Original Painting “At the Spring” [SOLD]

Eva Mirabal (1920-1968) Eah Ha Wa - Fast Growing Corn, was born in Taos Pueblo where she lived the majority of her life. She studied at the Santa Fe Indian School under Dorothy Dunn, the University of Southern Illinois, Carbondale, and the Taos Valley Art School.

She grew up in Taos, a village populated by well-traveled artists from Europe and other parts of the United States, as well as by the Indians from the Pueblo. Her parents, aunts and uncles all served as models for artists including Nicolai Fechin and Joseph Imhof, and they helped to build artists' studios.

Mirabal's father, Beaded Shirt, was an especially popular model, and a wooden bust bearing his image could once be seen outside Mabel Dodge Luhan's house. Growing up surrounded by artists, Mirabal was inspired to draw and paint the pueblo life she knew.

Mirabal first began attracting attention for her artwork while a teenager in the late 1930s. At age 19, in 1939, she was singled out for a Chicago gallery show:  "She expresses in every drawing—in every line—a truly feminine tenderness and grace," one critic wrote in the Chicago Union Teacher magazine. "The clean colors, simplicity and good taste make this ageless art truly modern." She was also the only female included in the First National Exhibition of Indian Painting, held at the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Mirabal was a stay-at-home mom, who loved to paint figures of natives doing daily chores and dances. She was an unintentional portraitist. She preferred single-image figures in small scale. She was an exceptional artist who could depict action in her figures with minimal lines.  Her paintings were always rendered in matte texture.

This painting shows a pueblo woman at a water well with her water jar.  The painting is signed Eah Ha Wa, her Tiwa name, and dated ’42.  It has just recently been framed using all archival materials.

Condition: original condition

Provenance: from the personal collection of a family from Pennsylvania

Recommended Reading:  Brody, J. J. Pueblo Indian Painting: Tradition and Modernism in New Mexico, 1900-1930. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1997.