One day Charnell and I visited the library of the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture/Laboratory of Anthropology on Museum Hill in Santa Fe.  The Lab has been in existence since 1931 (later merged with the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture), and has both an extensive archival collection and a library where we  browsed.

We were returning to the welcoming adobe building where the building designed by John Gaw Meem, and funded by John D. Rockefeller, copies Pueblo style. The thick walls of mud topped with heavy log rafters favored by Meem (Spanish Pueblo Revival) transformed Santa Fe in the early 1930′s.

We had previously discovered magazine articles that mentioned Tahoma’s art and books and newspapers that carried brief mentions of Taoma when we browsed the library. The slim bio file of Tahoma at the Lab’s library did not yield much information, much to the dismay of the librarian.

So when we made this return visit, the librarian was very happy to tell us about a new acquisition. Somebody had donated school newspapers from the Santa Fe Indian School, and librarians were beginning to catalogue them, but we were welcome to take a look.  Of course they were not a complete collection, but we were ecstatic to discover the Teguayo student newspaper covered the years that Tahoma went to school at SFIS.

When we went to look at the records available at the Lab of Anthropology, we had a long list of questions. One of those questions was, “What grade was Quincy in when he went to Santa Fe Indian School?” We were also curious to know what other interests he might have had besides art.

We knew that he had been sent to Albuquerque Indian School from Tuba City and had transferred to Santa Fe by the time he was in high school.  But suddenly, we found a sports article in the Teguayo that told us that he was playing basketball for SFIS’s 7th grade team in December 1934. Another member of that team, Herbert Manygoats, would surface later in our research as the friend who drove the adult Tahoma around New Mexico.

As we continued our search, we learned that Tahoma continued his interest in sports, as despite his crippled arm, he could throw a football a long, long way, according to Harrison Begay. And he set a track record that lasted for decades, and even taught some younger kids to play tennis. But those are stories for another day. Sports helped young men adjust and survive at boarding schools, we learned. And we’ll talk about that conversation later, too.

The photo at the top of the page was taken by Vera Marie Badertscher, all rights reserved. The photo of Quincy Tahoma in football uniform is used with the kind permission of the Roberta Anglen, daughter of Kee Yazzie who was a friend of Tahoma.

Back to you….What’s your guess as to the role of sports in government-run Indian boarding schools?

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)

September 17, 2004

What is that old story about searching the world and finding treasure in your own back yard? I am here to tell you that is the way it happens.

I live in Arizona. Ever since Charnell Havens asked me to help track down information about Quincy Tahoma so that we could write a book that would share his life with people, I have been taking periodic trips to New Mexico to sift through library and museum files, have gone to other cities to interview people, have even looked in a Los Angeles museum and a New York City museum for paintings done by Tahoma. Finally, after having run all around the country for five years, I decided to take a look at a museum in my own home town.

When I e-mailed Alan Ferg at the Arizona State Museum in Tucson, he said, “I don’t think we have any documents. But we do have ninety paintings.”

How’s that again? NINETY?? And so I spent two days looking at and describing ninety small paintings that Quincy Tahoma painted between the age of 16 and 18 and one that he did in 1940 when he was 19 years old. I have seen how his natural talent for telling stories with line and color was present before he had achieved technical proficiency. And his love of certain subjects started way back when he was in the ninth or tenth grade. If you want to look at the ninety paintings, contact Alan Ferg, to make an appointment.

Have you seen the Tahoma collection at the Arizona State Museum? In what other museums have you seen Tahoma’s paintings? Please share with the other readers of the Tahoma Blog.

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.