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Literatura de cordel (literature on a string) refers to small, hand-printed chapbooks of poetry, which address popular themes, folktales, and legends native to the dry, impoverished interior of northeastern Brazil.
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Even at the ripe old age of one hundred and seventy-five (depending on when you believe it was born), photography remains one of the youngest art forms.
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I vividly remember the electrifying moment when I first heard about Judy Chicago. It was my freshman year at college and I was riding the second wave of American feminism in a privileged place that at times felt searingly like the front lines.
Being the witness to a pure act of creation — a time when something new to the artistic world comes into existence — is not an experience many art historians are likely to have for we, as a group, are dedicated to mining the past.
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In many ways photographer Donald Woodman is one of the stereotypical free spirits who arrived in New Mexico in a VW van in the early 1970s, searching for a new life unfettered by the conservative conventions and stodginess of the East Coast, to experiment with new-found freedoms involving hallucinatory drugs and liberated sexual exploration. And yet, Woodman’s long, personal aesthetic trajectory, which continues today, is uniquely his own.
Donald Woodman recently left much of his visual legacy, including photographs, negatives, books, and research material to the Photo Archives of the Palace of the Governors /New Mexico History Museum as one of the first contributions to the archive’s ongoing Photo Legacy Project. The museum’s resulting exhibition, Donald Woodman: Transformed by New Mexico showcases images from the period in the artist’s life when he slowly abandoned the formative East Coast and committed himself to a new life in New Mexico. Initially unaware of the “Land of Enchantment” except through his studies and readings in the history of photography, Woodman was soon captivated by the light and landscape of southern New Mexico and the promise of a fulfilling creative life on his own terms.
Woodman’s handwritten 1971–73 diary begins with a series of quotes, the first gleaned from photographer, educator, and editor Minor White, dated October 1, 1971: “In a creative society all people will follow as leaders.” This short quote from Woodman’s most influential teacher and personal mentor is followed by various quotes from Eugen Herrigel’s Zen in the Art of Archery. Originally published in 1953, Herrigel’s account of his six-year exploration through Japanese archery of the theory and practice of Zen Buddhism served as a model for personal practice (in this case the practice of photography) and new ways of seeing and understanding. Zen was then finding a wide audience among those interested in “alternative” lifestyles and exploring Eastern thought in the West.
More clearly than the teacher could express in words, they [Zen practices] tell the pupil that the right frame of mind for the artist is only reached when the preparing and creativity, the technical and the artistic, the material and the spiritual, the project and the object, flow together without break.
— Donald Woodman, quoting Eugen Herrigel, 1971–73 diary
Woodman said of Minor White: “He is a rare teacher—judging the time to say the right things” (Woodman diary, October 27, 1971, 11 pm). In the 1960s White was the leading voice for photography’s personal expressive powers, believing that photographic representation was inherently symbolic —that photographs revealed not only their visual subject, but also the inner lives of their makers. Unabashedly mystical, White taught his students that photography could be used for deep psychoanalytical investigations through its metaphoric capabilities.1 White introduced Woodman to the transcendental aspect of the visual experience (and probably to Zen in the Art of Archery). This thinking can be seen in Woodman’s extended photographic series The Therapist, which he began on July 17, 1997, and continued until September 24, 2001. For just over four years, Woodman made one image during each of his therapy sessions with Dr. Donald Fienberg. These images explore the relationship between therapist and patient as well as serving as a vehicle for exploring interpersonal relationships and personal identity.2
Already an accomplished architectural photo-grapher (having graduated from the University of Cincinnati with a degree in architecture and working with the noted architectural photographer Ezra Stoller) when he came to study with Minor White at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Woodman spent nearly two years intimately absorbing White’s photographic and philosophical teachings as his student, assistant, and the director of the Creative Photography Lab’s gallery under White’s personal mentorship. Woodman’s first, brief marriage had dissolved, he had made the obligatory solo pilgrimage to Europe to study art and architecture and make photographs, and he was now searching for his own aesthetic path.
White instructed: “Turn the camera on yourself.”3 Woodman took this advice literally through his early nude self-portraits. His diary reveals how deeply he internalized White’s instruction:
And it began to make sense to try out the phenomine [sic] of being the photographer and the photographed as well as the challenge to pre-visualize how I would fit into the rocks without being there. It would test how well I could see what I was feeling & visa-versa [sic]. . . . as I reflect back those were short moments compared w/ what time I spent solving the problem I posed of exploring what Minor had talked about of seeing if I have feelings that I can recognize and believe really exist. Of the moments of quiet peaceful concentration. —(Woodman diary, 1971–73)
Woodman was also influenced by the photo-grapher Edward Weston. On October 8, 1971, during a visit to the Witkin Gallery in New York City, he made an impulsive decision: “I purchased a Weston print and felt totally comfortable about the whole thing, no guilt or second thoughts.” The next day Woodman wrote,
9 October 1971. It is much better to be exposed to things when you are ready. The experience is much fuller and significant, like the Weston Daybooks and the whole Weston exhibit and the print I got. I can see it in my mind quite well. I don’t know why it is staying w/ me, but I know it is going to be significant in my life. I want to get into the Daybooks because I sense a parallel in lifes [sic]. I hope mine is fulfilled to the same extent as his, and I hope it helps keep my interest in keeping this diary.
Like Weston, Woodman made images of many of his models and lovers and continued to keep a diary of his thoughts, photographic and personal, for years. Those diaries will eventually become part of Woodman’s collection in the Photo Archives.
Like so many young people influenced by the Beat Generation’s poets and jazz musicians, and by their own longing for adventure, Woodman caravanned with his cameras and friends across the United States in early 1972 on his first extended road trip. Jack Kerouac wrote in On the Road, that the only people “. . . for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.”
Mad like Kerouac, following the stars, Woodman left Boston and headed west, eventually to Carmel, California, where he visited with Ansel Adams, another important influence. Writing sporadically in his diary during this trip, Woodman saw the Blue Ridge Mountains, Albuquerque, White Sands, Indian country and Canyon de Chelly, the Hopi villages, Monument Valley, Death Valley, Point Lobos, and San Francisco. It was also on this trip that Woodman first met photographer and former student of Minor White, Richard (Dick) Faller, staying with him at Sunspot, New Mexico, and writing about his “telescope that watches the sun.” Faller worked at the National Solar Observatory at Sacramento Peak in southern New Mexico. The mission of the National Solar Observatory is “to advance knowledge of the Sun, both as an astronomical object and as the dominant external influence on Earth, by providing forefront observational opportunities to the research community.”
Sunspot and the Solar Observatory would become very important in Woodman’s life:
29 May 1972: It happened—yes I go to New Mexico for 6 months. Here I lie between boxes and Tammy Wynette (downstairs). This morning I awake feeling a little sick. I think I’m a bit scared of making the move. I also did a very scary thing Friday—I bought a 1970 VW bus on time: $2000 worth. … 31 May 1972: Today is a very sad day even though I start on a new adventure. I’m on my way to Sunspot for the next 6 months … I leave all of my very good and I hope lasting friends in Boston … And of course Minor who is that someone special beyond description.
Arriving in the desert, he wrote:
11 June 1972: Sunspot New Mexico is a slice right out of middle American suburbia and I fear that if I slip into the mainstream of society here—whatever that is—I will regress about 10 years. . . . At times I lapse into fears of copping out because I am working at an air force owned and operated thing near our famed missile testing site at White Sands. This especially haunts me when I catch the news (which I try to avoid) and it shows the results of our bombing in Vietnam. Haven’t I got any moral commitment to anything I ask myself? Of course, the things that have always plagued me are who I am and where I am going. And yes, what is the concept of work all about. Oh yes, the concept of time has been injected into my veins.
Minor White continued to be important to Woodman, and they stayed close until White’s death in 1976. But by then Woodman was very much embedded in his life and work in New Mexico. He spent five years in Sunspot working at the Sacramento Peak Solar Observatory (then jointly operated by Harvard University and the United States Air Force) as a photo-research assistant, running the film-processing lab, and making films, all the while making his own artwork. During this time Minor White published Woodman’s photographs in Aperture Magazine. Contrary to his expressed fears, Woodman never did become mainstream, wearing his curly hair long, getting involved in anti–Vietnam War efforts, questioning military authority, struggling with his own doubts and fears as an artist, and hopping in and out of bed with all sorts of friends, colleagues, and acquaintances.
In 1977, having left Sunspot and moved to Albuquerque, Woodman wrote of his first meeting with painter Agnes Martin, who is considered one of the great American Abstract Expressionist artists. Although their nearly eight-year relationship was complicated and difficult, bizarre even by the freewheeling standards of the 1970s, Martin would be an important influence on Woodman’s artistic thinking, encouraging him to explore photographic minimalism. Beginning as a filmmaker, Woodman worked as Martin’s personal assistant until 1983, building her a studio and home on his property in Galisteo, and piloting her down the Mackenzie River in Canada’s Northwest Territory in a 14-foot, flat-bottom aluminum boat for five harrowing days. (Woodman is currently working on a book, Agnes Martin and Me.) During 1980–81, Woodman traveled back and forth between Albuquerque and Houston, where he attended the University of Houston and received his MFA in photography in 1981. In 1984 Woodman met the artist Judy Chicago. They married in 1985 and have been collaborating in life and art ever since.
Donald Woodman: Transformed by New Mexico focuses on a small selection of Woodman’s transitional photography, from his early architectural photography to his more personal images made studying with Minor White, on through the scientific explorations at Sunspot and images exploring the light and landscapes of New Mexico, and culminates with an image from The Therapist Series. Each of the images reproduced here and included in the exhibition lead the viewer to look deeply at the colors and at the forms and at the shapes; to begin to understand the relationship Woodman has with his cameras, his world, and with himself as he moves quietly from behind the lens to placing himself in front of the lens.
Notes
1. Andy Grundberg, “Photography View: Minor White’s Quest for Symbolic Significance,” The New York Times, April 30, 1989.
2. Donald Woodman, The Therapist: An Intimate, Extended Portrait/Self-Portrait, in Photography in Transition (Las Cruces: Donald Woodman and the New Mexico State University Art Gallery, 2005), 11.
3. Author’s conversation with the artist, October 2013.
Mary Anne Redding is an independent curator and chair of the Photography Department, Santa Fe University of Art and Design.
