Mother Daughter Show

This show focuses on two of the most influential and well known artists of the 20th Century; Pablita Velarde, called by Clara Tanner the “greatest woman artist in the Southwest” and her daughter Helen Hardin.

Pablita Velarde or Tse Tsan, meaning Golden Dawn was the first full-time female student in Dorothy Dunn’s art class at the Santa Fe Indian School. She was born in 1918 at Santa Clara Pueblo and continued producing art until her death in 2006. Velarde painted in the “traditional” style of Santa Fe and did accurate portraits of Indian life and culture. Velarde’s mentors included Dorthy Dunn, but she also studied with Tonita Peña, the first woman painter to be accepted by her male dominated field.

Velarde was best known for her earth paintings, where she ground mineral and rock elements on a metate and mano until the result was a powdery substance from which she made her paints. She first began working in watercolor, but it wasn’t until later that she learned how to prepare these paints from natural pigments (a process called Fresco secco). She painted almost exclusively on paper supports and she was also known to create art derived from the Navajo sandpainting tradition.

Pablita Velarde’s daughter Helen Hardin or Tsa-Sah-Wee-Eh, meaning Little Standing Spruce, was born at Santa Clara Pueblo in 1943 and was acclaimed to be one of the preeminent American Indian painters of the twentieth century. Hardin continued painting until her death from cancer in 1984.

Her artistic style was one of definitive struggle; to capture, hold, and relish those aspects of her native heritage yet depart from the Santa Fe/Dorothy Dunn School of her predecessors. Hardin's style, so distinctive and compelling, began to emerge in the 1970s with a series of Katsina figure paintings.

Her personal explorations led her and her work into an intellectual and physical struggle of her very existence. Reflected in her art is the struggle of woman versus man, patron versus artist, Indian versus Anglo, tradition versus progression, and through all of these struggles emerged an art of complexity and timeless beauty, a forward looking art rooted firmly in the ancient past.