Spanish Colonial arts reach a crossroads
By keiko ohnuma | photos by peter ogilvie
Modern impulses are banging down the doors at Spanish Market, and for the first time in its 60-year history, the guardians of New Mexico’s traditional Hispanic art forms are allowing the purity to crack open—a little. A new category is being introduced this year by the Spanish Colonial Arts Society, which sets the rules for what can and cannot sell at market: They’re calling it “Innovation Within Tradition.” Established artists may now count on seeing some nontraditional work get past the jurors.
Many observers scoff that this is no more than very late recognition of what has already been happening since the 1800s, when homegrown arts such as the painting and sculpting of saints (santos) reached its height. How can anyone, in fact, be called a “colonial” artist in 2011? The label is fraught with contradictions, referring sometimes (as in the case of tinwork) to media that emerged only after the colonial era. Is it any wonder that some of the several hundred artists who show at Santa Fe’s two annual Spanish Markets would want to break out of the mold—show a saint in a modern setting, for a change, or use pigments out of a tube?
Santo Niño de Atocha, polychrome bulto, artist and date unknown. A traditional bulto from the 1700s contrasts with, at right, the same saint in mixed media with circuit boards, compact disc, and wire, by Marion C. Martinez (2001–2002)
The 82-year-old Spanish Colonial Arts Society (SCAS) still requires market artists to be at least a quarter Hispanic and to have family roots in the region. Within its 20-plus selling categories (the best known being colcha embroidery, straw appliqué, tinwork, furniture, and santos both two- and three-dimensional), exacting requirements have earned its standards committee the nickname “art Gestapo” among sellers.
Typical orthodox imagery is how most saint-makers (santeros) learn their craft, but nearly all the top artists have since moved on, using new techniques and subject matter for off-market sales. “How many Saint Anthonys can you do?” exclaims Marie Romero Cash, one of the first women to break into the field in the 1970s. “If I were still doing the same things, I’d be taking Xanax.”
Even a traditionalist like Charlie Carrillo, who was widely criticized for helping to tighten the rules for santeros in the 1980s because of his insistence on using hand-ground pigments, now advocates for contemporary iconography. His series of saints driving pickup trucks has proved popular enough that market director Maggie Magalnick points to them as a perfect example of what is meant by “Innovation Within Tradition.”
For Carrillo, an academic as well as a santero, the key lies in telling a saint’s story accurately. He believes that variations in setting, style, and technique are acceptable interpretations; it’s when santeros start using the aesthetic language to comment on social issues that tradition gets left behind.
His contemporary Luis Tapia is perhaps the best-known example of that divergence. One of the few santeros to cross over into contemporary art museums, Tapia broke ground early on, painting his santos in bright colors and using them to address such contemporary dilemmas as illegal immigration and sexual abuse. Before long, he was asked to leave Spanish Market.
Tapia says his work still deals with religious themes, so he remains grounded in the santero tradition—though he calls himself a sculptor now. He believes it’s natural for culture to evolve: “Stagnant water is not healthy,” he says. The SCAS may have had the noble goal of preserving culture, but “from my point of view they were destroying it—suppressing feelings, suppressing life. How can you ask someone to express life as it was 200 years ago?” Their motivation, he suspects, is economic: Many santeros have made good money churning out traditional saints—the most successful of them selling out within minutes—and they don’t want to change. “And those same artists,” Tapia notes, “are now going in the direction that I took.”
Charlie Carrillo at work on one of his unconventional santos: San Isidro Labrador driving a 1954 Ford tractor. Carrillo’s saints-as-truck-drivers are considered perfect examples of “Innovation Within Tradition” by the Spanish Colonial Arts Society. Right: Hey Zeus (2009), an unconventional bulto by Arthur López that probably would not make it into Spanish Market.
Pressure to allow more innovation may itself be driven by market forces, Cash suggests. She says she increasingly overhears buyers at market complain about homogeneous nature of the work, which puts pressure on artists to demand change. The paradoxical position at which the SCAS finds itself—advocating both innovation and tradition—lays bare the contradictions inherent in its mission to both preserve and commodify tradition.
Popular legends notwithstanding, New Mexico’s santeros of the 1700s and 1800s hardly sprang up in the cultural vacuum that their admirers like to claim. Studies have found strong evidence of Native design motifs, as well as borrowings from a range of imagery, techniques, and art supplies introduced by trade.
Moreover, what is now considered “traditional” Spanish Colonial is often a more recent hybrid. Nicolasa Chavez, curator of Spanish Colonial and contemporary Hispano/Latino collections at Santa Fe’s Museum of International Folk Art, notes that straw appliqué, for instance, was never used for religious subjects before the master revivalist Eliseo Rodriguez in the 1930s—after which everyone started doing it. The same is true for retablos in tin frames, as the two media appeared in different time periods. Yet such 20th-century innovations are regularly seen at Spanish Market. In fact, folk art itself has a history of innovation, Chavez says, with the most famous “masters” being typically the ones who pushed their medium to a new level.
Marie Romero Cash at work on one of her bultos. Right: Her Four Horsemen from 2004.
Tey Marianna Nunn, a scholar of Hispanic/Latino art, offers the additional caveat that categories such as “traditional” and “folk art” tend to reflect the cultural biases of the Anglo art intelligentsia. The Hispanic community itself, she says, often has a very different relationship to its “art” objects.
