The art of Helen Hardin

The story goes that in the 1970s, Indian artists Helen Hardin and Fritz Scholder had words. What prompted the exchange is not known, but allegedly Hardin quipped that if her colleague got punched in the nose and it started to bleed, he would lose his Indian blood in five minutes. If the tale is true, this was quite a verbal TKO for someone who was not a full-blooded Indian herself. One of Hardin's parents was Anglo, the other a member of Santa Clara Pueblo. Scholder was one-quarter Luiseño.

Both artists are gone — Hardin died of cancer in 1984 at 41 years of age, and Scholder was 67 when he died of complications due to diabetes in 2005 — yet their artwork continues to inspire younger generations of Indian and non-Indian artists. Scholder's fame is worldwide, and most recently, his work was featured at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., in a retrospective titled Fritz Scholder: Indian Not Indian, which closed at the end of this summer. Hardin's work has been well known regionally but less so beyond the southwest United States. But that
will change if Margarete Bagshaw, Hardin's daughter, has anything to say about it.

In August, Bagshaw — an artist herself — opened Golden Dawn Gallery, which showcases the work of her mother and her grandmother, Pablita Velarde (1918-2006), as well as her own art. The name of the gallery is taken from Velarde's Tewa name, Tse Tsan, which translates as "golden dawn." "The gallery is my legacy project. It's to honor my family," Bagshaw said in an interview at the gallery. "I hope to educate people about my mother and grandmother, seen both as strong women and what they accomplished as artists, for themselves and others, including me."

Beginning on Friday, Nov. 6, Bagshaw presents Changing Woman: A Woman Ahead of Her Time, a one-person exhibit of Hardin's work (10 percent of all proceeds will be donated to breast cancer research). "It was simply time," she said. "There has not been anything done exclusively about my mother's artwork in quite a while. She was the most significant contemporary Native woman artist during her lifetime. She was the first to create a path for other Native women artists to break out of Indian traditionalism; that is, allowing Pueblo women to paint what they were feeling and at the same time respect Native culture. My grandmother, of course, made it possible for Native women to paint at all, having studied with Dorothy Dunn at the Santa Fe Indian School in the 1930s, so they were both pathfinders in that regard. But Helen made contemporary Native women artists believe that what they were doing could be a career."

Hardin's reaction to Scholder, not to mention a few other Native artists, was, according to Bagshaw, indicative of her independent nature, outspokenness and, to some degree, her frustration in wanting to be seen on an equal basis with her male colleagues. But at a time in America when the general status of women was understood by some to be that of second-class citizens, it was particularly challenging for a woman of color to achieve equal footing in any capacity among male peers. "It was very difficult to be a contemporary of artists like Scholder, John Nieto, and R.C. Gorman, all men who had in their own ways broken away from traditionalist Indian art. And for a Native woman doing her own thing at the time, it was almost impossible to have a voice," Bagshaw said.

Born in 1943 to Velarde and Herbert Hardin, an Anglo security guard, Helen's childhood was one of displacement. The family lived in various places because of her father's military service during World War II. They lived in Texas, Pennsylvania, and California soon after Helen was born. But within two months of her birth, she was given her Indian name — Tsa-Sah-Wee-Eh or Little Standing Spruce — in a ceremony at Santa Clara Pueblo. Because of the family's sporadic moving and subsequent residence in Albuquerque, Helen was never fully initiated into the tribe.

Being raised Catholic by her mother, together with her Indian ancestry, set in motion conflicting ideologies in Hardin's belief system. She told writer Jay Scott, during the preparation of his monograph Changing Woman: The Life and Art of Helen Hardin (1989), that the only way to make peace with her religious upbringing was to realize that "everything the nuns told us was bullshit." She also recalled, "When I was in Catholic high school, I painted all the Christian subjects I will ever do. I got it out of my system. ... When I painted Indian subjects, a sense of Indian-ness would be there, a spiritual element I can't explain. The only thing that did bother me, once I began painting seriously, was that one of the commandments was 'Thou shalt have no other gods before me' and I thought, 'Oh my God, what are these [katsinas] doing in my life?'"

Indeed, katsinas are part of Hardin's signature imagery — not specific katsinas, which would go against Pueblo protocol, but highly imagined and artistically conceived ones. Examples are Guardians of Infinity (1983), which depicts three katsina masks emanating from one body, and Guardians of the Sun (1984), one of her last paintings, showing three katsina figures placed diagonally within the composition, conveying a sense of ascension. Take away the stylized facial features in the latter piece and Hardin's painting would be essentially nonobjective. "[Helen] has studied in her own way the [katsinas], and from there she begins in her own mind to create things," Velarde stated in Scott's book. "I suppose it's all right, but it doesn't represent anything of true significance to the pueblo, except that it's a mask. You can't identify which [katsina] it is, because it's in Helen's head."

Intelligence, technical skill, an eye for detail, a keen sense of design and color, and the freedom to conceptualize Native symbolism mark Hardin's mature work. "Her sense of color and composition were intuitive, the same way some musicians feel music, how certain sounds just go together," Bagshaw said. "But she was obsessed with perfectionism in her art and expected the same from others."

