Moylan's Monumental Mural

Lloyd Moylan believed that the highest purpose of public murals is to engender “universal understanding,”¹⁰ and he saw in murals a unique opportunity for public dialogue. Quite literally, he understood the process of mural-making as a chance for artists to respond in real time to public reactions to their work. Newspaper records attest that Moylan practiced what he preached and entertained visits by school children while he was working on Untitled (Allegory—History of the Region).

Moylan’s desire to create a public dialogue also manifests in attempts to relay a more inclusive and representative version of Southwestern history than was the norm for the time (one need look no further than a 1940 newspaper article, “New Courthouse Murals Art Complete History,” by Gallup booster Ruth F. Kirk for the typical dominant narrative). This is not to say that Moylan’s rendition does not trade in stereotypes—it does. For example, rather than portray the tremendous engineering, architectural, and logistical achievements of the Ancestral Puebloans at Chaco Canyon—the hub of a vast trade network notable for its astronomological organization—on the east wall as a reflection of “pre-contact” cultures, Moylan pictures inter-tribal raiding, emphasizing exaggerated notions of warlike Indigenous peoples (with the buildings of Chaco Canyon at best hinted at in the distant background; see Figure 1).

Yet, Moylan also goes against the grain in significant ways. Notably, he gives pride of place to the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 (Figure 2), when nineteen Pueblo communities banded together to drive the Spanish out of what is now New Mexico—an event glossed over, at best, in histories of the time (and even today), despite being the only successful Indigenous uprising against a colonizing power in North America. He also alludes to the resilience of Navajo and Zuni cultures, showing how traditions such as artistry and ceremony were sustained despite the forced removal and internment (Figure 3), at a time when popular ideology mainly (and wrongly) conceived of Native peoples as being a “thing of the past” and/or as having become shadows of their former selves, pitifully unmoored from their cultural bearings.

These attempts to account for a Native perspective are faulty. For example, Moylan’s telling of the Pueblo Revolt is rife with scalping scenes. While scalping practices of Native peoples was a hot topic amongst (non-Native) historians and even doctors circa 1940, current scholarship indicates that the story that Pueblo revolutionaries scalped Spanish colonizers is a fiction.

Perhaps the most strikingly progressive aspect of Untitled (Allegory—History of the Region) is Moylan’s treatment of the events of Fort Sumner, where Navajo people were imprisoned after being violently marched from their homelands in northwestern New Mexico to a preliminary reservation in the eastern part of the state on what is known as the Long Walk. We see a group of Navajo women huddled together at the feet of US Army soldiers bearing rifles. One of the women looks directly out from the scene, as if to implicate the viewer in the event (Figure 4). She is the only figure in the mural to address the viewer, as if to say “you be the judge of history” and to thereby endeavor another of Moylan’s ideals for public art: to “bring to the surface much that is growth-provoking in the spirit of humanity.”¹¹