Project Artists Archives | Page 2 of 2

Helmuth Naumer, Sr.

Born and raised in Germany in the heart of the Black Forest, Helmuth Naumer, Sr. dreamed of the American West he knew from “cowboy and Indian” novels by German author Karl May. In 1925, at the age of eighteen, he left for New York. As a naturalized citizen, he spent the next year traveling across America, stopping briefly in Santa Fe, NM before reaching Los Angeles, CA in 1926. Low on funds but still consumed by wanderlust, he joined the Merchant Marine and served at sea for six years. In 1932, he moved to Santa Fe, the town that in his view epitomized the “Old West.” Naumer said he “wanted to make a record of this country before it was overrun, still wild and beautiful because once that’s gone, we can never get it back.” Naumer built a home and studio on San Sebastian Ranch and raised horses.

Naumer quickly became known for his pastels on black paper. “Pastels are particularly suited for painting Western landscapes,” Naumer said. “Their soft tones match those of the distant mountain ranges and accentuate the delicate shades of our sunsets.”¹

Between 1935 and 1936, Naumer was commissioned by the National Parks Service, through the Works Progress Administration, to create artwork for the newly built visitor center at Bandelier National Monument. Naumer said he was paid $45 per month² to create fourteen pastel scenes depicting views of the Monument and nearby Pueblo villages (still on display at the Monument’s visitor center). For these paintings, the artist spent time living at Kewa (Santo Domingo) Pueblo.³ In 2016, the US Postal Service used Naumer’s painting Administration Building, Frijoles Canyon on a “Forever” stamp as part of a sixteen-piece set commemorating the National Parks Service’s centennial.

Of his experience as an artist in New Mexico during the New Deal, Naumer said: “It was difficult being an artist here, especially during the Depression when nobody had any money. To get along you had to trade pictures for necessities. I traded for furniture, for cars, for horses and goats.”⁴

Naumer continued as a prolific pastelist, though he also worked in oils and watercolors over the course of his career. In the late 1930s, he was traveling 1,500 miles each month across the state to paint en plein air (outdoors). “I can’t explain it, but paintings made at the scene sell better than those made in a studio of some imagined landscape,” he said. “Perhaps it’s some detail or shading at the actual scene that would be omitted from a studio painting.”⁵ He won prizes at the New Mexico State Fair each year he exhibited between 1939 and 1955, and his contemporaries excitedly noted that magazine magnate Henry Luce was one of his collectors.

In 1938, a newspaper columnist asked Naumer about Hitler’s rise to power. According to the writer, “Naumer’s merry grey eyes instantly became serious and he said: ‘It will probably be two or three years from now—perhaps sooner—but someday things are going to pop wide open in Europe and it will be the worst war this hectic world has ever experienced.’”⁶ Naumer went on to serve as a staff artist in the Army during WWII. After returning home, Naumer continued to paint and exhibit, and his work became increasingly abstract.

Describing his career in a 1959 pamphlet, he said that “though born in Europe and having lived in many places in the world, coming to the Southwest was like coming home. Here I found peace and beauty and these I try to paint.”⁷

Lloyd Moylan

Lloyd Moylan was a very productive New Deal artist. Indeed, he is the best-represented artist in Gallup’s New Deal art collection, which holds nineteen of his easel paintings and prints and one of his largest mural commissions (2,000 square feet).

Moylan first trained in his hometown at the Minneapolis Art Institute before continuing his studies at The Art Students League in New York City. A teaching position at the Broadmoor Art Academy brought him west to Colorado Springs, CO, in 1920. Moylan’s interest in mural painting developed during this time as the result of several trips to Mexico—the Mexican mural movement began in the early 1920s.

