by Barbara J. Harrelson

2007 may be known as the Year of the Woman Artist in New Mexico. The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe is celebrating its tenth year with a series of events celebrating “women of distinction,” with O’Keeffe among the most universally acclaimed artists. Several Santa Fe and Taos art galleries, and the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture (MIAC), are featuring a variety of historic and contemporary women artists during 2007.

New Mexico artists from the past, including Beatrice (Bea) Mandelman, Gene Kloss, Pablita Veldarde and Rebecca Salsbury James, and present, including Modernists Janet Lippincott and Florence Pierce, have been featured in recent exhibitions, along with Agnes Martin, whose long career ended with her death in 2004, and O’Keeffe, who died in 1986. Another early artist, the photographer Laura Gilpin, is still shown in galleries in Santa Fe and Taos.

Apart from Georgia O’Keeffe and Agnes Martin, many of these women artists are lesser known than their male contemporaries in the Santa Fe and Taos artist colonies—yet their work has left a mark of achievement far beyond New Mexico. In the case of O’Keeffe, Martin, and Velarde, their impact has been worldwide.

Some of these women artists (Mandelman, O’Keeffe, and Lippincott), like their male counterparts, studied at the famous Art Students League in New York City. Others (Mandelman, Velarde, and Kloss) produced works for the Depression-era Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the ‘30s and ‘40s, alongside the male artists similarly employed.

Bea Mandelman (1912-1998) and Agnes Martin (1912-2004), born in the same year (in New Jersey and Canada, respectively), began creating abstract art in the early-mid twentieth century and later became friends when living in Taos. They were part of a group of artists known as the Taos Moderns—a younger generation of artists who flocked to Taos after its fame was spread by the original Taos Society of Artists. The reputation of this small, quirky village in northern New Mexico as an art colony of the highest caliber dates to the beginning of the twentieth century—and continues to reverberate today.

Mandelman moved to Taos in 1944 with her husband, the artist Louis Ribak, after having achieved some success as a printmaker and painter experimenting with abstract forms. (She helped refine the silk-screen process as a fine art, producing a new medium, the serigraph.) In New York, she had studied with and befriended artists like Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, and Will Barnet. At one point, she and Ribak shared a Pennsylvania house with Jackson Pollock and Lee Krasner. Mandelman worked for the WPA from 1935-1942, as a muralist and printmaker. In the late ‘40s, she went to Paris to study with the renowned Modernist Fernand Léger.

Mandelman and Ribak established an art school and a gallery in Taos, where they lived for the rest of their lives, although they often spent winters in Mexico, and traveled abroad. Ribak died in 1979. Bea Mandelman died at her home in Taos in 1998, having been “re-discovered” a few months before her death, when a Forbes magazine article called her “one of the last of the original abstract expressionists” and reported that she had a lifetime’s worth of canvases waiting to be sold, “the best deals in abstract expressionism out there.”

Agnes Martin moved to New Mexico in 1952, because “...it was the second poorest state in the union,” she said. “I thought I could get cheap living, and sure enough I got a very good studio in Taos for $15 a month.” (She had studied and taught at the University of New Mexico in the ‘40s.) However, she moved back to New York five years later, urged by art dealer Betty Parsons to get back to the center of the abstract expressionism market, where Martin shared working space with Ellsworth Kelly and Robert Indiana, among others. By the end of the decade, she had solidified her position as a major American artist, and, in 1967, decided to move back to New Mexico permanently and take a sabbatical from art.

After some time spent “drifting” and not painting, Martin settled near Cuba (New Mexico) and later lived for a while in Galisteo, before moving back to Taos in 1993, where she lived out her days, continuing to work until her death in 2004. She was awarded the National Medal of Arts in 2003. Martin’s last exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts (MFA) in Santa Fe was the 2004-2005 In Pursuit of Perfection: The Art of Agnes Martin, María Maríinez, and Florence Pierce. “Perfection, according to Martin, exists in those moments of great joy and peace—moments that inspire her to create,” wrote MFA curator Timothy Rodgers (El Palacio, Winter 2004).

Rebecca Salsbury (Strand) James (1891-1968), who was called Beck by her friends, visited Taos with her first husband, the photographer Paul Strand, in 1926. She returned to New Mexico three years later, traveling with her friend Georgia O’Keeffe, to spend the summer at the Taos home of Mabel Dodge Luhan, who “presided” over the local artists and writers colonies. In the following years, the Strands, who were part of the avant-garde Stieglitz art circle in New York, returned to Taos each year, until their marriage ended in 1933. James moved to Taos permanently in 1937 when she married Bill James; she lived there until her death in 1968.

Beck was a self-taught artist who not only learned to draw and paint but also mastered the reverse oil-on-glass painting techniques, derived from early American folk art, which inspired experimentation by some Modernist painters like Marsden Hartley and Kandinsky. James, who had numerous one-woman shows, is also known for flower paintings that, inevitably, invite comparison with some of O’Keeffe’s famous images.

Gene Kloss (1903-1996) is considered one of the finest printmakers of her time and is widely identified with the Taos Art Colony. Born Alice Geneva Glasier in Oakland, California, she was educated at University of California, Berkeley. She married poet Phillips Kloss in 1925. They came to Taos on their honeymoon—carrying her printing press with them as they camped along the way—and, in her words, she “considered herself a New Mexican from then on.”

They did not move to Taos until after World War II, however, but visited regularly over two decades. A California art critic referred to Gene as “the artist who commutes to Taos.” While living in the Bay Area, the Klosses became friends with Ansel Adams, who was then pursuing a career in music. They would renew their friendship in New Mexico, after Adams had decided to become a photographer. Gene continued to produce prints of California landscapes and scenes, while the Taos visits yielded images of mountains and high desert terrain, along with portraits and depictions of ceremonies, including Native American and Penitente rituals. She also worked in oil and watercolor. The Klosses moved permanently to Taos in 1968. She was still working in 1985 at age 82, and much of her work can still be found in galleries in Santa Fe and Taos.

