Eliseo Rodriguez1 is best known for reviving the 18th/19th-century Spanish Colonial art of straw appliqué as a New Deal artist, but he was also a highly accomplished painter, though few of the paintings he made for the Federal Art Project are credited to him. Despite the lack of credit often afforded artists of color by New Deal art programs (and conventional Eurocentric art historical scholarship), Rodriguez was a multitalented modern artist who significantly contributed to the development of the Santa Fe art colony in the first half of the 20th century and beyond. In Quenching Their Thirst, Rodriguez employs confident, bold lines and a primary color palette to show a scene of everyday Hispano life in New Mexico and at the same time refer to the biblical parable of Jesus and the woman at the well. Author Carmella Padilla explains that “Rodriguez’s devout spirituality and personal religious experience infused his paintings with a special soulfulness.”2
Color: Brown
Sandpainting-style Wall Painting (Half Circle)
This Diné (Navajo) sandpainting-style wall painting is one of sixteen such murals decorating the first-floor lobby of the historic McKinley County Courthouse. It was reportedly painted by “a young Navajo painter”1 in 1939, the year the New Deal building opened. It is the companion piece to a semicircular mural painted on the wall opposite it (the murals are painted on either side of the building’s entryway staircase). Together, the two murals form a circular composition that references the four cardinal directions, represented by the circles and rectangles colored blue and black (seen here) and yellow and white (seen in the companion piece), which are sacred to the Diné people because the Diné homeland is delineated by northern, southern, eastern, and western mountains (as seen in the Navajo Nation flag).
It is not only this mural and its counterpart that are painted in pairs. Throughout the entire first floor of the courthouse, sandpainting-style wall paintings are composed in sets. Moreover, the artist intentionally placed sandpainting designs and figures so that they flank entrances, lobbies, and passageways, with most symbolically communicating messages of guardianship and blessing. Here, the semicircular mural includes four songbirds, perhaps bluebirds and orioles, which traditionally symbolize good fortune (generally speaking). In this manner, the artist wrapped the entire space in a protective embrace.
Sandpainting-style Wall Painting (Half Circle)
This wall painting is one of sixteen Diné (Navajo) sandpainting-style murals decorating the first-floor lobby of the historic McKinley County Courthouse. It was reportedly painted by “a young Navajo painter”1in 1939, the year the New Deal building opened. It is the companion piece to a semicircular mural painted on the wall opposite it (the murals are painted on either side of the building’s entryway staircase). Together, the two murals form a circular composition that references the four cardinal directions, represented by the circles and rectangles colored white and yellow (seen here) and blue and black (seen in the companion piece). The four directions are sacred to the Diné (Navajo) people because the Diné homeland is delineated by northern, southern, eastern, and western mountains (as seen in the Navajo Nation flag).
It is not only this mural and its counterpart that are painted in pairs. Throughout the entire first floor of the courthouse, sandpainting-style wall paintings are composed in sets. Moreover, the artist intentionally placed sandpainting designs and figures so that they flank entrances, lobbies, and passageways, with most symbolically communicating messages of guardianship and blessing. Here, the semicircular mural includes four songbirds, perhaps bluebirds and orioles, which traditionally symbolize good fortune (generally speaking). In this manner, the artist wrapped the entire space in a protective embrace.
