A Tale of Two Paintings

Portraits of Gerald Marr

Two nearly identical paintings of a young cowboy named Gerald Marr: one is owned by the New Mexico Museum of Art, the other by the Colorado Springs Fine Art Center.

Both paintings were created by noted New Mexico artist Peter Hurd between 1952 and 1953. Both feature Gerald Marr in three-quarter profile looking off to the left. In a characteristic Hurd composition, Marr’s bust is superimposed on a typical New Mexico landscape of rolling hills, wide blue sky with white clouds, and cattle fencing (Hurd’s San Patricio ranch).

Only in the details do the two paintings vary. In the Colorado Springs version, Marr has a rugged and somewhat solemn look, with deeper shadows around the cheeks and jaw, whereas in the Santa Fe painting, he looks slightly younger and more relaxed. Marr’s shirt is a bit bluer in the Colorado Springs version; the striping is more loosely painted, and the collar and shoulder of his shirt are slightly more wrinkled. In the background of the Colorado Springs version are five buildings, including a small red one, which is absent in the Santa Fe version, where only four buildings cluster in the distance.

Why would Peter Hurd spend the time and effort to create two nearly identical works? The answer lies in the story of a prize-winning rodeo performance, a painter’s ascent, and a young cowboy on the road.

In 1952 Gerald Marr was growing up in southern New Mexico. He loved horses and rodeos, as did most of the boys in Tularosa. He liked to spend time with his Uncle Tom and Aunt Louise Babers, who owned a ranch in San Patricio, New Mexico, while also running the general store and post office in town. A top steer roper in his youth, Tom Babers taught young Gerald everything he knew about riding and horses. Tom and Louise Babers’ ranch was just across the river from Peter Hurd’s place. When Gerald Marr visited his aunt and uncle, he would often play impromptu polo games with Hurd. If he wasn’t directly involved in the game, he could be found wrangling the horses or cooling them down.

Three years earlier, Thomas Fortune Ryan III (an aviation entrepreneur and descendant of industrialist, philanthropist, and art collector Thomas Fortune Ryan) had started the annual Billy-the-Kid Rodeo along with the Tularosa Lions Club. In 1952 the rodeo was staged at Ryan’s Three Rivers ranch, near Tularosa. There were numerous events for boys up to fifteen years old. Even though this would only be the second rodeo he had competed in, Marr decided to enter all the events he could.

Marr rode one of his Uncle Tom’s horses, a fourteen-year-old named Beetlebaum, a descendant of the US Cavalry’s Remount Program, which has been credited with creating a superior stock of horses. According to Marr, “He was just about the ugliest horse you ever saw. But he was a good roping horse and good barrel horse. Why, he could do anything.”

That year first prize for the champion of the Billy-the-Kid Rodeo was an airplane trip to New York City and Washington, DC, and a portrait commissioned by Thomas Fortune Ryan III from Peter Hurd. Second prize was a new leather saddle. Marr really wanted that saddle. For a boy who practically lived on a horse, how could a trip and a painting ever compete with a brand new saddle?

At the age of fifteen, Gerald Marr won “All-Around Cowboy” in his age division (thirteen to fifteen year olds), and even though he didn’t win the saddle, the win proved advantageous to him. His trip to New York and Washington was packed with highlights organized by Ryan, including meeting President Eisenhower and New Mexico Senator Dennis Chavez, and a tour of the White House and Pentagon. He met Gene Autry before Autry’s performance at the Madison Square Garden Rodeo and attended a World Series baseball game. While in Washington, Marr competed in a radio game show called Wonderful City, where he won numerous prizes, including clothing, hunting gear, a dog, and a horse that was donated by Ryan.

During the Christmas holiday in December 1952, Marr sat for his portrait with Hurd. They would start around 7:00 or 8:00 in the morning and work until around 10:00 a.m., when the changing light required rearranging the studio setup. Hurd completed preliminary sketches before executing the work in egg tempera. While sitting for the portrait, Marr again stayed with his aunt and uncle on their ranch in San Patricio. His part of the portrait was completed in under two weeks.

