Of course things have changed since the scrawny little boy was ushered over to Tuba City Boarding School to start his education. Tuba City has paved streets and tourists come to the shiny motel run by the Navajo Nation.

But Charnell and I visited Tuba City to look back to the 1920′s when Quincy Tahoma was a boy. It was during the enrollment process that he got the name the Navajo artist would put on his paintings for the rest of his life (sorry, you’ll have to read the book to find out about that). It was there that he may have first had the thrill of drawing and coloring a picture on paper. You could say that Quincy Tahoma was born at that school.

Not all Navajo children went to school back then. Some were needed at home to continue herding the sheep or helping with household chores. Like many children, Tahoma started school late, although the school records never seemed to get his age right, and there were no birth certificates to validate his age. But the family that raised him believed in education, at least for the boys in the family, so off to school he went.

In what is a researcher nightmare, we learned that all of the school records from the 1920′s when he attended school had burned.  Being optimists, we wangled our way into the big BIA offices in Tuba City and talked to the keeper of the records. The clerk looked at us stoically and repeated what we had already been told. No records.

Fortunately, while wandering around the Tuba City Swap Meet with us on a Friday morning, Mark Rosacker found a Navajo man willing to chat (but not to let us use his name).  He gave us directions to his home, a modernized hogan, with electricity, but still the traditional form.  While his wife, black hair pulled back in traditional knot, her colorful, full skirts spread around her on a bench,sat silently by, the man pulled out scrapbooks and unfolded his life.

He had been in the first grade at the same time as Quincy Tahoma. He related what it was like to escape into the bright sunlight for recess, the only time the children could speak in their own language. And how the children loved to draw and paint!  The teacher, like so many of that period, believed that art came naturally to the Navajo–in fact to all American Indians. While that sounds like stereotyping today, it was fortunate for the students like the man talking to us and for Quincy Tahoma. Both of them became artists and gained fame for their talent, a harvest that grew from the seeds planted when they were small boys at Tuba City Boarding School.

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?

Charnell and Vera have been away for several months, because we wanted something positive to tell you.

The good news.

Quincy Tahoma’s biography will be published by Schiffer Books. The book is due to appear in their Spring 2011 catalog.

A little history.

When Charnell Havens inherited some Tahoma paintings from a relative, she started looking for information about Tahoma’s life and art.  After a few years, she asked Vera Marie Badertscher if she would like to join the effort to uncover Tahoma’s biography and perhaps write a jointly authored book about the painter.

That was in the year 2000. Since then, the two of us have covered a lot of territory and talked to a lot of people, both separately and together.  Among the more than fifty people we interviewed, we have written about three of them here, Ramos and Gerdie Sanchez and Jean McSwain.

Next, we will share the road to publication so far. And we intend to take you along on this journey, so please come back often, and please tell us what you would like to know.

In order to be sure you do not miss anything, we encourage you to sign up for a subscription (see the box on the right) so that we can e-mail you each new post as it is written.

Quincy the movie star? Yes, Quincy Tahoma did star in a movie, sort of. He walks, he paints, he wears jewelry. Artists Simon and Herta Moselsio, from Bennington College, traveled to Santa Fe in 1943 and made short films of the young artist.

In one film clip, Tahoma emerges from a hogan and carefully closes the door. He wears a Navajo rug slung over his shoulder and is weighed down with silver concho belt and heavy silver squash blossom necklace. In the next scene we see the artist seated at a table painting. The table is covered by a rug and he is still wearing all his finery as he paints. No reality prizes for props and costumes for this film!

The short films include brief shots of several paintings, and give the viewer a chance to see the painter in action as he deftly makes a rabbit appear with a few brush strokes. Amerind Foundation in southern Arizona showed two of the three films as part of their 2004 exhibit of Native American master painters. Tahoma’s master work, Going to the Sing, which included more than sixty individual figures, hung beside paintings by Andy Tsihnahjinnie and Harrison Begay and others.  The photo above was given to a girl friend three years after the actual filming of the movie.

We have not been able to find anyone from Bennington who accompanied the Moselsios on that trip in 1943. Might you know someone?  Have you seen the movie? Please share your experience with us.