable slice. A feather sticks out of the crust, for no known reason. When asked about it, he responds, “How would I know? It made sense to me.”

Holmes laughs a lot. At himself, at his work, and at the world around him. Born 67 years ago and bred deep in the heart of Kansas, he speaks with an earthy native flavor, well fertilized by years of laughing, talking, and telling stories with acceptable exaggeration. He is customarily clad in denim, with legitimately scuffed boots and one of his many weathered cowboy hats. He resembles both Mark Twain and Will Rogers.

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That pie? He made a sweet, wooden, screened portable pie carrier as a Christmas gift for his wife one year. Then he thought, “I’ve got a pie carrier, got to make a pie.” He’s now baked about twenty in different shapes, materials, and flavors, among them wood, metal, linoleum, and other secret ingredients. “Why not?” he laughs. “I like pies. Everybody likes pies.” To Holmes, that’s enough.

Holmes is a committed, joyful collector of mostly twentieth-century art pieces, from the twenties and the thirties, the quirkier the better. “I like weird stuff—weird and different,” he proudly admits. He and his wife, Susan, a talented graphic artist and musician with apparently infinite good humor, live south of Santa Fe “beyond the state prison, behind the feed store, down about a mile.” Their house is comfortably alive with more than a hundred pieces of popular art they have discovered—sometimes just curious stuff, most often odd, overlooked, and undervalued by others. They take “aimless” driving trips to prowl flea markets, garage sales, and barn declutterings.

He can’t resist recalling a flea market in Wichita where he came across an imposing tramp art picture frame: gold-hued wood finely made in that carefully notched and layered style. It simply presented a cheap magazine picture of the Mona Lisa, but it was the hand-carved frame that captured him.

“When I told the woman I might like to buy it,” he mirthfully remembers, “she said, ‘Yes, of course. It is a lovely picture.’” He paid her $50. Mona Lisa, in her frame, still lives with the Holmeses, and still smiles about it, too.

Almost countless in their collection are tramp art picture frames and little wooden boxes frequently somewhat pyramidal, often with tiny drawers and hidden compartments.

His mother, a school librarian, gave him his first tramp art box when he was twenty. As with much tramp art, she couldn’t quite say what it was or where it originated. Neither could he—a sewing box, maybe—but he liked it. He keeps it still, near his workbench. To fill out the picture of his original-minded family, he remarks his father was “a civil rights lawyer before the term became well-enough known in Wichita to be disliked.” He cherishes a letter to his grandfather from legendary Emporia, Kansas editor William Allen White, vowing to fight the Ku Klux Klan.

The discovery of that letter among the family papers inspired Holmes to produce a fierce, notched, symbolic sculpture of a large, burned wooden cross bearing tiny figures of a hated hooded Klansman, a charred church, a black crow hanging from a noose. It is displayed prominently in his home.

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Tramp art, for the not yet initiated, is kind of a curiosity in the art world. The name may have a restless, open-road Americana flavor. But in fact, the style migrated from Europe in the nineteenth century and was seldom made by tramps or hobos or itinerants. Rather, the vast majority of so-called tramp art pieces were turned out closer to home by men often after a day working in factories or shops or on farms, or keeping busy between jobs. Most of it is made from wood tossed away after some other life, and is undated and unsigned.

When tramp art is found in attics or private homes, its true genealogy is, at best, speculative, depending largely on family lore. “Sometimes family lore is wrong,” remarks Laura M. Addison, curator of North American and European Folk Art at Santa Fe’s Museum of International Folk Art, “but still it’s family lore.” People, she adds bemusedly, “respond to a story of tramp art, no matter how untrue and romanticized it might be.”

Addison sums up the scope of the genre and the exhibition in the associated book No Idle Hands: The Myths and Meanings of Tramp Art (Museum of New Mexico Press). “The objects made were boxes, frames, clock cases, wall pockets and a variety of other household objects—including crosses and other objects of devotion, patriotic expressions, architectural models, whimsies, and an occasional thermometer, bank, satchel, or piece of furniture.” Some people think it is overwrought, too busy and gaudy, she admits. “The people who like it love the woodwork and all the small compartments, even though they may have no function.” Or, perhaps, because.

With a refreshing whimsy of her own, she conceived of and produced a large exhibition about tramp art, an art form she calls “tongue-in-cheek sculpture, with an enigmatic function. Or no function.” Fittingly, whimsy is also a term used to describe little pieces, sometimes complex, with no real purpose in life but to be charming and puzzling.

Holmes could be the poster man for No Idle Hands; his hands are unafflicted by idleness, and the man attached to them is both impulsive and compulsive about producing something whenever the mood strikes him. He is seemingly never more than a thought away from turning out another pie of the day or some equally peculiar object, perhaps impossible for a conventional mind to imagine, but easy later to admire for its ingenuity. A description for an exhibition of Holmes’ work at the Phil Space Gallery a while ago said his pieces “are beautiful and elegant in their construction and interplay of surfaces while being humorous, serious, and incisive at the same time.” That spans a lot. But to illustrate, consider the garfish.

A dedicated sculptor, Holmes fashioned a smooth, detailed, two-foot long garfish out of a piece of white pine. A dedicated fly fisherman, he carefully gutted it. A dedicated humorist, he stuffed it with a compartmentalized wooden case neatly fitted to house a three-piece pool cue he invented with a swiveling tip “for shooting around corners.” Since the garfish is a bottom feeder of no great renown, Holmes explains, “I thought calling it a pool garfish was more accurate for me than calling it a pool shark.” He used the cue only once. “They let me win.”

The line between fine art and folk art, of which tramp art is a part, is quite clearly drawn. In sum, fine art is a trained discipline. Folk art generally emerges from the traditions and culture of a community. Holmes is formally trained with a fine arts degree from the University of Kansas and a master’s degree in sculpture from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. He takes it seriously, with deserved pride.

“I’m not a folk artist or a tramp artist,” he points out. “I’m a trained artist, a sculptor, a cabinetmaker. I use that training in my work. When I make art, it’s because I have an idea and an image I want to convey. I love wood. But I like to work in different styles with various and sundry materials, sort of a gourmand, not a gourmet,” he says, waving at piles of scrap wood, sheet lead, an array of linoleum shards around his workshop. He likes linoleum because it is colorful and has always been cheap, making it well suited for low-cost creativity. “I have the definitive collection of old linoleum in the world,” he enthuses, as if there might be a competitor. “I just made that up, but I’m sticking to it.”

One of the unexpected high spots of No Idle Hands is Holmes’ tramp art iron, a smile-provoking little creation of notched layers of brilliant yellow shellacked pine, with a walnut handle and an aluminum base plate. “I don’t like ironing, I just like irons,” he says.

“You start doing something like that, and the next thing you know, you’ve spent six hours at it,” he says. “It’s absolutely a compulsive art. You don’t have a manual to work from. It’s all between the ears. There are no rules.”

And with no rules there are happy accidents. Holmes calls them part of the creative process. “You do something, and you think, ‘That’s kind of weird.’ Then all of a sudden, you look at it again, and you take a left turn. Or a right turn.”

He goes on, excitedly, his thoughts notching into the creative experience. “I’ve never seen a drawing for a piece, or a set of plans. This is definitely pre-computer work. I’ve also never seen a piece of abstract tramp art,” he adds.

Three items from the Holmes home collection are on loan to the exhibition. One, of course, is Mona Lisa and her tramp art frame. Another is a large wall piece with at least seven obvious and several secret drawers. Concealed compartments are often a characteristic of tramp art. Think runaway, purposeless creativity. Think also they are probably a great place to lose your keys.

He concedes that with all that detail, mistakes are made; there’s too much “notch-notch-notch” not to make some. “Elmer’s glue is how the world is held together. That and duct tape.”

He says he spent years trying to find a Santa Fe gallery that would be interested enough to show his idiosyncratic work, with no success. “Then, finally, one agreed. We sold eighteen out of twenty-four pieces,” he says, with dry satisfaction.

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Holmes’ artistic role models are H.C. Westermann and Marcel Duchamp. Westermann, it turns out, is a deceased, lesser-known American post-war artist. For a retrospective Westermann show in New York a year ago, Verve Gallery wrote, “he stands alone as an eccentric art world maverick.” Better-known French-American Duchamp stands alone by his urinal.

For his tramp-style fine art, Holmes works pretty much the way earlier whittlers and notchers did. He relies on a carver’s knife, an inexpensive razor saw like the ones model makers use, occasionally a chisel. A while ago, after decades of wood-working this way, he moved to his version of “advanced technology” (though he doesn’t yet use e-mail). He built a small wooden trough about two feet long to hold the pieces of soft wood as he notched them. He can carry it under his arm, like tramp artists might have done, had they thought of it. “Tradition is, you hold the wood in your hand for notching. Tradition cut my fingers a lot.”

