This is the final painting in a seven-part series of Southwestern history murals that the Gallup public schools commissioned J. R. Willis to paint through the Public Works of Art Project between 1935 and 1936—and that still hang in the Gallup High School library.
Willis concludes his series with an image of one of the last American military offensives against Native peoples in the Southwest. Starting in 1863, Kit Carson, at the command of the US Army, led the forced removal of Diné (Navajo) people to Fort Sumner/Bosque Redondo Reservation. Carson employed a “scorched earth” coercion strategy, destroying Diné homes and food sources. In 1864, he waged a final assault in Canyon de Chelly, where Diné people had taken refuge, which culminated in what is known as the Long Walk, a violent march of Diné people hundreds of miles to Bosque Redondo Reservation.
Willis’s mural whitewashes the historical narrative. In it, Carson appears as a somewhat passive armed guard, simply keeping order and guiding the Diné people to their destination. For their part, the Diné people—erroneously and stereotypically depicted in Plains-style buckskin clothing—appear fully cooperative and hardly distressed.
This is the sixth in a seven-part series of Southwestern history murals that the Gallup public schools commissioned J. R. Willis to paint through the Public Works of Art Project between 1935 and 1936—and that still hang in the Gallup High School library.
Willis dedicated the first five murals in his series to roughly 100 years of Spanish colonization of the Southwest in the 16th century. With this mural, he fast-forwards about 250 years to the mid-1800s and the end of the Mexican-American War (skipping over 200 years of Spanish colonial administration, the Pueblo Revolt, and Mexican Independence in the process).
This mural draws on stereotyped narratives of western expansion and American progress. A crew of “pioneers” strides directly toward the viewer, heralding a new world order. Willis seems well aware of his intended audience, encouraging local student-viewers to identify with the image by setting the scene in Gallup—the iconic landmarks of Pyramid Rock and Church Rock are clearly visible in the background.
This is the fifth in a seven-part series of Southwestern history murals that the Gallup public schools commissioned J. R. Willis to paint through the Public Works of Art Project between 1935 and 1936—and that still hang in the Gallup High School library.
Juan de Oñate, known as the first Spanish governor of New Mexico, was notorious in his own time as a cruel tyrant. His reign was so brutal that five years after his resignation, in 1612, he was charged by the Spanish viceroy with thirty crimes and convicted of twelve. His punishment was banishment from New Mexico, four years’ exile from Mexico City, and a monetary fine (given his wealth and political connections, Oñate was able to secure a pardon from a new king in 1623).
One of the crimes for which Oñate was convicted, and the one for which he is most infamous, was excessive force against the Acoma. In 1599, Oñate put the Acoma people “on trial” for attacking a group of Spanish conquistadors and killing twelve (including Oñate’s nephew). Finding them guilty, Oñate sentenced all Acoma residents over age twelve to twenty years of servitude. Additionally, he ordered that men over twenty-five years of age have one foot cut off.
Willis’s portrayal of Oñate reveals none of his criminality or disgrace. On the contrary, for his mural, Willis adopted a long-standing convention for portraits of military commanders and national leaders (from George Washington to Napoleon Bonaparte): Oñate sits confidently atop a white horse, turned three-quarters to face the viewer. Willis further monumentalizes Oñate by choosing what is now known as El Morro National Monument as his backdrop—the colossal rock formation imbues a sense of majesty.
This is the fourth in a seven-part series of Southwestern history murals that the Gallup public schools commissioned J. R. Willis to paint through the Public Works of Art Project between 1935 and 1936—and that still hang in the Gallup High School library.
Willis’s background as a Hollywood set painter is on full view in this highly theatrical rendition of Francisco Vásquez de Coronado’s assault on the ancestral A:Shiwi (Zuni) village of Hawiku (Coronado’s 1540 expedition was the second attempt by Spaniards to locate the so-called Seven Golden Cities of Cibola). In Willis’s conception, the Spanish conquistador rides valiantly into battle encased in golden armor and astride a white horse. This heroic treatment only accounts for the victor’s perspective.
This is the third in a seven-part series of Southwestern history murals that the Gallup public schools commissioned J. R. Willis to paint through the Public Works of Art Project between 1935 and 1936—and that still hang in the Gallup High School library.
