Quincy Tahoma, the Navajo artist,  loved horses.  I mean he LOVED horses. When he began to earn a little money from selling his drawings through the Santa Fe Indian School’s store, he saved up and bought a saddle for his dorm room.  No horse, just a saddle!

Not having a mount of his own, he sometimes cared for the horses of a Canyon Road artist whose main residence was in New York.  Tahoma loved to ride horses, he loved to watch them run, and he loved to draw them.

The Roundup (1956), Courtesy of Clifford Brito

Quincy Tahoma’s paintings spoke volumes about the horses’ speed, their strength, their beauty, their spirit and even their color, the latter two reflecting Navajo mythology.

Buffalo Hunt, riding Spirit Horse (1947) Private Owner

In her book They Sang For Horses: The Impact of the Horse on Navajo & Apache Folklore, LaVerne Harrell Clark says, “The horse of the Navajo and Apache mythology is a glorious horse – a supernatural steed, springing from the fertile imagination of the Southwestern Indians who produced it.  To its creators it came to be as much of a reality as the deities born in like manner from the roots of their native religion.”

Clarke explains that the notion that  the sun or moon could be described as riding a horse does not appear incongruous to the Navajo. According to Navajo mythology,”Sun possessed entire herds of horses in each of the colors of the cardinal directions“, which she later identifies as white (east), turquoise or blue (south,), yellow (west) and spotted (north).  Clarke takes the reader through a delightful discussion of the horses’ colors and their significance through the eyes of a youth making a mythological journey through Sun’s corral. “The youth could see also that rainbows formed an arch over the sky around the blue horses while blue swallows fluttered over them, doubtless empowering the horses with the speed and endurance they contained in their blue feathers.”

While white, black, and palomino horses are popular among Navajo due to their roles associated with mythological deities, the spotted horse is the favorite of folk heroes and guardian beings – those common folk of Navajo myths and tales.  It’s the working man’s horse of choice.

Two horses racing, Courtesy of Jean Wallace McSwain

Quincy Tahoma was a master at honoring his native beliefs and traditions through his art, and perhaps we now have more insight into why he included swallows in almost all of his horse paintings.

Note from Vera: There is more about Tahoma and his love of horses, in Quincy Tahoma: The Life and Legacy of a Navajo Artist, including photographs of Tahoma riding a horse and the story of an influential woman in his childhood who was a great horsewoman. We are sharing here just three of the more than 170 illustrations in the book. You can see the entire book soon, so be sure to preorder in the right-hand column.

©2012 Quincy Tahoma Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Events

Turquoise

Tucson Gem, Mineral and Fossil Show, American Indian Expo, Flamingo Quality Inn, Stone Avenue, Tucson AZ, January 31-Feburary 14. Featured artists and craftsmen, dancing, food.
Tulsa Indian Art Festival, OK, February 11-13, Juried art show and performances and demonstrations.

American Indian Music Festival, Casa Grande National Monument, Arizona, Feburary 12 and 13. This event was new to me, but it is only the third annual. The website promises food and crafts as well as music. Now if the weather will cooperate.

Southwest American Indian Art Fair, the Arizona Museum on the campus of University of Arizona, Tucson, February 19 and 20. Juried show with finest in crafts from around the country. Performance area with music, craft demonstrations, and food booths.

Indian Fair and Market, Heard Museum, Phoenix, AZ, March 6 and 7. Juried art show, book signings, music and dances.

Both the Denver Art Museum and the Boston Museum of Art have recently opened enlarged Native American collections. In fact, Denver claims to be the first museum to collect American Indian art.

Reading

I’m currently reading  A New Deal for Native Art: Indian Arts and Federal Policy, 1933-1943 by Jennifer McClerran. It is a must read for anyone interested in the development of American Indian Art starting in the 1930s. We have invited Jennifer to stop by Tahoma Blog and talk to us about the book because it intersects with Tahoma’s life in art.

Travelers in the Southwest should not miss Canyon de Chelley, and the nearby Hubbel Trading Post National Monument at Ganado.  On my reading stack, I have a beautiful book, Tséyi’ / Deep in the Rock: Reflections on Canyon de Chelly, about Canyon de Chelley by Navajo poet Laura Tohe and photographer Stephen E. Strom. If you say Tséyi’, the Navajo word for “place deep in the rock”) will come out sounding like what the Spanish heard–Chelley (in Spanish pronounced Shay).

I treasure a copy I acquired recently of an older book, Hubbell Trading Post National Historic Site , by our friend David Brugge, who wrote the foreword for Quincy Tahoma, The Life and Legacy of a Navajo Artist.

If you want to keep up to date and get good tips about collecting American Indian Art, you need to tune in to the informative, short and snappy posts on the Savvy Collector Blog. Phoenix appraiser Corinne Cain provides the authoritative voice. Her latest post introduced me to the new Google Art Project, where you can visit major museums and see the paintings in the room in which they are displayed, or zoom in for an incredible close-up of the painter’s brush strokes.

