The Solution That Sticks

BY PETER BG SHOEMAKER

Few things make a conservator swoon quite like a good adhesive. After all, in a business that often begins with lots of things falling apart, a good adhesive can be the difference between smiles and frowns around laboratory worktables in conservation labs the world over.

So imagine fifty or so pairs of moccasins, almost all heavily beaded, in various states of disrepair—tears in the heels, thread unraveling, some folded into themselves like scared armadillos, and all the gashes and distresses of a lifetime of wear and—in some cases—six to twenty lifetimes of storage. This enormous challenge faced conservators working to prepare the heart of the Stepping Out exhibition. In their arsenal: their own skilled and nuanced handiwork, and a wonder adhesive called BEVA 137.

Before BEVA enters the picture, the three conservators have other steps to complete. Maureen Russell, Sophie Hunter, and Larry Humetewa clean the moccasins, slowly and meticulously removing mud, dust, and whatever other detritus collects on beaded buck and buffalo hide over vast epochs of time. When necessary (and that is often), they painstakingly rehydrate the hide, using water and ethanol and a variety of handcrafted supports, clamps, and forms.

BEVA got its start in painting conservation when—in 1967—Gustav Berger (that’s the B, followed by Ethylene Vinyl Acetate) went searching for a better way to line paintings—a widely used practice that strengthens an existing painting by essentially adding another layer of canvas, or in cases of serious decay, replacing the canvas entirely. According to his obituary by Janice Hill Stoner, published on the International Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works website, “He had grown up with art; his father and grandfather were presidents of the Art Dealers Association in Austria, and his father had sent him to look at the treatments being carried out by his restorers.” Clearly, Berger wasn’t content with what he found.

He experimented with a variety of wax-resin combinations, trying to find the right mix of stability, longevity, low melting point, setting speed, and reversability. From among hundreds of these combinations he selected number 371—the first adhesive created for conservation use.

Conservators love BEVA because it provides a reversible medium that is both chemically stable and offers elasticity. Reversibility and chemical stability are of crucial importance for conservators the world over, and its elasticity makes it ideal for working with textiles and leather. And because it is a heat-seal adhesive—both bonding with, and essentially shrink-wrapping itself around uneven surfaces, it is ideally suited for work with errant pieces of thread, very tiny beads, and small tears. In other words, just what the doctor (Berger) ordered for Stepping Out.

Born in Austria, Berger served in the Israeli army before coming to New York. In a different time, maybe, he would have been considered an irrepressible natural scientist—a Robert Boyle sort of character—tinkering and experimenting constantly in an effort to improve the world around him. Although separated by 350 years, both men believed in experimentation as the path to knowledge, and both kept at it most of their lives. Like Boyle, Berger was both a hands-on practitioner and a legendary teacher, crisscrossing the world to give talks and demonstrations.

In over 60 research papers over nearly 40 years, Berger presented new ways to support large paintings, pioneered the study and remediation of paint cracking, developed innovative approaches to filling damaged surfaces, and of course, came up with BEVA.

During a recent visit, conservator Maureen Russell worked on a pair of Cheyenne/Sioux moccasins with blue and white beads, each maybe a millimeter or two in diameter, that depict bison footprints. She points out several places where threads holding beads are coming loose.

Using a strip of BEVA—imagine a piece of Scotch tape about a centimeter long and two-thirds of a centimeter wide, which she holds in place with a pair of tweezers against the loose end of the thread and the main body of the moccasin, she picks up the business end of a precision hot air tool (made in Santa Fe by Steven Prins), and melts the BEVA strip onto the moccasin. “Do you know,” she asks, as she leans in to the work, “that there is nothing more intensely personal than working with these moccasins?”

“You can see the outlines of people’s toes, the shape of their feet in the leather,” Hunter says. She walks over, picks up a nearby moccasin, and points out the clear outline of its wearer’s foot.

Russell straightens up and holds the moccasin to the light, the thread solidly adhered to the hide, and the beads no longer in danger of rolling across the floor. “These are real things worn by real people.”

In addition to stabilizing beadwork, the conservators are using BEVA to repair tears in the heels and elsewhere in a number of pieces they’re working on for the show, and anywhere a little additional stability might be a good idea.

Sometimes, a use might not be so straightforward, as in the case where Hunter was faced with a porcupine quill moccasin that was missing quills in a few places. After doing some research and talking things over with her colleagues, Hunter landed on a novel approach to preparing the piece for exhibition. She took Tyvek, painted it to match the red of the adjacent quills, and then used BEVA to iron it onto the underlying hide. She also once used BEVA to re-attach leather to a tortoise shell shield.

Following news of Berger’s death, the conservator Boris Sternberg posted on his studio wall a memorial that found much resonance in the obituaries that followed: “God made Gustav, and Gustav made BEVA.” The sentiment, if not the exact words, captures a truism in conservation: success is one part tool, one part technique, and one part frustrated conservator who needs to solve a problem.

Peter BG Shoemaker writes about conservation for this magazine.

Peter BG Shoemaker is a Tbilisi-based writer and frequent contributor to El Palacio on conservation matters.

The Poem in the Prose

By Candace Walsh

BY CANDACE WALSH

When I asked Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge to contribute a poem to our Museum of Art commemorative ode fest, she politely demurred because of other commitments, but encouraged me to write a poem for the section. Although I did not think it quite appropriate to shoehorn my pensées into such elevated company, as I sat down to mull-pry my editor’s letter into existence, I found that it wanted to take the form of a poem. If you’ve ever received a letter in the form of a poem, you know that what I’m hazarding here is, at least, plausible. If not, let this be the first.

To edit a magazine devoted to history
steeping in what endures
is to lose some sight of the ephemeral.

“Erosion, a term not quite
fitting, unless we aim
to find the beauty in what is lost”¹

But what is lost is the reverse of
to tangibly adore (although so much that’s lost
claims adoration, when you could love
someone, something,
in need of conservation).

Like a painting in a hall way, speck-scabbed, forlorn²
of two glowing women, gravid,
One bears a deity, one just a boy
affinity undimmed
under films of time.

And I have felt the urge
to ink my child’s first word
on a sacred page, next to birthdate and name
like Elizabeth’s daughter
with her Ansel Adams muse³
who claimed a photograph
as a mnemonic of the heart.

“the residue of the past is very much with us”⁴
as the art museum’s courtyard
always holds the last time
we spoke
(We’re always walking through
someone’s last time—
an invisible weight, selectively felt.
We’re always the place that holds
our own)

Disappeared is not obscured
and takes the form of art.⁵ And will keep taking the form
of materials at hand.
And often shows what some would rather
we overlooked, or forgot
because art is in part the place we are meant to look
and the truth will out.

Ephemeral but unforgotten:
My sleeping babies’ weight.
I absorbed the damp of their infinite trust
as they carved in me a nest.

They take, they take.
And when they go, they take.
Their abandon, my sweet ache.

As I wade through ephemeral life
They are typing airborne love poems
Aloft on teen pheromones
making it home
until they’re not;
I carry that weight in my heart.

Missing making piquant the existing

Though, histories do birth stories
in the act of raking back and forth
to unearth more.
There’s still so much to sift and sort
beneath the Palace floor.

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.

Pictures of an Evolution

A history of photography at the New Mexico Museum of Art

By Katherine Ware

BY KATHERINE WARE

Like many significant anniversaries, the New Mexico Museum of Art’s one-hundredth birthday provides the opportunity to both share memories and look to the future. The exhibition Shifting Light: Photographic Perspectives (see sidebar), which spans the museum’s second-floor galleries, brings together classic images from the museum’s international collection of nearly 9,000 photographs, which spans the entire history of photography, with new acquisitions and promised gifts that will help define the museum’s future engagement with photographic art. The exhibition’s strong emphasis on creative innovation and viewer interpretation inaugurates the institution’s next century. But as the museum moves forward, it is useful to see where it has been. Our extensive research and preparations for the centenary have turned up new information and stories untold. The narrative is still evolving, but here, for the first time, is a story that explains how and why the museum began exhibiting and collecting photography.

From an early date, the museum adopted a progressive stance towards the relatively new medium, and photographs in its galleries occupied both supporting and starring roles. Photography’s perceived truthfulness, as well as its ability to be manipulated artistically, meant that it was flexible enough to easily fit into the founders’ evolving vision of New Mexico’s first art museum. The young museum’s commitment to contemporary art, specifically American Modernism, was surely another factor in the embrace of the medium. The discovery of photography in 1839 essentially coincided with the beginnings of European Modernism and had a strong impact on its esthetic. Though the photographs shown at the museum in the early twentieth century were not always the most vanguard examples, in New Mexico the medium found an early welcome that helped define the state as a significant locus for photographic innovation and a gathering place for the photographic community, as it remains today.

The earliest recorded solo exhibitions of photographs strongly reflect the museum founders’ interest in archeology and ethnography. Colorado native Laura Gilpin (1891–1979) was first, with a 1921 exhibition of portraits, still lifes, and Southwestern scenes. Carl Moon (1878–1948), who specialized in portraits of Native Americans, followed soon after. Both Gilpin and Moon were Anglo photographers working in the Pictorialist style, an approach that often favored soft focus and a romantic depiction of subject matter. Both, too, were passionately interested in Native culture and embarked on decades-long efforts to document it.

After graduating from an Ohio high school in 1903, Moon moved to Albuquerque to begin what became a thirty-plus-year project photographing Native Americans in the Southwest. The museum’s founders were receptive to Moon’s ambitious undertaking, aligned as it was with their own desire to foster research on Southwestern art and culture and to display artistic renderings of those subjects alongside physical examples. Moon was a talented portraitist and many of his images of individuals stand up well to contemporary scrutiny. However, his staged scenarios of Native people—with titles such as The Medicine Drum, A Tale of the Tribe, and The Dancing Lesson—now appear stilted and naïve. Like some of the work of his more well-known contemporary, Edward S. Curtis, Moon’s constructed scenes contributed to misperceptions about Native tribes and their customs. Moon’s work eventually culminated in the four-volume Indians of the Southwest, published in 1936.

Gilpin’s career-long engagement with Native peoples, particularly the Diné (Navajo), was integral to the museum’s history and its photography holdings. She began taking photographs at age twelve and when she was fourteen, her mother took Gilpin and her brother to New York City to sit for a portrait with Gertrude Käsebier, the leading female photographer of the day. In Käsebier, the young and determined Gilpin found a model and a mentor. (Later in her life, she stood on the other side of the camera to make a portrait of Käsebier.) Though she often supported herself with other work, Gilpin was committed to photography and in 1916 consulted Käsebier about where to seek formal training. Before the end of the year, Gilpin had sold her successful turkey farm for a reported $10,000 and moved east to study at the Clarence H. White School in New York City. The influenza epidemic brought Gilpin back home in 1918, but after her recovery, she opened a photography studio in Colorado Springs and became an active member of the artistic circle associated with the city’s progressive Broadmoor Art Academy.

Gilpin credits her daily visits to the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis in 1901 as marking the beginning of her interest in indigenous cultures, though surely her proximity to longstanding evidence of the Puebloan culture in southern Colorado was an influence. As Gilpin became increasingly involved with both photography and Native studies, she noticed the poor quality of images available for the study of ancient architecture of the Americas and knew she could do a better job. Always entrepreneurial, she traveled around the Southwest and in Mexico, taking photographs of the remains of Puebloan and Mayan structures. To support herself, she self-published a guidebook to Mesa Verde National Park in 1927 and assembled some of her photographs of the architecture into sets of glass slides, which she marketed for use by teachers and lecturers. Though much of her photographic work from this time can be characterized as descriptive, she also made some posed views with Native participants that are not so different from Carl Moon’s genre scenes.

