We wanted to alert you to an article in the Santa Fean magazine February/March 2010. Joseph Smith remembers Tahoma paintings and stories about the Navajo artist’s life woven into Smith’s own family history. We continue to be amazed at the number of families who feel this connection to Quincy Tahoma and treasure his paintings.

You can read the article  in the Santa Fean online edition if the magazine is not readily available where you live.

Smith goes hunting for Tahoma’s grave in the Rosario Cemetery in Santa Fe and finds the area of the unmarked grave.  It is a sad, but very touching story.

Ever since we found the record of Tahoma’s funeral at the Cathedral and his grave location at Rosario cemetery, we have puzzled over many things. He was not a practicing Catholic, so why the Catholic church funeral and burial? Did his friend Eppie Montoya, politically and religiously well connected, pull a few strings?  Why is the grave not marked? Because the cemetery did not recognize American Indians? Because his friends ran out of money?

Give us your thoughts. And please take a look at Joseph Smith’s lovely essay.

When Dorothy Stevenson met the artist Quincy Tahoma, she was a young woman and he made a big impression on her. Later, as an adult, she became a teacher at St. Michael’s High School in Santa Fe and eventually wrote a musical play based loosely on Tahoma’s life.

Entitled Navajo Night Song, the musical was performed at the Greer Garson Theater at St. Michael’s school for three nights in 1977. In the play, the Tahoma-like central character was married and lost a baby son. Yet, in more than 12 years of research into Tahoma’s life, we never found evidence that he had married or had a child.

Can you shed any light on this perplexing subject? Do you know anything about the production of Navajo Night Song in 1977 in Santa Fe?