Tradiciones- Artes 2022

4

Victor Goler El Norté master santero

Breaking boundaries with glass

Polly Raye Central to the community

TAOS HAS ALWAYS BEEN A HOME TO ARTISTS, and amazing art —traditional crafts, decorative works and experimental excursions — has always been central to this community.

Nowhere else does one find potters, weavers, jewelers, plein air painters and writers work beside photographers, dancers, installation artists and hip hop performers.

Taos News loves to highlight these incredible artists each year in Tradi ciones: Artes (Arts). Look for our salute to our Unsung Heroes in next week’s special section.

In this year’s issue, we look at the

painstaking work of a master santero who restores devotional objects using traditional methods and materials.

Based in Taos, Victor Goler has nearly completed a months-long restoration of altar screens and statues in the San Antonio de Padua church in Córdova.

Read Tamra Testerman’s story on page 4.

Virginia Clark writes about the inter nationally-renowned glass artists Mary Shaffer, a pioneer in the American Studio

Glass Movement. In her decades-long career, her work has remained playful while it demolished existing boundaries. Her story begins on page 8.

And although not an artist — shop keeper and community leader Polly Raye has spent decades supporting local arts and commerce as the owner of the John Dunn Shops in downtown Taos. Read her story on page 12.

We hope you enjoy this year’s issue of Tradiciones: Artes. These artists are among the many who’ve come to Taos to tell their truth — through their art.

Victor GOLER

El Norté master santero

NEW MEXICO,

is a quaint

there

Victor

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The Art of Patient Care

‘It seems to me very important to the idea of true democracy — to my country — and to the world eventually — that all men and women stand equal under the sky.’ — Georgia O’Keeffe

to create positive change.

Goler has been involved in the conservancy and restoration of New Mexico devotional art for the past 35 years. He has also maintained a parallel career as a devotional artist and amateur historian of the older New Mexico Santos and Santeros. Enjoying a long history of conservation and restoration work, he was invited to examine the San Antonio de Padua church at the request of the New Mexico Profundo Organization, which helps to accelerate financing for many historical projects around the state.

The present mayordomo of the church, along with the parish priest, asked about conserving the three retablos (alter screens) and twenty-two bultos (statues). He was asked to offer a recommenda tion and the Archdiocese of Santa Fe for blessing of the conserva tion. “The initial mission was to only clean, conserve, and varnish the pieces within the church. The project would take three months of work. In the end, we extended the mission to include some resto ration that was needed to preserve certain areas and create a more cohesive balance to the overall work. We extended the work time to four-and-a-half months.”

“Much of the conservation work was straightforward. Cleaning was the first process — performed by removing years of surface dirt using distilled water and mild conservation detergents. The challenge was to be very careful around the areas that were very unstable, where the gesso and paint were flaking off. Sometimes, we had to stabilize the pigment prior to cleaning.”

Goler said the second treatment was to stabilize all the pigment and gesso throughout the reta blos and bultos. “This included structural stabilization of beams and rosettes on the retablos and arms, heads, bases, and attributes of all the bultos. We did much of this treatment using a conserva tion protein glue that could be easily injected into the affected areas. Once the adhesive was injected, the flaking pigment was then pushed back into place using a small iron. This procedure adhered any unstable areas back to the original wood surfaces.”

The last step was equally detailed: “We varnished all the pieces using a high-quality conservation varnish that has UV protection that is non-yellowing and reversible. The varnish helps to enrich the colors and protect the surface from future damage and makes it easier to dust without damaging the works.”

There were challenging changes and difficult adjust ments to be made. “As the proj ect moved along, we decided that some restoration was required. This meant that we replaced minor areas of missing pigment to pull

some of the imagery together and create a more balanced look. Part of the restoration included the removal of household paint that

had been splattered on the altar screens. This included the removal of older restoration efforts. The restoration procedure was the

most difficult, as we had to work and use stronger solvents and wear more protective gear to keep everyone safe. All the replace ments of paint were performed to be removed for future conser vation work.”

San Antonio de Padua Church was built in 1832 and the altar screens and statues inside were created around the same time.

But more than likely, took several years to finish, Goler said. “The majority of the work was created by Jose Rafael Aragon, one of New Mexico’s most prolific Sante ros (1796-1862). The body of work represented in the church is one of Rafael’s biggest productions of work in one place.”

The restoration stayed true to its historic roots. “All the materials used by Rafael Aragon represent what was being used. It required more than one person to create retablos during this period. A Santero would have to work with a blacksmith to make tools. A carpenter that could cut down a tree and saw the wood by hand, since there were no mills. They made many of the pigments from plants, minerals and bugs gath ered from the countryside. Glue was made from boiling animal hides, and later mixed with some sort of calcium carbonate to create a gesso. They needed someone that could distill grain alcohol to dilute the sap from trees to create a varnish and a variety of mate rials were used to create paint brushes.”

