I had a similar experience the other day on a visit to the late Melissa Zink’s home, evoked in part by her work but primarily by the setting in which it was placed. The house, the living room in particular, is filled with objects of rare beauty and power, things that she loved to look at, that filled her eyes with feeling: a framed page from an ancient Arabic manuscript; African dolls, one mother and child made of cloth with sticks for limbs; a grouping of clay figurines, round mouths, possessed of voodoo-like authority;  an Anasazi pot;  a pair of immaculately beaded Plains Indian moccasins; and, of course, walls of shelved books. I imagine she read every one of them. A few examples of her own work hang here and there, small things, perfectly composed,  ghostly in their ability to conjure her presence.

There’s a small leather sofa in the room where she often sat, reading, watching TV, talking with Nelson, her husband. In her last years when she hadn’t the energy to work in the studio, she’d paint there – tiny, jewel-like oil glaze paintings of oddly beautiful abstract-surreal subject matter.

On the shelf just above the sofa, there’s a 12 or 14 inch ceramic sculpture that’s among the most gripping, unflinchingly terrible figures I’ve ever seen. It’s a black-robed male with a twisted white face and head – evil incarnate. Protruding from the bottom of his robe are two angular elements, suggestions of an armature that supports and intrinsically defines the figure. It is a swastika. To the left of the figure are three perfected modeled pears and a gourd, delicately colored, fragile but somehow indomitable, like nature’s fruit. On the other side is an arrangement of ancient books, their exposed bindings slowly crumbling. The composition works like visual poetry, the effect nearly overwhelming, redolent with potential meanings that are only to be guessed at. The power of the composition reveals the aesthetic and intellectual courage that made her such a singular artist.

A blog reader recently sent me the following quote from Ralph Waldo Emerson that matches the feeling: “I was glad to the brink of fear.”

Stephen Parks

I try once a week to get into the woods, hike a familiar trail or bushwack  up an unexplored slope. A few days ago in need of some elevation (literally and figuratively) I headed up the South Boundary Trail, which begins just as Hwy. 64 enters Taos Canyon and loops up the top of mountain guarding the east side of the valley.  I hadn’t been to the top in several years and vaguely remembered that it took about an hour and a half to get there. By that point my thighs were burning, I was having to stop occasionally to catch my breath and the summit looked to be at least another half hour away. But the day was beautiful and I was determined, spurred, as I often am by the thought that something was waiting to be discovered.

 At the top I sat on a rock, drank some water, and looked over the valley. My heart sank, for stretched out to the west, nearly to the gorge, was what I can only call Taos Sprawl, roads slashed through the sage, clumps of houses like cultures of bacteria growing on the mesa. I’m being unfair, I’ve seen this sight many times before, never happy with it but never quite so disturbed, either. What had happened to MY gorgeous little town, the place I’d fallen in love with 38 years ago? Sitting up there the other day, I thought of a conversation I’d had in the late 1970s with the great writer Frank Waters, who back then was ruing how Taos was growing and changing. “But,” he said sadly, “we can’t put up a wall around the place and turn it into a museum.”

With that thought in mind, I turned my back on the sprawl, walked over the rim to the east side of the slope. Fifty yards away I was suddenly in the most heart-stoppingly gorgeous aspen grove I’d ever seen. The leaves were at their glowing golden peak, the sky was perfect blue and the scene sent me to my knees. I was reminded that I never have to go very far from the sprawl to find a place as beautiful as it was 38 years ago, or probably 3,800 years ago. No picture can quite do the experience justice. You just have to close your eyes . . .

Erin Currier, Taos Fiesta Queens VI, mixed media, 36 x 48 inches. Left to right: Jenni Alyssa Medina, Bianca Claire Silva, Anna Eloisa Vasquez (La Reina), and Andrea Bibiana Mondragon.

Erin Currier moved to Santa Fe a year or so ago, but a large part of her heart remains in Taos. She recently completed a love song to the town, Taos Fiesta Queens VI, and delivered it to Parks Gallery, her long-time local representative.

“I moved to New Mexico from New England nearly twenty years ago,” she says, “and almost immediately was deeply impressed by Taos’s Hispanic culture with its traditions, particularly its respect for its ancestors, elders, and family, for its sense of community.  It seems to me that the Fiesta Princesas and Reina reflect and embody these values.  As a socio-political artist, it was, and is, important to me to support and pay homage to these values and to these young women. And I love Fiestas!  I go most every year, and every year I find that the Reina and Princesas are stunningly beautiful. This is the sixth year I’ve painted them and it always feels like an  honor.”