This post above is by Vera Marie. The photo is by “Cobalt123,” used from Flickr with Creative Commons License.

Would you like to share places to go or things to read? We would love to hear from you. And we are still waiting to learn if you would be interested in having the opportunity to buy a Tahoma mousepad or other things with his paintings printed on them. So if you are reading this on Facebook or in your e-mail, please click through to the blog page and make a comment.

©2012 Quincy Tahoma Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Charnell and I (Vera) have been galley slaves for the last couple of weeks.  No, we’re not pulling oars on a ship purloined by pilots; and we’re not cooking in an airplane kitchen–we’re slavishly poring over the manuscript (galley) of Quincy Tahoma: The Life and Legacy of a Navajo Artist. (To be released in April 2011).

Our editor at Schiffer Publishing, Jesse Marth, has done a fine job of rescuing us from inconsistencies in spelling people’s names, disconnected sentences, and fuzzy paragraphs and just in general helping us make this the best biography of a Navajo artist that it can possibly be.

Charnell has had the unenviable task of going back to some of the nice people who allowed us to use images of their Tahomas and telling them that the image we have is not good enough.  Most of those slightly blurry images have been replaced with new ones.  Then she had to find places to squeeze in some late arriving images of paintings that were just too good to leave out of the book.  Then she had to verify that we had all the names of owners attached to the correct picture, and since we’ve been collecting these for about ten years, a lot of Tahoma’s paintings have been sold or otherwise moved from one owner to another. And then there are the museums who have changed names since we first talked to them. A hundred little details that we’re trying to get right in the finished product.

I’ve also been working on a list of words to appear in the index.  Some people never look at an index, but since I like researching, I favor books with indices that are actually helpful to the reader.  Now that most people are familiar with reading online, where you can click on a link that takes you to more information, it is even more important to have a helpful bibliography and endnotes and a complete index, to make up for the fact that a print book does not have those blue underlines you find in a computer document that indicate ‘more information on the other side of this click.’

If you are curious about how this all works, the galley comes to us in single space format with indications of where sections break and where photos will be inserted.  We have to write in any corrections and answer editor’s questions in red ink in margins, and then send it back.  We rewrote some sentences and rearranged some very minor things, but the book still contains 10 chapters and a postscript plus introductory material about the context of American Indian art in mid-twentieth century.  When we were satisfied, we sent it back to Schiffer Publications.

Now we wait to see what the whole thing will look like once the graphic artists have chosen typestyles and layout.  And YOU only have to wait until April 2011 to see the finished product.  We have added a place over there on the right hand side of this page where you can reserve your copy, so send us an e-mail today. (If you are reading this in your e-mail, RSS, or Facebook, you will have to go to blog to sign up. Just click on the title of this post at the top of the page.)

Vera Marie Badertscher

©2012 Quincy Tahoma Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Quincy Tahoma Book Cover, Release Date April 2011, Painting and Design copyrighted. If you wish to reproduce for review or promotion purposes, please inquire.

“Woot!” Charnell tells me that if we want to sound up to date, we say “Woot!” instead of Yay! or Hurrah! or Hurray!

But can’t we just say all of the above?

After more than thirteen years of work, we have concrete proof that you will be able to read a biography of  Quincy Tahoma, outstanding Navajo Artist. You can see the book cover here, but you can also see it at the Schiffer Publishing site.

The painting on the cover, by the way, belongs to Charnell, and is one of the paintings that inspired the long  journey to share Tahoma’s life with you.

We have been posting explanations of some of the work that goes into a biography, and telling you some of the things that we have discovered about Quincy Tahoma and American Indian Art of mid twentieth century. If you have not visited here before, take a look through the archives and you may be surprised at the way a book unfolds.

We’ve recently added a “Contact Us” section over there on the right. (If you are reading this in your e-mail, RSS, or Facebook, you will have to go to blog to sign up. Just click on the title of this post at the top of the page.) If you want to get your name on the advance reservation list for a copy of Quincy Tahoma: The Life and Legacy of a Navajo Artist, send us a note, through the link you see there. The book will be available in April, 2011. If you like the cover picture, just wait until you see the other 270 or so paintings included in the book.

Take a look at  Schiffer’s Tahoma page and tell us what you think. We really want your feedback. And can you help us compile a list of bookstores and Indian art stores and museums that we should contact? We’d love to hear from you.

VMB

©2012 Quincy Tahoma Blog. All Rights Reserved.

We first saw it on the back of his paintings. Not on the front, because very early on he developed a specialty signature, and that is another whole story, which we tell in our book.

Don’t forget, Quincy Tahoma: The Life and Legacy of a Navajo Artist will be available in the Spring of 2011.