Goler said, “The opportunity to work on the amazing santos of Jose Rafael Aragon and being a part of preserving a New Mexico treasure separates this project from others.”

Mary

SHAFFER

Breaking boundries with glass

‘LIGHT IS THE MAGIC WORD,’ says internationally-renowned glass artist Mary Shaffer, now of Taos. “Working with glass is like holding light in your hands.” First drawn to Taos in the early ’90s for the skiing, the mountain called her here permanently shortly thereafter, teaching at Taos Ski Valley adult and children’s ski schools; and also drawing and ceramic sculpting at University of New Mexico–Taos. Besides UNM–Taos, she has taught drawing, painting, sculpture, woodwork ing, art history, contemporary art, glass and more at Wellesley College, New York University and California College of the Arts, among others.

Born in South Carolina, and raised in South America and Europe, her first language was Spanish, second was English and she was educated in German. She ultimately learned English at age six when the family moved to California. Once she found fairy stories about dual uni verses she couldn’t stop, choosing the thickest books she could find, and reading every book written by an author she loved, “like all of Faulkner.”

Shaffer was a full-time artist by the mid ’60s, while she was living in Rome, which ultimately led her to being a world-famous multi media glass artist. But her first love was painting.

“I first knew I wanted to be a painter when I ran home from first grade and put my watercolor on the floor and stood on the table to look at it,” Shaffer told Tempo’s Local Color columnist Betsy Carey in 2007. “From the table I saw that, indeed, I had managed to capture the feeling of floating. I knew then, without a doubt, that I would be a painter.”

Painting progressed to glass in the ’70s, she said, when, as a mother of two babies in diapers, she didn’t have time to sit for hours fine-tuning images and space. Amazingly, since her mid30s, she said she lived exclusively from the sale of her work and raised her girls, Saarin and Maiya — a single mother creatively revolutionizing male-dominated glass art.

A graduate of Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 1965, she started out as an educational consultant for universities and the government, finally turning to glass as she sought a backdrop for her paintings.

She says she “accidentally” came to glass by “wanting an undu lating glass surface on which to paint,” then fell in love with glass and invented “mid-air slumping,” which is opposite to the auto industry in which plate glass is placed on molds to make auto windshields.

BEHIND THE CURTAIN:

GLASS ART OF MARY SHAFFER

Mary Shaffer; Foreword by Jane Adlin, Commentaries by Lucy R. Lippard & William Warmus; ISBN13: 9780764360527 |

cover. schifferbooks.com/behind-thecurtain-the-glass-art-of-mary-shaffer-6949.html

A must-read book that illustrates Shaffer’s innovative mid-air slumping technique using gravity to create flowing, organic shapes from glass. Nearly 200 photos covering four decades feature her iconic slumped and cast glass art, as well as large outdoor sculptures, conceptual installations and commissioned pieces.

Personal stories shed light on integral figures, moments and developments in studio glass art throughout her career, giving rare insider insight to artists, students and collectors. A foreword by Jane Adlin, a Metropolitan Museum of Art curator and contributions from art crit ics Lucy R. Lippard and William Warmus delve further into Shaffer’s artistic philosophy and legacy — one rooted in dissolving the binaries of liquid/solid, female/ male, intangible/tangible, personal/political.

“Shaffer works mid-air, allowing for some naturally-occurring yet controlled shapes to form.”

In the Harwood Museum 2018 exhibit “Harnessing Light,” J. Matthew Thomas, then Harwood collections manager, told Tempo, “I selected these three New Mexican artists who, by different paths, converge on a common focus: light on surface … Working with glass and other media such as found objects, stone, clay and graphite … Mary Shaffer’s works, culled from her collection aptly named ‘Tool Wall,’ is a whimsical exploration of the idiosyncratic character of discarded tools juxtaposed with the clarity of liquid glass.”

Pivotal to removing glass art from the commercial and industrial arenas, Shaffer affords artists “freedom” — freedom to design oneof-a-kind works. In her Taos studio, she takes “lovingly-crafted, hand-forged tools — the epitome of American invention” — and recycles them in her work, Shaffer explains. “The challenge is to make the glass look as honest and straightforward as the original tool.”

Her work is featured in collections worldwide, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, the Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto, Japan, and museums in France, Switzerland, Germany, Canada, Bolivia and Denmark. Shaffer has lectured worldwide and taught at New York University and California College of the Arts.

Her honors include receiving a USA Fellow Grant and a 2010 artist award by United States Artists, three National Endowment for the Arts awards, and the Glaspreis from the Kassel Competi tion in Germany. Shaffer was among the first group of four to receive the Visionary Award from the Museum of Arts and Design in 1995.

