Art for what ails us.
Art is a strange bird, isn't it? Always alluded to as emblematic of the human condition and the state of society, it often fails to earn enough***image1*** trust to speak effectively to such heady topics. Worse, an apparent glut, especially in such an art-centric city as Santa Fe, can have the effect of diminishing perceived value.
There's so much art here, and so much of it fails to exude anything in particular, that one is sometimes tempted to purchase, for example, a small, cast sculpture, just for the satisfaction of hurling it to the ground and watching it smash. (If anyone happens to have photographic evidence, my accomplice and I will deny it; it is the Photoshop era, after all.) There is a mish-mash of value, intent and possibility, at this point in the evolution of culture, which makes interfacing with art convoluted and strange.
Almost all art seems to be acceptable at this point, a friend recently said to me with palpable sadness. In other words, so many styles, fads, transitions, movements and moments have passed through the lens of art history that there is some justification for almost any kind of half-assed expression to lay claim to a kind of legitimate heritage or conceptual vernacular. Add to that the current cultural climate in which, as much as there are important works and tremendous ideas across all disciplines, there appears to be an equal capacity for vapidity and shallow fulfillment, and the state of the art world begins to mimic the state of the economy: wrecked by its own glib and carefree binge.
Of course, this is not entirely true. It is still possible, and always has been, to differentiate quality and sound craft from poor emulations and dilettantism. But at a time when it is so easy to dismiss art's value-a ***image2***time of what is now casually called the worst housing crisis in the post-World War II era-it's useful to find reminders that art has been used as morale booster and a clarifier of societal priorities in times of past difficulty and confusion. In particular, it is both instructive and delightful to tour
Big Deal! WPA Art from the New Mexico Museum of Art Collection
at the Governor's Gallery.
Assembled by 20th century curator Joseph Traugott, several works by New Mexico artists who were supported, to some extent, by the post-Depression Works Progress Administration effort, transform the modest gallery space adjacent to the Governor's Office into thoughtful testimony on the close ties between our nation's collective romanticism of the American West and the economic hardships prior to World War II. Traugott's exceptional command of the era allows him to capably intersperse photography, gender and style to summon an immense sense of the scope through which New Mexico, in particular, was portrayed during President Franklin Delano Roosevelt's New Deal.
Where Regina Tatum Cooke masterfully represented the Mission of San Miguel with her precise treatment of now-iconic architecture standing against an instantly knowable New Mexico landscape, James Stovall Morris rendered a magical realist scene of a storm moving through the land, its emotions mimicked by the wild-eyed residents of a pueblo village as surely as the adobe buildings that blend with the background hills. Both kinds of representation are as familiar as spring winds or the scent of juniper at this point, but at the time, they represented radically different sensibilities and interpretations of the region and its culture. Add the further contrast between painters like Will Shuster of the Cinco Pintores, Emil Bistram, who became a dedicated modern painter, and the legendary Freemont Ellis, and the enthusiasm with which artists used support from the WPA to generate multiple but simultaneous interpretations of New Mexico becomes intoxicating.
By contrasting these and other painters with exceptional printmaking examples by Kenneth Adams, Manville Chapman and E Boyd (represented by a particularly intriguing hand-colored lino cut of an altar piece at Laguna Pueblo), and photographs by John C Collier and Jack Delano (who were working, technically, under the Farm Security Act), the exhibition becomes particularly full-bodied. Of note, beyond the breadth of representation, is that the work ethic embodied by these artists comes across with great clarity. Charged with a task by the WPA, their enthusiasm for their subject matter is matched by the pursuit and refinement of their own craft and technique. Not all of these artists ultimately made huge impacts within their field of artistic practice (perhaps, for example, E Boyd's greater contribution was as curator to the Spanish Colonial and Folk Art Museums), but their exploration of region, culture and craft, exhibited side by side, is a moving tribute to the WPA and to New Mexico's origins as an art center.
Viewed from a greater elevation, the diversity of these works reminds us of a time when substance and technique were more foundational than style and innuendo, a time when art was viewed as an integral part of the solution to an ailing nation's deep troubles.