For the museum, Gilpin and Moon’s hybrid images—both art and document—were useful complements to object-based exhibits; they provided context for three-dimensional objects and offered aesthetic relief from archaeologist’s drier photographs and charts. Gilpin’s own interests quickly shifted away from ancient sites as she began to have firsthand experiences with Native people, beginning her ongoing efforts to record their lives and living traditions rather than their material culture. Through her partner Elizabeth Forster, a nurse, Gilpin had the opportunity to spend time in Navajo Country over the course of several years and gained a more informed and nuanced appreciation of Diné life. In 1940, when she was finally able to publish a collection of her photographs from that series, Gilpin purposely titled her book The Enduring Navajo in response to the prevailing idea of Native Americans as a “vanishing race.”

The museum included Gilpin’s photographs in numerous exhibitions during her lifetime, tracing her development into a mature artist as well as changing ideas about photography. Her second solo show at the museum was a 1926 selection from her recent travels and included images from Mesa Verde and the Pueblos of Taos and Laguna, among others. A third solo show in 1928 featured photographs of Mayan architecture at Chichen Itzá in the Yucatán. Gilpin’s images of indigenous buildings were undoubtedly what gave her initial entrée to the museum, but her training as an artist and her growing stature as a photographer must also have made her an important advocate for photography as fine art during a time when most art institutions considered it to be merely the product of a machine.

However, throughout the 1920s, the machine aesthetic was one of the most common aspects of Modernism, and photography was perfectly suited to it. By the end of its first decade, the museum finally offered a solo exhibition of Modernist photography, a selection of work by the young American artist Henwar Rodakiewicz (1903–1976). The photographer had recently married poet Marie Tudor Garland; they lived at the H&M Ranch in Alcalde, where they entertained friends and visiting artists, including Georgia O’Keeffe and Ansel Adams (whose portraits of Rodakiewicz are in the museum’s collection). Modernism in photography stylistically shifted away from the softer Pictorialist style that Moon and, at the beginning of her career, Gilpin used. Modernist photographers, such as Rodakiewicz, embraced the camera’s precision and often rejected traditional rules about perspective and representation.

An El Palacio writer confirms that Rodakiewicz’s images were a departure from the norm, asserting, “A new note is struck” in the artist’s range of portraits, nudes, Arizona landscapes, and machine studies. The writer goes on to describe “the feeling of tension, of power and even of movement that Rodakiewicz succeeds in putting into what appear to be simple photographic studies of mechanical devices….” This account suggests a radical departure from the ethnographic and picturesque nature of photographs the institution had shown earlier, both in conjunction with objects and in the Gilpin and Moon solo exhibitions. No checklist or images from this installation remain, but the description clearly suggests that Rodakiewicz’s photographs were closely aligned with Paul Strand’s close-up studies of his Akeley motion picture camera from just a few years earlier. After the worst of the Great Depression had passed, in 1940 the museum featured Eliot Porter (1901–1990) for its next solo photography show. Just the year before, Porter, a young biochemist with a medical degree from Harvard, had achieved the distinction of exhibiting his work at Alfred Stieglitz’s New York gallery An American Place, the last photographer to do so. Around that time, Porter decided to devote himself full-time to photography and began the regular visits to New Mexico that would culminate in his moving to Tesuque. He had already begun his pioneering work in color photography, but his first show at the museum consisted of all black-and-white prints, primarily taken in Maine and New Mexico. Though Porter’s work did not become part of the museum’s collection until later, most of the images from that show, including his picture of Cañoncito Church in snow, are now part of the museum’s overall holding of more than 290 of his photographs. Both Gilpin and Porter transplanted themselves to New Mexico and grew deep roots; they became regular exhibitors at the museum, anchored the local photography community, and provided connections to the broader art world.

Throughout the museum’s first two decades, painting and sculpture were still the dominant art forms at the museum. The graphic arts (initially printmaking and drawing) were gaining in stature, however, and eventually earned a separate annual competition, starting in 1946. By 1951, the Fifth Exhibition of Graphic Arts in New Mexico included photography, and a dozen New Mexico photographers had the opportunity to show their pictures alongside the prints and drawings. The photographer Charles E. Lord of Santa Fe, though virtually unknown today, distinguished himself in a field of entries that included images by state residents Tyler Dingee, Laura Gilpin, Eliot Porter, and others. The awards committee selected Lord’s genre scene Amigos—Mexico for “first honors in photography” and also gave his photograph a purchase prize, making it one of the early photographs added to the museum’s collection. The following year, Gilpin took honors in black-and-white photography for Navajo Weaver, which the museum acquired with the Southwestern Arts and Crafts Purchase Prize. J. Hobson Bass won the prize in color photography that same year. Santa Fe artist Tyler Dingee took honors in photography in 1954 with his dramatic composition Dark Discipline, taken in the museum’s St. Francis Auditorium, and the museum added it too to the collection.

By the summer of 1956, photography had seceded from the Graphics Arts competition and the museum presented its First New Mexico Photographers Exhibition, which began an annual trend of competitions through 1959. In retrospect, it seems quite humorous that Len Sprouse’s photograph Taos Artist, a portrait of a painter holding an array of paintbrushes, received the first prize in portraiture and graced the cover of the catalog of the first photography competition. Traveling photography shows, especially those organized under the aegis of LIFE magazine, appeared at the museum on several occasions, and in 1964 the museum booked Photography in the Fine Arts, a traveling show of nationally recognized photographers organized by the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The show was clearly meant to set a high bar for photographic art, with images by nationally recognized talents Wynn Bullock, Paul Caponigro, Carl Chiarenza, Josef Karsh, Arnold Newman, and others. In 1968, the museum chose to return to the model of the New Mexico photo annual competition, but it was for the last time, and with controversial results.

For New Mexico Photographers/68, Curator William Ewing diverged from the practice of inviting local photographers to select the show and instead invited his friend Duane Michals, an up-and-coming photographer in New York, as juror. Michals’ national reputation attracted an unprecedented 260 entries from 105 photographers, including a significant number from the ranks of the growing art program at the University of New Mexico. In making his final selection of 67 prints, Michals singled out many that did not align with established ideals rules of beauty and representation.

One of that show’s reviews, which none other than Laura Gilpin wrote, bore the headline, “Photography Exhibit Found ‘Provocative.’” Gilpin found the exhibition “interesting in its seeking for new approaches, provocative in some of the results” and mentioned a “somberness” to the entries overall. “One wonders what has happened to sunlight, particularly New Mexico sunlight,” she wrote, noting the absence of portraiture, landscapes, and New Mexico subject matter. Indeed, in a statement for the exhibition press release, Michals admitted that he had chosen not many images with New Mexico subject matter. They “said nothing new or startling as photography, being merely snapshots of New Mexico,” he explained. From Gilpin’s perspective, the photographs on the walls were “interesting experiments” that belonged in a classroom rather than a museum. “This exhibit may disturb people,” Michals wrote, “because they will not see what they expect a photograph to be…but I hope that viewers will use it as a point of departure to expand their own vision of the possibilities of photography in our time.”

Gilpin’s reference to the classroom was hardly random, as many of the entrants were students in the Department of Art and Architecture at the University of New Mexico. Graduate student Jim Alinder’s untitled photograph, which Michals awarded an honorable mention, surely exemplifies Gilpin’s misgivings (directional tk). The composition is claustrophobic despite the awkward presence of two open doors, and the child’s blurred and indistinct face, along with the shadow behind, are discomfiting. The artist doesn’t offer classic beauty, balanced composition, or clear meaning, and the picture isn’t even in focus. Instead, he uses the camera and the subject to construct a psychologically intense and ambiguous scene that breaks the rules that Gilpin had learned at the Clarence H. White School.

The 1968 competition was indeed a turning point for photography at the museum. Nearly half of the photographs shown in that exhibition came into the collection, largely donated by the artists. The architect of many of the donations was another photographer in the show, Anne Noggle, who soon became the museum’s first curator of photographs. Noggle joined the museum staff on a part-time basis in 1970 after completing her M.A. degree at the University of New Mexico, the same year that Gilpin was awarded an honorary doctorate from the institution. Just as Käsebier was an important touchstone for Gilpin, so Gilpin was for Noggle (and many young photographers finding their way to New Mexico around this time). During her five-year tenure at the museum, Noggle built up the nascent collection of photographs and organized a series of groundbreaking exhibitions. The year before she left the position to concentrate on her own photography, she opened a retrospective of Gilpin’s work, a labor of love developed over several years in close partnership with the photographer William Clift, who moved to Santa Fe in 1970. Gilpin was featured, too, in the landmark show Noggle organized with Margery Mann at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Women of Photography: An Historical Survey, which came to the museum in Santa Fe in 1976.

The museum recently celebrated Noggle herself with the 2016 solo exhibition Assumed Identities, which featured selections from the museum’s holdings of nearly one hundred of her prints. Thus, at a time when photographic images on electronic screens appear to supersede photographic prints, the “provocative” work that challenged Gilpin’s sensibilities has now become historic. Generations of New Mexico photographers continue to explore photography’s capabilities in ways that have shaped the history of the medium. The museum’s collection of photographs therefore strives to reflect that adventurous spirit, which has been part of its story since—almost—the beginning.

Katherine Ware is the New Mexico Museum of Art’s third curator of photography, preceded by Steve Yates and Anne Noggle. Additional information about the history of photography at the museum is available in the exhibition Shifting Light: Photographic Perspectives.

Katherine Ware is the curator of photography for the New Mexico Museum of Art. She organized the recently released online exhibition Fear and Loathing and is author of recent essays on the photographs of Caleb Charland, Chris McCaw, and Terri Warpinski. Her piece “Focus on Photography” was the first installment in this series of three articles about the museum’s year-long photography initiative.

Blazing New Trails

Ambitious new inroads are connecting today’s tech-savvy history buffs with New Mexico’s tried-and-true Historic Sites.

By Patrick Moore

BY PATRICK MOORE

New Mexico enjoys one of the most complex and culturally rich histories of any state in the union. From its geographical wonders, dinosaurs, and volcanos to its Native pueblos, Spanish missions, Western forts, and even rocket- and atomic bomb-testing sites, its past ranges from ancient to relatively recent. Within this treasured array, New Mexico’s Historic Sites shine.

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Patrick Moore is the director of the Bradbury Science Museum in Los Alamos, New Mexico. He previously served as the executive director of New Mexico Historic Sites, a division of New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs. Moore has spent more than thirty years in history and culture sectors. He received his undergraduate and master’s degrees from New Mexico State University, where he studied political science and history, and holds a doctorate in history from Arizona State University. His career includes work in research, historic interpretation and preservation at organizations including NASA, the National Park Service, the US Navy, and the Smithsonian Institution.

Into the Light

The story of a curator, a priest, a conservator, and a benefactor who worked miracles together.

By Kate Nelson

BY KATE NELSON

In 1995, during his first Christmas break as a student at Saint Mary’s Seminary in Houston, Stephen Schultz chose to spend a few days on a retreat, staying in the priests’ quarters at Our Lady of Belén, south of Albuquerque. There, he noticed a series of paintings hanging in the hallway, so old and in such bad condition that they barely revealed their religious content. Unframed, they seemed easily forgettable and widely forgotten. But for Schultz, that encounter began a tumble of coincidences—maybe even miracles.

