This is the second 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 portrays Spanish “explorer” Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, who spent eight years between 1528 and 1536 traveling along the Gulf of Mexico coast from present-day Florida to present-day Texas as part of a group of only four survivors of the ill-fated Pánfilo de Narváez expedition (the group included Estebanico, an enslaved Black Moroccan, pictured at far left). The group survived with help from the Native American peoples they encountered.
In his mural series, Willis relates Southwest history from a Eurocentric perspective. Despite his haggard appearance, Cabeza de Vaca is a commanding presence in Willis’s mural. His figure forms the apex of a triangular composition and is almost spotlit by the setting sun as he takes a confident, purposeful step forward.
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.
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
Edgar Alwin Payne’s paintings are often designed not just to show the viewer the landscape, but to help them imagine themselves within it. In Untitled (Grand Canyon), Payne positions the viewer a short distance down a canyon wall trail. This perspective is more intimate than an aerial view or the panorama visible from the canyon’s rim. Immersed within the canyon, the viewer is dwarfed by its hugeness but can also appreciate the architectural features of the canyon walls.
In his how-to book Composition of Outdoor Painting (1941), Payne described his lofty aim to share the “spiritual flow which encircles animate and inanimate nature—the rhythm of life and the universe” in his paintings. Mesa Redonia (the title appears to be a misnomer for an unidentified landmark) is a prime example of his use of brushstroke, color, and lighting to create atmospheric and mood effects and evoke a sense of awe and wonder.
In general terms, New Deal art programs sought to create a visual record of American life and American spirit. Artists across the country were deployed to document their communities, and Storage Barn is part of that rich tapestry of “the American scene.” Here, Lloyd Moylan memorializes a specific place at a specific moment in time. The artist must have known this particular subject well to have rendered it with such precision. Notice the six-paneled windows, the water trough slightly askew, and the individual blades of grass—even the weed poking up on the left edge of the building. Something outside the picture to the left casts an elongated, funnel-shaped shadow up the side of the barn and across its roof. Moylan also pays attention to each slope, plane, and crevice of the uniquely formed mountain towering over the barn.
In Rain on the Reservation, Lloyd Moylan revels in the light-bending, prismatic effects of a New Mexico monsoon falling in swaths on high mountains and mesas. Moylan’s watercolor technique highlights the geometry of the topography: he lets hard edges of paint form, strengthening the outlines and bulky contours of the shapes. He also paints in layers, so that areas of overlap create a multiplicity of triangles in a kaleidoscopic manner. Moylan loved to experiment with different styles, and in this painting, he plays in the space between realism and abstraction.
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.
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.
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.