Few women in recent history have midwifed their own second birth as has Judy Chicago, re-inventing herself according to her will and the kind of wisdom that comes with a keen mind, an unflagging diligence, and an indomitable determination to follow her own path.
As a female art student at the University of California, Los Angeles, in the 1960s, Chicago asserted her individuality and independence, often flying blind while she explored what it meant to be a “woman artist” in an era that found the very idea as likely as watering houseplants on the moon. Even the name, Judy Chicago, is an invention, announced in 1970 in relation to two pivotal solo exhibitions at the Jack Glenn Gallery in Orange County and California State University, Fullerton, to the accompaniment of a picture of the pugnacious young woman in a boxing ring, clad in sweatshirt, trunks, lace-up boots, and gloves. Born Judith Cohen in 1939, Chicago took the name of her hometown in order to divest herself of “male social dominance”—as the vocabulary of feminism, sweeping through the nation by the early seventies, would put it—and because “Chicago” had become her nickname in LA’s art circles, thanks to her pronounced midwestern accent. Now, Chicago celebrates her seventy-fifth birthday, and the artworld celebrates with her. It has been a long and, often, uphill struggle for the artist.
For many of us, the name Judy Chicago is synonymous with The Dinner Party, her iconic artwork that gives women their symbolic due, or as the artist herself put it, “a sort of reinterpretation of the Last Supper from the point of view of those who’d done the cooking throughout history.”1 The story behind this masterwork is phenomenal: it stands like a fixed pier in the riptide of second-wave feminism as it erupted out of the turbulent 60s and 70s in the United States. (Generally, feminism’s first wave is considered to have culminated in 1920 with the passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, in which women won national suffrage.) At the time that Chicago—in collaboration with a core group of twenty or twenty-five women and men along with hundreds of assistants—made The Dinner Party (1974–79), she had been a practicing artist for most of her life; her mother sent her to the Art Institute of Chicago for drawing lessons at age five. The youngster traveled there throughout her childhood, taking the number 53 bus every Saturday to a world that transcended complications arising from her father’s left-leaning politics and his early death.
By the time Chicago entered graduate school on a scholarship at the University of California at Los Angeles, she had been forced to “recognize that there was a serious gap between the way I saw myself and the way I was seen by the world.”2 Put simply, Chicago saw herself as a capable person—thanks in no small part to her father’s commitment to an emancipated political viewpoint—while the world insisted on confining her to the more limited noun, woman. For many years she worked to prove she was just as tough as any male artist, nearly slicing into her own torso when she faked familiarity with an electric saw in sculpture class. She learned to spray paint in an auto-body school, according to the directives of California’s Finish-Fetish movement; she nailed, sanded, and hammered her way to acceptance. But it came with a price: Chicago discovered that, in order to succeed as an artist, she had to neutralize her imagery and identify herself as an artist rather than as a woman. She was called a bitch, she was called a castrator, and she was looked upon as the exception to the rule that women could not be artists. For Chicago, “being an artist and being a woman spelled one thing: pain.”3 It is imperative to realize that in its initial publication in 1962 and in subsequent editions published through the mid-70s, no women artists were listed in the standard art history textbook History of Art by H. W. Janson. In fact, Chicago’s The Dinner Party broke barriers with its inclusion in the 2006 seventh edition of Janson’s book.
It was a great relief when materials from New York’s burgeoning women’s liberation movement began to reach the West Coast. Chicago recalls, “I couldn’t believe it. Here were women saying the things I had been feeling, saying them out loud. I trembled when I read them….”4 She would go on to develop a woman-only art class at Fresno State College in California, teaching a core group of fifteen students; the program comprised the first feminist art curriculum in American college history. Chicago arranged for the women to meet privately off-campus, so conditioned were they, when in the presence of men, to subvert their own identities as artists. The significance of a women-only art class cannot be underestimated. Chicago notes in her autobiography, Through the Flower: My Struggles as a Woman Artist, “[U]ntil one hundred years ago, women were not allowed access to institutions of higher learning. When they were finally accepted into colleges, they were treated as if . . . they had not just stepped out of a centuries-long cultural tradition and education quite unlike men’s.”5 The women built their own studio, learning by doing, as had Chicago, to use tools and “gain confidence in themselves physically.”6
The ultimate success of the Fresno program led Chicago to seek out Miriam Schapiro (an important leader of the soon-to-emerge Pattern and Decoration art movement), who was teaching at a newly opened school, the California Institute of the Arts (Cal Arts), which led to an invitation to bring Chicago on as faculty. She brought the women-only program; it opened in 1971 under its official moniker, the Feminist Art Program. One of its first projects, a landmark in the annals of feminist art history, was Womanhouse. Chicago and Schapiro organized a team of women to appropriate a vacant and vandalized mansion near downtown Los Angeles and transform it, room by room, into an aesthetic and performative expression of notions of home from a woman’s point of view. From the Menstruation Bathroom to the Bridal Staircase to the Nurturant Kitchen, the project was characterized by its personal articulation of what home might mean for each of the female students and some of the local artists who participated. In the month that Womanhouse was open, over ten thousand people visited. Group process was the mode, and out of it came such performances as The Birth Process, Three Women, and the memorable Cock and Cunt—performed on opening night for women only.
Chicago in New MexicoTo mark Chicago’s achievements and her three decades as a resident of the state, the New Mexico Museum of Art presents Local Color: Judy Chicago in New Mexico 1984–2014, opening during the weekend of June 6. The exhibition will serve dual purposes: to honor one of New Mexico’s most famous artists and to showcase some of her recent work, drawn from the museum collection and from the artist’s studio in Belen, just south of Albuquerque. Belen is close to the international airport, and she and her husband, Donald Woodman, a photographer and her frequent collborator travel a lot—especially lately. A look at their partial itinerary for 2014 is enough to exhaust the reader. The couple will be at the Brooklyn Museum’s Elizabeth A. Sackler Center for Feminist Art, the permanent home of The Dinner Party, as the center commemorates the artist’s California years in an exhibition titled Chicago in L.A.: Judy Chicago’s Early Work, 1963–74. The National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, DC hosts a birthday celebration in conjunction with its exhibition Judy Chicago: Circa ’75. The Palmer Museum at Pennsylvania State University offers a survey show, and Nyehaus, the artist’s New York gallery, presents a companion show to the Brooklyn Museum show at MANA Contemporary.
Then, of course, there’s the exhibition opening this spring at the New Mexico Museum of Art, curated by Merry Scully to include not only important works by the artist but objects from her daily life in New Mexico. Studies, early works, and paintings and photographs made by Chicago and Woodman from various series will be on view, including oil paintings from the PowerPlay series (1982–86); mixed-media pieces from the Holocaust Project (1985–93); and photo-combines from the series Nuclear Wasted (1988–89). Beside the NMMA exhibition, Chicago’s Santa Fe gallery, David Richard Contemporary, opens Heads Up this June, featuring a series of heads in glass, bronze, and ceramic. Viewers may recall her “Toby heads” of 2007, life masks of their sitter Toby Shor. After finishing that series, Chicago went back to work making other heads, integrating materials from earlier works. She is known for being willing to learn and use a wide range of media, especially media from the so-called decorative arts that historically made up the bulk of “women’s work.” The Dinner Party itself is an amalgam of ceramics, painted china, and “an array of needle and fiber techniques.” Glass is a compelling medium for Chicago, she says, “because it allows a look under the surface, endlessly.” One example of the artist playing with multiple levels of visibility can be found in the sculpture she made in 2000, Peeling Back. Layers of etched and mirrored glass were painted with acrylic, creating a flower-like image that is also reminiscent of Georgia O’Keeffe’s large-scale paintings of flowers. O’Keeffe is perhaps the only female artist of the Modern era who is more widely known than Chicago.
Having broken from solo work during the years of The Dinner Party, Chicago discovered a new approach to collaboration—with her husband—in their late-80s series Holocaust Project: From Darkness into Light. This project explores issues of power as exercised by a mercilessly patriarchal culture, exposing powerlessness in the face of human loss. Chicago and Woodman collaborated as artists for years as they sought to uncover the significance of their Jewish identities. During this period, Chicago would go through the deaths of her brother Ben to Lou Gehrig’s disease and her mother to cancer. Holocaust Project was originally inspired by Harvey Mudd’s epic poem, and the movie Shoah, a 1985 documentary featuring interviews with survivors of concentration camps. Chicago has described the couple’s experience of watching the film “for hours” in New York City. Next, they traveled for months in Eastern Europe, visiting all of the concentration camps and then Israel. According to London critic Galit Mana, “This journey led Chicago and Woodman to regard the Holocaust as a global phenomenon,” a viewpoint that has not been without its detractors. Filling 3,500 square feet and comprised of sixteen large-scale works, media used in the project include needlework and tapestry, stained glass, metal and wood, photography, and painting. The New Mexico Museum of Art has several works in its collection from the ancillary project, Nuclear Wasted, which deals with the state’s nuclear issues.
In 2003, Chicago was an artist-in-residence at the famed Pilchuck Glass School, founded by Dale Chihuly outside Seattle, Washington. She recalls that her “first glass pieces were for the Holocaust Project, specifically Rainbow Shabbat.” She had apprenticed with glass painters, but didn’t like the chromatic limitations of stained glass. She “knew there was another kind of glass painting that comes out of the china-painting world,” having painted china since the early 1970s. Still, it took her “a long time [to find a glass-painting teacher] since nobody in the glass world knew about this method.” She found her masters right here in the Santa Fe area, working closely with Ruth and the late Norm Dobbins, learning to develop her glass technology. The forms in Heads Up deal, says Chicago, “with unexpressed emotions in both the male and the female,” citing one large head in particular, the Grand Bronze Head with Golden Tongue: “There’s not a woman on earth who hasn’t met a man with a golden tongue. When you meet a man like that, he doesn’t come out and say, ‘I’m going to lie to you.’” A range of emotional states, from repressed rage to false smiles, comprises “what lies under the skin” in this series of heads. Also featured in the David Richard exhibition is a suite of lithographs, titled Retrospective in a Box, made over the course of five years with Santa Fe’s esteemed Landfall Press.
