May is Heritage Preservation Month -- Santa Fe's Awards Move Online

© Melanie West from the 2018 Heritage Preservation Awards Ceremony and reception

 Images from the 2018 Preservation Awards Ceremony, © Melanie West

- May is Preservation Month -
2020 Awards Announced Online Soon

A Letter from HSFF Executive Director Pete Warzel on the 2020 Awards

Every May, state and national agencies, local foundations and city departments, all associated with the honorable commitment to preservation of architectural and cultural history, celebrate Preservation Month, across the country. This year is no different.

The concept was started in 1973 by the National Trust for Historic Preservation as a week-long celebration. In 2005 the focus became an entire month, given the depth of history, successes and related events across the country. Now is not the time to stop an almost fifty-year-old tradition.

What is different this year is that public events are cancelled or postponed. These cancellations do not diminesh the significance of Preservation Month. Our recognition is happening in more modest fashion this year, and we all are trying to make it equally as relevant as the public ceremony.

The annual Heritage Preservation Awards ceremony, that has found a home at San Miguel Chapel for the past three years, has been cancelled. Likewise, the New Mexico Historic Preservation Division/CPRC Heritage Preservation Awards presentation has been postponed indefinitely. Normally, a full calendar of events around the state in honor of, and immersive to, Preservation Month is published by NM HPD, but not this year.

However, the city awards at San Miguel Chapel – jointly presented by the City of Santa Fe’s Historic Preservation Division, the Old Santa Fe Association, and the Historic Santa Fe Foundation – and the traditional reception at HSFF’s El Zaguán now canceled, we will be recognizing the awardees virtually. We will list and celebrate the slate of awardees online, highlight their properties, and commend their efforts, as the city, OSFA, and HSFF all applauded the commitment of the award recipients in the press and on their individual websites.

This is a collaboration that has existed for many years, and we all feel that we cannot let it pass this year, in spite of the health crisis that keeps us from celebrating in person. It will not be the same as sitting in the wonderful space that is San Miguel Chapel, then walking up E. DeVargas and Canyon Road to HSFF’s El Zaguán and our elegant garden for food and drink. We will, however, do our best to illustrate the significance of each recipient’s contribution through the online awards.

The award recipients will be announced in press releases and online at the three collaborators web sites during the week of May 11. The original date for the San Miguel ceremony was Thursday, May 14, 2020, and we are trying to stick to that date virtually, in order to do business as usual in a very unusual time.

This has been an interesting time for all of us. The Foundation's home and office at El Zaguán has been closed in order to protect staff and residents. That includes the garden, which is coming into its own given the spring weather. Staff has been working at home, and one of us rotates to the office to pick up mail, scan invoices, deposits, etc., to keep administration running smoothly. Events have been cancelled and exhibitions have been installed, unseen, and put online for sale. The current show, Tom Leech from the Palace of the Governors Press, and Patricia Musick, is extraordinary. The artists selected and illustrated quotes from Shakespeare – some of which are very pertinent to the times — to create unique objects on handmade, marbled paper with the quotes hand-drawn in calligraphy. Please visit our website and take a look, and buy if you have the inclination. These are one of a kind creations, not multiple prints, and they have been selling rapidly.

We will keep you informed of our accessibility status as we move into May, and hope to see you all again soon. In the meantime, please enjoy of blogs, emails, online exhibitions and lectures, and keep in mind the nature of Preservation Month. Look to our email, website, and press for the 2020 award recipients of the Heritage Preservation Awards.

Please stay home and read, and be very safe.

A Digital Presentation of Cormac O'Malley's Salon El Zaguan Salon El Zaguán

Historic Santa Fe Foundation hosts a monthly speaker as part of our Salon El Zaguán series. This lecture series is a member benefit and open to the public with admission. Space is usually limited for each event in the sala of our offices and home in HSFF's El Zaguán. Note that the schedule is subject to change for the upcoming months so keep an eye on our email announcements. For more information on the Salon El Zaguán series, visit our website.

This audio was recorded at Historic Santa Fe Foundation located at 545 Canyon Road, Santa Fe, NM as part of their monthly Salon El Zaguán talk series. O'Malley spoke on January 21, 2020 about the artists Dorothy Stewart and his father and poet Ernie O’Malley who lived in Santa Fe in the early to mid-1900s.

