Painter Eva Mirabal bequeathed a sealed wooden box to her son Jonathan Warm Day Coming. Its contents shaped his artistic trajectory.
With a name to remember, Jonathan Warm Day Coming is an influential artist from Taos Pueblo whose generational legacy has inspired him to document his family and Pueblo life through his work. This is the final week of Taos Pueblo Painted Stories, his show at the Fechin Studio at Taos Art Museum, which is on view through March 2. Warm Day Coming’s visual storytelling highlights his cultural identity at Taos Pueblo, but few know the full story of a simple wooden box that would carry him through tumultuous times—and profoundly inform his artistic career.
“I was born on a particularly cold winter’s day, and given my name during the traditional naming ceremony, and though I was never told the reason, I surmise it came from a longing for spring,” Warm Day Coming says.
His earliest memories were of his mother Eva Mirabal (Eah-Ha-Wa, Fast Growing Corn, 1920-1968) with a paintbrush in her hand working quietly in one corner of their summer home as he and his brother played nearby. “I believe these were the happiest hours of [my mother’s] life,” Warm Day Coming says. During winter, or “quiet time” at the Pueblo, he rarely saw his father, who was often stationed elsewhere for his military career and visited mostly in the summer.
From their summer home north of the village, they ranched and farmed in the foothills of the sacred mountain known as Mó-ha-loh, Má-ha-lu, or Taos Mountain. Most of their summer cooking was outdoors in a traditional adobe horno. Warm Day Coming fondly recalls the pigeon stew with pumpkin flowers his grandmother cooked over the fire in a micaceous pot.
He says, “There was an apple orchard, wild chokecherries, and plum trees all around the house, and a salt lick was positioned an arrow’s shot from the front door. The river and smaller streams were populated by cutthroat trout, which my grandmother cooked with fresh wild mint that grew along the river flowing from Blue Lake.” His early years were a waking dream lit by the summer sun.
He and his brother knew nothing about the “unusual course” of their mother’s early life, or the “breadth and depth of her artistic talent,” until after her steep decline and early death. After Mirabal’s sudden passing, they made a momentous discovery.
“I found a large wooden box that she had nailed shut,” Warm Day Coming says. “I could not bring myself to open it for many months out of respect for her privacy. This was a time of dark clouds gathering as me and my brother struggled to carry on. When the pain of missing her became too great, I gathered my courage and carefully pried the box open.”
It was only then that he realized the extent of Mirabal’s talent and the advancements she had made for Native women. He pored over one photo after another, some showing Mirabal in uniform as a member of the Women’s Army Corps during World War II. There were articles about her as one of the first Native American women, and the only full-time artist, to serve in the WAC.
By prying open that box, I had received a generational legacy that would propel me forward.
Under the photos, Warm Day Coming found his mother’s gouache paintings and carefully lifted them out, amazed at the range of her skills. During her tutelage by Dorothy Dunn at the Santa Fe Indian School, Mirabal learned the “flat painting” technique that would eventually become a genre exclusive to Native American artists. Warm Day Coming would later adapt this aesthetic in his own work. These paintings became the body of work for which she would be remembered, along with her atypical life beyond Pueblo walls.
“By prying open that box, I had received a generational legacy that would propel me forward, and the time of darkening skies would slowly pass as I found healing and new meaning in life,” says Warm Day Coming. His mother had encouraged his early interest in woodcarving and drawing, and after graduating from Taos High School, he attended Diné College in Arizona and then the University of New Mexico. At UNM, he developed the style—influenced by three generations of his family—that would launch his artwork into the public sphere.
Warm Day Coming’s grandfathers were both models for paintings by members of the Taos Society of Artists, including Eanger Irving Couse and Nicolai Fechin. Warm Day Coming adds, “My grandfather and great uncle Miguel helped Fechin build his house, laying its adobe bricks and mixing plaster composed of white earth and skim milk, which is now the Taos Art Museum.”
Warm Day Coming has also frequently posed for other painters. He is immortalized by Giovanna Paponetti (who titled her portrait of Warm Day Coming Taos Mountain), Sherrie McGraw, and David A. Leffel. Warm Day Coming’s sittings with Leffel are part of the documentary film David A. Leffel: An American Master. In this way, Warm Day Coming continues to represent not only his own remarkable family history, but an entire Native American population who have lived for over 1,000 years at Taos Pueblo, one of the longest continually occupied communities in North America.
Today, Warm Day Coming lives and paints in the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo mountains, in the same house his grandparents built. At the recent opening to celebrate Taos Pueblo Painted Stories at the Taos Art Museum, Jonathan was the one in the spotlight, a full-circle moment in Nicolai Fechin’s studio.
Warm Day Coming had envisioned writing a book about his mother from the time he opened the box.
The exhibition also features Warm Day Coming’s personal interpretation of ledger art. The museum’s didactics explain, “Ledger art is a testament to how Native communities navigated challenging circumstances while maintaining their cultural identities.” Warm Day Coming’s ledger art speaks to the complexity of cultural identity and lived experience as it juxtaposes the beauty of lives lived according to nature and the respect for all living things with the “repurposed” ledger pages.
Warm Day Coming’s children’s book, also titled Taos Pueblo Painted Stories, will preserve history and inform generations, both within and beyond Taos Pueblo’s walls. His activism and leadership within the tribe to improve education and foster transparency between the people and tribal leaders resonates with his mission.
He also co-authored Eva Mirabal: Three Generations of Tradition and Modernity at Taos Pueblo with Lois P. Rudnick, a project he had envisioned from the time he opened the box that sealed Mirabal’s place in the history of Native American art. Now he often depicts his own daughters, who he has raised as a single father, in his work.
“[I want to ensure] their inclusion in [the] association, participation, and creation of the ongoing cultural legacy of Taos Pueblo from my own lived experience,” Warm Day Coming says. “It is because of them that I was able to carry on and have hope for the future.”
