su libro

comfort food for the brain Autumn brings books on art collections and the art of mud building, tacos for the soul, and tortilla memories.
By Charles C. Poling

This article first appeared in Autumn 07 Su Casa

Serenading the Light: Painters of the Desert Southwest, revised second edition, text by David Clemmer, Schenk Southwest Publishing, Santa Fe, 153 pages, hardback, $55.

New Mexico Millennium Collection: A Twenty-first Century Celebration of Fine Art in New Mexico, compiled by William D. Laichas, Kathryne Fowler, and Nancy N. Stem, Fresco Fine Art Publications, Santa Fe, 160 pages, hardback, $45.
Perhaps more than most other American places, New Mexico has been interpreted to the outside world in large degree by painters (and photographers). For the past 100 years or so, painters have created, refined, revised, and inverted a set of iconic images about this place that have become part of our collective consciousness—like it or not, embrace it or reject it, it’s a powerful, beautiful legacy. Two recent books—Serenading the Light: Painters of the Desert Southwest and New Mexico Millennium Collection: A Twenty-first Century Celebration of Fine Art in New Mexico—open the reader’s eyes to complementary, even triangulating views into this unique art world of New Mexico.

Serenading the Light presents the tightly focused art collection assembled by pop Western painter Billy Schenk over the last 20-plus years. Concentrating on early 20th-century New Mexico artists who largely eschewed modernism in favor of unabashedly romantic imagery—brawny mesas, idealized Native Americans, soaring cloudscapes, vibrant autumn village scenes—Schenk has pulled together a powerful, accessible compilation of New Mexico imagery that, in book form, keeps the reader turning page after page in hungry anticipation.

Himself a well-known and intriguing artist working in the Santa Fe area, Schenk realized sometime in the 1980s that collecting art with limited funds (and who doesn’t have limited funds?) required finely tuned intention. This would provide clear, if rubbery criteria for choosing this and not that, which for Schenk meant finding “the more romantic imagery that was being painted in New Mexico, including landscapes with cottonwood trees, landscapes with adobes or adobe churches, and portraits of Pueblo Indians, Hopi, and Navajo.” He was also looking for skill in rendering the subject, refined technique and application of paint to canvas—no sloppy brush work here—and “a high degree of sensuality.” Thus armed, he proceeded to collect.

As it happens, most of us respond emotionally to these kinds of paintings too, making Serenading the Light an extroverted, highly engaging book. One pleasure comes from seeing unfamiliar works by famous, oft-posterized artists; another from appreciating the mastery of less-celebrated artists. A charcoal figure study by Maynard Dixon typifies the former, a block print and two serigraphs by Norman Bassett Hall, the latter. In fact, the print genre is represented by Hall, the strongly graphical Willard Clark, and the revelatory Gene Kloss, whose drypoint and aquatint prints wrest drama and suspense from potentially sentimental scenes. And in an interesting, purposeful omission from the collection, the work of poster favorite Gustave Baumann is nowhere to be found.

Otherwise, the roster of artists covers a respectable if not exhaustive span of New Mexico’s “who’s who” painters from Taos to Albuquerque, with heavy emphasis on Santa Fe, the Taos Society of Artists, and the Cinco Pintores of the capital city. You’ll find pieces by Oscar Berninghaus, Ernest Blumenschein, E. I. Couse, William Penhallow Henderson, Victor Higgins, Sheldon Parsons, Will Shuster, and Carl Van Hassler, to name eight of the 44 included in Serenading the Light.

Within the bounds of his criteria, Schenk has assembled a pleasing variety with consistent tone and uniformly high quality. It would be a satisfying coffee table book on those merits alone. Fortunately for those craving deeper engagement with the material, David Clemmer’s concise, pointed, authoritative commentary on each artist provides keen insight into the painters and their work. Written for a lay audience, Clemmer brings clear intellectual command to the material without ever talking down to or over the heads of his readers. The mini-profiles of each artist serve as a lively introduction to Southwestern art appreciation, its historical context, techniques, and leading practitioners—given the no-modernism caveat. Therein might lie the proof of Schenk’s collecting coherence: Clemmer finds unity without forcing it or superimposing an after-the-fact rationale or theme on the collection. After consuming Serenading the Light, just try to resist spending a weekend browsing galleries in Albuquerque, Santa Fe, or Taos.

Encouraging such a gallery tour seems to be the subliminal suggestion embedded in Millennium Collection, a rerelease of a 2000 title. It presents a selection of prominent artists in various media and references to the gallery that represents each one—and that paid to be featured in the book. With works by past masters, contemporary favorites, and potential future luminaries, the range is much broader than that of Serenading the Light, even including ancient Asian art (you feel the presence of the galleries in this category) and anonymous, unsigned art—essentially, historic Native American blankets, pottery, and artifacts.

