Fun lunch and visit with fellow painter Margarete Bagshaw on Friday, October 16, 2009. Margarete is from a long line of artists and daughter of the late great Helen Hardin and the late Santa Clara Pueblo painter Pablita Velarde. Hardin returned home to New Mexico this past August from three years living in St. Thomas in the U.S. Virgin Islands.
To the delight of ndn painting aficionados, Margaret and her fiancé Dan opened The Golden Dawn Gallery just in time for Indian Market to feature the paintings of three generations of her family and a few other select established and emerging painters. The gallery is located in the bright, airy space previously occupied by the Joyce Robbins Gallery on the east side of Galisteo Street near the corner of Water Street. The space is a wonderful venue for the bright, intricately drawn, expertly painted and totally original art of Pablita Velarde, Helen Hardin and Margarete Bagshaw.
Pablita Velarde, who passed last year in 2007, was one of only two women students at Dorothy Dunn's Studio School in the 1930s. Pablita defied the Santa Clara prohibition against women painting to become a prolific beloved artist and the first American Indian artist awarded the Women’s Caucus for Art (WCA) Honor Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Arts in New York City in 1990.
Helen Hardin gained early success in the Indian Art world painting in a traditional style, but stunned collectors by creating her own brilliant original art style that combined intricate geometry, precision drawing, and luminous application of multiple layers of paint to evoke her deep personal understanding of Pueblo spirituality and culture. Helen Hardin was at the height of her career in the mid-1980s when she was struck with cancer and tragically died when Margarete was just 19 years old. Her art was featured in the historic Women of Sweetgrass, Cedar and Sage exhibit that toured the United States in 1985-1987 and was dedicated to Helen Hardin’s memory.
Margarete Bagshaw whose complex ancestry includes her Santa Clara indigenous ancestors on her mother’s side and Daughters of the American Revolution on her father’s side, grew up surrounded by daily art-making by her mother and grandmother and witnessed their courage and tenacity in pursuing art despite adversity and pressure against women making art in their culture. Margarete observed their practice of challenging and breaking boundaries and has shattered boundaries in her own right as an artist with her own unique sensibility.
Margaret Bagshaw has developed a personal painting style that draws from strengths of both her mother and grandmother to create an impressive body of luminous complex geometric large paintings that embody the spirituality and power of stained glass cathedral windows and the primal understanding of light and shadow and experience of earth and sky of ancient American Indian pictographs as well as the complex symbolic geometry of Pueblo pottery.
This year, Margarete has created a new body of work in clay from New Mexico that she paints with the intricate, very personal iconography of her paintings. These clay pieces, which Margarete has collectors hold in their hands to experience, are provocative challenges to the closed mindset of many used to the ordinary distinctions accepted and expected in Indian Art. Are they paintings or sculptures? They appear like vessels, but are much too shallow to actually hold anything the way traditional Pueblo pottery can. This new work evokes the memory of pottery shards that inspired Pueblo potter matriarch Lucy Lewis to revive Acoma pottery and that many Pueblo potters still grind and knead into clay for new pots. With these new three-dimensional painted sculptures, Margarete Bagshaw continues in the tradition of her grandmother and mother of breaking with tradition and shattering boundaries to create art that is at once rooted in tradition while evoking and critiquing it, and something totally fresh and new.
The Golden Dawn Gallery, named for Pablita Velarde’s Pueblo name, has a serious collection of important historic works by Pablita Velarde including her traditional Pueblo life paintings, storyteller images and her innovative pictographic sand paintings made with natural earth pigments she collected and ground herself.
There are also several significant original paintings by Helen Hardin that have been unavailable for decades, but are now being made available again for collectors as previous owners have passed on, as well as the rare, only remaining lithographs of Listening Woman and Changing Woman still available on the market.
Golden Dawn also has a wide selection of Margarete Bagshaw’s luminous work that gives the collector the opportunity to acquire the art of an important American artist continuing and expanding the impressive legacy of three generations of art-making in the United States.
Visitors and local art lovers looking for a feast of color, line and texture displayed in a professional museum-like setting should make The Golden Dawn Gallery a not to be missed stop on their itinerary. It is rare to see so much important art in one place in Santa Fe, and reminds us that this work by three generations of New Mexican painters deserves its own museum and support by collectors, arts administrators, Museums of New Mexico and the people of New Mexico, America and the world.
