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On April 8, 1614, Castilian nobleman Don García de Silva y Figueroa set sail from Lisbon as the emissary of Philip III, ruler of the Habsburg Dynasty of Spain and Portugal, to ‘Abbas I, ruler of the Safavid Dynasty of Iran.
(more…)Marianna Shreve Simpson has been a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, and has published, taught, and lectured widely on medieval and early modern Islamic art in general and the arts of the book (especially Persian illustrated manuscripts) in particular. She has held many curatorial and director positions in her career, the most recent being a guest curator at the Princeton University Art Museum. Her books include Princeton’s Great Book of Kings: The Peck Shahnama (Princeton University Art Museum, 2015); Persian Poetry, Painting, and Patronage: Illustrations in a Sixteenth-Century Masterpiece (Yale University Press and Freer Gallery of Art, 1998); and Sultan Ibrahim Mirza’s “Haft Awrang”: A Princely Manuscript from Sixteenth-Century Iran (Yale University Press and Freer Gallery of Art, 1997).
Enter the Museum of International Folk Art exhibition The Red That Colored the World and you see red everywhere: in paintings, clothes, saddle blankets, altar cloths, and furniture. But as you drink in these glorious hues—pigeon blood, ruby, coral—how do you know that you are seeing cochineal, the red dye extracted from the female cochineal bug?
Mark MacKenzie is a former chief conservator and director of the Conservation Unit of the Museum Resources Division of the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs.
Attend any gathering — whether ceremonial or civic — of southwestern Native Americans and you will discover that almost everyone, old and young alike, is wearing turquoise jewelry. As in antiquity, turquoise today is important to the region’s cultures for more than just its intrinsic beauty.
Maxine McBrinn is a former curator of archaeology at the Museum of Indian Arts & Culture. She curated Stepping Out: 10,000 Years of Walking the West, and has written or contributed to many books and articles about the archaeology of the Southwest.
Morgan Farley writes poetry, personal essays, and memoir. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and a Discovery Award. As former editor and marketing director of the Museum of New Mexico Press, and as a psychotherapist specializing in creative process issues, Morgan has worked closely with writers for more than thirty years.
It’s been over forty years since I and my wife at the time, newly married, bought four Mexican mules and, riding two and packing two, traveled west from Taos to find a home somewhere in that general direction.
[wonderplugin_slider id=”120″] (more…)Tom Ireland (opens in a new tab) served as the editor of El Palacio from 2015 to 2016. He is an author known for his books Mostly Mules, a travel journal with photos by Molly Mehaffy; Birds of Sorrow: Notes from a River Junction in Northern New Mexico; Our Love Is Like A Cake, true-life romance in post-Soviet Poland; The Man Who Gave His Wife Away, an essay collection about relationships; and The Household Muse, a collaboration with Anne Valley-Fox. He was awarded a literary fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Jeffrey E. Smith award in nonfiction from The Missouri Review. Two of his essays were chosen to appear in Best American Travel Writing.
The spectacular exhibition at the Museum of International Folk Art, The Red That Colored the World, has been years in the planning and is only here for the summer. You should not miss it.
Curators Barbara Anderson, Nicolasa Chávez, and Carmella Padilla have assembled from around the world diverse works of art, fashion, and material culture which have at least one thing in common: their color derives from a little bug. For this issue, regular contributor Les Daly interviewed the curators, and writes about the history of cochineal dye and some of the treasures that have made their way to Santa Fe.
Red at Folk Art now joins turquoise at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Turquoise, Water, Sky: The Stone and Its Meaning, to anchor Santa Fe’s Summer of Color, a celebration that radiates from Museum Hill across the city. For this issue, Cindra Kline continues her exploration of Santo Domingo Depression-era jewelry, explaining the sources of its more surprising colors. Color also abounds in Indian Country, an exhibition of the work of David Bradley, whom curator Valerie K. Verzuh calls a “postmodern trickster.” The New Mexico Museum of Art—where color always flourishes—presents Colors of the Southwest. At the New Mexico History Museum and Palace of the Governors, it is Adobe Summer, with many public events. In this issue Kate Nelson heralds “the most ubiquitous color in New Mexico: mud.”
While El Palacio traditionally focuses on the exhibitions and programs of the Museum of New Mexico, several partners in the Summer of Color contribute pieces on the colors that are featured in their exhibitions and programs this summer: indigo and cobalt at the Museum of Spanish Colonial Art, purple at El Rancho de las Golondrinas, and silver at the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian.