Holmes doesn’t often deal in human figures. But, there in his workshop, with that whitening hair pursuing his white mustache and light beard, quietly contemplating through his glasses a chunk of old wood, little knife in hand, preparing to create, carve, notch, and shape it into something affectionately memorable, James Holmes’ charming creative muse comes inevitably into view. Geppetto.

Les Daly has reported for such publications as Smithsonian and the Atlantic, and frequently on a variety of interesting people and subjects for El Palacio.

You can read Laura M. Addison’s recent El Palacio article on the exhibition No Idle Hands at bit.ly/tramp_art.

Kate Russell (opens in a new tab) is a photographer. She lives in Santa Fe.

Les Daly has reported for such publications as Smithsonian and The Atlantic, and frequently on a variety of interesting people and subjects for El Palacio magazine.

Radio Killed the Sheet Music Star

The golden age of DIY music enjoyment is back for an encore at the New Mexico History Museum

By Meredith Davidson

BY MEREDITH DAVIDSON AND JAMES M. KELLER

Before radio and television, when making music at home was the evening’s entertainment and playing the piano was considered an essential talent among the middle class, sheet music was the music consumer’s gateway to the world. The New Mexico History Museum celebrates this era with sheet music of popular songs about the State of New Mexico, dating from the 1840s to 1960, in the new exhibition The Land that Enchants Me So: Picturing Popular Songs of New Mexico (opens March 2, 2018). The show spotlights graphically striking sheet music covers from the era, along with other printed materials, sound recordings, and memorabilia relating to New Mexico and its musical life. Co-curators Meredith Davidson and James Keller sat down to share more about the exhibit’s process and materials with our readers.

MD: What makes this exhibition significant?

JK: Popular music doesn’t automatically spring to mind when one thinks about historical documents, but these songs really can tell us how people who sang and played them viewed their world. In that sense, popular song was a form of media during its golden years. At the turn of the twentieth century, everybody sang and many people played the piano; more pianos were sold in the U.S. in 1899 than any other year in our history. A piano was an essential part of a well-appointed home. With the introduction of sound recording, sheet music gradually became less important, and music lovers increasingly became listeners rather than performers. They didn’t have to make their own music, and they became more passive in their relationships to songs. Still, recordings and sheet music coexisted happily through the 1920s until the advent of radio, which signaled the end of the golden age for the sheet music industry. Of course, music continued to be published after that, but it became less compelling as a visual object.

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MD: Your interest in music is certainly a life passion, but the popular sheet music you’ve acquired over the years seems less directly tied to your professional background, which is in classical music. How did you come to start collecting, and what have you been able to do with the materials so far?

JK: The story really begins on an airport runway in Missouri. In the late 1980s, I was living in New York City and doing some musical direction for a New Jersey-based theater company that specialized in shows relating to historical Americana. On the plane after a Missouri performance, the company’s director said to me, “I wonder if there were any songs written about New Jersey. It would be great to do an historical revue of songs about the state.” We guessed there might be a couple, but never enough to do a whole show. But the idea lodged in my mind; about 150 songs later, I had uncovered way more than enough to mount a show called The Garden State Songbook, which also took the form of an art exhibit in New Jersey.

Once bitten by the regional song bug, I got interested in songs about American places everywhere. Since then, the collection has grown to be quite large. In 2012, I mounted a substantial exhibition on the history of California as seen through popular songs. It ran for more than a year in San Francisco, and then toured to regional museums throughout that state. I’ve lived in New Mexico for several decades, so naturally when I came here I started collecting pieces about the Southwest. Now New Mexico gets its turn to shine. The New Mexico History Museum’s exhibit focuses on printed sheet music covers, but also includes period audio recordings, and even some film clips highlighting our state.

MD: What does the term popular music mean to you and how are we defining it within the exhibit?

JK: I think of popular music as distinct from either classical or folk music. These are songs or instrumental pieces, composed by identified composers who use a musical and poetic vocabulary that is easily accessible to all listeners.

MD: What would be a good example of a song that really did catch on?

JK: The earliest successful New Mexico–related song is “Navajo,” published in 1903. It was the breakthrough hit for composer Egbert Van Alstyne and lyricist Harry Williams—two vaudevillians. The lyrics begin, “Down on the sand hills of New Mexico.” This was one of the best-selling songs, nationally, of 1904. It was recorded by multiple artists, and released in several editions, and it launched Van Alstyne on a path of composing many songs on Southwestern themes.

MD: Those covers are some of the most visually stunning in the show; Tin Pan Alley publishers seem to have understood the value of catching people’s attention.

JK: The term Tin Pan Alley came into being around the turn of the twentieth century. It referred specifically to the music publishers clustered in a single neighborhood in New York City. A songwriter remarked that the chaotic noise of all the pianos playing at once made the street sound like a tin pan alley. The name became so well-known that people began using it to refer to the popular music industry in general. The field reached its high point in the period of the 1890s to the 1920s, and during that time, music publishers, just like book publishers, knew the power of a beautiful cover for luring in potential buyers. In the nineteenth century, they used creative typography, and then around the turn of the century, they commissioned artists to paint scenes depicting whatever the song was about: cowboys, beautiful landscapes, comical images. Quite a few covers in our exhibition are the work of artists who became specialists in sheet music illustration: very accomplished artists and designers whose full-color covers contributed to the sales success of these pieces.

MD: Another set of songs follows the popularity of the nineteenth-century novel Ben-Hur. The book was written by New Mexico’s governor at the time, Lew Wallace, presumably in the Palace of the Governors.

JK: It became the best-selling novel of the nineteenth century, surpassing Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and it remained the best-selling novel in the United States until it was, in turn, toppled by Gone with the Wind. We include several pieces of sheet music directly inspired by the narrative and characters of that novel. One of them was a big success: Chariot Race or Ben Hur March by composer E.T. Paull, who published his march with a detailed color cover that set a new standard for sheet music aesthetics. Even today, many people will recognize this as an old-fashioned circus march, but it was originally created to depict the famous chariot race in which Ben-Hur vanquished his Roman rival.

MD: While many of the works were issued by major publishers in New York or Chicago, what I find most charming in the show are those that were published locally, or those highlighting a specific detail of a place. Many of the songs were written by people who may have never set foot in the state, so they often reflect generic Southwestern ideas, but the local pieces are so charming because they highlight areas we know and love.

JK: We include a number of pieces that relate to New Mexico communities and cities. Often these were self-published by their authors. Through the middle of the twentieth century, you could send your song to a company that would set it in musical type for a fee, and print maybe a hundred copies, making anybody a potential music publisher. There is something heartwarming about realizing that a local music teacher or church organist composed a piece to celebrate his or her own town, be it Ruidoso or Carlsbad or Aztec. These songs convey a palpable sense of local pride.

MD: When you first approached the museum, you said there was a particularly rare gem in your collection. Could you share more about our prized piece in the show?

JK: Our official state song is “O, Fair New Mexico,” by Elizabeth Garrett, who was the daughter of Pat Garrett, the Lincoln County sheriff famous for shooting Billy the Kid. Elizabeth grew up as a typical ranch girl in southern New Mexico, although she was blind practically from birth. Her parents decided that she would not be raised differently from her siblings, and as a result, she grew up to be an absolutely remarkable woman. She excelled in music, and became an accomplished pianist. She traveled to Chicago to study voice; she spent time in New York, where she cultivated a close friendship with Helen Keller; and became one of the first people to employ a seeing-eye dog. She moved back to New Mexico, and was a valued member of the state’s musical community until her death in 1947.

We are grateful to be able to share with the public a hitherto unknown phonograph recording of Elizabeth Garrett singing “O, Fair New Mexico.” So far as we know, it is the only copy in existence. She made it in 1924 in Chicago at the studio of Marsh Laboratories, a pioneer in the newly devised electrical method of recording. Marsh made some of the earliest recordings of musicians who became important jazz figures, like King Oliver and Jelly Roll Morton, but it also served as a sort of vanity label. You could walk in and make your own recording and leave with a copy of it. That’s what we think happened here.

I was unbelievably lucky to acquire this record. Several years ago, I ran across an online auction catalog from a dealer in Germany who specialized in rare 78-rpm records. It listed “O, Fair New Mexico” on the Autograph label, which I recognized as a division of Marsh. But the auction had taken place almost a year before. Nevertheless, I sent an email to the dealer asking if he remembered any details about this record. He wrote back to say that, in fact, someone had bought the record in that auction, but he never received payment and therefore still had the record in his possession. He offered to sell it to me if I wanted it—which I did! Not until it arrived did I see the label, which lists the performer as Elizabeth Garrett. This was a find of immeasurable importance for the musical history of New Mexico.