Moylan completed several private mural commissions in Colorado Springs, including for the Antlers Hotel, which involved research travel to Taos, NM. Those visits inspired his move to New Mexico in 1934, where he set up a studio in Alcalde along with D. Paul Jones, who studied at the Broadmoor. In New Mexico, Moylan continued creating murals on a commission basis, for the Ute Theatre (since demolished) for example, but mainly now through the state’s Federal Art Project (FAP). The New Mexico FAP hired Moylan for large-scale murals at Eastern New Mexico University in Portales and Highlands University in Las Vegas (see “Additional Federal Art Projects” section below) in addition to McKinley County’s historic courthouse in Gallup. As a result of his participation in the New Deal, Moylan became a big believer in the value of public art and murals in particular. In an essay for the Federal Art Project, he wrote that public art “will bring to the surface much that is growth-provoking in the spirit of humanity.”¹

At the conclusion of the New Deal, Mary C. Wheelwright hired Moylan as the first administrator/curator of the Museum of Navajo Ceremonial Art, which she founded in 1937 in Santa Fe (and which is now known as the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian).

Moylan served in that capacity for twelve years, during which time he gained broad recognition as a painter, building on his reputation as a muralist. Moylan was well known by contemporaries as a premier watercolorist, “cherished modernist,”² and “specialist in Navajo subject matter.”³ He was a popular and frequent gallery and museum exhibitor, with a following of “Moylan enthusiasts.”⁴ He was an art judge for the State Fair in 1943, and his work was included in defining exhibitions of the era, including the Museum of New Mexico’s Styles in New Mexico Art traveling exhibition in 1946 as well as its 1955 traveling exhibition Santa Fe Art 1917–1955.

Wheelwright dismissed Moylan from his post in 1954, after which his career diminished. Moylan spent the last decade of his life between California and New Mexico.

Paul Valentine Lantz

Paul Lantz’s art career was fast and furious, at least for the first part. He enrolled at the Kansas City Art Institute at the age of fifteen,¹ reportedly the youngest student ever enrolled. Two years later, Lantz moved to New York City and worked as a dishwasher to fund his studies at the Art Students League. One version of the story is that after four years, the stock market crash prompted him to board a freight train to Santa Fe. Another version, recorded in Town & Country magazine, is that he hopped a boxcar to the Southwest after he “too enthusiastically” witnessed a Communist meeting in Union Square.² In any event, he made his way to New Mexico, his connection to the state being that of Taos Society of Artists member Randall Davey, who had been his teacher in Kansas City. Davey would continue to mentor Lantz and help to facilitate his career for the next decade.

Lantz lived and painted in Santa Fe and Albuquerque from 1930 to 1939, and in that time left a lasting mark. Lantz’s career operated on two parallel tracks. His living was mostly made as a commercial artist, creating murals and embellishing furniture for La Fonda Hotel, fulfilling portrait commissions, restoring church frescoes, and painting the “Toyland” set for the town of Madrid’s famous Christmas display. At the same time, he pursued his career as a “fine” artist. In 1933, he helped found the Rio Grande Painters, a modernist artist society that successfully organized shows across the state for several years.

During the New Deal, Lantz was first employed by the Public Works of Art Project as an easel painter. He made landscapes and scenes of Cabeza de Vaca’s exploits to hang in government buildings. Lantz was later employed by the Federal Art Project and in this capacity painted a mural for the Clovis Post Office between 1937 and 1938. Though he made a research trip to Clovis to prepare for the project, the subject matter of which was the history of Clovis, Lantz’s mural was criticized by locals for its lack of accuracy. “Old timers [attacked] it . . . saying that some of the buildings are in the wrong places and that a water trough, a conspicuous object on the street in the early days, has been omitted entirely from the picture. Others have attacked the appearance of a horse in the mural,” saying that it looked like it only had three legs. The Clovis News-Journal pointed out that “the animal’s position indicates that the [horse] is single-footing—something a cowboy would not tolerate.”³ Despite such thorough scrutiny, in 1939 Lantz’s art was chosen to represent New Mexico at both the New York World’s Fair and the Golden Gate International Exposition in San Francisco.