________________________________________
Text and Photos by Charleen Touchette 2009
http://www.oneearthblog.blogspot.com/
To the delight of ndn painting aficionados, Margaret and her fiancé Dan opened The Golden Dawn Gallery just in time for Indian Market to feature the paintings of three generations of her family and a few other select established and emerging painters. The gallery is located in the bright, airy space previously occupied by the Joyce Robbins Gallery on the east side of Galisteo Street near the corner of Water Street. The space is a wonderful venue for the bright, intricately drawn, expertly painted and totally original art of Pablita Velarde, Helen Hardin and Margarete Bagshaw.
Pablita Velarde, who passed last year in 2007, was one of only two women students at Dorothy Dunn's Studio School in the 1930s. Pablita defied the Santa Clara prohibition against women painting to become a prolific beloved artist and the first American Indian artist awarded the Women’s Caucus for Art (WCA) Honor Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Arts in New York City in 1990.
Helen Hardin gained early success in the Indian Art world painting in a traditional style, but stunned collectors by creating her own brilliant original art style that combined intricate geometry, precision drawing, and luminous application of multiple layers of paint to evoke her deep personal understanding of Pueblo spirituality and culture. Helen Hardin was at the height of her career in the mid-1980s when she was struck with cancer and tragically died when Margarete was just 19 years old. Her art was featured in the historic Women of Sweetgrass, Cedar and Sage exhibit that toured the United States in 1985-1987 and was dedicated to Helen Hardin’s memory.
Margarete Bagshaw whose complex ancestry includes her Santa Clara indigenous ancestors on her mother’s side and Daughters of the American Revolution on her father’s side, grew up surrounded by daily art-making by her mother and grandmother and witnessed their courage and tenacity in pursuing art despite adversity and pressure against women making art in their culture. Margarete observed their practice of challenging and breaking boundaries and has shattered boundaries in her own right as an artist with her own unique sensibility.
Margaret Bagshaw has developed a personal painting style that draws from strengths of both her mother and grandmother to create an impressive body of luminous complex geometric large paintings that embody the spirituality and power of stained glass cathedral windows and the primal understanding of light and shadow and experience of earth and sky of ancient American Indian pictographs as well as the complex symbolic geometry of Pueblo pottery.
This year, Margarete has created a new body of work in clay from New Mexico that she paints with the intricate, very personal iconography of her paintings. These clay pieces, which Margarete has collectors hold in their hands to experience, are provocative challenges to the closed mindset of many used to the ordinary distinctions accepted and expected in Indian Art. Are they paintings or sculptures? They appear like vessels, but are much too shallow to actually hold anything the way traditional Pueblo pottery can. This new work evokes the memory of pottery shards that inspired Pueblo potter matriarch Lucy Lewis to revive Acoma pottery and that many Pueblo potters still grind and knead into clay for new pots. With these new three-dimensional painted sculptures, Margarete Bagshaw continues in the tradition of her grandmother and mother of breaking with tradition and shattering boundaries to create art that is at once rooted in tradition while evoking and critiquing it, and something totally fresh and new.
The Golden Dawn Gallery, named for Pablita Velarde’s Pueblo name, has a serious collection of important historic works by Pablita Velarde including her traditional Pueblo life paintings, storyteller images and her innovative pictographic sand paintings made with natural earth pigments she collected and ground herself.
There are also several significant original paintings by Helen Hardin that have been unavailable for decades, but are now being made available again for collectors as previous owners have passed on, as well as the rare, only remaining lithographs of Listening Woman and Changing Woman still available on the market.
Golden Dawn also has a wide selection of Margarete Bagshaw’s luminous work that gives the collector the opportunity to acquire the art of an important American artist continuing and expanding the impressive legacy of three generations of art-making in the United States.
Visitors and local art lovers looking for a feast of color, line and texture displayed in a professional museum-like setting should make The Golden Dawn Gallery a not to be missed stop on their itinerary. It is rare to see so much important art in one place in Santa Fe, and reminds us that this work by three generations of New Mexican painters deserves its own museum and support by collectors, arts administrators, Museums of New Mexico and the people of New Mexico, America and the world.
________________________________________
Text and Photos by Charleen Touchette 2009
http://www.oneearthblog.blogspot.com/
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