Espejos de Aztlán; Edward González; Part 2

Here we come to work. THE FOREIGN Lbles Brug by Santas by look at prob time e stop ed cutting the not be de la Ciudad de Santa Fe, se trata de Eduardo González, que recientemente se acaba de publicar un libro que él escribió, y estaremos comentando sobre el tema de ese libro, el gran escultor

no mexicano, el señor Patrocínio Varela. My interest began when I was 12 years old. By that time I had read all the art books I could find, I was an avid art reader as well as a young sprouting artist, and so the time I reached junior high school, that Carfield junior high here in Abu Kyrgyz, where I was born, or where I was raised. I went straight to the library and to the art section and started going through all the books and hearing a little booklet on Patrocínio Varela, and that changed my life in some ways. And I was already committed to being an artist, but I had never seen the art of a Mexican

American, of somebody who I could identify with, and it was very, very impressed with Patrocínio's work at that time, like Bill Art was in a book, did the book have good photographs of his work? Yes, it had good black and white photos, and I began to realize that Varela was just as good an artist as the great artist of the period, Picasso Henry Moore, Broncosi, the great German expressionist. I just saw all that in his work, and it really impressed me and reinforced my idea that that great genius comes out of anyone. Great genius comes out of anyone, including the literate and the power to stricken, because if I understand something about the life of Patrocínio Varela, he was a very humble band of humble beginnings, and I understand his father was originally from Mexico.

Yes, his father was an immigrant from Mexico, probably a landless peasant, who then kicked off his land by the Guadalupe de Odia's regime, which started the Mexican Revolution, really. And found himself stranded up in the northern border states after building a railroad, and ended up in Bizbier, Arizona, marrying a young woman, probably Mexican-American, La Hulia. We don't know her last name, even, and had three children, Nicolas and Patrocínio, and then a little baby daughter, who died at the age of four months. And so we understand that Patrocínio may have been born in Arizona. Yes, we definitely know he was born in Bizbier, but his own account. After the death of his mother at the age of four, then Manuel, by buckport, took the

boy's up north into New Mexico territory, at that time in New Mexico is still a territory around 1904, 1905, and followed the sheep trails all the way to Mosquero, which was a big sheep center in Harding County, and then went up north to a house and settled in a house. So Patrocínio was actually a little boy when he came into New Mexico, so he was actually shaped and formed by the New Mexican landscape and its people. Very much so, and very much influenced by his father, his father, was very much a loner. He didn't teach the kids anything about religion, about Catholicism, which runs against the grain of northern New Mexico villages, where Catholicism is very important to both the Spanish and Spanish.

He got a lot of sheep hurting training, and his father was sometimes brutal with the boys, eventually chasing the boys out of the house, Barela at the age of 12, and Barela on his own literally at the age of 12, jumping the rails and ending up in Denver, his first up on his long 20-year journey away from New Mexico, doing odd jobs. Doing odd jobs, sheep hurting, coal mining, Wyoming, stockyards in San Francisco, cotton picking in Texas, he knew the crop seasons of practically all the western states, and interesting thing also about Barela is that at the age of 12 when he reached Denver, he was sort of adopted by a black family for about a year. He had heard himself falling off the rails and was picked up by the rail police and his

social worker took him to a black family and they raised him, probably taught him English for the first time. So probably at that time, Patrocino didn't speak very much English, no? Probably no English at all. But when his father left with the children from Bizby, they made it up to Northern New Mexico and eventually to Tau's Pueblo and Tau's. That's right. Tau's Pueblo, where Manuel became a famous curandero, he hit a big selling tamales to the Indian Pueblo because they had never really eaten or seen tamales before and made a small killing there and also selling a little bit of marijuana on the side, you know, little tamales, I guess. Good competition. But a very colorful man, eventually, you know, he had a very colorful man in his own right.

Eventually he died in 1954 by his own hand, he ended up in Truchas, still a loner, still very much a mysterious man, and he had an appendicitis attack, he had done that operation before he operated on himself, the operation was successful, but he died of the infection that said in later. My God. And you said that he was a reputable curandero? Yeah, he's very famous curandero throughout New Mexico, Patrocino was very proud of that. But he didn't pass this on to his two boys, right? No, he was very much afraid that the boys would take away his business if he had taught them that sort of trade. Do we know if Patrocino maintains some kind of relationship with his brother once they were kicked out of the house? Well, Nicolas lived and married a woman from Taos and moved to Eban, Colorado, and Patrocino would visit him from time to time after Patrocino eventually settled in Taos, but they didn't

get along that well because Patrocino drank a lot and his brother didn't, very much against Patrocino drinking so much. Do we know if Patrocino ever went to school or did he have any kind of formal education? We know that he went to school for about two or three weeks from the accounts of Maggie Gustor, the school teacher, and Taos. And she described him and his brother Nicolas at the age of five and six as two little wild animals that disrupted the entire one-room schoolhouse. There. The only way that he could keep Patrocino occupied was to give him a little ball of clay which he played with for hours, and his father finally took him out of the school because the boys couldn't tell him what they were learning, and so that was the end of their education.

