Painting
The collection of southwestern
American Indian easel paintings consists of more than 1300 works
spanning the careers of hundreds of artists. The collection covers
the entire early history of Southwest Indian painting, from the
self-taught Pueblo painters of the turn of the century to the artists
trained at the Santa Fe Indian School Studio with Dorothy Dunn beginning
in the 1930s. It includes many of the initial masterpieces of this
art tradition. The collection, among one of the earliest formed,
is the largest and most comprehensive of its kind, and includes
paintings by virtually all significant southwestern artists from
the late nineteenth century through about 1970.
SAR's collection policy has ensured that paintings have been selectively
acquired to fill specific gaps in the temporal, geographic, tribal
group, style, or periods of an individual artist's career. In the
past decade the School has been fortunate to receive several large
gifts of paintings which have complied with our collecting policies
and our needs, and have dramatically increased the size of the collection.
Because of this growth, we have done major conservation work on
the painting collection in 1985 and 1989 supported by grants from
the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), and we were awarded a
two-year $40,000 Heritage and Preservation grant from the NEA to
conserve the highest priority, recently acquired works in this collection.
The School has published a book titled Pueblo Indian Painting: Tradition and
Modernism in New Mexico, 1900 - 1930 by Dr. J. J. Brody (1997). In this book, Brody
presents the first complete history of this vibrant art. Based on the extensive painting
collections of the School's, the book traces the lives and examines the achievements of
seven key Pueblo artists. This book places this important but underappreciated art
squarely within the contexts of Pueblo culture and Euro-American modernism, bringing
long-overdue recognition to the tradition and its preeminent practitioners as a vital part
of American art history.
The IARC has also coordinated with the University of New Mexico's Art Museum in
Albuquerque, a public interpretive exhibition titled "Better Than The Picture of the
Camera, Early Twentieth-Century Pueblo Indian Painting." The show utilizes more than
forty works from the SAR collection, and Pueblo Indian Painting is being used as
the exhibition catalog. This traveling exhibit opened on June 9, 1998, and
ran until
September 27, 1998. The show was slated to travel to the Heard Museum in Phoenix,
AZ, and the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian in Santa Fe.