Born February 22, 1904, in Roswell, New Mexico, Harold Hurd Jr. would later change his name to Peter. After attending the New Mexico Military Institute, he entered West Point Military Academy in 1921. After two years, he decided to pursue art. He transferred to Haverford College, outside Philadelphia, and later attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. In 1924 he obtained an apprenticeship with N. C. Wyeth, where he met his future wife, Wyeth’s daughter, Henriette.

By the time of Marr’s portrait, Peter Hurd was known for his egg tempera paintings. Egg tempera was the primary medium of Western easel painting through the early Renaissance period but had fallen out of favor in modern times to be replaced by oil paint. The most common recipes use the yolk of an egg (although the whole egg can also be used) as the binder. Hurd favored egg tempera on gessoed panels (mostly Masonite) because it allowed him to capture light, sharp edges, and luminous shadows. He prepared his own panels and ground his own mineral pigments. The paint dries to a hard, durable, and lustrous surface, and since egg tempera dries very fast and cannot be brushed uniformly over large surfaces, these types of paintings have characteristic small-hatch brushwork. The quantity of each day’s paint must be estimated and prepared ahead of time. This necessitates numerous preparatory and field drawings.

In April 1953, the portrait of Marr won the Maynard Prize at the National Academy of Design’s 128th Annual Exhibition in New York. A month later, Hurd started discussions with the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center regarding their acquisition of one of his paintings as a memorial to Percy Hagerman, a well-known Colorado Springs resident and supporter of the Arts Center. In August 1953, Hurd offered them the painting of Gerald Marr, as he wrote in a letter to Fred Bartlett, “a painting of a young ranch boy who last year won a statewide junior calf roping competition sponsored by Thomas Fortune Ryan III.” There is no mention that this work had already been promised elsewhere, probably because by this time there was another version.

In May or June of 1953, Peter Hurd asked Gerald Marr to sit for a second portrait. This time Hurd paid Marr one dollar as a modeling fee. To this day, Marr still owns the framed check for one dollar written to him by Hurd. For the second portrait, Hurd asked Marr to wear the same hat and shirt, made by Marr’s mother, he had worn for the first.

In October 1953, the first version was exhibited in Tucson and then purchased by the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. A label on the reverse of the painting in the collection of the Colorado Springs museum reads, “National Academy of Art, Annual Exhibition, 1953,” clear evidence that the Colorado Springs version is the earlier.

After Hurd completed the second portrait in late 1953, he gave it to Thomas Fortune Ryan III to fulfill his commission. It is not known why Ryan didn’t give the painting to Gerald Marr at that time. At some later point, Ryan loaned it to the Old Lincoln County Memorial Commission. The holdings of the commission transferred to what was then the Museum of New Mexico in the late 1970s, but this painting fell through the cracks and remained on loan. Records of the commission suggested the painting was intended as a gift, but legal transfer of ownership was never completed.

In 1993 Jon Freshour, chief registrar of the Museum of New Mexico, contacted Mr. Ryan regarding the possible donation of the piece to the New Mexico Museum of Art (then the Museum of Fine Arts). At that time, Ryan contacted Gerald Marr to ask if he would like the work. Unfortunately, Ryan only left a phone message for Marr, who was traveling. The message did not make clear whether Ryan was offering to sell or give the work to Marr, and by the time Marr was able to get back to Ryan, it was too late: Thomas Fortune Ryan III had given the work to the museum. Even though he never received this part of his prize, Gerald Marr holds no ill will toward Mr. Ryan or the museum. He blames himself for not speaking up sooner.

The Museum of New Mexico version of the painting was first exhibited in Santa Fe in April 1993 at the Governor’s Gallery in the Round House Capitol Building. The exhibition was entitled Working Cowboys of New Mexico. An article in the Albuquerque Journal praised the portrait as “the most outstanding painting in the show.” It lists the history of the work as a commission that was donated by Thomas Ryan III after being “overlooked at a small branch museum in Lincoln.”