In 1940, to fund a trip to New York City for a show of his work in a Park Avenue gallery, Lantz incorporated himself and sold fifty shares for $10 each in “Paul Lantz Inc.”⁴ It is unclear if this enterprising move paid off. From New York, Lantz sent a painting back to Santa Fe to be sold at the Museum of New Mexico Art Gallery for $500, with the proceeds going to his shareholders as “dividends.” Lantz’s business ventures ultimately led to his divorce, and in a 1942 court filing, his wife declared the couple “broke.”⁵

The second half of Lantz’s career involved travel and mostly commercial artistic production. Lantz served as an artist in the Army during World War II and moved to California afterward. He then spent a decade on a farm in upstate New York and a few years in Mexico City. During this time, he worked as a book illustrator, illustrating more than twenty-five books including the 1942 Newberry Medal winner The Matchlock Gun by Walter D. Edmonds and Little Navajo Bluebird by Ann Nolan Clark. Once he decided to start painting “seriously” again, it was only a few years before he returned to Santa Fe permanently in 1973.

In a 1976 Southwestern Art article, Lantz’s contemporary John Jellico characterized him as a “Modern Old Master,” noting the color, dynamism and “fine pattern of movement” within his work.⁶

Gene Kloss (Alice Geneva Glasier Kloss)

Born Alice Geneva Glasier, Gene Kloss was already a highly respected California printmaker when she made her first trip to Taos, NM, for her honeymoon with her husband, musician and poet Phillips Kloss, in 1925. She brought her etching press on that trip and made prints from their campsite in Taos Canyon. “We bought a sack of concrete and set it up on a stump in the woods and I printed my plates there,” she explained. Kloss would later claim that she was “a New Mexican from then on.”¹ She would spend the next twenty years traveling between California and New Mexico before settling permanently in Taos.

The New Deal allowed Kloss to continue to succeed as an artist. “[The New Deal] was a very pronounced help to me in my career because the government subsidy alone gave it dignity and importance,” she said in a 1964 interview, continuing, “and their . . . attitudes towards the artist in their free expression and pulling the most out of one to do your best technically, and the amount, and the result of speeding you on your way in your creative work.”²

First, for the Public Works of Art Project, Kloss created a print series of nine New Mexico scenes that were reproduced and distributed to public schools across the state. She was then employed by the Federal Art Project to create etchings, oils, and watercolors. “They went to galleries, museums. Lots of them went to Washington for the offices,” Kloss recalled. Kloss won the Eyre gold medal at the 1936 exhibition of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and in the two decades following the New Deal, her work was collected by many of the country’s major museums. Her paintings explored the landscapes, cultures, and people of New Mexico, and she appreciated the New Deal’s emphasis on regionalism. “I think it [the New Deal] stimulated an interest in art. Because people in outlying places who had never seen anything had murals in their post office and received some of the easel pictures or prints to hang in their schools and their public buildings. I think it is one thing that started the public interest in art.”³

D. Paul Jones

Not much is known about D. Paul Jones, who appears to have been an introverted artist. While his murals and paintings have survived in New Deal art collections across New Mexico, from Raton to Clayton to Santa Fe to Socorro, the artist’s life, it seems, was lived mostly off the record. Kathy Flynn, self-titled “lead detective” for New Deal art in New Mexico, paints Jones as a restless outsider, perhaps traumatized by military service in France during World War I, writing, “After the war, he took himself to Phoenix and worked in a bank but needed more solitude, nature and art, so he bought some art supplies and food and went into the wild of the Hopi and Navajo country. He learned all about these people, their country and customs and was given [a] Navajo name [meaning Little Dog] because of his gift for imitating animal sounds.”¹

Jones reportedly went on to study at the Broadmoor Art Academy in Colorado Springs, where he met Lloyd Moylan, eventually moving with Moylan in the early 1930s to Alcade, NM, where they shared a studio.

Available records indicate that the New Deal was the most active time in Jones’s career. His formal introduction to the Santa Fe art scene appears to have been through an exhibition of Federal Art Project (FAP) artists at the Museum of New Mexico,² followed shortly thereafter by a revealing of his FAP mural, Founding of San Juan, The First Capitol of New Spain completed for the Spanish-American Normal School in El Rito, NM (now a campus of Northern New Mexico College). Contemporary reviews of Jones’s art were typically mixed. One reviewer of Founding of San Juan admired his landscapes while casting doubt on his figure-drawing abilities.³ Santa Fe artist and art critic Alfred Morang described Jones as tending toward a “gloomy color scale,” yet utilizing contrast effectively.⁴

Perhaps his failure to gain any real traction under the New Deal is why his career seemingly stalled at its conclusion. Jones continued to operate locally, so to speak, as a beloved Española Valley artist for the remainder of his life.