“There was grime and soot, holes and rips,” Schultz says. “Mainly I just noticed that they were old. I like old buildings—historical and religious. And I wondered, ‘Who looked at these paintings?’” He wondered if the soot was from prayer candles, and if the grime came from devout hands seeking a celestial connection, or both. Who painted them? Where had they hung? His questions elicited no answers. The church had lost its records, and the paintings had never been seen in its 1973 building—the third haven for the faithful in a parish that dates to 1793. Years later, Schultz would hear tales of the previous church’s demolition and how parishioners pulled bultos and crosses from rubbish heaps. Somehow, someone spared the paintings.

By the time Schultz returned to Belén as parish priest in 2003, the hallway was bare; the paintings were now tucked into a spare room. “What a shame no one can see them,” he recalls thinking. “Even when they were displayed on the walls, the only people who could see them were clergy. I thought it might be wonderful to have them restored.”

He made a guess as to what restoration might cost, and then weighed that price against the growing needs of his struggling congregation. The paintings stayed put. Father Schultz tended to his flock, unaware that gears had begun to turn far beyond him. Only in retrospect would he say the hand of God was well at work.

In the year or so before the June 2014 opening of Painting the Divine: Images of Mary in the New World, Josef Díaz, then a curator at the New Mexico History Museum, began exploring potential artworks within the state’s collections vaults and elsewhere. Robin Farwell Gavin, a fellow Spanish Colonial art historian, mentioned to him that a church in Belén might have a few. They dug up a 1968 pamphlet from the church’s 175th anniversary that mentioned the paintings and the need to have them preserved. Díaz called Schultz to see if they had survived.

Skeptical, Schultz nonetheless invited him to visit, with a warning about the paintings’ poor shape. When Díaz saw them, his heart sank. “They were in horrible condition,” he says. “But what was so perfect was that they fit precisely the theme I was focusing on.” The five largest paintings—about 40 × 65 inches apiece—likely once belonged within a set of twelve depicting the life of Mary. They included The Visitation, The Flight into Egypt, The Nativity, The Circumcision, and The Coronation of Mary. Díaz determined they were by the same ca. 1750s painter working south of Santa Fe and doing so quite skillfully with oil paint on canvas, unusual materials to make it that far up El Camino Real.

A second set of smaller paintings, probably made by a different artist, appeared less promising to Díaz. In return for the loan of one painting, he told Schultz, museum supporters would finance an expert conservation of it. Schultz saw a long-deferred dream take form and agreed. Díaz chose The Visitation, in part because it was the least damaged. “But I thought it was also the most intimate and, stylistically, the most beautiful.” The painting shows a pregnant Mary greeting her cousin Elizabeth, whose own pregnancy is near term. Joseph and Zacharias flank the women. Schultz says the most important part of the meeting is when Elizabeth’s baby, who will become John the Baptist, leaps in the womb at his recognition of the savior in Mary’s.

“People can relate to that story,” Díaz says, “especially women and mothers. You can see the two are having a conversation. It’s a very warm painting.”

Soon, Díaz packed it up and drove it to Denver. Months passed.

Over the last two decades, Cynthia Lawrence has gained a national reputation as a paintings conservator specializing in Spanish Colonial–era pieces. From her studio in Denver, she’s grown into a go-to person for the Department of Cultural Affairs’ Conservation Lab, as well as institutions in Los Angeles, Denver, and New Orleans. The Visitation wasn’t the worst painting she’d encountered, especially when factoring in the conditions native to adobe churches. All conservators learn to be experts at removing microscopic fly speck (scat), but colonial conservators learn to look for bird and bat guano, too. Consider the life of a mission chapel: dirt from mud walls and floors clings to every surface; flat roofs collapse; rivers flood.

A mix of art, history, and science, painting conservation can be painstakingly slow. Besides the variety of projects Lawrence usually juggles, she likes to give each bit of work time to rest, and her own eyes time to see new things. Over the following months, Lawrence steadily documented the painting’s problems and began addressing them, often working with a microscope to better see the threads of the canvas. She removed old patches of an unusual fabric, used in place of canvas, which must have been unavailable at the time of that repair. Then she gently humidified, stretched, and weighted the canvas back into shape. Working on spaces as small as an eighth of an inch, she daubed off layers of grime and varnish with a variety of solvents, patched the rips and holes, and with Díaz’s guidance, determined which damaged areas to repaint and how extensively. “Spanish Colonial paintings weren’t purely aesthetic; they were devotional images,” she says. “If somebody had glued silk flowers around the edge, a curator might decide this was important to the history of the piece.”

As the painting took shape, once-muddy colors began to pop—Mary’s blue cape and red dress, the pink folds of Elizabeth’s shawl. Appealingly expressive faces and a previously obscured landscape materialized. “I love the imagery,” Lawrence says. “It was beautifully rendered, and I haven’t seen that image very many times. This was probably my favorite one of the group.”

Eventually, Díaz brought the painting back to Belén for a short stay in advance of the exhibit’s opening. Inside the modern sanctuary, he and Schultz carefully unwrapped it, the priest joking that “it felt like Christmas.” When the dark and damaged painting he had so long ago admired emerged from the packing, Schultz fell silent. He beheld what thousands of earlier parishioners once had, in an era when illiteracy placed a profound importance on art as a teaching tool. “How many people have prayed to her?” he finally asked, softly. “How many couples were married in front of her?”

Díaz treasured the discovery of the paintings, but figured the story ended there. “I thought it was a great gift for our museums to give back to the church. In the back of my mind, I hoped it would encourage them to explore raising money for the others. But conservation is expensive.”

He didn’t know that Schultz had decided on the spot to ask Lawrence for a ballpark bid on protecting all the church’s paintings. She traveled to the church, did a first examination, and delivered a relatively affordable price, with a bit shaved off her normal fees. The cause, she figured, was that special. Encouraged, Schultz put out a call for donors, got a local TV station to do a story, even, had an article in the Archdiocese of Santa Fe’s People of God newspaper. And then he waited, listening to the silence.

Phillip Menicucci grew up at our Lady of Fatima in Albuquerque. Now the owner of a Rio Rancho cabinet-making company, he and his family still accompany his mother to Mass there. One day, he was chatting with Monsignor Bennett Voorhies of Albuquerque’s Our Lady of the Annunciation when he mentioned that he and his wife give money to the Vatican’s Patrons of the Arts program. “Keep your money local,” Voorhies chided. “Our churches have art, too.” Menicucci recalled having heard about some paintings in need of funding, but couldn’t remember much more than that. Rather than put it off, he called the archdiocese and eventually tracked down the newspaper editor, who put him in touch with Schultz.

They scheduled a meeting at which Meniccuci and his wife, Susan, intended to pick one painting for conservation. But then Susan, who was raised Jewish and later converted, found herself drawn to The Circumcision as a representation of her own religious roots. The couple went to a corner of the room, talked it over, came back to Schultz, and told him they would pay for two paintings. Later, they called him and said, “Pick a third.” Then they decided on the fourth. “When we shifted from the Vatican’s restoration to look locally, this project was a no-brainer,” Phillip says. “These paintings have been stuck in an attic, and they’re historic for the church in Belén. Restoring something that’s such a part of their history made sense to me.”

One by one, Lawrence got to work. As she addressed each painting, she began to commune with the unnamed artist. “One of the joys of this profession is you have a sense of how the artist worked. Did they draw it out first? Did they do layers and layers? Did they hide their brushwork or not? Sometimes you see something really special to that artist—a fingerprint, a pentimento, a change. It’s about getting into the mind of the artist. That’s why it’s exciting to do the work and do it well. You honor what the artist did.”

The Menicuccis took their children on a Colorado holiday and one day, instead of sightseeing, spent hours in Lawrence’s studio, watching her work, asking questions, and falling under the same spell. Their $20,000 donation paid to conserve and frame all four paintings. Other donations paid for museum glass, to ensure their longevity.

Before the paintings began filtering back to Belén, Schultz was reassigned to Albuquerque’s Our Lady of Fatima, and only a curmudgeon would call that a random move. Not only was he now posted at Menicucci’s childhood church, but Father Clement Niggel, the new Belén priest, noticed that the paintings weren’t quite poised to shine in their old home. The sanctuary’s 1970s-era architecture posed a challenge; LeRoy Neiman’s graphic sports prints would look more at home there than classic Spanish Colonial paintings. Returning them to the inaccessible upstairs hallway didn’t feel like a great option, either. So one day, Father Niggel called Schultz and asked him if he’d like to display a few of the paintings at Fatima. Maybe for a good long while.

Last summer, Schultz welcomed four of the paintings. The fifth, The Nativity, could be finished by Christmas 2017, appropriately enough, given that Belén is Spanish for Bethlehem. Schultz and his staff spent an afternoon hanging them in the sanctuary.

When the head maintenance man saw them, he was stunned. “He said, ‘Father, my parents were married at that church.’ His father, mother, grandfather, grandmother, great-grandfather, and great-grandmother, they worshipped in that church. He has ancestral connections to these. His mother is 92. She can’t wait to come see them. He has grandchildren of his own and can’t wait to bring them. And that’s just one family.”

The next afternoon, the Menicuccis paid a visit, discovering to their delight that the paintings happened to be hung near where they sit during services. Schultz pointed out newly revealed details in them, but Phillip likely couldn’t see them. Tears filled his eyes. “Don’t cry, Daddy, don’t cry,” his youngest son said, patting his arm. “I didn’t know the Department of Cultural Affairs was doing an exhibit that would involve us,” he said. “And I didn’t think these paintings would be at my childhood parish.”

“It was a confluence of interests,” Schultz says. “I had these paintings and a desire to see them protected. Phil had an interest in making religious art available to public view. But neither of us had the connections. Then, here’s
Josef with the connection and, by chance—or providence—he finds pictures of these images from a church publication fifty years earlier.”

The four paintings stayed up through October. Long-term, Niggel plans to rotate two paintings in and out of Fatima, while showing the other three somewhere inside the Belén church. Both are open during weekday business hours.

In August, Díaz left the History Museum to become chief curator and associate director at the Museum of Spanish Colonial Art in Santa Fe. He hasn’t forgotten the thrill of plucking a relic from obscurity, and still marvels at what he and the History Museum set into motion. “Part of our mission at the Department of Cultural Affairs is to work with these communities, seek out these treasures, and give back to them,” he says. “It also allows them to see us and all that we do. This really was one of the highlights of my career. It was so right and good. It makes me proud to be a curator.”

Kate Nelson is interim editor of New Mexico Magazine and loves ducking into New Mexico’s mission churches on research outings with curator Josef Díaz.

Kate Nelson (opens in a new tab) is a longtime New Mexico journalist who retired as managing editor of New Mexico Magazine where she earned numerous awards from the International Regional Magazine Association.

Material World

In MIAC’s Lifeways of the Southern Athabaskans, Apache objects speak louder than (antiquated and caricature-laden) words.

By Cullen Arlington Curtiss

Of the hundreds of peoples that lived and flourished in native North America, few have been so consistently misrepresented as the Apacheans of Arizona and New Mexico,” anthropologist and Apache culturist Keith H. Basso wrote in his essay “Western Apache” in the Handbook of North American Indians published in 1978. “Glorified by novelists, sensationalized by historians, and distorted beyond credulity by commercial film makers, the popular image of ‘the Apache’…is almost entirely a product of irresponsible caricature and exaggeration.”

This knowledge gap challenged Museum of Indian Arts and Culture Education Director Joyce Begay-Foss (Diné) to curate Lifeways of the Southern Athabaskans, opening at MIAC December 10. “The general public—even some Natives—doesn’t understand,” says Begay-Foss. The exhibition encompasses over one hundred objects made and used by Apachean groups in New Mexico and Arizona, including Chiricahua, Jicarilla, Mescalero, San Carlos, and White Mountain, dating from the 1880s to the 1960s. “This story needed to be told,” Begay-Foss says. “These objects have never been exhibited as a group.” Begay-Foss notes that the exhibition’s basketry, beaded clothing, parfleche, hunting and horse gear, and photographs are more than objects—they are proof of Apachean ingenuity, resilience, and tenacity.