The portrait has been shown in numerous exhibitions and reproduced in several publications. Prior to the rediscovery of the second painting, the Colorado Springs painting was often reproduced with an incorrect citation, saying that it was from the collection of Thomas Ryan. It wasn’t until after Ann and Albert Manchester published an article, “The Face behind the Portrait: Young Cowboy Wins Rodeo and a Place in Art History” in the January 1994 edition of New Mexico Magazine that the existence of the two paintings became known by most of the players. The article never mentions the painting in Colorado Springs and incorrectly merges the tales of the two paintings into one story. But it was the first widely available published article on the subject, ending with the story of the donation of the painting to the Museum of Fine Arts (now the New Mexico Museum of Art). The article includes several illustrations of the painting, and staff and volunteers at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center easily recognized the work and sections of the history listed in the article. It was a probably a bit of a shock to them that the work illustrated was listed as being in the collection of Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe.

So why did Peter Hurd paint two nearly identical paintings? There’s no clear record of his thinking, but his creation of the second portrait is probably explained by the popularity of the first. These works are often considered some of the best paintings done by Hurd, and the artist himself considered the first painting to be “one of the best examples of my work.” There was also the more practical motivation of replacing Thomas Fortune Ryan’s commissioned painting, which Hurd had sold to the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center.

Gerald Marr went on to become a professional rodeo participant and well-known thoroughbred horse trainer and breeder in Tularosa, New Mexico. Ryan and Marr remained friends long after the 1952 Billy-the-Kid Rodeo. In 1995, shortly after the existence of the two paintings was brought to light, Marr’s stepdaughter, Rhonda Rae Smith, became the first person to attempt to distinguish the two works and their histories for a New Mexico Endowment for the Humanities project. However, her comprehensive report was never published, and her research became buried in the files.

Of course, Marr has known about the location of the two works from the beginning. During a high school field trip with his class, he stood in front of his portrait hanging in the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center. When asked why he never mentioned the existence of the two paintings to any of the writers documenting his portrait before Rhonda Rae Smith, he answered in typically laconic cowboy style, “I guess they never asked.”

The two paintings were exhibited together for the first time in November 2012 at the New Mexico Museum of Art. The Colorado Springs version is in Santa Fe for exhibition in the New Mexico History Museum’s Cowboys Real and Imagined through March 16, 2014. The New Mexico Museum of Art’s version is on display in It’s About Time: 14,000 Years of New Mexico Art until January 2014. Over the course of a few months, the curious can compare the two paintings by crossing Lincoln Avenue in downtown Santa Fe and visiting both exhibitions.

Sources

Correspondence. New Mexico Museum of Art Chief Registrar’s Office, Santa Fe.1993.38.1.
Simone Ellis. “Even Cowboys Get the Artists.” Albuquerque Journal, April 11, 1993.
Andrea Kirsh and Rustin S. Levenson. Seeing through Paintings: Physical Examination in Art Historical Studies. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2000.
Ann Manchester and Albert Manchester. “The Face behind the Portrait: Young Cowboy Wins Rodeo and a Place in Art History.” New Mexico Magazine 72 (January 1994):26–28.
Gerald Marr. “Cowboy Never Did Get Rodeo Prize.” The Gazette, Colorado Springs, May 7, 2009.
Robert Metzger, ed. My Land Is the Southwest: Peter Hurd Letters and Journals.College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1983.
Rhonda Rae Smith. “Peter Hurd’s Portrait of Gerald Marr.” Manuscript, 1995.
“U.S. Remount Service Subject of New Book.” Equus Magazine, June 2003.

Michelle Gallagher Roberts is a cultural professional whose work explores the intersections of place, heritage, and public life. With nearly 30 years in the museum field, including more than 15 years at the New Mexico Museum of Art in various roles, she brings a depth of experience shaped by museum operations, preservation, and long‑range cultural planning. She currently serves as Deputy Cabinet Secretary for the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs, where she guides major initiatives and oversees statewide cultural infrastructure projects, including the construction of the New Mexico Museum of Art Vladem Contemporary. Alongside her leadership roles, Michelle has been an active writer and contributor to the field’s professional literature. Her publications include chapters in Rights & Reproductions: The Handbook for Cultural Institutions (2015; 2nd ed., 2018) and Museums & Revenue (2019). She has also written for El Palacio, drawing on her long engagement with New Mexico’s cultural institutions. Her academic background includes a Bachelor of Science degree in Anthropology from Central Washington University and a Master’s degree in Anthropology/Museum Studies from the University of Denver; she also completed the Getty Leadership Institute’s Next Generation program in 2017.