As if all these exhibitions, with their accompanying lectures, panels, and other events aren’t enough, this year the artist releases two more books (she’s up to fourteen now), with Monacelli Press: Institutional Time: A Critique of Studio Art Education, and The Dinner Party: Restoring Women to History, with essays by Chicago as well as British art historian Frances Borzello and feminist historian Jane Gerhard. Of course these publications must be celebrated with the artist in attendance. There’s another item on her schedule for 2014, as Chicago continues from her earliest days as an educator to be enormously active in the field of pedagogy. Through the Flower, the non-profit organization that works to ensure Chicago’s legacy, together with Penn State (the new home of Chicago’s archives), administer the Judy Chicago Art Education Award, given annually to teachers who make significant use of either The Dinner Party Curriculum (see http://judychicago.arted.psu.edu/dpcp/) or the Judy Chicago Art Education Archives materials at the university (http://judychicago.arted.psu.edu/).
A personal glimpseBy the time Local Color opens at the New Mexico Museum of Art this June, Chicago will have lived in New Mexico for 30 years. She first traveled to Albuquerque from LA in 1972 to make lithographs at Tamarind Lithography Workshop (now known as the Tamarind Institute, part of the College of Fine Arts at the University of New Mexico). Chicago and Woodman bought and renovated the old Belen Hotel in the historic railroad district of the tiny town south of Albuquerque. They’ve called the beautifully restored (by Woodman) turn-of-the-century building home since 1996—with several magnificent cats as beloved housemates. Says Chicago about her move to the Southwest, “My life has been centered on work and I’ve always made decisions about where to live based on where I could work. Until we moved into the Belen Hotel, I’d never owned any property as I didn’t want the responsibility—what I wanted was the freedom to work. And that’s what New Mexico has given me, far away from the centers of the art world (i.e., New York and LA) where the international art market presses down on artists and makes it difficult to pursue a personal vision like my own.” When asked about the effects of New Mexico upon her art, she relates, “When I first started going to Santa Fe to paint, in the early 1980s, I never imagined that I’d end up living here [in New Mexico]. But the landscape, the color, the open spaces have obviously provided a nurturing environment, one that provides immense psychic space, which I have needed as much as a fish needs water because otherwise, I wouldn’t have been able to think deeply through my work.” The story of how Woodman courted Chicago tells not only of love and passion, but illustrates the enormous zest with which these two embrace life. Here is his short version of the tale:
We were introduced to each other at a number of art events around Santa Fe between 1984 and 1985, and then again at the Galisteo Rodeo in July of 1985. That was the first time that Judy took notice of me. In September, Judy was invited to the burning of Zozobra at Fort Marcy Park [in Santa Fe]. There was a rivalry between her date and me for herattention. At the end of the evening—when the swarm of 10,000 people headed back to the Plaza—Judy was [caught] in the surging mass and wanted to see what was happening. I lifted her up on my shoulders and carried her back to the Plaza, where I purchased ten purple balloons (which she had been admiring) and tied them around her wrist. I left but soon got her phone number. Near the end of the month, I was able to arrange our first date. We had a very short, whirlwind romance. A week into what was a tumultuous affair, I insisted that we get married and on New Year’s Eve 1985, we were wed . . . . That was over 28 years ago.
To visit to the couple in their home in Belen is to experience the true warmth of hospitality. The renovated hotel is a natural haven for guests, and those who are so inclined may even be graced with a purring cat as a sleeping partner. After breakfast and talk in the kitchen, Chicago and Woodman usually work in their respective offices during the morning, retreating to their studios on the ground floor later in the day. Chicago is a rigorously disciplined soul, and she ends her day with exercise—including aerobics, yoga, and weight training—finding that it “brings me back to life” after one of her typically demanding days. As trim as someone half her age, she bemoans that she “can’t eat too much cake” in this, the year of her seventy-fifth birthday. “2014 is a really exciting—and demanding—year; I just hope I’ll make it to 76!” smiles Chicago. Considering her unstoppable dynamism, we’d better start making plans for her centennial celebration. And stocking up on purple balloons.
Notes
1. Judy Chicago, Through the Flower: My Struggle as a Woman Artist (New York: Doubleday, 1975), p. 210.
2. Chicago, p. 29.
3. Chicago, p. 42.
4. Chicago, p. 59.
5. Chicago, p. 88.
6. Chicago, p. 73.
All additional quotations in the article come from interviews and e-mail exchanges conducted by the author with Judy Chicago and Donald Woodman.
Kathryn M Davis is an art historian, writer, and curator who specializes in modern and contemporary visual arts and critical theory. Davis hosts a weekly radio show, ArtBeat, on KVSF 101.5 FM. She has taught art history at the Santa Fe University of Art and Design, and at the University of Tennessee, as well as at nonprofit arts organizations.
On a bright day in January, Museum of International Folk Art curator Laura Addison sat down with the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum’s new director of curatorial affairs, Cody Hartley, for a conversation about Hartley’s long engagement with the long history of art in New Mexico and his vision for its future.
Addison: I just have to ask, was the artist Marsden Hartley your great, great, great uncle?
Hartley: Unfortunately, no relationship. I did grow up in a family of artists, in Wyoming. My grandparents and my mother were professional artists. I have no artistic ability myself and art history was one way I could connect with my family on their level. [As an undergraduate at Wyoming] my major was in English with a minor in art history, and I took courses in Victorian painting and African art—and that piqued my interest in applying to graduate schools. My initial interest was African art, but I gravitated to American art at UC Santa Barbara.
Addison: You got both your master’s and your PhD [at UC Santa Barbara]. What was your master’s thesis on?
Hartley: Robert Henri and his time in Santa Fe. That became one small part of my dissertation.
Addison: The dissertation is titled “Art in an Arid Climate: The Museum of New Mexico and the Cultivation of the Arts in Santa Fe.” It almost seems like your whole life was preparing you for your new position.
Hartley: Without realizing it, yes. My grandparents had spent time here. My grandmother worked at Los Alamos and my grandfather went to the University of New Mexico.
Addison: The same grandparents who were artists?
Hartley: Yes. [My grandfather] pursued his MFA there. They ended up living in Colorado Springs, but they came back to New Mexico frequently for vacations, so I grew up hearing all these stories about Santa Fe and Taos. Curious about this place, I drove down from Wyoming for spring break and it made absolutely no sense to me. How does a community like this exist in a location that to this day is not that easy to get to? How does it have the kind of arts and culture that are so evident? This is about the time that economic surveys showed that Santa Fe was selling gobs of art, more than anywhere else of comparable size and more than most major cities. I wanted to understand how this was possible. I ended up coming back to Santa Fe pretty much every year for about a decade. Flash forward several years, [when] working on a dissertation topic I started thinking about Santa Fe again. I convinced my adviser that Santa Fe was a really interesting case study. How did it come into being and how does it have the artistic richness that it has?
Addison: There’s a question that you pose in the introduction to the dissertation: “How did Santa Fe become Santa Fe?”
Hartley: This was a community that put itself on the map very self-consciously, and it did that through a series of organizations and individuals who willed it into being. We’re still all benefiting from the structures they created.
Addison: Among those individuals was Edgar Lee Hewett, the first director of the Museum of New Mexico.
Hartley: Right—a very complicated character. I think he would’ve been a nightmare to work for. At the same time, because of his ambition he brought things into existence and simply made it happen. After he relinquished control, after his death, it took decades for many of those institutions to find their footing. He was certainly not the only person that helped create Santa Fe, but he’s more responsible for it, I think, than any other individual. He was a polarizing figure. He had an amazing ability to convince people to do things his way. He often seemed to secure the necessary credentials just after he got the job. He was not well regarded as an academic. His methodology was often considered suspect by the more forward-thinking individuals in his field. I don’t think he could’ve been successful in a larger place. Santa Fe offered this rich environment, this opportunity where he could nourish his ideas and create things, where somewhere else he would’ve been batted down.
Addison: You talk about Santa Fe as both typical of many American cities that were trying to leverage creative capital, but also unique in its ability to accomplish it.
Hartley: It was typical in that in the decades from 1900 to the 1930s many cities on the eastern seaboard and in the West were trying to figure out how to present themselves as unique successful communities, both socially and economically. Culture—museums, theaters, opera houses—those were all signs of a civilized city and a growing city. That pattern wasn’t unusual, but very few places were as successful as Santa Fe. They somehow got all the pieces in place—the institution building, the patronage, the businesses, the building codes, the aesthetic . . . [and] some really brilliant marketing.
El Palacio was a propaganda arm for Hewett. Every important thing that happened, he broadcast across the nation. It’s easy to make Hewett into something of a caricature, but he wasn’t stupid. He paid attention. He learned as he went. He was nothing if not an opportunist and a pragmatist. He adopted whatever he thought was going to be most effective in getting him to the next stage. My dissertation traces this series of progressions from the first displays in the Palace of the Governors, which were really about anthropology. This is his field, this is what he thinks he knows, and he’s presenting artifacts that have been excavated in the area and trying to tell his history of the region. He’s at this point only using art as an illustration. He does not have an art background and doesn’t think about art as something important and valuable in its own right. Over time he starts learning more about art. When he realized that the art pavilion [at the 1915 San Diego Panama-California Exposition] was as popular and successful as his anthropology exhibits, he thought: “Hey, there’s something to this.” Robert Henri really showed him how to do it. They were both such men of their ages—over-sized egos and a little bombastic. This was all happening with the backdrop of World War I. With U-boats off the coast of Maine, travel to Europe was much less desirable, [so] Henri had to find some other place to go to find the exotic‑looking types that he loved to paint. Here in Santa Fe, of course, he had these exotic‑looking “types,” be they Hispanic or Indian. Henri’s time in Santa Fe, his influence on Hewett, was critical in helping Hewett understand that this whole “art” thing had legs. This could really take the city somewhere.
As you track the correspondence and the articles in El Palacio about the building of what was just called “the new museum” at that point, it was going to [exhibit] anthropology, and industry, and other things, and maybe art, too. Art was just one of many, many things that were going to be shown in this new museum complex. By the time the building opened it was called the “New Art Museum,” and it was purely dedicated to art. Over those few years, Hewett really learned that art was much more captivating.
Addison: He was a quick learner.