In 1826, Albert Gallatin, founding member of the American Ethnological Society, arbitrarily bestowed the name Athabaska on a group of related indigenous people from western Canada in the environs of Lake Athabasca, which straddles the northern corners of Saskatchewan and Alberta. This term, which evolved in the early 1800s from the apt, Cree-tongued aðapaskāw, means, loosely: “where there are plants one after another.” Linguists today classify the Athabaskan people into three geographic subfamilies—Northern, Pacific Coast, and Southern. Anthropologists assert that these linguistically and culturally related peoples are ancestors of those who relocated from western Canada in the late 1300s and 1400s.

While Begay-Foss endeavors to correct some notions about Southern Athabaskan people through exhibits on language, homeland territory, cultural identity, mobility, traditional beliefs, horse culture, technology, and trade, she has avoided addressing the outdated but enduring stereotype of the Apache as a particularly savage people.

“We interpret their lives through language and lifeways. Putting aside what history books say about violence, I’m focusing on Apachean material culture—what these hunter-gatherers needed to survive, how they used land and its resources, how they felt about their people and animals.”

In her research, she went beyond academic texts and their limitations, seeking counsel from tribal representatives, whose people today, according to Begay-Foss, number as follows: 3,511 Mescalero; 4,038 San Carlos; 2,755 Jicarilla; 12,249 White Mountain (Western); and 650 Fort Sill (Chiricahua) in Oklahoma. In her consultations, for example, she’s learned that two dolls, misidentified as Mescalero, are Jicarilla. “Ours is an oral history,” Begay-Foss says. “We need our own people to tell our story.”

Organized by topic, the exhibition opens by focusing on distinct tribal homelands and language. Many linguists and anthropologists have contributed to the research that examines relationships in the tonal Athabaskan language family. Summarizing, Robert W. Young, former professor emeritus of linguistics at the University of New Mexico, writes in his essay “Apachean Languages,” also in the Handbook of North American Indians,that Apachean languages “diverge from one another to varying degrees in details of phonology, morphology, and structure, but basically they share a common pattern … [in fact,] a range of shared lexical cognates at 90–97 percent.” For instance, while -t’a’ is the predominant way to represent feather among all Apachean languages, dog varies slightly among Chiricahua (kéjaa), San Carlos (łiichaayáné), and Jicarilla (łi’chaa’á).

Apache translations accompany some early objects, including a beaded Chiricahua quiver, donated by the family of Sergeant William Minser, 3rd United States Infantry Regiment, stationed at Fort Stanton, New Mexico, who in 1886 accepted it from a surrendering follower in Chiricahua leader Geronimo’s band. According to the donor, upon acquisition, the quiver bore Geronimo’s name in purple berry juice, though it’s no longer visible. Visitors can also examine language through video and audio. The Education Room features videos of interviews with tribal members, including a Jicarilla basket weaver, speaking in her language with English subtitles.

Deeper in the exhibition, Begay-Foss shows the Apaches as nomadic hunter-gatherers, whose lives pre-dated land tenure. While stationary, they lived in shelters. Photographs of domed wickiups and cone-shaped tipis demonstrate different approaches to functional design. The framed wickiups, considered the more permanent dwelling, though generally burned upon departure, required one to three days of construction time. Women built them using arched willow or oak poles, overlaid with various grasses bound in yucca leaves. A hide covered the entrance. Tipis, which featured angled hardwood poles draped with sinew-sewn, brain-tanned (typically buffalo) hides, were quick to assemble, disassemble, pack, and reconstruct.

Portability was a critical characteristic of any Apache object, including their carrying vessels, which were generally woven, and therefore lighter than clay. An 1890s/early-1900s Mescalero burden basket, measuring two feet tall—used to carry belongings, corn, wood, nuts, and berries or other fruit—is made with sumac and yucca leaves; an 1895 Western Apache tus (water jar) is twined with mesquite bark and sprigs of willow and cottonwood, and protected with piñon pitch (resin) inside and out, whereas the Jicarilla wove in coils and pitched the inside only.

The bow (sometimes backed with sinew to increase spring) and arrow were made of hardwoods, such as mulberry, and banded in variable hues of ochre or vegetal paint to differentiate ownership. The exhibition features a Jicarilla bow, sporting a trade-garnered metal tip and turkey-feather fletchings, designed to aid in straighter shooting. The Apache hunted mule and white-tailed deer, elk, and buffalo, as well as small game, such as rabbits.

The dog was the Apaches’ pack animal and pulled a travois (sled) before the Spanish introduced the life-changing horse, increasing opportunities for travel, trade, and influential cultural encounters. Dated pre-1935, a pair of Chiricahua cowhide horseshoes protected front hooves and obscured tracks. Evidence of the Apaches’ appreciation for horses and dogs surfaces in their likenesses woven into vessels, but they used other common motifs, too. Begay-Foss says, “They honored the elements that helped them survive through their woven designs, showing their connections to land and sky through patterns.”

All clothing, generally sewn of brain-tanned hides, required enormous effort. A late-nineteenth- or early-twentieth-century fringed Jicarilla cape—made from an entire deer hide, bone beads, trade-garnered glass seed beads and brass bells, ochre dye, and sinew, was worn by young women during puberty ceremonies. A Western Apache cradleboard and female and male Jicarilla dolls represent childhood lifeways.

Beyond the larger goals of the exhibition, as MIAC’s education director, Begay-Foss looks forward to conversations with students, whose candid questions give her opportunities to share more about the Southern Athabaskan culture. Why is this arrow band red and that one yellow? How did they make colors? How do you tan a hide? Could they wear the capes whenever they felt like it? Did the babies like being carried in cradleboards? Did they get to sleep with their dolls?

“To really understand the Apache people, we need to examine their material culture and grasp how they survived—with the weather, the conflict, the resources. This is where the stories are.”

Cullen Arlington Curtiss (opens in a new tab) is a freelance writer with New England roots currently living in Santa Fe, New Mexico. When she’s not writing, she’s outside with her family and friends.

The Art of Remembrance

Crafting Memory: The Art of Community in Peru provides intimate glimpses into how art and community alchemize into healing and memory.

By Laura Addison

In 2003, Amy Groleau was doing archaeological field work as a graduate student in Ayacucho, Peru—a highlands city that many people associate with two very different national narratives. This region lies at the heart of Peruvian folk art, rich with roots in the pre-Columbian Wari culture and complex with the hybridity that resulted from colonial-era negotiations and violence. From 1980 to 2000, Ayacucho was also the epicenter of the country’s harrowing internal armed conflict, when the Maoist revolutionary movement, Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), conducted guerrilla warfare against the Peruvian government, and the state retorted with an equally violent counterinsurgency. The local indigenous community suffered persecution from both Sendero Luminoso and the state military.

The phenomenon of los desaparecidos (the disappeared) took root during the late-twentieth century in various Latin American countries that endured civil wars, including Peru. The estimated number of deaths during Peru’s Time of Violence (this period’s understated name), is 70,000; depending upon which report you read, the number of desaparecidos ranged from 8,000 to 16,000. Indigenous villagers in Ayacucho and similar locales became collateral damage during the conflict, as Sendero insurgents forcefully attempted to coerce them to cooperate, while the state military captured and extra-judicially punished suspected rebels. Los desaparecidos were kidnapped, interrogated, tortured, and, in the end, almost always killed and buried. Images of women marching in the streets, demanding information about their missing loved ones, holding signs bearing their names and photos, remain as potent today as they were in the 1980s and 1990s. Beginning in 2002, the government began to exhume burial sites in a process of truth and reconciliation, identifying and returning remains to loved ones.

Although she did not know it at the time, less than a mile away from where Groleau was excavating Wari ceramic sherds at the Conchopata site, forensic anthropologists were doing their own excavations—of mass graves at the notorious Los Cabitos military barracks, where government forces killed suspected insurgents. It was several years later, when a forensic team member asked her to identify some Wari pot sherds that were excavated from the Los Cabitos mass grave, that Groleau discovered the concurrent excavations of the Ayacuchan landscape, and the divergent layers of history those excavations revealed. When Groleau accepted the position of curator of Latin American folk art at the Museum of International Folk Art in 2014, she knew that this experience would shape her first exhibition.

Crafting Memory: The Art of Community in Peru considers the legacy of the Sendero Luminoso years—but also the cultural pride and hopefulness that today’s Peruvian folk art equally conveys. “Today’s artists have created a model for how to deal with upheavals,” Groleau says. “Together, through art, they are building strength and looking not just at the challenges but for the solutions. This show celebrates the ways people have used folk arts to overcome adversity and strengthen community. While all of the pieces in the show draw on memory and heritage, the works are decidedly forward looking, mapping out a future based on strengthening local cultures and valuing indigenous traditions and experience.”

Located physically at the heart of the Crafting Memory exhibition is a space devoted to memory, inspired by El Museo de la Memoria (Memory Museum) in Ayacucho. In the early years of the conflict, indigenous women created the organization ANFASEP (National Association of the Families of the Disappeared) to help find information about los desaparecidos and to care for orphaned children. Along with information, they also sought and shared food, education, and mutual support. One unanticipated outcome was the role that folk art played in healing, preserving memory, and seeking justice. Another result was the creation of the Museo de la Memoria, para que no se repita (so it is not repeated), as its motto states.

The ANFASEP women taught children, who came to their center daily, how to make retablos. The traditional Peruvian retablo is made of painted wood, and opens like a two-door cabinet to reveal narrative scenes depicting daily life and customs in the form of figures molded from potato paste. This art form had long been a staple in the highlands, popular in Ayacuchan homes as well as among tourists as souvenirs. The children’s retablos were different. As they created scenes within the retablos, they articulated their stories and traumas, making visual testimonials to the violence surrounding them.

Rosalía Tineo’s Ayacuchano ceramic figures and whistles, known as Huayli, follow a similar trajectory of changing meaning in a traditional art form. Artisans typically hand-build Huayli ceramics in the form of animals, humans, or nativities and other biblical scenes. Rosalía learned this tradition from her father, Don Leoncio Tineo Ochoa, as he learned from his elders, a family legacy that reaches back through many generations. As a member of the generation that lived through Peru’s twenty-year insurgence, Rosalía periodically reflects on its devastations in her own whistles. Camouflaging itself among the more traditional and benign iterations of animals and indigenous figures is one set that depicts her father’s experience of the war. Don Leoncio is shown kneeling before a member of the militia, his hands behind his hooded head as the armed man hits him with the butt of a rifle. A blindfolded woman (Leoncio’s wife) and a neighbor girl shielding her eyes are sightless witnesses to the crime. Far from the emotional register of a souvenir, this Huayli vignette speaks to the necessity of not forgetting even the most brutal memories. And it invests a popular folk art form with greater community relevance.

Peru’s Time of Violence produced absence and silence, and relied upon fear and intimidation to ensure that silence persisted. Therefore, to march, to create, and to bear witness were radical and precarious acts that reasserted the voices of victims. For the women of ANFASEP, and the children in their care, to remember was to resist. The exhibition’s selection of retablos, ceramics, and illustrations affirms the role of folk arts in perpetuating memory and safeguarding dignity.