            “Erin has been important to me, to the gallery and to Taos art in general since I first discovered her — scores of people make the same claim — at the Southside Bean more than a decade ago,” says gallery owner Steve Parks.  “Since our down-sizing earlier this year, we’re unable to stage her major exhibitions, as we did for so long, and she’s gone on to exhibit in the wider art universe. But she’s extremely loyal and continues to get us new work as she’s able, and this new piece is as strong and beautiful as anything she’s ever done.”

Taos Fiesta Queens is on view through the end of November at Parks Gallery, 110-A Paseo del Pueblo Norte. A portion of the sale of Taos Fiesta Queens VI will be donated to the Fiesta Council’s scholarship fund. For more information call 575-751-0343.

Last Winter Diary, January 2009

The gallery is currently gathering material for a book of the letters Melissa Zink and Eva Brann, a distinguished author and educator at St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, exchanged between 2006 and 2009. Going through the artist’s papers recently, I came across the following. It’s not from a letter but rather from the short address she delivered upon receiving the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence and Achievement in the Arts, in Santa Fe in 2001. It’s a moving statement that reminded me what an extraordinary artist she was, and how blessed I am to represent her work.
     “To the observer, mine appears an ordinary enough existence with little to distinguish it from uncountable others. But an observer cannot know the journeys I’ve made, the lives I’ve lived, the intensities of joy and anguish I have experienced. Nor can that observer know how the everyday complexity of life shines with unfathomable beauty or how the difficulty of expressing that experience becomes overwhelming. That same observer has no way of knowing that I have found permanent shelter in a world constructed from the experience of words and pictures, a world full of marvels, terrors and delights that becomes more real from one day to the next. A world I hope to vanish into someday.”

Melissa Zink, 2007

Melissa died in July, 2009. We miss her terribly but count ourselves among the lucky ones who glimpsed the richness of her interior world, the world into which she peacefully vanished.

Jim Wagner, mid-1960s

Thinking the other day about Agnes Martin and her big exhibition next year at the Harwood Museum, I remembered that Jim Wagner had known her in Taos in the 1960s. It seemed like a most unlikely pairing – Martin who became famous for her spare, nearly monochromatic grid paintings, and Wagner, the master of loose expressionism whose principal subject has long been the off-beat, funky charm of Taos. I asked Wagner to recall his early meetings with Martin:

“When I was growing up in Monmouth, Oregon, we had a family friend, Mildred Kane, who came by the house a lot. She’d  been  my sister’s kindergarten teacher, and she was a close friend of Agnes Martin.   I think they’d gone to college together in Canada. Mildred often visited Agnes when she lived in Taos, it must have been the late 40s and early 50s, I was in the 4^th or 5^th grade, and she would always tell us these stories about Taos, what a great place it was for an artist, and she’d show us drawings and watercolors that she’d gotten from Agnes. Nothing like the grids she became famous for – these were like nymphs or fairies running through graveyards, that sort of thing.  They’re probably still around someplace. I think the Fine Arts Museum in Santa Fe has some.

Agnes Marin, 1954

“Because of Mildred’s stories, I knew Taos was the place to go when I decided to become an artist in the early 1960s. A few years later, in about 1965, I was going into a liquor store,  Mundos — it used to be at the edge of that steep hill at the south end of Placitas Road. Anyway, I remember the day exactly because I’d just had a vasectomy, the pain pills were beginning to wear off and I was getting a bottle of bourbon to take home. So Agnes was in there and I recognized her, she was buying a bottle of Campari, and I introduced myself and told her about Mildred. Well, for whatever reason, she didn’t want to talk about Mildred but she invited me into the back room at Mundos where we sat and drank Campari.

“A few weeks later I was having cocktails at Louis Ribak and Bea Mandelman’s house, and Agnes was there. They were old friends. Agnes got pretty loose. We were all going to dinner at the old Casa Cordova restaurant in Seco, and I’ll never forget it, I had to carry Agnes into the dining room on my back. The owner, Godie Schuetz, was so mad at me . . .

