"The founding of New Mexico's famous art colony and its pioneer artists"--Jacket subtitle.

A well-illustrated study of the patronage that allowed the fledging art colony in northern New Mexico to flourish.

This definitive documentary history of the Society that made the northern New Mexico town famous as an art colony.

The underground world of con men, winos, prostitutes, laborers, and artists has been an abundant source of material for great writers from Dickens to Bukowski. The underground world of Taos, New Mexico, is no different. In the late 1950s this mountain town was higher, brighter, poorer, and farther removed than London, Paris, or Los Angeles, but it was every bit as rich for the explorations of a young writer. Max Evans, the beloved New Mexican writer of such enduring classics of Western fiction as The Rounders and The Hi-Lo Country, returns to form with The King of Taos. Set in the late 1950s, the novel tells the stories of sharp-witted Zacharias Chacon, aspiring artist Shaw Spencer, and a circle of characters who drink, fight, love, argue, and—mostly—talk. Readers will enjoy this witty and moving evocation of unforgettable characters as they look for work, love, comfort, dignity, and bottomless oblivion.

"Lorenzo in Taos," is written loosely in the form of letters to and from D.H. Lawrence, Frieda Lawrence, Robinson Jeffers, and Luhan. The book is a highly personal and most informative account of an intense relationship with a great writer.

Illuminates both the well- and lesser-known literary figures of New Mexico, whose collaborative efforts created enduring literary colonies. This book also discusses fifteen writers and concludes with walking and driving tours of Santa Fe and Taos.

They all came to Taos: Georgia O'Keefe, D. H. Lawrence, Carl Van Vechten, and other expatriates of New York City. Fleeing urban ugliness, they moved west between 1917 and 1929 to join the community that art patron Mabel Dodge created in her Taos salon and to draw inspiration from New Mexico's mountain desert and "primitive" peoples. As they settled, their quest for the primitive forged a link between "authentic" places and those who called them home. In this first book to consider Dodge and her visitors from a New Mexican perspective, Flannery Burke shows how these cultural mavens drew on modernist concepts of primitivism to construct their personal visions and cultural agendas. In each chapter she presents a place as it took shape for a different individual within Dodge's orbit. From this kaleidoscope of places emerges a vision of what place meant to modernist artists-as well as a narrative of what happened in the real place of New Mexico when visitors decided it was where they belonged. Expanding the picture of early American modernism beyond New York's dominance, she shows that these newcomers believed Taos was the place they had set out to find-and that when Taos failed to meet their expectations, they changed Taos. Throughout, Burke examines the ways notions of primitivism unfolded as Dodge's salon attracted artists of varying ethnicities and the ways that patronage was perceived-by African American writers seeking publication, Anglos seeking "authentic" material, Native American artists seeking patronage, or Nuevomexicanos simply seeking respect. She considers the notion of "competitive primitivism," especially regarding Carl Van Vechten, and offers nuanced analyses of divisions within northern New Mexico's arts communities over land issues and of the ways in which Pueblo Indians spoke on their own behalf. Burke's book offers a portrait of a place as it took shape both aesthetically in the imaginations of Dodge's visitors and materially in the lives of everyday New Mexicans. It clearly shows that no people or places stand outside the modern world-and that when we pretend otherwise, those people and places inevitably suffer.