Remaking Modernism: Cross-Cultural Encounters in Hispano Art, 1930-1960

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This project involves completing an 80,000-word manuscript entitled, Remaking Modernism: Cross-Cultural Encounters in Hispano Art, 1930-1960, for the University of Oklahoma Press, due in February 2013. The project derives from archival research conducted at the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art, Washington D.C., Woodstock Artists' Association and Museum, New York, and in New Mexico at the University of New Mexico, the National Hispanic Cultural Center (Albuquerque), Harwood Foundation (Taos), State Archives, Museum of Fine Arts, Museum of New Mexico's Fray Angelico Chávez History Library and Photographic Archives, and the Museum of International Folk Art (Santa Fe). This is the first book to consider Spanish-speaking Hispano artists as integral to the history of modernism in New Mexico. I explore innovation in Hispano art, in form, technique, iconography and subject matter, across a range of media, including painting, sculpture and photography, by recovering three much-neglected figures: santero sculptor Patrocinio Barela, black-and-white art photographer John Candelario, and painter Edward Chávez. These three artists broke new ground in Hispano art at a time when mainstream modernism was making its mark in New Mexico and prevailing primitivist discourses viewed Hispanos as traditional craftspeople, folk, primitive and outsider artists. While Anglo-American modernist writers, artists and patrons found inspiration in New Mexico's native communities, Barela, Candelario and Chávez became pioneers in their own right, by mediating their artistic traditions with the new aesthetic forms, markets and cross-cultural encounters that accompanied the revival and preservation of local culture from the 1920s into the New Deal. Alongside other Hispano artists of their generation, these individuals negotiated multiple social, cultural and economic worlds between 1930 and 1960. As cultural brokers, they melded elements of mainstream modernist culture with their ethnic heritage, challenging purist notions of Hispano art, particularly the elevation of 'authentic' Spanish colonial art through local markets such as Spanish and Native Market, and the limits of mainstream modernism. Barela, Candelario and Chávez developed a critical modernism, an experimental and transcultural aesthetic that expressed an ambivalent relationship to mainstream society and modernity, and a desire to reclaim local culture as Anglo tourists, writers, and artists began appropriating it. In doing so, they established a precedent for contemporary Hispano artists who continue to challenge purist notions of art and the power of Anglo-dominated markets. The project begins by examining the new markets, cultural hierarchies and systems of patronage that underpinned the Anglo-led revival and preservation of Hispano arts from the 1920s into the New Deal. It documents the commodification of local art forms through tourism and the curio trade and, in particular, the elevation of traditional Spanish colonial artifacts as a model for translating Hispano art. Hispanos responded to modernist primitivism and the revival, preservation and appropriation of local art forms in various ways. After considering artistic innovation at the local level by artists who worked for the Spanish Colonial Arts Society, Native Market and the New Deal's Federal Art Project, the book focuses in on three artist case studies: Barela, Candelario and Chávez. The book concludes by exploring their impact on contemporary Hispano aesthetics and identity formation in the context of a new 'revival' in Spanish colonial art and the creation of alternative markets for experimental Hispano artists such as Luis Tapia, Nicholas Herrera, Marion Martinez, Miguel Gandert, Ray Martin Abeyta and Orlando Leyba.