Modernity, Mestizaje, and Hispano Art: Patrocinio Barela and the Federal Art Project

Modernity, Mestizaje, and Hispano Art: Patrocinio Barela and the Federal Art Project Stephanie Lewthwaite New Mexico’s reputation as a cultural center dedicated to the preservation and revival of Native American and Hispano arts since the early 1900s is well documented. While the anthropological and archaeological “discovery” of the Southwest, the art colonies of Taos and Santa Fe, and the revival of Spanish colonial arts under Anglo patrons are well known, the Hispano artists who straddled multiple art worlds during the early twentieth century are less so.1 The “recovery” of Hispano artists—initiated by William Wroth and Charles Briggs and continued more recently by Laurie Kalb and Tey Marianna Nunn—remains far from complete.2 Although we know more about the Hispano artists who achieved regional and national acclaim during this period, most often through the New Deal’s WPA-funded Federal Art Project (FAP), Eurocentric aesthetic and anthropological categories of place, tradition, and authenticity have occluded the significance of their work. As Tey Marianna Nunn claims, Hispanos were invariably perceived as ethnic craftspeople rather than as artists in their own right.3 The positioning of Hispano art through terms such as craft, folk, and primitive precludes a thorough analysis of the connections among art, ethnicity, and modernity, and an understanding of Hispano artists as “modern” cultural agents. I examine the life and work of Hispano artist Patrocinio Barela. A santero sculptor (a carver of saints and devotional images) sponsored by the FAP in 1935, Barela was one of the few Hispanos to achieve national acclaim as an artist rather than as a craftsperson. Barela lay at the intersection of several complementary discourses about art and Americanism during the New Deal. Barela was an everyman, a universal laborer-cum-artist who was both a “modern primitive”4 and a product of cultural mixing between Europe and indigenous America. Barela Stephanie Lewthwaite is a lecturer in the School of American and Canadian Studies at the University of Nottingham, United Kingdom. Journal of the Southwest 52, 1 (Spring 2010) : 41–70 42 ✜ Journal of the Southwest symbolized the New Deal’s drive to democratize art by promoting a more pluralistic Americanism and by improving inter-American relations. However, New Deal rhetoric elevated Barela while sidelining him from modernity as a primitive, untrained, and instinctive artist. Barela has rarely been considered as a modernist in the conventional sense.5 Yet, a re-examination of Barela’s aesthetic forms and the multiple artistic, social, and ethnic worlds in which he circulated as a “transcultural agent” suggest the emergence of an “alternative hybrid modernism.”6 Barela must be repositioned within an evolving modernist multicultural art canon, for the wider processes of modernization and intercultural exchange that impacted Hispano communities during this period deeply informed Barela’s work and the evolution of a new santero aesthetic. Hispano Art, Anglo Patronage, and the New Deal New Mexico’s reputation as a cultural center dedicated to the preservation and revival of Native American and Hispano art after the early 1900s framed the New Dealer’s response to Barela’s work. The state became “America’s Orient” and an alternative cultural frontier where archaeologists, anthropologists, and avant-garde artists “discovered” new models of cultural exchange and coexistence. The state’s rural, folk, and indigenous communities in particular served as bulwarks against the modern machine age and as sites for spiritual and cultural rebirth.7 In the midst of America’s “crisis of modernity,” fears about cultural loss and regional distinctiveness spawned efforts to preserve local ethnic cultures, and Native American and Hispano arts in particular.8 Yet, the Hispano revival derived less momentum regionally and nationally than the Native American revival, because Hispano arts were invariably viewed as utilitarian objects rather than as art. Anthropologists and archaeologists demonstrated greater interest in the indigenous Pueblo culture.9 However, parallels between the treatment of Native American and Hispano arts exist, for Hispano art was also subject to the preservationist impulses of Anglo artists and reformers during the 1920s and 1930s. This revival was driven by vocational manual arts training programs in rural Hispano schools and by the Spanish Colonial Arts Society, established in Santa Fe in 1925 under Mary Austin...

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