Things Seen and Unseen

BY CYNTHIA BAUGHMAN

Cowboys Real and Imagined is on view at the New Mexico History Museum, and in this issue we round up cowboy and horse stories from across our museums. (more…)

Dining on Horseflesh and Other Cowboy Heresies

By Richard Sims

Basashi is easy to chew, and mighty tasty when dipped in a garlic-soy sauce. Deep red in color, well-marbled, sliced thin—in Japan, raw horsemeat is a delicacy.

As I tried some basashi along with other unfamiliar dishes in a hot springs resort on the southern island of Kyushu, I reflected on the many mountain men who dined on horse and mule meat in the American West. They had no choice. When you have to eat your transportation, you know circumstances are dire.

The men of the Corps of Discovery, commonly known as the Lewis and Clark Expedition, ate more than nine pounds of wild game per man per day. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark had to negotiate other meals where the item could be either pet or meat. Dog. Meriwether loved the little puppies and threw a few live ones in the canoe, for a snack later. William did not favor the taste. Winston Churchill once said (though the quote is also attributed to Will Rogers), “The outside of a horse is good for the inside of a man.” But sometimes the insides of a horse offer a different nutrition, one culinary if not necessary. In many countries, horsemeat as human food is a cultural choice, as we were reminded by recent headlines when horsemeat was found in cow-meat packages in European groceries. The English were appalled. The French offered the old Gallic shrug, and reached for the red wine that made the best pairing.

In over thirty years of museum work in six western states, I have had many occasions to interact with ranch men and women, and to experience North American cowboy and cowgirl culture. I have cooked dutch-oven meals for round-ups and calf sales in central Arizona, and I have written on the popularity and the satisfying poetics of cowboy poetry. (It’s not all “git-along little doggerel,” as one literary critic would have it.)

As a noncowboy and a nonhorseman among the saddle leather–and–snap button shirt crowd, I’ve also made my share of mistakes. While living on a hay farm in Sisters, Oregon, I got a job mending cattle-truck roads on a ranch in Brothers, Oregon, fifty miles away. (For the duration of the job I bunked in a single-wide in Brothers, perhaps making me the only one who has lived simultaneously in both sibling towns.) Every day at noon, after clearing big rocks and filling trenches, I drove the ranch jeep from the open range to the little Brothers café for burgers and black coffee. Mounted behind the counter was that famous specimen of western pseudofauna, the jackalope. Two ranch workers, Old Louis and Young Louis, his son, sat there, mostly ignoring me, until one day Old Louis lowered his newspaper, pointed his jaw at the antlered jackrabbit, and asked, “Have ya seen one of those up Pine Springs Canyon? I heard of a sighting.” I respected Old Louis, and wanted to get to know him better, but I couldn’t let him think I was that much of a greenhorn. “Yep,” I replied, “there was a small herd of them, hopping along so bunched up their antlers were clacking together and spooking the cows.” He didn’t care for my smart-ass response; he snapped his newspaper and went back to ignoring me. I lost a chance to learn more about ranching in central Oregon, and I stared dolefully at a burger gone cold, and a promising friendship gone colder.

I have filmed a branding near Wide Ruins on the Navajo reservation, where the generous cuts of beef for lunch were not familiar shapes found in the racks at Albertson’s. In Prescott, Arizona, I curated an exhibit exploring the fact that Indians are cowboys, too—herdsmen, even—if you allow that buffalo herds were managed ably by Native Americans for thousands of years until grossly mismanaged by the endless migration of target-happy palefaces.