MD: We had the pleasure of getting to play it with a friend of the museum, Andy Baron, who is a specialist in early recording technology. In an intimate listening session, he played the record on different early phonographs with different kinds of needles. What stood out in your mind about the recording itself?

JK: I found it thrilling. To actually hear the voice of this woman singing ninety years ago was a deeply moving experience. She never achieved a national career as a singer, but she was very accomplished. She had a well-trained voice produced in the manner of an opera singer. In New Mexico, she was constantly in demand as a recitalist, and it is easy to understand why.

MD: I was surprised by the quantity of songs that were available to choose from—more than a hundred.

JK: I’m surprised by it too! Those of us who live here are well aware that we are a corner of the country that is often overlooked—which may not be a bad thing—but the fact is that during the decades when people loved to sing, they sang about New Mexico just as they sang about everything else. This exhibition reminds us of a time when people felt that the place where they lived was something to sing about.

Meredith Davidson is the curator of 19th- and 20th-Century Southwest Collections at the New Mexico History Museum. Musicologist James M. Keller is the long-time program annotator of the New York Philharmonic and the San Francisco Symphony and is a journalist on the staff of Pasatiempo /The Santa Fe New Mexican.

Meredith Davidson is a former curator of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Southwest Collections at the New Mexico History Museum. She also edited the book Voices of Counterculture in the Southwest (Museum of New Mexico Press) by author Jack Loeffler.

Opening the Doors to Closure

This second article in the Project Indigene series focuses on Edilberto Jiménez Quispe, and one of his most significant works

By Amy Groleau

BY AMY GROLEAU | TRANSLATED, FROM THE SPANISH, BY STEPHANIE RIGGS AND AMY GROLEAU

At the height of the violence of Peru’s Internal Armed Conflict in the late 1980s, Edilberto Jiménez Quispe (Quechua) created a series of singular works giving testimony to the atrocities being experienced in his home region of Ayacucho. Using the art form passed down from his parents, Edilberto created scenes in miniature with potato flour and plaster, filling decorative boxes known as retablos with truths that were being suppressed in journalistic outlets.

Retablos are perhaps the most famous of Peruvian folk arts: brightly painted boxes with triangular pediments and hinged doors that open to reveal festive scenes of village life in the Andean highlands. The history of this art form begins with portable altars. In a blending of Catholic and Andean religions, boxes containing the figure of a saint were brought out to the fields as part of agricultural rituals, especially the herranza festival, when owners branded their animals. It came to be known as a Cajón Sanmarcos, or St. Mark Box, named after the patron saint of cattle. Often containing two floors, in older retablos the top level represented the heavenly world, or hanan pacha, which was the domain of the saints. The lower register contained the earthly world, kay pacha, with villagers and their livestock.

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Peru’s Ayacucho region is home to some of the most famous retablo makers, including the Jiménez family. Hailing from the Alcamenca district of Ayacucho, 10,500 feet above sea level, Edilberto’s parents, artisans and farmers Florentino Jiménez Toma and Amalia Quispe Sulcaray, produced retablos in the Sanmarcos tradition, and trained their seven children, including Edilberto, in the art. A religious man, Florentino’s work retained traditional themes of saints, while mixing in new scenes of indigenous customs and folklore.

Folk art enthusiasts began collecting retablos in the 1940s. By the 1950s, artisans had shifted from primarily making retablos for their community members to producing large quantities with international markets in mind. With new clients came new themes, and the scenes inside the boxes changed to accommodate external tastes. Retablos became bigger and more secular, favoring festival scenes and idyllic images of highland Quechua culture. In 1959, Neiman Marcus ordered dozens of retablos through Lima gallerist John Davis for their Dallas store’s Fortnight celebration of South America. The batch Davis sent to the United States included both conservative depictions of saints by Joaquín López Antay, and raucous festival scenes by Jesús Urbano Rojas.

While also depicting festivals and folklore, the Jiménez family pushed their designs in the direction of social commentary. This was especially the case for sons Nicario and Edilberto, whose work became more overtly political with the bloody conflict between the Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path) militants and the Peruvian Armed Forces that began in 1980 and ended in 2000. Edilberto studied anthropology at the Universidad Nacional de San Cristóbal de Huamanga in Ayacucho and also worked as a journalist. His unique background as an ethnographer, journalist, neighbor, and artist distinguishes his work on the Internal Armed Conflict.

During the 1980s, Edilberto created a series of retablos depicting veiled and overt stories of war. Literal depictions include a retablo showing the humanitarian work of the International Red Cross, while others were more allegorical, showing green parrots (military forces) decimating the crops (livelihoods) of highland villagers. One piece in particular marked a pivot in Edilberto’s color palette and the graphic depiction of violence suffered: Sueño de la Mujer Huamanguina, or Dream of the Woman from Huamanga, created in 1988. (Huamanga is another name for the city of Ayacucho.) It highlights the plight of women, and was inspired by the women who formed ANFASEP, the National Association of Families of the Kidnapped, Detained, and Disappeared of Peru.

In the spring of 2017, the Museum of International Folk Art commissioned a replica of this important piece, and the following is excerpted from an interview with Edilberto Jiménez Quispe in his workshop in San Juan Lurigancho, Lima, in April of 2017.

“During the time of violence, I made many works that represent its dramatic scenes, including The Dream of the Woman from Huamanga. I lived through it. I would hear how the women asked for help. I would see women walking from one police station to the other, looking for their relatives. I have seen so many, sitting, begging at the doors of the court of justice, desperate to know how their detained relatives are. Are they alive or are they not alive? I think that women have experienced the worst political violence; they have suffered very much. In this retablo, you see a woman under a hill, in a cave full of gold and silver. She’s asleep on top of a pool of blood, but in her dreams, she is dreaming about her beloved who is being arrested, jailed, killed, and then cast away. In Ayacucho, there are many places, like at the Infiernillo, and Puracuti, where people were tossed away after being assassinated. Family members looked for them there, and sometimes would find remains, like clothing, or only skeletons, or sometimes they would find nothing, or they would find animals, like dogs, or buzzards, eating the bodies.

“The European God, the Lord, the Eternal Father, is compassionately sending the archangel to recover the soul that is in the ravine, and taking him to heaven. The Andean Gods, the Sun and the Moon, are seeing this scene and crying.

“The colors in this retablo are symbolic. I used black because at the time, the women and families dressed in black. Every day, they would bring the dead to the cemetery, sometimes accompanied by many family members and sometimes just a few people. There was black in the streets of Huamanga; everyone and everything was in mourning. I also used black to represent the people’s desperation as they asked for help. Sometimes, they would take out white flags to represent the desire for peace. That’s why I painted white flowers over the black background. In the midst of these white flowers is another symbol: the hummingbird. In the Andes, the hummingbird is the messenger who goes to the Andean God to advise him what is happening. It is the messenger. Like the women, the hummingbird is desperate to tell the news. Its beak is like a trumpet.”

(Interview was translated, from the Spanish, by Susan Howard, with Stephanie Riggs.)

It was particularly dangerous for Edilberto to criticize the military during this time. The armed forces routinely “disappeared” people, pulling them from their houses to question them about their Shining Path activity. They were never seen again.

Simultaneously, Shining Path made examples of those suspected of being soplones, or informants, to the military by barbaric methods: hanging, drowning, decapitation. Even today, the act of displaying artwork in Peru that shows human rights violations committed by the military carries risk.

Although the independent Truth and Reconciliation Commission determined that one third of the nearly 70,000 deaths during the Internal Armed Conflict were caused by the armed forces, congress members of the political party Fuerza Popular, who back the former president Alberto Fujimori, accuse ANFASEP’s Museo de la Memoria of being Sendero Luminoso apologists for showing such artwork.

Here in New Mexico, we recognized the explicitly violent content as a display challenge. In response to concerns that Crafting Memory visitors with young children might not want them to see these images, we created a separate gallery within the main gallery, where all war-themed artwork is on display in the exhibition. The signs alerting visitors to graphic content also allow those who lived through this conflict to decide if they want to directly engage with this material.

Edilberto currently lives in Lima, where he continues to create retablos, write, and advocate for human rights in Peru. Additionally, he has worked with rural communities as part of an agricultural development NGO, was a member of the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, and was a member of the advisory team for the human rights organization Apoyo Para la Paz (Aid for Peace).

In 2005, he authored the book Chungui: Violence and the Traces of Memory, in which he created line drawings to illustrate the testimony of members of the community of Chungui, a district where nearly twenty percent of its population was killed during the war.

El Sueño de la Mujer Huamanguina and other works are on display as part of the exhibition Crafting Memory: The Art of Community in Peru through March 10, 2019.

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.

