Exhibition at the New Mexico Museum of Art Highlights its Rich Collection

Written by Augustus Merriweather Saturday, 17 December 2011 00:15

Santa Fe, NM.- The New Mexico Museum of Art is hosting an on-going exhibition highlighting the region's artistic history. "How the West Is One: The Art of New Mexico", organizes key objects from the museum’s collections so that they outline an intercultural history of New Mexico art, from the arrival of railroads in 1879 to the present. This long term exhibition presents 70 works by Native American, Hispanic, and European-American artists which illustrate the changing aesthetic ideals that have evolved within southwestern art over the last 125 years. The exhibition allows viewers to discover the one-ness of New Mexico Art. Unique, unpredictable, often contradictory unity developed from the interactions of the Native American Hispanic, and mainstream American aesthetic traditions. Ranging from tourist icons to internationally acclaimed art, these prime objects exemplify the changing aesthetic paradigms of southwestern art.

The completion of the transcontinental railway through New Mexico in the 1880s  initiated a “culture rush” in the Southwest. European-American artists and anthropologists hurried to the region to observe Native groups and collect artifacts before they were influenced by mainstream American culture and disappeared. The Museum of Fine Arts based its programming on Robert Henri’s conception of an “Open-Door” exhibition policy. Any artist working in New Mexico could exhibit in the museum without having to gain the approval of a jury of critics or collectors. The museum’s radical stance attracted artists to New Mexico helped to make Santa Fe a cultural destination in the 1920s. The “Open Door” policy at the Museum of Fine Arts stimulated an artistic explosion following World War I. The museum provided one of the few places where modern artists could exhibit their works without having to gain the approval of a jury. European-trained illustrators, academic painters and modern artists swelled the ranks of the Santa Fe–Taos Art Movement. Aesthetic differences within the Santa Fe–Taos Art Movement encouraged the development of artistic fraternities. Established academic painters formed the Taos Society of Artists; young Bohemians created the Cinco Pintores (the Five Painters), and established modernists became the New Mexico painters.


The differences diminished and all three groups disbanded by 1927. The anthropologists, intellectuals, and modernist artists in Santa Fe decried the growing commercialization of New Mexico culture in the 1920s. Their rejection of the region’s tourist arts led to efforts by modern artists and intellectuals to “revive” the Hispanic and Indian arts of the past. A major decline in southwestern tourism began in 1929 after the stock market crashed, and sparked a worldwide depression. Artists working in New Mexico had a difficult time as the boom-and-bust tourist cycle again went bust. The federal government, along with private groups, lessened the adverse effects of the Great Depression by providing economic opportunities for artists and by subsidizing regional art traditions.

By the 1930s two groups of modernist artists had developed in New Mexico. Nationally known artists and intellectuals were visited Mabel Dodge Luhan in Taos. Resident local modernists responded to the geographic isolation of New Mexico and developed in more experimental directions. Class differences among the modernists ensured that the two groups would remain isolated from each other and that few interactions would develop. World War II marked a turning point for New Mexico art. The romance of nostalgic paintings— that had dominated New Mexico art for decades—seemed shallow and insignificant in the aftermath of the conflict. This led many New Mexico artists to investigate spiritual and psychological issues. During the Cold War, many New Mexico artists embraced abstraction and rejected realist imagery. Because of its concentration on the physicality of materials and the formal relationships between visual elements, this aesthetic model became known as formalism. At the same time, Native artists challenged the domination of abstract imagery by challenging the stereotypes of “Indian-ness” and by adopting expressionist brushstrokes and Pop Art styles. Feminist artists opened a dialogue that rejected the dominance of mainstream cultural practices. This openness to multiple styles and media led an intercultural group of artists to question traditional identities and consciously to forge new cultural fusions. In the expansion of styles associated with pluralism in New Mexico, popular culture references often were used to question the assumptions implicit in earlier art.


One of the modern highlights of the exhibition is Ray Martín Abeyta’s dual portrait of an Indian from Asia and an Indian from the Americas, which puns on the geographic ambiguity of Christopher Columbus's erroneous "discoveries" in the Caribbean. Columbus mistakenly thought that he had arrived in India when he landed in the Caribbean. The resulting term “Indian” creates confusion relating to the cultures, lands and races of the indigenous peoples from both India and the Americas. The mis-discovery of America was not limited to 1492. The American Southwest itself has survived multiple "discoveries" by nomadic Native Americans, Spanish colonists and missionaries, United States geological expeditions, and anthropo-logical research teams. And finally, individual travelers continue to make their personal discoveries of the landscapes and peoples of New Mexico. All these are reflected in the art on show in "How the West Is One: The Art of New Mexico".

The New Mexico Museum of Art building dates only to 1917, but its architects looked to the past, and based the design on the 300 year-old mission churches at Acoma and other pueblos. It shares the graceful simplicity of pueblo architecture and the sense of being created from the earth. In turn, the building established the Pueblo Spanish Revival style of architecture, for which Santa Fe is known. It was built to become the art gallery of the Museum of New Mexico, which had been founded in 1909 by archaeologist Edgar Lee Hewett. He had begun holding art shows in the historic Palace of the Governors, then realized that an art gallery would be needed to effectively promote art throughout the region. The architects, Rapp and Rapp, had built the wildly successful New Mexico pavilion for the 1915 Panama-California Exposition in San Diego. They enlarged and modified that design and proposed it for the new art gallery. The Art Gallery of the Museum of New Mexico opened in 1917, and many of the works that were exhibited at the opening remain in the collection today. The early Art Gallery’s “open door” policy encouraged artists working in New Mexico to exhibit their work, since Santa Fe’s commercial gallery network was years away. That welcome, mixed with the excitement about New Mexico that was generated by the tourism industry, enticed artists with formal training from other parts of the country. The resulting blending and cross-influences of Native American, Hispanic, and European-based cultures created a unique body of work that is the basis of the New Mexico Museum of Art collection.  The museum changed its name over the years, as it grew and redefined its mission. The current name, The New Mexico Museum of Art, was adopted in 2007 to reflect the breadth of New Mexico art.  Its previous name, "The Museum of Fine Arts" had been adopted in 1962. Visit the museum's website at ... http://nmartmuseum.org

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