To add a video component to the story, my cameraman and I also traveled to Hopi country, to shoot a round-up. South of Second Mesa, Max and his crew were setting up the portable corral and unloading their horses. As we prepared our equipment for videotaping, we were told to look in the distance. Wild horses were spilling over the horizon and away, horses that had been feral for decades if not centuries. The day’s work was to gather cows. “Those horses,” one man said, “you can’t catch ’em. They turn and fight.” In eastern Montana in the 1930s, feral horses were called “canners” and were caught to become ingredients in cans of dog food, after a short stay at Chicago slaughterhouses. These canners had such a fate due to the mechanization of the big wheat farms, where large teams of horses were no longer needed. They were just cut loose, their muscles no longer useful for power, but for protein further down the food chain. The iconic steed was no more, subject to the heresy of ruthless economics. When we spoon out ground horsemeat for our domesticated canines, do we shiver in disgust, or do we casually accept the Darwinian hierarchy?

When I travel to our seven Historic Sites, I take different routes now and then to make the long drives more interesting. Going from Santa Fe to Lincoln, I’ll head directly south to Duran, turn right on Highway 54, and on to Carrizozo. You pass tiny Ancho before long. From the highway, the rough terrain that embraces Ancho is right out of a Hollywood western. Having already driven for three hours, bored and alone, I imagine riding horseback into Ancho—and I don’t ride horses. (The last time was in a snowy forest outside Banff. No thanks.) I sit astride my imaginary steed and conjure up the West when it was full of lone riders, mysterious and menacing, with a Zen gleam in their eye and tobacco spittle in their whiskers, chewing on a cigar stub, a piece of jerky, or a smoky mastication of both, entertaining vague notions of some destination or other, and some mission to complete.

Horses and livestock are also on my mind when I’m at work, on Museum Hill. Adjacent to the Stewart L. Udall Center for Museum Resources is a life-sized sculpture by Sonny Rivera, Journey’s End. In one robust assemblage of people and animals, Rivera captured the exhaustion and the elation of traveling the Santa Fe Trail. Six mules struggle with the heavy wagon; one of them is about to give out. Two mounted muleskinners urge them on for the last mile down to the plaza. A Puebloan woman observes the commotion, uncertain of what all this means for her way of life. A settler’s kid and his dog romp excitedly. It is a vignette, a frozen moment of the thousands of moments that roll up into New Mexico history. It’s cowboys and Indians and latent heresies of time and place, coming together at a pivotal instant.

I often regard Journey’s End on my way down the paved Santa Fe Trail to my regular lunch spot, the silver Le Pod food trailer across from Kaune’s Market. I joke with chef Jean-Luc that he needs to prepare American onion soup—enough of this French stuff. I don’t ask him if he’ll ever put horse on the menu. In Santa Fe, he might get the crepe pounded out of him.

Richard Sims is the director of New Mexico Historic Sites. He has degrees in anthropology from the University of Oregon and English from Northern Arizona University–Flagstaff. He has managed museums in Arizona, California, Colorado, and Montana. Several of his weekly newspaper columns in Prescott, Arizona, were devoted to humor, enough so that he was the special guest on Michael Feldman’s NPR program, “What Do You Know?” some years back.

Back In The Saddle

The Horse as Icon

BY JOSEPH TRAUGOTT

Horses have always served as potent symbols of the West for easterners as well as locals. Back in the Saddle builds on this reality by presenting twenty-five works from the New Mexico Museum of Art collection. (more…)

Let’s Talk About This

Folk Artists Respond to HIV/AIDS

BY SUZANNE SERIFF

Since the inception of the Gallery of Conscience in 2010, the Museum of International Folk Art has mounted three successful exhibitions in this space: (more…)

They Wove for Horses:

Diné Saddle Blankets

BY JOYCE BEGAY-FOSS

Before the arrival of the horse, foot travel was a constant challenge for the Diné and other tribes in the vast Southwest. When horses were introduced to the region by Spaniards in the sixteenth or early seventeenth century, the lifestyle and culture of the Diné dramatically changed. (more…)

Learning the Ropes:

A Twisted Tale of Twine

BY RICK HENDRICKS

Rope is one of man’s oldest tools. Almost every culture on Earth twisted animal hair, hide, sinew, or plant fibers to make some type of rope. Braiding and twisting strands of such materials yielded a product that was stronger than individual, unbraided fibers. (more…)

The Work of Art

Folk Artists in the 21st Century

By Carmella Padilla

As refugees, [Joy] Ndungutse and [Janet] Nkubana were among the lucky. Both educated and employed in Uganda, they had no experience of Rwanda’s dark days, though their parents’ years of sacrifice and struggle had left an indelible impression.