“After dinner Agnes and I sat in the car for an hour and talked about art. It wasn’t technical stuff at all, not how to paint or anything but about how art made you feel. It was almost like religion. Listening to her talk was like music just flowing over me. Like liquid gold. I took it all in.”

Jim Wagner, "The Committee," etching

After hearing Wagner’s story, I looked up a half-remembered quote of Martin’s that pointed toward a possible connection between the two: “If you live intellectually, you live with facts,” Martin said. “If you learn to surrender, you can go to bed, sleep, and then wake up with the answer. You have to surrender to inspiration . . . you have to put the intellect to sleep.”

“She was the first one to drive that home for me,” Wagner said. “Stop thinking. Let your subconscious do the work. You have to shut out the critics, the voices that want to tell you what you can do, what you can’t do. I call those voices  The Committee.” — Stephen Parks

Good question.   Working in the art world for some years now, I am constantly driven to describe the expansive, life-affirming space surrounding that which we define as being “beautiful,” but I also hesitate for a moment knowing that words are seldom the domain of the heart.    While I think we all have been moved by this mysterious quality,  the task of explaining beauty to someone who may never have  experienced it—now, stay with me here— is akin to summarizing a Tom Robbins novel:  “It’s like pointing to a snowflake and expecting someone to grasp the concept of downhill skiing.”

Well, maybe not quite.  But the point is that no matter how we struggle with descriptors, the essence of all great art and natural beauty is about the dialogue, the unique experience we bring to its various forms.  Without the interaction—without being present to read the book, or to gaze at the painting, or to sit amidst a perfect sunset—an essential element is lost.    We can’t just say that something is beautiful, period, end of story.  There is such richness in our presence that art and the poetic qualities of nature merely remind us of who we are already;   the places we have ventured to in our lives, the people we have loved, the stray cat that found its way to our doorstep—beauty conjures up everything that resides within us.

Beauty also comes to us when we are ready for it.  I think of poetry I read as a teenager, the tender words of Whitman, and how they were just words for me at one time.  With each trip around the sun, my journey has taken me deeper into a place of reverence for the natural world.  Now, after having a child and hearing him express wonderment for things like clouds and dirt, and relocating to New Mexico where the parched mountain landscape reminds me of our human ability to endure the more jagged parts of life (and to do so gracefully),  I can say that I finally get Whitman.  I get him!  Oh, the beauty of his words, reading Leaves of Grass again many years later:

(excerpted from “A Song of the Rolling Earth”)

A song of the rolling earth, and of the words according,
Were you thinking that those were the words, those upright lines?
those curves, angles, dots?
No, those are not the words, the substantial words are in the ground
and sea,
They are in the air, they are in you (…)

Jim Wagner "3 Koi in a Pond" oil on canvas

And so it goes for the art here at the Parks Gallery.  Not everybody is expected to “get” Melissa Zink’s work,  nor does everyone share the same experiences that make Jim Wagner’s paintings come to life—we clearly can’t define beauty in the same ways.  But, when the connection is made, it is something beyond words:    I can point to snowflakes all day long and still never convey to you the beauty that I find in witnessing someone connecting, really truly connecting, with a piece of art.  I am so grateful.

–Melissa Glarner

“Your column addressed to recent college graduates  asserts that  ‘the central business of adulthood [is] finding serious things to tie yourself down to.’ Sounds like a recipe for gaining membership in the conservative corner of the Republican Party. What about that bedrock attitude of American experience, ‘Go West, young man, go West?’ There can be great personal and social value, not to mention adventure, in searching for a place that challenges and nurtures the spirit – whether it’s Manhattan or Taos, NM. Then figure out how to apply your learned skills, abilities and ambitions to first get by and then get ahead in that new environment. It requires courage and perseverance and a measure of creativity, and along the way you’re going to contribute to a community and just maybe discover yourself along the way.  I wouldn’t trade my little gallery in Taos for a seat on NY Stock Exchange.”

Mabel Dodge Luhan, Frida Lawrence, & Dorothy Brett, c. 1938 near Taos, NM. Photo by Cady Wells

In 2012, Taos museums, galleries and other institutions are banding together to celebrate one of the valley’s primary distinguishing factors – the preponderance of strong, independent women who settled here during the last century and created a virtual cultural matriarchy. The Harwood Museum , founded by Elizabeth Harwood, will mount major exhibitions of art by Agnes Martin and Bea Mandelman. Millicent Rogers Museum will honor its founder, the fashion maven and collector extraordinaire of Native American and Hispanic arts, along with a major show of pottery by the legendary Maria Martinez. The Taos Historic Museums will feature work by under appreciated artist wives and daughters of the Taos Founders. And the Mabel Dodge Luhan House will host seminars and lectures on various aspects of the subject.

