Finding community: 'Out West' explores the contributions gay, lesbian artists wielded in the Southwest

Dec. 18—Walking through the New Mexico Museum of Art, visitors may be forgiven for assuming they are seeing a general survey of Southwestern painting.

But "Out West: Gay and Lesbian Artists in the Southwest 1900-1969" explores the significant contributions gay and lesbian artists wielded in the American Southwest. The show runs through Sept. 2, 2024.

The exhibit marks the first survey of the impact of queer artists in the American Southwest during the first part of the 20th century, said curator Christian Waguespack.

The show explores the work of such marquee names as Cady Wells and Marsden Hartley, as well as lesser-known artists Russell Cheney and Agnes Sims.

Northern New Mexico promised freedom and a sense of community denied these artists elsewhere, Waguespack said.

"It was the ability to settle and make a life for themselves without the societal constraints of more conservative cities back East," he explained.

The Massachusetts-born Wells first came to Arizona as a young man. His father sent him to a ranch school in Tucson to "toughen him up" in 1922. The family rebel who was more interested in music and the arts, he fell in love with the mountains and deserts and began painting them.

The artist was captivated by Spanish colonial history and art.

"He was very interested in santos and bultos," Waguespack said. "He was one of the first people to collect them."

Wells gave his collection of some 200 santos to the Museum of New Mexico in 1951.

"He stayed here for the rest of his life," Waguespack said.

Unlike Wells, Hartley developed his painting style by observing Cubist artists in Paris and Berlin.

"He first begins thinking about the Southwest when he was living in Berlin," Waguespack said. "He was always moving around. He wanted to study European modernism and (gallery owner and photographer) Alfred Stieglitz pushed him to go to Europe."

Hartley was a member of the circle of artists orbiting around Stieglitz, the husband of Georgia O'Keeffe. He first became known to Stieglitz and the New York art world in 1909 for his innovative depictions of his home state of Maine.

In Berlin, Hartley began studying at the city's Anthropological Museum, where he produced paintings of teepees, horses and headdresses. All of that stereotypical iconography vanished when he came to New Mexico.

Hartley came to Taos at the behest of art patron Mabel Dodge Luhan in 1918. He was here for 18 months. The artist embarked on a mission to create an independent, American modern art that did not draw on European tradition.

The Museum of New Mexico paid him to create what is arguably his Southwestern masterpiece, "El Santo," in 1919. Hartley found the cultures in New Mexico to be distinctly American.

"He's got the santo, the Indigenous blanket and the black pot," Waguespack said. "He's painting what the West has to offer."

Ever the restless nomad, Hartley used the money he earned to travel to California.

The Connecticut-born Cheney was an American impressionist, post-impressionist and New England regional painter. He spent one winter in Santa Fe in 1929.

It was enough time for him to incorporate distinctive New Mexican cultural material into his post-impressionist paintings.

"He developed tuberculosis and came out to Colorado to heal," Waguespack said. "He came down from there and made some paintings here. He's looking at the Spanish colonial influence out here, particularly the Penitente Brotherhood."

The Penitentes were a lay organization developed to fill the spiritual needs of New Mexico's communities after the 1790 withdrawal of the Franciscan order from the area.

Cheney's romanticized "New Mexico (Penitente)," 1929, shows a bulto or carved sculpture of St. Francis standing before the San Francisco de Asis Church in the Rancho de Taos Plaza.

The painting's subject matter reveals a critical Penitente theme: the sacred.

Born in Pennsylvania, Sims moved to Santa Fe in 1938. She had established herself as a textile and needlework designer in Philadelphia. In Santa Fe, she became a contractor with skills taught her by her father, restoring many of the old adobe homes on Canyon Road.

"Like any good Santa Fean, she came for two weeks and stayed for the rest of her life," Waguespack said.

"She was interested in ancient cultures," he continued. "She started looking to the petroglyphs as inspiration. She took that inspiration and married it to Cubism."

Over the next decade, Sims recorded 3,000 petroglyphs in drawings and thousands more in photographs. In 1949, she received a grant from the American Philosophical Society to further her research, and in 1950 she published a portfolio of selected rock art drawings in her monograph "San Cristobal Petroglyphs."

Sims' Canyon Road home hosted such luminaries as Truman Capote and Vogue editor Diana Vreeland.

"She was considered to be the heart of the lesbian culture," Waguespack said.

Sims worked with an array of mediums, including wood, oil, cloth and construction materials. The First National Bank of Santa Fe still displays her mural. She died from dementia in 1990.