New Year, New Post

Happy New Year to everyone. Here is a New Year tune to listen to. I planned to upload a painting I am working on today but I believe my daughter has the chord so it is postponed for now. This will have to do presently.

Retablo Painting with Gabriel Vigil

Today we spent a good share of the day creating Retablos which are Latin American devotional painting, especially a small popular or folk art one using iconography derived from traditional Catholic church art.  The class had some art teachers but most were not.  My finished project is the nativity scene on the bottom left.  Our instructor was a 33 year old who is very accomplished in his artwork.  You can read about him on this website.  http://santerogabrieljvigil.com/GabeVigilWEB/Page1/artistbio.html

I included some of his work that he brought in to inspire us.  

Afterwards we visited the Spanish Colonial Museum and viewed the exhibit  titled "Converging Streams:  Art of the Hispanic and Native American Southwest".  

Tomorrow is the last day.  I have a curriculum project to complete by tomorrow.  then we will share the projects and have a reception in the evening.

Yesterday we had a panel of New Mexico artists, a potter, Maxine Toya from Jemez Pueblo and Tina Montoya, a jeweler from Santa Domingo Pueblo talk about their work.   

What is the spiritual story of a homeland?

How does (perpetual) colonization, conquering, and resistance transform homelands and create new ones?  That was our essential question for the day.  We had a speaker in the morning.  Dr. Glenabah Martinez. Her lecture was on Taos Blue Lake and the struggle with the US government to have the land returned to the Pueblo people as sacred grounds.  Then we went to the Taos Pueblo for a tour. It is about 1 1/2 hours north of Santa Fe.  We had a large chartered bus.  We also stopped in Taos the town and had a little time to wonder around the plaza and look at the shops.  On the way home we stopped at the San Francisco De Asis Church Ranchos de Taos.  This is one of the most painted/photographed churches in the United States.  Georgia O'Keefe made it renown in one of her paintings.  Here is a good juxtaposition of Native and Spanish influences.

What are homelands?

We had homework last night!  We were given a book called Telling New Mexico: a New History edited by Marta Weigle.  The book presents New Mexico history from its prehistoric beginnings to the present in essays of many diverse disciplines such as anthropology, Native American and Chicano studies, history and geography.  We had homework as well as tonight.  I am so excited because tomorrow we go to Taos, New Mexico.  When I was a freshman in college at Wartburg I went there with several students.  We had a makeshift 

darkroom in an abandoned tavern and did photography the old fashioned way.  

Today we got to know the history museum better and learned more about the Contested Homelands.  Dr. Thomas Chavez spoak to us. He  is the retired Executive Director of the National Hispanic Culture Center in Albuquerque.  He also had been the director of the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe for 21 years. He was a poetic and thoughtful speaker.  He spoak about history as stories.  He said "Stories are gifts but they bring great responsibility. He also stressed how history has many layers and complexity of boundaries. The Santa Fe Trail and the Camino Real converge here in Santa Fe.  The oldest U.S. church is here in this town as well as what is considered the oldest house.

The final picture is of the New Mexico Veterans Memorial with a picture of the Bataan Memorial Military Museum in the background.  

Afternoon ramblings

Using a paper map from the hotel, I ventured out around the hotel, into the Plaza and the outlying circumference of the Hilton hotel which I am staying at.

The hotel itself originally was a hacienda built in the late sixteen hundreds and home to one of the original first families of Santa Fe. It is built in the Spanish Colonial style and has been very comfortable. This evening we had our first meeting with the

members of the our National Endowment for the Humanities workshop. Its official title is "Contested

Homelands: Knowledge, History, and Culture of Historic Santa Fe. There are about 40 participants

in this session. There will be two sessions. We are the first. I included two pictures here. One is the front entrance of the New Mexico History Museum.

That is where we will do the bulk of our work and where we had our reception this evening. The other is a photo of the typical Santa Fe style of

architecture.

Leaving Iowa for the Southwest

I left this morning at 8:00 for New Mexico.  It was pouring down rain most of the way to St. Paul.  I flew out at 11:30 on a direct flight to Albuquerque, New Mexico for the week I will be spending studying the history of the area.  Pictured is the Historic Plaza in the downtown area.  The Plaza itself has been here since 1610 and has been a National Historical Landmark since 1962.  Museums, shops, galleries and restaurants surround the Plaza.  It was extremely hot, dry and windy here today.  My workshop starts tomorrow at 5:00 p.m. so I have some time to visit some galleries and the Museum of Fine Art tomorrow.

Strange things at Lunch

School lunch is usually an experience. But today it was especially interesting when I received this sculptural grape. It was worth keeping and displaying as an artform.