What follows is an essay I wrote for a book in production, “A Precarious Balance: Creative Women of Taos,” with photographs and essays by Robbie Steinbach and Lynn Bleiler.

When I stumbled into Taos for the first time, September 30, 1973, I thought I’d died and gone to heaven. A few months earlier I’d packed my small family into a Volkswagen van, crossed the Hudson and headed west in search of a new life. As it turned out, September 30 was (and is) San Geronimo Day at Taos Pueblo. The men were engaged in their centuries-old ceremonial foot races, and the rooftops of the pueblo’s magnificent adobe building were lined with women wrapped in colorful robes. Behind them was the stately Taos Mountain which in the evening burned blood red in the setting sun. Needless to say, I thought it might be interesting to hang around for a while.

I quickly became enamored with the town and its history, and one of my first and strongest impressions was that the place was filled with strong, independent women. In those years, 4 of the 5 best galleries in town were owned by women – Maggie Kress and Tally Richards, Mary Sanchez and Rena Rosequist. The co-founder of the Lama Foundation was Asha Breeson, a woman of great physical and spiritual authority. Billy Blair was the fearless editor of the Taos News. All the elected officials in the town and the county were male, but arguably the most influential political figure in town was Sally Howell – she gave me my first job in town as her gardener. Then I tended bar for a few years at the old La Cocina on the plaza, a raucous joint on a Saturday night but nobody messed with Ruth Moya, the sweet but steely strong cocktail waitress who could stop a drunken brawl without raising her voice.

And there was Kathleen Summit, a storyteller and, I’m convinced, bruja or shaman or shape-shifter. She lived alone in a little adobe on the side of the hill, overlooking the Valdez valley. Kathleen was short, on the stout side with piercing blue eyes and white hair cut straight across just above her eyes. She had the mien of an owl. Kathleen knew the legends of Taos, where to find the petroglyphs and ancient shrines. On the full moon she drummed and danced and howled in unison with the coyotes.

Why Taos? What attracted Kathleen here, along with so many other strong women? The great preponderance of sky could be a lure, with its mythical associations with the feminine, as opposed to the common connection of males with the earth. Conversely, spirited women — and it is spirited women who are drawn here, women dissatisfied with traditional roles and expectations and possessed with the gumption to test their limits  – seem drawn to the primeval, ritual-rich influence of Taos Pueblo, that most earth-bound of cultures.

Taos Mountain is regarded as a mother by the people of the Pueblo. The most prominent object of Hispanic Catholic veneration is Our Lady of Guadalupe, and from across the cultures of the valley one hears wispy fragments of a legend about a blue diva that resides in the mountains.

One might assume that such an environment would attract more adventure-seeking men than women, and in the 19^th century, with the influx of mountain men and personages such as Kit Carson, that was true.  But since the turn of the 20^th century, and the unshackling, emancipation of women, the valley has attracted a distinctive coterie of remarkable women who refused to live lives defined primarily by roles of wife and mother. They were lead by the indomitable Mabel Dodge Evans Sterne Luhan, an heiress and art maven who had hosted a salon in her Fifth Avenue apartment and befriended many of the leading artists of the day. In Taos she intended to establish a utopian community of artists and visionaries, and D. H. Lawrence was to be the high priest. He came for a while and wrote some spectacular prose about the Taos Indians and landscape, but soon tired of the isolation and left. After his death, however, his wife Frieda Lawrence returned and lived here the rest of her life. Dorothy Brett, an eccentric painter friend of the Lawrences from London, spent nearly 50 years here. Mabel induced  Georgia O’Keeffe to visit. She came with her friend, the wonderful and under-appreciated artist Rebecca James. O’Keeffe eventually moved on to Abiquiu while James stayed, and later was joined by Barbara Latham, Gisella Loeffler and Gene Kloss, all of whom made vital contributions to the town’s reputation as an art center. Agnes Martin, the grande dame of minimalist painters, worked here in the late 1940s with her friend Bea Mandelman who had studied under Fernand Leger inParis. Martin went on to New York where she became famous before returning to Taos to spend the last decade of her life in productive seclusion.