Dorothy Stewart, the artist, arrived in Santa Fe in the mid-1920s. Ernie O’Malley, the poet and author, arrived in Santa Fe from Taos in early 1930. Stewart and O'Malley met in the literary and artistic circles in Santa Fe and became friends. He lectured there on Irish literature and history.

In late 1930 when Stewart wanted to return to Mexico to continue her series of Mexican print works, she asked O’Malley to escort her as the driver of her car. He was anxious to see what was happening in Mexico in terms of how indigenous art and influences were being incorporated into Post-Mexican Revolution art. Another New York artist, Theodora Goddard, then living in Santa Fe joined the troop as she was also particularly interested in the political side of the revolution and its political art. When they returned to Santa Fe after eight months of travel in Mexico, Stewart asked O’Malley to help her publish a book of her prints covering New Mexico and old Mexico with his writing and her prints. For various reasons the book never got published but O'Malley retained the prints which he had received from Stewart and hung some of them in his homes in Ireland where he returned in 1935.

O'Malley and Stewart had a deep and abiding interest in folklore and folkways in New Mexico and Mexico and elsewhere. Her art and his poems reflect on the life and attitudes in rural New Mexico of the time, and capture the spirit of those days, and indeed speak to us today.

The entire presentation is available on YouTube as a four-part series. Find the links to all below or find and subscribe to our channel YouTube.

View Part 1 here https://youtu.be/Ee_mNiPgCUw
View Part 2 here https://youtu.be/xNffUUFBsUY
View Part 3 here https://youtu.be/yUbamTPvZto
View Part 4 here https://youtu.be/sRsNxNJSdy8

HSFF RENAMES A.M. BERGERE HOUSE TO OTERO-BERGERE HOUSE

Georgia O'Keeffe Museum Research Center, Exterior, 2014-2015. Photography by InSight Foto Inc. © Georgia O’Keeffe Museum.

Historic Santa Fe Foundation works with the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum’s staff
to recognize Bergere and Otero families’ relationship to this historic building
by Pete Warzel

Cody Hartley, the Director of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum, during an introductory meeting of our two organizations, brought up research that his staff was doing on the history of the A.M. Bergere House, the building that houses the O’Keeffe offices at 135 Grant Avenue. This property was added to the Historic Santa Fe Foundation’s Register of Properties Worthy of Preservation on May 29, 1974, and was named after the second husband of Eloisa Luna Otero, Alfred Maurice Bergere, who was granted occupancy of the house by Governor Miguel A. Otero. The property was actually owned by the U.S. Interior Department after Fort Marcy disbanded operations in Santa Fe – the house originally one of the officer’s quarters. A.M. Bergere was at that time the district court clerk of the first judicial district, New Mexico (1901).

Eloisa purchased the property in 1905 from the City of Santa Fe, following yet another transfer from the Interior Department. The property was a bouncing ball of ownership since its construction in the early 1870s, although with this purchase it firmly remained as the home of the Otero and Bergere families, and a center of historic events and people in the city. The research presented by the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum focused on the significance of the Otero family, predominantly the women of the clan, as yet another permutation of women making history and preserving important properties in Santa Fe during the early 1900’s. The family called 135 Grant “La Casa Grande.”

Eloisa was a force in Santa Fe due to her family connections, wealth, and charitable work. She served as chair of the Santa Fe Board of Education and her home was gathering place for the discussion of local politics. The Santa Fe New Mexican, September 3, 1914, in her obituary stated that “She was ever the soul of hospitality marked by all the charms of the Spanish traditions.”

The home had been put in trust and conveyed to her children in succession from 1912 to 1976. Nina Otero Warren took possession in 1963, but was a significant presence at the home from her return to Santa Fe in 1914. In this centennial year of the New Mexico passage of the Nineteenth Amendment granting women the right to vote, it is important to note that Otero Warren was a leader of the women’s suffrage movement in the state, and a political mover in the Republican Party, running for the U.S. House of Representatives in 1922, the first woman in New Mexico to run for “high office”.

Anita Bergere, Nina’s sister from the Bergere marriage to Eloisa, took possession of the home following in 1965, but she too had been there from 1914 on, and also was involved in the suffrage movement, and followed her sister as Superintendent of Santa Fe County public schools.

