History in the Painting
As curator of 20th-century art at the New Mexico Museum of Art, Joe Traugott counts among his credits the current long-term show <i>The Art of New Mexico: How the West Is One</i>, a broad-ranging look at this state’s disparate artistic visions (up through April 2010). Here’s how Traugott tackles a few more ideas in the new works-on-paper companion show, <i>Paper Trail: How the West Is One, Too</i>.
What inspired you to present the works on paper in 14 distinct pairings?
It seemed the best way to visually explain the complexity of the region’s art: to combine objects from different traditions, and to mix popular culture and “high” art. The fusion of aesthetic ideas across cultural divides in New Mexico art is an important theme in the How the West Is One. Paper Trail continues this investigation, but does so by emphasizing artistic sources, cultural interactions, and photographic reality.
Which pairing most strongly reflects this?
One of Harrison Begay’s gouache paintings beside an early black-and-white lithograph by Fritz Scholder. Begay is a prime example of the second generation of Native easel painters who created decorative works for sale to outsiders (mid-1930s through 1950s). These paintings exemplified the style popularized by Dorothy Dunn, a non-Native art teacher at the Santa Fe Indian School. Quickly these works became stereotyped and predictable. Scholder rebelled against this imagery and expressed his own feelings toward Native-ness, inspiring a third generation of Native painters.
How does that relate to the paired works of Alfredo Montoya and Awa Tsireh?
An important purpose of these exhibitions is to recover such artists and their movements, and to restore them to their place in New Mexico art history. The Pueblo easel painting tradition began around 1910, with Montoya (of San Ildefonso) selling watercolors at Edgar Lee Hewett’s archaeological excavations. Anthropologists with the Museum of New Mexico, and a handful of modern painters and philanthropists in Santa Fe, supported Native artists [including Awa Tsireh] by creating what Hewett called the Santa Fe Program. This was the first of the art fraternities that developed within the Santa Fe–Taos Art Movement.
Are there any pairings you find especially intriguing?
Jaune Quick-to-See Smith’s smallpox-infected paper-doll clothing, paired with Bruce Nauman’s word lithograph, Live or Die. Quick-to-See Smith made the work as a political statement in reaction to the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s “discovery” of America. Together, these two works combine politics, history, and philosophy in a manner that impacts all of us, reminding us that history is filled with examples of genocide and that we need to struggle against evil deeds.
Paper Trail: How the West Is One, Too, through February 8, New Mexico Museum of Art, 107 W Palace, 505-476-5072, mfasantafe.org
