Despite concerns over artwork attributions, the Harwood Museum in Taos unveiled its show Unknown Santeros. Now a panel of experts is meticulously reshaping it.
“They were not artists, these early Spaniards, at least not in the accepted sense of the word,” wrote Mabel Dodge Luhan for The Arts magazine in 1925, in an essay about New Mexican devotional artists known as santeros. “From them we get these sensitive, suffering Santos: the curious offspring of a most cruelly-inclined race of men.”
Following the article’s publication there was a significant uproar in the village of Taos, New Mexico, where the New York-born arts patron had lived for eight years. Under public pressure, Dodge Luhan relinquished her collection of santos to the Harwood Foundation, the nascent predecessor of today’s Harwood Museum of Art.
Ninety-nine years later, a slice of Dodge Luhan’s collection has surfaced in a Harwood exhibition titled Unknown Santeros, and the local reception to the show’s interpretive language has been comparably explosive. Ahead of the exhibition’s opening in late February, a fierce online debate fostered by several Nuevomexicano artists about unattributed artworks in the display underscored the historically loaded implications of labeling nonwhite artists as “unknown.”
Now, as the Harwood plots a path forward, museum staff and community members reflect on a local lightning rod that echoes a global conversation about the institutional treatment of art objects from marginalized communities.
Despite the controversy, the Harwood didn’t update any attributions in Unknown Santeros ahead of its opening, although it did add a placard promising a new attributions process. It has since convened an advisory panel of Nuevomexicano scholars and made several changes to the show’s wall text and labels.
The artists who preemptively expressed concerns about the exhibition argue that the Harwood’s phased response aligns with legacies of racial discord in Northern New Mexico and the museum world. Meanwhile, museum leadership grapples with a small staff and limited budget as they attempt to answer complex questions about sacred objects that have been displaced from their original contexts for over a century.
A Hidden Collection
Operated by the University of New Mexico, the Harwood is the second-oldest museum in the state. The institution marked its centennial last year, celebrating with a robust array of programs and calling itself a “steward of Western art history.” Nicole Dial-Kay, the Harwood’s curator of exhibitions and collections since early 2020, was concurrently working to shed light on a little-seen segment of the museum’s permanent collection.
Dial-Kay noted that unattributed works in the museum’s collection of santos—statues or paintings descending from a Catholic tradition of depicting saints, angels, and other venerated figures—had rarely made their way out of museum storage. Her observation sparked the curatorial process for Unknown Santeros, a reconfiguration of the Harwood’s permanent Hispanic Traditions display that features thirty-three works from a collection of over 200 historical and contemporary santos.
“I pretty much always talk to [outside experts] about devotional art, because my background is contemporary art, which is one of the struggles of a small museum,” says Dial-Kay. “I’m one curator with over 100 years of artwork in many different cultural communities.”
She recounts a more-than-yearlong run-up to Unknown Santeros, which included discussions with three consulting experts, a small exhibitions committee, a community feedback panel, and the museum’s board. A public statement about the exhibition, released by the Harwood soon after the show’s opening, mirrors Dial-Kay’s early curatorial concept. It reads in part, “The Unknown Santeros exhibition pays tribute to those anonymous artists who were once named and known by their local communities.”
We don’t really own these objects, we’re just stewarding them.
Most of the artworks in Unknown Santeros were created between 1820 and 1920, wherein Mexico gained independence from Spain but subsequently lost some of its northern territory to the United States, a region that is now partly known as New Mexico.
During this time, white settlers instigated recurring land theft, vandalization, and lynchings in Nuevomexicano, Mexican, and Indigenous communities. A divide-and-rule tactic of United States imperialism manipulated and intimidated New Mexicans into suppressing their complex ancestries, which still reaps painful outcomes today. In their iconography and materiality, santos reflect the layered experiences of many New Mexicans—of anguish, defiance, celebration, and adulation—in this tumultuous period.
Throughout the curatorial process, Dial-Kay and the Harwood’s executive director, Juniper Leherissey, say they were starkly aware of the legacy of the Hispanic Traditions collection, from Dodge Luhan’s artwork transfer to errors that may have been introduced by the institution’s early-20th century administrator, E. Boyd, and in periodic database updates.
“I think every institution, I hope more than just museums, are grappling with some of the legacy of our history,” says Leherissey.
Dial-Kay adds, “We don’t really own these objects, we’re just stewarding them, these are the community’s pieces, and they are so much more… than a fine artwork.”
We Have Names for You
Brandon Maldonado is an Albuquerque-based painter with deep ancestral ties to Northern New Mexico. Santos are a major source of inspiration for his work, and he’s become an amateur scholar on the genre. Maldonado says he first heard about the development of Unknown Santeros from Dial-Kay on a visit to the Harwood in November 2022. Maldonado chafed when he heard the exhibition’s title.
