Annotations for Subject-headings: Folk Art

For over 400 years since New Mexico was settled by Spain in the 16th century, Hispanic folk artists in that state have created wooden statues called Santos, representing figures of Catholic saints. They've also made retablos, images of the saints painted on wooden panels. The practitioners of these carving arts or santeros were exclusively men until the last 20 years or so, but today, women are some of the best-known santeros and their contribution is the focus of an exhibit at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Catalina Reyes reports.

Though documentation is hard to find, it may be that New Mexican men and women have always collaborated at Santo making just as they often do today. Helen Lucero curated the art of the Santera exhibit.

Women have said all along are the keepers of the faith in New Mexico, and so they will put up these images to decorate their homes to pray, to carry in processions, to dress, and so it makes sense that they would eventually start carving and painting them themselves.

[Natural sounds of Museum] 40 objects representing the work of 26 Santeras are on view in the small exhibit room. There's a bulto tableau of Noah's Arc by Marie Romero Cash and her tin Smith husband, complete with wooden animals, a tin arc and foot tall carvings of Noah and his wife With Hispanic features and early 20th century dress, popular saints are rendered in various media Santo Nino de Atocha, a Christ child who helps prisoners. Dona Sebastiana or La Muerte, a skeleton in a two-wheeled wooden cart who represents death and of course our Lady of Guadalupe and Indian Virgin Mary who's especially venerated throughout the Americas.

I haven't seen anything quite like this that the men have done.

We are looking at a carving by Monica Sosaya Halford, a crucified woman who looks strikingly cheerful, smiling in a bright blue and white Basque peasant dress. She's an apocryphal saint named Santa Librada. A legend says she wanted to devote herself to God, so she prayed he would make her ugly to prevent her marriage. When God granted her wish and gave her a mustache and beard. The brother's enraged father had her crucified, but he converted to Christianity as she prayed from the cross. In New Mexico, Santa Librada goes without the beard in mustache. She sent to intercede on behalf of women with troublesome husbands.

She is the only crucified woman that we know of. This is the saint that women would pray to, and I just find it real interesting that her name is Librada also, which is basically translates as liberated. She is the one who helped women before there was a women's movement.

It was during the civil rights movement of the 60s says Lucero, that Hispanic men in New Mexico began to revive the dying Spanish colonial Santero tradition. About 10 years later, women artists began to emerge from behind the dominance of men in public arenas, making saints images in such a variety of media that Lucero decided to include more than bultos and retablos in the exhibit broadening the definition of santera.

I chose to expand it to include other media as well. In other words, images of saints produced on straw applique on tin, on culture, embroidery, weaving, hide paintings, and even one woman's work, Rosa Maria Calles, whose work is all decorating ceramic face.

[Natural sounds of woodworking] What I'm doing now is the actual roughing out taking the excess wood away.

Marie Romero Cash began carving and painting saints in the seventies when she was in her mid-thirties, the daughter of two famed Santa Fe tinsmiths. She's gone on to become one of the region's most recognized Santeras. Today she's working on a favorite figure, La Senora de Guadalupe.

[Natural sounds of woodworking] After all the excess wood is gone, I'll be able to start working on the face and the hands and toning it down, and then it'll be ready for sanding and gesso and painting.

Romero Cash has traveled throughout northern New Mexico studying Santo carvings in villages like Chimayo, where people still venerate figures hundreds of years old, but she'd rather be called a wood carver than a santera, which to her mind means a holy person. She says her goal isn't religious.

Mine happens to be learning everything that I can about specific things, including the santeros and what they did and how they did it and trying to get all our traditions in one bundle and then saving them and perpetuating them.

But Helen Lucero believes that for most of the Santeras in the exhibit, honoring the spirit of tradition is connected inseparably to the life of the soul.

And I asked the women what this meant to them to be producing saints. And quite often the spiritual aspect of it was much more dominant than any I would've ever expected. If you are busy representing God, then you have a real direct link if you are a Hispanic, Catholic, new Mexican to what your work is so that these people really see themselves as a bridge almost between a holy place and a secular place.

The art of the Santera continues at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico until January of next year. The exhibit will then travel throughout the country for several years, starting in Dallas, Texas for Latino USA. This is Catalina Reyes in Santa Fe, New Mexico.