Los Tres Modernos Ride Again

Andrew Shears, Parking Lot at Midday, oil on canvas, 15” x 19”

Shears’s conceptual and perceptual processes are meant to serve the viewer’s experience. Without this concern, there would be no reason to leave his reference and memory, and a beautiful, accurate rendering would be sufficient. Instead, the artist’s primary motivations are visual impact and stillness. Likely these grew from a young life filled with many moments stilled by beauty.

Perhaps the artist’s intention can be better explained by what some thoughtful authors have written about beauty and meaning.

From James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:

You see that it is that thing which it is and no other thing.

The radiance of which is the “whatness” of a thing. . . . The instant wherein that supreme quality of beauty, the dear radiance of the aesthetic image is apprehended luminously by the mind which has been arrested by its wholeness and fascinated by its harmony in the luminous silent stasis of aesthetic pleasure, a spiritual state, very like to that cardiac condition which the Italian physiologist Luigi Galvani . . . called the enchantment of the heart. And from Joseph Campbell, in Mythic Worlds, Modern Words: Joseph Campbell on the Art of James Joyce, writing about the passage above:

The aesthetic experience is a simple beholding of the object. . . . You experience a radiance. You are held in aesthetic arrest. . . . When we are in the presence of great beauty our minds go still.

Andrew Shears’s goal to share his spiritual appreciation for overlooked objects and spaces ultimately leaves one with a stilled mind and an enchantment of the heart.

—Susan Guevara

Los Tres Modernos

A Santero Tradition Reenvisioned

The three visionary artists Nicholas Herrera, Patrick McGrath Muñiz, and Thomas Vigil appear to be santeros: traditional painters and carvers of santos, religious icons used for devotion, protection, and instruction. All three artists have similar religious backgrounds and frequently use Roman Catholic iconography. But it’s more accurate to call them santeros modernos—modern saint makers who are expanding the santero tradition with their use of novel and more personal subject matter. And there is more. In looking deeply at their work, viewers may have a kind of spiritual experience different from any found in a specific religious tradition.

The work of these present-day saint makers embodies universal themes of life and death. The artists honor daily life—ragged, funny, wonderful, horrible life. No part of daily human life and its companion, death, is taboo. While the results may appear to some as religious and to others as grim and appalling, there may be something more accessible in between.

If we look deeply at the work, consider the creative impulses for these images and objects, and keep looking no matter how positive or negative our response . . . what will we see? Catholic saints, in paintings and carvings called retablos and bultos. Santos were believed to provide much-needed protection, health, and prosperity.

These objects for veneration were first carried from Spain to Mexico by Franciscan friars, to aid in the conversion of indigenous peoples to Christianity. The missionaries eventually took El Camino Real northward, bringing their icons to adorn newly built missions in New Mexico and southern Colorado.

With few materials, and little access to the techniques used in Baroque Spain, a New World version of retablos and bultos grew from the rough terrain and rural life of the Southwest. A specific art form emerged using local aspen, pine, and cottonwood root, and pigments made from minerals and plants—tools that had been used by indigenous artisans for generations.

But as the 19th century became the 20th, and mass-manufactured, inexpensive statues and prints undermined the market for hand-painted retablos and bultos, the original art form languished and began to disappear.

The 18th-century santero tradition of handmade religious icons was first revived in 20th-century New Mexico by the Depression-era Federal Arts Program of the Works Progress Administration. A second revival occurred in the 1960s, during the Civil Rights Movement, when a burgeoning Chicano Art Movement sought to reclaim Mexican and Mexican-American traditions omitted from mainstream history books and museums.

The Historical Path of the Santero

If these three artists do indeed hold the religious occupation of santero, the instruction they offer is devotion to one’s own life. This is a modern evolution of the Hispanic tradition of the santero, which began over 400 years ago

A santero had the task of creating santos: images of the myriad

Nicholas Herrera, La Cosecha del Otoño, Mi Madre y Padre, acrylic on hand carved wood, 19.75” x 22.5” x 7.5”

For several decades now, there has been a modernist renaissance and reinvention of the santero tradition. The artwork of Los Tres Modernos—Nicholas Herrera, Patrick McGrath Muñiz, and Thomas Vigil—significantly breaks the genre’s historical boundaries.

NICHOLAS HERRERA

Nicholas Herrera reimagines the santero tradition in wood, paint, metal, and found objects—often with surprising humor. His work was first collected by the Smithsonian Institution when, only 26, he carved Christ in the back of a police car. Herrera is considered a founding father of the transition of santero art to Modernism.

Herrera’s upbringing, Christian beliefs, and life experiences run deep in his images. A 15th-generation New Mexican who can trace his family’s history back to Spain, the artist no less warmly embraces his indigenous bloodline. Herrera lives and works on the family’s sixth-generation homestead in the small rural town of El Rito, an hour’s drive north from Santa Fe, New Mexico.

