Original Painting “Grinding Corn” [SOLD]

Eva Mirabal (1920-1968) Eah Ha Wa - Fast Growing Corn, favored painting small paintings, usually of a single figure, depicting traditional activities in and around Taos Pueblo where she had been born and where she lived the majority of her life. She had studied at the Santa Fe Indian School under Dorothy Dunn, at the University of Southern Illinois, Carbondale, and at the Taos Valley Art School, Taos, New Mexico.

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.

This painting is of a native woman grinding blue corn with a mano on a metate.  The blue corn will be used for making piki bread.  The painting is signed in lower right Eah Ha Wa, her Tiwa name, and is not dated.  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:  Silverman, Jason. "Drawing From Life: Spurred by the Taos Painters of the 1920s, Taos Pueblo's Eva Mirabal Painted Her Community as She Saw It - and Changed Southwest Art in the Process." Santa Fean (May 2002): 33-36.