Photo post: Mabel Dodge Luhan and Autumn Glory in Taos

Oh, what a glorious turning of the leaves in the Taos Valley these past several days. Two weeks ago I struck gold up at Taos Ski Valley

 

where the aspen glowed from greenish to bright yellow to red. These trees alight with warm colors set against the evergreen reminded me of some of  Ernest L. Blumenschein's paintings and his fascination with such contrasts in nature.

Lately, I've wondered what Mabel might have thought, and as I skimmed through her books Winter in Taos, Edge of Taos Desert, and even Lorenzo in Taos, what struck me was how much time she spent outdoors, how much she observed and wrote about nature. Mabel certainly felt the rhythm of the seasons. I wondered if she felt the same uplift of the heart as I do at viewing fall colors. She did and so I thought it would be fun to illustrate her words with photos.

Here, where we live, the autumn has come upon us imperceptibly and we have not noticed its gradual approach.

A yellowish tinge comes over the big cottonwood trees so slowly we do not see it until we go away and come back, then our eyes are fresh and we suddenly see that summer is over.

 The trees change color quickly now for there is frost at night and they are showing every shade of yellow against the dark mountains. The distance turns a deeper blue for all the yellow near us.
 

After the trees are fully turned and are like torches of fiery yellow, often with coral red tips, and others are big balls of radiant, sun-colored loveliness, they have a long quiet pause before the end. 

 

Day after day of Indian summer passes, breathless, when the whole valley is immobile and every leaf is motionless, shining golden and still. What days! One moves in a dream through the country, scarcely able to believe one's eyes, for the wonder of it.

Again the cottonwood trees were yellow against the dark-blue sky and there was no wind—not a breath of a breeze in the rich autumnal air.

This past Sunday I drove from Santa Fe to Taos, and all along the Rio Grande clusters and families of golden-glow cottonwoods loomed over the river as it snaked along the canyon. As evening deepened the color on the trees intensified from rich goldenrod to cadmium orange, morphing finally to rosy bronze. No camera could have captured this: I have it only in my mind's eye...and you must imagine it. When I arrived at the overlook onto the Rio Grande Gorge and Taos Mountain with the valley spreading as wide as the eye could see, it seemed that globes of cottonwoods festooned the sweep like so many tethered balloons looming over the landscape.

It's gone now. It's raining and the glow is gone. But not the memory and not the thrill of seeing nature wearing her glory coat of autumn.

With hopes that this has provided you with a feast for the eyes and a different view of Mabel Dodge Luhan.

Adios for now,

Liz

Short: Mabel Dodge Luhan & the Transformative Power of Taos

Whew! Visions and names of the Remarkable Women of Taos whirl in my head and inform my dreams. I'm interviewing and writing up women ranging across the age and community groups of Taos. Soon the Remarkable Women of Taos media campaign will go live, and you'll be able to read about some of the women in full, but today I'll give you a sampling of what is to come.

For this piece I am focusing on one of the questions on the interview form used to gather the stories of remarkable women, namely: "How has the landscape / environment of Taos shaped you?"

Obviously, I can't ask Mabel this question, but as Judi Jordan pointed out, mining Mabel's work can unearth some answers. Here's one example of the transformative power of Taos from The Edge of Taos Desert. Mabel first writes about the change she felt as all the trappings from her former life fell away. Leading into the following paragraph, she recalls the intimate memories of her life, then relates the effect of Taos on her:

I was offered and accepted a spiritual therapy that was cleansing, one that ... finally rewarded me with a sense of reality.

Looking at a similar question, I thought you might like to know how some contemporary Taos women responded. For artist and book illustrator Amy Cordova whose family has lived in the area for three centuries, the land holds the stories of her ancestors.

There is something sacred in realizing that my ancestors traveled my same routes, saw the same grand peak of Taos Mountain, smelled the sage after the rains, or the scent of pinon rising from a kiva fireplace on a cold winter’s night…just like I experience…now. I feel close to them through this way of thinking.

When she first arrived, glass artist Delinda VanneBrightyn immediately sensed that Taos was a special place--a place that felt ancient yet left her, like Mabel, feeling renewed, alive.

The land and sky here has shaped me for sure. It informs my art. It fills my soul. It hardens me to be strong and fit and capable. It softens me with its boundless and breathtaking beauty. It leaves me in awe of my insignificance. It inspires me to push on to be as creative as possible.

This just a glimpse of the transformative power of Taos. May these few paragraphs also provide you with a flavor of the contemporary remarkable women of Taos who will appear on the blog in the months to come.

