The Art oƒ Tonita Peña and Joe Herrera
W. Jackson Rushing III
Fr e d Jones Jr . Museu m of A rt
•
The U n i v er sit y of Ok l a hom a
contents Preface and Acknowledgments Mark Andrew White vii Tradition + Innovation = Beautiful Consequences W. Jackson Rushing III 3 Catalogue of the Exhibition 45 Notes 101 About the Venue 107 contributors 107 Publication Notes 108
Tonita Peña (Quah Ah) (U.S., San Ildefonso Pueblo, 1893–1949) Buffalo Dancer, 1930s Watercolor on paper, 11 × 14 in.
Cleveland Museum of Art, 1937.809 Gift of Amelia Elizabeth White
Preface and Acknowledgments The Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art and the University of Oklahoma have a venerable history of
supporting the study and encouragement of Native American art and culture. In the late 1920s, professors Oscar Brousse Jacobson and Edith Mahier began mentoring and promoting the
careers of early modern Kiowa artists. For Jacobson, this practice extended to his directorship of the University of Oklahoma Museum of Art, as it was then called. He collected paintings and
sculptures by Native artists from across the American Southwest and attempted to draw greater attention to their work through the publication of American Indian Painters (1950), coauthored
with his wife, Jeanne d’Ucel. Among the numerous artists included in that portfolio, both Tonita Peña and Joe Herrera merited inclusion. Jacobson and d’Ucel dubbed Peña the “grand lady of
Pueblo art,” and they lavished praise on Herrera, who was both her son and a talented protégé.1
Jacobson also sought works by Peña and Herrera for the growing collection at the museum,
which possessed at that time one of the largest representations of Native American painting in the country. That collection would grow over the decades following Jacobson’s tenure. In 2010,
the gift of the James T. Bialac Native American Art Collection contributed significantly to that growth, especially with regard to the careers of Peña and Herrera. The gift introduced thirty-
one paintings by Peña and twenty-five by Herrera, and Mr. Bialac would continue to add works by both artists in subsequent years.
When Dr. W. Jackson Rushing III approached the museum with a proposal for an
exhibition examining the careers of mother and son, he presented the ideal opportunity to celebrate the careers of two of the most influential artists in Native American art history.
The resulting exhibition, Generations in Modern Pueblo Painting: The Art of Tonita Peña and
Joe Herrera, is the first important survey of either artist. Key loans from important public and
private collections, and selections from the James T. Bialac Collection, provide a retrospective of the two artists and their broad influence on other Native artists, including Pablita Velarde and Helen Hardin.
This project is indebted first and foremost to the scholarly contributions of Dr. Rushing,
Eugene B. Adkins Presidential Professor of Art History and Mary Lou Milner Carver Chair in Native American Art and Graduate Coordinator at the OU School of Visual Arts.
The unwavering support of President David L. Boren and First Lady Molly Shi Boren
continues to be of enormous benefit to both the museum and the university, and the museum greatly appreciates their support of this exhibition.
Julia Herrera and her children, Joe H. Herrera, Jr., and Yvonne Lewis, have supported
Dr. Rushing’s research with enthusiasm and hospitality, especially during his visits to Laguna Pueblo. Their memories of Tonita Peña and Joe Herrera were informative and inspiring.
Dr. Rushing, who began research for this project with an OU Arts and Humanities Faculty
Fellowship in 2015, was invited to be a Visiting Scholar at the School of Advanced Research
in Santa Fe that summer. Since that time, both Dr. Rushing and the Fred Jones Jr. Museum
of Art have received the cooperation and support of the following individuals and institutions:
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Bruce Bernstein, Executive Director of the Ralph T. Coe Foundation; Dr. Janet Catherine
Berlo, University of Rochester; Mary Manly, former Curator and Archivist, and Chelsea Owen, Archivist and Guest Services Associate, of the Arnot Art Museum; Laura Eklund, Collection
Manager in the Department of Anthropology at the California Academy of Sciences; Meghan Petersen, Librarian and Archivist at the Currier Museum of Art; Beth A. Zinsli, Director and
Curator at the Wriston Art Center Galleries, and Erin K. Dix, Archivist at the Seeley G. Mudd Library, Lawrence University; David A. Phillips, Interim Director, and Diane Tyink, Archivist at the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology, University of New Mexico; Gerrianne Schaad,
former Librarian and Archivist, and Melissa Owens, Registrar and Exhibits Coordinator at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum; Nancy W. Grinnell, former Curator at the
Newport Art Museum; Elaine Hughes, Collections Director, and Amber King, Registrar at the
Museum of Northern Arizona; Christina Burke, Curator of Native American and Non-Western Art, Thomas E. Young, Librarian and Assistant Registrar, and Darcy Marlow, Associate
Registrar of Loans and Exhibits at the Philbrook Museum of Art; Laura Holt, Librarian at the Catherine McElvain Library, and Jennifer Day, Registrar at the Indian Arts Research Center, School of Advanced Research; Valerie Verzuh, Curator of ICC Collections, and Diane Bird, Archivist at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, Laboratory of Anthropology; Alicia
Rawlins-Perkins, Associate Registrar, and Diana M. Cox, Intellectual Property and Copyright Manager at the Gilcrease Museum; Nicole S. Williams, Exhibitions Coordinator at the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College; Susan E. Bergh, Chair of the Art of Africa and the
Americas and Curator of the Pre-Columbian and Native North American Art at the Cleveland Museum of Art; Sarah Cucinella-McDaniel, Chief Registrar at the Denver Art Museum;
Stephen Lockwood, Collections Manager at the University of New Mexico Art Museum; Diana Pardue, Curator of Collections, and Mario Nick Klimiades, Library and Archives Director,
Billie Jane Baguley Library and Archives, Heard Museum; Rachel Menyuk, Archivist at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian; and Ashlea Espinal, Dr. Rushing’s research assistant at the University of Oklahoma.