Did the barelas, the father ever owned some land in the Taos area? Eventually he did homestead up in the eastern side of Taos Pascanyon and a little place called Sakate Blanco, and he homesteaded quite a few acres there for a while and then sold that land and then moved to Truchas. So Patrocino went away from New Mexico for about 20 years, did a lot of wanderings, a lot of jobs. Yeah, it's very uncanny that he identified with Christ and he was here a young man disappearing from his home village and his homeland and then returning after 20 years of wandering. The trailer returned around 1931-32, met Dremedios Trujillo who was working as a and Haradora plastering walls for the wealthy Anglos who were moving into Taos and Patrocino was the

mud mixer and a hard carrier and so they fell in love and got married and she was a widow with four children already. Let's stop it right there when Patrocino falls in love and talk a little bit about the opening reception which has happened at the Museum of New Mexico because that's where the good number of pieces of Patrocino are in exhibit. This we have some wonderful works there that really describe his life and the tremendous breadth of his art. We have to remember that Patrocino was the first Mexican-American artist to gain national recognition. He was also the first artist from New Mexico to be collected by the Museum of Modern Art in New York and probably one of the first to be collected by the Smithsonian as a modern artist.

So we feel that for those factors and the fact that he is a real genius has left us a huge body of work to prove that. That he deserves his place in not only American art but in the international scene. And I think that the book, which is a very beautiful item published by Red Cream Books out of Santa Fe, the name of the book is Spirit Ascended the Art and Life of Patrocino Varela and you worked along with David Witt. Yes, we collaborated on the book. It took us about a little over three years to write the book and independently about ten years of research that we combined our efforts with. The book itself has a little over 200 pages and beautiful color reproduction.

What do you think this book might do in terms of assuring Patrocino Varela a place and certainly in the art of the old Mexico, but in the art of the world, I would say? Well, we're very proud of the book. We feel that it will be a part of every library in America, we hope. Because art books of that stature and breadth are rare. So it will be a mainstay. There are other things we are doing. The wonderful periodical publication, Arteza Mexico, has agreed to do an important article that David and I wrote for those periodicals for art publications and Arteza Mexico is an international magazine that will go to Europe and Latin America.

So I mean, you work with Patrocino Varela began when you were a teenager and it has continued all along, but the fact that you have done this book doesn't mean that it's your association with Varela is over and done with them. No, we're also working hard to get national exposure. This is our first phase, our second phase is to impact the National Museum of Art in Washington, D.C., the Smithsonian, hopefully to get a national exhibition, get this exhibition along with the pieces that are at the Smithsonian for a national show and also to do a catalog resume of documenting all of his work, which are up to data, a little over 1200 that we found to a hundred pieces that I told you, and we feel that there are more because we had at least a dozen people reach us during this show, notifying us of the collections

that they have. So the more we hear people hear about this book, the more I think we'll get that information. Were you happy with the way that the exhibit that the pieces were mounted by Mr. Stuart Ashman of the director of the Museum of New Mexico? Yes, I believe that the show has a tremendous impact. Both David and I curated the show, so we selected the pieces, we wrote the commentary that's on the walls and brought the show together as a cohesive unit, but Stuart Ashman and Joseph Trogett, who was the curator, did a wonderful job in the display, and the last three days that I've been there, I have seen that the rest of the exhibitions in the museum have all but been ignored, and I see just crowds of people around the Barelachio.

Well it certainly was an experience at the opening reception, I was very happy to be there and saw so many people from Tau's, Spagnola, seems that a large number of people from the mountain villages came to check it out. That's very unusual for the Fine Arts Museum, I believe that Stuart Ashman to his credit is seeking to draw the Chicano population into the fold, into a way of connecting to cultural activities or something. The exhibition will be traveling and we'll get into that a little bit later on, but once even when Patrocino Varela married that lady, he still was he carving by then? No, Varela wasn't carving. It was perhaps two months into his marriage that someone brought him an old Santo on 19th century Santo to repair, because Varela was good at fixing things in wood, and it was

a revelation, to him it was a revelation that he could make or carve a figure hole compared to the old Santo which was carved in pieces, the head was carved separately and then stuck on the body, the arms carved separately, and then jess out onto the body, and he felt that it was a week in the power of the piece. So immediately he already saw that there was a power to Santo Dato art, and it was his revelation that one single time in his life, it was an epiphany really that he could actually carve a piece and he visualized it, so he ran to the wood pile, as soon as he got home from work and carved a piece carved all into the night, and a figure started to emerge and he never stopped carving.