John A. Jellico

John Jellico was an artist, educator, and writer, with a life and career that spanned several states, industries, and genres.

Born to Austrian immigrants (his gravestone marker notes that his mother was a passenger on the Carpathia when it rescued Titanic shipwreck survivors), Jellico was raised in northern New Mexico and graduated from Raton High School in Raton, NM. He set his sights on the artistic profession from an early age, and worked diligently to achieve his goal. According to an unpublished biography written by his daughter, Nancy Norris Jellico, “his quest for knowledge about art and artists was insatiable and he was never idle. In high school his teachers discovered his art ability and kept him busy with posters, backdrops for plays, and other school artwork. He sketched and painted constantly.”¹

Jellico was also aided in his quest during his high school years by Manville Chapman, a noted artist with ties to Taos, NM, originally from Raton. Chapman immediately recognized Jellico’s talent and exchanged art lessons for modeling work. With Chapman’s help, Jellico was able to start selling paintings, adding those earnings to the savings he was putting away for art school from his summer jobs as a ranch hand.

After graduating high school in 1934, Jellico immediately enrolled in The Art Institute of Pittsburgh. After his first year, he was awarded a scholarship which enabled him to squeeze his next two years into one by taking both day and evening classes. After graduating in 1936, Jellico pursued another year of study at the Phoenix Institute of Art in New York City, where he trained with top illustrators of the period, including Norman Rockwell. Reportedly, Rockwell criticized Jellico’s drawing of horses, to which Jellico retorted that he had no right to do since Rockwell had never lived in the West. Jellico spent the next five years mainly working as a book illustrator and commercial artist, while also showing and selling at Greenwich Village galleries and continuing his education through night classes at the Grand Central School of Art.

While living in New York City, Jellico maintained his ties to New Mexico, exhibiting in Raton in at least 1938 and 1941. Additionally, according to his daughter’s biography, he spent the summer of 1937 in New Mexico during which he painted a mural for a church in Raton. Perhaps that is also when he became involved in the state’s federal art programs. In an undated, handwritten note to Kathryn Flynn, author of Public Art and Architecture in New Mexico: 1933-1943, Jellico reported that he produced “a large number of easel paintings” for the WPA (Works Progress Administration). He also describes being hired by the WPA to create twenty-seven ceiling decorations with Juanita Lantz for the Raton Public Library (since demolished).²

In 1942, Jellico enlisted and spent the bulk of his military service working under the Chief of Chaplains of the US Air Force and painting murals for sixty-three Air Force chapels.

At the end of WWII, he was offered a job as an instructor at his alma mater, The Art Institute of Pittsburgh, where he would also become the Assistant Director in three years’ time. With the West calling him home, he moved to Denver, CO, in the mid-1950s to help build the Colorado Institute of Art, leading the school until its sale in 1975 (after which it became the Art Institute of Colorado; now closed).

While fulfilling his role as art educator and administrator, Jellico also authored several instructional books, including How to Draw Horses for Commercial Art (1946) and textbooks for the International Correspondence Schools of Scranton, became a magazine editor and writer, and co-founded a gallery in Santa Fe in 1969, which prompted him to return full-time to painting and exhibiting.

Allan Houser (Allan Capron Haozous)

Born Allan Capron Haozous, Allan Houser is one of the most influential and renowned Native artists of the 20th century. Best known as a sculptor, Houser also excelled in drawing, painting, and teaching. Through his prodigious artistic output and a generation of students and followers, Houser forged and shaped the field of contemporary Native art.

Houser was Chiricahua Apache. His parents, Sam and Blossom Haozous, met while imprisoned at Fort Sill, OK. After famed Chiricahua leader Geronimo’s surrender to the US Army in 1886, Sam was one of a group of children and mothers jailed in St. Augustine, FL. Blossom was born in a prison camp at the Mount Vernon Barracks in Alabama. Both were part of 250 Chiricahua later forcibly moved to Fort Sill, where they remained imprisoned until 1913. Allan was their first child born outside of captivity.