The museum staff also has been exceptional in their realization of this project, and I would
like to thank, in particular, Michael Bendure, Director of Communication; Tracy Bidwell, Chief Registrar; Tanya Denton, Manager of Administration and Operations; Lesha Maag, Director
of Audience Development; Melissa Ski, Director of Learning + Engagement; and Kristi Wyatt, Preparator and Associate Exhibition Designer.
Generations in Modern Pueblo Painting: The Art of Tonita PeĂąa and Joe Herrera provides a
much-needed scholarly examination of two of the most significant Native American artists of
the twentieth century. On behalf of the museum and Dr. Rushing, I extend our gratitude to all those who played a role in seeing this project to fruition.
Mark Andrew White
Wylodean and Bill Saxon Director Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art The University of Oklahoma
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preface and acknowledgments
Tradition + Innovation = Beautiful Consequences In the first two decades of the twentieth century a small coterie of enterprising Pueblo Indian
artists invented a new “secular” art form: nonceremonial watercolor paintings meant for sale to collectors outside the community of origin. They sought through their works to communicate
Pueblo social and spiritual values even as they participated in a cash economy. Inspired in part
by pottery designs and murals painted on the walls of kivas (underground ritual chambers), this first generation of modern Pueblo painters was largely self-taught, and virtually all of them,
including Velino Shije Herrera (Zia), Fred Kabotie (Hopi), Julian Martinez (San Ildefonso),
José Encarnacion Peña (San Ildefonso), Tonita Peña (San Ildefonso/Cochiti), Otis Polelonema (Hopi), Abel Sanchez (San Ildefonso), Awa Tsireh (San Ildefonso), and Romando Vigil (San
Ildefonso), are represented in the James T. Bialac Native American Art Collection in the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art (FJJMA) at the University of Oklahoma.1 Access to this important
collection was a stimulating factor in the organization of this exhibition. In particular, the stellar selection of Joe Hilario Herrera’s late works in the Bialac Collection was key in facilitating new conclusions about his process and motivations.
Tonita Peña and the other first-generation artists were supported in their endeavor by the
Santa Fe culturati, such as Edgar L. Hewett, who in 1907 founded the Museum of New Mexico and the School of American Research (SAR); his associate, Kenneth Chapman; the poet and
editor Alice Corbin Henderson; and the philanthropist Amelia Elizabeth White. Painters and patrons were of one mind, although not necessarily for the same reasons, in their belief that
Pueblo culture should be preserved and protected. Through trial and error, the artists quickly
learned how to make modern art: that is, to negotiate social modernity while maintaining their
cultural and artistic integrity, even as they met, in varying degrees, the romantic expectations of their patrons for authentic pictorial documents of supposedly unaculturated aboriginality.
Modernism is understood here as neither singular nor monolithic, and although it had
urban centers of power, it was received by indigenous artists on the “periphery” around the world at various times during the twentieth century. Because modernity did not develop or arrive
everywhere simultaneously, we should acknowledge that the “time” of modernity and, therefore, modernism, was irregular. In other words, modernities provoked modernisms.2 Modernism was simultaneously a philosophy of art, a set of stylistic tendencies (including primitivism), and a
range of strategic aesthetic responses to specific social conditions, and it came to the art colony in Santa Fe by way of the painter Paul Burlin in 1913.3 By 1915 a first generation of self-taught Pueblo
watercolor painters were producing “folk art” images—quasi-anthropological in intent—often on commission for the Santa Fe culturati who believed they were collecting pure, primitive art. Frequently using ritual performance as subject matter, these artists, such as Crescencio
Martinez (San Ildefonso), were commoditizing culture by picturing that which is normally only enacted. Such paintings were produced in what Mary Louise Pratt has termed the “contact
zone,” that creative liminal space between the “dominant” culture and its supposed “Other.”4
Beyond their stylistic “archaisms,” what makes Pueblo paintings after roughly 1915 modern is
3
the way their beauty, mystery, and charm subtly, even covertly, state their refusal of reductive
binaries: Modern/primitive, Art/artifact, and Subject/object. Indeed, by 1920 the painter-critic
Walter Pach—he of the Armory Show—had defined the character of such painting as abstract, elemental, and essential.5
Generations in Modern Pueblo Painting documents and celebrates in particular the art of
Tonita Peña, the only female Pueblo painter of her generation, as well as the work of her
distinguished son, Joe Herrera (Cochiti), and their positive influence on a younger generation of artists, including Pablita Velarde (Santa Clara) and her daughter, Helen Hardin (Santa Clara).
It is my contention that Peña and Herrera were key figures in the development of modern art in the United States and that there is no satisfying explanation for their exclusion from surveys on
the subject. On the contrary, for several reasons, a critical examination of their aesthetic achievements and legacy reshapes our understanding of American modernism.
The emergence of Peña’s identity as a Pueblo female painter in the 1920s was a radical turn in
and of itself, and so it is instructive to consider her incipient feminism, manifest in part by her
refusal to be censored by conservative elements in her community. Similarly, this exhibition and catalogue firmly establish the significance of her participation in, and thus contribution to, the
American scene in the 1930s. Furthermore, the inclusion in this essay for the first time of lengthy excerpts from her letters inserts her voice into a narrative that all too often excludes indigenous perspectives.
The work of Peña’s son, Joe Herrera, was indebted to Pueblo sources, including Peña’s own
paintings, as well as those of Awa Tsireh, Julian Martinez, and his mother’s cousin, Romando Vigil. Herrera also took inspiration from Art Deco, Cubism, Paul Klee, and the modernist
primitivism of both Raymond Jonson and Agnes Sims. After 1950, his “heritage” primitivism (an intentionally reductive aesthetic that evokes the prehistoric foundations of culture) incorporated rock art images and other ancient iconographies into a hybrid modernism. My recent research, presented in this catalogue, deepens our understanding of his engagement with archaeology
and the succor he took from the artistic legacy of ancient Puebloans. These revelations, in turn,
enable us to see more clearly how cultural traditions—the deep significance of heritage—played
a formative role in certain modernist constituencies. Thus, Generations in Modern Pueblo Painting demonstrates how the historical temporality of modernism unfolds through heritage as much as
through dialectical progress. Herrera’s own voice, too, is heard in this essay, illuminating specific works of art as well as his theory of cross-cultural art.
