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.
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 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.
The loose, bold brushstrokes of The Mine have the vigor and vitality of a painting made outdoors (a “plein air” painting). While the location in the picture has not been identified, it is both possible and probable that it depicts the Gallup, NM, area. Herbert Tschudy visited Gallup frequently on the annual trips he made to New Mexico during the first three decades of the 1900s. Handwritten notes on the back of the painting detailing its exhibition history indicate it was made in Gallup. A noticeable and plentiful feature of the Gallup landscape are twisted juniper trees, one of which appears prominently in the foreground of The Mine. Despite the title, the sparsely painted smoke stacks in the painting’s background appear incidental to its primary subject: the dramatic natural features and dynamic sunset colors of the high desert landscape. Because the artist has no known involvement in the New Deal, it is likely that he donated this piece to the Gallup Art Center based on his relationship to the community.
In 1939, according to a newspaper report, “state art directors . . . made provision for selection of a young Navajo painter to aid with the murals for the new McKinley county [sic] courthouse”1 (the now-historic McKinley County Courthouse was built with New Deal funding and opened in 1939). The same article explains that the plan was for “the Navajo painter [to] aid in a sandpainting reproduction on the ceiling of the entrance hall.” The wall painting seen here most closely fits that specific description. It is painted on the ceiling under the second-floor staircase in the building’s back entryway. Because the stairway divides into two at the landing, there is an identical painting on the ceiling across the stairwell.2 The artist created sandpainting pairs throughout the entire first floor, paying particular attention to flanking entrances, lobbies, and passageways with matching sandpainting designs in order, it seems, to bestow the space with protection and blessings.
The design seen here is likely an anthropomorphized “thunder being.” It is generally understood that the zigzag arrows emanating from the head and left hand of the figure represent the sound and reverberation of thunder, while its feet represent storm clouds emitting lighting.
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.
Lloyd Moylan was known by his contemporaries as a “specialist in Navajo subject matter.”1 It is believed that, in the spirit of the Western American self-styled artist-explorers who preceded him, he spent a significant amount of time visiting the Navajo Nation. Indeed, his paintings, presumably of people he met and events he attended, communicate first-hand experience. In Squaw Dance,2 Moylan takes a documentary approach both in the way he positions the viewer as an onlooker removed from the action and also in details such as the curls of cigarette smoke. (The lived experience of this piece is highlighted by comparison to Moylan’s Dance at San Felipe.)
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.
Lloyd Moylan tended to depict Diné (Navajo) subjects in a straightforward, almost documentary manner. However, he approached Pueblo subjects differently. Moylan created several paintings of Pueblo women at work, each in a different style. Here, his approach is reminiscent of Pablo Picasso’s 1917–1925 neoclassical period, with statuesque figures, a subdued color palette, white-washed and simplified drapery, and an architectural composition in which the elements are arranged in a triangular formation akin to an ancient Greek temple pediment frieze. In Untitled (Pueblo Indians), Moylan prioritizes form over content, attending more to the artistry of the scene than to the tasks of the people in it.
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.