You said that his father never instilled him in him a feeling for religion, but somehow he ended up doing a lot of pieces with a religious theme. Yes, that's the irony of his work, but Elan never went to church, his wife tried very hard to get him to go to Mass, and he would say, you know, why go to church, the Vigas would crack, and the people would turn around and stare at me instead of pray. So he was very anti-religious in that respect, in respect to the formalities of religion. Yet he was creating some of the most innovative religious art of the 20th century, which is attested to in the exhibition. There are a number of very important religious carvings that are very innovative, and so

he was also carving scenes of domesticity that are very moving, like mother and child, and holy family scenes, which go contrary to the way he grew up. Perhaps there is this sense of longing to have this loving family relationship that motivated him to create such moving pieces of art. How would you, let's see, we phrase this, his method of carving is very different from what we know as something to art. Oh, very much so, yes. It's a very unique style, and yet he had no access, I mean, it's very, very modern, like a big compared to the work of Henry Moore, the great sculptor from England. By many of the European intellectuals like Picasso and Broncosi and German expressionist,

yes, there's that connection to his art, and to ethnographic art as well. How did this come about? Arella operated from his intuitive side, he did not intellectualize his art, like these Europeans did. Eventually, American artists were selecting from a European menu. Serial expressionism, minimalism, cubism, and sort of imitating Europeans. Seriala came from the heart, and he reads very much like a Jungian psychology book, and Carl Jung talked about the shared memory idea in the arts, and by Gully, he provided us with a theory, and Barella is walking proof of that theory, that this shared memory, that we all have this connection to the creative effort, that we all have, Barella was able

to visualize it, which is rare in our forms, which we tend to forget, where our primal energy comes from, Barella, it was right at the surface of our form, Barella. We are talking in this edition of his program, Espejos de Slam, with the artist Eduardo Gonzales, who visits us from Santa Fe, to talk about the book that is published by Red Crane Books of Santa Fe, Spirit Ascendant. This book is about life, and the art of Mr. Patrocino Barella, one of the great sculptors in New Mexico. Edward, does it seem like Patrocino's marriage really settled him down and gave an opportunity to do precisely this kind of work, was she, was a woman a good influence on him?

Patrocino, his marriage was normal. Patrocino was a very complex man, and in La Povera de los Medios, she was unaware of this, because she saw this very handsome young man coming into her life. It could have been a movie star, it could have been a movie star, and he was an itinerant worker. For all intensive purposes, it appeared to be a hard worker who did the same sort of work she did, but the one thing that Barella was was this wanderer, this stranger to community. I think George Simoldo, the great German sociologist, described the stranger as in society, he represents that person who was outside the culture and confronting it, and never really accepting it.

So Barella was this person, this stranger, and Barella perhaps never even knew himself that he was that person. And he picked up bad habits on the road, come in, he was a chain smoker, by that time a heavy drinker, we know that from discussions with his stepchildren who were almost adults at that time, that he was at that time even a heavy drinker. So she married a very complex man at that point, and then when he started to carve, his complexities were even heightened, even more, and the fact that he had been wandering for 20 years, it was very hard for him to be a stable father type, anyways he used alcohol as an escape to remind him of those wandering days where he had no cares in the world, and he started creating that he called heavy burdens, and it was a heavy burden, I carry a heavy load, you know, married a woman with four children, and now I have to care for

them. And so he had three more children, so there were children to replace the ones that were leaving, and so he started to carve pieces that represented this domestic life and turmoil, as well as this wonderful life with family. He perceived the children as his own, and not anything that are made of he also had to do with, you know, for example, and she developed a very poor relationship with him because of his drinking, because his drinking was an embarrassment, you know, it is, this is a real problem in Chicano society too, to this day, and I think Barela represented this new reality for the Chicano in New Mexico, where community was beginning to disintegrate, because Barela was the wanderer, and at the same time he did begin to express this separation

and the very difficult times that Chicanos were having in the 1930s, if you can imagine somebody wanting to be an artist in the midst of the depression, the new very little English, we never had any art training, and who was from the lowest economic and social group in the community, he had everything going against him, and was alcoholic to boot. And somehow he was, somehow he was able to do it, do you think that his association with the WPA was a productive form? It was, and Barela had been working diligently at his art for three years before he was on the WPA, on his own, and he was getting a little bit of recognition, and the federal