Until now, neither Peña nor Herrera has had the benefit of a museum retrospective.
Generations in Modern Pueblo Painting is both the first significant presentation of Peña’s work
since the 1930s and the premiere presentation of many of Herrera’s major late works. In addition, revealing documentary photographs are published in this catalogue for the first time.
White Coral Beads: Emergence
Tonita Peña (fig. 1) was born at San Ildefonso Pueblo, just north of Santa Fe, in 1893, the
daughter of Ascencion Vigil and her husband, Natividad Peña.6 Quah Ah, her name in the Tewa
language spoken in her village, means White Coral Beads, a prophetically poetic name for a
woman who became known for the beauty of her paintings. In their one-room schoolhouse at 4
Generations in Modern Pueblo Painting
San Ildefonso, she and other young students were encouraged by their teacher, Esther B. Hoyt, to make paintings
based on how they felt while dancing in the village plaza.7
To the best of our knowledge, none of Peña’s schoolgirl paintings are extant.8 Upon the death of her mother in
1905, Peña was sent by her father to live at Cochiti Pueblo, south of Santa Fe, with her aunt and uncle, the noted pottery artists Martina Vigil and Florentino Montoya, who taught her to make pottery and to speak the Keres lan-
guage.9 Following the death in 1912 of her first husband,
Juan Rosario Chavez, whom she had married in 1908 and with whom she had two children, Peña was educated for
an unknown number of years at St. Catherine’s Industrial Indian School in Santa Fe.10 In 1913 she married Felipe
Herrera, and on May 17, 1920, she gave birth to their son,
Joseph Hilario Herrera. Tragically, Felipe Herrera died in a mining accident shortly thereafter, on July 16. Thus, by
the time she began painting as an adult, certainly by 1920, Peña was a twice-widowed mother of three children, and
the income she realized from the sale of her paintings was critical for the survival and well-being of her family.
Most of those first sales were to Hewett at the Museum
of New Mexico. Comanche Dance (1920–21, plate 1), one of
thirty-seven paintings by Peña in the Bialac Collection, gives us a baseline for tracking her artistic development and is diagnostic, therefore, of the short-lived first period of her adult production:
one or two figures, which are large, relative to the size of the picture support, are drawn in pencil and covered with brushy washes of mostly transparent color. Emergent and elemental, the style
might be described as untutored in any formal sense yet still mediated by an awareness of Western
Figure 1 T. Harmon Parkhurst (U.S., 1883–1952) Tonita Peña, c. 1925–45
Courtesy Palace of the Governors
Photo Archives (NMHM/DCA) Negative no. 046988
conventions of representation.
Artistic Agency
Two of Peña’s early paintings, Making Pottery (c. 1922, plate 2) and Making Tissue Bread (c. 1922, plate 3), featuring truncated figures engaged in traditional female labors, are almost certainly
self-portraits, given the artist’s recollection, according to Samuel L. Gray, “that she used herself as a model for the face or faces of her early paintings of women.”11 There was no precedent in
pre-modern Pueblo art for genre paintings, and so they are best described as auto-ethnographic, as they reflect a keen awareness of, and appreciation for, the desire of Euro-American anthro-
pologists to collect (images of) traditional culture. In a productive syncretism, the naïve formal
quality of the pictures contrasts with the fluid grace of the artist’s elegant script that captions the subject matter.
We can be sure this is Peña’s handwriting by comparing it to a cache of mostly unpublished
correspondence between her and her patrons at the Museum of New Mexico and the School of tradition + innovation = beautiful consequences
5
Plate 61 Joe Hilario Herrera (See Ru) (U.S., Cochiti Pueblo, 1920–2001) Direction Man, 1984 Watercolor on paper, 23½ × 19 in. Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, University of Oklahoma, Norman James T. Bialac Native American Art Collection, 2010
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Plate 62 Joe Hilario Herrera (See Ru) (U.S., Cochiti Pueblo, 1920–2001) Parrot Hunt Ceremonial, 1984 Watercolor on paper, 31 × 41¼ in. Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, University of Oklahoma, Norman James T. Bialac Native American Art Collection, 2010
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Plate 63 Joe Hilario Herrera (See Ru) (U.S., Cochiti Pueblo, 1920–2001) Pottery Mound Revisited, c. 1984 Watercolor on paper, 24¾ × 31¾ in. Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, University of Oklahoma, Norman James T. Bialac Native American Art Collection, 2010
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Plate 64 Joe Hilario Herrera (See Ru) (U.S., Cochiti Pueblo, 1920–2001) Anasazi Gathering, c. 1980s Watercolor on paper, 31 × 41 in. Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, University of Oklahoma, Norman James T. Bialac Native American Art Collection, 2010
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Notes Preface and Acknowledgments 1. Oscar B. Jacobson and Jeanne d’Ucel, American Indian Painters, vol. 2 (Nice, France: C. Szwedzicki, 1950), 7 and 5. Tradition + Innovation = Beautiful Consequences Earlier iterations of some portions of this essay appeared in the following: W. Jackson Rushing, “Authenticity and Subjectivity in Post-War Painting; Concerning Herrera, Scholder, and Cannon,” in Margaret Archuleta and Rennard Strickland, Shared Visions: Native American Painters and Sculptors in the Twentieth Century (Phoenix: Heard Museum, 1991), 12–21; Bruce Bernstein and W. Jackson Rushing, Modern By Tradition: American Indian Painting in the Studio Style (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1995); and W. Jackson Rushing, “Making Modern: Selected Paintings, Drawings, and Prints,” in Mark White, ed., The James T. Bialac Native American Art Collection: Selected Works (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press with the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, 2012), 91–139. 