Hartley: He was a quick learner. Modernism was an important factor. This was an age when, in the wake of the Armory show, you had a wide portion of the American public thinking that modern art was ludicrous, the “scribblings” of insane people. In earlier [El Palacio articles], at the beginning of the teens, they’re talking about cubism and modernism and all this horrible stuff that’s the work of stark-raving lunatics and it means nothing; the public, they said, will demand beautiful, pictorial scenes. They were showing Taos Society artists and typical romantic realist paintings and saying, “This is what good art is. This is what the people want and demand. It needs to have a story. It needs to be pretty.” Then, by the middle of the decade, towards the opening of the museum, suddenly they start giving lectures about modern art. You’ve got Hewett himself giving lectures interpreting cubist paintings and relating them to Native American symbolism. He quickly evolves from being radically conservative in the art world to being quite liberal and becomes a proponent, to a great degree, for modernism.
Addison: El Palacio was a really significant source for your own research.
Hartley: Yes, I could not have done it without El Palacio. I spent days in the archives going through old museum records, board minute reports, and financial reports, picking up little nuggets here and there, but the real gist of my dissertation research came from El Palacio. The museum wrote its own history. I knew that it was a propaganda arm at some points and couldn’t entirely be trusted to accurately represent everything that was happening. But in terms of providing a chronology of when things were done, and who did them, what was being shown, what the dialogue was, it was invaluable evidence. It’s really amazing that again, in this place—in this location—a museum system like this was created at that age, that quickly.
Addison: In your dissertation you talk about “Santa Fe déjà vu,” the many parallels between Santa Fe of the past and Santa Fe of the present and how a lot of the same topics get revisited over and over again. One is the debate between the historic and the contemporary—those who want this to be a contemporary art city and those who are more interested in the past. You talk about culture as a driver of the economy—a topic that is revisited often.
Hartley: How many times do we hear people say, “This city really needs to use arts and culture to rebuild its economy”? We’ve been rebuilding our economy for one hundred and twenty years now. Either we haven’t quite figured it out or we’ve let things slip. In the past decade Richard Florida and others have produced a whole series of books on creative capital and creative commerce—what cities can do to attract young, bright, talented, creative types to revivify dying downtowns. This is all stuff that Hewett and his friends were doing at the beginning of the twentieth century, when the railroad bypassed Santa Fe and this town’s economy was in the tank. It is amazing how those patterns seem to repeat themselves.
Addison: Let’s talk about your arrival here. You were assistant curator of paintings at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and you helped open the Art of the Americas Wing.
Hartley: That was great fun. When that was done in 2010, I was figuring out what to do next and was lining up some exhibition projects and some book ideas. Then, I got an interesting call from the director. He asked me to consider moving out of curatorial and into development, which is not a normal career path [for a curator]. They had a program created in 2000 called Gifts of Art. They took the strategic, active approach of a fundraiser but applied it to collection building. It seemed like the most insane thing I could do as a curator. I felt like I was giving up everything I’d ever studied for or trained for. Once I made the leap I loved it. I never looked back.
We brought some incredible collections into the museum while I was there. I worked with the most interesting and exciting people, both collectors and the curatorial staff. I would never have had that opportunity if I’d stayed in my American art niche. I was very happy, but then I got a call asking if I would consider a position at the [Georgia] O’Keeffe Museum. I said, “That’s very nice. Thank you, but I’m very happy in Boston.”
Intelligently, they said, “That’s understandable. Would you be willing to at least look at the job description and let us know if you can think of anyone that we should be talking to?” I started reading the job description and I have to say it fit perfectly. Line-for-line I thought, “That’s me. Those are the things I like doing, that I would want to do more of.” I started talking to Robert Kret [director of the O’Keeffe Museum]. I was impressed by his ambitions for the institution, excited about what he saw as the potential for where this museum could go and what could be done with it in the coming decade. The more I learned, the more excited I got about what this museum’s capable of. It’s a quirky place. There aren’t many new museums. At sixteen years old we’re still very young. You can understand from my dissertation research [that] I find museums really interesting. To be in close to the ground floor of one, with a chance to really make a difference. . . .
Addison: Not only to this institution, but to the whole city.
Hartley: Exactly. That, I find exciting. The serendipity of it, coming full circle, that I would be coming back to now work in the community that I spent so much time thinking about historically. And, being able to think about, “How do we take all that past and move this into the twenty-first century? What does this town’s future look like as a center for the arts?” It’s exhilarating. Who gets an opportunity to do that?
Addison: You said you liked what you heard Rob Kret say about the next decade? Are you able to share that with the readers?
Hartley: We’ve spent the first fifteen years proving ourselves. We did major exhibitions. We demonstrated that we had the professional skills, the knowledge, the expertise, the staff to handle the finest artwork and work with museums across the country and around the world. We put together topnotch publications and came out of the gate running. I think we have a chance to think long term about O’Keeffe’s legacy and her role in American modernism. A lot of the focus has been so intently on just Georgia O’Keeffe, and understandably so. But I think she becomes infinitely more interesting when you start expanding beyond her and thinking more about the circles she moved in, the artists she was familiar with and corresponded with, the works and movements that she was a part of and that she reacted against, and the historical context. She lived an amazing life in an amazing century. We’re just now coming to terms with what the twentieth century meant for this country and for the world. Being able to think about her as a portal into this history, rather than simply a subject in a box, I find exhilarating. There’s enormous potential. Who has this much information on one artist? We don’t ever talk about this, but just think about her living at Abiquiu, just over the ridge from Los Alamos, knowing people like Oppenheimer, building a fallout shelter in her backyard. . . .
Addison: O’Keeffe in the atomic age.
Hartley: Yeah. I have that somewhere in my notes as a show idea. Who thinks of her in those terms? We don’t think about her as being part of that moment [in history], but she was.
Addison: She’s still very romanticized.
Hartley: I don’t think American art historians have really come to terms with how significant the Southwest was in the formation of American modernism. Everybody came through here. That was one of the things that originally got me interested in Santa Fe: “How does this town attract every single artist and writer you can think of?”
Addison: At one point, it had to do with subject matter. Don’t you think beyond that, it was really about a circle of friends?
Hartley: It was about a circle of friends. It was about a different destination. Certainly, Mabel Dodge Luhan was the single greatest factor in drawing many, many, many of those people here. They came here looking for America. They were trying to figure out what this nation was going to be culturally, because it was still a very undefined moment. All O’Keeffe’s comments about the great American thing and all that work to try to figure out what American art was going to look like as distinct from European art. This was a place where those artists felt like they could find something. You throw in the cultural history, the ethnic diversity. There’s too much interesting stuff going on for them not to want to be here.
Addison: Is Santa Fe what you expected? You spent so much time studying it.
Hartley: It is funny to live here after thinking about it in a kind of “academic tourist mode” during research and visiting. Living here is different, but I’m very happy. It’s so comfortable. The quality of life is high. Where [else] do you get skies like this? I was up at Abiquiu this morning, standing in O’Keeffe’s patio with that perfect rim of adobe and blue sky and thinking, “This is January 3rd. How is this possible?” I think there’s a lot of energy and individuals here who really want to see this community grow.
Addison: How do you think the collection will grow?
Hartley: Our collection? I would absolutely love to implement something like the Gifts of Art program of the Museum of Fine Arts [Boston] here. I want to ensure that collectors of O’Keeffe’s artwork think about this [place] as the national repository for her work—as the single best place to care for, share, interpret, and preserve their collections, their artwork.
Addison: What about O’Keeffe’s peers? Could the scope be larger, include collecting more examples of American modernism?
Hartley: Yes to modernism! There’s still some really good stuff out there but it’s getting harder to find. I would really like to have a collection that, at the least, allows us to present that context and show a broader sense of O’Keeffe’s relationship to her peers, how what she was doing was unique and different, but also how she was in dialogue with her times.
Addison: You’ve only been here nine months but, in a way, you’re writing a final chapter to your dissertation by being here and being part of the history. What do you think that chapter will be about when you write it ten years from now?
Hartley: Ten years from now? It will be about how the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum became a part of the community in a very meaningful, sustained way. I’d like to think that we’ll have a better understanding of O’Keeffe’s significance and her context. Every day, there are more people walking through those doors who have never known O’Keeffe as a living person. She’s always been a historical figure in their minds. So how do we continue to make her relevant and do right by the responsibility that we have in caring for this material?
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.
Many El Palacio readers will have heard the news that I am packing up my wagon and heading eastward. On March 15 I leave the New Mexico History Museum, and on April 15 I begin a new position as CEO of the Missouri History Museum in St. Louis.
I don’t have to deliberate too long to think about what I have done with the last decade of my life. In fact, much of what I have done has been reported in the pages of El Palacio—our partner in documenting the collections, exhibitions, and programs that have brought so much positive attention to the New Mexico History Museum. Many of our plans and dreams for the new museum were shared with “El Pal” readers. It has been a pleasure to serve on the editorial board for almost the entire twelve years that I have been part of the Museum of New Mexico system.
I am leaving behind many favorite objects and collections—some of which were first described here, in El Palacio, like the Spanish Colonial painting of La Macana, an image of the Virgin Mary that depicts a statue or bulto that survived the Pueblo Revolt. I remember vividly the moment that curator Josef Díaz and I found her in a crowded colonial art gallery in Mexico City. She belonged here, and with the help of our foundation members (also readers of El Palacio) we were able to purchase her.
In this magazine, in 2009, to mark the inauguration of the New Mexico History Museum, the staff described their favorite objects in the collection. I had a long list but I chose the colcha or hand-stitched tapestry that still hangs in our core exhibition Telling New Mexico. The work that went into producing the piece, from shearing the sheep for its wool, to spinning and dyeing the yarn, to weaving the fabric and then stitching it, is a tale of devotion and craftsmanship that is still so much a part of our Spanish Colonial art traditions in New Mexico. El Palacio readers have learned about many of the collections and specific items—documents, maps, photographs, pinhole cameras, Spanish Colonial paintings, printing presses, and so much more—that we acquired during the first five years the History Museum has been open, and they have learned about the behind-the-scenes care and research that curators and conservators have undertaken to make artifacts ready for exhibitions.