“You could have done a whole show where you’re showing ‘these were unidentified in our archive, and thanks to the research of these people, we have names for you,’” he says. Maldonado says he offered to connect Dial-Kay with additional scholars and resources that could help the museum accomplish just that, particularly regarding works that could be from the taller, or communal studio, of the well-known Aragón family of santeros.
Following the initial conversation, Maldonado recounts interactions spanning more than a year, including emails, texts, and Instagram messages that he shared with us. He says that he spoke with Dial-Kay in person again in November 2023, but as the show’s opening approached this February, Maldonado still hadn’t heard anything about an attributions process. Then, two weeks before Unknown Santeros debuted, an unsuspecting museum worker reached out to Maldonado’s friend and artistic colleague Eric Romero.
Sara Kollig was new to Taos when she joined the Harwood as a part-time member of their installation team in February. Kollig’s first project was to help hang Unknown Santeros. Awestruck to be handling sacred artifacts as part of her first preparatory role, she took pictures of the installation and sent them to Romero, her artistic “mentor.”
A week later, when Maldonado was added to a group messaging thread with the photos, he was alarmed by which works were still labeled “unknown,” thus galvanizing Kollig’s efforts to share additional observations from inside the museum. “I wasn’t going to remain a bystander when I was in a position to help. I passed on what little information I had about the show, about which works we hung up,” she says.
We’re dealing with something that really mirrors that same kind of way of talking about the community, acting like you’re the white savior.
After digging into the Harwood’s public online collections database, a particular piece titled Holy Family leapt out to Maldonado. He says he promptly reached out to Dial-Kay with specific scholarly sources that might help attribute Holy Family to José Rafael Aragón, and suggested the museum contact a local scholar named Charlie Carrillo for assistance with labeling additional pieces. In an impassioned public Facebook post the day before the exhibition’s opening, he recounted Dial-Kay’s alleged response: “It’s too late to change the tags.”
That’s when Leherissey, the Harwood’s executive director, stepped into the online fray, commenting on Maldonado’s post that although Holy Family had been included on an “internal working checklist,” it was passed over for display to allow for an “attribution review.” This conflicts with Kollig’s memory of the initial installation process: she specifically recalls the team hanging Holy Family and marveling at its “craftsmanship, composition, and brightness on the wall.”
Leherissey reflects further on the situation, telling us, “The request was for us to basically change attributions without… the research that we’ve been doing. […] We welcome the input. We offered to engage, but we need to work with someone who can communicate, be respectful.”
For her part, Dial-Kay says she wasn’t made aware of community concerns about attributions until receiving “an email a week before opening,” and that she immediately initiated outreach for an advisory panel that could review the entire santo collection.
Beyond his frustrations about the significant discrepancies between his story and those of the museum’s leadership, Maldonado says the experience has left him wrestling with the broader implications of the institution’s alleged response—or lack thereof.
“What an odd coincidence—this collection was donated to them under these racist kind of circumstances,” he says. “And then after [ninety-nine] years, we’re dealing with something that really mirrors that same kind of way of talking about the community, acting like you’re the white savior. And then talking about the locals, as you know, they’re as naive as their paintings.”
The Oppressor and the Oppressed
Charlie Carrillo was one of the experts Dial-Kay contacted around the time that the attributions debate burst into public view. The Abiquiú-based artisan, author, and doctoral archaeologist says he received a message a week prior to the opening of Unknown Santeros. The museum sent him images of four of the sixteen unattributed santos slated for exhibition. “What was very obvious to me was the folks at Harwood had no clue what they were dealing with,” he says.
Carrillo first encountered santos in the Northern New Mexico village of Abiquiú in 1977, as a young archaeologist on a summer research project. He would later earn a PhD in archaeology with a focus on devotional artworks of this region—and marry a woman from Abiquiú. In his early observations of santos, with their highly stylized figures that felt vividly alive, he could already sense their communal purpose.
He says communities did not conceive of santos as inanimate objects: they were for benediction, blessing miracles, or seeking divine protection. “People weren’t having people over in their homes and saying, ‘oh, look at my art collection,’” Carrillo explains.
That’s part of the reason Carrillo expresses frustration with the term santero. The word was coined by white art collectors who thought it made sense to call someone who made santos a santero in the way that someone who makes shoes (zapatos) is a zapatero. In reality, Carrillo says the makers of historical santos called themselves what they were—artists, painters, sculptors, scholars, and teachers. Their ancestral identities were even more multifaceted.
It’s challenging when you start talking about decolonization in a Hispano community because the Spaniards were colonizers, too.
