New Mexico’s New Deal programs worked in concert with the State’s vocational schools to produce countless pieces of furniture and decorative arts to fill public buildings. In New Mexico, that program dovetailed with efforts to revive 18th-century Spanish Colonial traditions. The resulting proliferation of Spanish Colonial–style interior décor cemented New Mexico’s visual identity. Take this trastero (cabinet), for example. It was likely produced in a New Deal workshop employing Hispano artists to recreate Spanish Colonial furniture designs, with an emphasis on certain features and motifs such as those seen here: turned spindles, scalloped edges, rosette carvings, and visible joinery. In this way, the New Deal cultivated a visual vocabulary that has since been perceived as looking characteristically “New Mexican.”