Sandpainting-style Wall Painting
The first recorded instance of reproductions of Diné (Navajo) sandpainting designs being used for interior decoration was in the El Navajo Inn in Gallup, NM. The El Navajo was a Harvey House hotel—one of dozens owned and operated by the Fred Harvey Company at major stops along the Santa Fe Railroad. It opened in 1923 and featured first-of-its-kind artwork in the lobby and common areas: twelve sandpainting-style wall paintings copied by Fred Greer, a white artist, from drawings by Sam Day Jr., a Diné artist. This use of sandpainting designs was highly controversial as sandpainting was traditionally a deeply sacred, private, and protected ceremonial practice. To quell the outcry from the Diné community, the Harvey Company arranged for the hotel’s opening to include a ceremony performed by a reported twenty-nine “medicine men.”1
Less than two decades later, the sandpainting-style wall painting concept was repeated in Gallup’s 1938 New Deal McKinley County Courthouse, when, according to a contemporary report, “state art directors . . . made provision for the selection of a young Navajo artist to aid with the murals for the new McKinley county [sic] courthouse.”2 The artist painted a total of sixteen sandpainting-style wall paintings throughout the building’s first floor, and, in fact, the one seen here is a nearly exact replica of one installed at the El Navajo Inn3 (which was demolished in 1957). Perhaps because these murals are seen as “decorative” or “reproductions” of traditional/cultural designs, the artist was never credited by name (the story of the three sets of painted-over initials seen along the bottom of the painting has been lost; they are presumed to be additions made and then “erased” long after the fact and their relevance and meaning is, at this point, undetermined).
Sandpainting-style Wall Painting
This is one of sixteen wall paintings that decorate the first-floor lobby of the historic New Deal-built McKinley County Courthouse, reportedly made by “a young Navajo painter”1 in 1939 (the same year the courthouse opened). The wall paintings replicate designs and compositions originating from the Diné (Navajo) spiritual practice of sandpainting. The transition of sandpainting from a sacred, private ritual to a secular, public art form occurred at the turn of the 20th century as cultural tourism arose in the Southwest and a market for Native art developed. Diné artists navigated this transition by modifying sandpainting designs to offset their spiritual significance—swapping colors, eliminating certain elements, re-ordering patterns. The mural seen in this image highlights this transition as it incorporates the aesthetics and language of sandpainting with European-derived visual practices. Here, common sandpainting designs and symbols are arranged in a vertical wall composition (sandpaintings were historically created on the ground) to represent a figure in dimensional space—a ceremonial dancer standing on a surface surrounded by plants and/or a landscape.
Untitled (Wagon & Campfire)
Untitled (Wagon and Campfire) is an ambitious and tightly composed painting involving twenty-two figures, four covered wagons, and four horses. The painting has an architectural quality, with the elements organized in layers: a sequence of mesas establishes the background, a row of wagons comes next, and then a line of people standing, before the layers conclude with a seated group huddled together in the foreground. The saddle purposefully tucked in the lower right corner enhances this “paper peep show” effect. Within each layered grouping, figures are carefully considered in terms of individual posture and relationship to each other. The warm glow emanating from the campfire directs the viewer’s attention, illuminating details such as the glint of the coffee pot, a man’s pensive expression, the spokes of a wagon wheel, a horse’s ear hairs, the tie of a tsiiyééł (hair bun), and the turquoise earrings that dot the scene. Details outside the reach of this central light source are present but relaxed, as the harmonious earth-toned color palette unifies the composition.
Scenes of Diné (Navajo) people traveling by wagon and horseback were a favorite subject of Lloyd Moylan’s. See also in Gallup’s New Deal Art Collection: Prelude to Dust, Appointment in Gallup, and Journey Through Longhouse Valley.
Prelude to Dust
Prelude to Dust pictures a Diné (Navajo) family grouping—a man, two women, and two children—huddled together with their animals against the wind. The force of the gale is shown through the billowing wagon bonnet, the man’s up-turned hat brim, the tipped-over coffee pot, and the blown-back hair of both the women and their horse. The streaks of line and color in the sky above and the valley below add to the windswept effect. The painting captures a defining feature of life in northwest New Mexico, “high wind events,” and speaks to Lloyd Moylan’s close study of the area and its inhabitants, which distinguished him among contemporaries in Western American art during his career.
Moylan occasionally created variations on a theme, and Prelude to Dust is an interesting parallel to From Shiprock to Shonto (also made in 1942) in the University of Arizona Museum of Art collection. From Shiprock to Shonto portrays the same or a similar family, again contending with extreme gusts as they journey across the high desert of the Navajo Nation. Though not entirely accurately depicted, the titanic rock formation in the background of Prelude to Dust may also be that of Shiprock.
Navajo Mother-in-Law
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.
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.
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?