The nexus of Gallup’s New Deal art collection is the Gallup Art Center (GAC), which brokered the creation, allocation, purchase, and donation of the majority of the works.
Poster from the Washington D.C.-based June 1939 exhibition on Federal Art Centers organized by the Federal Art Project.
In 1936, the Federal Art Project (FAP) inaugurated twenty-three experimental art centers in southern states for the purpose of expanding access to the arts in rural America.1 In 1937, the FAP expanded the successful program to western states. Over the next two years, four art centers were created in New Mexico in remotely located towns: Las Vegas, Roswell, Melrose, and Gallup (in chronological order). Eventually, the FAP organized about one hundred community art centers in small towns across the country.2
All federal art centers followed the same model. They were established with local sponsorship, with the FAP providing staff, direction, and oversight, and the community providing space, equipment, and supplies.3 The centers maintained gallery space that featured FAP-organized traveling exhibitions, hosted public lectures, and offered free art classes to children and adults, all with the aim of stimulating “genuine interest in art as an essential of community life.”4 They also coordinated with local schools to engage youth and enhance educational opportunities.
Photograph of the opening of the Gallup Art Center in 1939.
The campaign to establish a federal art center in Gallup began in summer 1938 when a field representative for the New Mexico FAP, Mary (Toni) Thoburn, began petitioning City Council and civic groups for their support, including the Rotary Club, Kiwanis Club, 20-30 Club, Business and Professional Women’s Club and the Junior Women’s Club. A total of 125 club and community members met to discuss the project with Thoburn, FAP state director Russell Vernon Hunter and FAP federal assistant director Dan Deffenbacher, at a banquet at the El Rancho Hotel on October 23, 1938.5 By mid-December, the City Council had voted to provide $50 per month in funding (over $900 in today’s money),6 and in mid-January a board of directors for the project was selected.7 The center had the local government, private, community, state, and federal support it needed to get off the ground.
The Gallup Art Center, originally known as the Gallup Community Workshop,8 officially opened with a tea attended by a hundred people on Sunday, February 26, 1939.9 It was first located at 4th Street and Coal Avenue in downtown Gallup in a converted storeroom. Thoburn was its first director.
Poster from the Washington D.C.-based June 1939 exhibition on Federal Art Centers organized by the Federal Art Project.
The GAC immediately became a wellspring of creative activity, galvanizing Gallup’s arts scene. Even before the official opening, drawing, design, woodworking, and cabinet-making classes began under the instruction of accomplished artists. Within three weeks, 248 people were enrolled in classes. The Center also opened with two special art exhibitions. One, loaned by the state’s FAP office, featured prominent New Mexico artists. The other opening exhibition of “self-portraits through the ages” came from the national office of the FAP in Washington, DC.10
In the first four months the center was open, a reported 4,040 people attended classes, and ten exhibitions were mounted.11 The Center continued in this vein for the duration of its operation, putting on an incredible variety of shows averaging an impressive two per month. A number of FAP traveling exhibitions visited the Center, highlighting a range of themes from “Scenes of Everyday Life” and “Industry” to the circus and American cities. The Center also organized shows of local artists, exhibited private collections, and hosted a display of Latin American art sponsored by the International Business Machines Corporation (IBM). It shared work by Native artists, Hispano artists, local artists, artists from Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and Taos, East and West Coast artists, famous artists, amateur artists, and children. It showcased oil painting, watercolors, printmaking, photography, wood carving, and textiles. Perhaps most impressively, it was selected as the first stop on the national tour of the Museum of Modern Art’s (MoMA’s) 1941 Indian Art of the United States exhibition, heralded at the time as “the largest and most representative exhibit of American Indian art ever compiled.”12
At the same time, the Center provided a robust schedule of art classes for hundreds of adults and children, covering basic and specialized disciplines including figure drawing, plein air (outdoor) painting, still-life painting, metalwork, woodcarving, Spanish Colonial tinwork, and lithography. Anna Keener Wilton, Theodore Wahl, Thomas Horton, James Whiteman, Willie Gonzalez, Arthur Penner, Teofilo Lopez, Toni Thoburn, and Martha Kennedy each served at one point as instructors at the GAC.
Several artworks made their way into what now constitutes the Gallup New Deal art collection through channels outside the Gallup Art Center.
A seven-part mural series by J. R. Willis currently housed in the Gallup High School library was commissioned by the school’s superintendent through the Public Works Administration.17 Likewise, Joseph Fleck’s West Wind is also the creation of an earlier New Deal program, the Public Works of Art Project, which was the first federal art program.
Some artworks, including artworks produced in series, in particular Louie Ewing and Eliseo Rodriguez‘s Navajo Blanket Portfolio, were distributed to schools, libraries, and other publicly supported institutions directly through the FAP.
The collection currently remains divided between the Octavia Fellin Public Library, McKinley County, and Gallup McKinley County Schools.
It is not an overstatement to say that it is a miracle that this collection has survived to the extent that it has. The federal government ordered all state and local New Deal program records destroyed when the New Deal ended at the onset of World War II, as it did not have the resources to transfer them to Washington, DC. Gallup’s New Deal art inventory has therefore been pieced together through newspaper records, photographs and oral history, and the Library’s archives. Some artworks have gone missing from the collection over time. Some have been recovered, as is the case with Quenching Their Thirst by Eliseo Rodriguez, which was found in the ceiling tiles of City Hall in 2011.18 Yet an unknown number have not been, and perhaps never will be, found.
Missing New Deal artworks include:
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Gallup and McKinley County are situated on the ancestral and current homelands of the Diné and Ashiwi peoples.
Gallup’s New Deal art collection consists of over 120 objects created, purchased, or donated from 1933 to 1942 through New Deal federal art programs administered by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to support artists during the Great Depression.
The Gallup New Deal Art Virtual Museum features three types of exhibits, combining traditional and non-traditional approaches to illuminate academic, creative, and individual understandings.
Gallup’s New Deal art collection includes works by a demographically, professionally, and stylistically diverse group of named and unnamed artists.
Image Use Notice: Images of Gallup’s New Deal artworks are available to be used for educational purposes only. Non-collection images are subject to specific restrictions and identified by a © icon. Hover over the icon for copyright info. Read more