Adios for now,
Liz

Mabel and Fabiola Cabeza de Baca: Home Making in New Mexico

The history of women in the American West is like the history of air. You could certainly write history without it. You just can't have history without it.*

Rereading these introductory sentences to Home Lands : How Women Made the West, I thought about a conversation I had with Mabel’s biographer Lois Rudnick where the question arose: “What would Taos have been like without Mabel?” Part of the “Home Lands” exhibition (currently at the New Mexico History Museum) is dedicated to Mabel and her Santa Fe counterparts, poet Alice Corbin and writer Mary Austin, who represented the modern “New Women.” Through both her salons and her written essays Mabel openly flaunted convention about women in matters of love, family, and career. In the period between World Wars I and II, ideas of feminist emancipation also reached into the lives of New Mexico’s Pueblo and Hispanic populations.

One of these women, Fabiola Cabeza de Baca (referred to in the Dictionary of Literary Biography as a beloved and nearly legendary cultural heroine), served as a premier example of a native Spanish-speaking New Mexican whose life was indeed remarkable.

Fabiola Cabeza de Baca in front of a New Mexico schoolhouse, photographer and date unknown. Fabiola Cabeza de Baca Gilbert Photograph Collection, no. 000-603-0002, Center for the Southwest Research, University of New Mexico.

Born in 1894 in La Liendre, New Mexico Territory, she grew up on the family ranch. Just after high school Fabiola joined a number of young Hispanics recruited to teach in New Mexico’s rural areas. She began her career in the one-room schools of Guadalupe County, and would soon number among a handful of the earliest of New Mexico’s Hispanic pioneers in education. While teaching, she intermittently attended New Mexico Normal University (now known as Highlands University) in Las Vegas, NM. She took a year off to study at Centro de Estudios Historicos in Madrid, Spain, then received her B.A. in Pedagogy from her alma mater in 1921. Fabiola spent some additional years in the classroom, then continued her education at New Mexico College of Agriculture and Mechanic Arts (now New Mexico State University), graduating with an M. A. in Home Economics in 1929. That year Fabiola began working for the U.S. government, at a time when the communal land cultivated for centuries by the Hispanic farmers of northern New Mexico came under federal legal assault, when they lost traditional grazing lands to the jurisdiction of the U.S. Forest Service. 

In her job as extension agent Fabiola brought new scientific ideas and the latest household technology to rural households in the remote, wide-spread villages of northern New Mexico. While teaching women the newest gardening and poultry-raising techniques and introducing modern canning kettles and pressure cookers using the latest government bulletins on food preparation, Fabiola also saw the value in and worked to preserve the people’s traditional ways. As an extension agent Fabiola spent nearly thirty years of her life on the road. A paragraph from Homelands: How Women Made the West provides an overview of the work she did during that time.

She helped hard-pressed families get access to canning equipment and sewing machines, and made information available to families not comfortable with English by speaking Spanish (and later Tewa and Towa), translating government bulletins from English into Spanish, and writing her own bilingual materials. Cabeza de Baca in turn heard stories she would treasure; collected folklore about herbal medicine, planting practices, and religious rituals; and learned much of what she would later recount about New Mexican cooking in her 1939 book Historic Cookery. She kept voluminous notes about remedies, rituals, and recipes and took palpable pleasure in cataloging local knowledge, techniques, and skills, observing the mingling of faith and science.**

“Pueblo Girls Learning to Use Pressure Cooker, 1930s,” by Frances E. and Henry Prior Clark. Braun Research Library Collection, Autry National Center; OP.160

Fabiola’s budding career as an extension agent could have ended after a train hit her car in 1932. Injuries to her leg eventually resulted in its amputation. Fabiola may have lost her leg, but not her courage or her desire to work. During her two-year convalescence, she wrote extension brochures on canning and food preparation. Back on the road, she visited thousands of homes and made notes on the cultural practices of the villages she served and collected recipes from the Anglo, Indian, and Hispanic families from her extension circuit. Fabiola’s outreach broadened when The Santa Fe Scene published a series of vignettes she had written that included recipes, and KVSF broadcast her weekly bilingual radio program on homemaking.

In the midst of her work as extension agent, in 1935 Fabiola joined together with such notable Hispanic New Mexicans as politician and suffragist Nina Otero Warren and writer Cleofas Jaramillo to found the Sociedad Folklorico de Santa Fe (Folklore Society of Santa Fe), an organization dedicated to preserving the Spanish language and Hispanic folkways in New Mexico. Observing the toll Americanization was taking on the centuries-old traditions she had grown up with, Fabiola decided to preserve this cultural history in writing. The articles she penned for The Santa Fe Scene expanded into The Good Life (1949), a book published as a tribute to the Hispanic traditions of New Mexico. Six years later her next book, We Fed Them Cactus (1954), recounted the history of four generations of her family and their transition from wealthy Spanish land grant holders to struggling ranchers under a new governmental legal system that violated their previous title to the land.

Fabiola Cabeza de Baca (far left) with the Sociedad Folklorica in 1945. Courtesy Palace of the Governors Photo Archives.