The history of the house and its inhabitants and owners is a fascinating look at the Otero and Bergere families, and their interaction, influence, and importance to the history of Santa Fe. Dr, Hartley and the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum intend to expand the narrative of their office property, beginning with a more appropriate name. In the new edition of Old Santa Fe Today, currently in process with photography and narrative for each entry, you will see the Otero-Bergere House, newly named and approved by the HSFF Board of Directors on February 27, 2020.

 Link to the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum research on the property below.

OLD SANTA FE TODAY - THE NEW EDITION UPDATE

Covers above: 1991 fourth edition, 1972 third edition, 1966 first edition, and 1982 third edition.

Old Santa Fe Today New Edition Update
HSFF Executive Director Pete Warzel

As most of you know, the Historic Santa Fe Foundation began a project in 2019 to completely revise our iconic publication, Old Santa Fe Today, in a fifth edition. The fourth edition was printed in 1991 with much needed to be addressed in that lapsed time.

The new edition will have the complete inventory of properties on the HSFF Historic Register of Properties Worthy of Preservation, now at a total of 98, and one or two more addition likely before we go to press (currently being researched for nomination by our Mac Watson Fellow Katie Dix). New research and writing for each entry is being done by Audra Bellmore, PhD., Associate Professor in the Center for Southwest Research and the Curator of the John Gaw Meem Archives of Southwestern Architecture, on a volunteer basis. It is an incredible commitment to this foundation by Dr. Bellmore, and the staff and Board of Directors are extremely grateful. New color photography is contracted with Simone Frances, an architectural photographer based in New Mexico.

The Museum of New Mexico Press will design, produce, market and distribute the new book, and as you most likely know, has been printing elegant books focused on art, archeology and history of the state and region since 1951. (Órale! Lowrider, The Santa Fe Scottish Rite Temple, Painted Reflections, Los Luceros, etc.) The quality of these books and others in the MNMP catalogue is exceptional.

I had occasion to pick up a copy of a now, 24-year-old book, The National Trust Guide to Santa Fe. Interesting and mostly well done. But, it is a guidebook. There is very good, well-researched background in the introductory chapters, but essentially it is a walking tour by street address in various sections of the city. (It is good to see an entry for the Rios wood lot in the Canyon Road tour section, and the drawing of the proposed towers for the Cathedral from 1885 is incredibly disturbing – it would be interesting to see what the Historic Districts Review Board would do with that if proposed today). OSFT is not that, but could be utilized in such a way. The photographs of the properties will be stunning, with interior shots of many of the properties that are never seen. The narrative on each will be much more extensive than allowed in a guidebook format. Yet, with the detailed map insert, and the proposed mobile phone app, the book certainly will be conducive to using for a walk, or drive tour.

OSFT is a standard of research, used, in its past editions, by writers and academics exploring the history and architectural significance of Santa Fe. Indeed, Richard Harris, the author of the National Trust guide referred to above, cites the 4th edition of OSFT as a source. Paul Weideman, who launched his wonderful book at our sala in December 2019, Architecture Santa Fe: A Guidebook, likewise used Old Santa Fe Today as reference. That is telling.

We have a budget of $40,000 to meet our subvention with the Museum of New Mexico Press, as well as the contracted photography, map-making and app production. To date we have received $12,300 from very generous individuals and an additional $20,000 from businesses that housed in the Register properties, or simply committed and concerned about the architectural and cultural history of the Santa Fe area: Victory Contemporary (gallery – in the Delgado House), Inn of the Five Graces (Barrio de Analco and the Tudesqui House), Bishop’s Lodge (Lamy Chapel), Santa Fe Properties (José Alarid House), The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum (Bergere House), La Fonda on the Plaza, Eugene V. and Clare E. Thaw Charitable Trust (the Brooks House), and Wolf Corporation (Marybeth and John Wolf – the Hinojos House). New Mexico Bank and Trust, Avalon Trust, Sunwest Construction, and Dave Feldt, Realtor, have also generously donated funds to help complete this project, although not housed in one of our Register buildings. Through this exceptional help from businesses and individuals we have reached 81% of our funding and budget goal. The finish line is near.

A revision of Old Santa Fe Today has been a goal of this Foundation since I came here six years ago. It is brought up in conversations with preservation organizations, writers, and members of HSFF, continuously, in the hope that we would redo with a new edition. The 4th edition, from 1991, is outdated, not only regarding the number of properties on our Register, but as to information regarding many of the properties included. Thirty years is long enough to wait for a new version.