Even as their mother was disconnected from her homeland, she gave the sisters a cherished gift of Rwandan tradition, teaching them to weave colorful coiled baskets from natural fibers and grasses in the style made and used in Rwanda for centuries. Their father sold the baskets at a Ugandan resort where he worked, supplementing his meager income and giving the sisters a proud role in helping to feed their family.

The sisters took part in a hallowed Rwandan rite of passage in which young girls weave their way into adulthood. They learned the history of the craft, how women once used small baskets to pass messages among themselves, how the most skilled weavers produced their finest baskets to adorn the king’s palace. With every colored fiber they connected to every concentric coil, they understood that, despite their differences, basket making bonds Rwanda’s women together.

Ndungutse’s and Nkubana’s exile ended as the devastation of the [1994 Rwanda] genocide called them home. The sisters opened a hotel, where displaced women and children often came to beg. When women began bringing baskets to trade for food, they opened a gift shop. Seeing how selling the baskets brought hope and self-respect to women, the sisters considered that a basket making business could help shape Rwanda’s future. […]

“The women of Rwanda were already trained in basket weaving as a traditional skill,” says Ndungutse. “I knew that empowering women with income-generating skills would empower a whole community.”

The idea took root beneath [a] tree in Gitarama as the sisters encouraged village women to join a new cooperative, Gahaya Links, which would train rural women to weave and design baskets for the modern market. The cooperative promoted women’s economic empowerment by ensuring fair wages, safe working environments, and respect for cultural identity. Above all, it promoted a principle of unbiased cooperation—asking women to look beyond ethnicity and to share the skills and resources that would rebuild their country.

To those who resisted, Nkubana said: “Don’t we breathe the same air? Speak the same language? Don’t we all love our children? Let us just weave and try to put the past behind us. When we weave, we weave together.”

Today, more than four thousand women across Rwanda have heeded Nkubana’s wise words to become members of Gahaya Links, an alliance of rural cooperatives. Now an incorporated export company, it partners with Macy’s, Anthropologie, Full Circle Exchange, Women for Women International, Bluma Project, and others to take Rwandan baskets to markets worldwide. […]

While Rwanda’s legacy of violence cannot be forgotten, it is remembered by the basket makers of Gahaya Links as the opportunity that is helping to create a legacy of peace. Today in markets worldwide, the baskets of Gahaya Links are known as Peace Baskets. In art and in action, the baskets stand as powerful symbols of women who are weaving the best parts of their history into a better future. n

Excerpted from The Work of Art: Folk Artists in the 21st Century, by Carmella Padilla, foreword by Indrasen Vencatachellum, principal photography by John Bigelow Taylor, Judith Cooper Haden, David Moore, and Bob Smith. Published by IFAA Media and distributed by the Museum of New Mexico Press. 264 pages with 160 color images. Clothbound, $60; paperbound, $29.95. Available first at the 2013 Santa Fe International Folk Art Market or www.folkartmarket.org, and later through bookstores, the Museum of New Mexico Foundation Shops, and at mnmpress.org.

Carmella Padilla is a Santa Fe writer who frequently explores intersections in art, culture, and history in New Mexico and beyond. Her books include El Rancho de las Golondrinas: Living History in New Mexico’s La Ciénega Valley; Low ‘n Slow: Lowriding in New Mexico; and The Chile Chronicles: Tales of a New Mexico Harvest. She is a recipient of the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts.