If you accept the fact that the book has a marketing mission and the selections were made by gallery owners selling art—and that’s how the world works, isn’t it?—then you can move on to enjoy the wide diversity on these pages.

Much as the text enhances Serenading the Light, the trenchant introductory essays make Millennium Collection a worthwhile read, not just a casual page-turner. Penned by David L. Witt (“Beginnings: Coming to New Mexico”), David Clemmer, again (“Visual Expression: Contemporary Art”), Jan Ernst Adlmann (“Tactile Dimensions: Contemporary Sculpture”), Ian Alsop (“Ancients: Asian Art”), and an anonymous contributor (fittingly, “Anonymous: Unsigned Art”), these chapters bring context and depth to the project, their wide scope going beyond the artists appearing in the following pages.

In fact, many of the artists whose work is not featured in the book get comprehensive treatment in the introductory chapters. The list of omissions includes huge names like Agnes Martin, Luis Jimenez, Wilson Hurley, Peter Hurd, and Richard Tuttle, just to mention a few, but most of them are given their due in writing. Still, it would be nice to see a Hurley landscape or Jimenez sculpture on these pages.

That’s a quibble. The paintings, sculpture, and other pieces included from the likes of Georgia O’Keeffe, Maria Martinez, Maynard Dixon, Glenna Goodacre, and R. C. Gorman bring credibility to Millennium Collection, while recent work by up-and-comers suggests the new millennium will keep the strong arts tradition here alive. To that point, Witt writes: “New Mexico is not an unchanging land of poco tiempo—that is a mistaken perception of outsiders. New Mexico is dynamic in the ever changing and complex relationships of its people and environment. It is this complexity that gives rise to enigmas. It is to explain enigmas that we have artists and poets.”

Together these two books offer a wide-ranging visual tour of art mostly made in New Mexico (except for those sculptures from Tibet and chests from Japan). The Millennium Collection fills in gaps intentionally avoided by Schenk in Serenading the Light, including sculpture, modernism—O’Keeffe!—multimedia, bultos and retablos, and so on. The only thing missing is photography—not surprising, since any fine art photographer can tell you how hard it is to break into the gallery market in that medium. (I thought that question had been settled in favor of film art 75 years ago!)

Tortilla Chronicles: Growing Up in Santa Fe, by Marie Romero Cash, University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 199 pages, hardback, $24.95.

A Taco Testimony: Meditations on Family, Food, and Culture, Denise Chávez, Rio Nuevo Publishers, Tucson, Arizona, paperback, 208 pages, $16.95.
Maybe the insecurities of the post-9/11 era have led many of us to burrow into our nests, to comfort ourselves with food, and to gaze wistfully back on supposedly simpler, safer times. Tortilla Chronicles: Growing Up in Santa Fe and A Taco Testimony: Meditations on Family, Food, and Culture share more than the food-memoir mix, though, as both books delve into the childhood and coming-of-age experiences of Hispanic New Mexican girls, separated slightly in time (just seven years) but greatly in geography. Cash was a child of Santa Fe, Chávez of Las Cruces. Considered side by side and despite wide differences of tone, perspective, and life experience, these two writers’ books lead the reader deep into New Mexico’s Hispanic culture.

Cash is a well-known artist, award-winning santera, and author as well. Her books include Built of Earth and Song: Churches of Northern New Mexico, Santos: Enduring Images of Northern New Mexican Village Churches, and Living Shrines: Home Altars of New Mexico. This memoir covers her childhood through high school before she left New Mexico for a few years, only to return and remake herself as an artist and something of a cultural steward. The charm of the book rests in Romero’s plain, humble voice, which suggests an unvarnished authenticity. Unlike Chávez in A Taco Testimony, Cash is less interested in character development, in analyzing how she became who she is, than in setting down a record of a particular era—the 1940s and 1950s (Cash was born in 1942)—in a particular place, Santa Fe.

Thus while the chapters loosely center on certain themes or events—“Teen Years, Dating, and Other Hazards,” for instance, or “Community Celebrations”—they bear the organizational stamp of a scrapbook, verbal images knit together by proximity rather than an overt, writerly theme. That makes Tortilla Chronicles an easy book to dip in and out of, and many of the brief scenes, cultural vignettes, and character sketches create a lasting impression, whether it’s Cash’s brothers burglarizing the neighborhood grocery or Cash counting her steps during the five-block walk through near-downtown Santa Fe to school.

Cash’s old neighborhood, the South Capitol area, around Houghton Street, comes alive with neighbors, friends, relatives, creepy characters and scary dogs, shops and acequias and vacant lots. It’s the kind of neighborhood life that seems no longer to exist but that many baby-boomers grew up in—except that Cash was surrounded by relatives, and Santa Fe seemed a million miles from mainstream America. Still, her memoir is a strong reminder that Santa Fe has long been different from other northern New Mexico towns—a bit more worldly and a bit more urban, in a pre-automobile-culture way—yet still has old ties through family and history to village life in the mountains and mesas and high river valleys.