As to the success of her decades-long career, Shaffer thinks her work “involves a strong element of play, of losing oneself in another world not unlike the one we knew as children.”

MADE, PROMISE

were

Polly RAYE

Central to the community

When Polly Raye moved to the Taos area in the mid-1970s, she had already amassed enough adventures and compelling stories to fill a book. But, a few years earlier, when she left the East Coast with her three young children, there was no inkling as to the road her life would follow or where she would wind up decades later.

For 40 years, Raye has been the beloved owner of the John Dunn Shops located in the center of the Taos historic district. Under her care, the tree-lined outdoor pedes trian shopping area became host to some of the town’s most allur ing boutiques, but is best known as the heart of the community — a place of conviviality and home of the iconic bonfire-lit festivities that welcome every winter holiday season.

Hers is a story with as many twists and turns as the road to the ski valley.

Raye grew up in a small town outside of Boston. When she was 14, she told her parents she wanted to work at a ranch in Colo rado, and their answer was, “If you can figure it out, then you can do it.” It was a principle she held close and carried forward.

Raye graduated from Smith College with a major in the philos

ophy of religion, but she also had an interest in finance. “My father and grandfather were in busi ness and taught me that there is more to value than money,” she recalled. “‘A deal that’s not good for everyone isn’t good for anyone,’ they both said.”

Raye spent two years in New York as a stockbroker before moving to Hartford, Conn., and working as a financial analyst in common stocks. “Out of all the analysts in the New York area, only three were women,” another hint of her pioneering spirit. Regard less, “I was on the train tracks to the conventional.”

When Raye got divorced, “The train derailed and I decided I wasn’t getting back on it. What mattered to me then was support ing my children (sons John and Will, and daughter Hannah); not being an absent mother; and engaging in meaningful work.” With a guide book to spiritualbased communes in hand, she loaded her family into a converted Chevrolet camper van and drove south to Mexico, visiting a number

of them in the U.S. along the way. During their travels along the then-sparsely-populated eastern Mexico coast, she “experienced a paradigm shift: I learned how little we really needed.” She home-schooled her children and accepted the assistance of local villagers, with whom she developed friendships, “even though we didn’t speak each other’s language.” They traveled through Belize and Guatemala, sometimes in the company of hitchhikers and always respect ing the lessons of the land, before returning to the U.S.

By 1976, Raye and her family were living at the Lama Founda tion north of Taos. When her chil dren enrolled in public schools, “they tested at two grades above their expected grade levels.” Raye, herself, both taught math and mastered the art of cook ing as meditation, a practice that would serve, several years later, as the foundation for The Apple Tree, a restaurant (now Lambert’s) espousing the Buddhist mission of “right livelihood.” Owned by Raye and operated by her community of like-minded companions, “We served love disguised as food,” she said, recalling their open-door policy

and starving-artist daily specials.

After four years of off-grid living, Raye’s move to the center of town set the stage for not only one of Taos’ nostalgic restaurants but for her eventual ownership and expansion of the John Dunn Shops. The development of the shopping area came in fits and spurts, she recounted, noting fire, finances, merchants clamoring for spots in the up-and-coming property, and the Town of Taos requesting a master plan that would create a pleasant walkway between Taos Plaza and munici pal offices on Civic Plaza Drive.

On all fronts, Raye delivered.

“I didn’t know anything about retail, but I wanted to landscape the overgrown grounds so people would find it more attrac tive to walk over to the Apple Tree from the plaza, where all the other businesses were in those days,” she said. “For the first several years, I lost money, but I was happy to landscape the grounds and encourage the merchants to grow their businesses.”

Like the greenery Raye planted, the John Dunn Shops continue to flourish. And her legacy in Taos will continue to be defined by her love of community and commit ment to its prosperity.

We would like to take this opportunity to thank the Taos Community Foundation for being our title sponsor for this year’s Tradiciones section.

Your generous support made this year’s Tradiciones section one of our biggest ever.

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Our communities are strong and resilient!

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Rio Grande ATP has been and continues to be there for all those seeking a new way of life.

Rio Grande ATP, Inc. has been helping your family members and friends find recovery for 44-years.

Our communities are strong and resilient!

There are many Paths to Recovery.

Rio Grande ATP has been and continues to be there for all those seeking a new way of life.

Rio Grande ATP, Inc. has been helping your family members and friends find recovery for 44-years.

Our communities are strong and resilient!

There are many Paths to Recovery.

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Rio Grande ATP has been and continues to be there for all those seeking a new way of life.

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Tradiciones

Honorar a Nuestros Héroes 2022

annual

Artes: The art of living in balance with our surroundings for more than 1,000 years.

Taos Mountain Casino is proud to honor those who both exemplify the best of the past and who help us weave it into the future. These people are our own links in what continues to be an unbroken circle of tradition at Taos Pueblo.