Newsflash: Sizzling Summer of New Mexico Women

What could be more exciting than firecrackers on the 4^th of July? For me, summer programs centered around the remarkable women of New Mexico. This past July the Taos-based group Izcalli In Nanantzin Danza Azteca, under the direction of Capitana Tanya Ocañas y Vigil, ended their feast day celebration on a Saturday afternoon with a dance in Aztec regalia. The festivities which included a velacíon or prayer vigil and a procession to the San Francisco de Asís church, honored Señor Santiago de Los Cuatro Vientos (St. James of the Four Winds). That weekend celebrations of the biblical Santiago and Santa Ana (St. James and St. Anne) at the annual Taos fiestas took place on the Plaza. The weekend began with a Fiesta mass followed by a line-up of Spanish music and dance that included groups of Taos women performers like Catalina Río Fernandez and Flamenco Nuevo Mexico, and the Audrey Davis Trio.

Colorful dancers along State Road 68 in Ranchos de Taos. Photo by Rick Romancito, © 2011*

Earlier, in June, the final of four exhibitions opened at Santa Fe’s New Mexico History Museum. All include stories of women. Since its opening in 2009, the New Mexico History Museum has featured stories of men, women and children as part of a conscious effort to broaden the telling of history. This summer’s exhibits, according to museum director Frances Levine, focus “squarely on the contributions made by women that don’t begin and end with popular Western stereotypes.” The exhibition Home Lands: How Women Made the West, presents such well-known New Mexican artists as Pueblo potter Maria Martinez, painters Pablita Velarde and Georgia O’Keeffe, and photographer Laura Gilpin. Contemporary New Mexico artists include New Mexican santera (carver of saints) Gloria Lopez Cordova; Santa Clara Pueblo artists Tammy Garcia and Nora Naranjo Morse. To complement Home Lands, Albuquerque-based poet and playwright Joy Harjo was commissioned to create a video piece inspired by a historic narrative of slavery and interracial marriage in 19th century New Mexico.

 

Dorothea Begay. Photo by Ann Bromberg, © 2011**

A traditional Navajo sheep rancher in Canoncity, Begay told author Sharon Niederman in 1996, “We need to bring back our livestock. To learn to survive off that; to learn to work and farm. We must care for the community together.”

A second exhibition, Ranch Women of New Mexico, documents the lives of 11 women who have “cow-girled” or owned ranches in the state over the past 50 years. The text by Raton author Sharon Niederman and photos by Albuquerque photographer Ann Bromberg bring to life women's dynamic contributions to the environment, their multicultural families, and their economic survival in a "boots on the ground" way of life.

Mary B. Davis. Photo by Ann Bromberg, © 2011

Daughter-in-law of legendary New Mexico rancher Linda Davis, Mary B. Davis shows what she's made of as manager of the horse breeding operation of the Crow Creek Division of the CS Ranch.

The staff at the New Mexico History Museum designed a summer program to augment these exhibitions. Coming up this month: “Homespun: Northern New Mexico Spinning and Weaving Techniques,” demonstrations by the Española Valley Fiber Arts Center, and a lecture “Through Her Eyes: An American Indian Woman’s Perspective.” Due to travels to interview some remarkable women in Wallowa County, OR, I missed Dr. Tey Diana Rebolledo’s lecture “Fabiola Cabeza de Baca and The Good Life.” A native of Las Vegas, NM, teacher and writer Fabiola Cabeza de Baca “elevated both the art and science of homemaking from the Depression forward, blending traditional practices with modern-day conveniences. Beginning in the 1950s, her expertise went global when she started home-economics programs in Central and South America for the United Nations and became a trainer for the Peace Corps.” Her story is included in the Home Lands exhibition.

My interest in Fabiola Cabeza de Baca stems from her work in the 1940s with the County Extension Service in Taos. My friend Corina Santistevan recalled her teaching local women to can both meats and vegetables with a huge pressure canner that was brought for use by the community. I will be profiling Fabiola Cabeza de Baca later this month.

Just today Judi Jordan and I talked about Mabel visiting people and places throughout the Taos Valley and in other places throughout New Mexico. Oh how Mabel would have enjoyed visiting with these interesting women!

Adios for now,

Liz

* Courtesy of Rick Romancito, Tempo editor, The Taos News

* Courtesy of the Photo Archives at the Palace of the Governors/New Mexico History Museum, DCA, Ann Bromberg Collection HP.2008.31.

