Adobe Gallery Blog

The Pueblo Indian artists who were the first to take brush to paper, establishing the easel-art tradition in Native America, are the focus of the current exhibition Paintings by Early Students of the Santa Fe Indian School at Adobe Gallery. "We've always given Dorothy Dunn credit for bringing in art at the Santa Fe Indian School in 1932," said the gallery's Alexander E. Anthony Jr., "but before that, as early as 1900, the teacher at the San Ildefonso Day School, Esther Hoyt, encouraged her kids to paint whatever they wanted to paint. That was against government policy. The government was very strongly trying to downplay the paganism of the Indians and to get rid of their religion and voodoo kind of dancing."

The one-room school run by Hoyt had 18 students from San Ildefonso Pueblo in 1902, and three years later, enrollment climbed to 31. The little artists included Awa Tsireh (Alfonso Roybal), who was four years old in 1903; Tonita Peña, who was ten; and Tse Ye Mu (Romando Vigil), who was four in 1905. Among Hoyt's other students who kept at what they learned and became famed painters as adults were Alfredo Montoya, Santana Roybal, and Abel Sanchez. "These young artists from San Ildefonso got a jump-start on all the other pueblos, and it became the beginning of the Native American easel-painting movement," Anthony told Pasatiempo in a recent interview at his gallery, which he said will be forty years old in 2017. Anthony opened his gallery on Albuquerque's Old Town plaza and moved it to Santa Fe in 2001.

"Teacher Elizabeth Richards, who replaced Esther Hoyt, not only allowed her students to paint as they wished, but encouraged them to do so, and provided art supplies to them," said Anthony. Later in the next decade, Elizabeth DeHuff, who was the wife of the Santa Fe Indian School superintendent, hosted students of grade-school age at her house, which was against government regulations, and gave them paints and paper - and her husband was reprimanded. Among DeHuff's regular visitors were Fred Kabotie and Otis Polelonema from Hopi and Velino Herrera from Zia Pueblo. "The students from San Ildefonso have been known as the ‘self-taught' artists who brought Indian easel painting to the attention of the nation's art patrons," Anthony said. "It was not until the 1920s that they were able to sell their artworks."

In his 1997 book, Pueblo Indian Painting: Tradition and Modernism in New Mexico, 1900-1930 (School of American Research Press), J.J. Brody writes that the problem hinged on how to classify these paintings. "Useful objects, or at least those that had an appearance of usefulness, were at the heart of the Indian curio market. It was important that an Indian object, even if called ‘art,' look utilitarian and ‘authentic' enough to convince both the casual tourist and the serious collector that it represented a genuine experience with a real person from an exotic society. Paintings and other objects that did not fit those expectations presented special marketing problems."

No paintings from the earliest days at San Ildefonso are known to exist, Anthony said, "but fortunately a number of these artists, such as Julian Martinez and Miguel Martinez, continued on at the Santa Fe Indian School, so we have work that was done later. But we are emphasizing that the young people from San Ildefonso were the people who started the whole thing rolling."

The first woman who became a well-known painter was Tonita Vigil Peña. "She bucked the system because painting was considered the men's art form, and pottery was the women's, and you didn't mix. But Tonita persevered, and she was finally accepted by the men as an equal." The second significant woman painter, Anthony said, was Pablita Velarde of Santa Clara Pueblo. "Her dad didn't think she should paint, but when she ran into Tonita at the Indian School, Tonita said, ‘Do what you want to do,' and she did."
Velarde honed her craft in Dorothy Dunn's art department at the Santa Fe Indian School. Dunn, who was born in Kansas and educated at the Art Institute of Chicago, first encountered Native American art at Chicago's Field Museum in 1925. Seven years later, she obtained permission to initiate an art program at the Santa Fe Indian School. In what was called the Studio School, Dunn "strove to create an atmosphere of genuine creative expression, encouraging her students to celebrate their unique cultural heritage and cultivate their natural talents," Anthony said.

Stylistically, the early casein and tempera paintings made under Hoyt, Richards, and DeHuff relied on uncomplicated portrayals of the people who participated in the tribe's ritual dances. "The San lldefonso paintings are almost always simple, linear compositions organized parallel to the picture plane," Brody writes. The young artists usually presented the dancers in profile and exhibiting limited interactions with one another. "The Indian school artists, on the other hand, used many different dance subjects in realistic, active, and interactive postures" and included panoramic and vanishing-point perspectives.

"The early ones have no ground plane, no trees, nothing but the dancers," Anthony said. "That was the ‘flat painting' style that was even encouraged by Dorothy Dunn: Just paint the dancers. Don't do the European style of putting them in the landscape." This curricular choice, zeroing in on the documentation and celebration of Pueblo mythology and ceremony, was a commendable departure from what were too often racist Indian-school policies, but it has been criticized by some Native American artists as lacking in originality. In any case, the success and resulting influence of Dunn's students suggest that her training was eminently effective; her other alumni included the Navajo painter Quincy Tahoma and two more groundbreaking artists, Pop Chalee (Taos Pueblo/Swiss) and Eva Mirabal (Taos).

Dunn was only at the Santa Fe Indian School for five years. Her successor, Gerónima Montoya, told The New Mexican in 2010 that Dunn was "a wonderful person, and a wonderful teacher. She was very understanding about Indian people." Montoya was a native of Ohkay Owingeh who graduated from Santa Fe Indian School in 1935 as valedictorian. She was first hired as Dunn's assistant and then directed the school's art program from 1937 to 1961. Indian arts education in Santa Fe saw a substantial shift in 1962, when the Santa Fe Indian School campus (temporarily) closed and the Institute of American Indian Arts was founded on the site. "That's when the whole idea changed," Anthony said, "with Allan Houser, Fritz Scholder, Otellie Loloma, and others saying, ‘Don't do what you've always seen. Be yourself.' "

The exhibition at Adobe Gallery has a relatively narrow focus, but there is great variety in the paintings shown, even by single artists. There are two paired images - the sweet Navajo Boy and Girl with Fawns and the colorful, dazzling Pair of Paintings of Navajo Feather Dancers by the renowned Navajo painter Harrison Begay, another student who pursued an artistic career after his departure from Dunn's Studio School.

Some of the pioneering artists had, during their lifetimes, long gaps between the years when they painted. "Tse Ye Mu ended up leaving San Ildefonso and became an illustrator for Walt Disney for a couple of decades, then came back to the pueblo late in life," Anthony said. "Another of the early ones from San Ildefonso was [José] Encarnacion Peña. He was a farmer and cattle man who painted when he was young and came back to it after he retired from that work. He and his wife used to bring his paintings in the first year I had the gallery, which I started in 1977. He died in 1978."

Some of the early artists contrast the realism of the human dancer figures with stylized (geometrical, symmetrical) clouds, rainbows, and other forms. Two examples, both by J.D. Roybal, are Corn Dance Procession at San Ildefonso and a painting of twin avanyu (water serpent) figures entwined on a rainbow arch over three deer. Abstracted geometrical backgrounds appear in Pablita Velarde's whimsical Mineral Earth Painting of a Koosa Clown and her detailed, almost portrait-like Pueblo Eagle Dancer and Tewa Pueblo Ram Dancer.

A standout feature in the earliest paintings is the faithful depiction of ceremonial regalia. These artists did not have the idea, or the audacity, to introduce fanciful variations. "No, they didn't," Anthony said. "Works by Tonita Peña and others are considered to be great ethnographic documents of the early days." 

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Source: www.santafenewmexican.com/pasatiempo

Written by: Paul Weideman (Pasatiempo)