Not all arte popular (popular art) of today contemplates this legacy of fear or violence; the exhibition also demonstrates joy and pride in both heritage and craftsmanship. Other examples of contemporary arte popular from both the highlands and urban centers symbolically encircles the exhibition’s “Memory” space. The famed Oncebay family of weavers from Ayacucho works collectively to create remarkable textiles that incorporate pre-Columbian motifs, such as a shawl with Wari designs, or a weaving that includes embroidery of ancient Paracas-style figures. Each family member participates in this centuries-old weaving tradition: the mother spins the wool, the father and brothers dye and weave the wool, and the three daughters create the embroidered designs. While the Oncebays do not reflect the Time of Violence overtly in their work, their story nonetheless reveals collateral consequences of the armed conflict. The family found itself under curfew, and consequently lost their means to sell their work. As a result, they devoted themselves to the study of their ancestors’ ancient imagery. Since the 1990s, the Oncebays have worked to resuscitate Wari techniques and motifs in Peruvian weaving.

Silversmith Edwin del Pino also uses pre-Columbian designs for his repoussé and filigree jewelry and functional objects. Working with an ancient technique of hammering metal into relief, del Pino’s expertly crafted repoussé silverwork includes tupus, the decorative pins indigenous women wear to secure a shawl. Historic tupus predated the Spanish Conquest, but even after the Colonial period, tupu designs retained colonial motifs. Del Pino’s tupus, in contrast, celebrate Peru’s indigenous roots through reference to both technique and imagery.

Some of the artists included in Crafting Memory employ the strategy Groleau refers to as “remixing”—that is, asserting cultural pride by reviving pre-Columbian motifs or traditional techniques but then blending them unapologetically with a modern sensibility. Lima-based artist Qarla Quispe, for example, creates contemporary interpretations of the familiar pollera, the full-gathered skirt that Andean women wear with layers of petticoats. Quispe’s versions, with printed fabrics based on her contemporary drawn designs, establish indigenous heritage within modern fashion. For many generations, urban Peruvian audiences viewed the pollera scornfully, as a touristic stereotype or a sign of rural poverty, so by positioning the Quechua staple this way, Quispe counteracts the stigma long associated with indigenous dress. She also contradicts its association with artifacts of the past. “Native culture is not only heritage,” Groleau says, “it is the present and future.”

Aymar Ccopacatty accomplishes the same type of revalorization by remixing the traditional chullo, the brightly colored knit cap with earflaps and tassels that men in the Peruvian highlands make and wear, with an urban folk aesthetic. Among indigenous communities, Ccopacatty explains, the chullo symbolizes authority, worn by a man once he becomes an adult and assumes more responsibility in the community. His sculpture Ch’ullu for a New Leader is an oversized chullo—measuring ten feet tall—knitted from discarded plastic bags, caution tape, and fabric litter collected from around Lake Titicaca. Once sacred to the Inca, Lake Titicaca is today contaminated by sewage, trash, mercury, and a variety of other pollutants that poison the fish and sicken those who live near the lake’s banks. A mountain of plastic trash, the most modern of materials, encircles the water.

The giant chullo, knitted from this refuse, clearly comments upon this environmental travesty at the same time that it situates authority for the lake with the Aymara and Quechua, for whom Lake Titicaca represents their ancestral heritage and future wellbeing. It’s impossible to ignore its larger-than-life scale, which establishes the iconic importance of this traditional article of clothing. Moreover, as Ccopacatty knits these colorful plastics together with the help of youth at a regional children’s center, the process echoes ANFASEP’s catalytic practice of creating community through folk art. Just as the children of ANFASEP healed wounds and shared a sense of unity with other survivors during the Time of Violence through the retablo, the children who participate in knitting plastic adaptations of traditional attire acquire a sense of shared stewardship of both the environment and their cultural heritage.

Laura Addison is curator of North American and European folk art at the Museum of International Folk Art. She was previously curator of contemporary art at the New Mexico Museum of Art (2002–13), and is a frequent contributor to El Palacio.

Stitched to the Soul

Anchored by Native and Anglo roots, ceremonial and contemporary art, Teri Greeves stretches even further, blending roles as a preservationist, an innovator, and an important social critic.

By Kate Nelson

BY KATE NELSON

Once upon a time, in a trading post on Wyoming’s Wind River Indian Reservation, a bored eight-year-old asked a local beadworker for a lesson. The woman gave the child baby moccasins, and only when the girl had finished with the first one’s seemingly simple triangles and lines did her teacher tell her to turn it around and look at it as though it were on her own foot. The little girl, one Teri Greeves, followed her teacher’s instructions. Soon, the beads faded. In the negative space bordered by the triangles and lines, the girl saw the hoof of a deer, the animal figuratively sewn to the soul of the baby whose foot might someday fill it.

“From the very first object I ever made, I was being told to look at the negative space,” says Greeves. Today, she is one of the nation’s preeminent Native beadworkers, celebrated for her exacting traditional designs, unconventional applications, and biting commentaries on contemporary culture. “You can’t just look at the design. You have to see the whole thing.”

She never tackled the second moccasin, and the first disappeared—lost or somehow swallowed into the massive collections of her mother, the trading post owner, Jeri Ah-be-hill. Greeves often wondered if it still existed, that emblem of her first step on a path toward not only artistic innovation, but scholarly studies of clothing, identity, and Native women’s unsung roles in their importance.

“Literally, everything has a meaning and purpose when you’re dressing for your community,” Greeves says. Tribal clothing’s designs, colors, how they’re worn, and when they’re worn add up to a nomenclature that reveals the wearer’s place in the world—their tribes, their clans, the animals they carry within them. Greeves steeped herself so deeply in those stories from her mother and the other Natives she encountered that when she attended her first New Mexico powwow, after moving from Wyoming in 1986, she could tell her friends where most of the dancers came from—even what season they were born in, based on the construction of their moccasins’ tongues.

Even with that immersion into her Native heritage, Greeves has long felt split between two or even more worlds. A Kiowa/Comanche who was raised amid Shoshone and Arapahoe, she has an Anglo father and an Ottawa husband. “Hands and feet in both places,” she says. As she developed as a Native artist, she made ceremonial objects with extraordinary precision, plus delightfully modern mash-ups of Converse shoes beaded with familiar icons, cartoon imagery, and personal commentary. Blue ribbons, commissions, and museum purchases stacked up (along with New Mexico institutions, the British Museum, New York’s Museum of Art and Design, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the Portland Art Museum, and Washington DC’s National Museum of the American Indian, to name a few).

Her traditional moccasins found early favor with collectors and helped her make a living from her artwork. Her career, one that encompassed the binary of keeping the faith and pushing the boundaries, might have continued unabated until one day ten years ago when, while visiting a cherished collector, she saw a pair of her traditional moccasins on display. Never worn, never danced in, never meshed with a human spirit, they had grown so stiff that she feared they had no use beyond art—and that she was complicit in the deed.

In that moment, Greeves’ origin story reached a fork in the road. One represented creativity, the other responsibility. Hands and feet in both places, could she travel two ways?

“I realized I couldn’t sell objects we use in ceremonial life to non-Native or non-Kiowa people,” Greeves says. “In my mind, I separated. As an artist, you’re like, oh, I’m going to push the boundaries. But there’s this one, traditional way of making things, and there’s this market way of doing things. That’s the place where I can do whatever.”

Her vocation was also a diversion from an earlier goal. Greeves, daughter of Ah-be-hill and Italian-American sculptor Richard Greeves, intended to become a lawyer. She has the mind for it, with a steely take on the many costs of injustice, and a fighter’s instinct for pulling all but the most necessary punches. In the late 1980s, she worked her way through the University of California at Santa Cruz by beading small items that her mother, by then divorced and relocated, could sell in her trading post off Old Santa Fe Trail. Mostly, she applied traditional designs to mainstream accessories, like powwow earrings, for example. One day, Ah-be-hill suggested she try beading a pair of Converse All-Stars. Years before, such a pair had come into the Wind River shop, dazzling both Teri and her sister, jewelry artist Keri Ataumbi. “We thought they were crazy cool,” Greeves says. “My mother set a really high price on them. I think she didn’t want to sell them.”

Ah-be-hill sent Greeves a new pair. To her delight, she found that the tongues on these iconic kicks lift all the way out, so that she could slip a beading hand into the tip of the toe. She began with simple designs, but soon realized that, besides using various parts of the shoe to tell an intricate story, she could also let each shoe tell a different episode. She covered her new canvases with horses, tipis, superheroes, and representations of “Rez Pride” that often drew on powwow imagery. She took finished pairs to Santa Fe Indian Market and the Eight Northern Indian Pueblos Arts and Crafts Show. “Every time I put them on the table, people would come up, laughing and smiling,” she recalls. “The first couple times, I was offended. But then I realized that all they saw were beaded Converse All-Stars, and they were walking into the story that I wanted to tell with a smile and their heart open. This is a vehicle I am using to tell very complicated stories.”

The stories blend past with present—a loincloth-clad Indian karate-kicking the word kapow, powwow-perfect dancers in Ray-Bans—and celebrate iconography like deer, turtles, lightning, and whirlwinds.

She continued making other objects as well—bracelets, vessels, leggings, and traditional moccasins. In 1990, as she prepared to head to law school, she entered Indian Market with a deer-hide umbrella embellished with beads, shells, and coins. It fit no category, yet Indian Parade Umbrella took home best-of-show honors, and remade Greeves’ career plan. The more she examined the abstract images on the many objects her mother collected and those she herself encountered, the more she believed that she could become the standard-bearer for the unknown women she believes crafted at least half of all recognized Native art. They were, to her eyes, the forgotten inventors of a modern American art form.

“Long before Georgia O’Keeffe ever set foot in New Mexico, the first abstract eye was a female eye, and she was a Native eye,” Greeves says. “The pottery, the beadwork, the parfleches. All of those abstract designs are women’s work, and white abstract painters of America were seeing this when they came west.”

Perhaps nowhere does her eye for imposing abstraction on the everyday reveal itself better than her high-heeled sneakers. Manufactured by the Steve Madden company in the Converse All-Star style as a cheeky riff on high-fashion stilettos, they take on extra oomph when coated with Greeves’ designs. One pair delineates the difference between “rez girls” (softball players) and “ndn girls” (powwow princesses). Another analyzes luck through the traditional lens of Deer Woman on one shoe, a tribal casino on the other. Perhaps there’s a person out there who would dare tie any of them onto their feet—her earliest examples were meant to be worn—but Greeves elevates shoe to sculpture, as seen in the pair she created for the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture’s permanent collection and now on exhibit in Stepping Out: 10,000 Years of Walking the West.

Kiowa Ladies depicts two women, one for each shoe, plus two sets of abstract designs that Greeves pulled from a weathered bonnet-case parfleche made long ago by an unknown Kiowa woman. For her, the shoes hold a place in third-wave feminism, marrying the Kiowa tradition of men creating pictorial images and women inventing the abstractions in a way that elevates those women into a long-denied spotlight.

Imagine them on your feet. Those pure abstractions, long the design domain of women, speak directly to each other, left foot to right, gliding down to the earth and up to the shins. Staring out on either side, the women whose faces never graced their works watch each step you might take, see what you might see. Their unadorned faces appear beautiful, daring, serene.

“They’re two different women, Kiowa women, and not a specific woman. It’s the Kiowa female eye, that genius eye,” she says of the shoes. “It’s recognizing there were these master artists in Native America and, in paint first, they were creating an abstracted world and then were introduced to this new medium of beads.”

The shoes carry extra importance: They are the final pair of high-heeled high-tops Greeves may ever create. Steve Madden discontinued the style. Greeves has hunted the web, finding only sorely abused second-hand versions of the medium that put extra pop into her art. “I can’t get them anymore,” she says. The path ends. Others, she knows, await.