Two of our regular columnists examine the use of color in media where we do not always expect it: Daniel Kosharek writes about early hand-colored photographs, and Penelope Hunter-Stiebel discusses a brilliantly colored piece of sculpture. And there is color elsewhere throughout the issue, in Morgan Farley’s poem, and Laura Marcus Green’s story of an indigo quilt, and in Mark MacKenzie’s tale of high-science investigation of the traces of cochineal in works of art.
But we have our sobering notes. Three curators at the History Museum teamed up to write about their Civil War exhibition, mounted in coordination with the Santa Fe Opera’s premiere of Cold Mountain; and Thomas Leech of the Palace Press writes about two of the most chilling pieces of paper to pass through his hands in his years as a printer and curator.
And finally, a personal note. This is my last letter as editor of El Palacio. After five plus years and twenty issues of El Palacio, I am ready to cede the chair to someone else. It has been a privilege to be part of the long tradition of this magazine and to work with our talented staff and writers, and with our museums and programs, and our readers. Every day I learn something new and see something amazing, and I’m going to miss those daily surprises, though I look forward to reading about them in these pages. I am thrilled that our longtime copy editor and occasional contributor, Tom Ireland, is going to step in as interim editor for a few issues. Tom was an editor at the Office of Archaeological Studies for many years, and is the author of four books. He contributes to this issue a memoir of the time, many years ago, when he almost left New Mexico for good, and tells us how he came back, a return for which we are thankful. He is now at work on the fall El Palacio, which will be a special issue in conjunction with All Trails Lead to Santa Fe, a conference on the three trails which converge here: El Camino Real, the Old Spanish Trail, and the Old Santa Fe Trail. The conference is based at the Santa Fe Community Convention Center from September 17 to 20, with lectures, field trips, and new research in El Palacio. Happy trails to all!
Cynthia Baughman served as the editor of El Palacio magazine from 2010 to 2015. Cynthia and her husband moved permanently from the Philadelphia area to Tesuque Village in 2010. Born in Tennessee, Cynthia grew up in Washington DC, earned a BA in English from Dartmouth College and an MFA in Creative Writing from Cornell, and taught writing at Ithaca College and Temple University before working with the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs.
This summer the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian celebrates the opening of the Jim and Lauris Phillips Center for the Study of Southwestern Jewelry. This new wing comprises two galleries, a classroom, curatorial workspace, and an expansion of the museum’s sales shop, the Case Trading Post.
[wonderplugin_slider id=”119″]Jonathan Batkin (opens in a new tab) is a former director of the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Retiring in 2020, he is recognized as a director emeritus for the museum following 30 years of service. Jonathan has writted or been part of writing several books including Pottery of the Pueblos of New Mexico 1700-1940, Clay People: Pueblo Indian Figurative Traditions, Harmony by Hand: Art of the Southwest Indians-Basketry, Weaving, Pottery, The Native American Curio Trade in New Mexico, About Face: Self-Portraits by Native American, First Nations, and Inuit Artists, and Loloma-Beauty is His Name.
Phoenicia — not New Mexico — is the land of purple. However, purple will get the spotlight this summer at El Rancho de las Golondrinas, the living museum just south of Santa Fe. Las Golondrinas will participate in the Summer of Color by rounding out the color wheel with history’s most elite and sought-after color.
[wonderplugin_slider id=”118″]Amanda Crocker is a former director of programs and marketing at El Rancho de las Golondrinas.
Contemporary artist Beverley Magennis, describing her first foray into New Mexico in 1975, said, “Roswell blew my mind. I had never been out west. From the minute I set foot in New Mexico I knew I’d never leave. There seemed to be the right amount of space, the right amount of sun.”
[wonderplugin_slider id=”117″]Carmen Vendelin is a former curator of art at the New Mexico Museum of Art. She organized Colors of the Southwest and O’Keeffe In Process in 2015 and is curated Stage, Setting, Mood: Theatricality in the Visual Arts as a complement to the traveling exhibition First Folio! The Book That Gave Us Shakespeare.
In 1957, as renovations were being made to the Conquistadora Chapel in the Cathedral of St. Francis of Assisi, one Franciscan friar was on hand to oversee the work.
[wonderplugin_slider id=”116″] (more…)Robin Farwell Gavin is chief curator for the Spanish Colonial Arts Society and the Nuevo Mexicano Heritage Arts Museum, formerly the Museum of Spanish Colonial Art, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She was also a curator at the Museum of International Folk Art. Her books include Converging Streams: Art of the Hispanic and Native American Southwest (coedited with William Wroth; Museum of New Mexico Press) and Cerámica y Cultura: The Story of Spanish and Mexican Mayólica (University of New Mexico Press).
