Fall 2019

2019 / Vol. 124 / No. 3

Read Where Worlds Collide A museum display case with colorful graphic art, a framed photograph, a red brick panel, and decorative objects on wooden flooring. [gen-ai]

Where Worlds Collide

BY DAVE HERNDON In the fifties and sixties, Alexander Girard’s status as both a Modernist designer and a prolific consumer of folk art might have seemed hopelessly irreconcilable. After all, what could Mad Men-era commercial design possibly have in common with, say, clay totems or weavings produced in the Peruvian highlands, Mexican pueblos, or remote villages of India or Poland? It would have required some vigorous leaps of the imagination, a forensic eye for detail, lots of travel, and intimate knowledge of Girard’s accomplishments as creator and collector to develop a unified theory for the seemingly far-flung spheres of his aesthetic vision.

By Dave Herndon

Categories: Featured, International folk art

Read Rescued from the Ashes Five men in old-fashioned red uniforms pose indoors, four holding scrolls and one with a sword; the photo has a vintage, hand-colored appearance. [gen-ai]

Rescued from the Ashes

BY HANNAH ABELBECK Photographs taken in the Southwest before 1866 are  exceptionally rare, which is why this stunning but unidentified quarter plate ambrotype—with vigas and corbels—caught our attention. Ambrotypes, collodion positive images on glass, became popular in the 1850s but were supplanted by tintype and glass negative processes by the mid-1860s. The cased image hadn’t aged well, but inspection by conservators suggested the problems were superficial.

By Hannah Abelbeck

Categories: Framework

Read From Headed into the Wind: A Memoir A bearded man smiling, wearing a bandana and binoculars around his neck; text reads Headed into the Wind: A Memoir by Jack Loeffler. [gen-ai]

From Headed into the Wind: A Memoir

BY JACK LOEFFLER The North American Southwest is desert country, a vast mosaic of dry habitats where elevation, longitude, geography, and weather patterns interact to determine the nature of prevailing life-forms. Most life-forms are indigenous, but a few others roll in like tumbleweeds, like I did one night during the summer of 1957 by human reckoning. I camped in my car by the side of the road and woke up to blazing sun in the Mojave Desert, alien country to a native West Virginian.

By Jack Loeffler

Categories: Uncategorized

Read Heavy Meta A man walking in a museum. [gen-ai]

Heavy Meta

How do you design an exhibit about exhibits? In late 2017, Museum Resources Director David Rohr came to us at Exhibit Services with a new project: Create a meta exhibition that would showcase the long history and ongoing development of public exhibitions within the Museum of New Mexico. Usually, our process for creating exhibits involves collaborating with curators and other museum staff, who draw from works in their collections, or borrow objects from other museums.

By Matt Celeskey

Categories: New Mexican history, Visual art

Read ¡Buenas Melodías! Electric guitar with custom artwork depicting a winged woman in a purple dress and a red devil-like figure on the body near the bridge and pickups. [gen-ai]

¡Buenas Melodías!

BY NICOLASA CHÁVEZ Música Buena: Hispano Folk Music of New Mexico, at the Museum of International Folk Art from October 6, 2019, to March 7, 2021, tells the history of New Mexican Hispano folk music (and related dramatic interpretations) that developed over four hundred years, from the Colonial era to the present day. Master musician and instrument maker Cipriano Vigil, recognized by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Smithsonian Institution, serves as guest curator; his book New Mexican Folk Music: Treasures of a People (University of New Mexico Press, 2014) was a catalyst for the exhibition.

By Nicolasa Chávez

Categories: International folk art, Visual art

Read Women and Jodhpurs and Pipes, Oh My! Two women stand outdoors with their arms around each other, both wearing long skirts and sweaters, in front of a bush and a house. [gen-ai]

Women and Jodhpurs and Pipes, Oh My!

BY HANNAH ABELBECK A friend of mine, Annie Sahlin, often comes in  to work on some of the materials she donated to the Palace of the Governors Photo Archives. Now and then, after seeing one of our posts on Facebook, she’d say, “Oh, I saw that photograph by Margaret. My grandmother, Isabel, was friends with Margaret.” She said it enough times that I asked her what she was really saying.

By Hannah Abelbeck

Categories: New Mexican cultures, New Mexican history, Southwestern history

Read Spinster Acts A room with a fireplace and chairs. [gen-ai]

Spinster Acts

BY ETHAN ORTEGA On March 28, 2019, Governor Michelle Lujan Grisham signed legislation designating Los Luceros (formerly a Historic Property) as a State Historic Site, thus securing funding, staffing, and preservation of the site in perpetuity. As a result, Los Luceros and its complicated history were thrust into the limelight and embraced by its visitors. (more…)

By Alicia Inez Guzmán, Ethan Ortega, Gene Peach, Hannah Abelbeck, and Rapheal Begay

Categories: Featured, New Mexican history

Read Stake Your (Re)Claim A vintage wooden washboard with a handle and wire fastenings, positioned horizontally on a white background. [gen-ai]

Stake Your (Re)Claim

BY CHARLOTTE JUSINSKI While copy editing this issue of El Palacio this summer, I was struck by the number of stories of reclamation included therein. New Mexico’s history is fraught with both fact and fiction, oftentimes nearly indistinguishable from one another, and this issue of El Pal serves to drive home the true (or at least the truer) version of so many tales we’ve heard differently again and again.

Categories: Editor's Letter