Georgia (O'Keeffe) and Mabel on My Mind

"On the Portal, Ghost Ranch, 1959" Photo by Todd Webb, © 2010*

Last August after Karen Young and I began making plans for the 2012 Year of Remarkable Taos Women, Canadian poet and author Kate Braid contacted me. One of her favorite painters is Georgia O’Keeffe. Kate spent a week in Taos some years ago. Inspired by the landscape, history and people – and some recent research she’d conducted on Georgia, she went on to write a book of poems that “document” Georgia’s journal of an imaginary trip with Emily Carr, Canada’s iconic woman painter. Nominated for several prizes, including the Pat Lowther Award for Best Book of Poems by a Canadian Woman, Kate’s book, Inward to the Bones: Georgia O'Keeffe’s Journey with Emily Carr, won the VanCity Women's Book Prize in Vancouver, British Columbia.

One of Kate’s poems (below) inspired this blog posting. I remembered reading how two series of photographs by Georgia’s husband Alfred Stieglitz had helped develop a mystique around O’Keeffe, in particular his photographs from the 1930s. These portraits, released to the press in the 1910s and 1920s, contributed to the legend that grew up around her: descriptions of her personality ranged from aloof to enigmatic to reserved.

On reading her letters, however, I discovered a more complex personality, the real Georgia. One she penned in April 1929, a week before leaving New York for New Mexico, illustrates her reluctance to leave Stieglitz (who had suffered a severe heart attack the previous September). She wrote: “If I can keep up my courage and leave Stieglitz I plan to go West the beginning of next week for two months. It is always such a struggle for me to leave him.”

Kate Braid portrayed that aspect in this poem (from Part II, “New Mexico: Light over Water”):

28.

I pack the suitcase, trembling with excitement.

And fear. Alfred will miss me.

He is so fragile, so tragic.

His long white fingers play with my valise,

His eyes cast down in sorrow.

But I must go—

It is for my spirit, for my life.

Kate also captured O’Keeffe’s anticipation. Then experiencing an ebb in her career, a time when she considered her painting weak, she needed a change, a new world of possibilities. In 1916 Georgia had found inspiration in the west Texas landscape, in the contrasts between color, form and shape, after her move to Canyon. The New Mexico landscape, viewed briefly during a visit to Santa Fe in 1917, had also captured her imagination.

How Georgia got to Taos is a long story, but at Mabel’s invitation she and her friend and fellow painter Rebecca Strand (then married to the well-known American photographer Paul Strand) arrived there in May 1929. Mabel put them up in the Pink House, and gave Georgia her own studio to work in.

That summer in northern New Mexico changed O’Keeffe’s world forever. What happened to her comes out in letters. Just days after their arrival Rebecca wrote to Stieglitz telling him how much greater the opportunity to work was, how she and Georgia both felt active and alive in Taos away from all the distractions of the city. Sometime that summer O’Keeffe wrote her friend Henry McBride(art critic for the New York Sun)”You know I never feel at home in the East like I do out here—and finally feeling in the right place again—I feel like myself—and I like it—and I like what Mabel has dug up out of the Earth here…” At the end of her stay, O’Keeffe expressed her appreciation to Mabel (who was absent from Taos most of the summer):

I wish I could see you this morning—more than that I could tell you how important these months have been to me—Maybe you know—I am ready to go now—in every way—If you were here I could tell you quite definitely how it came about—it is some thing so perfect—so perfect for ending this and beginning a new thing—(August 1929)**

In the process of beginning the “new thing”—paintings inspired by the folk art, architecture, light and landscape of Taos—Georgia also found herself. From 1929 until her death in 1986, O’Keeffe captured the vast New Mexico sky, the canyons and cliffs around Abiquiu, and bones bleached in the desert sun. These images became her signature paintings. And it all started at Mabel’s in Taos.

For me, Kate Braid’s last poem (from Part IV, “Inward the Bones”) encapsulates O’Keeffe’s long life and painting career. It provides the perfect ending to this posting.

87.

I dream a wild wind over my bare bones,

a terrifying song through the cavities of my skull,

my hips. The thin digits of what once were

articulating fingers, trail paint.

I am reduced to light     wind.

I can feel myself inside this body

like hills, like a vaulted room,

like spans or poles set

bone-deep in pearly earth

A dark shell falls away, light rising

through translucent flesh.

I am haunted by skeletons, stripped clean

of blood and dirt.