Working with our talented exhibition designers, preparators, fabricators, and careful conservators has taught me that many hands are responsible for the development of our outstanding exhibitions. Our curators, archivists, librarians, and editors have made our exhibitions communicate factual history in engaging ways. Because of the beautiful design work of the graphics team, museum visitors can choose their level of content interest, learning history in an effortless visual way, or delving into the explanatory text. None of our work would have been possible without the support of the Museum Resources team—the Museum of New Mexico Press, Marketing and Public Relations, Conservation, Creative Services—and the administrative support of the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs. Museum of New Mexico Foundation staff and donors have been generous; without their support none of our work could soar to the high levels that it has at all of the History Museum’s sister institutions. Our success belongs to us all and is a testament to what can be done with teamwork and sufficient resources.
Many exciting exhibitions are in the works at the New Mexico History Museum. I know some of the thrills that await our visitors in the coming years, and trust that you will read about them here, in El Palacio. For example, soon you will see an exhibition of the Spanish Colonial paintings from Mexico, Peru, and Bolivia that were brought together in the 1940s by Ambassador Charles Collier and his wife, Nina, which once graced their lovely home at Los Luceros, now the property of the Department of Cultural Affairs. You will surely delight in the coming exhibition of toys from our collections, including some examples excavated from archaeological sites in downtown Santa Fe. Next year, in a comprehensive exhibition on the diaspora of Jewish people of fifteenth-century Spain, you will learn more about conversos in New Mexico history. And, in the coming years you will see and learn more about the Fred Harvey Company and the Harvey Girls. By documenting our own times for future generations, photographers participating in the Photo Legacy Project are important contributors to our collections and future exhibitions.
As I begin my journey to Missouri, I am reminded of the topics that connect New Mexico and Missouri history: the Santa Fe Trail, stretching from Franklin, Missouri, to the Santa Fe Plaza, and the Army of the West, led by Col. Stephen Watts Kearny and including the Missouri Mounted Volunteer Regiment. So, as I begin my journey East on that very trail, I am taking with me a stack of El Palacios. I look forward to future issues of the magazine that will keep me informed of news from the home front. I may even have some dispatches to send back to you. In truth, several El Palacio pieces are brewing in my mind already, based on artifacts that the Missouri History Museum staff used to entice me—such as the diary of Stephen Watts Kearney, the lovely portrait of Kearney’s wife, and the hand bills announcing the 1852 inauguration of former St. Louis mayor William Carr Lane as Governor of the New Mexico Territory, at the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe.
Hasta pronto! See you soon!
Frances Levine, PhD is an ethnohistorian and historical archaeologist, former director of the New Mexico History Museum/Palace of the Governors. Her recent essays for El Palacioinclude: “‘So Dreadful a Crime’: Doña Teresa Aguilera y Roche Faces the Inquisition for the Sin of Chocolate Consumption” (117 [4], Winter 2012) and “Perspective: The Long Road Home: Pecos Pueblo Repatriation” (118 [3], Fall 2013).
The first issue of El Palacio was published in November 1913 as a monthly eight-page broadsheet. Paul Walter served as editor, writing the entirety of the first El Palacio in his clear prose and objective tone.
Included are stories of archaeological excavations in the Southwest and Guatemala as well as reporting about the completion of the Palace of the Governors building renovation and the Museum’s participation in the upcoming Panama-California Exposition at San Diego. There are also numerous mentions of classical archaeology, archaeological meetings, and publications, in addition to a Tewa myth and a piece about the transfer of Quarai Ruins to the Museum of New Mexico for preservation.
On page four the purpose of the new monthly is spelled out: “Future numbers will print live news notes from the field of archeology throughout the world . . . awaken interest and enlist support for the preservation of historic and prehistoric remains, ancient monuments . . . promote archeological and ethnological research . . . [and] promote . . . the advancement of, knowledge of, and interest in, the historic past of the Southwest.” On the same page, under the heading “The Dollars and Cents of It,” we are told that “the payroll of the School and Museum . . . for the month of October [1913] was $2,702.85 . . . probably more than was paid out for wages by any other institution or industry within Santa Fe’s city limits.”
Edgar Lee Hewett (1865–1946), who founded the School of American Archaeology in 1907 and the Museum of New Mexico in 1909, needed to promote these institutions and their projects among patrons and sponsors as well as to scholars. His primary interests, Southwest archaeology and news of the Museum, are the focus of the first issue. Hewett recognized that most contemporary writing about Native cultures and archaeology was included in the dense reports of the Bureau of American Ethnology or other anthropology journals. Many of these publications were ponderous and directed at other specialists. Hewett, however, desired a more popular vehicle to assist with building a donor and membership base.
Consistently, El Palacio has been written in an accessible style, but often still inclusive of original and scholarly content, informing readers, both professional and lay, about the ordinary and extraordinary work of the Museum of New Mexico. The magazine continues today to be a vital source of information about the region and the Museum’s research. Reaching its one-hundredth year ensures that it will continue to be a first source for New Mexico researchers. Curators do write for their professional peers, but a Museum of New Mexico tradition remains: to write accessible publications for all interested parties.
El Palacio’s first issue highlighted the work of the Museum of New Mexico and School of American Archaeology, known today as the School for Advanced Research. Today the two are separately managed and organized institutions. But in 1913 they were both under the directorship of Hewett. Hewett was paid by the Archaeological Institute of America, the umbrella organization of which the School was originally a branch, and received no salary from the state—a sleight of political hand. Simplistically, the Museum was responsible for the physical buildings, staffing, and funding, while the research program was carried out by the School. Staff and monies were comingled and managed to take full advantage of a private and public organizational relationship, creating a legacy of singular work. These two Santa Fe institutions were essentially one organization until, in 1959, a state legislator pointed out that the arrangement of a shared School and Museum board violated the conflict of interest clause of the New Mexico State Constitution. This began the difficult and tedious job of separating staff, collections, and assets. (See Snow, this issue.) Both organizations were visionary; both continue to thrive and enhance the city, state, and region.
Reading the first El Palacio, we sense that we are only getting part of the story because of the abundance of laudatory comments about Director Edgar Hewett. Each main article praises Hewett, with the exception of the article about which room in the Palace building was used by Lew Wallace to complete his epic work, Ben Hur.
A short appreciation of Hewett by one of his board members praises him as “a master in his chosen line, and that manifest destiny has in store yet greater achievements. . . . The School is a product of Hewett’s mind and heart and long may he continue to direct its activities.” A Board of Managers resolution supporting Hewett’s leadership, and printed in full, hints at the underlying story.
Hewett was long a contentious figure. He was routinely criticized for devoting more energy to developing an institutional empire than he did toward the developing science of archaeology. He was certainly a tireless promoter of archaeology for the public. As his published lecture schedule in the first issue attests, Hewett kept a vigorous travel schedule promoting and raising funds for the Museum and, in the eyes of many, promoting himself. Hewett primarily managed the Museum through surrogates rather than a steady presence. By 1913 he had begun a part-time residency in San Diego as he prepared exhibitions for the San Diego Exposition, which would open in 1915. In addition, his appointment as director and the choice of Santa Fe as a place to establish a new branch of the Boston-based Archaeological Institute of America continued to rankle some of the eastern academic anthropology establishment. Some of this resistance surely resulted from the contemporary shift to university-based anthropology from museums, where most anthropology had been based in the late nineteenth and first ten years of the twentieth century.
Anthropologist Franz Boas, for one, deplored Hewett’s methods and the inclusion of what he called local interests and amateurs. Boas criticized Hewett for not being thorough, being too diffuse in his interests, and having summer-school dabblers visit and work at archaeology sites. Nonetheless, a vehement attack on Hewett published in the Santa Fe New Mexican in fall 1913 was personal and unwarrantedly excessive. Indeed, the decision to publish El Palacio probably arose from Hewett’s need to counter his ongoing feud with the New Mexican and its owner and editor (and future US senator), Bronson Cutting. Hampered by the unfriendly local press, Hewett needed a public of his own.
The controversy began when the Santa Fe Chamber of Commerce started using the slogan “The Oldest City in the United States” to describe Santa Fe, the catchphrase appearing on 68,000 envelopes for the use of city businesses and paid for by subscription. Hewett, as well as his staff and board, indicated the inaccuracy of such a statement to the chamber. (Hewett correctly pointed out that St. Augustine, Florida, is the oldest European settlement in the western hemisphere. There are numerous older indigenous towns and villages in South America, and Walpi and Acoma in North America, that have continuous occupation of more than a millennium.) This was truly a tempest in a teapot, but Hewett’s style had left a gaggle of malcontents; consequently this relatively small matter served as a way to call Hewett’s leadership into question. A box on the front page of the New Mexican lauded the chamber’s recent accomplishments (including the distribution of the debatable envelopes) and continued with a listing of “WHAT SANTA FE STILL NEEDS”:
A School of Archaeology (recognized as deserving world-wide fame) with a director at its head who is not merely a promoter but who is recognized as an archaeologist in scientific circles and who is able to obtain the endorsement of the leading eastern universities. . . . A school of Archaeology with a man at the head who is able to devote more than a few weeks of the year to an institution which should be made the greatest in the country.
Still many Santa Feans supported Hewett and the nascent tourism that he was creating. The New Mexican continued to pummel Hewett and to try and discredit his person and work, going as far as to ridicule the School’s managing board. The strong and decisive response in El Palacio seems warranted considering the unsympathetic and myopic attack from the local paper.
Hewett’s indelicate tone alienated not only the Chamber of Commerce but also the New Mexico Historical Society. Both organizations had recently been displaced from the Palace of the Governor’s building by Hewett’s successful lobbying to obtain it for his combination of Museum and School. Former territorial governor L. Bradford Prince had lived in the Palace from 1889 to 1893, and in 1909 as president of the New Mexico Historical Society he continued to use the Palace for exhibitions and the society’s library. Hewett ridiculed these exhibitions as being unscientific and unimportant. Moreover, it was during Prince’s term as territorial governor that much of the Victorian gingerbread was added to the building, all removed during the Museum’s renovation of the building. Prince was never successful in his quest to acquire exclusive use of the building or to have it used as a branch of the Smithsonian, and the successful acquisition of the building by Hewett—a Santa Fe newcomer—had to have injured his pride.
