Patterns of renewal: Native women artists and the northern New Mexico exhibitionary complex in the twenty-first century

Abstract

Native North American women in the Southwest adeptly navigated a transformative moment in their economies of arts production in the early tourism era, the 1880s to 1910s. They altered their practices within a divergent time reshaped by drastic increases in commerce and travel via transcontinental railways. As arts leaders, Native women adapted their extant practices of mentorship and education, local and international reach, interdisciplinary forms, and place-specific interactions. Through this work, they established an exhibitionary complex with area partners that reached northern New Mexico by the 1910s. During the remainder of the twentieth century, Native women artists built upon this foundation in northern New Mexico. In the twenty-first century, Native women persist these legacies in wide-ranging arts practices in this locale. There exists a robust scholarship on Southwestern Native arts and exhibitions of the early tourism period. Studies have focused on particular media and associated artists and patrons, with an emphasis on potters and painters in institutional and familial contexts. My dissertation examines the tethered relationships between Native women artists of the early tourism and the post-2000 periods. In doing so, my selection of a trio of in-depth case studies allows me to focus on this topic from a broader, generational perspective. Further, I analyze the relationships, or patterns of renewal, between Native women’s arts and exhibition practices established in the early tourism era and the ways that Native women artists carry these acts of accomplishment and leadership forward in the twenty-first century. In this study, I trace a history of Native women’s leadership within the dual contexts of interdisciplinary art forms and exhibition practices in northern New Mexico between the 1880s and 2010s. Following this historical context, I focus on the arts practices of Susan Folwell (Santa Clara Tewa), Cara Romero (Chemehuevi), and Athena LaTocha (Hunkpapa Lakota/Ojibwe) within solo exhibition contexts in northern New Mexico.