ABSTRACT
Indigenous peoples who lived and worked in and around New Mexico’s modern little art colonies at Taos and Santa Fe were not only objects of Anglo-European modernist fascination but proficient modernist actors who circulated dynamically within the modern world-system. This essay focuses on the lives of Maria Martínez (San Ildefonso Pueblo), Lynn Riggs (Cherokee), and Tony Luján (Taos Pueblo) in order to better understand the stakes of their engagement with modernism both individually and collectively. These three moderns worked and lived between the implementation of the General Allotment Act of 1887 and the Indian New Deal of 1934: turbulent years in US Native American history that coincided with the Anglo-European-dominated “high modernism” of Eliot, Joyce, Pound, et al but also, locally, with the long and bumpy transition to New Mexican statehood in 1912. Martínez, Luján, and Riggs manipulated and modernized traditional artistic forms, strategically presented themselves as purveyors of either tradition or innovation or both, adeptly navigated a complex, modern marketplace, and capitalized on the technological and social opportunities afforded by the region’s modern tourism and real estate industry. In so doing, they engaged the key technologies and ideals of modernity as they made the innovative social and aesthetic practices of modernism serve themselves personally and their people collectively.