Good Winds and Good Days

Kites of Japan

Kites! Appealing to young and old alike, kites fill us with wonder and we watch them fly with a twinkle in the eye and a wide “kite smile.” Enjoyed the world over, kites have a particularly special place in the cultural arts of Asia and are associated with world-famous festivals in South Asia, Southeast Asia, and the Far East.

Kites have been flown for pleasure; for sport, in kite-fighting events; as ceremonial offerings and gifts of thanks to gods and ancestors; to bring good luck and ward off danger; to assist in warfare; to predict the harvest; to catch fish; to lift building material; and to celebrate the lunar New Year and other seasonal and national holidays. Kites likely originated in China more than 2,500 years ago and were introduced to Japan between the sixth and the eighth centuries (Current Era), perhaps by Buddhist monks for talismanic purposes. By 937 CE, the Chinese words for “paper hawk” — widely accepted to mean “kite” — appear in the Wamyo Ruijusho (Japanese Names for Things Classified and Annotated), Japan’s first dictionary of Japanese and Chinese words, which is organized by categories. Poet and scholar Minamoto Shitago is credited as the author. It is said that he was sponsored to write the document by the Imperial Department of Shinto and the Bureau of Divination.

While cross-cultural influences are clear, Japan has one of the most intricate kite traditions, and Japanese kites have a distinct beauty. Many Japanese folktales refer to kites as a mode of transport, such as the legend of Minamoto no Tametomo, a twelfth-century warrior who built a giant kite to fly his son from a secluded island to Honshu, escaping a lonely exile. Other stories tell about palace invasions and infamous robberies whereby a kite lifts the villain to the spoils. Giant battle kites are said to have lifted warriors out of threatened cities. Whether the stories are true or not, today’s giant festival kites are certainly able to carry people off their feet, and the festivals themselves are believed to have originated during times of war.

During the Edo period (1603–1868), when Japan was secluded from international exchanges, “folk” whose social position was below that of the samurai class were allowed to fly kites, and kite mania spread through the land. While kiting was permissible, the government discouraged it, and restrictions were imposed to prevent injuries caused by zealous fliers. Ukiyo-e (“pictures of the floating world”) woodblock prints depict kite-flying during the eighteenth century, and the types of kites and the artwork that embellished them at the time continue to be popular designs today.

Clearly, kite-flying is a time-honored tradition in Japan. Still, it has been suggested that traditional kite-making has been on the decline since the early twentieth century. With the growing urban landscape and developing infrastructure, kite-flying began to get pushed aside. Less kite-flying meant less kite-buying, and consequently less kite-making. Some even say that Hashimoto Teizo, who died in the early 1990s, was the last “real kite-maker of Edo” (the old name for Tokyo).

Perhaps it is true that most kites today are commercially made with nylon and plastic. Nevertheless, the art of the handmade kite carries on, and though full-time, traditional kite-makers are few and far between, they are still out there creating handmade, hand-painted kites, using the traditional materials of split bamboo or cypress wood, washi paper, ink, and colored dyes.

One of these artists, Mikio Toki, will visit Santa Fe during the 2013 Folk Arts Week at the Museum of International Folk Art to demonstrate kite-making and kite-flying with the community, as well as to participate in the Santa Fe International Folk Art Market.

Today, as in the past, kite types, shapes, and styles vary greatly in Japan. Certain kite types tend to be from certain regions and are structured in a specific way. Different kite structures harness the wind in different ways. Japanese kite scholar Masaaki Modegi notes that the classic, rectangular Edo-style kites, which are steady fliers in strong winds, appeared in the early 1700s and likely developed from the desire to fly (or float) ukiyo-e prints. Ukiyo-e were wildly popular at the time, and these kites are notorious for their similarly elaborate paintings of warriors, kabuki characters, and folk heroes such as Kintaro and Daruma.

The exhibition Tako Kichi: Kite Crazy in Japan, at the Museum of International Folk Art, presents these and other traditional kites from various regions of Japan and introduces a number of respected traditional kite artists. Tako kichi roughly translates to “kite crazy,” but the word kichi also means joy and enthusiasm. In that sense, tako kichi refers to people who are fantastically passionate about kites — perhaps a little more than the average kite-flier.