1. The two notable exceptions are the San Ildefonso painters Alfredo Montoya and Crescencio Martinez, both of whom died young and whose works are remarkably scarce. The historiography of this movement is rich and thick; see especially Clara Lee Tanner, Southwest Indian Painting: A Changing Art (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1957); Dorothy Dunn, American Indian Painting of the Southwest and Plain Areas (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1968); and J. J. Brody, Indian Painters and White Patrons (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1971), and Pueblo Indian Painting: Tradition and Modernism in New Mexico, 1900–1930 (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 1997). 2. See the essays in Elizabeth Harney and Ruth B. Phillips, eds., Mapping Modernisms: Art, Indigeneity, Colonialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2018, forthcoming). 3. For Paul Burlin and modernist primitivism, see W. Jackson Rushing, Native American Art and the New York AvantGarde: A History of Cultural Primitivism (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1995), 49–55. 4. For Mary Louise Pratt and the “contact zone” in the context of modern Pueblo painting, see David W. Penney and Lisa Roberts-Seppi, “America’s Pueblo Artists: Encounters on the Borderlands,” in W. Jackson Rushing, ed., Native American Art in the Twentieth Century: Makers, Meanings, Histories (London and New York: Routledge, 1999), 21–38. 5. For Walter Pach and Pueblo watercolors, see Rushing, Native American Art, 32–33. By mid-century, what had been emergent in 1920 had been codified. The painter, theorist,
and critic Allen Leepa, who taught at Michigan State University, noted succinctly: “The modern artist constantly seeks to understand the essentials of the aesthetic in painting, devoid of unnecessary superficiality, and exploiting at the same time the nature of his exploration. In his search, the modern painter goes back to the elemental source of his creative feelings”; see Leepa, The Challenge of Modern Art (New York: Beechhurst Press, 1949), 93–94. Leepa’s work was featured in the Young American Artists exhibition organized by the Museum of Modern Art in 1953. 6. See Appendix 1, “Genealogical Record of Tonita Peña (Quah Ah),” in Samuel L. Gray, Tonita Peña (Albuquerque: Avanyu Publishing, 1990). 7. See the poet and art collector Alice Corbin Henderson’s recollection of Tonita Peña’s memory of her teacher in Dunn, American Indian Painting, 203. 8. See Brody, Pueblo Indian Painting, who writes, “None of her known paintings predates 1920” (115). 9. See Jonathan Batkin, “Martina Vigil and Florentino Montoya: Master Potters of San Ildefonso and Cochiti Pueblos,” American Indian Art Magazine 12 (Autumn 1987): 28–37. 10. According to Brody, Peña attended St. Catherine’s from about 1912 to 1919, a period that has significant overlap with her marriage to Felipe Herrera (1913–1920); see Brody’s catalogue essay in A Bridge Across Cultures: Pueblo Painters in Santa Fe, 1910–1932 (Santa Fe: Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, 1992), n.p. 11. Gray, Tonita Peña, 61. 12. For one example among many, see Peña to B. Lansing Bloom, December 15, 1920, Edgar Lee Hewett Collection, Box 28, Museum of New Mexico (hereafter cited as Hewett Collection), where she describes herself as a “poor lady” who “don’t have nothing to give to eat to my children. I need some money soon.” 13. Bloom to Leo Crane, December 22, 1920, Hewett Collection. 14. Bloom to Peña, December 22, 1920, Hewett Collection. 15. Peña to Bloom, January 22, 1921, Hewett Collection. 16. Peña to Bloom, February 18, 1921, Hewett Collection. 17. Peña to Bloom, July 10, 1921, and Bloom to Peña, July 11, 1921, Hewett Collection. 18. Peña to Edgar L. Hewett, September 19, 1921, Hewett Collection. 19. Bloom to Peña, July 11, 1921, Hewett Collection. 20. Peña to Bloom, April 7, 1922, and Bloom to Peña, May 16, 1922, Hewett Collection. 21. Julia Herrera, personal communication, April 25, 2015.
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22. “Especially delightful are the groups of pottery makers in which Quah Ah demonstrates the craft and achieves convincing ceramic quality in the large ollas, always faithful in their decoration to traditional symbolism”; Dunn, American Indian Painting, 211. According to Kenneth Chapman, who knew Peña’s work well, “If we accept the basic requirement that a symbol must represent clearly an idea commonly understood by the culture in which it is used, there are at least two motifs in San Ildefonso design, the meaning of which would be understood throughout the entire pueblo area.” In Pueblo lore, he wrote, clouds “denote entities of great ritual importance,” while the “stylistic forms of feathers are used to “express the concern of the people for favors from the sky powers”; Chapman, The Pottery of San Ildefonso (Santa Fe: School of American Research, 1970), 12–13. 23. John A. Ware, A Pueblo Social History: Kinship, Sodality, and Community in the Northern Southwest (Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press, 2014), 164. 24. Charles H. Lange, “Tablita, or Corn, Dances of the Rio Grande Pueblo Indians,” Texas Journal of Science 10 (1957): 65–66. 25. Charles H. Lange and Patricia Foreman Lange, “The July 14th Feast Day Dances at Cochiti Pueblo, New Mexico: 1882, 1931, and 1990,” in Mehila S. Duran and David T. Kirkpatrick, eds., Why Museums Collect: Papers in Honor of Joe Ben Wheat (Albuquerque: Archaeological Society of New Mexico, 1993), 132. 26. Anna O. Shephard, quoted in Lange and Lange, “July 14th Feast Day Dances,” 130. 27. Lange, “Tablita,” 70. 28. For the Exposition of Indian Tribal Arts, see Rushing, Native American Art, 97–103. 29. Frederick J. Dockstader, Great North American Indians (New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1977), 210–11. 30. See the letter to Amelia Elizabeth White, September 1933, in the Amelia Elizabeth White Papers, Box 1, School for Advanced Research (hereafter cited as White Papers). 31. That exception would be Molly H. Mullin, Culture in the Marketplace (Durham: Duke University Press, 2001), 79. 32. Dolly Sloan (?) to Amelia Elizabeth White, August 3, 1933, White Papers. 33. See “Quah Ah, American Indian Artist Being Given Her First ‘One-Man’ Show in Newport,” White Papers. For Pueblo painting in Venice, see Jessica L. Horton, “A Cloudburst in Venice: Fred Kabotie and the U.S. Pavilion of 1932,” American Art 29 (Spring 2015): 54–90. 34. See the clippings from the New York Sun, August 27, 1933, and the Providence Sunday Journal, August 23, 1933, in the White Papers. 35. Ibid. 36. “A ‘First View’ of Water-Colors by Tonita Peña of Cochiti,” Exhibition of Water Color Paintings by Tonita Peña (1933), White Papers.