Another teaching opportunity arose when Fabiola went to Mexico as a representative of the United Nations. From 1950 to 1959 she developed home economics programs in Mexico, and set up demonstration centers among the Tarascan Indians. Later she also trained extension agents in Central and South America. Following her retirement in 1959 Fabiola continued her community work, delivered lectures, and worked as a trainer and consultant for the Peace Corps. She died in Albuquerque in 1991 at age 97.

While working on the book, Stones into Bread: The Lives and Letters of Peggy Pond Church and Corina Aurora Santistevan, Two Women of New Mexico, I discovered that in the 1940s Corina worked with Fabiola Cabeza de Baca, who procured a pressure cooker for communal utilization and demonstrated its use in Taos. It led me to wonder if Fabiola provided training for some of Mabel’s cooks.

One thing is for certain: if you are in the area, you still have time to see the “Home Lands” exhibition in Santa Fe at the New Mexico History Museum. I’m planning to see it one more time before the show closes on September 11^th. It’s a seminal, thought-provoking exhibition. If you don’t have an opportunity to see it, I heartily recommend the book. You’ll see Mabel in a different context and come to appreciate the contributions of remarkable women like Fabiola, women who made the American West home.

Adios for now,

Liz

* Home Lands : How Women Made the West by Virginia Scharff and Carolyn Brucken Los Angeles : Autry National Center of the American West, University of California Press, 2010 : 1

** Home Lands, Chapter 1 "Home on Earth: Women and Land in the Rio Arriba": 34

For more information on Fabiola Cabeza de Baca, see Tey Diana Rebolledo’s introduction to Fabiola’s book We Fed Them Cactus. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998. (Diana gave a lecture on Fabiola this past July as part of the “Home Land” exhibition programming.) Also, Fabriola’s preface to The Good Life: New Mexico Traditions and Food (included over 80 recipes and an introduction by writer Ina Sizer Cassidy). Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico Press, 1986.

Mabel Dodge Luhan House blog celebrates 1st anniversary in Taos and Remarkable Women

Today marks the first anniversary of the “Mabel Dodge Luhan and the Remarkable Women of Taos” blog. If you go back to August 6, 2010 you’ll see that the initial posting began with a sign. It seemed appropriate to celebrate the blog’s new year with another sign from Taos: the one that indicates that you are in the vicinity of Mabel’s house. On this anniversary, let me introduce you to Mabel’s physical world.

So much in Taos happens behind adobe walls…and so much is hidden away. In the case of the Mabel Dodge Luhan House, once you reach the parking lot, you can only see the solarium topped by El Gallo, the rooster weathervane.Only after climbing up the curving wooden plank steps, does the main house come into view.

 Crossing the courtyard, Mabel’s domain – or part of it (the main house is surrounded by additions built on over the years) – confronts you. Approaching the main entrance, you walk along the same cobblestone walkway under the portal or covered porch trod by former visitors like D.H. and Frieda Lawrence, Leopold Stokowski, Georgia O’Keeffe, Tennessee Williams and numerous other houseguests of Mabel’s—famous and infamous, well-known names and unfamiliar ones.

As you pass through the door with Mabel’s initials, you enter her world…and not her world. When you step into the living room, past and present collide. You are living in the present, Mabel isn’t. Yet although 2012 will mark the 50^th anniversary since her death, she continues to inspire and inform the present.

Reflecting on this first year anniversary of the blog, I realize I’m only beginning to tap into the variety, depth and breadth of subjects that interested Mabel. Restless, in need of entertainment, she loved surrounding herself with interesting people—in Italy, in New York, and in Taos. I believe that what she gleaned from her salons, what she wrote about, what she participated in before she arrived in New Mexico made her remarkable. In Taos she became more remarkable.

And now? For starters, Mabel’s blog has inspired the Town of Taos to designate 2012, New Mexico’s 100^th anniversary of statehood, as The Year of the Remarkable Women of Taos. And right at the head of it, there’s Mabel…and not Mabel.

Earlier this afternoon I spoke with Lois Rudnick, Mabel’s biographer. (We are meeting next week to brainstorm and finalize events at the Mabel Dodge Luhan House as part of The Year of the Remarkable Women of Taos celebration.) I told Lois that Mabel was pushing me, driving me. She understood only too well. We both know that Mabel is at the heart of it all. Lois has a new book on Mabel going to the publisher, and I have one almost ready on two other remarkable women of Taos that includes Mabel snippets.

Floodgates are opening around the Year of the Remarkable Women of Taos. Exhibitions and events around the theme burgeon with every passing week as we approach 2012. Daily now I add another name or five to the growing list of Taos’s remarkable women.

So on this first anniversary of the “Mabel Dodge Luhan and the Remarkable Women of Taos” blog, all I can say is “stay tuned.”

Adios for now,

Liz

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.