Creating the Culture State

El Palacio

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Related Article in El Palacio, Summer 2012
By Lois Rudnick

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<i>Cui Bono?,</i> Gerald Cassidy, ca. 1911, oil on canvas, New Mexico Museum of Art. Gift of Gerald Cassidy, 1915. <br>Object Number 282.23.P
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The title of Gerald Cassidy's painting translates as 'Who Benefits?' and raises important ethical and political questions about the relationships among the Indian subjects of Anglo paintings, the artists who used them as models, and the viewers/tourists who look at them. Who would benefit from ethnic tourism? What economic, social, and cultural impacts would it have on the lives and communities of Pueblo and Hispano peoples?

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<i>Indian Detour bus at San Juan Pueblo, NM,</i> ca. 1925. Photo by T. Harmon Parkhurst.<br> Courtesy Palace of the Governors Photo Archives (NMHM/DCA), Neg. No. 004011</b>
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Fred Harvey's Indian Detours encouraged train passengers to take motorcar tours through 'Indian Country.' Led by educated and well-trained 'couriers,' these tours promoted the sale of Indian crafts. High-minded patrons of the arts in Santa Fe disdained the Harvey Indian Detours. Alice Henderson wrote contemptuously (and patronizingly), 'So we saved the Indians for Fred Harvey.'

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<i>Music on the Plaza,</i> John Sloan, 1920, oil on canvas. New Mexico Museum of Art. Gift of Mrs. Cyrus McCormick, 1952.<br> Object number 326-23P.
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John Sloan's painting celebrates the sociality of Santa Fe Plaza, but most of those who are shown are Anglo tourists, of whom Sloan was notoriously critical. In the lower left-hand corner is an elderly Hispana woman, wrapped in a black shawl, who is barely visible in a community space that has been taken over by modern Anglos.

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<i>Archeologist Kenneth Chapman sketching designs on Pueblo pottery, NM,</i> ca. 1915 <br>Courtesy Palace of the Governors Photo Archives (NMHM/DCA), Neg. No. 013312.<br><br>

Kenneth Chapman created numerous portfolios of traditional Pueblo pottery designs and headed the Pueblo Pottery Fund. He was photographed here in the Laboratory of Anthropology.

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<i>Patio, Palace of the Governors, Fiesta, 1925, SF, NM</i> [standing from left to right is Mayor Nathan Jaffa, Oskenonton (chief of a Canadian Mohawk tribe), Edgar L. Hewett, and José D. Sena, Jr., a prominent Hispano civic leader]. Courtesy Palace of the Governors Photo Archives (NMHM/DCA), Neg. No. 007271.

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The City Different's leading cultural impresario, Hewett played a key role in shaping the image of 'historic' Santa Fe, and in several important cultural institutions, including his directorship of the New Mexico Museum of Art and the Laboratory of Anthropology.

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<i>Mabel Dodge Sterne,</i> ca. 1918, photo courtesy of the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.
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Santa Fe (and Taos to a lesser degree) was a city of women: Anglo women were leaders in the arts and patronage fields and central to the civic and institutional life of the city. The experiences of a few of these remarkable women illuminate some of the complex tensions involved in their art, writing, and patronage.
Mabel Dodge Luhan put Taos on the map of modern art by bringing major writers, artists, and social reformers to northern New Mexico, who painted, photographed, and wrote about the beauty and power of its physical and cultural landscapes--Georgia O'Keeffe, Ansel Adams, and D. H. Lawrence among them. But in her publications and activism, she presented the Pueblos as a single entity, without any assertion of individual will or interest in modern progress. Perhaps her greatest contribution to Pueblo welfare was bringing John Collier to northern New Mexico, where he began a thirty-year campaign for Indian civil and political rights, most effectively (though controversially) in the 'Indian New Deal' he was able to legislate as commissioner of Indian affairs under President Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

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<i>Poet Alice Corbin Henderson and her husband painter William Penhallow Henderson, Santa Fe,</i> 1932. Photo by Will Connell. Courtesy Palace of the Governors Photo Archives (NMHM/DCA), Neg. No. 059757.