The book’s title notwithstanding, Cash talks just a little bit about tortillas, about food, but these gauzy, wistful recollections have a particularly dense flavor that reminds me just how important food is to childhood memory. In A Taco Testimony, award-winning writer and novelist Chávez takes that notion and cooks up a seven-course banquet of epicurean reminiscence. This unconventional coming-of-age memoir set in Las Cruces incorporates traditional autobiographical narrative, ruminations on the history and cultural meaning of the taco, recipes, cooking advice, and poetry. Pushing the culinary metaphor to the boiling point, the book itself might be the ultimate taco for the soul: the covers are the tortilla, the diverse writing its mashed-together filling. Whatever.

Chávez dedicates A Taco Testimony to her mother, Delfina Rede Faver Chávez, who maintained a dignified equipoise within her family and the larger world beyond. Clearly her mother inspired her as a role model. As Chávez sets out to understand her own past, her parents, her family, and her culture of Hispanic southern New Mexico, the key to understanding everything, even her spiritual center, is the taco—rolled, not folded!

Growing up in a working household on a tight budget, her father gone most years, life could be challenging, thrilling, fun, and tragic by turns. Chávez honors the beauty, exposes the hypocrisies and contradictions, assigns responsibility, and takes the hard shots straight up. This is real life and all’s fair. Her touch is light, though, sparing the story from the excesses of bitterness, self-pity, smugness, or revenge.

The recipes, taco lore, and other culinaria give Chávez the opportunity to pull out of the quotidian family story and ruminate on larger themes of culture, race, love, family, and being. “Tacos are sacred to me,” she writes. “I have been saved from depression, anxiety, and more-than-serious mental and spiritual breakdown by making tacos.” Tacos bring the family together, create connection in distant cities, console the grief-stricken, and feed the hungry teenagers. Every significant event in Chávez’s life, it seems, arrived at the table with a taco appetizer, to the point where she speculates, “Does one create memory from food, or does food create memory? Both are the case for me. I am indistinguishable from family, food, and culture.”

Using tacos as the lens for viewing life, Chávez recalls her mother’s struggle to pay the bills in her alcoholic father’s absence. She recalls trips to Juárez with college friends. She recalls “a breakdown of sorts” in graduate school, her mother’s death, the trials of caring for her aging father: tacos, tacos, tacos. Other foods too—peanut butter and banana sandwiches, “pasta” (a sauce but no noodles), marshmallow surprise, biscochos. But none attain the sacramental status of tacos, which act as the tangible link to identity.

“Everyone wants the energy of being and belonging,” she writes. A Taco Testimony channels that energy from one writer into readable form.

The Rammed Earth House, revised edition, by David Easton, photographs by Cynthia Wright, Chelsea Green Publishing Company, White River Junction, Vermont, 288 pages, paperback, $40.
Maybe it’s naive regionalism—okay, probably so—but rammed earth construction seems like a higher-tech (in a preindustrial sense) version of adobe building. Both use mud, one as bricks, one packed into forms in strata called lifts. Both share the benefits of earthen building: high sustainability value, abundant thermal mass, a natural-home aesthetic, a literal tie to the land (when made with local dirt), and a romantic connection to the human past and to current building practice worldwide. Probably a half-billion people, at least, live in earthen homes today. If you could corner the market on dirt, you’d be a trillionaire—but then, maybe the fact that you can’t has something to do with the appeal and ubiquity of earthen building.

Author David Easton and photographer Cynthia Wright, a husband-and-wife team, have designed and built more than 100 rammed earth homes and commercial buildings in the past 30 years through their company, Rammed Earth Works, in California. It’s safe to say they were at the frothy crest of this gathering wave of retro-alternative construction. They know a thing or two about it and through this book generously share that knowledge with the world.

A meaty book, The Rammed Earth House offers an introduction to the history and craft of rammed earth construction, then a guide to building that way, with enough how-to detail to get an experienced contractor through the process, I suspect.

The chapters run from “The Evolution of Earth Building” through “The Architectural Plan” to such details as “Soil Preparation and Compaction” and “Doors, Windows, Niches, and Fireplaces.” An appendix on identifying soils drills even further down into the nitty-gritty.

The plentiful photographs provide useful illustration of these construction details as well as lovely examples of historical and contemporary rammed earth buildings from around the world. Many of them were built by Easton and Wright’s company—fine examples of northern California eclecticism.

This book should prove useful to either the building professional—builder, designer, or architect—who wants to wade into non-adobe-mud construction or the homeowner who wants to evaluate the green-building options and make an informed choice along with the designer or builder.