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notes to pages 7–14
37. For Indian mural painting, see Dunn, American Indian Painting, 248–49. 38. Brody, Pueblo Indian Painting, 183. Likewise, Dunn reported that Peña and others created large, impressive panels “for further works of mural size”; Dunn, American Indian Painting, 248. 39. Sally Hyer, “Creations of Indian Artists and the Architectural Styles in Pueblos and Reservations Move Out into the State,” in Kathleen A. Flynn, ed., Public Art and Architecture in New Mexico 1933–1943 (Santa Fe: Sunstone Press, 2012), 214–16. 40. Mary Austin, “American Indian Murals,” American Magazine of Art 26 (August 1933): 384. For Austin as patron, critic, and theorist of Native American art, see Rushing, Native American Art, 24–26. 41. See the notes in the Arthur and Shifra Silberman Native American Art Collection, Dickinson Research Center, National Cowboy & Western Heritage Center, Oklahoma City (hereafter cited as Silberman Collection). For Kenneth Chapman’s obituary of Harry P. Mera, see www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/ content/view/188B6AA26CD70734E77F85A2476EEB0C/ S0002731600008842a.pdf/div-class-title-harry-p-mera1875-1951-div.pdf, July 1951. Mera was a prolific scholar who wrote about Indian textiles and silver, and Pueblo pottery and its iconography, especially rain bird imagery. 42. Silberman Collection; and Dunn, American Indian Painting, 248. 43. Dunn, American Indian Painting, 248; Hyer, “Creations of Indian Artists,” 216; and Bob Thomas, “Santa Fe Treasures Unearthed,” Arizona Republic (undated clipping in the Romando Vigil file in the Heard Museum Archives). 44. Her Eagle Dance, seen in figure 3, is now in the collection of Howard Goldsmith in Santa Fe. 45. The caption on the verso of the photograph includes the following description: “The plaque which hangs over her head has the symbols of rain clouds, corn, lightning, and the sun’s rays. On the right is the medicine bundle, a collection of sacred objects entrusted to the care of one person, who holds it for the clan to which it belongs.” 46. Jacobson and d’Ucel, American Indian Painters, vol. 2, 7. 47. Julia Herrera, personal communication, July 25, 2015. 48. Peña was not the only southwestern Indian painter to make patriotic work during the war. Eva Mirabal (Taos), Ben Quintana (Cochiti), and other students made war bond posters at the SFIS in 1942. 49. Santa Fe New Mexican, May 29, 1943; clipping in the Tonita Peña file in the Heard Museum Archives. 50. “War Artist,” The Mail, May 27, 1944; clipping in the Tonita Peña file in the Heard Museum Archives. 51. See Lisa Roberts-Seppi, “Tonita Peña,” in Roger Matuz, ed., St. James Guide to Native North American Artists (New York: St. James Press, 1998), 447. Epitacio Arquero was governor at Cochiti in 1940, 1943–44, and in 1951, after Peña’s death.
52. Gray, Tonita Peña, 18–19. 53. Victoria Maria Melchor to Samuel L. Gray, n.d., quoted in ibid., 61. 54. Ibid. 55. Roberts-Seppi, “Tonita Peña,” 447; and Melchor, quoted in Gray, Tonita Peña, 61. 56. Tanner, Southwest Indian Painting, 62. 57. Marsden Hartley, “Tribal Esthetics,” The Dial 65 (November 1918), 400. 58. On the Bursum Bill and the politics of exhibiting Pueblo watercolors on the East Cost in the early 1920s, see Penney and Roberts-Seppi, “America’s Pueblo Artists,” in Rushing, Native American Art, 32–33. 59. Margretta Dietrich, “Death of Artist Peña Means Loss,” Santa Fe New Mexican, September 12, 1949; clipping in the Tonita Peña file in the Heard Museum Archives. For Dietrich and Indian art, see Mullin, Culture in the Marketplace, 76. Note also Dunn’s comment that Peña’s “singers sing the most lustily of any in Indian paintings”; Dunn, American Indian Painting, 211. 60. Jacobson and d’Ucel, American Indian Painters, vol. 2, 7–8. For Jacobson and d’Ucel themselves, see Mark Andrew White et al., The Art of Oscar Brousse Jacobson (Norman: Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, 2015). 61. Tanner, Southwest Indian Painting, 133. 62. Dunn, American Indian Painting, 210–11. 63. Brody, Pueblo Indian Painting, 4. 64. According to Tanner, “Not only did he receive a rich tribal background from his mother, but she also gave him a thorough training in the art abilities which he inherited from her;” Tanner, Southwest Indian Painting, 64. 65. Dorothy Dunn, “Pablita Velarde: Painter of Pueblo Life,” El Palacio 59, no. 11 (November 1953): 338. 66. Pablita Velarde, quoted in Sally Hyer, “Pablita Velarde: The Artist as Cultural Broker,” in Between Indian and White Worlds: The Cultural Broker, ed. Margaret Connell Szasz (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994), 278. 67. Quoted in Maureen Reed, A Woman’s Place: Women Writing New Mexico (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005), 240. 68. Velarde, quoted in ibid. 69. Velarde, quoted in Hyer, “Artist as Cultural Broker,” in Szasz, Between Indian and White Worlds, 279–80. 70. Hyer, “Artist as Cultural Broker,” in Szasz, Between Indian and White Worlds, 282. 71. See her comments in ibid., 291. 72. Velarde, quoted in ibid., 274. 73. Reed, Woman’s Place, 247. 74. Dorothy Dunn, “Pablita Velarde,” 338. 75. Ibid., 335. 76. Ibid., 341. 77. Mary Carroll Nelson, Pablita Velarde (New York: National Women’s Caucus for Art, 1990), n.p.
