Funding for COLORES was provided in part by: Frederick Hammersley Fund, New Mexico PBS Great Southwestern Arts & Education Endowment Fund, and the Nellita E. Walker Fund for KNME-TV at the Albuquerque Community Foundation... ...New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs, and by the National Endowment for the Arts... and Viewers Like You.

THE NEW MEXICO MUSEUM OF ART'S EXHIBIT "OUT WEST" REVEALS THE UNTOLD STORIES OF GAY AND LESBIAN ARTISTS WHO SHAPED THE SOUTHWEST'S ARTISTIC LEGACY THROUGHOUT THE 20TH CENTURY.

OUT WEST >>Faith Perez: What initially inspired the Out West exhibit at the New Mexico Museum of Art?

>>Christian Waguespack: When I first showed up at the museum, I was working on an exhibition about Cady Wells who features prominently in Out West, and as somebody who I work on a lot, and one of the things that really struck me is that for a man who moved out to New Mexico and was living here, you know, around the 1930s, he got to live his life as an out gay man and wasn't in the closet and credited a lot of his ability to do that with the kind of environment that the West and Santa Fe in particular offered for out queer folks during that time.

And since I started that project and worked with that narrative moving forward over the years, every time I run across an artist where that's part of their life story, I kind of stored it away in the back of my head and thought, oh, there's another really interesting story of somebody who was able to be out because of the community that was thriving in Santa Fe during that time.

And at a certain point it just kind reached a critical mass for me and I thought, you know, I really need to do something with bringing this knowledge together.

It kind of surprised me that nobody had done it yet, and I wanted to put together that exhibition to show this community of people and this group of people altogether from that perspective.

So that's how the exhibition came together.

It just kind of seemed like such an obvious story that needed to be told that the time had come to do it.

[MUSIC] >>Faith Perez: Was there a particular story or artist that really resonated with you?

>>Christian Waguespack: Yeah, I mean, all of them come to resonate with you after a while, but for me, you know, Cady Wells again was one of those really pivotal figures whose-- you know, his work, I'm very excited about.

His life story I found incredibly compelling and his personal story was something that I found very interesting and something that resonated with me.

And I was thinking about one of the things that I grapple with as a curator who works primarily with historic artwork is how do we make those stories interesting and compelling and relatable to people today?

So how do you put contemporary art or historic art in a contemporary context?

And so I thought about my relationship with him in the ways that I could relate to his story and the feelings that I felt as an out gay person coming to New Mexico to make a life for themselves, and seeing those parallel tracks still very relative, seeing a certain kind of kinship and fellowship there with somebody who lived, you know, almost a hundred years ago.

And I felt like, well, I'm probably not the only one who's going to feel that way.

So that story was incredibly compelling.

But when you dive into the lives of all of these people, they're all so interesting and so unique and blaze their own paths, but the thing that stuck out for me the most and that I appreciated the most was the bravery of doing that during this time.

It's still a struggle for many people who are gay or lesbian or trans to build a life for themself, and there's still that fear today.

So if you can imagine what that was like over a century ago, their bravery in doing that I think is incredibly compelling.

>>Faith Perez: And I felt like Cady Well's story was really compelling too.

Can you tell me a little bit about his personal life and how he ended up in New Mexico or in the Southwest?

>>Christian Waguespack: Sure.

So Cady Wells grew up in something of an influential family back east.

They ran an optical company.

They were pretty well off.

They were society people, and he had that interesting place within the family of being the most rambunctious and the most troublesome.

But he was also regularly described by people who knew the family as the family favorite.

And so, there was this clash between his charm getting him certain places and really endearing him to the people around him.

But his unwillingness to fit a certain mold, he was continually kicked out of boarding schools and really just kind of did his own thing.

And that led his dad to make the decision that he needed to send him out west to a dude ranch to man him up, right?

So as a young man, he was interested in artwork, he was interested in music, he was interested in things that people during that time and in that place considered a little bit more effeminate than what a young boy and a family of certain social standings should be doing.

So he sent them out to this all boy dude ranch outside of Tucson, the Evans Ranch School.

And it seems to me one of the most completely misguided things that you can do because it absolutely backfired.

Cady loved being there, he loved being in this environment with other young men out in the wild, but he also really loved the new landscape, literally, the physical landscape that he was experiencing.

And that's when he fell in love with the West.

[MUSIC] And as is the story for many people who kind of land here, he thought he was just passing through, ended up staying the rest of his life.

He ran into an interesting social circle in Taos.

Decided that he would stay for a little bit and then just never left.

And while he was here, he made a lot of close friendships with the artists who were working here.