But on the back of paintings, he would often write a dedication to the person receiving the painting. He gave away a lot of paintings to fortunate friends. And he would often add where he was when he painted it, so we have found references to “Santa Fe Indian School,” the “Santa Fe Indian Hospital”, “Tahoma of Santa Fe,” Tahoma of Tuba City,” and even “Scottsdale” on one. We never saw one that said City Jail or State Prison, although he painted there as well.

Inscription on back of a 1947 painting, Courtesy of The Family of Richard G. Jones

Since there was so little paper trail, and he was something of a drifter, we really did not expect to come up with correspondence, which is the mainstay of much biography.  However, by the time we had talked to a hundred or so people and visited who knows how many history and art intsitutions, we had amassed a rather surprising number of things in Tahoma’s own hand writing.

The first example we saw was a framed letter owned by the Christian Brothers of Santa Fe. In it, Tahoma is asking his friend, one of the Brothers, for money to pay bail. Later, at the National Cowboy Museum in Oklahoma City, Charnell found a letter and a follow up telegram to famous photographer Elliott Porter, also asking for money.  Porter had befriended Tahoma, and this time it wasn’t bail, but money to get out of Santa Fe and away from people Tahoma thought were a bad influence on him.  (It is a good story, but we have to leave something for you to read in the book.)

Not all of the Tahoma correspondence is about money. My favorites are the love notes and letters that former girlfriends shared with us.  We interviewed those girlfriends and in the book we  tell the story, as well as reproducing a hand-illustrated Christmas card and a page of a love letter.

1943 Christmas card, Courtesy of Jean Wallace McSwain

Two other outstanding examples of Tahoma’s handwriting showed up.

One had survived in New Mexico. David Brugge and his friend Jim Wilson took in Tahoma at their Albuquerque Indian store. David, who told us the story (and later wrote the Introduction to our biography of Tahoma), did not know if the ledger still existed.  Tahoma made some entries in the hand-written ledger of sales of his paintings, and Charnell came in contact with the then-owner of the ledger, the stepson of Jim Wilson.

The second find completed the story of Tahoma’s fancy penmanship. We were contacted by the owner of a sketchpad that belonged to Tahoma.  An artist’s sketchpad tells so much about how an artist works, and besides telling us how he created paintings, this one showed us that Quincy Tahoma created his fancy penmanship. He must have been taught to write in grade school, like all of us, but the artist in him was not satisfied to just follow the forms in the writing book at Santa Fe Indian School.  He created his own gorgeous swirling “Q” and majestic “T” along with the lesser letters of the alphabet.

1944 drawing from sketch book, Courtesy of Frank Tropiano

If you own a Tahoma painting, have you looked at the back of it to see if he wrote on the back?  Have you ever discovered interesting stuff on the backs of paintings by other artists?

©2012 Quincy Tahoma Blog. All Rights Reserved.

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)

©2012 Quincy Tahoma Blog. All Rights Reserved.

The good news.

Quincy Tahoma’s biography will be published by Schiffer Books. The book is due to appear in their Spring 2011 catalog.

A little history.

When Charnell Havens inherited some Tahoma paintings from a relative, she started looking for information about Tahoma’s life and art.  After a few years, she asked Vera Marie Badertscher if she would like to join the effort to uncover Tahoma’s biography and perhaps write a jointly authored book about the painter.

That was in the year 2000. Since then, the two of us have covered a lot of territory and talked to a lot of people, both separately and together.  Among the more than fifty people we interviewed, we have written about three of them here, Ramos and Gerdy Sanchez and Jean McSwain.

Next, we will share the road to publication so far. And we intend to take you along on this journey, so please come back often, and please tell us what you would like to know.

In order to be sure you do not miss anything, we encourage you to sign up for a subscription (see the box on the right) so that we can e-mail you each new post as it is written.

©2012 Quincy Tahoma Blog. All Rights Reserved.

Some of our interviewees were adamant on this fact, and anthropological books from the time seemed to bolster that opinion. A woman who had overseen the government nurses who served reservation communities told us that a nurse had rescued a Navajo baby whose family had put him out to die. A part-Navajo woman told us that her mother (a full-blooded Navajo) and her mother’s friends believed that had been Tahoma’s fate until someone rescued him.

Other people, however, were not so sure, and some even had examples of children who had born with defects who were raised by their own families.

The one thing that kept nagging at us about the theory that Tahoma had non-Indian adoptive parents, was the fact that many told us how steeped in the Navajo Way–Navajo beliefs– Tahoma was throughout his life.  He reportedly carried a pollen bag (popularly called medicine bag). We were told that he believed in witches and spirits and the power of evil forces to change from human to animal form.

How could he have such strong beliefs in Navajo ways if he was not raised by Navajos? Eventually we found two surprising answers to our questions.

Do you know someone who held on to his traditional beliefs, even when raised in a different culture?

©2012 Quincy Tahoma Blog. All Rights Reserved.