Contemporary New Mexican Artists: Spanish Market 2024
Peyton Wright Gallery is pleased to present a number of works by modern New Mexican artists working within the state's historic artistic legacies, currently featured in the gallery this month during Spanish Market.
These artists exemplify a modern inspiration of traditional craftsmanship from over the past 200 years in a wide array of techniques and genres.
Marie Romero Cash has been creating art for half a century, and is a well-known award -winning folk artist and writer in Santa Fe, where she has lived most of her life. Her whimsical one-of-a-kind creations are in demand by collectors of all ages.
She is one of only five United States artists invited to participate in the 2019 International Folk Art Market and has participated in the annual Spanish Market in Santa Fe for over forty- five years.
The daughter of prominent traditional tinwork artists, the late Senaida and Emilio Romero, Marie has created large altar screens for a number of churches in the United States and in Mexico, including Stations of the Cross for the Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi in Santa Fe, which have been viewed by tens of thousands of visitors.
As a writer, her early works focused on research-based books about the culture and churches of Northern New Mexico, along with a memoir about growing up in Santa Fe in the 1950s.
Later she authored a mystery series based around Santa Fe; a romantic novel about the Pueblo Revolt; a children’s book; and most recently, a second memoir, “Staying Afloat.”
Her works are in the following collections: the Museum of International Folk Art; the Gene Autry Museum of the American West; the Albuquerque Museum; the Museum of Spanish Colonial Art; the Smithsonian Institute; the Vatican; the Archdiocese of Santa Fe; the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center; and many private collections.
Marie Romero Cash
Marie Romero Cash at work, 2024. Courtesy Bobbe Besold
Nuestra Senora de Talpa, 1986
23” x 15” x 1”
Wood and watercolor
Santa Fe, New Mexico
Signed, dated and titled verso
In the state of Jalisco in Mexico is a little village known as Talpa de Allende. Today it is a center of Marian devotion, but in the 17th Century it was known to few besides the priests who came occasionally to administer the sacraments.
The poverty of the villagers was reflected in their church, which was decorated in the crude fashion of the Mexican Indians in the area. Its chief ornaments were statues carved from cornstalks. With the passing of time, the cornstalks had decayed, and the statues had become ugly images of Our Lady and the Saints. In 1644, the priest gave orders that the statues should be destroyed.
Among the statues was one representing Our Lady of the Rosary, with her child in her arms and the half-moon at her feet. As one of the village women reached to destroy this image, she was suddenly surrounded with a very bright light. The crumbling statue was miraculously changed – its soft substance become solid and strong, its ugly outlines became extremely beautiful. This miracle took place on September 19, 1644.
Since that time, this image has been venerated in the Basilica of Talpa de Allende, and devotion to Our Lady of the Rosary of Talpa has spread among the Mexican people.
Tree of Life, 1993
43” x 22” x 13”
Wood, natural pigment and stamped tinwork
Signed on bottom
Imagery in the piece, from bottom upwards: Snake (Garden of Eden); Nativity; Crucifixion; St. Michael the Archangel on left, Our Lady of Sorrows on right; bishop on left (the one Juan Diego presented the Guadalupe robe to), Our Lady of Guadalupe on right; Santiago; Holy Spirit on top.
Eight attendant angels surround the piece.
Tinwork by Bobby Romero.
“The tree of life is an iconic representation throughout the history of art dating back to the Book of Genesis in the Holy Bible. In New Mexican Santero art, early unpainted examples were created by Jose Dolores Lopez, the patriarch of the Cordova carvers.” -
Marie Romero Cash
21”
Wood, cloth, watercolor and natural pigments with stamped tin and stamped copper inserts
Signed on bottom
x 30” x 23”
Truchas Altar Screen, 1988
Mahogany with natural pigments
As seen in the Nuestra Senora del Rasario Church in Truchas, New Mexico, to the right of the main altar, is another retablo by Pedro Antonio Fresquis, this one dated 1821.
This retablo is fashioned after this work.
Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe 2016
14” x 11.5” x 2.5”
Wood, watercolor and stamped tin
Titled, signed and dated verso
In December 1531, the Virgin appeared to an Indian neophyte, Juan Diego. In a series of appearances to him, she stated her desire to have a church built upon the site of her appearance, the hill of Tepeyac, just outside the Mexican capital. Her wishes were fulfilled when Juan Diego presented a cloak full of roses that she had given him for the unbelieving bishop. The cloak appeared miraculously imprinted with her image.
This tilma is presently in the basilica of Guadalupe, where it has been since it was transferred in 1709 from earlier chapels, and is the basis for any subsequent reproduction of Nuestra Senora de Guadalupe.
Anita Romero Jones (1930 - 2013)
Anita Romero Jones, a native of Santa Fe, was an exceptional artist and recognized talent in the traditional arts of New Mexico.
The first of seven children of tinsmith Emilio Romero and colcha artist Senaida Romero (and the eldest sister of artist Marie Romero Cash), Jones steered clear of artistic endeavors as a young woman. Instead, she married in 1956 and raised four children while accompanying her husband to homes in California, Florida and Idaho.
After returning to Santa Fe in the early ‘70s, when she was in her 40s, she began to investigate art. Jones tried tinwork, retablo painting, colcha embroidery and hide painting before she discovered the art of carving wooden saints when the curator of the Spanish Colonial Arts Society showed her the collection of bultos in the basement of the Museum of International Folk Art. Jones once noted that because she had grown up with plaster-of-Paris saints, she “went crazy” when she first saw the Museum’s bulto collection.
Wanting to try her hand at carving, Jones brought home a piece of firewood, probably piñon or cedar, to carve. Her husband knew that would be difficult to carve, so he found her a piece of aspen. Soon, she was creating versions of St. Francis (patron saint of Santa Fe and animals), St. Agnes (patron saint of children, engaged couples and gardeners), St. Pasqual (patron saint of cooks and kitchens), St. Cayetano (patron saint of gamblers) and her favorite, the Virgin of Guadalupe. She began exhibiting at Spanish Market in 1974.
A popular and well-known “santera”, Jones participated in Spanish Market each summer from 1974 until her retirement in 2003. Creative and innovative, she was the recipient of many major awards throughout her career. She was best known for her original concept of combining tin altar screens with painted and hand carved figures and creating highly detailed and colorful wooden retablos. Her works have been featured in many books and magazines, including Arte del Espirito; Across Frontiers; The Saint Makers, and Chicana Traditions: Continuity and Change.
In 2000 she was honored by the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC, at their exhibit, “Santos: Substance and Soul.” Her works are in major museum and private collections, including the Museum of International Folk Art, Museum of Spanish Colonial Art, Millicent Rogers Museum, the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, Albuquerque Museum and others.
Altar Screen
45” x 25” x 6”
hand painted wood, carved wood
Signed verso
18.5” x 13.5” x 3” Wood, acrylic and tin
Blessed Maria with the Stable Animals, ca. 1955
14” x 5” x 3”
Sculpture, carved cedar wood
Patrocino Barela (c. 1900 - 1964)
An integral figure in twentieth-century Hispanic and New Mexican art history, Patrociño Barela rose to art world celebrity in the 1930s, an unlikely prospect for someone of his background.
Barela’s date of birth is unclear, but is estimated to be between 1900 and 1904. Barela did not attend school for more than a few weeks and never learned to read or write.
He had left home at age eleven following the death of his mother and sister to travel around the Southwest in search of work. He worked as a steelworker, miner, on the railway, as a farmhand, and as a unionized carpenter. In 1930, he married a widow and eventually with her had three more children (giving them seven in total).
Asked to reconstruct a damaged wooden bulto (a devotional carving) of San Antonio, he later recounted that he knew that someone was going to make 20 dollars from repaired carving and that he was promised five. Although the five dollars never appeared, Barela realized that his work had value and he continued to make figures.
His prodigious output soon caught the eye of Russell Vernon Hunter, artist and New Mexico state director of the WPA, who signed Barela up for the Federal Art Project (FAP). By the summer of 1936 Barela’s sculptures were on display at the Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe, and in September of that year they appeared in New Horizons in American Art at MoMA. In the wake of the exhibition, Time magazine named Barela its “Discovery of the Year.”