Andrew Dasberg, for instance, Georgia O'Keefe was one of his best friends.

She referred to him on numerous occasions as the second best artist painting in the Southwest.

And you can imagine who she thought the number one was.

So he became part of the scene.

With his family money too, he also did a lot for communities here in New Mexico.

So it's very difficult for me to imagine what the 20th century art scene in New Mexico would've been without Cady Wells.

Many of his middle of his career pieces that he would do focused on his collection of Hispanic religious artwork.

But what I find really interesting about that series is where other artists were, like Russell Cheney, even Georgia O'Keefe, were using Santos and Bultos, Marsden Hartley too.

Were using Santos and Bultos as material for still lifes.

And you can kind of tell that they're these wooden figures that they're just putting in a scene and painting as a still life.

Wells was able to imbue them with a sense of spirit, and he would zoom in on faces.

He would give them this emotional weight, and I think they really become portraits, right?

They transcend just a representation or a copy of the object that he's working from and become something more engaging and something a little bit more creative.

You know, for all the good work that he did over his life, he was a very troubled individual.

He struggled with depression, he struggled with fitting in.

He served in World War II, and when he came back, he suffered from what was called "shell shock" back then, but now we know is post- traumatic stress disorder, he wasn't able to paint for a long time.

So, he used a lot of his artwork to work through his depression and his anxiety.

You can see that in the work, they're usually very dark, usually very heavy.

I think one of the things that make them particularly interesting in the sense is they're not necessarily the kind of thing you might want to hang in your home, but they're great for a museum to tell the story of the artist and to tell the story of New Mexican art history.

>>Faith Perez: That kind of brings me to Marsden Hartley.

So who was Marsden Hartley and why did he come to New Mexico?

>>Christian Waguespack: So Hartley is another, I think, a great kind of counterbalance to Cady Wells.

So Wells came here, built a life for himself and stayed.

Hartley was notoriously paraeripatetic, and he was traveling all over the place and it was very difficult for him to settle in one place.

[MUSIC] So, he was only here for about 18 months in the early part of the 20th century.

He was one of the first people in the group of artists who were in Out West to come to New Mexico.

So New Mexico shouldn't take it personally that he didn't stay here very long cause he didn't stay anywhere very long, but he came to New Mexico on the heels of a trip to Berlin.

And during that time, the very early part of the 20th century, Berlin was considered to be one of the places for gay people to go and be able to live a more open life.

At that time, there were almost 40 operating gay bars in Berlin before the wars.

And he went there.

He speaks about it being one of the first times that he ever was able to really just be himself.

And he fell in love with an officer.

And unfortunately, that man was killed and Hartley made a series of paintings commemorating his lover, and then history became what we know history to become, and he had to leave Berlin and come back to the United States.

And so he created two main types of paintings here.

Some were still lifes, the other were landscapes.

And we've got an example of each in the show, the still life is titled "El Santo", and he's including these objects that he thought of as kind of quintessential to this place.

So there's a Hispanic retablo, there's an indigenous black pot, and there's a Mexican blanket.

But what's interesting to me about this is scholars so often read it from the point of view of he's discovering the West, which is certainly true, through these artifacts that are very specific to here, right?

Kind of things that you can only find in New Mexico.

But if you look at them from the point of view of a gay man, the retablo that he chose is not St. Francis, which it could very easily have been, or San Pascual, who we love here.

It's this particular depiction of Christ on the way to being crucified.

It's called "Jesus Nazarano", and it's the patron image for the Penitente Brotherhood.

And it's interesting to see that Cady Wells, Russell, Cheney, Marsden Hartley, all of these gay men in the early part of the 20th century, really directed a lot of attention to this group and found a kinship to this group that none of them had any roots with, which I found very interesting.

>>Faith Perez: His painting a portrait of a German officer.

I thought that one was really poignant and, I wanted to know too, how did his painting, that portrait, as well as his experience in Berlin, influence his artwork here in New Mexico?

>>Christian Waguespack: That's a really great question.

>>Faith Perez: Yeah.

>>Christian Waguespack: So one of the interesting things about his painting of a German officer, which is this symbolic portrait of the man that he fell in love with who was killed.

If you look at it and you don't know Hartley's story and you don't know about this relationship, it just looks like this abstract composition of things that are vaguely related to the military.

But if you know, then you can start symbolically piecing--taking the painting apart and saying, oh, that number, that was his regimen number.

That spur, he was cavalry that particular kind of badge or emblem related to him.

So, Hartley tended to do these paintings that required some type of symbolic and insider knowledge to fully understand.

