Portrait of Tahoma

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?

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)

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.

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