WHEW! Haven’t been here for ten whole days but we have a good excuse.  We sent the completed manuscript to the printer yesterday.

Charnell had the task of getting permissions to reproduce pictures, then formatting them to fit, deciding which ones went where (with some input from Vera), making color prints, checking the color, and lot of other technical stuff. Vera wrote and formatted the captions.

In the end, we had more than 260 illustrations!  When you get the Tahoma book, (working title Quincy Tahoma: The Life and Legacy of a Navajo Artist,) you will be seeing over 100 paintings that have never been seen before in public.  So many private donors shared their paintings with us that we have paintings from every year of his painting life, starting when he was a teenager.

We also have photographs that were given to us by girlfriends, school friends, and descendents of friends who knew him during his lifetime.

This collection of photographs of Tahoma seems amazing when you realize that it took years of research before we saw what he looked like in a photograph.  When the Circle of Light tribute to outstanding Navajos was created in the Tanner Trading Post in Gallup New Mexico, we were told they searched for a very long time and finally found ONE picture of Quincy Tahoma.

More about the manuscript in future posts, and why not subscribe by e-mail, so that you can learn all the secrets of writing a biography?

I would like to give a tip of the hat to the many, many people who helped us dig up details about Quincy Tahoma’s life. We do not even know the names of many of the helpful clerks, librarians, secretaries, archivists, curators, shop owners, and others who helped both Charnell and me as we started searching for clues more than ten years ago.

Here is one example.  When we found a copy of Quincy Tahoma’s obituary clipping in a bio file at the Laboratory of Anthropology in Santa Fe, it confirmed what Charnell had heard from Feliz Tixier whose family knew Tahoma — that he had served a short term in the state penitentiary.  While the article answered many questions for us about the date and place of his death, and circumstances of his burial, it opened up a new set of questions.

Prison? When? For what? For how long?

I took my questions to the New Mexico Library and Archives. When I asked an archivist where I might look for prison records, she pointed me to books containing the records of prisoners.  As I flipped through the pages, I got excited because the records included mug shots, and at the time we had not found a photos of Tahoma. They also included details about the conviction, dates of incarceration and release, etc.

However, I noticed that all the criminals in the book were accused of very serious crimes–multiple murders, acts of violence. That did not sound like our boy, Tahoma, and sure enough, there was no record of a Quincy Tahoma.  Another mystery.

But the archivist pointed me to another set of records, the Governor’s inmate records. Here I found a brief note that Quincy Tahoma had been pardoned in March 1, 1948, after serving part of a sentence that began on New Year’s Day, 1947.

I took the prisoner number on the record and went to the U. S.  District Court building in Santa Fe to see if they had records that went back to the 1940′s. The very helpful person I talked to assured me that they did have microfiche records going back that far, but it might take a while to find them. I left my phone number and went on to other explorations.  She called me later to tell me that the number I gave her did not correspond with their numbering system, and my hopes sank. Then she said that she had continued to search, and had found the records of his trial. Amazing! Surely she had more pressing matters than digging up a fifty-plus-year old trial.

I went to the court house and saw the short record of Quincy Tahoma’s trial–what he was accused of, who accused him, who the judge and prosecutor were, and most amazing of all–discovered that he apparently had no defense attorney. The trial apparently lasted no longer than a traffic court trial, Quincy pled guilty to a lesser offense and was taken immediately to prison.

Now I am going to leave you with a bit of mystery, so that you will want to buy Quincy Tahoma: The Life and Legacy of a Navajo Painter when it is released next spring.

But if it has not been for the persistence of a clerk at the Federal District Court records office, we would never have been able to tell this part of Tahoma’s story.

We suspect that Quincy was railroaded by a system that assumed American Indians to be guilty when accused by non-Indians.  But we have no proof that is the way the courts ran. Do you know of other cases in the mid-twentieth century where an American Indian seemed to be railroaded by the courts?

Quincy Tahoma painted hundreds and hundreds of paintings in his short life. Charnell has embarked on the huge task of rounding up photographs, or at least visual descriptions of all the paintings we can find that Tahoma painted.

We know we will never find them all. There will be somebody who has a Tahoma in the closet and does not use the Internet and has not found us.

There will be a museum somewhere that we did not realize might have a collection of American Indian art.

But in the meantime, Charnell is re-contacting all the private owners we talked to in the past ten years to be sure they have not sold their paintings or bought new ones, and to be sure that we have their permission to use a photograph of their paintings in our book.

And she is contacting all the museums that we know have Tahomas in their collections and trying to get their permission to reproduce their paintings.  Museums have to get money to operate from somewhere, and one of the places that they get it is by charging a fee for the use of their photos. Sometimes that fee is beyond our ability to pay. Sometimes they will give us a break because this book will be THE book of record about Tahoma and his paintings, and it would be a shame if their particular collection, chosen with such great care, was not included.

You know how it is. Museums always have way more paintings than they can display.  So some of these absolutely top notch Tahoma paintings have never (or rarely) been seen by the public.  Our book will be an opportunity for thousands of interested people to finally see what good taste those museums have, and what a great painter Tahoma was.

All of this is to let you know that if you have a Tahoma painting, or if you know the whereabouts of one–it is not too late to be considered for our book.  Please leave a comment below or let us know by e-mail and we will talk to you. We want to be sure that his very best is represented. Have you seen Tahoma’s paintings in museums outside of Arizona, New Mexico and Oklahoma that we should be aware of? Do you know someone with one in his or her private collection? Let us know.

Here is a list of the museums that we are in contact with:

Arizona

The Heard Museum

Amerind

Arizona State Musem

California

California Academy of Sciences (Ruth and Charles Elkus

Collection)

Connecticut

Yale Beinecke Library

New Mexico

Center for Southwest Research, University of New Mexico

New Mexico Museum of Indian Arts and Culture

Wheelwright Museum

School of American Research

Milicent Rogers Museum

Oklahoma

Fred Rogers Jr. Museum

National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum

Gilcrease Museum

Philbrook Museum

Washington D.C.

National Museum of the American Indian (Smithsonian Institute)