Santa Fe Indian Market

We met many artists at the Santa Fe Indian Market last week. One in particular made the trip complete for me.

Back in May, as Charnell Havens and I were deep in a blog tour promoting the book Quincy Tahoma: the Life and Legacy of a Navajo Artist, I wrote at A Traveler’s Library about some books that would help you get acquainted with American Indians.

One of those books was about Geronima Cruz Montoya, The Worlds of Potsúnú: Geronima Cruz Montoya of San Juan Pueblo.

Quincy Tahoma, a Navajo (Diné) honed his artistic talent at the Santa Fe Indian School.  Teacher Dorothy Dunn started what she called The Studio, where young (and not-s0-young) American Indian Artists came to learn to apply new techniques to their talent and old traditions.  Geronima Cruz was a student at the school, and the slim, quiet young woman became Dorothy Dunn’s right hand, helping to teach younger students.  When Dunn left to get married, Geronima Cruz took over as the head of The Studio.

Quincy Tahoma was in high school when that happened. Miss Cruz got married and became Mrs. Montoya. Although her style of painting could not be more different than Tahoma’s–she painted the typical Pueblo way with geometric designs, flat figures, and no background while Tahoma painted roiling action against deserts and mountains– Geronima Cruz Montoya admired the young man’s talent.  She once said that he just sat in the back of the room and painted and painted.

When Charnell and I were gathering information about Tahoma’s life, we interviewed many people who knew him, but we never had a chance to talk to Geronima Montoya. She does not like to do interviews since she has become quite deaf.  But imagine my delight when I discovered her name on the program for the Santa Fe Indian Market. She shared a booth with an artist son. Appropriately placed for such an icon of Indian art, her booth was under the portal in front of the Governor’s Palace on the north side of the Plaza.

Geronima Cruz Montoya at the Santa Fe Indian Market

She sat on a lawn chair in a line with some of her family members, dressed in a patterned blouse and tan slacks, her gray hair pulled back in a bun. I looked at some of her recent paintings in a bin, and then  I approached and said “Geronima Montoya?” She nodded. A relative sat beside her and took in everything I said, and later wrote it all out for the 96-year-old artist.

This woman has lived from the era when Pueblo men were just beginning to paint images on paper for sale to outsiders–mostly ethnologists and anthropologists–until this event that draws 100,000 people each year. She has seen women become a force in the Indian Art World. She has seen the 90-year-old Santa Fe Indian Market grow from a Saturday gathering of Pueblo potters under the portal of the Governor’s Palace in Santa Fe to a sprawling wonderland of 1100 artists from many tribes, many of whom have graduate degrees from universities across the country. And she has seen the market for Indian art grow and diversify–with the traditional art that she practiced fading from view and then having a rebirth.

When I spoke to Geronima Cruz Montoya, I was speaking to the history of American Indian art.

John King, Navajo painter, in front of his Indian Market booth

While teachers like Dunn and Montoya influenced Tahoma, Quincy influenced other artists. We chatted with three artists who are quoted in the book as saying that Quincy Tahoma inspired them. Upton Ethelbah, Jr. (Apache/Santa Clara) of Albuquerque won a blue ribbon for a stunning white sculpture; Anthony Emerson Chee (Diné) has a studio in Farmington, New Mexico and John King (Diné), painter of horses, says he was strongly influenced by Tahoma’s paintings.

©2012 Quincy Tahoma Blog. All Rights Reserved.

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.

©2012 Quincy Tahoma Blog. All Rights Reserved.