As James wrote to Mabel Dodge Luhan after her first visit in 1929: her experience of Taos was “the first time I have been so completely myself, so well, so happy.”

This project by Robbie Steinbach and Lyn Bleiler (whose bio can be found at: http://somostaos.org) is devoted to the women who are perpetuating the feminine spirit of Taos. They are the artists and healers and community leaders who continue to define this strange, obstreperous, beautiful and singular community.

– Stephen Parks

The market will return, and in the meantime Taos’s art reputation is being maintained — and even bolstered — by two factors:  activity in our remarkable museums and the persistence in the Taos Valley of what I’m still romantic enough to call the Art Spirit. The town has four fine museums — Millicent Roger’s Museum, Taos Historic Museums, Taos Art Museum and the Harwood Museum which is perhaps the finest small town art museum in the nation. In the last few years the Harwood has mounted a number of exhibitions that have garnered national attention, including important shows of Richard Diebenkorn’s early New Mexico paintings, Wayne Thiebaud’s wonderful but seldom seen landscapes, and in 2006 a splendid survey of Melissa Zink’s art. Next year, the Harwood will present an exhibition of Agnes Martin’s early work that is sure to attract an international audience.

Ken Price, Pink Egg (courtesy Los Angeles County Museum of Art)

And Art Spirit. Taos has been home to world-class artists for more than a century. While the early Taos painters were attracted by the dramatic landscape, the richness and authenticity of the Pueblo Indian and Hispanic cultures and the quality of the fabled “Taos light,” contemporary artists whose work has nothing to do with mountains or Indians are still lured and held by the ineffable Art Spirit, the sum of all the factors above plus something in the air that nurtures creativity. Taos remains important because Ken Price, Larry Bell , the late Agnes Martin, Johnnie Winona Ross, Jack Smith, Marc Baseman, Ron Davis and a handful of others have chosen to call Taos home. Just their presence makes this an important place. For the most part they don’t exhibit here. Taos is home because it inspires them and leaves them alone to work. Price, one of America’s most honored contemporary artists, will have a major retrospective next year at the Los Angeles County Museum, a show that will go on to the Metropolitan Museum in New York. Bell currently has a 50-year retrospective at the Carre d’Art Musee in Niems, France.

Detail of New York Times illustration, 1992, Johnathon Rosen

Some years ago the New York Times Sunday Magazine ran a long article on how money moves around the world. The piece was accompanied by a two-page illustration picturing an octopus/robot-like creature sitting onManhattan, with tentacles running out to major financial centers around the world. Two-third of the way along the tentacle from New York  to Los Angeles was a little spigot and under it the word “Taos.” Certainly the illustrator wasn’t including Taos because of its monetary riches (Taos wasn’t mentioned in the article). Rather, I suspect, he regarded it as an interesting, somewhat quirky place, a town that occupied a special niche in his – and I suspect the national psyche. Many have heard of Taos, some have visited, but few can define just why it is so special. Is it the ancient Taos Pueblo, the great sweep of the high desert valley, the fabled light? Or maybe the spirit of rebellion, from Po’pay leading of the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, to the first territorial governor of New Mexico losing his scalp in the revolt of 1848 and the hippie influx of the 1960s. Or the art, from the Taos Founders of the early 1900s to the world renowned contemporary artists living here today.

Petroglyphs just north of Rinconada, NM

After nearly 40 years here, it’s the history that continues to captivate me and the way in which the history is literally embodied in the landscape. I try and get out once a week to wander across the desert or climb a mountain – I think of it as getting to know the neighborhood. I walk and climb to gain access to new views of this extraordinary landscape. But I’m also always on the lookout for links to the past, and I almost always find something – a pot shard or an arrow head that might have lain on the earth for 800 or a thousand years since the last human touched it. Recently I was hiking on a rough trail that ran along a ridge just north of the village of Rinconada, along the Rio Grande about 20 miles south of Taos. After 30 or 40 minutes I was drawn, who knows why, to some rock amongst the pinons off to the left of the trail and there, suddenly in front of me, was a house-sized boulder covered with petroglyphs. Many times I’ve stumbled onto such treasures and every time it’s a thrill.

Over the next few weeks I’ll ramble on in this blog about some of the Taos treasures that make the place so distinctive.

–Stephen Parks