A beautifully illustrated book on the origins and history of traditional Hispanic tinwork.

Over the past century, women artists and writers have expressed diverse creative responses to the landscape of the Southwest. The Desert Is No Lady provides a cross-cultureal perspective on women by examining Anglo, Hispanic, and Native American women's artistic expressions and the effect of their art in defining the southwestern landscape. The Desert Is No Lady has been made into a motion picture of the same title by Women Make movies, New York, NY "A beautifully crafted book. . . . Although it varies in intensity, the response of women to the environment is virtually always different from the male frontiersman's view of the land as inanimate, boundless, conquerable and controllable." ÑPolly Wells Kaufman in Women's Review of Books "A powerful masterpiece." ÑEve Gruntfest in The Professional Geographer

Higinio V. Gonzales (1842–1921) was more than a gifted metalworker. A man of varied talents whose poems and songs complement his work in punched tin, Gonzales transcends categorization. In The Artistic Odyssey of Higinio V. Gonzales, Maurice M. Dixon, Jr., who has spent more than thirty years studying New Mexico tinwork, describes the artist’s signature techniques. Featuring translations of Gonzales’s poetry, this book restores a long-forgotten New Mexican innovator to the prominence he deserves. Recounting the scholarly detective work that revealed the full scope of Gonzales’s art and career, Dixon tells the story of a craftsman who was also a poet. He begins with Gonzales’s first signed literary work, a handwritten birthday poem decorated with beautifully drawn flowers and birds, dated 1889, and then pieces together the artist’s life and career. Through meticulous research into manuscripts and the dates of tin cans that Gonzales repurposed into elegant, fanciful frames, niches, sconces, and religious decorations, Dixon identifies as Gonzales’s numerous pieces of poetry and tinwork once attributed to anonymous poets and artists. His most important discovery served as a Rosetta stone: an ink wash and watercolor drawing in an ornamental tin frame (housed at the Millicent Rogers Museum in Taos), whose documented provenance helped Dixon to identify Gonzales’s other artwork. More than 100 color photographs of Gonzales’s tinwork and more than a dozen translations of the artist’s poetic and musical works punctuate the narrative. Both a catalogue raisonné of a hitherto little-known artist and an anthology of his writings, this book reconstructs the creative life of a long-overlooked talent, one whose quest for beauty resulted in a prolific body of art and literature.

In the San Luis Valley of southern Colorado, there thrives a folk tradition with links to both the past and future. Colcha embroidery is a traditional Spanish colonial style of textile, bed covering, or wall hanging dating from the early nineteenth century. In the first book to consider this craft, Suzanne MacAulay provides a detailed account of this folk art tradition that is both old and constantly renewing itself, presenting a sensitive portrayal of artists and the contexts in which they live and work. Stitching Rites reveals how art, history, and memory interweave in a rich creative web. Based on archival research and on extensive interviews with artists, the book reveals the personal motivations of the embroiderers and their relationships with their work, with each other, with their community, and with outsiders. Through stitchers like Josephine Lobato and the San Luis Ladies Sewing Circle, MacAulay shows how colcha creation is bound up in a perpetual round of cultural commentary and self-reflection. MacAulay includes detailed descriptions of changes in stitching techniques, themes, and styles to show the impact of a wide range of outside influences on the lives of the artists and on the art form. She also provides a discussion of New Mexican Carson colchas and their place in the collector market. By focusing on the individual creative act, she shows how colcha embroidery is used to record how a stitcher's memories of her life are intertwined with the history of her community. Through this picture of a community of embroiderers, MacAulay helps us to understand their stitching rites and sheds new light on the relationship between Hispanic and Anglo cultures.

"E. Boyd was a pre-eminent authority on Spanish colonial arts. Twenty-three distinguished contributors discuss her work; traditional Hispanic arts and their preservation."--GoogleBooks.