They were coded.

They were secret, right?

And even during this time with Berlin being a place where a lot of gay people went and felt a certain level of comfort, you couldn't just be completely out.

So you had to find these kind of codes, and this was something that was just blanket part of gay culture.

So with Hartley, you got to keep that in mind when you're unpacking these paintings.

And I should say that the landscapes he did when he went back to Berlin later in his life, and he recalled New Mexico, so they weren't actually made here, but when he's back in Berlin, back in the place where he had that powerful relationship, he's thinking back to New Mexico and he's creating these landscapes that are coded about those two people.

And so in his landscapes, one of the things that you'll usually see is a desert landscape.

Okay, fine, New Mexico, we get that.

But in the foreground, there'll be two trees and there'll be some type of natural force blocking them or keeping 'em apart.

So it'll either be like a canyon, or a ravine, or an arroyo, or a river, and one of the trees is knocked over, but not completely uprooted.

And when you start symbolically reading it, the tree that's felled, but not all the way dead, is the self-portrait of Hartley.

And he'll usually drive this home by doing his signature like right underneath that particular tree.

The chasm is time, depth, distance, and death.

And the other tree that's completely gone, that was Carl, that was the officer that was lost.

So I think it's so interesting that when he's back in this place where he had this very powerful emotional experience and romance, long down the road in time, he's thinking back to New Mexico and using this place and this landscape to embody those secret messages.

>>Faith Perez: Kind of work through the trauma too, I'm sure.

>>Christian Waguespack: Work through the trauma.

Absolutely.

>>Faith Perez: Yeah.

>>Christian Waguespack: And I think his time here too, you know, was right after that.

So he was using this place to work through the trauma.

A lot of these artists, one of the things that comes up again and again and again is they land here after trauma.

They come here to heal and to create a new, hopefully better version of themselves.

>>Faith Perez:And then, you know, that brings me to Russell Cheney.

>>Christian Waguespack: Yeah, so Russell Cheney is another one who didn't stay here very long.

He's another East Coast artist, and he's best known for his East Coast post- impressionist paintings that are absolutely beautiful but, like so many artists during the early part of the 20th century, he developed tuberculosis.

And during that time, the idea was you go somewhere high and dry.

So all these folks from the east coast were going to places like New Mexico and Southern Colorado to get up into the clean air and hopefully help with their breathing.

And that was the case for him.

And like so many people, he immediately clung on to Hispanic religious imagery.

But he came down here and he made this painting that we have in the exhibition that's called "Taos or Penitente."

He gave it two titles that happens sometimes.

And what you're seeing is the front of Ranchos de Taos Church, which is interesting because you usually see it from the back.

Everybody like to paint the back of that church, and then the plaza that's in front of it.

And there's a bulto of St. Francis, and unlike Cady's pieces, he's not imbuing it with this extra kind of emotional weight.

You look at it and you see that as a painting of a sculpture.

And then on the other side is this cross casting a shadow down on the rest of the composition, and that's a Penitente cross.

So again, you have three gay artists working in Northern New Mexico who make work about this group that they don't have any personal relationship with.

It's imagined.

But you can kind of get a sense for why if you were a gay man in the early part of the 20th century, you would be drawn to this hermetic group.

It's all men.

It's known for being relatively secret, and a lot of people tended to approach their group with ungenerous sense of interpretation.

They would sensationalize them.

So I think that that feeling of persecution was something that related to all of these gay men coming here.

They saw this group.

It was an all male group.

So there was that sense of brotherhood that you find in gay communities up to this day, that sense of unnecessary secrecy for your own safety, and then that sense of kind of a sensational pushback by people who don't fully understand who you are.

And so persecution makes a lot of sense to me why these folks would've been interested in looking at this group and finding a relationship to them.

>>Faith Perez: How does Agnes Sims work and life enrich the story of the Out West exhibit?

>>Christian Waguespack: Yeah, so Agnes Sims and many of the lesbians, women in the show, very different story.

We don't see any penitentes showing up in their work.

[MUSIC] She was a really fantastic character.

So she moved out here from Pennsylvania.

Again, that same story of, you know, not really able to live out and open in the way that she wanted to there.

Came to Santa Fe, and it's again, that story of she was coming on vacation.

She thought she was going to be here for two weeks.

She bought a house and stayed for the rest of her life because she was here and felt like, oh, I can be myself.

I can be comfortable.

She made a really broad range of material.

What I think is interesting is her background as a contractor, this professional field that especially during that time was very male forward, right?

You didn't see a lot of women in the field of contractor.

She brought that media into the work that she was doing.

