I have set out many times in search of beautiful landscapes, original inhabitants who walked that land, their cultural pursuits, the art they created, houses they lived in, their customs, costumes, almost everything in which they revealed themselves.
Curating my thoughts became a struggle at the Nedra Matteucci Galleries, situated at Paseo de Peralta, Sante Fe. From the moment I stepped into the quaint airport at Albuquerque, the largest city in New Mexico, US, I fell in love with its old-world charm. After spending a night in Albuquerque’s Old Town, I travelled to Santa Fe the next day.
To keep it easy on the pocket, I generally choose places of stay, which are a little out of the way. In Santa Fe, I chose a house tucked away in the middle of nowhere, which had the most artistic compound wall, and an even more fascinating indoors. I was warned on the first day not to let the two pet turtles walk out of the main gate. Every morning, I travelled to downtown Santa Fe. Founded in 1610 as a Spanish colony, it is considered to be the oldest state capital in the US. The sand-coloured Pueblo-style architecture all over the city, without skyscrapers, makes for a lasting memory. Apart from its unique architecture, Santa Fe has 300 and more art galleries, which attract artists from all over the world, making it the mecca of contemporary art.
Nedra Matteucci is a family-owned gallery, which over the years has collected the most impressive paintings and sculptures of native American art as well as modern Western art. The sculpture garden adjoining the gallery is sprawling. Michael Naranjo’s Eagle Man, the Girl with Flying Doves, the Mermaid Girl are creations in bronze which depict the bold simplicity flowing at a languid pace in each of his textured sculptures, which he urges viewers to sense with their fingers.
Naranjo, a Tewa Indian, came to Pueblo as a 23-year-old after he lost his sight and was handicapped in the Vietnam war. He began his sculpting career at a hospital bed when recuperating in Japan. The Eagle Man is an astounding sculpture of an eagle dancer with tail feathers, wings and an armour-shaped head. It is a creation of Naranjo’s dream of soaring beyond the darkness of human misery.
Intriguing tribe
Elias Rivera, another artist who fascinated me at the gallery, moved from New York to Santa Fe in 1982. A widely acclaimed artist, his colourful paintings of the daily lives of the Tarahumara tribe are riveting. This native American group from Chihuahua, Mexico, are tireless runners, justifying their tribe’s name, which means ‘those who walk well’. Rivera’s Tarahumara Women, is an intense story on canvas. Howard Cook’s pastel Deer Dancer is a glorious tribute to the dying rituals of forgotten tribes, while Kenneth Adam’s Jim Mirabal and David Leffel’s Ancient Chinese Cooking Pot with Birdfeeder speak of a long-lost intriguing time.
After 10 days in Santa Fe, I travelled to Taos, bounded by high mountains. Taos the site of the old multi-storied adobe structure which has been the house of the Taos Pueblo people for over 1,000 years, is now a UNESCO world heritage site. Taos is also home to many interesting galleries, one of which is the Museum of International Folk Art, a Pueblo-style mud museum that has the highest collection of international folk artefacts in the world. Apart from textiles, there were costumes, amulets, dolls, miniature cities, masks and quilts from across the globe, some with traditional needlework from China’s Yunnan province. Sha Sha, the artist behind these works, is carrying forward the legacy of her grandmother.
Standing face-to-face with G Richier’s The Big Grasshopper (1946), in the sculpture garden at the Centre of Modern Art, Calouste Gulbenkian museum in Lisbon, I found a striking semblance in thought, with a sculpture I had marvelled at earlier, in a Kolkata gallery, by a promising sculptor from a nondescript village in Bengal. This connectedness of thought is what makes journeying for art worth the while.
