Eliseo Rodriguez1 is best known for reviving the 18th/19th-century Spanish Colonial art of straw appliqué as a New Deal artist, but he was also a highly accomplished painter, though few of the paintings he made for the Federal Art Project are credited to him. Despite the lack of credit often afforded artists of color by New Deal art programs (and conventional Eurocentric art historical scholarship), Rodriguez was a multitalented modern artist who significantly contributed to the development of the Santa Fe art colony in the first half of the 20th century and beyond. In Quenching Their Thirst, Rodriguez employs confident, bold lines and a primary color palette to show a scene of everyday Hispano life in New Mexico and at the same time refer to the biblical parable of Jesus and the woman at the well. Author Carmella Padilla explains that “Rodriguez’s devout spirituality and personal religious experience infused his paintings with a special soulfulness.”2