Santos, for example, started being made by local craftsmen in the 1700s to fill the huge demand for religious objects needed by Franciscan missionaries in their goal of converting the Native population. Production peaked in the late 1800s, then died down quickly with the arrival of imports by railroad. Archbishop Jean Baptiste Lamy (1814–1888) also contributed by ordering churches to destroy the homegrown saints, which he found grotesque and barbaric, and replace them with prints and plaster imports—though many remained safeguarded by the Penitente Brotherhood, an influential lay confraternity also suppressed by Lamy.
With the influx of Anglo artists and intellectuals in the 20th century, the santos took on a new meaning. Fascinated with folk arts as a hedge against the dawning “machine age,” influential newcomers such as Frank Applegate and Mary Austin seized on the village crafts they found in New Mexico in the 1920s as symbols of an endangered past. It was in this same period that Indian Market was created—a parallel effort to turn cultural objects into collectible art, thus “rescuing” culture by commodifying it. The term “Spanish Colonial art” was born, along with programs (such as those created by the federal Works Progress Administration in the 1930s) to promote a renaissance of village arts that would generate both producers and collectors.
Fiesta at the Border by Luis Tapia, right, in his studio.
Luis Tapia, Man Without Heart.
In 1929 a group of influential Anglos founded the SCAS, borrowing use of the label “Spanish” to describe New Mexico’s poor, brown population—a rhetorical strategy applied since the drive for statehood to distinguish them from the distrusted “Mexicans.” As Charles Montgomery quips in his 2002 critical history The Spanish Redemption: “The cachet of ‘Spanish colonial arts’ could attract a following . . . in numbers that ‘Mexican crafts’ could not have matched.”
Like other labels re-appropriated from the dominant social group, this one ironically became over time a badge of identity and cultural pride for New Mexican Hispanos. To call oneself a Spanish colonial artist in the postmodern era is “a very political and deliberate way of communicating power, place, and identity,” says Nunn, who is now visual arts director at Albuquerque’s National Hispanic Cultural Center. It reflects “clever positioning” by contemporary santeros, she says, originating from the time when many of them took up carving—during the civil rights era.
Carrillo, Tapia, and Cash all started making santos in the 1970s, and all of them are self-taught. When they discovered the anemic Spanish Market under the portal at the Palace of Governors, it consisted of a couple dozen souls who eked out extra income selling unpainted wood carvings for around $35. All three artists say they were drawn by a desire to investigate and validate their little-understood Hispanic heritage.
Refused by Santa Fe’s fine arts museum to exhibit their work, a group of these artists started mounting their own shows, says Nunn, which sparked collector interest. The revitalization of Spanish Market in the 1960s and ’70s after decades of dormancy was thus driven by artists themselves. And these artists have always strived to “stretch,” says Nunn, as artists do by nature—though not necessarily in the easily recognized, boundless way of contemporary art.
For example, both Carrillo and Felix Lopez, another highly respected santero, researched the use of pigments, gessos, and varnishes from natural sources; both speak of it as a conscious refusal of things modern to resurrect a past that had been nearly lost. Growing up in the 1950s, says Lopez, “we were not taught the history of this area”—meaning the upper Rio Grande Valley, where he still lives. “No one taught us anything about the history of New Mexico. They were trying to teach us American history, about Washington and Lincoln.”
Lopez resented the call to set aside his culture, and in a spirit of protest he earned a master’s degree and chose to teach Spanish language at Española Valley High School for 21 years. With the death of his father in 1975, he changed direction and began to carve saints.
It was not a calling to art per se, nor to the medium of wood, but rather a mission that arose out of his strong Catholic faith, to honor his cultural traditions and do something deeply meaningful with his life. Unlike most santeros, Lopez will not sell to anyone he has not met, or without a compelling reason. Mostly he takes commissions for church sculpture and restoration of antique santos.
A soft-spoken, thoughtful man, he has been at work for three years on a life-size Christ effigy in an open monument for the Santuario de Chimayó. He credits his parents for strong grounding in the faith that used to hold together family and community in northern New Mexico against widespread, relentless poverty. Money still does not interest him, he says. He would prefer to be, as in his childhood, “rich in other ways.”
It used to be that all santeros aspired to holy lives, the better to carve powerful santos. These sculptures were treated as members of the family and community, spoken to and dressed according to the seasons. For Lopez, this is the crux of tradition: reconnecting to a time when community and religious life were one. The choice to create santos traditionally—as sacred objects—thus represents a quiet but powerful form of cultural resistance. It overturns the Modernist definition of art as a practice in and for itself that upholds individual expression above all else. That his highly refined sculptures continue to fly under the radar of the art-loving public appears to be just fine with Lopez.
Felix Lopez stands with San Isidro, a piece from 1984.
But what does it say about the place of art in contemporary society? Banished to the ghettoized category of “folk art,” Hispanics who do creative work within their tradition, like many others around the world, suffer from the same type of stereotyping as in society at large, says Nunn. Their art is immediately perceived as being not quite important enough to be studied or shown. “Eighty percent of artists represented in Santa Fe galleries are not residents of this state,” Nunn says heatedly. “I think it has a lot to do with the perception of Hispanic art and the people and the community it comes from. It gets condensed down to what museums and galleries think, as opposed to the artists’ dreams of what they could do.”
Indeed, those two impulses are now poised to meet in the fight for the soul of Spanish Market—which is “taking us out of our comfort zone,” admits the market’s Magalnick. Who or what does Spanish Market serve today? Is it the demands of Santa Fe’s tourism economy, individual artists’ need for recognition, or the preservation of an endangered culture? Says Carrillo: “‘Innovation Within Tradition’ has opened the floodgates.”
From the Spring/Summer 2011 issue