78. See her introduction in Pablita Velarde, Old Father Story Teller (Santa Fe: Clear Light Publishers, 1989), n.p. 79. Pablita Velarde, quoted in Lydia Wyckoff, ed., Visions and Voices: Native American Painting from the Philbrook Museum of Art (Tulsa: Philbrook Museum of Art, 1996), 275. 80. See Frederic H. Douglas and René d’Harnoncourt, Indian Art of the United States (New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1941), 102; and Rushing, Native American Art, 176–78. The Hohokam were ancient farming peoples in southern Arizona from the early years CE until about 1450; see Suzanne K. Fish and Paul R. Fish, eds., The Hohokam Millenium (Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press, 2008). 81. Velarde, quoted in Reed, Woman’s Place, 241. 82. Reed, Woman’s Place, 243. 83. Ibid., 263. 84. Various incorrect dates have been given in the literature; the birth year of 1920 is confirmed by the “Certificate of Baptism” in the Herrera Family Archives, Phoenix. 85. Joe Herrera, quoted in Gray, Tonita Peña, 59. 86. Joe Herrera, quoted in Tryntje Van Ness Seymour, When the Rainbow Touches Down (Phoenix: Heard Museum, 1988), 149. 87. Ibid. 88. Joe Herrera, quoted in Gray, Tonita Peña, 59. 89. W. Jackson Rushing, “Critical Issues in Recent Native American Art,” Art Journal 51 (Fall 1992): 8. 90. Joe Herrera, quoted in Seymour, When the Rainbow Touches Down, 150. 91. “Maisel’s Indian Trading Post, Albuquerque, New Mexico,” National Park Service, U.S. Department of the Interior, www.nps.gov/nr/travel/route66/maisels_indian_ trading_post_albuquerque.html. 92. Joe Herrera, quoted in Bart Ripp, “Eleven Indian Painters Created a Treasure at Maisel’s,” Albuquerque Tribune, February 1, 1988, B1–2. 93. Oscar B. Jacobson and Jeanne d’Ucel, Indians of North America (Nice, France: C. Szwedzicki, 950), vol. 2, 5. 94. Tanner reported that in 1952 Herrera received “high commendation for exhibits of his abstracts in the Museum of Modern Art, New York” (Southwest Indian Painting, 64), but in more than thirty years of studying his art I have seen no evidence to support this claim. 95. See Rushing, Native American Art, 104–20. 96. Jill D. Sweet, Dances of the Tewa Pueblo Indians, 2nd ed. (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, 2004), 80. 97. Ibid., 81. 98. Ibid., 83–84. 99. W. Thetford LeViness, “Dancing Indians Are His Subject,” The Desert Magazine, August 1949, 16. 100. Ibid.
notes to pages 15–22
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101. Julia Herrera, personal communication, August 15, 2003. 102. Joe Herrera, quoted in Seymour, When the Rainbow Touches Down, 150. 103. Christina E. Burke, “Introduction,” in Impact: The Philbrook Indian Annual 1946 to 1979 (Tulsa: Philbrook Museum of Art, 2014), 10. 104. Randall Suffolk, “Foreword,” in ibid., 5. 105. Joe Herrera, “Cochiti Green Corn Dancers and Koshares”; typescript in the Heard Museum Archives. 106. Joe Herrera, “Buffalo Dance,” ibid. 107. Hester Jones, “At the Gallery,” El Palacio 55 (October 1948): 326–27. 108. Joe Herrera, personal communication, 1987. 109. For Raymond Jonson’s Native-inspired modernist primitivism, see Rushing, Native American Art, 79–85. 110. Joe Herrera, personal communication, 1987. Recently Julia Herrera affirmed the positive impact of Jonson on Herrera; personal communication, June 27, 2015. 111. On the social, political, and religious significance of the Turquoise and Pumpkin moieties at Cochiti, see Charles H. Lange, Cochiti: A New Mexico Pueblo, Past and Present (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1959), 389–90. 112. On communal rabbit hunting at Cochiti, see ibid., 125–28, where Lange notes that rabbit skins were sometimes used to decorate katsina masks and other ceremonial items. 113. Dorothy Morang, “Thirty-Ninth Annual Exhibition for New Mexico Artists—A Review and Historical Comparison,” El Palacio 59 (September 1952): 271–72. There are at least two versions of Eagles and Rabbit, which differ only slightly from each other. It’s possible that Morang had seen the one featured on the cover of El Palacio three months later, in December 1952, and not the one featured in our current exhibition. 114. Alfred Morang, “Annual Indian Art Exhibit,” El Palacio 47 (May 1940): 117–18. 115. Joe Herrera, quoted in Seymour, When the Rainbow Touches Down, 151, 145. 116. On Herrera’s enthusiasm for kiva murals excavated at Awatovi, Kuaua, and Pottery Mound, see Seymour, When the Rainbow Touches Down, 151. 117. Joe Herrera, personal communication, 1987. 118. Raymond Jonson to Charles Fabens Kelley, April 20, 1954; Joe Herrera file at the University of New Mexico Museum of Art, Albuquerque. 119. Rushing, “Authenticity and Subjectivity,” in Archuleta and Strickland, Shared Visions, 13. 120. Dorothy Dunn to Margretta Dietrich, August 29, 1952; see File 93DDK in the Archives of the Laboratory of Anthropology, Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, Santa Fe. 121. Dunn, “The Art of Joe Herrera,” El Palacio 59 (December 1952): 367.