There is perhaps one further reason for the New Mexican’s attack on Hewett. New Mexican owner Cutting had shortly before the episode forcefully and antagonistically purchased the newspaper from Paul Walter, whom Hewett immediately hired as El Palacio’s first editor (Walter also served as the Museum’s first associate director and secretary). Walter had arrived in Santa Fe in 1898 and immediately began reporting for the New Mexican. In 1908 Walter and his brother-in-law purchased the New Mexican, with Walter serving as president of New Mexican Printing and editor of the New Mexican from 1908 to 1913.
Hewett’s nickname, El Toro, was well deserved. But with the perspective of time it is clear that without his single-mindedness and assertive style there might not have been a Museum of New Mexico. El Toro did abide. The defense of Hewett aside, in volume one, issue one, we learn of the truly laudable accomplishments of the young museum and its director. Certainly the singular achievements of establishing and operating the School and Museum stand above all others; however, consider that within the first four years of the Museum, Hewett’s leadership had set in motion, as accurately reviewed in the first issue of El Palacio, a vibrant publication program, public education, exhibitions, and research and preservation of ancestral (archaeological) sites, all recounted and explained in the first El Palacio. There were plenty of accomplishments to celebrate.
On the masthead of the first El Palacio is the handsome profile of the Palace of the Governors, a view of the building we generally take for granted today. If that issue of El Palacio had done nothing more than print this image, it would have been enough to signify the everlasting influence of the Museum of New Mexico. The Palace continues to anchor Santa Fe’s plaza; no citizen today could or would imagine the city in its absence.
Along with the legislation that created the Museum of New Mexico in 1909, the new organization had also received the Palace building and authorization and funding to renovate it. The masthead’s image fêtes the completion of three years of remodeling and preservation of the building, including the construction of its distinctive portal.
Hewett knew the success of his museum and programs depended on visitors to the city and region, and he was one of group that strongly influenced the design and development of what we know today as Santa Fe style. In 1912 Hewett, along with his protégée, Sylvanus Morley, was appointed to the Santa Fe Planning Board, which helped to determine a fitting architectural style for Santa Fe. These efforts helped Hewett’s employee Jesse Nusbaum garner support for the final look of the restored Palace. It was completed in the fall of 1913, just in time to help name and serve as the masthead for the new publication.
Reading over the first issue of El Palacio, one cannot help noticing a number of important future projects foreshadowed—most notably, the building of the Museum of Art, Fiesta and Indian Fair, the Santa Fe art colony, Bandelier National Monument, Salinas National Monument, and the San Diego Museum of Man. It is evident that the early years of the Museum set the stage for many seminal future accomplishments. There were positive outcomes even in the presence of or in opposition to Hewett’s belligerent style and querulous manner, including the development of the Laboratory of Anthropology and the Indian Arts Fund.
The Indian Arts Fund was founded in 1922 with the mission to collect and document Pueblo and other Southwest art from the time period of 1598–1880, those items that Hewett had systematically disregarded. Hewett was dismissive of post-1600 Native cultures, believing them to have been “adulterated” by changes brought by Spanish and American settlement in New Mexico, and could approve historic and newly made Native art only under the condition that he could guide the artisans to return to a “pure” pre-1598 form. His view that anything post-1600 was not scientifically valuable helped Hewett rationalize using museum collections to horse-trade and fund his archaeological pursuits. Some influential Santa Feans eventually became disenchanted with Hewett and formally organized themselves to collect historic Pueblo arts. Unfortunately, Hewett’s bickering with many of the Indian Art Fund founders was personal, with Hewett labeling them as do-gooders who hindered science.
Kenneth Chapman, the Museum’s assistant director, who had worked with Hewett and the Museum since its founding, was intimately involved in the creation of both the Indian Arts Fund and the Laboratory of Anthropology. Hewett’s long absences from Santa Fe meant that Chapman was left in charge of the Museum, but still was required to be in continual contact with Hewett and to check with him about each decision. During one of Hewett’s absences in 1926, John D. Rockefeller made an unannounced return visit to Santa Fe. Chapman knew the consequences of meeting with Rockefeller in the absence of Hewett and dutifully demurred, but Rockefeller insisted on meeting Chapman and learning more about his work. As a result, during this visit Chapman shared with Rockefeller the nascent Indian Arts Fund collection and drove with him to San Ildefonso to meet potters extraordinaire Julian and Maria Martinez. It was during this visit that Rockefeller pledged his anonymous support to the Indian Arts Fund, deciding to support Chapman’s projects over those of Director Hewett.
Another product of Rockefeller’s interest was his funding the construction and first five years of operation of the Laboratory of Anthropology, originally built to house the Indian Arts Fund. The new institution was to serve as the base for anthropological training, to inspire Native artists, and to systematically collect archaeology and ethnology in order to develop methodologically sound developmental sequences. The Laboratory’s first board was filled with distinguished American anthropologists, including many individuals with whom Hewett had disagreed for many years. Hewett battled with eastern anthropologists and institutions in what he believed to be his proprietary role regarding the Southwest. Hewett believed he was the doorway through which all Southwestern archaeological work was to be developed and done; he also resented the eastern museums that had collected and removed from the Southwest tens of thousands of objects.
Ironically, it was the Laboratory of Anthropology and the Indian Arts Fund that helped stop the outflow of New Mexico art, ethnology, and archaeology. We continue to believe today that Southwest collections might be better studied and understood within the contexts of their making, as well as serving as inspiration for Native people. Perhaps collaboration and a helpful hand rather than shunning colleagues would have assisted Hewett in his ambitious empire building. When the Smithsonian deaccessioned hundreds of Pueblo pots in the late 1920s and gave them to museums across the country, the Museum of New Mexico was not one of the recipients—but well could have been. Eventually, Hewett did react to the formation of the Laboratory of Anthropology and the new institution’s interest in post-1600 Native cultures by creating the Hall of Ethnology in 1939 in the Old Armory building on Washington Avenue.
Nineteen twenty-six was not a particularly positive year for Hewett. Thirteen years after the first El Palacio appeared, Hewett’s mantle showed some cracks. He found himself battling against Santa Fe artists (whom he had encouraged to come to Santa Fe). They complained that the Chautauqua form of education that Hewett championed was inappropriate for Santa Fe, antiquated, and unnecessary, with stilted programming and ponderous historic pageantry. They pointed out that increasingly Hewett’s Fiestas program excluded Santa Fe’s citizens, notably Hispanic people. The battle for ownership of Fiestas was played out through Hewett’s nemesis, the New Mexican. Eventually Hewett would remove himself and the Museum and School from involvement with Fiestas, resulting in the establishment of the Fiestas Council and the modern Fiestas observance and community celebration. Within a few days of Hewett’s death in December 1946, the private Laboratory of Anthropology and the Museum of New Mexico and School boards met to begin the process of a merger, giving new meaning to “over my dead body.” While the Laboratory was not originally part of Hewett’s museum, it is today one of Santa Fe’s iconic buildings and an essential part of the Museum, anchoring Museum Hill’s Milner Plaza and caring for singular research collections.
El Palacio is the story of the Museum of New Mexico, including all of its institutional complexity. Sometimes chatty, other times filled with pomposity, it is our companion and helps us to see what others see, to explore, and to learn. It is filled with family stories known and unknown, and as family chronicle it reads for the ages. The first issue promised, “The scope of El Palacio will broaden with the next issue.” Over the next issue, and the next hundred years of issues, the scope of the Museum of New Mexico broadened, and the scope of the magazine did indeed broaden along with it. Today, that initial promise stands, along with the promise of the institutions Hewett founded.
Bruce Bernstein is director the Continuous Pathways Foundation and tribal historic preservation officer, Pojoaque Pueblo. As assistant director for collections and research at the National Museum of the American Indian, he supervised the opening and operation of the Museum’s Cultural Resources Center. Bernstein has also served as chief curator and director of Santa Fe’s Museum of Indian Arts and Culture and Laboratory of Anthropology, and as executive director of the Southwestern Association for Indian Arts. He holds a doctorate in anthropology from the University of New Mexico and has published broadly on Native arts and museums as well as curated numerous exhibitions. His most recent book is Santa Fe Indian Market: A History of Native Arts and the Marketplace, published by the Museum of New Mexico Press.
On December 4, 1933, excavation began on the first site to be listed in the official New Mexico archaeological site registry—Laboratory of Anthropology 1 (or LA 1).
Stanley A. Stubbs and W. S. Stallings Jr. of the Laboratory of Anthropology directed the work of dozens of Santa Fe men over the next six months on the north bank of the Santa Fe River near Agua Fria Village. Supported by the Civil Works Administration (later to become the Works Progress Administration) and the Federal Emergency Relief Administration, this was one of several important New Mexico archaeological excavations that were carried out as the nation struggled out of the Great Depression. More than 250 rooms were excavated with state-of-the-art methods, all just a scant six miles from the Palace of the Governors.
The El Palacio of the time, published every two weeks, was filled almost exclusively with articles on archaeology and anthropology. The November 22–29, 1933, issue was dominated by a detailed account of a multiday visit to Jemez Feast Day, with short articles on tomb excavations in the northern Caucasus, the death of the last speaker of the Mohican language, religious concepts of the Cree, a debate about whether the Egyptian pyramids were made of stone or concrete, and “First Aid for Southwestern Ruins”—all articles assembled from the Science Service wire. The first-aid article celebrated the allotment of Public Works Program funds for the repair of ruins at Mesa Verde and Aztec Ruins, but there was no mention of the pending LA 1 excavations. The next two issues of El Palacio describe a trip to Acoma and include cross-cultural articles on religion by Robert Lowie (excerpted from the American Mercury). The silence about the local excavations persisted until February 1953, when it was noted in a single line that the excavation manuscript had been completed.
El Palacio’s importance to archaeology is evident in bibliographies from current professional journals, books, and theses. This was especially true the first seventy-five years or so of publication, when articles on artifacts, excavations, or new research were found in nearly every issue. In this context, the lack of articles describing the results of the excavations at LA 1—or Pindi Pueblo, as it was named by its excavators—is remarkable. With this issue, eighty years after it was excavated, Pindi Pueblo has finally made it into El Palacio.