Stacks of deer, buffalo, and moose hides occupy one corner of Greeves’ home studio south of Santa Fe. Part of another wall holds bins filled with beads, tin cones, mirrors, elk teeth, shells. Old moccasins, including her mother’s, stand on a rolltop desk. Pictures of Greeves’ forebears hang above her work desk, along with a decorated stick representing a mystical snake of Kiowa lore. Stuffed bookshelves share space with projects in the making, including Indian Market projects and Ottawa-style leggings and moccasins for her youngest son’s naming ceremony. “I don’t know how to make the pucker-toe moccasins that are specific to those Great Lakes people,” she frets. “I think he’s not going to have proper moccasins.”

Greeves’ concentrated study of tribal designs and their evolutions have won the admiration of curators across the nation. She has access to the collections vaults at the National Museum of the American Indian and the National Museum of Natural History, where she pulls inspiration from “the intentionality of the old work”—how earlier artisans did what they did when time and materials were dear and cultural identity was key. In 2019, she’ll co-curate a yet-to-be-titled exhibit at the Minneapolis Institute of Art exploring Native women’s creativity from prehistory to today.

Kiowa women are particularly adept at beadwork, and use the skill to tell stories about where their people come from, stitch by stitch retelling their roots. “I was brought home from the hospital in beadwork,” Greeves says. “My mom had a beaded diaper bag. Beaded objects were around me. I was enveloped in beadwork. It’s identity. You grow up hearing, ‘Don’t do it that way. That’s not the way we do it.’ The value of my existence is I can be some sort of cross-cultural conduit. I live in both worlds, so I can talk about what I see and try to interpret it into some kind of story that makes sense.”

On commission and often as gifts, Greeves continues to make ceremonial clothing and footwear, but only if she knows the people who will use them and can then concentrate upon how they will do so as she works. Although she limited a line of her commercial offerings, she solidified her ability to critique the present with techniques from the past. Lauded for her expertise in crafting fancy footwear, she herself prefers flip-flops or Doc Martens most days of the week. And she understands those people who might blend the artifacts of various tribal cultures in the name of the new—especially when the earned value comes from the “pan-Indianism” of powwows at which she sometimes pokes gentle fun.

“You see the crowns, leggings, belts, everything matchy-matchy. That’s nothing like what Kiowa women wore 20 years ago, 50, or 100,” she says. “But it’s not bad. It’s alive, and it keeps reinventing itself. But that style of dress is in response to competition, not ceremonial.”

For that, she draws lines around her ability to borrow from any other tribal tradition while still speaking out on behalf of all tribal peoples. She rails against the National Museum of Natural History for holding football fields’ worth of artifacts precious to individual identities—and for combining them in collections of dinosaur bones and mineral samples. She charges that lapses in the institutional archiving process make it difficult to research them. (The National Museum of the American Indian, she says, operates more orderly and ethically.) She mourns the loss of traditional lifeways that complicates her access to properly tanned hides. She makes a theme song of the need to recognize more Native art as women’s art. And she sighs at being asked to once again answer her most-often-asked question: Is your beadwork an art or a craft?

“Craft is art, and art is craft,” she says. “In the end-all, be-all, I’m a shoemaker. In the zombie apocalypse, I can make shoes. What I say is this: I am a beadworker. In my community, that means something. Almost all Native art is women’s work and it’s considered crafts by the larger art world. They don’t know what they’re looking at. They don’t know that it’s a deer hoofprint.”

The photographed gazes of her ancestors and the array of artifacts surrounding Greeves assures that she walks confidently on all the paths she’s chosen. Many of the pieces in her studio came from her mother, the family’s true fashionista, who died in March 2015, leaving behind packed storage sheds. Greeves and her sister put off cleaning them out. “Hantavirus central,” Greeves jokes. But finally they went in, and there, in the very last of the sheds, Greeves found the baby moccasin. Sitting in her hand, it weighs but grams. No baby ever wore it, set its soul within it, marveled at the deer that guided its feet. Yet it means the world. A young Kiowa girl on a faraway reservation threaded her intent into it, speaking for the first time with the women who came before her and with those yet to arrive. One foot done, she was on her way.

Author of the artist biography, Helen Hardin: A Straight Line Curved, Kate Nelson is New Mexico Magazine’s interim editor who loves immersing herself in the state’s arts, culture, history, and mountains. She also wrote “Into the Light” in this issue.

A Fateful Commencement

One hundred years ago, five paintings in the New Mexico Museum of Art's first exhibition challenged the world to think about New Mexico and its art. The times may be different, but the challenge continues.

BY JOSEPH TRAUGOTT

One hundred years ago, New Mexico’s famed light streamed through the new museum’s skylights at its very first exhibition. That same light emboldened the artists whose 172 paintings graced the museum’s pristine walls. More than a thousand people attended the museum’s opening festivities in November 1917. The thirty-eight European American artists depicted mostly Native American subjects, with varying levels of verisimilitude and sentiment. Although nobody present could have predicted this, these glowing paintings would define the trajectory of Southwestern art for the next thirty years.

The museum’s centennial gives us a fine opportunity to contemplate the impact of this exhibition. To do this, we must examine these works from both historical and contemporary perspectives. Five monumental paintings from the first exhibition serve as prime objects outlining the subjects and styles addressed in this exhibition: Gerald Cassidy’s Cui Bono, Leon Kroll’s Santa Fe Hills, Henry C. Balink’s Pueblo Pottery, Joseph Henry Sharp’s The Stoic, and Robert Henri’s Portrait of Dieguito Roybal, San Ildefonso Pueblo. The meanings of these works are not frozen in the past. Their connotations have evolved over the decades, reflecting the dynamic complexities of New Mexico.

Promoting New Mexico and the New Museum

Edgar Lee Hewett served as the guest editor of the January−February 1918 issue of Art and Archaeology, the monthly journal of the Archaeological Institute of America (AIA). Normally, this elite publication emphasized classical subjects from Europe, North Africa, and the Near East, but this double issue featured the opening of Santa Fe’s museum. In the form of photographs about the region, misleading bits of local history, local architecture, Catholic missions, and dreary dedication speeches that droned on for pages, Hewett oriented readers to his version of the American Southwest.

But most importantly, Art and Archaeology reproduced paintings by thirty-five of the artists in the exhibition, all presented as high-quality, halftone illustrations. Santa Fe culture czar Hewett implied to the journal’s international audience that art and archaeology developments in Santa Fe were as important as those in Greece, Rome, and Palestine. Gifts to the museum were usually described as gifts to “the school,” expressing Hewett’s conflicted institutional interests. While running poorly recorded archaeological excavations, he served as the unpaid director of the Museum of New Mexico and its new art museum, and also directed the School of American Research (a subdivision of the AIA that became known as the School of American Archaeology from 1907−1917 and now is known as the School of Advanced Research).

Taos Society of Artists paintings were the biggest draw to the first exhibition at the new museum. Many of the members were well-known illustrators, and articles about the society had been featured in literary journals. The group was well known in Santa Fe because Hewett had given them three exhibitions at the newly renovated Palace of the Governors, beginning in 1915. After training in Europe and tiring of European subjects, the artists of the TSA returned home seeking picturesque American scenes. The members quickly “discovered” Pueblo Indians, even though their ancestors had been living in New Mexico for at least 13,000 years. The success of their displays underscored Santa Fe’s need for an art museum.

These well-established artists formed their hierarchical society in 1915 to promote their rather academic, Realism-inspired paintings of Indians by organizing sales exhibitions that traveled around the United States. Eastern high society found the TSA paintings chic, expensive, and commercially viable, so it is not surprising that of the thirty-eight TSA paintings in the exhibition, only Julius Rolshoven’s, Portrait of Santiago Naranjo and Joseph Henry Sharp’s The Stoic are now in the collection. The society’s sophisticated marketing gave their paintings extra buzz.

The Dramatic Western Scene

Cui Bono, a monumental painting by Santa Fe art colony co-founder Gerald Cassidy, depicts a Taos Pueblo man wrapped in a white blanket that shields him from the blazing summer sun. The Taos man’s carefully rendered face contrasts with a sun-drenched adobe wall, with the Pueblo’s north building and Taos mountain beyond. This larger-than-life study consolidates landscapes, Pueblo architecture, Pueblo peoples, harmony with nature, and cultural interaction into a single painting.

Many people assume that Cui Bono is the subject’s name, but it is actually a Latin phrase that means Who benefits? Cassidy painted this work as New Mexico was achieving statehood in 1912, and the title implies political content. The man’s eyes seem to ask, “Who will benefit from statehood, now and in the future?”

Serious talk of statehood began in the 1880s after the Santa Fe Railway connected the Territory of New Mexico to the rest of the country. Protestant, Anglo-Saxon members of Congress had balked at granting statehood because New Mexico’s population was predominantly Native, Hispanic, and Catholic. As statehood began to seem inevitable, nosy anthropologists, artists, photographers, traders, and tourists flocked to traditional New Mexico communities, determined to capture the last fleeting views of lifeways they believed would disappear soon. In 1917 it was not clear how indigenous and Hispanic communities would benefit from the influx of outsiders who often viewed traditional cultures as backward, exotic, and strange. Both Native and Hispanic peoples remembered the crooked deals over land and water rights that coincided with the American Colonial period, beginning in 1846, and they had little reason to trust that they would be treated fairly.

Visitors not familiar with Southwestern cultures often assume that Cui Bono offers an authentic view from the Pueblo past. The dress looks the part; the architectural backdrop dates back at least seven centuries; and the scene truly looks as if were pulled from the pages of National Geographic. But not so. Cassidy portrayed an up-to-date Pueblo man from Taos expressing a contemporary, cross-cultural synthesis from the twentieth century—not bygone days. The man wears a machine-woven cotton blanket that may have come from a mail-order catalogue via the United States Postal Service. It looks like he is wearing blue jeans, but they are probably only the legs from a pair of jeans. To keep cool during the summer, it was common for men to cut off the legs of their jeans and wear them like chaps, suspended by garters, along with a traditional breech cloth. Cassidy’s painting highlights the ability of Pueblo people to adopt new ways without surrendering to cultural assimilation.

Cui Bono has been on display for a century and now is understood as a symbol of the museum and its collections. The image is memorable and easily described by people who have only seen the work once. While his location within the museum often changed, Cui Bono was always on display.

Hewett and his supporters built the museum hoping that the Museum of New Mexico Art Gallery would spur economic development through tourism, and Leon Kroll’s Santa Fe Hills exemplifies the picturesque settings travelers and tourists might encounter in Santa Fe. By the early-twentieth century, the Santa Fe Railway’s advertisements, incorporating paintings of indigenous peoples, successfully stimulated tourism and promoted economic development between Chicago and Los Angeles. At the time, viewers interpreted Kroll’s work as an emotionally dynamic, modernist painting among a field of more academic, realistic images. Of the fifteen images of Hispanic subjects in this exhibition, Santa Fe Hills is the most compelling and mysterious.

Today, this painting’s dramatic summer sky and dark storm clouds are more than signs of coming monsoons. Metaphorically, they allude to the cultural and artistic angst of twentieth-century New Mexico. Native people contended with rapid technological and economic change through expanded contact with non-Native Americans. The transition from a barter economy to a monetary economy challenged egalitarian aspects of Native life.

