One way to view Navajo Mother-in-Law is as a two-dimensional anthropological diorama. It is Lloyd Moylan’s attempt to depict an archaic Diné (Navajo) custom of mothers-in-law avoiding contact with their sons-in-law. With this painting, Moylan puts culture on display in an exoticizing fashion, as is the case with so many early 20th-century Western American artworks. Here, the subject is quite literally “staged” by means of its theatrically framed composition.
Artist Location: Octavia Fellin Public Library
Navajo
Despite its generic title, Navajo is a highly individualized portrait. Lloyd Moylan achieves an immediate sense of who this person is through the sitter’s lost-in-thought expression and character of his hands. Additional details such as the broken-in nature of his hat, the casual manner in which he rolls a cigarette, and the horse in the distance round out the story of a veteran horseman. While the title attempts to extrapolate from this individual a representation of an entire culture, the force of his personality is too strong.
Journey Through Longhouse Valley
In developing a career as a Western American artist, Lloyd Moylan spent a good amount of time and canvas documenting the movements of Diné (Navajo) people in and around the Navajo Nation.1 He pictured people traveling the route through Long House Valley along the northern part of the Navajo Nation at least three times. At first glance, Journey Through Longhouse Valley appears to be a straightforward depiction of a group of adults and children riding on horseback through the sage- and rabbit-brush. But Moylan’s composition raises questions on closer look. Why do the woman and man in the left foreground turn to face the viewer? If something caught their attention, then why is the woman’s horse not alert to the disturbance? In fact, almost everything about the woman’s appearance is out of place—the way she sits her horse, her ceremonial jewelry, and the way she holds the baby in her arms instead of in a cradleboard. The man’s posture is also peculiar—his foot is out of its stirrup and he has fully shifted his position so it is opposite his moving horse. One way to interpret these incongruities is that the artist, for his own reasons, imposed a portrait of a nuclear family—mom, dad, and baby—onto the scene.
Household Duties
Lloyd Moylan created several paintings of Pueblo women performing domestic chores—each in a different artistic style. While cultural documentation was the professed agenda of many early 20th-century Western American artists, with regard to this specific subject, Moylan appears more interested in the composition he is creating than the story he is telling. Notice the simplified and monumentalized shapes of the women in Household Duties. Here, Moylan was perhaps influenced by the famous Mexican muralist Diego Rivera (some records suggest he may have visited Mexico and seen Rivera’s murals in the 1920s).
Approaching Storm
In Approaching Storm, galloping horses race by in a blur. Details, such as the horses’ facial features, are at most merely suggested through minimal brushstrokes, and their forms are simplified into solid-colored ovals. As the hills and curves of the landscape mirror and encircle these shapes, the painting’s depth is flattened and its subject becomes a swirl of line and color. Seen this way, Lloyd Moylan’s title becomes a question: are the horses running to stay ahead of the weather, or is the thunder of their stampeding hooves a metaphorical storm?
Appointment in Gallup
Appointment in Gallup pictures the seven decades–old (as of 1942) practice of Diné (Navajo)/settler trade established by the reservation system, as a group of Diné riders makes its way to the reservation border town of Gallup, NM, to conduct business. The title of the painting and the composition itself—the men appear to be riding at a leisurely pace and making casual conversation—imply a commonplace, routine activity, but that is only the beginning of the story. In reality, border town relationships have, since their inception, been far from neutral. “Border towns depend upon the products, labor, and economic activity of Native Americans . . . yet power and resources are disproportionately held by non-Native residents.”1 When this painting was made, the City of Gallup’s population—according to the 1940 U.S. Census—was 97 percent white and 1.34 percent “Indian.” Moylan probably saw this as just another aspect of Diné life, which it is, but he missed the underlying tensions and inequities.
Horses & Whiskey Don’t Mix
William Robinson Leigh was a turn-of-the-20th-century aficionado of adventure and storytelling in Western American art. In Horses and Whiskey Don’t Mix, he puts the viewer in the middle of the action, as he captures a horse mid-buck and a rider mid-fall. Details such as a cowering dog, alarmed onlooker, and tumbling cowboy hat add charge to the moment, and the finer points of scattered playing cards and a discarded beer bottle help the viewer to imagine the plot.
Untitled (Donkey Braying)
Though Anna Vaughn Hyatt Huntington is best known for creating several of New York City’s major equestrian monuments, small animal sculptures like Untitled (Donkey Braying) were the “bread and butter” of her artistic career and are just as formidable and persuasive as their large-scale counterparts. Details such as the flick of the tail, the flare of the nostrils, the flex of the ears, and the curvature of the neck communicate this donkey’s bellicose attitude.
This piece probably made its way to the Gallup Art Center as a donation by the artist toward a potential future permanent art museum, likely at the urging of fellow NYC-based artist Albert Lorey Groll, who himself donated five artworks to Gallup.
Untitled (Apache Crown Dancer)
Trained in the Studio Style by Dorothy Dunn at the Santa Fe Indian School between 1936 and 1937, Allan Houser (Chiricahua Apache) worked in this “flat” style during the New Deal and at the start of his career, on his way to becoming a trailblazing 20th-century artist. Even in this early work, one can see Houser pushing the boundaries of the conventions of the era, painting the dancer’s movements with palpable energy and power.
Under Western Skies—New Mexico
Albert Lorey Groll was heralded in his time as the “greatest of American sky painters.” Over the course of his career, he frequently depicted classic Southwestern vistas of limitless sky, bountiful clouds, and the repetition of increasingly distant mesas and mountains.