The Museum and the Lab
Stubbs and Stallings’s work at Pindi Pueblo was a shining example of how archaeology could be done. The staff of the newly minted Laboratory of Anthropology, Inc., executed a salvage investigation of a threatened site, drawing on the multidisciplinary expertise of specialists from universities and museums from around the nation. The result was a detailed study of an Ancestral Puebloan village that had been occupied at the formative time of migration and the coalescence of distinct Pueblo populations in the Northern Rio Grande. Migration of Ancestral Puebloan peoples was a hot topic in Southwestern archaeology in the 1930s, as it still is today.
The intellectual and even political context of New Mexico archaeology in the early 1930s was shaped by differences between the established Museum of New Mexico and its young rival, the Laboratory of Anthropology, Inc. The Museum grew out of Edgar Lee Hewett’s monumental or top-down perspective on sites, regions, and big ideas about the history of Southwestern cultures. In contrast, the Lab was incremental and systematic, building upward from data toward interpretation in a scientific and academic approach. “Academic” is used carefully, since the Museum was closely allied with University of New Mexico archaeology, both established by Hewett, while the Lab was closely allied with East and West Coast universities and museums.
The site’s official name, LA 1, reflects this institutional difference. Dr. Harry P. Mera joined the Lab as staff archaeologist and director of the State Archaeological Site Survey Program. Dr. Mera, a Public Health Service physician, had conducted a long-term study of archaeological sites while visiting clinics throughout New Mexico. He mapped, collected potsherds, and made observations about the sites he visited, cataloguing and organizing the information as any good scientist would. When hired by the Lab in 1931, his collections and records came with him, and by his retirement in 1948, the LA registry had increased to 2,400 sites. Today, Mera’s work is carried on by the Archaeological Records Management Section (ARMS) of the New Mexico Historic Preservation Division in collaboration with the Museum. At last count, ARMS has nearly 180,000 sites in its data-base, and the ARMS system is a national leader in archaeological site management. Although the Museum could have created a site registry during its first decades of existence, that sort of systematic approach was not part of Hewett’s vision.
The completion and publication of the Pindi report happened soon after the end of the rivalry between the Museum and the Lab. As the Lab was failing financially in the 1940s, Hewett did nothing to help. Hewett’s death in 1946 ended his tenure, not only as the only director the Museum had ever known, but also as the founding director of the School for Advanced Research, originally called the School of American Archaeology. With the absorption of the Laboratory of Anthropology, Inc., by the Museum of New Mexico in 1947, rivalry gave way to cooperation, and the Pindi report was published jointly by the School and the Lab in 1953.
Why LA 1?
LA 1 was ideal for the Civil Works Program, consistent with nationwide examples of labor-intensive archaeology projects that put able-bodied men and women to work. The site was privately owned, and the local owners fully supported the excavations. The pueblo was actively being destroyed by the erosion of the Santa Fe River, and the owners hoped to turn the exposed ruins into tourist income—a Depression-era entrepreneurial dream. By excavating and leaving the adobe walls open to the elements (rather than back-filling), Stubbs and Stallings knew they were dooming the site to eventual destruction, a fate that had largely come to pass by the time of publication.
Scientifically, LA 1 was one of the largest known black-on-white-pottery pueblos in the greater Santa Fe area. A. V. Kidder had excavated at Forked Lightning Ruin near Pecos in 1926–1929, but the other major excavations by Kidder at Pecos Pueblo (1915–1929) and by Nels Nelson in the Galisteo Basin (1912) had focused on later, larger pueblos of what we now call the Classic period. From LA 1, Stubbs and Stallings expected to learn about the founding, growth, and dynamic changes leading up to the Classic period. They hoped to further document the evolution of black-on-white pottery into the later, multihued, lead-glazed pottery, and they wanted to explore the descendant relationships between Northern Rio Grande communities and the earlier settlements in neighboring regions, including Chaco and Mesa Verde. A. V. Kidder, who was on the board of Lab, Inc., heartily endorsed the work, and offered to raise funds for the publication of its results.
The Excavations: Village Layout and Architectural History
Six months of excavation at LA 1 revealed a complex village history and fascinating glimpses of life during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The archae-ological team systematically dug into and through adobe wall rubble, collapsed roofs, remodeling debris, superimposed floors, and layers of trash. The excavators exposed and documented 253 rooms, eight kivas (subterranean ritual structures), and five rectangular ceremonial rooms. A plaza area included a series of turkey pens with abundant eggshells, bones, and droppings, leading Stubbs and Stallings to name LA 1 after the Tewa word for turkey—Pindi. The stratigraphic relationships, changing pottery styles and technologies, and careful documentation of bonded or abutted corners of the coursed adobe walls allowed them to identify three main building periods (First, Second, and Third Periods) and a fourth period that predated Pindi Pueblo.
The pre-Pindi occupation underlay the main village and consisted of a circular pit structure (a subterranean house) and an adjacent above-ground pole, brush, and mud storage or living room. The distinctive mineral-painted pottery had been named Kwahe’e Black-on-white by Mera, and a few tree-ring dates derived from fuelwood suggested that the rooms had been occupied in the late twelfth or early thirteenth century. This single-family dwelling was typical of Ancestral Puebloan farm settlements during what Rio Grande archaeologists today call the Late Developmental period. Other sites from this era are scattered within and overlooking the Santa Fe River Valley between Pindi and the Santa Fe Plaza.
This small homestead was abandoned and replaced by a substantial settlement beginning between AD 1250 and 1270 (First Period). About forty adobe rooms of varying sizes were arranged one to three rows deep, forming a linear apartment complex with perhaps a few second-story rooms. The roomblock was oriented north to south with three kivas in the open space to the east. Rooms with interior fire pits were interpreted as living spaces, whereas rooms lacking floor features were used for storing food, goods, and raw materials. Santa Fe Black-on-white bowls and textured utility jars were represented in the abundant potsherds. The room suites housed eight to ten families, and Stubbs and Stallings observed that the building style and layout were typical of the Northern San Juan and Northern Rio Grande regions.
Following a short and unexplained abandonment, the original forty-room apartment was remodeled. Portions were razed and leveled, and the kivas were filled to accommodate the next building phase (Second Period). The “new” Pindi Pueblo experienced changes in village layout, spatial organization of ritual structures and spaces, and size, more than doubling to a village of more than 200 rooms inhabited by twenty to thirty families. Four roomblocks, each growing in two or three episodes, incorporated and replaced the remnant First Period rooms. Stepping down toward enclosed plazas from their two- to four-story heights, roomblock layouts were somewhat helter-skelter, suggesting unplanned expansion of the core buildings over a twenty- to forty-year period between AD 1310 and 1350.
Roomblocks were one to five rooms deep in plan and one to four stories tall, defining three enclosed plazas and a smaller placita. This pattern of small plazas was also found in more recent excavations in the Santa Fe area at Arroyo Hondo Pueblo. These plazas are early versions of the large, enclosed communal plazas of the fifteenth-century Classic-period villages of the Tewa and Galisteo Basins. Kivas were incorporated into the Pindi residential roomblocks, leaving plazas as open space. Rectangular rooms with interior features similar to those in kivas were also scattered throughout the village. The combination of open plazas, enclosed kivas, and other ritual spaces reflects changes in the organization of ritual practice as kivas and ceremonial rooms served smaller segments of the population, and the plazas were settings for more communal and less esoteric ceremonies and activities.
In addition to their roles as public spaces for ceremonies, dances, meetings, and daily work, the main Pindi plaza contained the turkey pens for which the site is named. On the south and east side of the plaza, impressions in the plaza fill defined four enclosures of small poles and twigs appended to the exterior walls of the roomblocks. Inside the pens, yellowish soil was mixed with abundant eggshell and turkey bone, evidence that led Stubbs and Stallings to conclude that the residents were raising and keeping turkeys. Turkeys were valued for their feathers and important for blankets and ritual; they were also a source of dietary protein. Wild turkeys had been kept by Northern Rio Grande residents since the early 800s, but the evidence from Pindi suggested intensive domestication at least by the thirteenth century.
By the end of the fourteenth century, Pindi had been abandoned again, and the buildings fell into disrepair. A few tree-ring dates suggested to Stubbs and Stallings that there might have been a final building episode (Third Period), and later researchers have reinforced that suspicion, suggesting that Pindi may have seen a short resurgence in the early 1400s. This rhythm of occupation and abandonment is consistent with what we know today of neighboring village sites— Agua Fria Schoolhouse, Santa Fe Community Convention Center, and Arroyo Hondo—where occupations by smaller, vestigial populations ended by AD 1420, coincident with a major regional drought.
What Pindi Villagers Left Behind
Stubbs and Stallings’s careful documentation of architecture and stratigraphy provides a remarkable framework for the story of Pindi Pueblo, but it’s the artifacts they recovered that provide substance, meaning, and even beauty. The Pindi excavations occurred at a time of transition in American archaeology. The appreciation for the exotic that had driven excavation and collection a generation earlier had given way to systematic and detailed description of form, function, and variety. Specialists were brought in to identify bone and plant materials (including pollen), making use of the wide-ranging academic connections that were a hallmark of the Laboratory of Anthropology. The 1930s volumes on Pecos Pueblo artifacts set a high bar for scientific description, and the Pindi studies built on that foundation, including collaborations with many of the same researchers.
Typical of open-air sites, nature had applied a filter of preservation to the excavated materials at Pindi. Clothing, housewares, and tools of perishable materials, which make up the majority of both ancient and modern possessions, were eliminated by decay except in the rare cases where fragments were preserved by burning or their impressions were detected during excavation. Thorough excavation recovered esoteric artifact types with the common material remains of daily life. Pottery was singled out for extensive analysis, and the remaining types of artifacts were individually described in their remarkable variety. Pipes,
pendants, pigments, picks, and pins form an alliterative list of personal possessions, while plugs and piki stones are household accessories. Plugs, often found in place, were large, carefully formed adobe stoppers used to control air flow through vent holes between interior rooms. Piki stones were carefully prepared griddles installed or supported over hearths. Abundant large, hafted stone tools, including axes, mauls, picks, and combination tools, ranged in quality of workmanship from the crude-but-effective to exquisitely finished polished axes. The latter were often fashioned out of visually stunning raw materials, suggesting that appearance was as important as function. Tool kits for crafting turquoise and other fine stone and shell jewelry included raw material, cut blanks, drills, drilled blanks, and lapidary abraders. Finished beads and pendants were made from sherds, shell, bone, pumice, shale, travertine, selenite, schist, and mica.