Kroll’s storm clouds foretold bitter aesthetic fights between traditionalist painters and modern artists. The first controversy between artistic paradigms developed during the presidential campaign of 1920, when the Santa Fe New Mexican attacked the art shown in the new museum for being “Bolshevik” in character. At the time, Eugene V. Debs was running for president as a socialist, and many individuals in the arts community actively supported him. The paper’s criticism was political, rather than artistic. Hewett also rejected ultra-modernism, a code word for art associated with “radicals” like John Sloan and Robert Henri. In response, Hewett fired affable painter Sheldon Parsons, the museum’s manager, and that created a permanent rupture between the director and mild-mannered modernist painters that lasted until Hewett, aka “El Toro,” died in 1947.

This artistic and institutional struggle over the changing meaning of modernism lasted until near the end of the twentieth century. The final battle came in the early 1980s, when Georgia O’Keeffe offered to sell the museum one of her rare skull paintings. Some museum supporters wondered why the institution would want one of those paintings. Now, thirty-five years later, the museum still doesn’t have one.

The Ethnographic View

Paintings depicting Native people wearing traditional clothing, engaged in daily activities, and performing rituals dominated the first exhibition. Displaying what some considered to be strong ethnographic content, Henry Balink’s Pueblo Pottery hit the mark with its portrayal of a Pueblo woman offering ceramic wares for sale to tourists. Balink understood that Native women in tribal dress produced salable paintings, especially if they looked exotic to metropolitan audiences.

This compositional trope harks back to the nineteenth century, when French painters produced Orientalist images of exotic scenes in North Africa and the Middle East. John K. Hillers’ New Mexico photographs followed this style. Beginning in 1879, his photographs often presented Native people posed in front of Navajo weavings hung as a backdrop, or engaged in indigenous rituals. His images were widely known in Bureau of Ethnography publications, and were transformed into wood engravings for publication in the literary journals of the period. This compositional formula was already stale to sophisticated readers, but by the time Balink came to New Mexico, it didn’t matter, because these scenes appealed to a broader audience hungry for romantic images of Native people.

Today, these paintings of Native people can seem like worn out stereotypes that are not really ethnographic in content, suffering from a syndrome that art historian George Kubler calls “replication.” These works were tailored for outsiders who were interested in romantic souvenirs of a positive experience exploring the land of Pueblo, Navajo, and Hispanic people. But today, such images have lost what Robert Plant Armstrong described as their “affecting presence.” If Balink had painted an ethnographic painting, it’s fair to suggest that he would have titled it more specifically A Pueblo Potter and Her Vessels, rather than the generalized Pueblo Pottery.

Not all scenes of Indian life generated romantic responses. Many viewers recoiled at the grisly scene Joseph Henry Sharp portrayed in The Stoic. This TSA work presents an Indian warrior dragging four horse heads attached to a stick pierced through his back muscles. Viewers at the first exhibition naturally assumed that Sharp depicted a Southwestern ritual because it was displayed in a New Mexican context.

But this ritual occurred in Montana, and Sharp claimed to have observed this practice on Crow Reservation around 1902. According to the tale, a warrior’s son died at an Indian boarding school, and the father had to prove that he could overcome the pain of his son’s death. So he slayed four of his favorite ponies, lashed their heads to his back, and dragged them until he dropped from exhaustion or they tore free from his back muscles.

The raw emotion of this painting is the antithesis of a scientific portrayal emphasizing ethnographic goals. The realistic presentation of the Crow warrior made this work a personification of the cultural other, the “noble savage.” Both the Canadian and US governments outlawed such Plains rituals beginning at the end of the nineteenth century, so this painting probably represents a ritual done in private.

Today this painting rekindles racist stereotypes of Plains Indians that developed during the High Plains Wars of the late-nineteenth century. Artists fresh to the Southwest found it difficult to reject sensationalist rituals that seemed outrageous to Easterners in their prim Victorian parlors; rituals like the Hopi Snake Dance or Hispanic mock crucifixions. For example, against the explicit requests of the participants, photographer Charles F. Lummis literally captured his iconic 1888 photograph of a Penitente mock crucifixion. Mainstream artists often felt they could work unimpeded by matters of consent, exemplifying colonial attitudes of the period.

In contrast to Sharp, Robert Henri painted empowering portraits of Native people with a fusion of realist and expressionist brush strokes. Henri emphasizes the emotion of drumming as an essential component of Pueblo rituals in Portrait of Dieguito Roybal, San Ildefonso Pueblo. Roybal’s face is realistically painted, and Henri depicts the drummer looking squarely at the viewer. But Henri renders Roybal’s clothing and the drum with loosely painted, expressionistic brushstrokes that deliver a gush of complementary colors—flashy reds and acidic greens—that break with realist tradition. This portrait defines Pueblo-ness as a powerful burst of colorful energy.

Henri sought out individuals from ethnic backgrounds that Euro-American culture often demeaned, and sought to destroy racist myths and stereotypes through sensitive paintings of scorned ethnicities. When Hewett met Henri painting portraits of Native people in California, it was a case of opposites attracting. Henri’s anarchist tendencies clashed with Hewett’s conventionally mainstream attitude. In a radical move, however, Henri convinced Hewett to organize the exhibitions at his museum based on an open-door policy, a concept allowing any New Mexico artist to exhibit in the museum without having to pass the muster of a conformist jury [read more, see Kate Nelson’s “Finding Their Niche,” bit.ly/Nelson_MOA].

A century later, Dieguito seems like a tame composition with subdued expressionist passages. Its early intention, however, had an immeasurably powerful impact. Henri broke with painterly and cultural traditions early in the twentieth century. In a truly radical approach, Henri empowered the powerless through energetic brush strokes.

A Holistic View of the First Exhibition

These five paintings represent the range of images on display at the first exhibition in the New Museum, from realistically painted portrayals of Native people to lightly abstracted representations. The exhibition included veiled commentaries about the politics of the period and represented a broad spectrum of popular Euro-American attitudes toward New Mexico and its Native people. With such a comprehensive exhibition, what could be missing?

Well, Native people. And Hispanic People. Not as the subjects of paintings, but as artists making works of art.

Hewett was well acquainted with Native artists. He had been working with Maria Martinez since 1909 when he gave her an unfired lump of clay from an archaeological site to see if she could mold it into a vessel—and she could. Maria and her sisters demonstrated pottery making in the courtyard of the Palace of the Governors, and a photograph of the three potters became a popular postcard from the nineteen-teens.

When Hewett was excavating on the Pajarito Plateau around 1910, his workmen from San Ildefonso Pueblo began showing him watercolor paintings of Pueblo rituals and individual katsinas. He encouraged them to continue painting and bought their watercolors, beginning around 1910. Alfredo Montoya was one of the first Pueblo easel painters, and his stunning painting Deer and Antelope, Buffalo Dance presents a work not based on Renaissance perspective.

Hewett helped develop the Pueblo easel painting tradition by commissioning the San Ildefonso artists to paint works describing the ceremonial cycle at the Pueblo, yet he and Henri didn’t include these paintings in the first exhibition. Why? The exclusion of indigenous artists’ works from the museum’s first exhibition betrays Hewett’s belief, shared by many non-Native people in New Mexico, in a cultural hierarchy that ranked the white European and European American mainstream at the top. It appears that he considered Pueblo watercolors to be visual anthropology (collected initially for the School of American Research) and that pottery, weavings, and baskets were merely decorative objects.

El Palacio commented on a Maria Martinez pottery exhibition that included her recently invented, matte-on-black pottery in an announcement that described her work as “handicraft,” inferring that her work was categorically different from the European American art usually shown in the museum [see El Palacio, July 8, 1920]. This short article praised Martinez’s “artistic decoration” and predicted her pieces “will stand comparison with the best that has come out of the Orient, or the Occident, ancient or modern.” It is noteworthy that the museum distinguished art from craft, painting from artistic decoration, Native from non-Native, and Maria Martinez from Henry Balink.

Over time, Hewett bowed to the popularity of Pueblo watercolors with his patrons and began incorporating Native-made art into art museum exhibitions and collections, but the museum’s emphasis remained stubbornly European American, with non-Native painters describing Pueblo activities and rituals in a rather realistic style [see Bess Murphy’s “Defining Moments” bit.ly/Murphy_MOA]. These works quickly transitioned from inventive paintings breaking with tradition into replications that became formulaic and lost affective power. One can only conclude that Hewett’s view of art was purely conservative and Eurocentric with an emphasis on realist painting.

Looking Back

The first exhibition at the Museum of Art expressed a colonial perspective that represented the conventional wisdom of the period. While Henri, the anti-colonial activist, may have selected works for the exhibition, El Toro certainly approved the list. Hewett believed that Native American culture was declining in New Mexico at the beginning of the twentieth century. He clarified his beliefs in Ancient Life in the American Southwest, his rambling, 376-page narrative about Pueblo people. In it, he wondered, “what is to be the destiny of this Native American race? Are sacred fires permanently quenched, or can the flames of the spirit . . . be revived?” As a result of this ethnocentric idea, many new immigrants to New Mexico assumed the White Man’s Burden and felt compelled to “help” indigenous peoples assimilate by proselytizing about Christianity.

In Ancient Life in the American Southwest, Hewett took full credit for the efforts to reverse this perceived cultural decline in the Pueblos through the Santa Fe Program, a plan for interactions with Native people and based on the notion of the White Man’s Burden.

Some substantial results may be claimed for the Santa Fe experiment. It may be said that every art practiced by the Pueblos in ancient times has been brought back with the exception of basketry. The dramatic ceremonies have become understood; opposition to them is abating. A priceless heritage is being regained. Archaic ceremonies are being revived. Many never seen heretofore by white people are now performed in public.

His appraisal of the Santa Fe Program was self-congratulatory hyperbole; it implied that Native people couldn’t survive without external help. These were not new ideas; they were formed and reformed during the Spanish Colonial period (1598–1821), the Mexican Colonial period (1821−1846), and further refined during the American Colonial period (1846−1912).

Colonialism connotes an unequal power relationship between groups expressed through economic, political, and cultural relationships. Lingering colonial attitudes at the time included the belief in Manifest Destiny (the idea that God had empowered white culture to dominate the continent), the obligation expressed in the White Man’s Burden to assimilate indigenous people to mainstream culture, and the assumption that indigenous cultures were declining and soon would disappear. A century ago, these concepts were intimately interconnected.

The clearest expression of these colonial attitudes is found in St. Francis Auditorium. Hewett proclaimed in his dedication address that “the architecture is that of the Franciscan mission of New Mexico, inaugurated three hundred years ago.” The permanent installation of six murals of Catholic scenes painted by Donald Beauregard transformed a secular building based on Pueblo and Spanish architectural elements into a religious edifice named for a Catholic saint. In a historic reference, Hewett noted in Art and Archaeology, “that trail is marked by superhuman devotion. We might call it ‘the Way of the Martyrs.’” Hewett concluded his paternalistic comments by noting that to Native people, the museum “must be to them a sanctuary.” Pueblo people’s memories of the 1680 Pueblo Revolt contradict Hewett’s naïve justification for the design of the auditorium.

Today, the museum is quite different from the institution that Hewett envisioned a century ago. His museum functioned more like an art center where works are for sale than a museum preserving New Mexico’s artistic heritage. Henri’s open-door policy is gone, and curators now make decisions about exhibitions. Looking back at this exhibition today, it is clear to me that Hewett and the European American artists instantaneously created an artistic canon based on outsider depictions of Pueblo lifeways. But we don’t understand those works in the same way as visitors did a century ago.