arts program came in in 1936, and Vernon Hunter, the new director, along with, was actually Ruth Fish brought him to the attention, and from there Hunter loved his work, because he already had a body of work, and that same year Barela's art was shown in Santa Fe, and then went to the Museum of Modern Art in New York in a group show, and Barela was hailed as the discovery of the year, and in national publications, Time Magazine, the New York Times, Washington Post, all these publications just raved about his art. At that time Santa Fe already had a well-established art, Gringo Art Community. Well, that's right, and Taos as well, Taos had a big art community. And how I wonder how they looked upon the work that Patrocini was producing? Well, it's interesting, we documented that in the book, how he was ignored primarily

by many of the high society people who held a lot of sway in the art communities, like the Mabel Dutch Lohan group in Taos. Mabel Dutch wrote a book in 1944 of all the Taos, great Taos artists, left Barela out, because by that time Barela had already received national acclaim. The Santa Fe art community was no more interested in Barela's art as well. Then Hacintokirarte and Mexican-American artists who printed his book in the 1960s, left up Barela as a Mexican-American artist, and he devoted a whole chapter to the Santero Art in New Mexico, in his book, Edward, Patrocini, where he never was a penitenti, but he had some kind of associations with the Morales, could you talk a little bit about that?

Because the penitenti art of New Mexico was very important to Barela's art. Los Hermanos were his neighbors, and he was very good friends with him, they were his drinking buddies, and he also knew Ali Alavados, that the Hermanos knew, because they taught him, and they also would commission him to do artwork for the Morales, but Barela himself was never a penitenti, and he actually forbade one of his step-sons from becoming a penitenti. He was just too much of an independent figure, this outsider, this stranger to community, to be one. You mentioned the fact that he received, and of course a lot of people don't, but Patrocini would allow him to receive recognition in his lifetime, but that doesn't mean that he, like a Hollywood movie, he became rich and famous at the end.

No, but he could have done better, and Vernon Hunter was responsible for not allowing him to receive more money from his art, and Hunter, the head of the Federal Arts program, was receiving letters from top galleries in New York, and in Washington, D.C., who wanted to handle Barela's art, who could get good money for his art, and return commissions to him, Vernon Hunter refused to allow these galleries to interact with Barela and acquire his art for exhibition and sale, and this is well documented in our book, there's correspondence between Hunter and Holger K. Hill, who's head of the National Program in Washington where they both agreed that Barela's naivete would be spoiled by these galleries and his

fame. It was a matter to me of economics that they prevented Barela from being more successful financially, and when the Federal Arts program ended in 1943, then Barela was, went back to sheep pretty, and carving at night. Did he die in Paris then? Barela died no wealthier than when he started. Oh no, what did I do? He was scraping by. He never accepted the idea of the gallery system in Tows where they wanted to show his work on commission. He refused that process. He always wanted them to buy his art, and then he would, a lot of times, undercut these galleries who were selling his art for $40, $50 and the galleries, he would put one in a paper sack and take it down to the plaza and sell it for $10, you know.

They could enjoy the galleries crazy, and at some point, some galleries were not very good to him, and would cheat him out of works and give him a few bucks for a piece and a bottle of wine, because, you know, by then he was severely alcoholic. We're running out of time, Edward, but we do want to invite everyone to check out the book at the bookstores, Spirit Ascended The Life, The Art and Life of Patrocinio Arella by our guest tonight, Edward Gonzales, and also by David Elwood. We would also like to invite you to check out the exhibit of, I don't know, how many pieces, 20, 25, 40 pieces at the Museum of New Mexico. It's a wonderful exhibit, and Edward, it will be traveling, could you tell us where it might be going?

Oh, sure. From Santa Fe to right now, it's at the Museum of Nova Hicun Santa Fe. Yes, at the Fine Arts Museum in Santa Fe till December 20th. From January 31st to April 27th, it will be at the Roswell Museum and Art Center. From there it will travel to the Snipe Museum, University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana that will go from June 8th through September 14th, now for Albuquerque. It will travel to the Albuquerque Museum October 12th to January 4th, October 12th, 1997 to January 4th, 1998. And then finally return to the Harwood Museum on January 28th through April 7th, 1998. So after all these years, Patrocini continues to rule you, Edward? Yes.

Could you tell us why? Well, Barrela represents a new archetype in American art. The artist who has an experience, a cultural experience, totally foreign to the quote, American, unquote, experience, one whose culture is not yet quite even accepted by the general Anglo-American culture in the United States, yet one who has, in many ways, surpassed some of the great artists in the world. So Barrela is important for us to continue our efforts, to bring him to light so that everyone knows about Barrela, just as everyone knows about George O'Keeffe.

He has heard the voice of our friend, Edward González, who visited us this night from Santa Fe. For the guests of the Island, I am Cecilio García Camarillo and I invite you to accompany us the next Monday at 8 o'clock of the night to continue sharing with all of you information, culture and art, very good night. We'll talk about that. and program support provided by the Market Plot.