Bone, a versatile raw material, was used to manufacture the most delicate of pins as well as wedges that appear to be robust enough for splitting wood. Awls, in a bewildering variety of forms and from many animal species and body parts, hint at the incredible variety of textiles (baskets, clothing, etc.) that would have adorned residents and residences. Of seventeen glimpses of coiled basketry preserved as impressions on pottery sherds, quality ranged from a coarse nine stitches per inch to an extremely fine workmanship of twenty stitches per inch. Bone tubes were shaped and drilled for a variety of flute-like whistles, including a composite form that included a vibrating diaphragm.
A seamless continuum between the secular and the sacred is reflected in modern Pueblo culture, so that many of the artifacts from Pindi have ceremonial implications that can only be imagined by archaeologists. Clusters and associations of objects that came to light during excavation are suggestive of the importance of, or perhaps just an interest in, found objects such as fossils and minerals. Fascinating examples of a more clearly ceremonial artifact type are carefully shaped quartz pebbles or “lightning stones.” These hand-held pebbles exhibit “tribo – luminescence,” the emission of light from the interior of the stone or crystal when the pebbles are rubbed or impacted with sufficient force to physically deform the crystal lattice.
Pottery: Keys to Local and Regional Trends and Relationships
Due to its abundance and interpretive potential, pottery was singled out as the most important of the artifact categories. Kidder had published the basic framework for pottery classification in the Northern Rio Grande in 1915, and by the 1930s pottery sequences were defined for most of the northern Southwest. During the study of the Pindi pottery collections, Stubbs and Stallings benefited from detailed technical and stylistic analyses of Pecos and Forked Lightning collections conducted by Anna O. Shepard and others. Meanwhile, at the Laboratory of Anthropology, Mera was finalizing his synthesis of pottery variation across the broad sweep of the New Mexico landscape. With well-established definitions of the basic decorated pottery types and sequences in place, the Pindi assemblages provided an unparalleled opportunity to test prevailing typological sequences while adding to their descriptive and interpretive potential.
Stubbs and Stallings and their peers believed that the pottery sequence in the Northern Rio Grande was strongly influenced first by the Chaco region (eleventh and twelfth centuries) and later by the Mesa Verde region (thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries). These influences were seen in the decorated pottery: the black-on-white, black-on-red, polychrome, and glaze-paint wares. Since the occurrence of these different decorated wares changed through time, their relative frequencies across the site were used to both date the building episodes and examine regional relationships and influences. Utility or cooking wares exhibited more gradual change in textured surfaces and were seen as less sensitive and less useful for temporal or regional studies.
Taking advantage of the preexisting frameworks and expertise of Lab staff members Anna O. Shepard and Kenneth Chapman, and the huge collections from Pindi Pueblo, Stubbs and Stallings chose to focus on the details of design style and the wealth of creativity within the established pottery types. They painstakingly compiled a catalogue of the design motifs and decorative layouts employed by the ancient potters in hopes of teasing out patterns that might reflect detailed changes through time. Changes were expected to provide clues to the direction of origin or influence, potter identity, and local or nonlocal production, but they were stymied by the dizzying array of geometric and linear combinations. Without clear trends, they chose to illustrate and describe the pottery in hopes that future work would bring clarity to the situation.
As anticipated by Stubbs and Stallings, Pindi Pueblo fit nicely into the period leading up to the regional dominance of lead-glazed pottery south of Santa Fe and biscuit ware to the north. Pottery from the lowest levels of the site was dominated by locally produced mineral-painted Kwahe’e Black-on-white, but with significant amounts of white, red, and even utility pottery imported from as far away as the Zuni and Chaco regions between AD 1000 and 1200. More recent studies suggest that Kwahe’e decorative styles also exhibit strong influences from Salinas, Chupadero Mesa, and Tijeras areas to the south. This more holistic view portrays early Santa Fe River villagers as engaged with all their neighbors, not just those to the west. Essentially, the bewildering diversity and cross-pollinating of decorative styles emerged out of the local mineral-paint tradition.
The village periods at Pindi Pueblo coincided with a change to carbon-based paint on decorated pottery. Five distinct types were defined based on subtle variation in clays and tempers, and the types fell into two geographic groups. Santa Fe Black-on-white, Pindi Black-on-white, and Wiyo Black-on-white were made from high-iron clay deposits that are characteristic of the Rio Grande and Santa Fe Valleys and the Tewa Basin. Galisteo Black-on-white and Poge Black-on-white were made from Galisteo Basin clays, tempered with crushed potsherds and sands. Pindi Black-on-white vessels were made locally (within the Santa Fe River Valley). Poge Black-on-white was produced in the local region. Galisteo Black-on-white was imported from communities to the south.
Despite the lack of coherent patterns in the black-on-white designs, distinct changes in the pottery-type mixtures were associated with each of Pindi Pueblo’s village occupations. Collections associated with the First Period were dominated by Santa Fe Black-on-white sherds with small amounts of Wiyo Black-on-white but limited occurrences of the other types. They had expected to find evidence of Mesa Verde pottery in this late thirteenth-century context, but the few candidate sherds were classified as Galisteo Black-on-white. In terms of connections and relationships, the pottery of the first villagers was linked with the Rio Grande Valley and the Tewa Basin.
By the early 1300s, during the Second Period, a different pottery-production trajectory was apparent. Collectively, Galisteo, Poge, and Pindi Black-on-whites were more abundant than Santa Fe Black-on-white. Galisteo and Poge Black-on-white were similar in appearance to San Juan Basin pottery because of the white-firing clays and slips used in their production. This similarity reinforced the belief that Mesa Verde people had migrated into the Northern Rio Grande Valley, and the subtle differences between the two pottery types reflected the incorporation of local designs into the original Mesa Verde–derived tradition. Pindi Black-on-white was distinct in raw materials, and as the name implies, it was seen as the locally produced analog of the suite of contemporary pottery types. It was clear that between the the First and Second Periods, the geographic extent of connections and relationships had changed, in that the second residents interacted more intensively with communities to the south in the Galisteo Basin than with the Rio Grande Valley or the Tewa Basin. While these implications of the pottery-type frequencies seemed clear, there was an underlying and unexplored conflict with the striking decorative variety of black-on-white pottery. All of the decorative elements and their organization were shared to a remarkable degree across the types, contrasting with the accepted model of mass population movements to the Northern Rio Grande Valley. If the migration scenario were correct, it would require mechanisms for the rapid acceptance and integration of the decorative aspects of pottery even as people were on the move throughout the Southwest and as communities established and changed their social and economic networks.
The pottery mixture of Pindi Pueblo changed again in the final occupation of the site, after the second village was largely or totally abandoned.
This observation is limited by a small number of sherds, but Santa Fe and Wiyo Black-on-white return to dominance over the local and Galisteo Basin types. However, glaze-ware pottery started to appear as another indicator of interaction with the region to the south.
Since the publication of the Pindi Pueblo results, investigations of the Agua Fria Schoolhouse, Santa Fe Community Convention Center, and Arroyo Hondo Pueblo sites have strengthened our perspective. Pottery studies yielded results similar to those from Pindi Pueblo, suggesting that all villages were involved in a tightly knit local network of production and exchange. This work has also demonstrated that the mix of Pindi, Santa Fe, and Galisteo Black-on-white pottery continued well into the fifteenth century, when many villages were producing glaze-paint pottery to the south and biscuit-ware pottery to the north. Amidst these regional trends, the Santa Fe River potters continued their traditions until they were forced to leave by worsening drought. Clearly, no one site holds the key to understanding how populations from many regions were incorporated and accommodated through the fourteenth-century migrations. But the documentation of stylistic variability across types at Pindi Pueblo is a solid contribution to our understanding of how diverse peoples incorporated new ideas and ways, as well as each other, while maintaining identities that had structured their lives for generations.
Final Thoughts
The excavation of Pindi Pueblo in 1933–1934 was an opportunity created by a federal make-work project with a nod to the development of local tourism. It became an exercise in unraveling the architectural and spatial complexities of a village with a two-century-long history. While expecting simplicity, Stubbs and Stallings defined the birth and growth of a village that we now know was one of a tightly knit family of communities along the Santa Fe River and its tributaries between the middle 1200s and early 1400s. Detailed architectural and artifact recording left a legacy of information that influenced and guided later excavations at Pindi’s sister pueblo communities at Agua Fria Schoolhouse, Santa Fe Community Convention Center, and Arroyo Hondo.
When the report was published, Stubbs and Stallings were convinced that Pindi Pueblo had been influenced by the movement of people out of the greater Four Corners region into the Santa Fe River Valley and Northern Rio Grande. On the other hand, they had to explain the strong pattern of local, in situ origin and growth of Pindi Pueblo and the Santa Fe River Valley communities. The Santa Fe River Valley was a crucible of accommodation, acceptance, and compromise. Those mechanisms were fine tuned in the later large villages of the Galisteo Basin and the northern Tewa Basin, eventually forming the basis for the Pueblo villages the Spanish encountered when they first arrived in New Mexico. With the arrival of the Spanish, the processes of accommodation, acceptance, and compromise started again.
Welcome back, Pindi Pueblo! Your recognition in El Palacio has been a long time coming.
The authors would like to acknowledge the friendly staff at the Archaeological Records Management Section, New Mexico Historic Preservation Division; and the Archaeological Research Collections, Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, for their professional assistance in support of this article.
Eric Blinman is the director of the Office of Archaeological Studies. His studies have focused on the northern Southwest since 1979, and he has been on the Museum of New Mexico staff since 1988.
Stephen S. Post (opens in a new tab) is is a former deputy director for the Office of Archaeological Studies, a division of New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs, where he worked from 1976–2011. He worked as a ceramic analyst and field technician for the School for Advanced Research (SAR) Contract Archeology Program in 1983–1984 and authored a study of the SAR campus in 2011. His experience encompasses 12,000 years of New Mexico’s rich past. Between 1994 and 2011, he directed advance archaeological excavations for Santa Fe’s public and private projects, including the New Mexico History Museum, the Santa Fe Community Convention Center, Santa Fe Railyard, and Las Campanas de Santa Fe, among others.