Hardin's tendency toward perfectionism is demonstrated throughout her work via precise drawing and brush techniques, which she would later bring to her printmaking. Indeed, her use of geometric forms and interlocking planes are reminiscent of synthetic Cubism, which lent itself nicely to her precisionism and design. But Scott points out that her artistic sensibilities came from ancestral sources dating back to the ancient, pared-down petroglyph images that she saw in any number of anthropological books that were part of the family library, books illustrated with representations of work by Hohokam, Mogollon, and Ancestral Puebloan people. All three groups used patterned motifs and intricate delineation of line on their pottery, which was integral to Hardin's two-dimensional work.

Basically self-taught, Hardin worked primarily in acrylics and made etchings. Her use of airbrush and sponge techniques allowed her to achieve a variety of textural effects that often created an atmospheric, even mystical realm for her katsina figures. The etching process suited her precise drawing capabilities, despite being reluctant to take on printmaking. She had no interest in lithographs, having once said — according to Bagshaw — that "Everyone and their dog was doing stone lithography." But once she learned the etching process with printmaker Richard Ximenez, owner of El Cerro Graphics in Las Lunas, New Mexico, Hardin was drawn to the more structured method and exactitude necessary to produce good imagery.

"My mother always wanted to be doing something different. And when she had the opportunity to work with Rick [Ximenez], she took it. No other, or very few, Native women at the time — this was around 1978 — were making etchings. She and
Rick became good friends, as well as collaborators; she was the artist, he was the technician."

A moment in Hardin's short career that was key to her success was a trip to Bogotá, Colombia, in 1968 to visit her father — an official for the U.S. Agency for International Development at the time. He arranged for her to exhibit a group of her paintings at the U.S. Embassy there. When the show closed, 27 of them had sold, convincing the young artist that her work had merit apart from her mother's accomplishments, since very few people in Colombia knew her mother's art.

Two years later, Hardin was featured in a story in New Mexico Magazine. Pictured on the cover in a black top, black jeans, and boots, adorned with Native jewelry, and sporting a modified pageboy haircut, Hardin exuded self-assuredness and contemporary Native womanhood as she looked out onto a panoramic Southwestern landscape. Consequently, her image became an Indian pop symbol for the hippie generation. "The photograph of Hardin that graced the cover of New Mexico Magazine above a caption of pristine '60-speak — 'Tsa-Sah-Wee-Eh Does Her Thing' — was a tailor-made pinup for the groovy groupie," wrote Scott. "[It took] its place on commune walls, next
to postery icons of the three graces of the pop revolution, Jane and Joan and Janis."

Prior to the magazine article, Hardin's painting Chief's Robes (1968), was awarded first prize for innovation at the Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial in Gallup and was cited for best in painting at the Santa Fe Indian Market in 1969. That same year, she was honored with a one-person show at the Heard Museum in Phoenix. Three years later, her painting Winter Awakening of the O-Khoo-Wah was awarded first prize at a national Indian art competition in Scottsdale. And in 1975, Hardin was the only woman featured in the PBS series Native American Artists.

"My mother sought to convey in her art not only an intelligence, but something anthropological and aesthetically beautiful. Her favorite Native culture was the Mimbres because to her it was so real. It reflected their daily life, and she had a deep respect for that," Bagshaw said. "But when she wanted to do something more decorative, she turned to the pottery designs of the Zia, Santo Domingo, or Acoma people."

This is clearly illustrated in the painting Acoma Birds (1977), in which two red birds with erect tail feathers are depicted in profile, perched on a ledge. They face each other as if in a courting ceremony amid an array of blossoming flowers. The composition is simple and uncluttered, colorful and well balanced, and conveys a sense of joy for animal life, as well as the pleasure of art making. "But my mother had her more intense imagery —
her mask paintings — which she concentrated on near the end of her life. That was when she took her intellectual pursuit of art into something more spiritual."

In 1976, Hardin completed Looking Within Myself I Am Many Parts, which was the beginning of several works more introspective in tone than her previous ones. It's a highly geometricized, abstract close-up of a woman with a faraway gaze who leans forward, giving the impression of being lost in thought and emotionally fragile. This was followed by a set of four-color etchings — The Woman Series — that have been seen as self-portraits as ageless katsinas: Changing Woman (1981), Medicine Woman (1981), Listening Woman (1982), and Creative Woman (1984). The last was left unfinished when the artist died in June of that year; on reflection, she had altered the print's original concept. "I thought for a while that I would conclude [the series] with Winter Woman, but then I decided I didn't want something symbolic of the end of life, and that I should do Creative Woman instead," Hardin told Scott. Presumably, all four images were different facets of Hardin's being, although she identified most with just one. "Listening Woman is the woman I am only becoming now. She's the speaker, she's the person who's more objective, the listener and the compassionate person," Hardin said in 1984.

Bagshaw believes that a younger generation of Native artists are only now becoming aware of what Hardin accomplished in such a short time, particularly her courage in pursuing what she believed in. "Facing her own mortality gave my mother the freedom to paint whatever she wanted, which came from her soul. That's where the masterpieces came from."

details
Changing Woman: A Woman Ahead of Her Time
Opening reception 5 p.m. Friday, Nov. 6; exhibit through Dec. 2
Golden Dawn Gallery, 201 Galisteo St., 988-2024