Collector of Vanishing Cultures

John Bosshard: Keeping Tribal art from passing into history

by AMY BOAZ
PHOTOGRAPHY by ROBERT RECK

Edward Curtis has often been described as a “keeper of secrets,” the groundbreaking photographer of Native America. As an ethnographer, anthropologist, and historian, Curtis captured images of ancient cultures that were losing the battle against “progress” and technology. Many of those tribes were on the cusp of profound transformation at the turn of the 20th century, when Curtis painstakingly sought them out for photographs. His work helped transform the way Native Americans were perceived by the broader American public.
More than a century later, Abiquiú gallery owner and artist John Bosshard emerges as one of Curtis’ most dedicated admirers. His influence is evident in Bosshard’s lifelong commitment to preserving the cultures that Curtis sought to document. Bosshard himself has become a steward of stories, histories, and human relationships embedded in the objects he preserves.

That dedication is evident in his vast assemblage of Native wares and antiques, gathered over two decades of global travel and now displayed in an historic adobe warehouse on Abiquiú Plaza. Bosshard’s reverence for Native American culture is heartfelt, reflecting a life shaped by responsibility rather than acquisition.

“He led a life of adventure and danger that was the result of his dedication and passion for documenting and preserving the traditional culture of every Native American Tribe west of the Mississippi and also Canada and Alaska,” explains Bosshard, a tall, rangy man whose steel-gray hair curls crisply at his neck beneath a Western fedora. “He knew that traditional Native American culture was passing into history and he wanted to portray them as a noble and proud people. He left behind a legacy that today is recognized even by Native Americans as the most accurate and comprehensive document of their culture.”

Bosshard’s dusty, cavernous showroom is a kind of museum of Native cultures, including some that are nearly lost. The main 5,000-square-foot space contains treasures from Asia, Africa, and South America that he personally selected over the decades, while other rooms are crammed with antiques from Native Americans and Southwestern Native communities in the form of Navajo weavings and Hopi pottery. Tribal sculptures from the pre-Inca Wari and masks from the Dogon people of West Africa confront viewers with a ferocious life of their own.

Bosshard is deliberate in distinguishing his work from extractive collecting. He does not speak in terms of ownership, but responsibility—of holding objects long enough to protect their stories, and of sharing them in ways that preserve rather than erase important context. What matters to him is not accumulation, but continuity—ensuring that what has been carried across generations is not reduced to décor or commodity.
The items are showcased in a building that dates from the 1880s and once housed landowner Miguel Gonzales’ Gonzales y Bode Mercantile, a thriving enterprise at an early Abiquiú intersection of Hispanic, White, and Genízaro cultures. Built on ancestral Tewa ground, it later became a jump-off point for westward migration to California along the Old Spanish Trail. Local history in New Mexico can be fragmentary, but accounts suggest that until the construction of the Abiquiú Dam in the 1950s, Gonzales and his German partner, Martin Bode, operated the warehouse as a general store, post office, and stagecoach stop before Bode later relocated the business to the nearby highway crossroads.

When Bosshard bought the building in 2005, he discovered a cellar stuffed with wooden boxes holding the secrets of a Wild West past—mostly alcohol, ammunition, and explosives once shipped by rail from around the world (Argentina, Kansas City, Chicago) to meet the critical needs of Western settlers. Bosshard has the boxes stacked high in his back room, alongside other utilitarian remnants of that era, such as a Fairbanks commercial scale, installed in the 1880s, that would “weigh your goods and your children,” as Bosshard likes to recount. The freight elevator, equipped with a dazzling system of counterweights allowing a worker to move stock between floors single-handed, still functions flawlessly, an early engineering marvel. These objects were tools of necessity—not nostalgia.

Bosshard delights in these early artifacts of 19th-century rural life. “It was difficult living out here,” he muses. “It was boom or bust. Life out here was a tenuous affair. There are the examples of Carol Stanley, whose husband informed her he won Ghost Ranch in a card game, and Louisa Wade Wetherill, who ran trading posts in Navajo country in Arizona and was so beloved by Chief Hoskinini. We had three cultures, all in competition. You’ve heard people say, ‘Whiskey’s for drinking, water’s for fighting.’ People forget that now. I hate to see people judge this culture by the comfortable standards of today.”

Was it similarly difficult for the gallery owner when he first arrived? “I’ve been very, very fortunate,” he replies.
Bosshard grew up in Wisconsin. He contracted polio at age five and was paralyzed from the waist down. Confined to bed, he entertained himself with illustrated books about Native American children and cultures, stories that took an early hold. Against expectations, he recovered and went on to become a devoted trekker, traveling widely and covering thousands of miles on foot.

