Though Lloyd Moylan’s artistic focus skewed heavily toward northwest New Mexico and Diné (Navajo) subjects, in The Rio Grande Country he shifts his gaze to the area around Alcalde, NM, where he had a home and studio. Many Western American artists have been drawn to the Rio Grande valley since the late 1800s, in part because of its famous natural light. Here, Moylan captures the drama of the sun streaming through a break in storm clouds: the cross atop the church and bent tree appear spotlit, while the bent figure of a woman and the foreground are cast in deep shadow. The play between the jewel tones of the sky and trees and the earth tones of the buildings and hill enhances the extreme lighting effects.
Color: Black
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.
Untitled (Dinnertime)
Lloyd Moylan’s New Deal prints were widely distributed by the Federal Art Project. Untitled (Dinnertime), for example, is now in museum collections from Tucson, AZ, to Madison, WI, and Missoula, MT. Since its invention in the late 18th century, lithography has been valued as a method of high-volume printmaking, and it certainly offered a way for New Deal art programs to produce and distribute prints in great numbers. (Untitled (The Breadwinner) is another example of a widely distributed Moylan lithograph in Gallup’s New Deal art collection.) Lithography has also been valued for the way it combines soft effects of shading with fine line work. Because the process begins with drawing, the result shows the movement of the artist’s hand. In Untitled (Dinnertime), Moylan experiments with a variety of techniques, including outlining, contouring, cross-hatching, scribbling, erasing, and rubbing. The resulting pattern of curves, lines, and textures emphasizes the image’s graphic quality.
Untitled (The Breadwinner)
Lloyd Moylan created several lithographs for the Federal Art Project, which were widely distributed (see Untitled (Dinnertime) for an explanation of lithography as a “high volume” method of production) and which subsequently came to be are known by different titles. The Breadwinner is not only the most documented title for the print seen here, it is also the most apt. While Moylan mostly turned his artistic attention, not without prejudice, to Native American cultures, The Breadwinner looks at social roles and hierarchy in the animal kingdom. A rooster stands with puffed chest, his gaze directed at the viewer, while a hen, gaze averted, bows to pick up a piece of feed—presumably provided by her companion—in this depiction of stereotypical gender roles.
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?
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.
Inscription Rock—N. Mexico
In the early 1900s and for the next four decades, New York–based artist Albert Lorey Groll made numerous trips to the Southwest and produced paintings, etchings, and works on paper that introduced East Coast audiences to novel (for them) landscapes. Some of the places he pictured, though famous now, were only just gaining national recognition at the time of his travels. For example, the Grand Canyon, which Groll repeatedly visited and sketched, was made a National Park in 1919. Likewise, El Morro National Monument, the subject of Inscription Rock—N. Mexico, was designated in 1909.
West Wind
In this full-length portrait, Joseph Fleck monumentalizes the figure of a Pueblo woman: she is as tall as the clouds—the top of her hand cannot even be contained by the canvas—and she is pictured at an oblique angle that exaggerates her proportions. The overall effect is to evoke the perceived mythology of its Native subject—a significant focus of Western American art at the turn of the 20th century and in the following decades. Visual references to Taos Mountain and the ancient Taos Pueblo complex in the distance, as well as to the cultural and generational practice of gathering water (note the woman and child in the background) underscore the painting’s concepts of timelessness and natural harmony.
Navajo Blanket Portfolio – Plate 15
From 1939–1942, the Laboratory of Anthropology in Santa Fe sponsored a New Deal Federal Art Project initiative to create a print portfolio of fifteen Navajo weaving designs drawn from its collections, and hired artist Louie Ewing to orchestrate the effort. The silkscreen printing process was a relatively new technology to the United States, so Ewing, with assistance from fellow artist Eliseo Rodriguez, had to essentially invent his own version of it. Two hundred of each print were produced. Prints were distributed to the Bureau of Indian Affairs and federal government “Indian service schools,” as well as universities, libraries, and museums nationwide for instructional and educational purposes.