Shaken, I vibrate to the sensations

that were once this body. The wind whistles

music through these bones.

Before I sign off, I’m pleased to announce that Kate has promised to contribute something in the future about her experience writing these terrific, moving poems on O’Keeffe.

Adios for now,

Liz

* Cover photo to Inward to the Bones: Georgia O'Keeffe’s Journey with Emily Carr (2010) by Kate Braid courtesy of Caitlin Press, Half Moon Bay, British Columbia.

** Quotes from this and other letters excerpted from Georgia O’Keeffe: Art and Letters by Jack Cowart, Juan Hamilton, and Sarah Greenough. Washington : National Gallery of Art ; Boston : New York Graphic Society Books, 1987.

Newsflash : Town of Taos theme for 2012 -- "The Remarkable Women of Taos"

Last fall Karen Young and I decided to offer a workshop at the Mabel Dodge Luhan House called “Meetings with Remarkable Women”, slated for next summer. Through Steve Parks, director of the Parks Gallery, we discovered that the Harwood Museum of Art had planned two exhibitions, Agnes Martin: Before the Grid and Bea Mandelman: Centennial for 2012. Subsequently, Karen and I hosted a brainstorming meeting with Steve; the Harwood’s director, Susan Longhenry; Janet Webb, owner of Webb Design; and Cathy Connelly, the Town of Taos Public Affairs & Tourism Director. As we talked, ideas grew up around historic and contemporary Taos women. We also discussed programming and promotion of the arts (Mabel would have liked this). Our conversation, and several anniversaries that coincide with New Mexico’s Centennial next year, culminated in the Town of Taos designating “The Remarkable Women of Taos” as its theme for 2012.

Mabel and Gisella Loeffler (right). Courtesy the Taos Historic Museums

Already other institutions of the Museum Association of Taos have scheduled exhibitions featuring Taos women for next year. They include Out of the Background – The Women Artists of Early Taos at the E.L. Blumenschein Home; Cultural Threads – Nellie Dunton and the Colcha Revival in New Mexico at the Hacienda de los Martinez; and Millicent Rogers & Her Circle and Unknown Was a Woman at the Millicent Rogers Museum. Steve Parks announced that in March 2012 Parks Gallery will show Melissa Zink Remembered, Paintings and Sculpture, 1975 to 2009.

An example of colcha embroidery, after 1870* Courtesy of the Millicent Rogers Museum 

Just last week our core group and some museum personnel met with representatives from Taos galleries and art organizations, the publicity team from the Town of Taos, and the New Mexico Committee of the National Museum of Women in the Arts. These organizations are looking into exhibitions, lectures and other events that highlight creative women in Taos. While they design programs and events, we are inviting widespread participation drawing from the fields of education, history, agriculture and recreation in Taos. Looks like 2012 will be filled with events that will explore, discuss, and celebrate the remarkable women of Taos.

Stay tuned. Oh, and save the date – June 1-3, 2012 – for the Mabel Dodge Luhan House’s workshop, “Meetings with Remarkable Women.”

Adios for now,

Liz

* This example of Rio Grande Hispanic colcha shows a type of embroidery specific to New Mexico. The woman who created it is unknown.

Mabel Dodge Luhan, Peggy Pond Church and "Ultimatum for Man"

Mabel partially inspired the subject for this posting. I had it in mind to feature a poet of New Mexico to celebrate National Poetry Month in April. While with polishing the final draft of my manuscript on two remarkable women of New Mexico*, I had occasion to revisit Mabel Dodge Luhan’s “A Poet of Los Alamos, New Mexico” that appeared in The Chicago Sun Book Week on December 1, 1946. In this book review Mabel introduced Peggy Pond Church’s new volume of poetry titled Ultimatum for Man and wrote that apart from the poets, no New Mexican writers had recorded “the most startling event [of the time]…the discovery of how to split the atom.” Of the poets, Mabel opined, Peggy Pond Church outranked all the others: “her life-pattern [was] singularly identified with the Great Event, for the environment of all her years was the scene of the magnificent discovery and the material of her latest poetry.”