In his youth, Herrera was going down a rough road of drugs and alcohol when a head-on collision that should have claimed his life instead transformed it. Sobriety, faith, and dogged persistence led him to become a significant contributor to folk and outsider art, and the master storyteller he is today.

The artist uses his vocation as The El Rito Santero to remember and honor the old ways—and to express empathy with others across the globe. Herrera fondly remembers the family horno (an outdoor adobe oven), and the roasted meat, pies, and ears of corn cooked in it. In La Cosecha del Otoño, Mi Madre y Padre, the artist carves images of his parents to either side of a carved horno, behind them a string of tiny, dried ears of corn. More individually carved ears boil in a pot inside the horno.

Nicholas Herrera working on his sculpture La Corona. Photo: Beth Wald

Nicholas Herrera, La Corona, mixed media, 92” x 82” x 30” Photo: Beth Wald His father holds a string of ears between his large hands, and his mother a single ear in one outstretched hand, ready to add it to the steaming pot. In the painted background a field of ripe corn stretches below ravens circling in an ultramarine sky. The Virgin of Guadalupe blesses the work from above. Below her, a cherub grasps the edges of her skirt to ground her to this earthly scene.

“This is the way I grew up with my mom and dad,” Herrera says: “the harvest in the fall, la cosecha del otoño. Every year getting ready for winter. Preparing fruit, drying and canning apples and peaches. Nothing was wasted.” His words are wistful. “When winter came, we shared with our neighbors. It was the barter system. I remember borrowing salt!”

Climate change, water shortages, racial injustice, a pandemic that leaves us bereft while shining light on our inequities—all is subject matter for the artist.

La Corona depicts the COVID-19 pandemic as a female Grim Reaper eight feet tall, made of welded antique auto and tractor parts. The dual meanings of her name in Spanish—corona, the virus, and corona, a halo of light— suggest a blazing light turned on our social, political, and healthcare inequities in this time of pandemic disease and civil unrest. With an antique scythe in one hand and the scales of justice in the other, this giantess demands a response.

For more than three decades, The El Rito Santero Nicholas Herrera has made his own way in life and art. With materials and content, he has remained true to his own view and experience of life, wasting nothing, grateful for each day.

THOMAS VIGIL Thomas Vigil’s unique technique combines discarded street signs, aerosols, and stencils with the Catholic religious iconography that permeates Hispanic culture and is no less ingrained in this artist’s identity. Vigil was born and raised a Norteño—a man from northern New Mexico. He speaks with orgullo, pride of his native town of Española.

“As Norteños, everything we do in our lives we do with heart and pride. When we go to work, when we work on our cars, we do it all with heart and pride.” Vigil fell in love with graffiti and the medium of spray paint as a young man—his first canvases were the signs, fences, and walls of the street. His love of art making led him to pursue a career in graphic arts by first honing his skills at Northern New Mexico Community College, in Española. He received his degree, but his passion remained the tools of street art.

Thomas Vigil, Scar Tissue, mixed media, 28” x 24”

In Scar Tissue, Vigil depicts the short sacrificial path of Christ with the emotional power of dripping aerosols over a discarded, graffitied “NEIGHBORHOOD WATCH” sign. The artist says, of his intent for this composition, “I don’t want to ignore the hard times, pretend they don’t exist.” Vigil is determined to embrace all of life. “We all have a path,” he says.

The artist acknowledges the challenges faced this past year by himself, his community, and the world at large. In the painting A Toda Madre o un Dismadre, the Virgin clasps her hands in prayer as our intercessor for self-knowledge. “When everything is a toda madre (truly great or completely messed up), you have to stay true to who you are. The good times can quickly become the worst.

“We’ve been through so much this last year,” Vigil continues, speaking of the COVID-19 pandemic; “there was so much bad news. I felt I had to show images of hope and prayer—but acceptance, too.”

Thomas Vigil, A Toda Madre o un Dismadre, mixed media, 65.5” x 47”

In Never Ending Struggle for Peace and Quiet, Vigil sanctifies the challenge his mentor has had with on-and-off drug addiction. With the heart of a brother, Vigil asked his friend to tag the signage surface, then stenciled an image of the Virgin Mother cradling her infant son, sorrowful fatigue on each face.

These shared life lessons are more personally and fully expressed in Vigil’s recent art than in previous years. His early fears of lost credibility because of his rejection of professional techniques and materials are gone. His origins as a street artist have confronted the self-critical voice that most of us hear at one time or another: Not good enough. “I’m not so sure all those professional [techniques] are that important anymore. Now, I’m letting myself be myself.”