Brown Archives | Gallup New Deal Art

Untitled (Kit Carson at Cañon de Chelly)

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.

Untitled (Fray Marcos de Niza Sees Zuni)

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.

Desert

In the 1930s and 1940s, painter Brooks Willis developed a reputation as an “extreme modernist.”¹ The clean lines, hard edges, and sharp angles of Desert certainly live up to this reputation. Yet the soft glow of twilight on the horizon and gradation of light to dark blue in the sky softens the painting’s strict geometry and gives it a more naturalistic ambiance.

Comparing Desert to Willis’s painting Cottonwoods, made in the same year, reveals how the artist experimented with ideas of modernism. However abstract Desert is in its geometrical composition, it retains much of traditional European painting’s emphasis on depth and perspective. Cottonwoods, however, with its visible brushstrokes and high level of attention paid to the act of applying paint to canvas, rather than to developing an illusion of depth, might actually post a greater challenge to tradition.

Cottonwoods

Cottonwoods is a deceptively simple painting by an artist known in his day as an “extreme modernist.”¹ Each individual brushstroke is legible: sunlit trees take form through the masterful placement of light and dark tones side by side in either short, stubby strokes or long, narrow strokes, which gracefully develop a sense of texture.

How Cottonwoods is unapologetically “modern” (by 20th-century standards) is fully understood in comparison to Brooks Willis’s painting Desert, made the same year. Desert takes the more immediately “modern” approach of abstraction, reducing its subject to geometric shapes. Cottonwoods, however, operates not on the level of style but on the level of technique, distilling the very concept of a painting to its most basic materials and methods.

Bench

The New Deal famously built a great number of public buildings. It also furnished those buildings, turning out an incredible quantity of decorative arts. In New Mexico, the Federal Art Project worked in concert with other New Deal programs and state vocational schools to set up workshops employing mostly Hispano artists to produce Spanish Colonial–style furniture and other items for newly constructed buildings across the state. This bench and an identical duplicate were created for the historic McKinley County Courthouse, which was built through the Public Works Administration in 1938.

Bench

In all likelihood, this bench was made at a 1930s State of New Mexico vocational school. During the New Deal, the state’s vocational schools and the Federal Art Project teamed up to manufacture furniture and decorative arts for newly constructed public buildings such as the 1938 McKinley County Courthouse, where this bench and an identical copy are housed. Schools operated according to a workshop model: students/artists were supplied with instructional bulletins, or production manuals, and worked individually and/or collaboratively to create pieces. Although designs were regulated, students/artists found ways to express original artistry. Unfortunately, the New Deal did not credit these students/artists—most of whom were Hispano—for their work.

Trastero

New Mexico’s New Deal programs worked in concert with the State’s vocational schools to produce countless pieces of furniture and decorative arts to fill public buildings. In New Mexico, that program dovetailed with efforts to revive 18th-century Spanish Colonial traditions. The resulting proliferation of Spanish Colonial–style interior décor cemented New Mexico’s visual identity. Take this trastero (cabinet), for example. It was likely produced in a New Deal workshop employing Hispano artists to recreate Spanish Colonial furniture designs, with an emphasis on certain features and motifs such as those seen here: turned spindles, scalloped edges, rosette carvings, and visible joinery. In this way, the New Deal cultivated a visual vocabulary that has since been perceived as looking characteristically “New Mexican.”

Trastero

This trastero (cabinet) is unique in terms of its design, which draws from the confluence of cultures that is New Mexico. It combines “imported,” traditional Spanish Colonial motifs such as the scalloped border and rosettes carved into the lower part of each front door panel with “local” ideas. By decorating the top half of each panel with images of corn stalks, the artist “Indigenizes” the piece—corn is a crop native to the Americas and it continues to be significant to the Indigenous peoples of what is now the Southwestern United States. Unfortunately, New Deal and associated programs generally categorized woodworkers as “craftspeople” and not artists, and did not credit the maker(s) of this hand-built, original work.

Historic McKinley County Courthouse

This building was constructed through the Public Works Administration (PWA). The cornerstone was laid in 1938 and the building opened one year later. The PWA funding formula matched local investment 45 percent to 55 percent. McKinley County raised $125,000 through a general obligation bond—passed by voters 427 to 77 on August 9, 1938—and the PWA made a grant of $102,272.

The building was designed by Trost & Trost, an architecture and engineering firm based in El Paso, TX, to house county offices, including the County Commission chambers and County Treasurer, Clerk, and Assessor offices on the first floor, a courtroom on the second floor, and a jail on the third floor. Trost & Trost designed and built hundreds of buildings across the Southwest in the first half of the 1900s. In addition to the courthouse, the firm is responsible for three other Gallup buildings built in the 1920s/1930s, none of which still stand.

In its design for the McKinley County Courthouse, Trost & Trost fully embraced the mythology of “triculturalism,” which has pervaded New Mexico for generations. Triculturalism promotes the exceptionally simplistic view that the state is home to a harmonious melting pot of three main cultures, “Native American,” “Hispanic,” and “Anglo.” Of course, this narrative never has been inclusive of all of the population’s ethnicities or the great variety of ways New Mexicans identify themselves. The historic courthouse conceptualizes triculturalism, as its north, east, and south facades are designed to represent Anglo, Hispanic, and Native American cultures, respectively.

The building’s north face houses its main entrance and includes classic western European features such as a portico and columns along with Art Deco–style elements such as the geometric carved decorations at either end of the portico. Its east side resembles a Spanish mission church, with a high-arched doorway and bell tower. Its southern exterior is an interpretation of an Ancestral Puebloan cliff dwelling with a T-shaped door and flat wall accented by an asymmetrical arrangement of small, square-shaped, unframed windows.

The interior of the courthouse is highly decorated with tilework, wallpaintings and tinwork light fixtures throughout the first-floor lobby, and large mural titled Zuni Pottery Makers on the wall of a first-floor office. A 2,000-square-foot mural covers the walls of the second-floor courtroom, and the building was originally furnished handcrafted pine tables, chairs, benches and cabinets (now in storage).

The Half-Breed

The Half-Breed is a problematic painting, not least because of its title, a derogatory term for a biracial Native American person. The circumstances of its creation are a mystery. Who it pictures and why it was made are not known. The artist likely donated it, along with Chief Deer (Sioux Indian), to the Gallup Art Center. The two paintings are almost identical in size, and the possibility that they are a set raises the question of what Albert Delmont Smith meant to convey by the comparison. The Half-Breed has not been displayed by Gallup’s public library for some time, and suffered damage long ago due to improper storage.

Color: Brown

Untitled (Kit Carson at Cañon de Chelly)

Untitled (Fray Marcos de Niza Sees Zuni)

Desert

Cottonwoods

Bench

Bench

Trastero

Trastero

Historic McKinley County Courthouse

The Half-Breed

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