The exhibit also introduces the popular folklore referred to on illustrated kites. Kites in the show range from a half inch high to twelve-foot Shirone fighter kites. Because most paper kites get destroyed by the wind or water when used over time, or by collisions during kite fights, old kites are quite rare. Most of the kites on view date from the 1960s to the present, but there are a few very special pieces that date to the mid-nineteenth to early twentieth century. Ukiyo-e depicting kite-flying, on loan from Scott Skinner of the Drachen Foundation, are also on view, including works by Hiroshige and Hokusai, as well as a kite-related woodblock-printed board game dating to around 1862.

The exhibit was inspired by the remarkable and comprehensive private collection of David M. Kahn, an avid connoisseur and erudite collector of Japanese kites, who is lending most of the kites on view. Currently the executive director of the Adirondack Museum, Kahn has also directed the San Diego History Museum, the Louisiana State Museum, and the Connecticut and Brooklyn Historical Societies. For the past twenty-five years, he has traveled widely in Japan and gathered a stunning collection of over 700 traditional Japanese kites. His collection continues to grow.

Tako Kichi: Kite Crazy in Japan is on view June 9, 2013 – March 23, 2014, at the Museum of International Folk Art. Public programming for this exhibit will include lectures, kite-making workshops, and kite-flying on the plaza at Museum Hill. International Folk Arts Week is July 7 – 12, 2013, at the Museum of International Folk Art (check the museum’s website for scheduling details).

The Santa Fe International Folk Art Market is July 12 – 14, 2013.

Shot Clock

By Penelope Hunter-Stiebel

This clock haunted me from the first time I saw it. If I had been in an art museum or gallery, I would have interpreted its gaping bullet hole as an artist’s anguished gesture of protest against the inexorable passage of time.

But seeing it in Telling New Mexico, the long-term core exhibition of New Mexico History Museum, the clock drew me into its backstory.

The tiny initials S T in Gothic script on the dial and an elaborate set of instructions on a paper label that I later discovered inside its oak case identify it as a clock made by the Seth Thomas Clock Company. The Connecticut firm supplied many such devices to railroad companies, the most famous being the four-sided clock that is still the centerpiece of New York’s Grand Central Station.

The museum’s clock originally hung in the waiting room of the depot of the El Paso and Southwestern System, built around 1902 in the small town of Columbus, New Mexico, on the Mexican border.

In the early hours of March 9, 1916, a troop under the command of the famed Mexican revolutionary Pancho Villa crossed the border to raid the town and its nearby army cavalry camp for much-needed supplies. As gunfire broke out, a bullet pierced the railroad depot clock and severed its pendulum, stopping the works at precisely 4:12 a.m. When dawn came, some eighteen residents and soldiers lay dead along with over a hundred Villistas, but the rest of the troop had ridden off.

The United States retaliated with a massive force of 10,000 soldiers headed by General John “Black Jack” Pershing, penetrating 420 miles into Mexico in pursuit of the charismatic Mexican general. Revered as “The Lion of the North,” Villa evaded capture in the desert mountains of his native Chihuahua, but the fruitless chase offered Pershing an opportunity to test the latest advances in mechanized warfare with automotive vehicles and even airplanes, which would soon be used in World War I.

Just ten days after the raid, the stationmaster, Lewis Turner Jaggers, who had escaped harm with his family in their upstairs quarters at the depot, wrote his superintendent asking for permission to keep the stopped clock as a personal souvenir. It was his daughters who donated “what had been a matter of pride and a conversation piece in our family” to the Museum of New Mexico in 1996.

The depot building is now the Columbus History Museum, and the site of the military camp is Pancho Villa Park. Every March 9 for the past fourteen years, the town has commemorated the raid with a celebration of international friendship, featuring a cavalcade of Mexican and US horsemen from the border. But for thousands of visitors to the History Museum in Santa Fe, its unforgettable witness is the clock, stopped by a bullet, that bears eloquent testament to the early morning hour when time paused to put Columbus, New Mexico, on the map of history.

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