Detail from the cover of Ultimatum for Man

Born in 1903, Peggy spent her formative years living on the Pajarito Plateau. She combined her love of horses and the outdoors and spent hours alone on horseback, riding through pine and juniper forests, wandering through canyons where petroglyphs appeared on the basalt walls overhead. During her summers on the Pajarito Plateau, Peggy often watched archaeologist Edgar Hewett and his students digging in Ancestral Puebloan ruins nearby. In her own explorations, Peggy discovered caves with smoke-blackened ceilings, corrugated cooking pot fragments and shards with black-on-white designs. Inspired by the Ancient Ones, she built fires in her favorite caves and roasted apples on pointed sticks.

To give a brief overview of the time she spent there as an adult, Peggy’s biographer Sharon Snyder has graciously provided the following text: **

By the time she entered Smith College, Peggy had won awards for her poetry and was achieving recognition. Although she loved college life, she was homesick for New Mexico, and when the chance came to marry a young master at the Los Alamos Ranch School, she jumped at the opportunity to return to the Pajarito Plateau. She married Fermor Spencer Church in 1924, and they raised three sons at the school. During that time Peggy published two volumes of poetry and an award-winning children’s book, The Burro of Angelitos. She was a respected member of the Santa Fe writers’ colony despite living thirty-five miles away. Her first two books, Foretaste and Familiar Journey, were among the seventeen published by the Santa Fe Writers’ Editions. Her happiness on the plateau was abruptly uprooted in 1942 when the government took over the school for the top-secret Manhattan Project. Distraught and somewhat bitter, the family moved to Taos, and in 1946 Peggy published Ultimatum for Man, a volume of poems considered by many to be her best and strongest work. The poems arose from the pain of losing her beloved home and from her pacifist beliefs that collided with the development of the atomic bomb.

Mabel reviewed several of the poems in Ultimatum for Man, interweaving them with Peggy’s story and with the historic sequence of events leading up to “the sad and frightened men who were responsible for the atomic bomb.” These men became the subjects of Peggy’s impassioned verse, “The Nuclear Physicists,” one of the most strident poems in this collection.

Given two other events in the news these past weeks – the damage to the nuclear reactor resulting from the earthquake in Japan and the 10^th anniversary of the nuclear accident at Chernobyl – it seemed appropriate to include an excerpt from the poem.

The Nuclear Physicists

           

These are the men who

working secretly at night and against great odds

and in what peril they knew not of their own souls

invoked for man's sake the most ancient archetype of evil

and bade this go forth and save us at Hiroshima

and again at Nagasaki.

These are the men who

now with aching voices

and with eyes that have seen too far into the world’s fate,

tell us what they have done and what we must do.

In words that conceal apocalypse they warn us

what compact with evil was signed in the name of all the

            living,

and how, if we demand that Evil keep his bargain,

we must keep ours, and yield our living spirits

into the irrevocable service of destruction.

Now we, in our wilderness, must reject the last temptation:

the kingdoms of earth and all the power and the glory,

and bow before the Lord our God, and serve Him

whose still small voice, after the wind, the earthquake,

the vision of fire, still speaks to those who listen

and will the world’s good.

Peggy Pond Church. Photo courtesy of Corina Santistevan

Peggy came through this time of upheaval and went on to write the award-winning book, The House at Otowi Bridge (1960).*** The Pajarito Plateau looms large as the setting for this dual memoir of Peggy and her friend Edith Warner, who served home-cooked meals in her tearoom at Otowi Crossing to Niels Bohr, Robert Oppenheimer and other Manhattan Project scientists (who through an agreement with the U.S. government were her sole guests during this time of secrecy). Metaphorically, the bridge that crosses the Rio Grande connected the book’s past and present: the past of the San Ildefonso people, living in the shadow of ancestral Pueblo ruins on the edge of the Pajarito Plateau, with the present Los Alamos era marked forever by the creation of the atomic bomb.

Now a Southwest classic, Peggy’s book served another purpose. As Sharon Snyder has noted:“For the people of the Pajarito Plateau who had been displaced by the war, it was a book of healing.”

Leaving you with thoughts for healing ourselves and our planet.

Adios for now,

Liz

*In its final stage, the manuscript now bears the title “Stones into Bread: Peggy Pond Church and Corina Aurora Santistevan, The Lives and Letters of Two Women of New Mexico.” 

**Sharon Snyder’s forthcoming biography is titled At Home on the Slopes of Mountains: A Biography of Peggy Pond Church. Sharon has kindly agreed to contribute a blog piece on Peggy in the near future.

***First published in serial form in The New Mexico Quarterly magazine (1958-59), “The House at Otowi Bridge” won a Longview Literary Award for excellence in 1959.