Native American Archives | Gallup New Deal Art

Uncredited Navajo Artist

According to a contemporary newspaper report, “a young Navajo painter” was selected by New Mexico’s New Deal art program in 1939 “to aid in a sandpainting reproduction on the ceiling of the entrance hall”¹ of the McKinley County Courthouse built that same year (as a New Deal project itself). That newspaper article is the only known documentation for what is actually a series of sixteen Diné (Navajo) sandpainting-style wall paintings covering the first floor of the historic courthouse. Importantly, it names the artist of the courthouse’s other major mural, Lloyd Moylan, along with a New Deal art administrator and art instructor. The name of “the Navajo painter”—as they are referenced in the article—has yet to be recovered, however.

The fact that Native artists such as Harrison Begay, Timothy Begay, Allan Houser, and Jose Rey Toledo were publicly credited for their work by the New Deal, but the anonymous courthouse muralist was not, reveals the prevailing attitudes and biases of the era. The New Deal Native artists whose names we know were trained in a U.S. government school to produce Western art-style easel paintings and murals. Their artwork thus fits the Eurocentric definition of “fine art” espoused by the New Deal, and they were recognized in the same manner as their white artist counterparts: by name as individual creators.

New Deal artists like the anonymous courthouse muralist, making what were considered the “folk” or “lesser” forms of “handicraft,” “decorative,” and/or “traditional” arts, however, did not receive the same kind of recognition. As the above-referenced newspaper article reveals, the anonymous courthouse muralist’s sandpainting designs were seen as “reproductions,” not originals. Misconceptions of “traditional” Native arts as utilitarian and/or not imaginative or innovative persist today. Weaving, pottery, basketry, and jewelry, for example, are still often viewed not as singular works of art but as expressions of entire cultures and world views, and are still caught up in ideas of “authenticity” that prioritize conformity to historical standards.

Jose Rey Toledo

Jose Rey Toledo was of Jemez, Zia, Pecos, and Hopi heritage. His interest in art was encouraged from a young age. In school, he made pencil and crayon drawings along with paper arts and crafts. He also grew up sketching hunting scenes in charcoal with his uncle on the kitchen walls while waiting for breakfast. When he was eleven years old, a missionary interested in “documenting” Jemez daily life asked Toledo to make drawings on a chalkboard. “I started by sketching heads of animals, anything I could think of—horses, cats, bighorn sheep,” the artist recalled. “Those were just impromptu chalk drawings . . . She was very surprised that we could have a semblance of some realism in our drawings.”¹

From 1930 to 1935, Toledo attended the Albuquerque Indian School. He took his first formal art classes starting in tenth grade, and remembers being “discouraged by teachers” from including a background in his paintings. As he explained, he was taught that “Pueblo Indian painting was characterized by just a blank surrounding the image . . . that was the Indian style.”² He designed the diploma for his high school graduation, after which he enrolled in the College of Fine Arts at the University of New Mexico. Short on tuition funds, Toledo dropped out after only two weeks, however.³

Toledo’s professional art career ramped up in the early 1940s, as he went to work on the Federal Art Project. By the end of the decade, he was receiving national recognition and ribbons for his work, including at the Gallup Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial (which used one of his paintings for its 1941 poster⁴). In 1947, he was awarded first prize for Indian painting from the Philbrook Museum of Art for his painting Dancing Spirits. “I wanted to do something that was specifically of Pueblo nature. And the thing that came to my mind was a painting of the Zuni Shalako dancing and their spiritual guardians,” he said. “And that was the largest painting I was going to attempt on watercolor paper . . . so I painted that and sent it off.”⁵

Eventually, Toledo returned to school and received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of New Mexico in 1951. He went on to receive a Master’s in art education in 1955.

The knowledge, lifeways, beliefs, and, in particular, ritual dances of his people were the focus of his work. For Toledo’s 1994 obituary, Zuni scholar and former Museum of Indian Arts and Culture curator of ethnography, Edmund J. Ladd, commented that “he was a very astute observer. He painted everything from memory. He recorded a lot of elements and cultural materials that are preserved only in his paintings. His works are a source of preservation for the Pueblos.”⁶

Over the course of his life, Toledo gave back to his community and Native peoples in many ways. He taught art at the Albuquerque and Santa Fe Indian Schools for the first half of the 1950s. In 1956, he applied to become a health education specialist through the Indian Health Service. He served assignments in North Dakota, South Dakota, and Laguna Pueblo, NM, through the early 1970s, at which point he went back to school for his third degree, a Master of Public Health from University of California, Berkeley. Toledo continued to work for the Indian Health Service in Albuquerque until his retirement in 1976.

In addition to being an artist, art educator, and health worker, Toledo was also a highly respected culture bearer, storyteller, community leader, and civil rights activist. From the 1960s to the 1980s he participated in civil rights demonstrations in Gallup and Albuquerque and gave numerous talks on cultural and historical topics. In the 1970s, Toledo also enjoyed yet another career as an actor, appearing in films and television including Flap (1970), The Man and the City (which aired on ABC from 1971–1972), The Trackers (1971), and a popular pizza commercial.

Allan Houser (Allan Capron Haozous)

Born Allan Capron Haozous, Allan Houser is one of the most influential and renowned Native artists of the 20th century. Best known as a sculptor, Houser also excelled in drawing, painting, and teaching. Through his prodigious artistic output and a generation of students and followers, Houser forged and shaped the field of contemporary Native art.