Barela’s bultos are motivated by his own metaphysical relationship to Christianity. In showing religious subjects through an abstracted style, he intended for his works to provoke the viewer’s imagination into entering a spiritually symbolic vision. Central to his vision is a tension between the recalcitrance of wood and the animated dynamism of his subjects.
Although some of his work is on religious themes, he rejected the label of Santero since he did not create art specifically for religious purposes; the majority of his output was secular. He examined all aspects of the human condition with an emphasis on relationships within the family. Stylistically his sculpture has affinities to both 11th Century Romanesque and 20th Century expressionism.
Barela died in an overnight fire at his home studio in Cañon, near Taos, New Mexico at the age of 62.
52” x 41” x 18.5” Elk hide, native woods, patina iron hinges and pigments
Ramón José López (b. 1951)
Ramón José López of Santa Fe, New Mexico, sees his direct link to tradition in his santero grandfather, who died two years before López was born on October 23, 1951. He continues to use many of his grandfather’s carving tools. Like his grandfather, he is inspired by his deep religious faith and is committed to perpetuating the santero tradition, carving three-dimensional sculptural representations of Catholic saints.
In the 1970s, López, then a carpenter, began making jewelry. By 1981, his mastery of Spanish colonial metalworking methods had spurred a revival of that craft. He expanded his repertoire to include silver hollowware candlesticks, ecclesiastic vessels such as chalices, and domestic utensils. After studying the works of the nineteenth-century master santeros, he began to carve and paint using traditional hand-adzing and polychrome techniques to create retablos (two-dimensional portrayals of saints and other sacred images, usually on wood panels), bultos (three-dimensional images), and reredos (large carved and painted altar screens). He coats local aspen or piñon pine with gesso made from gypsum and rabbit-skin glue and works directly on the wood with paint he makes from natural pigments and dyes. His metalwork, carving, and painting skills are now also employed in the creation of diminutive relicarios, metal-framed images painted on wood, often with a hidden drawer at the bottom to hold a rosary. In addition, he has taken up the rare colonial art of hide painting.
In all that he does, López credits his cultural heritage and the earlier generations of masters that set the standards toward which he strives: “My traditional work lets me see how influenced I really was by my heritage, my history. It showed me my roots in this area — opened my eyes. It’s all inspired by my upbringing here, my Catholic religion and my interest in the churches of New Mexico, with all their beautiful altar screens. I want to achieve the level of quality of those old masters — what they captured on wood, emotions so powerful, so moving.”
López has passed his skills on to his four children and has served as a master artist in the New Mexico Arts Division’s state folk arts apprenticeship program. He has won Santa Fe’s Spanish Colonial Market’s grand prize and first prize on many occasions and has exhibited widely in dozens of venues, including the Albuquerque Museum, the Taylor Museum in Colorado Springs, the New Mexico State Capitol and the Smithsonian Institution.
Trastero de Fe y Oraciones 2007
Trastero: 19” x 16” ( doors open) x 8” deep
Oraciones: 5” x 17 3/4” x 5” deep
Straw application on wood signed and dated verso
Martha Varoz Ewing is a traditional straw appliqué and tin artist in the Traditional Spanish Market. Martha uses wheat, oat and barley straw in her work, which she gathers from her brother’s wheat fields in Southern Colorado.
Martha was mentored in the art form by the late Paula Rodriguez, who was responsible for the revival of this dying art form in the 1930’s through the WPA (Work’s Progress Administration) during President Roosevelt’s term.
Martha is a native of Santa Fé and has been a participant in the traditional Spanish Market since 2004. She is passionate in sharing her art form and techniques with others in order to ensure its continuation with future generations. She continues to research the art of Straw Appliqué and Marquetry and the various techniques used in other countries.
She is an award winning artist and was awarded the top five awards at the traditional Spanish Market in Santa Fe in 2007 which included: Best of Show, People’s Choice, Archbishop’s Award, 1st place in Straw Appliqué & Museum Purchase Award. (Spanish Colonial Arts Museum in Santa Fe, NM).
In 2013, Martha was awarded 1st Place in Mixed Media and the Poster Award.
Her work is internationally collected and is in the permanent collections of several museums.