Outside the Frame

By Hannah Abelbeck

BY HANNAH ABELBECK

Carl Newland Werntz was a painter, fine arts photographer, advertiser, illustrator, cartoonist, world traveler, and educator from Illinois. Trained at the Art Institute of Chicago, he founded a rival school, the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, in 1902. He likely took this photograph prior to that, while traveling in the Southwest.

Unlike in more common, stiffly posed portraits of the era, Werntz’s subject steps forward with care and deliberate grace, her burden basket behind her as she moves across a vague space. Yet, this single, mediated image has wider implications. Other prints made from the original negative reveal that Werntz photographed the young woman in a building with wooden floors and framed doors, perhaps at Fort Apache. In those copies, you can see through a doorway behind the girl, into another room lit brightly by a window. For this particular print, Werntz instead closely cropped the image and printed it in soft focus, a reflection of his pictorialist sensibilities. Many non-Native photographers working in this style depicted Native American subjects symbolically: as a timeless, idyllic people, as a “vanishing race,” or, in this case, as a metaphor for time: an innocent girl at the brink of the nineteenth century, stepping into an uncertain future as an adult of the twentieth. However, this interpretation more likely betrays Werntz’s perspective than hers.

For another perspective, visit the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture’s most recent exhibition, Lifeways of the Southern Athabaskans, curated by Joyce Begay (Diné). It contains not only photographs, but material objects created by southwestern Apache groups including moccasins, baskets, pottery, and tools, which help Native and non-Native people today understand the lived experiences of historical Athabaskan-speaking people. These rarely seen objects represent their creators’ ways of knowing, and express their observations, their expertise, their artistry, and their innovations—from their own perspectives.

Hannah Abelbeck is the digital imaging archivist at the Photo Archives of the New Mexico History Museum/Palace of the Governors. The archives can be searched online (with the option of ordering prints) at palaceofthegovernors.org/photoarchives.html.

Hannah Abelbeck (opens in a new tab) is the photo archivist in the Palace of the Governors Photo Archives at the New Mexico History Museum and is actively working to increase access to its photographic collections.

They Came to Heal and Stayed to Paint

The artists, their boss, and the gallery

By Nancy Owen Lewis (1945-2022)

“The people in this part of the country have about as much use for an artist as their burros have for a fiddler’s midsummer night’s dream,”

complained Carlos Vierra in a letter sent to his sister on August 15, 1904. Vierra, who had studied art at Mark Hopkins Institute in San Francisco, came to New Mexico not to paint, but to heal from a deadly disease. Born in Moss Landing, California, to Portuguese immigrants, Vierra had been working as a marine illustrator in New York City when he developed tuberculosis. Seeking a healthier climate, he moved to Pecos, seventeen miles southeast of Santa Fe, where a family acquaintance owned a ranch. “I expect to stay here two or three months,” he told his mother, hoping a rugged outdoor life would restore his health.

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A handful of artists formed Santa Fe’s art colony in the early 1900s. Like Vierra, they originally came to New Mexico not to paint but to heal from tuberculosis, the leading cause of death in America at the time. As a result, it followed a very different trajectory than the art colony at Taos. Artists Ernest Blumenschein and Bert G. Phillips, who “discovered” Taos in 1898 after their wagon threw a wheel outside town, had been trained at the Académie Julian in Paris, along with four of the six original members of the Taos Society of Artists, founded in 1915.

In contrast, Santa Fe’s art colony developed in tandem with the health-seeker movement. Carlos Vierra, Gerald Cassidy, Sheldon Parsons, and Kenneth Chapman attended different art schools. Their careers also differed. Prior to their arrival in New Mexico, the first three worked in New York City, while Chapman worked at an engraving studio in Milwaukee.

The first (mostly) Anglo artists to establish permanent roots in Santa Fe would play a key role in what became the New Mexico Museum of Art. At the time of their arrival, however, Santa Fe was a town of scarcely 5,000 people. It had “no paved streets, no automobiles, and one sewer line,” noted Gerald’s wife, Ina Sizer Cassidy. “A passenger could ride all over town in a horse-drawn taxi for a quarter.”

As the terminus of the Santa Fe Trail, Santa Fe had once been the largest, most important settlement in the territory. In 1878, the railroad changed that. Unlike Albuquerque and Las Vegas, the territorial capital lay in a steep basin unsuitable for the main track. Within the next thirty years, New Mexico’s population doubled, while Santa Fe’s shrank by nearly twenty-five percent.

To attract visitors, local leaders promoted Santa Fe as a tuberculosis health resort. Although Robert Koch discovered the tubercle bacillus in 1882, effective drugs would not come into play until the 1940s. During the intervening years, the only medically approved recourse was nutritious food, fresh air, and rest, preferably in a high, dry, and sunny climate. Even within its railroad-unfriendly basin, Santa Fe’s elevation still clocked in at a formidable 7,000 feet. City boosters touted its therapeutic properties in local pamphlets, describing Santa Fe as the “queen of health resorts.”

Despite this puffery, Santa Fe offered few amenities. But upon recovery, all four artists chose to remain. They likely feared relapse. As Chapman explained, “I have regained my health in New Mexico, and experience had taught me not to risk leaving the Southwest.” But there was another compelling reason: Edgar Lee Hewett, founding director of the School of American Archaeology and Museum of New Mexico, provided studio space, hosted exhibits of their work, and gave them jobs.

Tuberculosis had also brought Hewett to New Mexico. He was teaching in Colorado when his wife, Cora, became ill. Hoping that fresh air would heal her lungs, he put her in a camp wagon and toured New Mexico. In 1898, he became president of New Mexico Normal University, now Highlands University. Sadly, shortly after his five-year contract ended, Cora died of TB. But by that time, Hewett had developed a passion for Southwest archaeology. In 1907, the Archaeological Institute of America appointed him director of the School of American Archaeology. The Institute hoped its newest school would professionalize a discipline whose practitioners seemed more concerned with museum collections than scientific research.

The first thing that Hewett did, however, was establish a museum. In 1909, the Territorial Legislature granted Hewett approval to establish the Museum of New Mexico and to house both institutions in the Palace of the Governors. Hewett trained students and excavated sites, but instead of scientific studies, he aimed his publications at a popular audience. Colleagues complained that he was more of a promoter than a scientist. Involving art, however, enabled him to do both. Under his direction, the Palace of the Governors hosted exhibits and provided studio space. As he explained, “We find that from the peoples of the past it is mainly their fine arts that have survived. Art is the great, lasting, self-revealing activity of life. Through it we transmit our spiritual power through the ages.”

Trained at the Art Institute in Chicago, Kenneth Chapman began experiencing pulmonary problems while employed at an engraving studio in Milwaukee. An acquaintance recommended New Mexico to Chapman after returning from the area “fit as a fiddle.” The 1899 move proved beneficial, for Chapman recovered his health and also met Hewett, then president of New Mexico Normal University, who offered him a job teaching art. A decade later, Hewett, now director of the School and Museum in Santa Fe, hired Chapman as secretary, illustrator, and manager of the artifact collections. This led Chapman to become intrigued by the symbols on pottery fragments, and he soon embarked on a study of design motifs.

In 1912, after eight arduous years in Santa Fe, Carlos Vierra joined Hewett’s staff. As he explained to his mother, “When I stop to think of the useless years I have had to live in such a country as this with so many things against me, I sometimes wonder why I am still alive.” In 1905, he had purchased a photography studio, but sold it a few years later, as the indoor work nearly killed him. Although still interested in photography, he had developed a new passion. At a time when popular American styles had begun to replace traditional adobe architecture, Vierra joined other staff members to reverse this trend.

Appointed director of exhibits for the 1915 Panama–California Exposition in San Diego, Hewett employed Santa Fe artists to help with the event. Vierra installed murals depicting six Maya cities, five of which he painted at his studio at the Palace of the Governors, where they were shown to the public before being shipped to San Diego. Chapman designed the Painted Desert exhibit, while Gerald Cassidy painted The Cliff Dwellers of the Southwest. The event also provided an opportunity for these relatively unknown artists to show their work in a national venue. Cassidy exhibited Cui Bono?, depicting a man from Taos Pueblo, while Chapman’s drawings of bird motifs introduced exposition attendees to Southwest Indian pottery designs.

Three months after the exposition opened, the New Mexico Legislature appropriated funds for an art museum in Santa Fe. Businessman Frank Springer provided the required matching funds, and commissioned Chapman and Vierra to complete a set of murals for the building’s auditorium. Chapman later designed furniture for the new museum as well. The mural commission had originally been awarded to Donald Beauregard, who was too ill to finish the job. Knowing that death was imminent, he recommended that Sheldon Parsons complete his work. Parsons had studied at the National Academy of Design in Rochester, and had been a successful portrait painter.