So, we are here, and moving rapidly, and all – Board of Directors, staff, associates, partners, publisher, writer, and photographer – are so looking forward to this elegant presentation of our history. We hope you can help us with this project, and also that you thoroughly enjoy the final product, due to be available in 2021. It will be a wonderful addition to the living library of Santa Fe’s architectural and cultural history.

Read more about the reprint on the Old Santa Fe Today page on our website.

BOOK REVIEW — In a Modern Rendering

Cover of In a Modern Rendering, the Color Woodcuts of Gustave Baumann: A Catalogue Raisonné

In a Modern Rendering, the Color Woodcuts of Gustave Baumann: A Catalogue Raisonné by Gala Chamberlain

A Book Review by Alan “Mac” Watson

With the appearance of Gala Chamberlain’s monumental In a Modern Rendering, the Color Woodcuts of Gustave Baumann: A Catalogue Raisonné (Rizzoli Electra, 2019), Santa Fe’s beloved Gustave Baumann becomes established as an artist of international stature.  This is a wonderful work of scholarship, presenting not only an authoritative catalogue of the 190 known editions of Baumann artistic color woodcuts but also an additional 200 pieces of “ephemera and undated color woodcuts,” plus an additional 35 pieces described by Chamberlain as “problematic pieces”—linear blocks, each of which expresses the entire image of an existing color woodcut.

The Catalogue is prefaced by a formidable essay of critical biography by Nancy Green of Cornell University, the carefully documented facts of Baumann’s life—his lifelong development from a meticulous craftsman to an artist of brilliant vision and technique.

Master printer, Baumann afficionado, and Director of the Press at the Palace of the Governors Tom Leech has contributed an essay of fascinating insights into Baumann’s printing methods, his materials of wood, inks and paper, and his tools for carving blocks and making successive impressions where each color requires a separately carved block.

And Chamberlain herself has contributed a further essay on Baumann’s “Studio Practices,” presenting an account of the varieties of paper he used over the decades, his “chops” (seals, signatures and symbols  that he used in signing his work), and the problems of dating the discreet editions he issued of the colored woodblock prints.

The Catalogue was initiated by Ann Baumann, daughter of Gustave and Jane, who inherited the Baumann estate which includes extensive archival material—personal letters, manuscripts, scrapbooks, and records of Gustave’s paintings, records of sales, catalogues, consignments and exhibitions—all of which Chamberlain draws upon to compile the Catalogue.  Chamberlain’s meticulous scholarship over the past three decades is apparent on every page of this impressive book.

Weighing in at roughly eight pounds (629 pages), this is not a book to curl up with on a winter’s evening! The publication was undertaken with the highest standards of bookmaking in mind, designed in the tradition of fine Baumann craftsmanship by Leslie Fitch and David Skolkin and published by Rizzoli, known internationally for its surpassing works of pictorial art.

Many of the full-page illustrations in the Catalogue have been photographed by the Museum of New Mexico’s excellent Blair Clark. Nonetheless, they must fall short of the actual woodcuts printed by the artist himself. As Tom Leech’s essay so gracefully observes: “I encourage you, when looking at a Baumann woodcut, also to look into it, to discern one layer from another…you will find different degrees of impression and thickness of ink. Keep in mind that, even though the reproductions in this book are of the highest quality, they are essentially two-dimensional representations of a three-dimensional art.”

By Gala Chamberlain
With essays by Nancy E. Green, Thomas Leech
Foreword by Martin F. Krause
Rizzoli Electa
Hardcover, 648 pages
$175.00

ABOUT THE AUTHORS:
Gala Chamberlain is the trustee of the Ann Baumann Trust and director of the Annex Galleries, Santa Rosa, California.

Nancy E. Green is the Gale and Ira Drukier Curator of European and American Art, Prints, and Drawings, 1800-1945 at the Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art, Cornell University.

Thomas Leech is director of the press at the Palace of the Governors and a curator at the New Mexico History Museum, Santa Fe.

BOOK REVIEW — Stanley Crawford's The Garlic Papers: A Small Garlic Farm in the Age of Global Vampires

Cover of The Garlic Papers

Stanley Crawford’s The Garlic Papers
A Book Review by HSFF’s Executive Director Pete Warzel.

“After planting and harvesting crops for over forty years, you would think a being might finally comprehend the ephemeral nature of all things. Not, alas, this one.” — Stanley Crawford, The Garlic Papers: A Small Garlic Farm in the Age of Global Vampires

The classic A Garlic Testament: Seasons on a Small New Mexico Farm was first published in 1998 and has been in print ever since. It is an elegant and eloquent rumination on life through the annual cycle of a small farm in Northern New Mexico. It is a quiet testament.