This past September, demonstrators protested the Santa Fe Fiesta and the Spanish Colonial version of the re-conquest of New Mexico in 1692, a celebration that Hewett revived. Protests against Fiesta have been increasing since the 1970s. They reminded us of the need to present unvarnished history, not popular New Mexico tales. Our obligation is to understand and preserve what Hewett created, but to do so by carefully explaining New Mexico history using St. Francis Auditorium and Beauregard’s Catholic murals as contradictory teaching aides. Our responsibility is to correct the inaccuracies embedded in conventional versions of the past, and provide sensitive explanations that reveal the complexity of life under Spanish, Mexican, and American versions of colonialism.

And as the first exhibition reveals, there is always more than one interpretation.

Joseph Traugott has written seven books on New Mexico art, including The Art of New Mexico: How the West Is One and New Mexico Art Through Time: Prehistory to the Present. He retired after eighteen years as curator of twentieth-century art at the New Mexico Museum of Art.

Project Indigene

Welcome to a series of overdue conversations about hot-button issues in Native art.

BY MARLA REDCORN-MILLER, DEPUTY DIRECTOR, MUSEUM OF INDIAN ARTS AND CULTURE
AND AMY GROLEAU, CURATOR OF LATIN AMERICAN COLLECTIONS, MUSEUM OF INTERNATIONAL FOLK ART

Appropriation, cultural intellectual property rights, activist art that addresses war and violence, the criteria for what counts as Native art, issues of indigenous authorship and authenticity . . . the list is long and complex. These questions—central to indigenous arts and artists—are increasingly entering public discourse. These polarizing topics tie into larger issues of privilege and politics that make it tempting to throw one’s hands in the air and walk away in frustration. However, the stakes are high; the questions are more than worthy of deeper consideration and reflection. And so, El Palacio asked us to explore these conversations in a four-part series.

In this article series, our approach will not be proscriptive. We will reveal what this level of navigation looks like on the ground at our museums: the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture and the Museum of International Folk Art. Throughout the series, indigenous artists from across the Americas will share their perspectives.

In our directorial and curatorial roles, we must continually be mindful of the ways our cultural institutions’ exhibitions and collecting practices can either highlight or silence variations in traditional arts and the issues facing communities that produce the works we display. If we don’t attend to issues of copyright and intellectual property, our museums can unwittingly undercut the very communities that we strive to serve by competing with living artists. If we are not mindful of the power dynamics involved in determining who has the authority and right to “tell the story,” then we place ourselves at risk for repeating paternalistic patterns of earlier generations. Shying away from displaying art that critically engages with contemporary political and social issues distances museums from living communities and reinforces the damaging image of timelessness that burdens indigenous people.

In the first half of the year, we will be exploring indigenous art and activism: works that respond to contemporary social and political issues while challenging the materials, methods, and symbols that have bracketed traditional arts. The issues that indigenous communities face affect all of us. So rather than focusing on what can seem to be insurmountable problems, we frame these works as interventions and as models for thinking about how art can draw communities together and strengthen responses to the challenges we face globally.

In the Spring 2018 issue, we’ll present a conversation with Peruvian artist Edilberto Jiménez Quispe (Quechua). Risking his personal safety, he produced artwork that criticized the Peruvian government’s tactics during a time of war, and continues to use his art to expose corruption and abuse. The Jiménez family includes many of today’s most renowned producers of Peru’s retablos ayacuchanos, the iconic boxes with hinged doors containing figures and scenes sculpted from plaster and potato starch. Edilberto and his brothers Nicario, Mabilón, and Claudio (familiar to many from the International Folk Art Market) all have pieces on display at the Museum of International Folk Art’s exhibition Crafting Memory: The Art of Community in Peru. Originally from the Ayacucho region of Peru, the family migrated to Lima for safety during the internal armed conflict between the Shining Path guerillas and the Peruvian armed forces. During the violence, Edilberto and his brothers used their craft to create testimonies of human rights violations and the atrocities that were committed on both sides. The Spring 2018 issue will also convey MOIFA’s discussions on how to provide access to this important art while maintaining a family-friendly atmosphere.

The Summer 2018 issue will include a conversation between Nora Naranjo Morse and Aymar Ccopacatty—two indigenous artists who created projects that involve changing notions of the landscape, natural resources, and traditional knowledge. Despite the geographic distance between their ancestral lands, located in North and South America respectively, each artist confronts the ever-growing presence of garbage dumps and landfills on their homelands. Rather than seeing this waste as a modern problem separable from traditional culture, each has found a means to reincorporate these discarded pieces of consumer-driven culture into an artistic practice. The process of creating the art itself may be considered a demonstration of resourcefulness, creativity, and individual community responsibility: an act that is not only about healing but also about looking to the future. “Native culture has been discarded by dominant culture much like this trash in the landfill,” Naranjo-Morse says. “How do we pick up the pieces of what has been discarded of our cultures and reconfigure them for the future?”

Aymar Ccopacatty (Aymara) applies traditional techniques of knitting and weaving to plastic garbage he collects from around Lake Titicaca in Puno, Peru. Plastic bags are replacing sheep’s wool and camelid fiber as the most abundant “harvestable” material in the landscape. He asserts that we are living in an age of plastic and that we cannot ignore it as part of our heritage. Over the past decade, he has knit large-scale sculptures from plastic feed sacks, grocery bags, caution tape, and sheet plastic found in the environment. Similarly, he has experimented with spinning plastic on a drop spindle, created woven plastic textiles, and constructed warp strings from discarded billboard vinyl. His work Ch’ullu for a New Leader, a ten-foot-tall knit cap with earflaps, is part of the Museum of International Folk Art’s exhibition Crafting Memory: The Art of Community in Peru.

Locally, Nora Naranjo Morse (Santa Clara Pueblo) brings into focus the damaging effects of American mass production and consumerism on Pueblo values of resourcefulness, reciprocity, and respect for the earth. In her latest work, Cause and Effect, she has produced kinetic sculptural forms that combine recycled material she gathered from the Santa Clara landfill with traditional clay. The idea for this project occurred during an experience she had while gathering clay at a traditional pit that Pueblo people have used for generations. As she relates, “I went to gather clay at our traditional pit . . . and as I went over on top of the hill and stopped, I saw the Santa Clara dump and realized the close proximity to the clay pit . . . this river of trash almost seemed like it was coming towards this clay pit.” The experience sparked many questions that she has continued to explore in Cause and Effect. Naranjo Morse frames global indigenous issues in ways that remind us that individual daily choices we make have profound, cumulative effects on the larger world.

In the Fall 2018 issue, series contributor Mateo Romero (Cochiti Pueblo) takes on a form of cultural appropriation that claims and co-opts Native intellectual spaces in the visual and performing arts, literature, and academia. Romero asserts that indigenous artists and writers need to direct and lead more arts and culture projects, to exercise a more active Native voice, and to reflect on what occurs “if we don’t, and others step in and take our place.” The term he coined, semiotic sovereignty, encompasses this concept.

As Romero says, cultural appropriation of [intellectual or discursive spaces] is a complex and often contentious topic because of its links to power and authority. And yet, for museums, it is critical to provide a forum that engages a spectrum of perspectives in order to more fully understand its complexities. Too often “Native voice” and “Native authorship” are pitted against academia or museum authority as if these positions cannot coexist. Indeed, Native oral history and traditional knowledge not only provide a sense of depth that enriches scholarship; they also expand our understanding of traditional and contemporary indigenous ways of being. In the last couple of decades, Southwest archaeology has shifted, increasingly incorporating oral history into its narratives through collaborations with the descendant communities of ancestral sites. Many artists, including Mateo Romero, Ted Jojola, Joe Horse Capture, and Heather Ahtone, suggest that Native voices no longer need cultural translators. Instead, Natives have both their respective tribal worldviews and their Western educations, and are able to speak both for themselves and to the public at large.

Still others support collaboration, seeking to combine institutional resources together with tribally based forms of knowledge and resources to achieve greater, enriched ends. (Diego refers to Mateo’s brother, who is also an artist. Mateo’s work is included in the exhibition. For more on Mateo Romero, visit the exhibition Diego vs. Indian Art, on view at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture June 3, 2018–January 6, 2019.)

In Spring 2016, national retailer Pottery Barn released a line of embroidered throw pillows, drink coasters, table runners, and other housewares called “Otomi” after the indigenous Otomí communities of Mexico, famous for their embroidery traditions. As it came to light that these products were machine-embroidered in China, with no clear benefit to the communities where the designs originated, Pottery Barn received broad public criticism, including becoming the subject of a Change.org petition. Pottery Barn has since struck the Otomi name from the products’ descriptions, which now say, “Inspired by traditional patterns and embroidery techniques from Central Mexico.” But does striking the name from the product line solve the issue? How does the mass production of replicas of Otomí artistic heritage affect the market for products handmade by Otomí themselves? What rights does a community have to control the use of its ancestral designs and cultural traditions?

As communities work to establish legal boundaries for use of their names and designs, more people are becoming aware of these culture-based intellectual property infringements. The Navajo Nation sued Urban Outfitters in 2012 for the use of their name on products. In 2017, Guatemalan weavers petitioned their congress for legal protection of designs. To address this subject, and in an attempt to dispel the ignorance around it, Simon Fraser University’s iPinch (Intellectual Property Issues in Cultural Heritage) produced a free online guide for designers called Think Before You Appropriate: Things to Know and Questions to Ask in Order to Avoid Misappropriating Indigenous Cultural Heritage (bit.ly/ipinchguide). It explains that meaningful collaborations must include voluntary and prior informed consent, shared control over process and product, acknowledgement and attribution, respect for cultural differences, and reciprocity and benefit sharing.

In the final installment of this series in 2018’s Winter issue, Pamela Kelly and MIAC staff will provide an overview of the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture’s partnership with the Museum of New Mexico Foundation’s licensing program. This program has developed an alternative means for a more responsible licensing process that involves tribal community consultation in an effort to minimize the exploitation of indigenous cultural property. The MIAC Licensing Working Group, which is a sub-committee of the museum’s Indian Advisory Panel (IAP), is central to the success of this project. The MIAC Indian Advisory Panel was established in the 1980s and provides guidance to MIAC staff during the development and implementation of exhibitions, public programs, and educational initiatives. This active and knowledgeable advisory panel ensures that the interpretive perspectives that MIAC presents in their numerous projects and initiatives are—to the greatest extent possible—culturally appropriate and based on sound research and understanding about the Southwest indigenous world view under discussion. The IAP Licensing Working Group reviews proposals from for-profit companies that are requesting licenses to use modified designs from the pottery, textiles, paintings, and basketry of the museum’s collections. The goal of this sub-committee is to avoid cultural misappropriation and uphold proper use of images. Central to this project is the belief that it is possible to adapt and reproduce specific vetted imagery in a way that is dignified and respectful, and celebrates the artistic achievements of the Southwest Native peoples.

By exploring these issues with people whose work is at the front lines of these debates, we hope to encourage you, as members of our community, to be empowered to re-engage with these challenging topics as thinkers, conversationalists, and consumers.

BY PETER BG SHOEMAKER

BY CANDACE WALSH

BY KATHERINE WARE

BY PATRICK MOORE

BY KATE NELSON

BY KATE NELSON

BY JOSEPH TRAUGOTT

BY MARLA REDCORN-MILLER, DEPUTY DIRECTOR, MUSEUM OF INDIAN ARTS AND CULTUREAND AMY GROLEAU, CURATOR OF LATIN AMERICAN COLLECTIONS, MUSEUM OF INTERNATIONAL FOLK ART

BY MARLA REDCORN-MILLER, DEPUTY DIRECTOR, MUSEUM OF INDIAN ARTS AND CULTURE
AND AMY GROLEAU, CURATOR OF LATIN AMERICAN COLLECTIONS, MUSEUM OF INTERNATIONAL FOLK ART