'Out West' celebrates artists drawn to state for its inclusive spirit
Mar. 8—Maine-born artist Marsden Hartley spent part of the 1910s in Berlin because it was one of the world's best places to live openly as a gay man, says Christian Waguespack, head of curatorial affairs with the New Mexico Museum of Art.
By 1915, World War I had plunged the German capital into a tailspin of paranoia and competitive patriotism, and Waguespack says its approximately 40 gay bars vanished. Hartley returned to North America in December that year, making his way to New Mexico. By the standards of the time, it was an accommodating place — a then-new state with a live-and-let-live ethos that long has enjoyed a reputation for open spaces and open minds.
Hartley is among several artists who were drawn to the Land of Enchantment partly to escape mistreatment based on sexual orientation and who are featured in Out West: Gay and Lesbian Artists in the Southwest 1900-1969, running through September 2 at the New Mexico Museum of Art.
It's the first exhibition of its kind in the Southwest, Waguespack says. It features 34 pieces by artists including Russell Cheney, Cady Wells, and Agnes C. Sims.
"As I've been researching artists for projects over the past few years, I kept meeting new people who were gay or lesbian or gender-nonconforming artists who were part of the New Mexico story," he says. "It became more and more remarkable to me that nobody had done a project on this yet. Individually, these artists' sexuality is no secret. It was just a matter of putting them all in the same room with each other."
details
Out West: Gay and Lesbian Artists in the Southwest 1900-1969
* Through September 2
* New Mexico Museum of Art, 107 W. Palace Avenue
* $7-$12
* 505-476-5063; nmartmuseum.org
Hartley created the oil-on-canvas painting El Santo, which shows a picture of a saint hung on a dark wall, with a houseplant and more-abstract items in the foreground. Cheney's oil-on-canvas New Mexico (Penitente) depicts a saint figurine against a backdrop of a striking cloudy sky and adobe buildings. Wells' Head of Santo (Head of Christ), created with oil and watercolor on paper, focuses on Jesus' slightly concerned-looking face. The works are spiritually connected, yet were created a decade apart — in 1919, 1929, and 1939, respectively.
As the name Out West suggests, the featured artists were all open about their sexuality, Waguespack says. The exhibition focuses on works through 1969 because that's a watershed year in the gay rights battle, spurred by New York City police raiding the Stonewall Inn. A year later, thousands marched in New York on the anniversary of the raids in what's recognized as the nation's first gay pride parade.
"There was a significant conceptual shift in the way gay and lesbian culture and history was talked about in the United States after that," Waguespack says. "It's less easy to nail down, but 1969 tends to be a pretty fair date when we discuss the transition between modern art and contemporary art."
As for starting in 1900, Waguespack was the museum's curator of 20th century art from 2017-2023 and wanted the focus of Out West to be on the first half of that century.
"Very little has been done on this time period in terms of gay and lesbian culture here, which I find strange," he says. "It also helped me with space. We're in a nice-sized gallery, but if we went much past 1969, I would have needed a lot more space because a lot more people would need to be brought into the story."
Waguespack is drawn to 20th century art in part because of the many societal changes artists encountered. Some were inspired; later in her life, Georgia O'Keeffe created the Sky Above Clouds series inspired by her views from airplanes. For context, O'Keeffe was born 16 years before the Wright Brothers' fateful flight at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina.
"Cady Wells is a great example of somebody who didn't deal with the changes very well," Waguespack says. "His work is all kind of a response to various anxieties that really came to him as a more mature adult, particularly after he came back from World War II. After seeing all of that devastation in Europe, he didn't paint for many years. Then he moved to Jacona, which was right in the shadow of Los Alamos, where he was consumed with this fear about atomic contamination and the idea that human beings were just going to wipe each other out."
Wells' letters to friends reflected his paranoia. He'd write things like, "I'd love for you to join me for dinner next Thursday — if we're still here" and wasn't joking, Waguespack says.
He adds that later works by Wells, who died in 1954, were heavier and more involved. Wells believed that while the state maintained its natural beauty, atomic testing had robbed it of its purity.
Most of the works featured in Out West come from the museum's collection. Among the exceptions: three ceramic pieces created by Maurice Grossman that were housed at the Tucson Museum of Art.
"He was a really important figure in the Tucson gay and lesbian scene and kind of building that community there," Waguespack says of Grossman, who taught in the ceramics department at the University of Arizona. "He's also a very important figure in the ceramics world for people in the Southwest."
The museum also borrowed one of abstract expressionist Agnes Martin's early paintings from the University of New Mexico Art Museum — a find Waguespack is proud of because Martin acquired and destroyed many of her early works.
"I've heard that she would go to museums and say, 'If you give me that dirty, old, not-so-good painting, I'll give you a brand-new painting. You certainly want to do this trade, right?'" he says. "She was very controlled about her image, and she didn't want things that weren't in the moment she was living in out there in the world."
Sims, another of Martin's contemporaries, took a different tack with her art. She learned contractor skills from her father while growing up in Pennsylvania, then moved to Santa Fe in 1938, when she was in her late 20s. She was inspired by petroglyphs south of the city and used building materials such as cement and plastics in her paintings and sculptures.
"She would paint on these unstretched canvases that would be like a Tyvek you would put on houses now, and she would use casing and industrial materials," Waguespack says. "This is something we would expect to see a contemporary artist do, but to have a woman artist here in the 1950s saying, 'I'm going to use these masculine materials to make something completely different' is really cool today."