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notes to pages 22–31
122. “Herrera Has New Paintings on Exhibition,” Santa Fe New Mexican, July 27, 1952; clipping in the Heard Museum Archives. It is worth noting here, even if briefly, that in the early 1950s Herrera was part of an emerging vanguard in Oklahoma and New Mexico that included Oscar Howe (Yanktonai Nakota), Chief Terry Saul (Choctaw/ Chickasaw), Velarde, and Walter Richard “Dick” West, Sr. (Southern Cheyenne). These artists sought to reconcile Native traditions with aspects of mainstream modernism, especially Cubism and Surrealism; see Mark A. White, “A Modernist Moment: Native Art and Surrealism at the University of Oklahoma,” Journal of Surrealism and the Americas 7, no. 1 (2013): 52–70. Simultaneously, the Chippewa modernist George Morrison, who was then based in New York City, was likewise fusing Expressionism, Cubism, and Surrealism into an awardwinning indigenous modernism; see Kristin Makholm and W. Jackson Rushing III, Modern Spirit: The Art of George Morrison (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2013). 123. Joe Herrera, personal communication, 1987. 124. Pictograph Altar, from the Denver Art Museum, was included in a historic 1970 exhibition, American Indian Art, at the Heard Museum; see the gallery brochure with an introduction by Norman Feder in the Heard Museum Archives. 125. Joe Herrera, untitled artist statement, 1952, Denver Art Museum. 126. “Highland Art Teacher Back at School with List of Newly Won Honors,” Albuquerque Journal, August 26, 1954; clipping in the Heard Museum Archives. 127. Dorothy Dunn, quoted in ibid. 128. Joe Herrera, quoted in ibid. 129. Dunn, American Indian Painting, 279. 130. “The Story of the French Awards,” Ceremonial Magazine, August 1954, 25; clipping in the Heard Museum Archives. 131. “Highland Art Teacher Back,” Albuquerque Journal; August 26, 1954; clipping in the Heard Museum Archives. 132. “The Story of the French Awards,” 25. 133. Paul Coze to Margretta Dietrich, August 5, 1954, Dorothy Dunn Collection, Archives of the Laboratory of Anthropology, Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, Santa Fe. 134. See Rushing, Native American Art, especially chaps. 2–6. 135. Joseph Traugott, The Art of New Mexico: How the West Is One (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico, 2007), 144 and fig. 131. 136. Agnes Sims, “An Artist Analyzes New Mexico’s Petroglyphs,” El Palacio 55 (October 1948): 304. 137. The anthropologist Bertha Dutton, long-time curator at the Museum of New Mexico, commented on Sims’s studious approach to rock art: “In this case, extensive field work, with library and specimen correlations, resulted in valuable identifications and interrelationships”; Dutton,
Sun’s Father’s Way: The Kiva Murals of Kuaua (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 963), 36. 138. Julia Herrera, personal communication, April 25, 2015. 139. Sims, “An Artist Analyzes New Mexico’s Petroglyphs,” 302–309. 140. Margretta Dietrich to Dorothy Dunn, August 11, 1952, Dorothy Dunn Collection, 93DDK, Archives of the Laboratory of Anthropology, Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, Santa Fe. For Herrera’s comments on his paintings collected by William and Leslie Van Ness Denman, see Seymour, When the Rainbow Touches Down, 171–75. 141. Sims, “Migration Story in Stone,” El Palacio 56 (March 1949): 67–70. 142. Sims, San Cristobal Petroglyphs (Santa Fe: Southwest Editions, 1950), 3. 143. Joe Herrera, Jr., personal communication, April 15, 2016. 144. Lange, Cochiti, 308. 145. Julia Herrera, personal communication, April 25, 2015. See also Lange, Cochiti, 332–33; and Anne Morand, “Southwestern Indian Paintings,” Gilcrease Journal 5 (Winter 1997–98): 35. 146. Hester Jones, “1956 Indian Artists Exhibition,” El Palacio 63 (September–October 1956): 291. 147. Ibid., 288–91. 148. Morgan Lee, “Cochiti Painter; Advocate Dies at 80,” Albuquerque Journal, October 5, 2001; clipping in the Heard Museum Archives. 149. Flo Wilks, “Noted Indian Artist Feels His Major Role Is Improvement of Indian Life,” Albuquerque Journal, October 26, 1969; clipping in the Heard Museum Archives. 150. Joe Herrera, quoted in ibid. 151. Dorothy Pillsbury, “Words in the Air,” New Mexico Magazine 38 (January 1960): 3–5. 152. See Joe S. Sando, Pueblo Profiles: Cultural Identity through Centuries of Change (Santa Fe: Clearlight Publishers, 1998), 237; and “Joe Herrera Organizes Nizhoni Indian Dancers,” Albuquerque Journal, April 14, 1958; clipping in the Herrera file, University of New Mexico Art Museum. 153. Joe Herrera, “Shared Vision of Joe Herrera,” typescript of presentation at the Heard Museum in 1991, Herrera file in the Heard Museum Archives. 154. Even so, his work was still frequently on view. For example, in 1960 he received a cash award at the All American Indian Days in Wyoming for a painting titled Creation, and he was featured in a 1965 exhibition at the Heard Museum of the important Byron Butler Collection; see Joan Bucklew, “Selected Works of Indian Artists Represented in Butler Collection,” The Arizona Republic, December 12, 1965, 30C. 155. In 1987, he reported to me that he started painting again occasionally in 1968 “for a little while.” In 1990, however, he told me that he had started again in 1967.