He studied art at the University of Wisconsin and the Art Institute of Chicago, then moved west, working to expand the hip record store chain Licorice Pizza in Los Angeles. “I also believe music is transformational,” he notes of his work then. It was good money and being in the West allowed him to indulge his yen for the outdoors—skiing, river rafting, trekking. Eventually he took a trip to Taos that changed everything.
“It spoke to me,” Bosshard says of his first encounter with Taos Mountain in the mid-1970s. “There is a tradition that certain mountains emanate spiritual energy. I was so moved by Taos Mountain. I used to do drawings about it with the energy emanating from it. If you shut up and listen, it will speak to you.”
He built a house off Blueberry Hill, which he called Rock Garden Gully (a name stolen from a Taos Ski Valley run), neighboring Indian land. He recalls how the Taos Pueblo youth rode through the land on horseback, hunting rabbits by whacking the scattering hares with their clubs. “I had a whole collection of rabbit clubs,” he says fondly.

For more than 25 years, Taos served as his base. He operated an art gallery out of artist Emil Bisttram’s former studio on Ledoux Street, next to the Harwood Museum, which then housed the town’s library. Bosshard recalls meeting journalist and author John Nichols conducting research for his novels in the library. R.C. Gorman’s gallery was next door to Bosshard’s, and other casual friends and customers included Elizabeth Taylor’s brother, Howard, as well as actors Dennis Hopper and Clint Eastwood. Bosshard remembers running into painter Dorothy Brett in the town’s art galleries.

Other mountains beckoned, such as the Four Sacred Mountains marking the traditional homeland of the Diné (Navajo) and Mount Kailash, the 21,778-foot-tall Himalayan peak most sacred to the Tibetan Buddhists. From 1986 until 2020, when COVID-19 restrictions took hold, Bosshard made annual “mountain pilgrimages,” finding spiritual sustenance in places from the Himalayas to the Andes while building connections with artists and bringing back antiques and textiles for his gallery.

“When I first visited these remote places, many of them had seen very few Westerners…and the people I encountered still lived without electricity, running water, or modern conveniences,” Bosshard recalls, relaying his travels to Ecuador and Peru to study Inca and pre-Inca history. “I lament the fact that those cultures which I experienced and was enriched by are now quickly disappearing, and our children and grandchildren will not be able to see them as they once were, with all their rich cultural texture, traditional way of living, and spiritual beliefs. They now are impatient with their traditional way of living and are enticed by the modern world and all they think it has to offer them.”
Bosshard’s hobby of buying and selling old adobes eventually lured him to Abiquiú, where he bought what he describes as the “shipwreck” that was the old Gonzales y Bode mercantile warehouse. Located next to Georgia O’Keeffe’s property on Abiquiú Plaza, he initially used the structure to house his growing collection of global wares. Within two years, he consolidated his Taos and Santa Fe galleries into the space.
Bosshard and his Thai wife, Daeng, a former textile artist who now fashions replicas of Anasazi pottery and sells them at Santa Fe’s El Museo Cultural, inhabit the charming two-story adobe next door, circa World War I construction.

Their house is perched overlooking the expansive Rio Chama valley with the russet cliffs of Abiquiú, famously rendered by O’Keeffe, beyond. Historically, Native tribes (Navajo, Ute, Apache, Comanche) used the river valley to raid settlements, Bosshard explains.
An apple orchard occupies the lower level of the backyard, while the higher land next to the house is shaded by a huge black locust tree and commanding box elder. A dainty model-size Thai shrine called a spirit house is where the “ghosts live,” Bosshard says, adding that plenty of ghosts are still about. A yellow-haired cat named Tong, meaning “golden” in Thai, slinks underfoot.

Their house is furnished in a graceful extension of Bosshard’s assemblage of Southwestern furniture and exotic objets d’art, including many rare and valuable prints by Curtis and books about the photographer. He pauses to dwell on one treasure, evidently his favorite, a book about Curtis’ lifelong and often unappreciated mission to document 80 Native American tribes—a mission that ended in obscurity and debt.
Bosshard often returns to Edward Curtis’ work, not out of nostalgia, but recognition. Curtis understood that entire worlds can vanish within a lifetime. Standing in Abiquiú, surrounded by objects that have crossed continents and generations, Bosshard knows that truth firsthand. He has lived long enough to watch cultures, landscapes, and ways of life recede before his eyes—and to understand that preservation, at its core, is an act of attention in the present.

Editor’s note: Important books supporting this piece include Timothy Egan’s Short Nights of the Shadow Catcher: The Epic Life and Immortal Photographs of Edward Curtis (2012) and Lesley Poling-Kempes’ Ladies of the Canyons: A League of Extraordinary Women and Their Adventures in the American Southwest (2015).

From the Summer 2026 issue