Houser’s artistic career began as a student of Dorothy Dunn’s at The Studio School at the Santa Fe Indian School, where he enrolled in response to an advertisement he saw at the Indian Office in Anadarko, OK. “I was twenty years old when I finally decided that I really wanted to paint,” he said. “I had learned a great deal about my tribal customs from my father and my mother, and the more I learned the more I wanted to put it down on canvas. That’s pretty much how it started.”¹

In a move indicative of the Santa Fe Indian School’s pedagogy, administrators reportedly “suggested” he anglicize his name and change it from Haozous to Houser. Indeed, Houser considered Dunn’s painting instruction equally restrictive. He attended during the 1936-37 school year, overlapping with artists Timothy Begay and Harrison Begay, and earning straight A’s. Houser graduated with a certificate in 1937.² He would later speak of “not caring” for Dunn’s perception of “Indian-style painting” and the art education he received.³

Still, Houser’s talent was immediately recognized by the New Deal and beyond. In terms of the New Deal: in addition to exhibiting his work at federal art centers across the country through the Federal Art Project, the Treasury Section of Painting and Sculpture commissioned Houser to paint murals in the Department of Interior building in Washington, DC, between 1939 and 1941. Houser also had a solo exhibition at what is now known as the New Mexico Museum of Art the year he graduated and another in 1939, and his work was also exhibited at the Golden Gate International Exposition and the New York World’s Fair in 1939.

He achieved even greater success later as he came into his own as an artist. After relocating to Los Angeles in 1942, Houser came into contact with modernist artists and by the end of the decade had established himself as a boundary-pushing, monumental sculptor. Houser broke open narrow expectations of sculpture and Native art, clearing the path to limitless possibilities.

In 1954, he was awarded the Palmes d’ Academiques, a special commendation from the French government, at the Gallup Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial. In 1962, Houser established the sculpture department at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), the successor to The Studio School. He taught at IAIA for almost two decades. In 1992, he became the first Native artist to be awarded the National Medal of Arts. In 2004, a retrospective of his work served as the inaugural exhibition for the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC.

Elidio Gonzales

Elidio Gonzales was an esteemed artist, furniture-maker, and businessman. Per his obituary, highlights of his career include making “the doors for the Santuario de Chimayo [a shrine and pilgrimage site in Chimayo, NM], [being] selected to do the entrance doors for the entrance to the Hispanic Heritage Wing of the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe and [making] furniture and woodwork for famous artists and writers.”¹

Gonzales got his start as a carpenter and artist during the New Deal. Having grown up in Mora and Black Lake, NM, where his family ran a sawmill, he moved to Taos in 1934 to attend the Taos Vocational School. “I learned the Spanish Colonial designs at the school and within three months I was an instructor . . . I was a participating artist in the WPA [Works Progress Administration] work project in the ’30s,” he told The Taos News in 1985.²

During World War II, Gonzales served for three years in the US Army as a woodworking instructor for army rehabilitation programs. In 1945, he opened El Artesano de Taos, a hand-crafted furniture business. According to scholar Guadalupe Tafoya, “The red and yellow sign that hung outside of his shop . . . is familiar to anyone who ever walked or drove along La Loma Road [in Taos]. Elidio produced museum-quality pieces for clients all over the Southwest. He had enormous influence on the style of furniture being produced in Taos, favoring the rosette, with designs that were very clean and sharply etched.”³Gonzales was known as “El Maestro,” or a Master Carver, and mentored many next-generation furniture-makers.

Despite his widespread recognition and enormous influence, Gonzales’s first print media mention as an artist—according to the available archives—only came in 1961,⁴ and his first full print media profile appeared in 1966⁵—more than thirty years into his career (a 1945 newspaper article⁶ listed him as a member of the “arranging committee” for that year’s Christmas Handicrafts and Art show at the Harwood Museum of Art, but did not identify Gonzales as an artist himself). The art world’s bias against furniture as “fine art” prevailed over the course of his fifty-four years in the business, but Gonzales’s talent and dedication were undeniable and his commitment to education—not only did he teach woodworking, he did many public demonstrations and talks throughout his career—made him an effective advocate for his craft.