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Associate editor of Poetry magazine, the premier modern poetry journal in the early twentieth-century US, Alice Corbin Henderson came to Santa Fe in 1916, suffering from tuberculosis. She advocated for the Southwest in her prose and poetry and participated in the creation of the Indian Arts Fund (1925) and the New Mexican Association for Indian Affairs (1922). Her poem 'Litany in the Desert' speaks eloquently about the ravages of World War I and industrialism on the Western world: 'On the other side of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, there is a great welter of steel and flame. . . I know nothing of it here. . . . I do not know why men fight and die. I do not know why men sweat and slave. I know nothing of it here.' But many nuevomexicanos did 'sweat and slave'--perhaps not in urban factories, but certainly as mine and farm workers. Neither Henderson nor any of her Anglo patron colleagues wrote or painted about the poverty or the racial and class tensions that were part of daily life in northern New Mexico and from which they benefited personally in terms of inexpensive day labor, domestic work, and models for their art.

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<i>Mary Austin and Earnest Thompson Seton at Mrs. Austin's home,</i> Santa Fe, NM, 1927. Photograph by Carol Stryker. Courtesy Palace of the Governors Photo Archives (NMHM/DCA), Neg. No. 014248.
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Mary Austin was one of the founders of the Spanish Colonial Arts Society (SCAS), in 1925. In 1929 she located a benefactor to purchase El Santuario de Chimayo, which was about to be demolished, and the SCAS donated it to the Archdiocese of Santa Fe on the promise that it would be protected in perpetuity. During the Great Depression, SCAS helped to foment an 'Hispanic New Deal,' unique in the Southwest, to preserve the village cultures that the founders admired. This included the delivery of wool, tin, leather, and other raw materials to artists' villages; a state-funded Hispano arts program in the public schools; and the creation of bluebooks devoted to the detailed recording of dyes, tanning, colcha embroidery, and adobe home construction.<br><br>
Ernest Thompson Seton was an acclaimed naturalist, wildlife illustrator, childrens' book author, and supporter of Native American rights, who served on the founding committee of the Boy Scouts of America.

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<i>John Gaw Meem Presenting the Deed to El Santuario de Chimayo to Archbishop Daiger,</i> 1929. Mary Austin, in hat, bending over the table, along with other founders of SCAS. Courtesy Center for Southwest Research, University Libraries, University of New Mexico. Beatrice Chauvenet Pictorial Coll. (Pict 000-588).

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<i>Federal Arts Project (WPA) wood carver José Dolores</i> Lopez, NM, ca. 1935. Photo by T. Harmon Parkhurst. Courtesy Palace of the Governors Photo Archives (NMHM/DCA), Neg. No. 094470.
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Jose Dolores Lopez was the first discovery by Mary Austin and Frank Applegate in what they claimed as the Hispano wood-carving revival. Although many bultos (figures of saints) created in the 19th century were polychromed, the Spanish Colonial Arts Society determined that unpainted religious figures were the most authentic.
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<i>Francisco Delgado, tinsmith (1858-1936),</i> taken in Delgado house on 503 Canyon Road, ca. 1920s or 30s. The Delgado family has produced five generations of tinsmiths, both male and female, who are renowned for their work. Courtesy Palace of the Governors Photo Archives (NMHM/DCA), Neg. No. 71180

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John Collier hangs in effigy, at the corner of Lincoln and Palace Avenues (in front of the New Mexico Museum of Art) in Santa Fe, in 1931. Collier was the single most powerful figure in relation to Indian affairs and civil rights--fighting on behalf of Pueblos and other Native Americans from 1922--through his years as creator of 'The Indian New Deal' (1934) and head of the Bureau of Indian Affairs under President Franklin Roosevelt. This small demonstration reveals the animosity between Collier's Indian Affairs organization and New Mexico Association of Indian Affairs, organized by the artists and writers of Santa Fe, both organized in the 1920s. The dissension was ostensibly over Collier's unwavering devotion to the Pueblos in his fight for land settlements. The Santa Fe group felt some justice was also due to Hispanos who had lived for generations on the land. <br>
The large sign contains a message composed by Santa Fe poet, Witter Bynner that reads in part: <br><br>
'Praise God from whom all/Blessings flow--Praise God/for Indians here below-/No matter who may pay the/cost, without the Indians/I'd be lost-...Love for the Indians is my boast/yet I love John Collier most-...'<br> Courtesy Palace of the Governors Photo Archives (NMHM/DCA), Neg. No. 106188