Leherissey says factoring colonial hierarchies into the curatorial framework of Unknown Santeros was tricky. “It’s challenging when you start talking about decolonization in a Hispano community because the Spaniards were colonizers, too,” she says.
Nuevomexicanos today often acknowledge both Spanish and Indigenous ancestry. “We’re the oppressor and the oppressed in New Mexico. From [the] Genízaro[s] to the conquest and even before that,” says Romero, who is an oil painter and Nuevomexicano with Genízaro roots. Those with Genízaro and Genízara roots descend from enslaved, detribalized Native communities.
Maldonado says, “By the time these santeros were making their works, they definitely weren’t Spaniards. They had never seen Spain. […] This is just another way of trying to get people to forget who [we] are. We are as much a part of the Mexican story as we are with the [Spanish] story.”
Different aspects of the wall labels in Unknown Santeros reflect shifts in cultural power dynamics over time. One santo, labeled a “gift” from Dodge Luhan in the accompanying wall text, was titled “Santo Nicholas.” Spanish speakers immediately recognize this as an improper use of the language—a “high school-level error,” according to Maldonado. The correct phrasing and spelling would be “San Nicólas Obispo.”
Leherissey says “Northern New Mexico Spanish is a very unique thing,” referencing handwritten titles with “incorrect Spanish” on the backs of works by historical Taos wood carver Patrociño Barela. “So, what do we do? Do we, I, say ‘Oh, that’s not right, that’s not correct Spanish’ and we change it, or even have a translator come in and do that? That’s actually losing a piece of the actual artwork.”
According to Carrillo, this is an “insult to the Spanish-speaking people of New Mexico.” He clarifies that white collectors with a limited grasp of the language often scribbled titles on the backs of artworks. Carrillo ultimately joined the Harwood’s new advisory panel, and after their first meeting in early April, the museum updated the label to “San Nicólas Obispo”—nearly seven weeks after the exhibition opened.
Art vs. Craft
Another subject of debate from the Unknown Santeros exhibition concerns a possible historical corollary in its interpretive framework: stark categorizations of “art” versus “craft.”
The original wall text for the exhibition stated, “Because these craftsmen did not consider themselves artists, they rarely signed their artworks.” The verbiage partially echoes Dodge Luhan’s controversial written assessment of santeros from 1925.
Following the first meeting of the advisory panel, it now reads, “It was common for devotional artists to work together in workshops, and they rarely signed the artworks they created.”
Albuquerque-based artist Romero, who originally shared Kollig’s images of the Unknown Santeros display with Maldonado, says he doesn’t identify as a santero but draws inspiration from the tradition for his figurative oil paintings.
“If you study these, the [line work] and the nuance of color, and how they got the materials, these were absolute artists,” he says. “These were before [the European] avant-garde, before their time, and they were doing something that was centralized to New Mexico, that represented, even if you weren’t Catholic or spiritual, they represented so much more than the credit that Juniper and Nicole gave them.”
As the public debate heated up, Romero says his knowledge of the Chicano Civil Rights movement (or El Movimiento) of the 1960s and ’70s inspired him to speak out. In early March, he appeared with Maldonado and another local artist, Vicente Telles, on KUNM’s Raíces program to discuss the attributions controversy and the Harwood’s history.
Dial-Kay tells us in an email that the museum has actively dismantled dichotomies of art and craft in its recent past, pointing to her curatorial projects Contemporary Art Taos/2020 and Santo Lowride, which showcased “a broad spectrum of artistic practices.” She identifies the museum’s recent conservation of Hispanic furniture from the Works Progress Administration era as an example of their efforts to elevate disciplines that have often been partitioned from fine art discourse.
[Museum] labels still concentrate on formalism, as opposed to the history of the painting or the pain that it engenders.
Emmanuel Ortega, an art historian who earned his PhD from the University of New Mexico and is now an assistant professor in Art of the Spanish Americas at the University of Illinois at Chicago, offers more context on how museums have helped cultivate the historical binary between artists and craftspeople.
Ortega has studied and curated ex-votos, sculptural and painted votive offerings that are a related but distinct form to santos. He says, “[Ex-votos] are in this murky, liminal stance [where] they have not been anchored to a specific category where art history can further enhance their ideas of the canon, [so] they became curios—things that you can possess, things that you can toss, things that you can forget about, things that you can put in your bathroom.”
He adds, “I’m always looking at the historical context. Where was it created, for what purpose? And try[ing] to avoid the hierarchies of art to intervene.”
New Mexico State University in Las Cruces recently invited Ortega to co-curate the traveling exhibition Contemporary Ex-Votos: Devotion Beyond Medium, which pairs historical retablos with works by contemporary Latinx artists. Ortega explains that the exhibition’s curatorial team wanted to create a “methodological approach” that other curators could use for “othered” groups of religious artworks.