156. Joe Herrera, in Directions in Indian Art: The Report of a Conference Held at the University of Arizona (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1959), 18. 157. Julia Herrera, in ibid., 21. 158. Joy L. Gritton, The Institute of American Indian Arts: Modernism and US Indian Policy (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2000). 159. Gerhard and Gisela Hoffmann, “Michael Kabotie,” in Roger Matuz, ed., St. James Guide to Native North American Artists (New York: St. James Press, 1998), 272. 160. Sally Euclaire, “Artist Fuses Modern Values with Traditional Indian Art,” Albuquerque Journal, August 18, 1989, C11. 161. See Wyckoff, Visions and Voices, 45. 162. Joe Herrera, personal communication, January 10, 1987. Furthermore, the distinguished art historian J. J. Brody recalled that Herrera “was one of several artists either hired by Frank Hibben or coopted to expose and/or copy the murals. . . . Joe worked during the first season (1954) and perhaps others.” Brody e-mail to Dave Phillips (forwarded to author), May 22, 2015. 163. Ware, Pueblo Social History, 164. 164. W. Thetford LeViness, “Pottery Mound Murals,” New Mexico Magazine, March 1959, 22–23, 52. 165. Ibid., 52. 166. Frank Hibben, Kiva Art of the Anasazi at Pottery Mound (Las Vegas: KC Publications, 1975), 56. 167. George Kubler, The Shape of Time (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962), 33–35. 168. Richard Willliam Hill, “8 Texts on Indigenous Art That Put Things in Perspective,” Canadian Art, February 28, 2017, http://canadianart.ca/features/8-texts-onindigenousart. 169. According to Kelly Hayes-Gilpin and Steven Leblanc, “Most textiles have not survived, but kiva murals offer a wealth of evidence of what those textiles (or at least the ones used in rituals) looked like”; quoted in Ware, Pueblo Social History, 164. 170. Ware, Pueblo Social History, 164. 171. Caroline Jean Fernald, “The Visualization of the American Southwest: Ethnography, Tourism, and American Indian Souvenir Arts,” PhD diss., University of Oklahoma, 2017, 121 and n. 289. 172. As Herrera explained, “They were a people, beginning with beliefs, ornaments, languages, fable, love of children and a scheme of life that worked”; quoted in Flo Wilks, “Noted Indian Artist Feels His Major Role Is Improvement of Indian Life,” Albuquerque Journal, October 26, 1969; clipping in the Heard Museum Archives. 173. Joe Herrera, personal communication, 1987. 174. Dorothy Dunn, Indian Paintings from the Margretta S. Dietrich Collection (Santa Fe: Museum of Fine Arts, 1963), n.p.
notes to pages 31–42
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175. See the press release “Contemporary American Indian Painting Exhibition to Open November 8 at the National Gallery of Art”; www.nga.gov/content/dam/ ngaweb/research/gallery-archives/PressReleases/19591950/1953/14A11_43762_19531107.pdf. See also “Modern Indian Art Exhibition Fulfills N.M. Woman’s Dream,” The Denver Post, November 15, 1953, in the file of Dorothy Dunn Kramer letters to Kenneth Chapman at the School of Advanced Research. 176. I have just begun researching this exhibition, which was organized by Harrison Kerr, dean of the College of Fine Arts, and was supported by the U.S. Information Agency. Sixty paintings were sent on an extensive tour of Europe, where numerous reviews of the show were published, none of which have yet been translated into English. These records are held in the archives of the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art.
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notes to pages 42–44
177. Archuleta and Strickland, eds., Shared Visions. 178. Robert E. Hartley, “The Indian World of Jeanne Snodgrass King,” American Indian Art Magazine 38 (Summer 2013): 34–41; and Jeanne O. Snodgrass, American Indian Painters: A Biographical Directory (New York: Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation, 1968). 179. Herrera, “Shared Vision of Joe Herrera,” 2. 180. My understanding of heritage primitivism is based on the discussion of it in Stephen Polcari, “Orozco and Pollock: Epic Transfigurations,” American Art 6 (Summer 1992): 38, where he applies the concept fruitfully to a study of Mexican modernism. 181. Jason Silverman, “A Pioneer in Using Traditional Designs on Contemporary Work,” The New Mexican, March 26, 1993. 182. Joe Herrera, quoted in ibid. 183. See his comments in Seymour, When the Rainbow Touches Down, 175.
About the Venue
The University of Oklahoma’s Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art is one of
the finest university art museums in the United States. Strengths of the nearly 17,000-object
permanent collection (including the approx. 3,300-object Eugene B. Adkins Collection and the
more than 4,500-object James T. Bialac Native American Art Collection) are the Weitzenhoffer Collection of French Impressionism, twentieth century American painting and sculpture,
traditional and contemporary Native American art, art of the Southwest, ceramics, photography, contemporary art, Asian art, and graphics from the sixteenth century to the present.
Contributors W. Jackson Rushing III is the Eugene B. Adkins Presidential Professor of Art History and
the Mary Lou Milner Carver Chair in Native American Art at the University of Oklahoma.
Mark A. White is the Wylodean and Bill Saxon Director of the Fred Jones Jr. Museum
of Art at the University of Oklahoma.
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Publication Notes Copyright © 2018 The University of Oklahoma.
The catalogue has been published in conjunction with the exhibition Generations in
Modern Pueblo Painting at the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, January 26–April 8, 2018.
No part of this publication may be reproduced or used in any form without the written consent of the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art. Catalogue design: Julie Rushing
Catalogue editor: Alice K. Stanton Copy editor: Michael Bendure
Photography: Todd Stewart, unless noted Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art The University of Oklahoma 555 Elm Ave.
Norman, OK 73019-3003
Phone: (405) 325-3272; Fax: (405) 325-7696 fjjma.ou.edu | @fjjma
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017963083 ISBN: 978-0-692-99668-3
This catalogue was printed by University of Oklahoma Printing Services and is issued by the
University of Oklahoma. 750 copies have been printed and distributed at no cost to the taxpayers of Oklahoma.
Credits:
Front cover: Detail from Bow and Arrow Dance, n.d., Tonita Peña. See plate 5 (p. 48); and detail from Germination, 1982, Joe Hilario Herrera. See plate 56 (p. 92).
Back cover and frontispiece: Photograph of Tonita Peña and infant son, Joe Hilario Herrera, c. 1920–21, T. Harmon Parkhurst. See figure 6 (p. 19).
Page iv: Detail from Ancien Danse du Papillon, c. 1950, Joe Hilario Herrera. See plate 28 (p. 68).
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