Joseph Amadeus Fleck

Joseph Fleck was born and raised in Austria and trained as an artist at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. After serving on the Italian front in World War I, he emigrated to the United States in 1922, first landing in Kansas City. There, he saw an exhibit of the Taos Society of Artists, which prompted his move to Taos in 1924 or 1925.

Fleck lived and worked in Taos the majority of his life. While he followed and shared the artistic perspective and principles of the exclusive, conservative Taos Society of Artists (active from 1915 to 1927), painting Southwestern subjects—mostly portraits of Native peoples and Taos residents—in a realistic manner, Fleck was denied entry to the Society per its bylaws, which had been amended in 1919 during the Red Scare to restrict membership to American citizens (Fleck became a citizen in 1927). He was, however, a member of the Taos Artists Association.

During the New Deal, Fleck fulfilled commissions through the Public Works of Art Project and painted murals at post offices in Raton, NM, and Hugo, OK. After WWII, he turned his attention from portraiture to landscapes. His style evolved in step with his subjects, gradually loosening from an academic to a quasi-impressionistic approach. From 1942 to 1946, he served as the Dean of Fine Arts and artist-in-residence at the University of Missouri in Kansas City.

Louie Ewing

Louie Ewing is best known as a pioneer of silkscreen printmaking in the United States, a reputation he earned as a New Deal artist. Ewing moved to California in 1933, where he studied art at a junior college. He followed one of his instructors to Santa Fe, NM, in 1935, and almost immediately started working for the state’s Federal Art Project (FAP).

Ewing was first hired by the FAP to work as an engraver on the Portfolio of Spanish Colonial Design. He was then classified as an experimental artist¹ and, as such, commissioned by the Project’s director, R. Vernon Hunter, to try new ways of working, including mosaic and silkscreen printing. His best-known contribution to the New Deal is the Navajo Blanket Portfolio, a set of fifteen silkscreen prints of Navajo weavings.

For the Portfolio project, Ewing was hired in 1939 through the FAP by the Laboratory of Anthropology (founded in 1927 by John D. Rockefeller to study the Southwest’s Indigenous cultures; the Laboratory is now part of the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture) to make prints of its Navajo rug collection for distribution to the United States Indian Arts and Crafts Board “in furthering the improvement of Navajo weaving,” to “Indian service schools” for instructional purposes, and to other public educational institutions such as universities, libraries, and museums. Ewing first made paintings of the rugs and then was assisted by Eliseo Rodriguez in producing 200 prints of each painting. Silkscreen printing was such a novel technique at the time that it took the artists three days to make their first print. “We [first] made our squeegees, to move the paint across the screen, out of an auto tire because there wasn’t a squeegee invented then,” Ewing recalled. “And then we used a window-cleaning thing and that didn’t work because the oil melted the rubber.”² Finally, they partnered with a local manufacturer to design and produce equipment that worked.³ Only ten of the original fifteen prints have survived in Gallup’s collection, but the National Gallery of Art has a complete set.

Ewing credits the New Deal with helping to launch his career, saying it offered “a wonderful chance, from getting out of art school to make a transition to professional, and besides making it possible to eat,”⁴ and adding that “I could break away from the WPA [Works Progress Administration] and have my own business.”⁵

Indeed, he continued as a prolific serigrapher for the next four decades, producing silkscreened posters for the Gallup Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial from 1939 to at least 1971⁶ and receiving numerous book commissions from major institutions across the country. Additionally, he taught at the Santa Fe Indian School in the 1940s and introduced artist Harrison Begay to silkscreen printing, a technique Begay would later translate into a successful printmaking business called Tewa Enterprises. After the New Deal, Ewing expanded his repertoire to include oil paintings, watercolor, gouache, and acrylic. He had his first solo show in 1946 at the New Mexico Museum of Art.⁷

New Deal Contribution: Project Artists

Helmuth Naumer, Sr.

Lloyd Moylan

Paul Valentine Lantz

Gene Kloss (Alice Geneva Glasier Kloss)

D. Paul Jones

John A. Jellico

Allan Houser (Allan Capron Haozous)

Elidio Gonzales

Joseph Amadeus Fleck

Louie Ewing

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