2019 brings a continuation, not quite a sequel – The Garlic Papers: A Small Garlic Farm in the Age of Global Vampires. If Stan had ever previously intended to write a follow-up on his classic, he most likely would not have predicted the chain of events that are delineated in this one.

Circumstances distill to this: In 2014 Ted Hume, an international trade attorney, asked Stan and Rosemary Crawford to act as an affected party, a garlic grower, to request a review of Harmoni International Spice regarding their import/pricing policies. Harmoni is a major importer of garlic in the U.S. and is owned by the Chinese company, Zhengzhou Harmoni Spice. The “dumping” in the anti-dumping laws is the import of foreign goods, in this case garlic, at a price that undercuts American growers (dumps on the market). The review by the U.S. Department of Commerce went smoothly until Harmoni decided that millions of potential fines would enfeeble their position in gaming the trade system in the U.S. market, and decided to play hardball. Some seven legal jurisdictions, four sets of attorneys (plus Chinese law firms) opposing, seven legal firms (representing Stan and associates), plus advising firms, are all locked into the mess. Ted Hume and Stan are not budging in what has become a real time David and Goliath story, and a look at best, into the inefficient, incompetent bureaucracy of U.S. governed international trade, at worst, the corrupt nature of the system.

The beautifully clear, Crawford writing style re-emerges in this work, as does a very lucid reporting of circumstances around the Harmoni-Spice international intrigue and legal imbroglio. Stan has multiple lives – farmer, novelist, writer of clear and beautiful non-fiction, man who cares deeply about the world. This book is truly a hybrid, and well done. He tells the economic/political story, yet combines it with elegant ruminations on the work of farming, and then, as in the chapter “Apocalypse Shortly”, let’s rip with a hilarious recap of a dinner among fellow Dixonistas, “…discussing our favorite topic, the End of the World.”

Was all, is all, this worth it? And by all I mean not simply the complex legal harassment of a small, Northern New Mexico owner/farmer by a powerhouse of an international exporter of garlic, but his hard, forty years of farming also. To the farming question: “Above all, it is quiet on the farm. I take the quiet for granted. After a day in the city, I crave the quiet.” And, to the legal trade question: ‘I have been asked a number of times whether I regret becoming involved in this labyrinth. No, because it has been a fascinating peephole into how the world works….”

Stan gave a reading and book signing at the Historic Santa Fe Foundation several weeks ago, and his demeanor is calming, his patience in responding to the facts of the Harmoni-Spice scrum inspiring. He looks the same, at 82 years of age, as in the photographs of him when A Garlic Testament was published almost 22 years ago. He is fit, wiry, intellectually curious, and still a fine, fine writer. In an interview from 2008 with PowellsBooks.Blog, the iconic bookstore in Portland, Oregon, Stan said, “Writing is what I do to make sense of life.”

I will tell you a story from many years ago when I called Stan for advice from my Denver home. A late spring snowstorm had split an apple tree in my courtyard and somehow over the next months I saved the good half. However, a year later the good, living half, was leaning into the house. What to do? I asked the guy who would know. On the phone he said, “Well, do you want the Santa Fe answer or the real one?” I bit. Ok, give me the Santa Fe answer. He paused, and said, “Move the house.” I took the real answer.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
STANLEY CRAWFORD is co-owner with his wife, RoseMary Crawford, of El Bosque Garlic Farm in Dixon, New Mexico, where they have lived since 1969. Crawford was born in 1937 and was educated at the University of Chicago and at the Sorbonne. He is the author of nine novels, including Village, Log of the S.S. The Mrs. Unguentine, Travel Notes, GASCOYNE, and Some Instructions, a classic satire on all the sanctimonious marriage manuals ever produced. He is also the author of two memoirs: A Garlic Testament: Seasons on a Small Farm in New Mexico, and Mayordomo: Chronicle of an Acequia in Northern New Mexico. He has written numerous articles in various publications such as the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, Double Take, and Country Living. For more information, please visit stanleycrawford.net.

The Garlic Papers: A Small Garlic Farm in the Age of Global Vampires
Stanley Crawford
Leaf Storm Press
$16.95, Paperback
186 Pages