Houser was Chiricahua Apache. His parents, Sam and Blossom Haozous, met while imprisoned at Fort Sill, OK. After famed Chiricahua leader Geronimo’s surrender to the US Army in 1886, Sam was one of a group of children and mothers jailed in St. Augustine, FL. Blossom was born in a prison camp at the Mount Vernon Barracks in Alabama. Both were part of 250 Chiricahua later forcibly moved to Fort Sill, where they remained imprisoned until 1913. Allan was their first child born outside of captivity.

Houser’s artistic career began as a student of Dorothy Dunn’s at The Studio School at the Santa Fe Indian School, where he enrolled in response to an advertisement he saw at the Indian Office in Anadarko, OK. “I was twenty years old when I finally decided that I really wanted to paint,” he said. “I had learned a great deal about my tribal customs from my father and my mother, and the more I learned the more I wanted to put it down on canvas. That’s pretty much how it started.”¹

In a move indicative of the Santa Fe Indian School’s pedagogy, administrators reportedly “suggested” he anglicize his name and change it from Haozous to Houser. Indeed, Houser considered Dunn’s painting instruction equally restrictive. He attended during the 1936-37 school year, overlapping with artists Timothy Begay and Harrison Begay, and earning straight A’s. Houser graduated with a certificate in 1937.² He would later speak of “not caring” for Dunn’s perception of “Indian-style painting” and the art education he received.³

Still, Houser’s talent was immediately recognized by the New Deal and beyond. In terms of the New Deal: in addition to exhibiting his work at federal art centers across the country through the Federal Art Project, the Treasury Section of Painting and Sculpture commissioned Houser to paint murals in the Department of Interior building in Washington, DC, between 1939 and 1941. Houser also had a solo exhibition at what is now known as the New Mexico Museum of Art the year he graduated and another in 1939, and his work was also exhibited at the Golden Gate International Exposition and the New York World’s Fair in 1939.

He achieved even greater success later as he came into his own as an artist. After relocating to Los Angeles in 1942, Houser came into contact with modernist artists and by the end of the decade had established himself as a boundary-pushing, monumental sculptor. Houser broke open narrow expectations of sculpture and Native art, clearing the path to limitless possibilities.

In 1954, he was awarded the Palmes d’ Academiques, a special commendation from the French government, at the Gallup Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial. In 1962, Houser established the sculpture department at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), the successor to The Studio School. He taught at IAIA for almost two decades. In 1992, he became the first Native artist to be awarded the National Medal of Arts. In 2004, a retrospective of his work served as the inaugural exhibition for the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC.

Timothy Bradley Begay

Little is known about Timothy Bradley Begay. What information that can be pieced together indicates that Begay’s life and career followed much the same trajectory as many of the Native artists of his generation. He trained as a painter first under Dorothy Dunn at The Studio School at the Santa Fe Indian School in 7th and 8th grades (the 1935/36 and 1936/37 school years), and continued his art education at least one more year, in 9th grade, under Dunn’s successor, Gerónima Cruz Montoya, before graduating in 1941.³ Timothy Begay’s classmates at The Studio School included Harrison Begay and Allan Houser.

After graduating high school, Begay was hired by Peter Kilhan (who designed the main light fixtures for the Rainbow Room at Rockefeller Center in New York City) to fabricate decorative ironwork. Kilhan’s firm closed at the start of WWII, and Begay enlisted in 1942, serving through the end of the War. He returned to Santa Fe in 1945, where met his wife, Rosaria, took up welding for work, and continued exhibiting paintings alongside former Studio School classmates and fellow Native artists for a period. The Philbrook Museum of Art has two works by Begay dated 1950, but it would appear that, unlike many of his peers, his art career dwindled in the second half of the 20th century as welding became his full-time and lifelong profession.

Harrison Begay

Harrison Begay has been called the “Patriarch of Navajo Art.” His long and influential artistic career began in the 1930s and spanned the second half of the 20th century. Despite his prominence, and as with so many of his contemporaries, Begay’s early years are practically undocumented. Biographical records, and, accordingly, most accounts of his life, begin with his enrollment in the U.S. Indian Boarding School system.

In 1932, Begay started school at the Office of Indian Affairs’ vocational school at Fort Wingate, NM—where the artist reports being given the Anglican name “Harrison Begay.”¹ During his 8th grade year in 1934, at the age of seventeen, Begay transferred to the Santa Fe Indian School. There, he studied art under Dorothy Dunn at The Studio School for two years (in 9th and 10th grades during the 1935/36 and 1936/37 school years), earning A’s in the subject. Begay continued his art education during his senior year under Dunn’s successor, Gerónima Montoya Cruz.² Harrison Begay’s classmates at The Studio School included Timothy Begay and Allan Houser.

After graduating high school in May 1939, Begay began studying architecture at Black Mountain College in North Carolina. WWII interrupted his schooling, however, and Begay spent the next four years in military service. In 1951, he resumed his professional artistic pursuits, co-founding Tewa Enterprises with fellow artist Gerald Nailor Sr. in order to create large series of silkscreen prints of their own and others’ work (including Allan Houser’s). Finding it especially suitable to printmaking and reproduction, Begay continued to work in the Studio Style pioneered and proselytized by Dunn, creating artworks depicting Navajo culture. Likely due to its aesthetic as much as its accessibility, Begay’s art found a wide audience and was popularized.

Begay continued to create art well into his nineties. In 1954, he received a special commendation from the French government, the Palmes d’ Academiques. He was awarded the Native American Master Artist Award from the Heard Museum in 1995 as well as a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2003 by the Southwestern Association for Indian Arts.

Artist Demographic: Native American

Uncredited Navajo Artist

Jose Rey Toledo

Allan Houser (Allan Capron Haozous)

Timothy Bradley Begay

Harrison Begay

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