A Fall Exhibition at Couse-Sharp Historic Site

“The TSA deeply influenced perceptions of the Southwest, Hispanic Americans, and Native Americans throughout the nation,” said Davison Koenig, executive director and curator. “Their original paintings were exhibited and collected extensively at the time, and their prints and drawings were disseminated even more widely through magazine illustrations, advertising, and Santa Fe Railway calendars, to name just a few examples. In this way, the TSA members’ interpretations of their neighbors, landscapes, and architecture became part and parcel of how other Americans saw our region.”

The museum will hold an opening celebration for the exhibition, on view June 23–October 17, on July 10 and plans a panel discussion, Taos Society of Artists: In Pursuit of a National Identity. The discussion invites attendees to contemplate the conflicts of identity, representation, and perception inherent in the cultural moment. The panel of art historians and artists includes representatives from multiple regional perspectives, such as Alicia M. Romero, PhD, curator of history at the Albuquerque Museum; Ilona Spruce, CSHS deputy director and chair of the Taos Pueblo Foundation; and Michael Grauer, consultant, guest curator, and scholarly researcher, writer, and presenter.

The 30-plus paintings in this exhibition tell a range of stories about the various communities that existed in Taos and environs in the early twentieth century: Hispano laborers plastering homes and tending sheep; Indigenous people drying chiles at Taos  Pueblo, hunting rabbits and fishing; Anglo-American artists and settlers; portraits of individuals and families. Locations range from small-town street scenes and a rural Catholic chapel to tipis on the Great Plains, and from the lush fields of the lower Rio Hondo to the open, horizon of Taos valley ringed by snowcapped peaks. 

“The paintings depicted a variety of American individuals, American landscapes, American homes and families, American workers, and American architecture that were previously unfamiliar to the majority of people living in the United States,” Koenig noted. “Whether or not the TSA succeeded in forging an ‘authentically’ American art, the images created by its members did successfully expand the definition of what it meant to be American.”