Parsons contracted tuberculosis while working in New York City. After a period of remission, the disease flared up following the death of his wife in 1913. Parsons and his daughter Sara were en route to San Francisco, where he had a mural commission, when he suffered a relapse. By the time the train reached Denver, he was seriously ill. Parsons took his doctor’s advice and headed to Santa Fe, hoping the climate would heal his lungs. At the time of Beauregard’s recommendation, he was still convalescing. Because Hewett didn’t want to risk losing another artist, Chapman and Vierra completed the murals.

As plans for the new museum moved forward, the Palace of the Governors hosted its first annual exhibition of Santa Fe artists. The show, which opened in August 1915, featured the work of Chapman, Vierra, Parsons, and Cassidy, who arrived that year.

Born in Covington, Kentucky, Cassidy grew up in Cincinnati, where he studied at the Institute of Mechanical Arts. After receiving additional training in New York, he became a successful draftsmen and lithographer. Then at age thirty, Cassidy was diagnosed with tuberculosis and sent to Albuquerque to heal. Upon recovery, he moved to Denver, where he worked as a lithographer. While there, he married writer Ina Sizer, who encouraged him pursue a career as a painter. Searching for a suitable place to live, they visited Santa Fe in 1912 and decided to make it their base, as “it was near a telegraph, a railroad, and in a community with subjects for him to sketch.” Three years later, they bought a house on Canyon Road. While Cassidy painted, his wife immersed herself in the community, becoming a member of the League of Women’s Voters and later serving as state director of the Federal Writer’s Project.

The fact that this small community of artists flourished was due in no small measure to the women who accompanied them. Despite the hardships, they embraced life in Santa Fe. Sara Parsons was only twelve when she and her desperately ill father arrived. The community welcomed them, and found them a two-room apartment near the plaza. In gratitude, the Parsons invited their new friends to a five-course Thanksgiving feast, which Sara cooked on a two-burner oil stove. As her father recovered, Sara began to paint. She exhibited her work at the Second Annual Santa Fe Art Show. When she was eighteen, she married artist Victor Higgins and moved to Taos.

In 1910, Carlos Vierra married Ada Ogle, a high school teacher he met in Santa Fe. The wedding took place in Hutchinson, Kansas, her hometown. He brought her back to Santa Fe, with “no place we can call a home.” But embracing the life he had to offer, she accompanied him on research trips and joined him in San Diego for the Panama–California Exposition. She participated in Springer’s 1915 expedition to El Rito de los Frijoles, and on April 4, 1922 was elected secretary of the Arts Club. She also advised her husband on construction details, convincing him, as he began work on their new home, that it really did need a kitchen.

Chapman met his future wife in Santa Fe shortly after her arrival in 1910. Originally from Philadelphia, Katherine Muller had signed up for Hewett’s summer archaeology program. She soon met Kenneth Chapman, who was one of the lecturers. “Even if I had wished, I could not well have avoided meeting her,” he explained. “For weeks, wherever I turned, she was usually in the thick of it.” Kate, who had attended the Philadelphia Art School, became immersed in efforts to preserve traditional architecture. By 1914, she had a studio at the museum, where she taught and gave lectures. She and Chapman joined the Vierras on Springer’s 1915 expedition to El Rito de los Frijoles, where they made over 100 sketches of rock art. On September 30, 1915, the couple was married at the St. Francis Cathedral. Two years later, they purchased an adobe house on Acequia Madre. After their two children were born, Kate embarked on a career renovating and designing adobe houses.

Other artists settled in Santa Fe. In 1916, William Penhallow Henderson came with his ailing wife, poet Alice Corbin Henderson, who was admitted to Santa Fe’s Sunmount Sanatorium. The following year, artist Arthur Musgrave arrived. He had developed TB while serving in the British army. Upon discharge, his doctor sent him to the Southwest to recover his health. Having heard about Santa Fe’s art colony, Musgrave wrote to the museum, inquiring about lodging. In response, Paul A.F. Walter sent him a list of suggestions and an El Palacio article on “The Santa Fe–Taos Art Colony.” Both Musgrave and Henderson would exhibit their work at the art museum’s inaugural show.

Art had now become an essential part of the School of American Archaeology’s mission. At Hewett’s urging, on February 3, 1917, the school changed its name to the School of American Research “to better reflect a mission that also embraced ethnology, linguistics, and art—in fact the entire group of subjects that proceed from the study of man.”

The new art museum opened November 25, 1917. People flocked to the St. Francis Auditorium to hear the speeches, but it was the art displayed in the museum’s galleries that would keep them coming back. The inaugural art exhibition featured 172 paintings by forty Southwestern artists, including works by Vierra, Chapman, Parsons, and Cassidy, who donated Cui Bono? to the collection.

Following the dedication, Hewett appointed Parsons curator of the art museum, while Chapman and Vierra continued to work for the School of American Research. As the decade drew to a close, Santa Fe’s first resident artists not only recovered their health; they also laid the foundation for a growing art community. But in the process, their own art had changed. Gerald Cassidy, formerly a lithographer and draftsman, became known for his luminous Southwestern vistas and native portraiture. Sheldon Parsons, who had once painted portraits of notables such as Susan B. Anthony, now produced impressionistic New Mexico landscape paintings. Carlos Vierra, formerly a marine illustrator, became a major proponent of the Spanish-Pueblo Revival style, and in 1918 began construction of his own adobe home. Commercial artist Kenneth Chapman became an authority on Indian art.

The 1920s had its own influx of artists, among whom many sought healing as well. Will Shuster, a twenty-six-year-old efficiency engineer from Philadelphia, was one of them. He arrived March 3, 1920, after contracting TB following military service in France. He recovered, and became a prominent Santa Fe artist (and originator of Zozobra). In 1934, the art museum commissioned him to paint a series of murals honoring the spiritual, ceremonial, and agricultural traditions of the Pueblo Indians—a theme suggested by Hewett and funded by the Federal Emergency Relief Administration. Many of the over 7,600 centennial celebrants who filed through the museum on November 25, 2017 saw these murals in the courtyard of the New Mexico Museum of Art—not only an intriguing counterpoint to the murals adorning the walls of the St. Francis Auditorium, but a reminder of the inadvertent role tuberculosis played in making Santa Fe into the world-renowned art destination it is today.

Nancy Owen Lewis (1945-2022) was a scholar and writer. She was an anthropologist and professor and dedicated member of the Society for Applied Anthropology. Nancy was the Director of Programs at the School for Advanced Research for thirteen years. She co-authored (with Kay Leigh Harper) A Peculiar Alchemy: A Centennial History of the School for American Research (2007), which was named “Best Book in History” at the 2008 New Mexico Book Awards. This was followed by Chasing the Cure in New Mexico: Tuberculosis and the Quest for Health (2016), which won the award for 2016 Best Book in New Mexico History and the 2017 Southwest Book Award.

Roamings, Run-Ins, and Rendez-Vous

Contact: Local to Global celebrates the rewards of artistic confluence at the New Mexico Museum of Art

By Merry Scully

BY MERRY SCULLY

Planning for our centennial exhibitions required reflection on the past, but also the kind of bold thinking under which the Museum of Art was founded. Rather than a chronology of the institution, our centennial celebrates the museum as an active place where art and history are archived, catalogued, and created. Contact: Local to Global reflects the New Mexico Museum of Art as a point of contact for the visual arts in New Mexico over the past five decades. Thirty artworks from across time, media, and interests illustrate the diversity of artistic approaches and media that have intersected in New Mexico and at the Museum of Art over the past half century. This continuum of contact between New Mexico and artistic discourse, inspiration, and production is at the heart of the show.

Contact: Local to Global presents work from the latter half of the twentieth century to the current day, and highlights the engagement of artists with New Mexico; the New Mexico Museum of Art with artists and collectors; and New Mexico’s engagement with national and international art communities. A combination of artists, media, and time periods illustrates the diverse art and artists that enrich the state’s cultural life. The twenty-three artists in this exhibition, most with work in the museum’s collection, include major players in the international art scene, such as Sol LeWitt, Agnes Martin, Bruce Nauman, and the artist collective Postcommodity; local heroes with national and international recognition, including Diego Romero, Virgil Ortiz, Peter Sarkisian, and Susan York; accomplished artists who also made significant academic contributions to their field, such as Clinton Adams, Garo Antresian, and Rick Dillingham; and a few artists early in their careers, including Jami Porter Lara, Ati Maier, and Jen Pack.

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The sophisticated ceramic works that artists continue to make in the Southwest build on centuries of New Mexican Pueblo pottery traditions. Artist Jami Porter Lara forages for clay and uses traditional, hand-building and firing methods to create her black pottery. The shapes draw inspiration from historic forms and contemporary sources, including the ubiquitous screwcap neck of a plastic water bottle. The beautiful, burnished surface and the familiar but exaggerated shapes bring attention to the unusual juxtaposition of form and media, which in turn draws correspondences between the historic and contemporary, and the natural and technological worlds.

