Painting of a Cochiti Pueblo Dance Participant by Joe Herrera [SOLD]

This original painting by Cochiti Pueblo artist Joe Herrera was completed using acrylic paints on canvas board.  It's always a treat to view a painting by Joe Herrera.  His creativity, versatility, and incredible technical abilities are apparent in every one of his images.  As the son of early San Ildefonso Pueblo artist Tonita Peña, Herrera was born into a family of innovators.  Over the years, he managed to develop a practice that successfully combined traditional ceremonial themes with a variety of modern styles.  This original painting is a strong example.

The painting features a single Native American male dance participant.  He’s depicted in profile and in motion, which is typical.  The incredibly detailed dance regalia is also expected of a Native dance image.  What’s most unusual is the setting in which the dancer exists. He dances through a sideways rainbow and a colorful world of interlocking shapes and patterns.  Rain cloud designs are turned sideways and arranged down the side of a vertical line.  From this line, the rainbow emerges, circling the dancer.  Within and outside of the rainbow, there are groups of colored blocks separated by pairs of thin lines.  Tiny dots in a variety of colors—most likely applied with some sort of atomizer—cover the entirety of the image.  This gives the otherwise brightly colored painting a rich, smoky texture.  This is an excellent offering from an early innovator. 

A friend of Adobe Gallery, who is an accomplished San Ildefonso Pueblo artist, shared some information about what this dance participant’s role might be: “This could be how singers dress up during buffalo dances—part of the choir.  We do that too (at San Ildefonso).  It resembles the attire of the Kiowa or plains style.”

The painting is signed Joe Herrera in lower right.  It is framed within a mustard yellow wooden frame with a fabric-covered interior band.

Joe Hilario Herrera (1923-2001) See Ru was an innovative and successful Native American painter.  His father was from Cochiti Pueblo, and his mother—pioneering painter Tonita Vigil Peña (1893-1949) Quah Ah—from San Ildefonso.  Though his artistic inheritance and early art education came from his mother, Herrera is rightly considered to be from Cochiti Pueblo. He attended the Santa Fe Indian School, served in the US Army during World War II, worked at the Laboratory of Anthropology, and eventually completed a degree in art education at the University of New Mexico.

In her book Southwest Indian Painting: A Changing Art, Clara Lee Tanner describes Herrera’s innovative style: “In the mid-1950s, Herrera developed a style which was encouraging for the future of Indian painting. The rich design—lore of the past and much that is prevalent in religious forms today he combined into abstract painting.  Again it is the clever manipulation of the age-old and omnipresent themes—sun, moon, clouds, rain, lightning, kachinas, birds, the sacred serpent…The end product is essentially Indian; it is also modern, for abstract art is preoccupied with form and color and pattern.”  Dorothy Dunn’s American Indian Painting of the Southwest and Plains Areas states that he “did justice to a fine tradition in his authentically drawn ceremonial subjects.  His work was unlike that of his renowned mother, Quah Ah, for his was coolly decorative where hers was warmly natural.”

Condition: excellent condition, cleaned recently by a professional conservator

Provenance: this Painting of a Cochiti Pueblo Dance Participant by Joe Herrera is from a private collection

References:

- Southwest Indian Painting: A Changing Art by Clara Lee Tanner

- American Indian Painting of the Southwest and Plains Areas by Dorothy Dunn

Relative Links: Cochiti Pueblo, Tonita Vigil Peña - Quah Ah, San Ildefonso, Native American Paintings, Joe Hilario Herrera