Home at last
this little piggy

Buying a single wooden swine launches folk art careers, changes lives, and forges enduring relationships.

By Christine Mather

This article first appeared in Spring 2009 Su Casa

In a lineup of wooden animals on the shelving in our living room, there among the cats, owls, and raccoons, sits the face only a mother could love: my first pig. As pigs go in my house, it is of modest proportion—a mere piglet, really—but this porker bares his teeth as if he were guarding his lunch. He is rather dirty, not from an attempt at realism but as a result of more than 30 years of shelf sitting. He has what we call in the museum trade a patina, the fancy term for well-earned grime.

I cannot see this pig with any objectivity as a work of art—folk art, that is—because I have had him so very long and he conjures so many thoughts, a hog full of memories. He came to me one day when I was new to New Mexico, new to my career, new to my marriage—full of the freedom that ignorance bestows upon young adulthood. I bought the black-and-white wooden pig with teeth ablazing for what now seems like a very modest sum, $35. But at that point in my young careerist married life, we had around $100 in our bank account, so an expenditure of $35 took about one-third of our available funds. I didn’t hesitate; I didn’t wonder for a second if this was a wise or prudent thing to do or if my husband, Dave, would approve of parting with our shared resources. Home again, home again, jiggity jig went the pig under my arm.

Once there, the piglet was received as an object of wonder and immediate affection by Dave, whose monetary resources had plunged by a third but whose life was about to be changed forever. The petite porker sent us off on an adventure from which we have never recovered.

So compelling was the small swine that Dave immediately set out to see a man about a pig. That man was Felipe Archuleta. Felipe’s backyard contained a heap of wood and a beat-up table with a handful of tools from which emerged a barnyard full of carved animals whose brutish strength and character were to make him world famous. Felipe, a native New Mexican with a hard-knock life, had been laboring in his backyard on various wooden animal projects for at least five years before we came along. He had received the call to carve when asking God what he could do after a work layoff as a rough carpenter. Eventually his wooden animals received some local acclaim, but it was the meeting of the two men, Dave and Felipe, that propelled them both forward—Dave into the world of folk art dealers and Felipe into fame as an American folk artist.

Prior to this historic encounter, Dave and I had been graduate students living in Ann Arbor, Michigan. While in school, I had taken a class on American decorative arts from Bob Bishop, then a curator at The Henry Ford museum. Bob shared with us a love for American folk art, including its more zany aspects. When we headed out to New Mexico, Bob headed for New York to become the director of the American Folk Art Museum. Once in New Mexico, I became a curator of the Museum of International Folk Art. Suddenly Bob and I were both knee-deep in our passions, with Bob eager to revive America’s interest in folk art. Already familiar with Felipe’s work, Bob begged Dave for an article about Felipe to help launch his museum’s new publication. “And while you’re at it, Dave, help me get a piece of Felipe’s work,” or some such words to that effect. That casual throwaway request sealed Dave’s fate—the first such request of many to come.

As Felipe gained national recognition generated by the article Dave wrote, it sent him into a tizzy of wood carving. While anyone was free to ask Felipe to make a piece, Dave found himself as the intermediary between those making the requests and the overwhelmed artist. The reality of the ordering process was that any request had to grind along in the byzantine labyrinth of Felipe’s thought process. Like many engaged in the creative process, he was reluctant to begin almost anything and was often agitated by the steady stream of demands. “I’m not a machine gun, I’m not God,” he’d complain. “It’s not fair to do these things. You have to use your mind a lot.”

Because Dave and Felipe shared an energetic and sometimes unpredictable nature, they had not so much a sympathy for as an understanding of each other’s behavior. The two hyperkinetic and pugnacious guys bounced off one another as Dave took over the role of prodding his elder forward and providing whatever materials he might need. Despite the demands, Felipe flourished in this atmosphere of attention.

The little piggy was to be but the first among many in our home. Soon Dave and I were buying two animals and selling one in an effort to keep up with the flow of requests for Felipe’s work and to satisfy our own overeager desire for more. A steady stream of not just pigs but lions, tigers, bears, sheep, and burros—not forgetting the almost life-size hippo nor the gorilla that now graces the Smithsonian—came trotting through our house.

Like their maker, these animals were hardly passive creatures, turning out to be surprisingly kinetic given their wooden nature. Since Felipe chose to make them anatomically accurate, we shared an especially hilarious evening watching fungus after fungus drop out of the rear quarters of an evidently moist log that had become a large sow. We were regaled with an equally damp tale of a big pig that had been uncrated upon arrival to customers who suddenly had what appeared to be the world’s largest Chia Pet, its body covered in a furry layer of green mold. This also brings back memories of a museum opening a crate containing a life-size sheep, with wool, that horrified the curators when hundreds of little moths emerged. Felipe’s propensity for freely using his dog Truchas as a source for fur has given us decades of shedding from a little bear, and an untreated deer hide on a badger led to one nasty, shockingly lively mess.

So one pig led to another and then onto a menagerie of critters that now inhabit every available part of our home. Felipe Archuleta did not create all the works, since he fostered an entire school of wood-carvers emanating from his cluttered yard in Tesuque, New Mexico. His legacy has endured long beyond his lifetime and even beyond his immediate sphere of influence. Today, chickens by Navajo artists from the Four Corners area roost on top of the kitchen cabinets, and giant porkers rout around the living room while bottle cap rattlesnakes dangle near the front closet. No surface seems free from folk art in our home, which we describe as a testament to the powers of accumulation or perhaps more accurately as an example of untreated obsessive-compulsive disorder.

The little pig so heedlessly purchased was to be, in some ways, our destiny—a purchase effortlessly fated. As for Dave and Felipe, neither was entirely comfortable with his new role. As Dave once put it, “If someone had told me I would be selling life-size wooden pigs for a living, I would have said they were nuts.” While Felipe’s take on it was even more profound, “What good is being famous if I don’t be here much longer?” But for me, I chose a pig, and that has made all the difference.

Christine Mather is a museum curator, as well as an author of Santa Fe Style, Santa Fe Houses, Native America, and True West, volumes that explore design and lifestyle.