Pablita Velarde (1918-2006) and Laura Gilpin (1891-1979) represent two distinctive art traditions in New Mexico, each groundbreaking in its own way, and with the common theme of Native American subjects and values. Gilpin lived in Santa Fe for a while, spending time among the Navajo and Pueblo Peoples, while Velarde, of Santa Clara Pueblo, was educated in Santa Fe, but lived most of her adult life in Albuquerque.

Born in Colorado, Laura Gilpin moved to New York in 1916 to study photography at the Clarence H. White School. Gilpin wrote, “Many enter the field of photography with the impulse to record a scene. They often fail to realize that what they wish to do is to record the emotion felt upon viewing that scene.” The pictorial style that Gilpin developed, with a preference for black-and-white, has been described as an influence on Ansel Adams and his followers.

Pablita Velarde’s Tewa name is Tse Tsan (Golden Dawn), the name her grandmother gave her at birth. At the age of 5 years, she left the Santa Clara Pueblo after her mother’s death to attend the St. Catherine Indian School in Santa Fe, using the name of Pablita Velarde. She went back to the Pueblo each summer, repeating the experience of many Indian children of her time, who lived in two worlds, speaking two languages.

She later attended the Santa Fe Indian School where Dorothy Dunn taught painting to Native American boys while the girls learned crafts like basket weaving and embroidery. She managed to get permission at age 14 to study painting with Dunn, but had to contend with lots of teasing and discouragement from her fellow students—and her father, who felt she should be spending her time on “women’s work.” He took her out of the Indian School and she studied bookkeeping and typing in the Española public schools before returning to the Indian School—and Dunn’s painting classes—in time to graduate in 1936.

While working menial day jobs, she painted at night, and sold an occasional work—for a dollar each—under the portal at the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe. Her big break came at age 19 when Velarde was commissioned by the National Park Service, under the Works Progress Administration (WPA), to create scenes of traditional Pueblo culture for the visitor center being built at Bandelier National Monument. She produced some 84 paintings between 1939 and 1945. Sixty-eight of these paintings are included in the exhibition at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, through January 6, 2008.

After the success of the WPA work, more lean years and menial jobs followed before her art would gain the awards and international acclaim that secured her place as a prominent Native American painter. MIAC’s A New Deal for Tse Tsan: Pablita Velarde at Bandelier, (through January 6, 2008) showcases selected early work.

Florence Miller Pierce, now living in Albuquerque, and Janet Lippincott, in Santa Fe, are the two Modernist artists who, both in their late 80s, are still working, after many achievements and exhibitions. Their work is represented in contemporary art galleries in Santa Fe and New York, as well as major private and public collections in the nation.

Pierce, born in 1918 in Washington DC, had grandparents living in New Mexico. At the age of 18, she convinced her parents later she returned to New Mexico and was one of two women artists asked to join the Transcendental Painting Group (TPG), led by Bisttram and Raymond Jonson. She met her husband, Horace Towner Pierce, who was also a student at the Bisttram School of Fine Art. They were married in 1938 and pursued parallel artistic careers until his death in 1958. The goal of the TPG was to “carry painting beyond the appearance of the physical world through new concepts of space, color, light and design to imaginative realms that are idealistic and spiritual.” Although Pierce did not ultimately accept all of the thinking of the TPG, the core concepts of transcendental art became embedded in her work.

Janet Lippincott shares several things with Florence Pierce: she too was born in 1918 (in New York City), studied at the Emil Bisttram School in Taos, and is still painting every week, as “one of the few remaining New Mexico Modernists” to be featured in a recent Santa Fe exhibition. The artist began her studies as a teenager at the Art Students League in New York City. World War II interrupted her art education when she joined the Women’s Army Corps and served on General Eisenhower’s staff. Her “war stories” include landing on Omaha Beach soon after the first wave of troops on D-Day, insisting that an agitated George Patton cool his heels in Eisenhower’s office, and being in Paris when it was liberated.

In 1949, she traveled to Taos, New Mexico—never having been west of the Hudson River—to study art with Emil Bisttram on the G.I. Bill. After further studies at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center and San Francisco Art Institute, Lippincott moved to Santa Fe in 1954, where she has been, according to art dealer Karan Ruhlen, “a force in New Mexico’s contemporary arts scene,” painting in a classic Abstract-Expressionist style. In recent years, Lippincott, although living in a Santa Fe retirement home, makes time each week to work. In 2002, Lippincott was honored with the Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, the most distinguished award for artists in the state of New Mexico.

While New Mexico as home (and, perhaps, as subject) is the common denominator for all of these women, none of them can be described as “regional” artists. Their work surpasses geographic boundaries and, even with the Southwest themes of Velarde, Kloss, or Gilpin, achieves a universal meaning.

As Bea Mandelman put it, “I don’t feel I’m a regional artist in any way. I just happen to be living in Taos. My home is here. The miracle of me is that I did all this in the middle of cowboy and Indian art—I did the work [while] engulfed in the Southwest motif.”

The other thing these New Mexico women artists have in common is long lives. With the exception of Rebecca James, who died at age 76, all have lived to be 85 or older, with several living into their ninth decade. Is it the bracing New Mexico air and light that fed their vitality, or the joy and freedom of creating their own brand of art? Maybe strong family constitutions—or all of the above. Art lovers everywhere are the beneficiaries of the long, lustrous careers of these women artists who continue to influence New Mexico art today.