It was certainly an unusual friendship, the jailer and the prisoner.  Or was it?!!

Quincy Tahoma seemed to make friends everywhere he went, and the Santa Fe jail was no exception.  As a 1950s frequent guest due to public intoxication, the young Navajo endeared himself to the guard, Clifford Brito, who let the artist out of his cell to perform janitorial duties and to paint.

Tahoma showed his gratitude by painting a beautiful scene of a brave rounding up horses.  The art work was custom designed to fit over the doorway of the jailer’s mobile home and  Brito treasured that painting until his death in 2008.

You can view Clifford Brito and his painting in the slide show on the home page of  the Tahoma web site. I took this picture when I interviewed him in 2004 during a research trip to New Mexico.

Do you know of other instances of jailers and prisoners becoming friends? Have you heard any other jail-time stories about Quincy Tahoma?  We were told, for instance, that he was briefly incarcerated in Indiana or Illinois while on a road trip with a friend, but the details of that adventure are scant.

Photograph by Charnell Havens. All rights reserved.

August 31, 2004

“History is documented with ‘personal recollections.’”

Mona Ortiz Stetina wrote that in an e-mail to Anne Cavanaugh at the Santa Fe New Mexican.

We had written an article for the New Mexican telling people a little bit about Quincy Tahoma and our project and asked for their help. Along with the article, we printed a picture loaned to us by Dan Fannell whose step father Jim Wilson was one of the many people who had befriended Tahoma. A drive-in movie had provided a giant canvas for one of Quincy’s favorite subjects—a horse being spooked by a skunk. We did not know the name of the drive-in, but had been told it stood on Cerillos Road in Santa Fe. (more…)