“[Museum] labels still concentrate on formalism, as opposed to the history of the painting or the pain that it engenders,” he says. “So when we think of folk art without understanding, well, what do we mean by ‘folk’ […] that’s something that we have naturalized, and there’s a violence there.”
Homework
In April and June, the Harwood convened its new advisory panel to examine every historical santo in the Hispanic Traditions collection, a project that required intricate preparations. Leherissey planned and budgeted for the meetings, drawing from the museum’s small pool of unrestricted funds to cover the panel’s travel costs and stipends. Dial-Kay directed the museum’s diminutive staff as they lined up nearly one hundred artworks for examination in the Harwood’s auditorium.
Leherissey says, “Honestly, our entire collection has been neglected, and in a lot of places,” she says. “So this is important research. I do wish that we had [funding] to support it, because then we could do that, plus maybe conservation.”
She adds, “There are many collections in museums that have the same issue and most museums aren’t doing anything about it.”
Drawing on her upbringing near Peñasco in Taos County, Leherissey acknowledges her own white privilege and the marginalization of Hispanic communities over time. In modern-day New Mexico, Latinx, Chicanx, and Nuevomexicano communities still actively resist displacement and encroachment upon historical land grant territories throughout Taos County and the state.
Leherissey tells us, “I knew also that by stepping into the space of opening this conversation that we then could be attacked. And it would be the place where people who have years and years of generational disenfranchisement and lack of recognition… want a voice, too. There is a long history of the Harwood that has embodied a lot of the power dynamics and racisms of the past.”
The Hispanic Traditions advisory panel comprises five local scholars: Robin Farwell Gavin, Alicia Romero, Gustavo Victor Goler, Felipe R. Mirabal, and Carrillo. Dial-Kay recounts their intense commitment to the project, which spanned two ten-hour meetings and discussions about granular compositional elements such as the line work of eyebrows and jawlines.
Even amongst the experts… there’s heated debate. Some objects took hours for them to come to a decision.
“We have every publication out on the table, and there’s not a single publication that represents the knowledge that these people have,” says Dial-Kay. “We would flip through book after book after book and say, ‘That’s wrong. That’s wrong. Here’s why.’ Even amongst the experts, I mean, there’s heated debate. Some objects took hours for them to come to a decision on who a possible attribution could be, who a saint could be.”
Following the second meeting of the panel, Leherissey and Dial-Kay told us that two artworks now have updated artist attributions, and another is labeled with a “possible attribution.” Dial-Kay says, “The actual artist, maker attributions were not commonly changed. But what was changed was the identification of the saints [and] the different terminologies we use.” She says the next phases of the process involve entering the new information into the database, eventually presenting it to the community, and, if they can secure further funding, conservation work and display updates.
However, during visits to the Harwood between March 3 and May 2, we observed that the museum updated the attributions of at least seven works on display in Unknown Santeros. One is now attributed to José Aragón, and another to José Rafael Aragón—the artists Maldonado originally contacted the Harwood about.
Five months after the opening of Unknown Santeros, parties from all sides of the initial debate agree that the Harwood’s struggles exemplify a curatorial challenge for museums everywhere. Carrillo believes the Harwood learned an important lesson: perform due diligence before a show opens, not after the fact. “[The Harwood] didn’t do [their] homework,” he says. “This is just the tip of the iceberg. Not for the Harwood anymore, but for all museums to take note and to learn a lesson from this.”
Carrillo declares that regardless of the turmoil surrounding Unknown Santeros, the experience has been a net positive. “There’s an old saying in Spanish. It says, ‘No hay mal que por bien no venga.’ There’s no bad from which good doesn’t come.”
Editor’s note:
In this article, two terms are used to describe certain Hispanic residents of New Mexico: Nuevomexicano and Hispano. Another identifier is Neomexicano. These interchangeable terms reference people whose ancestors resided in the historical region of Santa Fe de Nuevo México, the land now known as New Mexico, along with parts of Arizona, Colorado, Nevada, Texas, and Utah. They are broad terms, encompassing descendants of Oasisamerica Indigenous groups, Mexicans who arrived before the Mexican-American war, and Spanish colonists.
Update 7/19/24: This article has been updated to include a summary of curator Nicole Dial-Kay’s written statement about the Harwood Museum of Art’s efforts to address historical hierarchies between art and craft. She also writes, “Harwood Museum of Art strives to honor and present a rich tapestry of artistic traditions that reflect our diverse cultural heritage.” She specifically points out that her inaugural exhibition, Contemporary Art Taos/2020, “prominently featured works in felt, quilting, graffiti, and jewelry. This marked a significant departure from the previous Contemporary Art Taos survey, which was more focused on Western art traditions.”