So you see her working in unconventional materials like concrete, cement, industrial paints, making artwork in ways that kind of reflect that architecture and that building, which is something that this attention to gender and media became very important in the 1960s and later in contemporary art where people were starting to push back about these gendered art media.

The other thing that she did was her contribution as an academic.

She was one of the first people to get really seriously interested in the petroglyphs out by Gallisteo.

And she did a whole series of recording those petroglyphs, some don't exist anymore, and we only have her recordings as that history.

And she wrote articles about them and she lectured about them.

And she had a role, much like the way that Cady Wells really put a lot of his attention and resources behind elevating Spanish colonial art from craft to art.

She did the same with petroglyphs.

She said, these are a really important part of this region's cultural history, and they need to be taken seriously.

So we have a lot of that early information and early kind of attention thanks to her.

And that just came out of a general interest.

It's such a her story.

She and a friend decided to go on a hike one day, she saw these things, the next thing you know, she's literally written a book on them.

So she was just this firecracker.

>>Faith Perez: So why was New Mexico such a social and cultural haven for LGBTQ plus community members, especially those that are in the Out West exhibit?

>>Christian Waguespack: That's a really good question.

So why?

You know, why here, why then?

>>Faith Perez: Yeah.

>>Christian Waguespack: The answer that I've come to personally is during this time, New Mexico was a haven for creatives and for artists, and essentially just for people who wanted to leave the establishment of the east and bigger cities and move somewhere where that establishment didn't really exist, where they were given the freedom to kind of be who they wanted to be and do what they wanted to do without social forces pushing them in other directions.

And I think that's part of the reason why Santa Fe, New Mexico in particular, became such an artistic hub.

There were these people who could just come here and do their thing.

You know, we all know the story of Georgia O'Keefe, coming out to New Mexico and building that so distinctive life for herself on her own terms.

And she's well known for that, but she's not unique in that sense.

So many artists, known and unknown, were able to do the same thing.

And so I think you had that ready-made sense of Santa Fe as a place for people who didn't quite fit.

And then many of these gay and lesbian artists came in part for that artistic freedom, right?

They were, I think, first and foremost in their mind artists, and they wanted to pursue their own artistic career and their own artistic vision.

And then they found that within that community, there was also this built-in freedom and acceptance for them to be who they wanted to be on other levels of their life.

And so that micro-community became kind of built into this larger community of allowing a little bit more tolerance for misfits.

[MUSIC] >>Faith Perez: So how do you hope this exhibit will impact the LGBTQ plus community in the Southwest and the broader public's understanding of that history?

>>Christian Waguespack: So, one of my hopes is that this exhibition serves as just a small and inspiring history lesson as a place where people could come and be their true selves, live individually, live fruitfully.

That's been part of who we are for over a century.

And I think it's important that we remember that moving forward and never lose that aspect of who we are, as a place.

So that's one thing that I want to do with that.

And then the other is just to maybe reintroduce many of these characters to people and hope that they'll find some inspiration in these older models.

And then the third thing is to kind of show the different ways that people were able to live back during this time and see how we can continue to carry that through till today.

You know, one of the interesting things about this exhibition for me is if you go to it and you took the title down, you would not necessarily know that it's an exhibition about gay and lesbian artists.

You would think, I'm in a survey of New Mexican art history.

And I like that because I hope that what it would do was have people walk away with a sense of, New Mexican and Southwestern art history wouldn't be what we understand it to be today without these people.

That wasn't a subgroup that we're now paying attention to.

They were deeply embedded in the grain and social fabric of arts and cultures in New Mexico for over a century, always have been, always will be.

You can't have art and culture in New Mexico without these people.

And then the other thing is to show the different kinds of expressions that these people brought to their own--their own lives.

They all lived differently.

The idea of a gay or queer community wasn't the same back then as it was now, and so many of these people really had to forge their own way.

So to honor that bravery for me is important.

So to remember that history here, right?

And that these artists who were coming in in the early part of the 20th century are just another step in a path that's been here time in memoriam, for me, is very important.

So that's what I hope people will take away.

The award-winning arts and culture series ¡COLORES!

is now available on the PBS App, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and at NMPBS.org.

From classic episodes to brand new shows, ¡COLORES!

Watch now on your favorite NMPBS platforms.

Funding for COLORES was provided in part by: Frederick Hammersley Fund, New Mexico PBS Great Southwestern Arts & Education Endowment Fund, and the Nellita E. Walker Fund for KNME-TV at the Albuquerque Community Foundation... ...New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs, and by the National Endowment for the Arts... and Viewers Like You.