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<i>Interior of The Native Market,</i> ca. 1934. Courtesy of Acequia Madre House.
Leonora Frances Curtin created and subsidized 'The Native Market,' which demonstrated and sold Hispanic craft making and arts, during the Great Depression. It stayed in business from 1934 to 1940. The store supported 350 artisans.
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<i>Pablita Velarde at the Santa Fe Indian School,</i> ca. 1932. Photo by T. Harmon Parkhurst. Courtesy Palace of the Governors Photo Archives (NMHM/DCA), Neg. No. 073942.
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Many Anglo women patrons were instrumental in supporting the careers of Pueblo Indian women painters such as Tonita Peña of San Idelfonso Pueblo and Pablita Velarde from Santa Clara Pueblo, who were criticized by their tribe for doing what was not considered women's work. Margretta Dietrich, one of the most influential patrons of Indian and Spanish Colonial Arts, bought 250 paintings from the Pueblo and Navajo artists she supported. Elizabeth DeHuff and Dorothy Dunn helped to create a new tradition of Indian painting on paper during the interwar years that produced extraordinary works of art. But the Anglos set the term of what could be painted--stylized watercolors of daily and ceremonial life.

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<i>Margretta Dietrich spoofing a proposal for a Chautauqua for Santa Fe,</i> August 4-7, 1926. Courtesy Palace of the Governors Photo Archives (NMHM/DCA), Neg. No. 10932.
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Dietrich created a float for the 1926 Santa Fe Fiesta, 'Dr. Quack's Remedies for the Uncultured,' that was part of a battle, undertaken by her and other Anglo arts patrons, to keep the Texas Federation of Women's Clubs from building a 'culture' center in Santa Fe because they feared they would negatively impact the high-toned cultural values they had worked so hard to promote on behalf of Pueblo and Hispano artists and artisans. They were successful in keeping the center out of Santa Fe.

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Amelia Elizabeth White at the International Exhibition, Seville, Spain, 1929,</i> with her collection of Native American artifacts. Courtesy School for Advanced Research.<br><br>
Elizabeth and Martha White, Bryn Mawr graduates from a wealthy Eastern family, built their estate, El Delirio (named after a bar they loved in Spain), and willed the compound to the School of American Research (now the School for Advanced Research), one of the premier institutions in the world for the study of global cultures. While they were alive, the Whites donated the land for the Laboratory of Anthropology (1931) and for the Museum of Navajo Ceremonial Art (1937, now the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian) that was designed William Penhallow Henderson. Alice Corbin Henderson was the first curator. Mary Cabot Wheelwright, the museum's founder, had spent years working with Navajo spiritual leaders and recording their traditional songs and stories.

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<i>The early American room at the International Antiques Exhibition, Grand Central Palace,</i> NY, 1931. This room shows how White promoted Native American art as integral to American colonial interior design. Courtesy School for Advanced Research.

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<i>E. Boyd, </i> Santa Fe, New Mexico, ca. 1958. Photograph by Charles Herbert. Courtesy Palace of the Governors Photo Archives (NMHM/DCA), Neg. No. 015368.<br><br> E. Boyd was an artist, the foremost expert on Spanish colonial religious art in New Mexico, during the 1930s and 1940s, and the first curator of the Spanish Colonial Arts Department of the Museum of New Mexico, founded in 1951.

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<i>Julian and Maria Martinez making pottery,</i> San Ildefonso Pueblo, NM, ca. 1950. Courtesy Palace of the Governors Photo Archives (NMHM/DCA), Neg. No. 009185.<br><br>
This image of a tourist watching master potters Julian and Maria Martinez at work was created for The New Mexico State Tourist Bureau. The Martinezes, from San Ildefonso Pueblo, were the inventors of the famous black-on-black pottery, and are undoubtedly the best-known clay artists in New Mexico history.

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<i>Woman dressed in Southwestern style as promotion for SF Railway,</i> ca. 1930-1940. <br><br>This photograph presents a wonderful example of what is often referred to as 'Santa Fe Style'--the kitchification that the art patrons worked so hard to modify but also helped to create.Courtesy Palace of the Governors Photo Archives (NMHM/DCA), Neg. No. 161164