Here, Willis fictionalizes the story of Fray (Friar) Marcos de Niza’s sighting of the Pueblo of Zuni (an event fictionalized in much the same way by Niza himself). Sent to find the rumored “Seven Golden Cities of Cibola” in what is now northwest New Mexico in the late 1530s, Niza declined to do more than glance at the Pueblo of Zuni from a distance after he was told that his advance scout (Estebanico, an enslaved Black Moroccan who had previously been part of the Cabeza de Vaca expedition) had been killed by its residents. His report of a large city full of riches, however, spurred Francisco Vásquez de Coronado’s expedition in 1540.
The image of Niza being welcomed with open arms into the Pueblo is a fabrication, a Eurocentric historical rewrite that denies issues of conflict and conquest. Likewise, Willis portrays A:Shiwi (Zuni) people in a primitivist and entirely inaccurate way, wearing loincloths and carrying spears and bows and arrows. This depiction serves the dominant narrative of the supremacy and inevitability of European “civilization” used to obscure and justify the violent policies and practices of colonization.
This is the second in a seven-part series of Southwestern history murals that the Gallup public schools commissioned J. R. Willis to paint through the Public Works of Art Project between 1935 and 1936—and that still hang in the Gallup High School library.
Here, Willis portrays Spanish “explorer” Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, who spent eight years between 1528 and 1536 traveling along the Gulf of Mexico coast from present-day Florida to present-day Texas as part of a group of only four survivors of the ill-fated Pánfilo de Narváez expedition (the group included Estebanico, an enslaved Black Moroccan, pictured at far left). The group survived with help from the Native American peoples they encountered.
In his mural series, Willis relates Southwest history from a Eurocentric perspective. Despite his haggard appearance, Cabeza de Vaca is a commanding presence in Willis’s mural. His figure forms the apex of a triangular composition and is almost spotlit by the setting sun as he takes a confident, purposeful step forward.
Between 1935 and 1936, J. R. Willis was commissioned by the Gallup public schools, through the Public Works of Art Project, to create a seven-part mural series on Southwest history (which still hangs in the Gallup High School library). Willis’s murals depict major events of Spanish and American colonization of what is now the United States from a Eurocentric perspective.
This mural begins the series and sets the stage for the history presented with an inaccurate and biased map of Spanish exploration of Central and North America in the 1400s and 1500s. The map conflates and drastically oversimplifies the political geographies of Central and South America and Africa. The same is true of the travel routes of Christopher Columbus (1492–1502), Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca (1527–1536), and Francisco Vásquez de Coronado (1540–1542), with a few curious “loop the loops” thrown in. Cabeza de Vaca and Vásquez de Coronado feature prominently in the mural series.
Edgar Alwin Payne’s paintings are often designed not just to show the viewer the landscape, but to help them imagine themselves within it. In Untitled (Grand Canyon), Payne positions the viewer a short distance down a canyon wall trail. This perspective is more intimate than an aerial view or the panorama visible from the canyon’s rim. Immersed within the canyon, the viewer is dwarfed by its hugeness but can also appreciate the architectural features of the canyon walls.
In his how-to book Composition of Outdoor Painting (1941), Payne described his lofty aim to share the “spiritual flow which encircles animate and inanimate nature—the rhythm of life and the universe” in his paintings. Mesa Redonia (the title appears to be a misnomer for an unidentified landmark) is a prime example of his use of brushstroke, color, and lighting to create atmospheric and mood effects and evoke a sense of awe and wonder.
Edgar Alwin Payne first visited and painted Canyon de Chelly—a cluster of several canyons, including Canyon del Muerto, in northeastern Arizona—in 1917.1 Commissioned by the Santa Fe Railroad to record the journey from Albuquerque to California, Payne spent four months exploring the canyons, and the artwork he produced cemented his status as one of the period’s leading Western American artists. In Canyon de Muerto, Payne is largely concerned with capturing the scale of the canyon’s 1,000-foot-tall walls. The painting is composed so that the sandstone rock formations extend beyond the boundaries of the frame, taking up over two-thirds of the canvas and rationing the view of the sky. Two strategically positioned horseback riders provide the viewer a reference point for apprehending such dramatic proportions.
