These thumb prints are backed up so that the essay will make sense even after the Collector's Guild has changed the Luis Tapia works on its webhsite. These are copyrighted materials and should not be reproduced without contacting the Collector's Guild,"Owings-Dewey Fine Art, Owings Dewey Fine Art, Santa Fe, New Mexico, Owings Dewey Fine Art, Taos Founders, modernist, Modernism, Master Works, master works, Retablos, retablos, Bultos, bultos, Spanish Colonial Furniture, furniture, prints, Prints, Drawings, drawings, American Art, fine art, painting, paintings, sculpture, Gustave Baumann, J.H. Sharp, Joseph Henry Sharp, Cinco Pintores, Taos Society of Artists, santos, devotional art, Abstract, expressionist, expressionism, impressionist, impressionism, representational, west, western, southwest, southwestern, 19th and Early 20th Century Paintings, sculpture, bronze, bronzes, contemporary, monumental sculpture, folk art."
I downloaded the site's text as well as its thumb nails. It's a very well done site and many of you may want to read the actual essay long after it's gone from the Collector's Guild site. The thumb nails are used here as fair use" for teaching.
Artwork of Luis Tapia, Santa Fe
- Luis Tapia
"Donna Sebastiana con su Consecha (Harvest)" / d. 1999
Carved and painted wood
24 1/2"V x 15"H x 4"D
"The work of Luis Eligio Tapia
often reveals a turn of mind that sets a traditional bulto
apart from the typical imagery of Spanish Colonial art in New Mexico.
Such deviations do not intend to shock, satirize or caricature the
traditional forms. They are there to exchange remarks with the tradition,
they are there to make the tradition live."
Luis Tapia
"Northern New Mexico Bella"
Carved and painted wood
14 1/4"V x 23"H x 11"D
"Born in 1950, the native Santa Fean grew up when peer pressure
and the school systems worked in subtle ways to homogenize culture. In
a manner extremely common to New Mexico Hispanics, Luis was "Louie" or
"Lou" to his childhood friends. The nickname normally coined to confer
individuality on someone, ironically submerged Luis' Hispanic identity
into an anglicized context. Like many of his generation, Luis searched
for his roots, aided by the social consciousness of the late sixties and
early seventies. A founder in the early seventies of La Cofradia de Artes
y Artesanos Hispanicos, Luis has played a key role in the contemporary
renaissance of Hispanic art in the Southwest."
Luis Tapia
Homage to Patrociño Barela"
Carved and painted wood
20"V x 15 3/8"H x 8 1/2"D
"But this search has not been one
to simply "recover" or "preserve" traditions. As he studied the losses
and revivals of Colonial arts in New Mexico in the early twentieth
century, Luis found that some attempts to preserve the traditions
seemed lifeless because of a zeal to maintain a sense of "purity."
Other efforts, such as the now typical unpainted "Cordova Style,"
altered older traditions to suit the "truth to materials" aesthetic
of early modernist artistic and intellectual circles outside of New
Mexico. However successful they were as marketing ventures in their
own time, both methods regarded the work of art as an autonomous object.
Not part of a living artistic culture."
Luis Tapia
Immaculate Heart of Mary" / d. 1999
Carved and painted wood
19 3/8"V x 10.5"H x 12"D
"Luis looks instead for the nourishment
of blending tradition with contemporary culture so that the tradition
may continue to grow and flourish. In order to accomplish this, he
had to break with more recent revivals. His color is bright and new,
neither antiqued nor absent. At first ridiculed in his work in the
early seventies, the bright color reminds us most of all that this
art is contemporary. It does not try to recreate the ambiance of another
time or the aesthetics of another place. The metaphor of roots and
growth in an important one for Luis, for it gives him a sense of reality
within a growing urban environment of ever-increasing artificiality.
He is not without humor in his perceptions of his home. His eyes twinkle
as he chuckles over the alternate name of the City Different -- Fanta
Sé"
A Justice Site
jeannecurran@habermas.org