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).
Color: Green
Dance at San Felipe
Since the late 1880s, photographers from Charles Lummis to Edward Curtis, as well as painters—especially those associated with the Taos Society of Artists—frequently pictured Pueblo ceremonial dances as the appetite and market for images of the Southwest’s Native peoples grew with the expansion of the railroad and rise of the tourist economy. Dance at San Felipe is Lloyd Moylan’s rendition of this popular voyeuristic subject, but rather than providing an “eye witness” account, the painting appears contrived. The overall image is too “clean,” lacking visual information and detail, and too perfect in its orderliness and symmetry. Perhaps Moylan modeled this scene on other artworks he had seen, possibly mass-produced picture-postcards, calendars, and other souvenir items and promotional materials. (The artificiality of this piece comes into focus in comparison to Moylan’s Squaw Dance.)
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.
Untitled (Allegory–History of the Region)
This 2,000-square-foot, site-specific mural covers all four walls of the courtroom of the historic McKinley County Courthouse. Lloyd Moylan painted it in 1940, the year after the building opened to the public. Utilizing the architecture of the room to organize his narrative, he tells a version of Southwestern United States history, from the pre-human period to the turn of the 20th century. The mural begins in the northwest corner with images of prehistoric animals such as dinosaurs. The west wall covers the beginning of human history through the pre-contact period. With the next turn of a corner, Moylan introduces Spanish and then American colonization and the “Indian reservation” era. The east wall is dedicated to Western American expansion and settlement, and the final corner memorializes the major historical turning point of the transcontinental railroad.
Untitled (Church in the Rio Grande Valley)
Notice the play of form and texture in Untitled (Church in the Rio Grande Valley). Three different cloud formations—billowing cumulus, popcorn stratus, and wispy cirrus—fill the sky. Immediately below, the horizon consists of a peaked hill of weather-worn red rocks and dirt , against which the pitched roof and steeple of a clean-lined, uniformly built church is set. The precise geometry of the church building contrasts with the undulating curves of its thick adobe courtyard wall. In the lower right corner, the bristly branches of a green bush poke through a pile of sharp-edged, glinting rocks—which look recently placed—interrupting the otherwise smooth, elongated brushstrokes of the foreground.
The painting evokes tensions between human-made and natural, new and ancient, and the lone figure seems caught in the middle. Literally, she is mid-step, her torso turned one way and her head the other. Figuratively, in the way she is moving forward while also looking backward, she may be a reflection of the artist’s creative mindset. In the 1930s, Lantz was part of a group of modernist New Mexican artists seeking “freedom from inhibitions”1 and tradition in art.
Untitled (Aspens)
Best known as a printmaker, Gene Kloss was a multitalented and prolific artist for whom Taos, NM, was an ample and consistent muse, providing a career’s worth of inspiration. Writing that “an artist must keep in close contact with nature and man’s fundamental reliance on nature in order to produce a significant body of work,” 1 Kloss was interested in rendering the changing seasons of the Taos landscape. In Untitled (Aspens), she captures the blazing yellow of fall in the Sangre de Cristo mountains, the foliage set alight by the slanting, intense rays of the late afternoon sun. (See her 1936 painting Midwinter in the Sangre de Cristos in the Smithsonian American Art Museum’s collection for a compelling comparison.)
Spring Landscape
D. Paul Jones’s artistic career, in terms of both production and exhibition, was largely concentrated in and around the Española valley area of New Mexico, countryside studiously represented in Spring Landscape. The artist would have been intimately familiar with the view: a mountain range on the horizon borders a valley blanketed in plowed and planted fields, where squat adobe dwellings nestle among cottonwood trees.
Navajo Blanket Portfolio – Plate 11
From 1939 to 1942, the Laboratory of Anthropology in Santa Fe sponsored a New Deal Federal Art Project initiative to create a 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.
Navajo Blanket Portfolio – Plate 9
From 1939–1942, the Laboratory of Anthropology in Santa Fe sponsored a New Deal Federal Art Project initiative to create a 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.
Navajo Blanket Portfolio – Plate 8
From 1939–1942, the Laboratory of Anthropology in Santa Fe sponsored a New Deal Federal Art Project initiative to create a 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.