Jose Rey Toledo was of Jemez, Zia, Pecos, and Hopi heritage. His interest in art was encouraged from a young age. In school, he made pencil and crayon drawings along with paper arts and crafts. He also grew up sketching hunting scenes in charcoal with his uncle on the kitchen walls while waiting for breakfast. When he was eleven years old, a missionary interested in “documenting” Jemez daily life asked Toledo to make drawings on a chalkboard. “I started by sketching heads of animals, anything I could think of—horses, cats, bighorn sheep,” the artist recalled. “Those were just impromptu chalk drawings . . . She was very surprised that we could have a semblance of some realism in our drawings.”1
From 1930 to 1935, Toledo attended the Albuquerque Indian School. He took his first formal art classes starting in tenth grade, and remembers being “discouraged by teachers” from including a background in his paintings. As he explained, he was taught that “Pueblo Indian painting was characterized by just a blank surrounding the image . . . that was the Indian style.”2 He designed the diploma for his high school graduation, after which he enrolled in the College of Fine Arts at the University of New Mexico. Short on tuition funds, Toledo dropped out after only two weeks, however.3
Toledo’s professional art career ramped up in the early 1940s, as he went to work on the Federal Art Project. By the end of the decade, he was receiving national recognition and ribbons for his work, including at the Gallup Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial (which used one of his paintings for its 1941 poster4). In 1947, he was awarded first prize for Indian painting from the Philbrook Museum of Art for his painting Dancing Spirits. “I wanted to do something that was specifically of Pueblo nature. And the thing that came to my mind was a painting of the Zuni Shalako dancing and their spiritual guardians,” he said. “And that was the largest painting I was going to attempt on watercolor paper . . . so I painted that and sent it off.”5
Eventually, Toledo returned to school and received a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the University of New Mexico in 1951. He went on to receive a Master’s in art education in 1955.
The knowledge, lifeways, beliefs, and, in particular, ritual dances of his people were the focus of his work. For Toledo’s 1994 obituary, Zuni scholar and former Museum of Indian Arts and Culture curator of ethnography, Edmund J. Ladd, commented that “he was a very astute observer. He painted everything from memory. He recorded a lot of elements and cultural materials that are preserved only in his paintings. His works are a source of preservation for the Pueblos.”6
Over the course of his life, Toledo gave back to his community and Native peoples in many ways. He taught art at the Albuquerque and Santa Fe Indian Schools for the first half of the 1950s. In 1956, he applied to become a health education specialist through the Indian Health Service. He served assignments in North Dakota, South Dakota, and Laguna Pueblo, NM, through the early 1970s, at which point he went back to school for his third degree, a Master of Public Health from University of California, Berkeley. Toledo continued to work for the Indian Health Service in Albuquerque until his retirement in 1976.
In addition to being an artist, art educator, and health worker, Toledo was also a highly respected culture bearer, storyteller, community leader, and civil rights activist. From the 1960s to the 1980s he participated in civil rights demonstrations in Gallup and Albuquerque and gave numerous talks on cultural and historical topics. In the 1970s, Toledo also enjoyed yet another career as an actor, appearing in films and television including Flap (1970), The Man and the City (which aired on ABC from 1971–1972), The Trackers (1971), and a popular pizza commercial.