The shape of a forty-ounce plastic soda bottle nearly doubles in scale in Porter Lara’s LDS-MHB-9SBR-0917CE-01 (2017). The polished surface of the familiar, yet engorged, bottle form has sprouted four additional screwcap necks on either side of the usual central spout. The hand-built, stone-burnished form, created with clay from the earth, is in opposition to the machine-fabricated, petrochemical version we are accustomed to. This transformation of form and material alters our perception of the object. Through mutation, Porter Lara elevates the bottle’s shape, familiar on a supermarket shelf, or flattened by the side of the road, and evokes a comparison between this eight-armed vessel and a statue of the Hindu deity Shiva.

The mix of traditional pottery and Western popular culture is central to the work of Diego Romero, who has a direct connection to the tradition of Pueblo pottery, and uses traditional methods to produce contemporary ceramics. Raised in Berkeley, California, Romero spent his summers at his paternal grandparents’ home on Cochiti Pueblo, where he now lives. Romero’s bowls address art historical and social issues, and use a Pop Art or comic book style to comment on pueblo life.

His Olympia (Chongo Made and Painted Me) (2000) makes reference to nineteenth-century French painter Édouard Manet’s oil on canvas, Olympia (1863), in the collection of the Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Romero’s Olympia, a reclining nude with dark, straight hair, wears a tablita—an ornate headdress that Pueblo Indian women wear in ceremonial dances. As is the case with Manet’s pale-skinned Olympia, whom he depicts reclining while a black female servant presents her with a floral bouquet, we can study Romero’s Olympia in terms of race, class, and gender. The signature on this work, “Chongo Made and Painted Me,” refers to Romero’s alter ego, as well as characters that often appear in his work, and is slang for an indigenous man who wears his hair in a traditional bun, or chongo.

At the time of Manet’s painting, the public was accustomed to seeing painted depictions of nude women, but these figures were usually intended to represent goddesses or mythological figures. The controversy, among other scandalous aspects of the 1863 painting, was that the nude figure depicted an upper-class courtesan within a contemporary scene. Manet and Romero, over a century apart, both subvert a traditional mode of presentation by modernizing the subject matter.

At the other end of the spectrum are works of art that employ conceptual, high tech, and non-traditional strategies and means of production, like Sol LeWitt’s conceptual Wall Drawing #73, from the New Mexico Museum of Art collection. In the 1960s, artists began to experiment with artworks that gave priority to the idea or concept for an artwork over the production of an object. In 1967, in a few short paragraphs published in Artforum magazine, LeWitt named this new art form conceptual art and defined some of its characteristics. In the conceptual art model, the visual artist’s work becomes like architectural plans or a musical composition, completed with an idea that others can build or perform. Every time a wall drawing is exhibited it must be redrafted. The installation of Wall Drawing #73, for this exhibition was drawn in graphite on a white wall by artists Roland Lusk and Susan York over the course of eight days. They followed LeWitt’s directions: “Lines not straight, not touching, drawn at random, uniformly dispersed with maximum density, covering the wall.” This work was originally drawn as a gift to Lucy Lippard, a noted art writer and proponent of minimalist art, who later went on to be a strong voice for the work of feminist and multicultural artists. Now a New Mexico resident, Lippard gave the drawing to the New Mexico Museum of Art in 1999. At the close of this exhibition, the drawing will be painted over and the directions will be kept in our collection storage to be re-executed at another time. Wall Drawing #73, has been loaned and exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

It was good fortune to have Santa Fe-based artist Susan York assist with the drafting of Wall Drawing #73. Known for working primarily in graphite, both drawn and cast, the artist’s work is represented in the exhibition by Floating Column (2008), a fourteen-foot column of solid, cast graphite. The dark and polished column hangs from the ceiling, hovering just above the floor of the gallery. On loan from the Lannan Foundation Collection, this is only the second time that this large-scale sculpture has been installed for public view.

York’s 1:1 Lannan Floating Column (eye level from the floor) @ NM Museum of Art Centennial 1917–2017 (2017), is a graphite drawing on paper that depicts a detail view of the column as installed at the museum, and hangs near the impressive sculpture. This pair of objects is a fine encapsulation of this contemporary New Mexico artist’s current work. York was born on the East Coast and raised in Albuquerque, where she attended the University of New Mexico. She received her Master of Fine Arts degree from the Cranbrook Academy of Art and has based her studio practice in Santa Fe since the 1980s. York’s influences include the Dutch de Stijl movement, her friendship with mentor Agnes Martin, and the aesthetic qualities of the expansive New Mexico landscape. A similarly minimal response to the light and land of New Mexico appears in the atmospheric works by artists Agnes Martin and Stuart Arends that hang nearby.

Yorgo Alexopoulos uses state-of-the-art custom software and electronics to make his artwork. On loan from the collection of Carl and Marilynn Thoma is Alexopoulos’s Everything In-Between (2014), from the series No Feeling Is Final. Six connected electronic screens of varying sizes flood with a synchronized composite of scrolling horizontal and vertical images. The desert landscape, symbolic geometric forms, and archetypal images present the artist’s reflection upon individual and collective connections to things larger than ourselves. Glowing light beams out a non-objective narrative that is similar visually and in intent to earlier works by the Transcendental Painting Group (TPG). Founded in New Mexico in 1938, the TPG employed color and light to imbue their non-objective paintings with idealistic and spiritual content. Filmed and commissioned in New Mexico, Everything In-Between illustrates the continued relevance of New Mexico’s topography as a direct source of material and inspiration for artists.

The land also appears in Postcommodity’s Pollination (2015). This ambitious, immersive installation is on loan from the Scottsdale Museum of Contemporary Art, and like the Sol LeWitt wall drawing, it’s re-built each time that it is exhibited. Postcommodity is an indigenous artist collaborative composed of three artists: Raven Chacon, Cristóbal Martínez, and Kade L. Twist. In a manner similar to the life-sized tableaus of artists Edward and Nancy Kienholz, Pollination recreates a peepshow environment of a hallway with closed doors and individual viewing booths. As a collective, these artists challenge the role of the individual artist as author and provoke viewers to take an active role while engaging with the piece.

To fully experience this installation, visitors must enter a viewing booth and deposit a token. This commercial transaction prompts a screen to rise, giving the participant a glimpse of a lush garden setting. Environmental and ecological issues come to mind as one views the scene, as the glass and frame of the viewing booth create a barrier. Replacing live performers with a bucolic landscape, the artists play upon a longstanding tradition in Western visual and literary arts, which links the female form to nature. The absurdity of this interaction tempers the larger ideas the artists are addressing, among them personal and environmental isolation, separation, and exploitation.

The unconventional format of the Postcommodity installation shares space in the exhibition with less traditional works, like Alexopoulos’s Everything In-Between and Ati Maier’s high-definition video projections The Placeless Place (2016) and The Map Is Not the Territory (2013). The wide range of materials and subject matter in Contact: Local to Global reflects the diversity of artists and ideas that find a home and a voice in New Mexico, and that define the visual arts of their time.

Many artists still make New Mexico their home. Others pass through as tourists, participate in exhibitions, and work with New Mexico’s many outstanding foundries, print studios, ateliers, and institutions, including the University of New Mexico, Tamarind Institute, Art Foundry, New Mexico State University, the Institute of American Indian Arts, Site Santa Fe, and the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Program. As the only contemporary collecting institution in Santa Fe, and the art museum for the state of New Mexico, the New Mexico Museum of Art captures, collects, and documents this range of intersections and crossovers from our varied citizens, visitors, and institutions, as they all contribute to New Mexico’s robust relationship with the visual arts. Just as they did a century ago, at the encouragement of Edgar Lee Hewett and Robert Henri, artists continue to find New Mexico the sort of community that welcomes artists and encourages the production and exhibition of progressive artworks that challenge traditional artistic practice and advance new thinking in the arts.

Merry Scully is head of Curatorial Affairs and curator of Contemporary Art at the New Mexico Museum of Art.

Merry Scully is the executive director at the Robert and Frances Fullerton Museum of Art at California State University San Bernardino. Merry was previously the head of curatorial affairs and curator of contemporary art at the New Mexico Museum of Art. Her exhibitions include shows in the Alcoves and Poetic Justice which opened during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Living History

By Candace Walsh

BY CANDACE WALSH

History. When I was in high school in the eighties, it was called Social Studies. My teens learn history in a class called Individuals and Society. The concept of trying to dismantle history’s silos with new nomenclatures and perspectives is not a new one.

