Re: Catching Up -- The Cassidy Collection

We spend quite a bit of time in Santa Fe, and a fair amount of the time we spend there, we're doing something at La Fonda on the Plaza, the iconic Fred Harvey hotel that has served as the city's social hub for generations.

I can't remember when I first visited La Fonda, but I do remember very distinctly seeing the Cassidy paintings the first time. They were, and I think they are, stunning.

Gerald Cassidy (né Gerald Ira Diamond Cassidy) was a founding member of the Santa Fe Artists Colony, arriving in Santa Fe in 1912, and sometime in the 19-teens he got together with the handful of other "easel artists" in Santa Fe to form the Art Colony -- which in a sense still exists.

He created the collection at La Fonda in 1922 when the hotel itself was still in the process of self-creation. They are large works on brown paper, most of them essentially life-size, executed in casein, and remarkably lively even after all these years.

"Santiago" is one of the most striking works of the collection. It is thought the model may have been an elder at one of the nearby pueblos, although Cassidy may have invented the character without a live model. In the '20's, it was customary for Indians in New Mexico to don Plains Indian headdresses and sometimes Plains Indians garments as well, to please artists and tourists who expected "Indians" to dress that way, even though the Pueblo peoples never had done so in the past. "Santiago," it will be remembered, was the cry of the Spaniards whenever they commenced to slaughter among the New World native peoples, a cry that they brought to the Americas after using it so successfully in ridding the Iberian peninsula of the Moorish taint. Consequently, this image titled "Santiago" has multiple layers of ironic commentary that Cassidy may or may not have intended.

Cassidy's "Shalako" is also quite striking for very different reasons. It is certainly a more accurate rendering of nearby Indian appearance and customs, but without context it seems perfectly astonishing, which I imagine Cassidy was aiming for.

Of course in New Mexico, you have to have a Spanish Dancer, wearing a Spanish shawl from China-na-na (something I picked up from a zarzuela, "La Verbena de la Paloma" that we worked on in St. Louis ages ago. Embroidered Spanish shawls were -- and apparently still are -- made in Manila, but the Spanish sometimes said they were from China...)

And what's New Mexico without a priest? I ask you.

And if you're going to have a priest, you'd better have a penitente, something like the matachine below:

But then, ultimately, if you are going to come to New Mexico from out of town, from Back East especially, you will carry with you an image of trailblazer and mountain man Kit Carson, for whom there are schools and monuments erected, and of whom Gerald Cassidy did a portrait.

Two Lane Blacktop; Art and Found

On the way to Santa Fe

"Do you get to Albuquerque much?" asked the Native American film maker sitting next to me at a meeting in Santa Fe on Tuesday.

"Oh," I said, "about as often as we get to Santa Fe. It's about the same distance to go to one or the other, but the route to Santa Fe is a lot nicer..."

We travel to and from Santa Fe via NM 41, an iconic two lane blacktop highway through one of New Mexico's less populated regions. NM 41 aligns along a former railroad route that runs between the what used to be the AT&SF tracks south of the central mountain chain, and the northern tracks that run through Lamy, which was once the rail-stop for Santa Fe, though it is 18 miles or so east and south from the Plaza. The railroad builders at the time said they couldn't go into Santa Fe proper because the terrain was "too difficult." I suspect it had more to do with the amount of money they could or could not extort from the City Fathers.

Well.

There are some towns and former towns of a sort along NM 41, Estancia and Moriarty being the most populous with up to 1,000 people in each, but there's McIntosh, Otto, Buford and Stanley in the Estancia Basin, and then over a rise and through rolling country in the Galisteo Basin, you get to Galisteo itself, a dusty, ancient adobe town beside the often dry but recently roaring Galisteo River, a town with no services, yet one that serves as a kind of outpost suburb for Santa Fe these days.

NM 41 stubs out at NM 285 just east of Lamy. Two-eighty-five north takes a route across the railroad tracks and through the semi-rural El Dorado suburb of Santa Fe. After passing through El Dorado, you pick up I-25, whooshing by at 75 miles an hour north and west another few miles (the signs say 8, but I don't think it is) to the Old Pecos Trail exit, where you sort of follow your instincts -- and in my case, imprinting, since I've done it so often -- till you pick up the Old Santa Fe Trail and wend your way as best you can into Town, which for us is the Old Town around the Plaza.

Santa Fe is not a big city; it's quite small, actually, so it's not really all that likely you'll get lost in urban sprawl or anything like it, but the way the town is laid out and roadways, streets, and paths operate, it's very easy to get lost while trying to get from place to place within Santa Fe, or even get lost trying to find the Plaza. It's not as easy as it may seem.