But the need to do it continues. Last year at the Association of Writing Professionals conference, a panelist talked about a concept that stayed with me. She talked about the “one story,” AKA the dominant narrative. It’s the story about a particular demographic that becomes the story we fall back on if we’re not actively trying to expand our thinking. For example, “a novel about a gay character has to be a coming out story” or “a memoir by an African American has to be about growing up in the ghetto.” Other kinds of stories meet with resistance; agents and publishers describe the stories as not relatable when they just don’t align with what’s expected. An especially dangerous and tragic example is the one story too many people believe: that all Muslims are terrorists.

In his essay on Medium.com, “Reimagining Community-Centered Sites for History and Healing,” Estevan Rael-Gálvez writes, “remembering, from the Spanish word recordar, implies to awaken, but it is also, as the Latin word recordis reveals, to pass back through the heart and make whole again.” He underscores the importance of expanding beyond the one story, especially for oppressed or traumatized communities. “Understanding…how knowledge was collected in a colonial context, as well as the imperative of addressing historic trauma, it is clear that storytelling and photography can function to create openings for reimagining community history and healing.”

Mary Morris’s new novel, Gateway to the Moon (Nan A. Talese/Doubleday), is set in contemporary northern New Mexico and tells the stories of Miguel Torres, whose Hispanic family roots go back to the time of Coronado, and his employers, a family from back East. It also vividly tells the stories set in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, of Miguel’s multiple generations of crypto-Jewish ancestors, in Spain, Mexico City, and northern New Mexico. The New Mexico History Museum’s 2016 exhibition, Fractured Faiths: Spanish Judaism, The Inquisition, and New World Identities, rewrote history in the minds of thousands of visitors, and El Palacio’s articles amplified and expanded on its offerings. In addition to living in New Mexico in the late eighties and researching the topic from afar, Morris visited Fractured Faiths while writing Gateway. In an email, she writes, “I think that to understand one another in these particularly fraught and divisive times we have to see that our history is a richer, more textured tapestry than we’ve acknowledged in the past.”

Artist Sabra Moore, who lives in Abiquiu, wrote Openings: A Memoir from the Women’s Art Movement, New York City 1970–1992 (New Village Press, 2016). It’s a thorough record of a group of women, including foreword writer Lucy Lippard, who worked together in New York City not just to make art, but to make space to be artists. “The museums weren’t interested in showing them, nor were the important critics interested in reviewing what they were doing,” writes Margaret Randall in a second foreword. They protested at museums, opened their own galleries, and collectively put out the feminist journal Heresies. Moore writes, “Every inch of that magazine had been argued, traded, weighed, and then physically assembled by the issue collective, which would meet weekly for the duration. In the case of the Feminism and Ecology issue, we met for two and a half years.” So much effort. And yet, their history is far from included in the one story of that era of artists in New York.

El Palacio’s readers do care enough to keep learning, and constantly revise their own takes on history, art, and culture. Thank you for making the effort, and enjoying the rewards. As Margaret Randall puts it, “You never know what discovering real history may do to the way you live and work today.”

Candace Walsh (opens in a new tab) is a former editor of El Palacio. Currently, she is an assistant professor of creative writing at Central Washington University. Walsh holds a PhD in creative writing from Ohio University and an MFA from Warren Wilson College. Candace has worked on staff at Condé Nast International, Mothering Magazine, and as the managing editor of New Mexico Magazine. Her writing has appeared in numerous national and local publications. Walsh is the author of Licking the Spoon: A Memoir of Food, Family, and Identity (Seal Press 2012), a 2013 New Mexico – Arizona Book Awards winner, and two of the essay anthologies she co-edited were Lambda Literary Award finalists: Dear John, I Love Jane and Greetings from Janeland.

History’s Footprints

The Museum of Indian Arts and Culture’s Stepping Out exhibition gives us occasion to examine the meaning‑packed relics of an anti‑barefoot movement

By Laurie Webster

BY LAURIE WEBSTER

Visit the storage facility of any Southwestern anthropology museum, and you’ll see drawer after drawer of pre-Hispanic woven sandals—a few in pristine condition, but most worn out from use. Their sheer quantities are astonishing because early Southwesterners didn’t actually need footwear. Human feet develop thick calluses to protect them from sharp objects and hot and cold temperatures, and for most of human history, people went around barefoot. Today our feet are tender because we wear shoes, but the use of footwear is essentially a cultural and sartorial choice in all but the most extreme climates.

Ancient sandals survive to a greater extent than most other woven items at archaeological sites because of their sturdy construction. Early Southwestern weavers fabricated their sandals from the leaves and fiber of yucca plants, and occasionally other materials, using the finger-weave techniques of plain weave, twining, braiding, and wrapping. Weavers equipped the sandals with toe or side ties to attach them to feet, and they sometimes padded the shoes with leaves or shredded bark to insulate them. Hide sandals and moccasins have also been found at some Southwestern archaeological sites, but they were never as popular as sandals until after about AD 1400, when sandals fell out of use and hide footwear replaced them. The impetus for this change was probably the growing interaction between settled, agricultural Pueblo groups and their Navajo, Apache, Pai, and Plains neighbors, and the increased importation of hides into these agricultural communities.

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Just as we do today, early Southwestern groups used different styles of footwear and other types of clothing to express their social identities. During various time periods and in different regions of the Southwest, people furnished their sandals with distinctive toe and heel finishes, borders, and sometimes raised treads to distinguish them and their tracks from those of their neighbors. Low-visibility construction attributes provide information about cultural transmission and learning networks, while more visible decorative features express social group identities. Because of the temporal and regional diversity of sandals, they can be used like ceramics and projectile points to identify past cultural groups in the archaeological record.

Particular footwear styles were probably linked to wearers’ age, gender, ceremonial roles, or activities such as warfare, hunting, or long-distance trading. The archaeological record hints that men and women wore different sandal styles. Historically, Pueblo men and women have worn different styles of moccasins, so why wouldn’t their ancestors have worn different sandal styles in the pre-Hispanic past? Funerary data suggest that, during the early Basketmaker period, the coarse weft-faced wickerwork sandals and decorated twined sandals were worn primarily by men, and that women often used sandals with a different style of lacing. After about AD 700, people in the northern Southwest were rarely interred with footwear on their feet, making it difficult to link different sandal styles with gender. Perhaps future DNA studies can help address this question.

I first became interested in ancient sandals thirty years ago, when I began my studies of archaeological textile collections from the northern Southwest. Since then, I have become fascinated with the diversity of sandal styles and technologies. The earliest yucca sandals from the northern Southwest, used by Archaic hunter-gatherers, have been radiocarbon-dated to about 8,000 years ago. Two styles were worn: an open-twined sandal with the wefts worked in two-strand twining, and a warp-faced plain-weave sandal with multiple warps worked in an over-one, under-one weave. In twined and plain-weave sandals, the warp elements run lengthwise, and the weft elements cross and interact with the warps. Open-twined sandals faded from the archaeological record by about 5500 BC, but the warp-faced plain-weave style persisted into the Late Archaic period and may have evolved into the weft-faced plain-weave (wickerwork) sandals of the Basketmaker II period, which I discuss below.

Archaic hunter-gathers of the southern Southwest (southern Arizona and New Mexico, and the Trans-Pecos region of Texas) also wore plain-weave sandals, but they were different from those of the northern Southwest. Their sandals were weft-faced rather than warp-faced, and the earliest examples, dated to about 5,000 years ago, had only two warps. Later, four-warp and other multiple-warp varieties appeared in the region.

As Southwestern groups adopted maize agriculture and became more settled, their sandal styles became increasingly differentiated, and in some cases, more elaborate. Most of these sandals feature plain weave, twining, or braiding. In the following sections, I briefly review the historical development of these major styles and contrast the types people wore in the northern and southern Southwest.

Plain Weave Sandals

As noted, plain-weave sandals are one of the earliest forms of footwear on the Colorado Plateau. Thick, coarse, rigid, and easily manufactured, most were designed for rugged use. During the Basketmaker II period in the northern Southwest, weft-faced plain-weave wickerwork sandals with usually four, but sometimes five, six, or more warp elements fulfilled this role. Most have a warp and weft of whole yucca leaves, although juniper-bark and turkey-feather-cordage versions are also known. Stylistically, they have a square toe and heel, and many from northeastern Arizona and southeastern Utah have a toe fringe produced by extending the warp ends past the toe.

Around AD 650–700, a new style of plain-weave yucca sandal appeared in the northern Southwest. This coarse sandal had four to six warps, yucca leaf or fiber wefts, and a rounded or pointed toe, and it remained in use for about 400 years. A later variation has an elongated body that was folded up in back to cover the heel. The only two-warp style to gain popularity in the northern Southwest was a narrow sandal made of rigid, narrow leaf yucca wefts worked in a figure-eight weave, the ends shredded on the underside to make a pad, used after about AD 1000.

In the southern Southwest, the two-warp weft-faced plain-weave style of the Archaic period was used into late, pre-Hispanic times. Sometime around 200 BC, rigid plain-weave yucca sandals with four or more warps became popular in the Mogollon culture area of southwestern New Mexico. With a square toe and heel, these four-warp wickerwork sandals resemble the ones people in the northern Southwest wore, but they lack the toe fringe.

Several hundred years later, people in the Mogollon region created a more refined plain-weave sandal with fine cordage elements and a concentric warp. People along what is now the US–Mexico border of the southern Southwest adopted two variations of two- and four-warp wickerwork plain-weave sandals from the Trans-Pecos area: the scuffer-toe (a short sandal that covered just the ball of the foot), and a sandal with what is known as a fishtail heel. Some sandals incorporated both features.

Twined Sandals

The most finely woven, elaborate, and in my view, intriguing Southwestern sandals are the twined yucca cordage sandals of the northern Southwest. Closely linked to the Ancestral Pueblo culture of the Colorado Plateau, these sandals appeared in the Four Corners region in about 100 BC and persisted into the early-thirteenth century. Commonly referred to as twined sandals, most incorporate several weave structures, including twining, plain weave, and weft-wrapping.

The earliest versions are closely linked to the western variant of Basketmaker II culture. Most have square toes and heels, like the coarser plain-weave sandals of this period. Regional variations occur. The fanciest ones originated in southeastern Utah and northeastern Arizona, where the majority have a bolster or buckskin fringe at the toe; some have geometric or banded designs on the upper face; and most have horizontal ridges on the underside that served as a raised tread. The upper faces are woven primarily in plain weave (sometimes twining), and the raised tread was produced by a wrapped twining technique. Intriguingly, many have a row of human hair twining just below the buckskin fringe. People used human hair for a variety of weaving purposes during this period and, as documentation for the use of hair ties at historic Hopi sites shows, the choice of hair possibly was based on kin relationships.

Sometime around AD 300, the center of decorated twined sandal complexity shifted to northeastern Arizona, where it remained for several hundred years. During this time, twined sandals with slightly scalloped toes, colored geometric designs on the upper face, and raised, geometric designs on the soles appeared in this region. The apex of twined sandal production occurred in the Four Corners region between AD 600 and 750, when the most elaborate examples have a scalloped or rounded toe, a puckered heel, multiple zones of colored designs on the upper face, and highly complex geometric patterning on the sole. The production of these sandals was a technological feat. Some incorporate as many as fourteen weave structures, all variants of twining, plain weave, or weft-wrapping.

People in the northern Southwest continued to make twined sandals after AD 750, but they used simpler patterns and weave structures. Those sandals from between AD 1050 and 1150 tend to have simple bands or bold tapestry designs on the upper surface, and isolated, raised diamonds or triangles on the soles. By this time, the toes of the sandals were shaped for the right or left foot, and people began embellishing the toes with a small projection, or jog, along the outer edge. Some archaeologists have interpreted this jog as a symbolic sixth toe, an idea that Patricia Crown and colleagues corroborate in a recent American Antiquity article, which documents the presence of polydactyly, a congenital condition resulting in an extra finger or toe, among several high-status burials at Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon. Significant assemblages of jog-toed, twined sandals have been recovered from Chaco, the West Ruin of Aztec, and Antelope House in Canyon del Muerto, and additional examples have been found at smaller sites in the Four Corners region that appear to have had links to Chaco. Their use may have signaled a symbolic connection to the Chaco leadership, religion, or political system.

The final iteration of twined sandals dates to the late-twelfth and early-thirteenth centuries. These sandals are coarser in texture than their predecessors, and have bold, raised designs on the soles produced by massive weft-wrapping. Around AD 1250, this long-lived and unique sandal tradition disappeared from the archaeological record. We still do not know whether these finely woven sandals served specific symbolic or ceremonial roles, or were simply a fancy form of footwear, but their elaborate iconography, evident labor investment, and demonstration of specialized technical knowledge suggest that they were something very special.

Braided (Plaited) Sandals

Braided sandals, also referred to as plaited sandals, were the last major sandal tradition to appear in the Southwest. Made from whole or split yucca leaves, most are woven in 1/1 (over one, under one), 2/1 (over two, under 1), or 2/2 (over two, under two) diagonal interlacing. Because the weave structures of the 2/1 and 2/2 braided sandals resemble those of twill-woven fabrics, they are often described as twill-plaited constructions.

In the northern Southwest, braided sandals appear earlier in the eastern portion of the Colorado Plateau than they do in the west. The presence of 2/2 twill-plaited sandals at the Durango Rock Shelters, a Basketmaker II site, led archaeologists to believe that they dated to that period, but a recent radiocarbon date from one sandal indicates that they were intrusive to the site, and actually date to late Basketmaker III. Additional radiocarbon dates from northwestern New Mexico support the appearance of 2/2 twill-plaited sandals in the upper San Juan River region between AD 600 and 700.

Braided sandals were well-established in the Four Corners region by the Pueblo I period. One style from southwestern Colorado and northwestern New Mexico was worked in fine 2/2 twill plaiting and had a square toe and cupped heel. Another early braided sandal, more common to southeastern Utah and northeastern Arizona, was coarsely woven in 1/1, 2/1, and less often 2/2 diagonal interlacing. It had a distinctive square heel made by vertically wrapping the lower ends of the braiding elements over a crosswise element and up to the surface. Many of these sandals were shaped for the right or left foot, suggesting manufacture after AD 900.

During the Pueblo II period, people in the Four Corners region of the Colorado Plateau began making finely woven 2/2 twill-plaited sandals with tapered toes and slightly cupped heels. By AD 1050–1100, many of these sandals, like their twined counterparts, were equipped with a toe jog. By the thirteenth century, 2/2 twill-plaited sandals and coarser 1/1 and 2/1 braided sandals were the most common footwear in the northern Southwest.

In the southern Southwest, coarse braided sandals appeared in the Mogollon region around AD 700 or slightly earlier. By AD 1000, they were ubiquitous south of the Mogollon Rim, outnumbering all other sandal styles. As in the north, the earliest examples have square toes and heels, and later ones have rounded toes and heels, often subtly shaped for the right or left foot. Most are woven of wide yucca leaves in 1/1 or 2/1 diagonal interlacing, and have the elements folded up at the heel and anchored with a transverse strip of yucca. These Mogollon sandals somewhat resemble the coarsely braided ones from the northern Southwest, but are made with thicker leaves and have a different heel finish.

Around AD 1300, a new style of braided yucca sandal, this one finely plaited and equipped with an H-shaped woven strap, appeared in the southern Southwest. This style is thought to be part of a widespread Salado sandal tradition related to the site of Paquimé (Casas Grandes) in northern Chihuahua, Mexico.

Despite their ubiquity at Mogollon and later Salado sites, braided sandals never achieved much importance in the Hohokam culture area of southern Arizona. There, coarse two-warp plain-weave sandals persisted from the Late Archaic period into late, pre-Hispanic times. People also wore a unique style of sandal shaped like a coiled braid. Made of yucca or agave fiber, these braidlike sandals appeared in southern Arizona around AD 800 and continued in use until about AD 1250–1300. Because of the poor preservation of textiles in the Hohokam region, most of these sandals are mineralized (petrified) or carbonized (charred) and difficult to analyze. The only unburned examples from southern Arizona come from Ventana Cave on the Tohono O’odham Reservation and Winchester Cave near Willcox. Their construction has been variously described as weft-wrapping (the site of Snaketown) and stitching on a matted fiber pad (Ventana Cave), but their technology is still open to question, and needs replication studies. In my opinion, most were probably made either by coiling a braided cord into the shape of a sole and then stitching the rows together, like Spanish espadrilles, or by twining the wefts in a spiral pattern over warps perpendicular to the long axis.

Archaeologists know a lot about Southwestern sandal styles, their construction, and how they changed through time, but they have barely scratched the surface in their understanding of sandal production and the social contexts in which sandals were used. If any Southwestern sandal tradition served a specialized purpose, it was probably the finely woven and ornate twined sandals of the Colorado Plateau. Their technological complexity and rich iconography raise a multitude of questions about who wove and wore them, whether certain villages specialized in their production, how and when people used this footwear, and what social messages they were intended to convey. All of these queries apply to other sandal styles, as well. These and many other intriguing questions invite future exploration.

Laurie Webster is an anthropologist who specializes in the textiles and other perishable material culture of the American Southwest. She lives in Mancos, Colorado.

Laurie Webster is an anthropologist who specializes in the textiles and other perishable material culture of the American Southwest. She lives in Mancos, Colorado.