Los Pinos Ranch Added to HSFF's Register

Los Pinos Ranch

At the August 25, 2022 Board of Directors meeting, the Education, Research, and Archives Committee recommended to the Board that Los Pinos Ranch be added to the HSFF Register of Properties Worthy of Preservation. The ranch was approved, adding another property with a fascinating history to the Register. Many of the guest ranches that once checkered northern New Mexico have now disappeared, as have many of the Spanish Log construction buildings in the region. Still operational and with great architectural integrity, Los Pinos Ranch is an enduring emblem of the economic activity and architectural typology that characterized the region during the early to mid 1900s.

Los Pinos Ranch, founded in 1912 by Amado Chaves, has operated as a guest ranch for a century. Part of the phenomenon of wealthy and educated individuals from the East Coast seeking outdoor recreation in a rustic yet cultivated atmosphere, Los Pinos Ranch was home to and the place of respite for many historically significant people. Notable figures who occupied the ranch include Charles Lummis, Marc Simmons, Paul Horgan, and Robert J. Oppenheimer. Oppenheimer frequented the ranch over a period which spanned decades, starting when he was a teenager. His horseback rides with Amado’s daughter Kia Chaves, a lifelong friend, eventually led Oppenheimer to the site of the Manhattan Project in Los Alamos.

Alan “Mac” Watson researched and wrote the nomination for the property on behalf of the ranch’s owners Alice M. McSweeney and William J. McSweeney. The McSweeney family is one of two families who owned and operated the ranch. The McSweeney and Chaves families both meticulously maintained guest registers, diaries, letters, photographs, and videos which provided Mac with a wealth of details on the ranch’s history. The property and its facilities, the history of its use through today, as well as the significance of the people associated with Los Pinos Ranch over a century, position Los Pinos Ranch as a place worthy of preservation and recognition. It is an honor to include such a remarkable property on HSFF’s Register.

LEARN MORE ABOUT HSFF'S REGISTER

J. Robert Keating's Poteet Victory: A Book Review by Pete Warzel

Poteet Victory
By J. Robert Keating
Atmosphere Press
Hardcover, 620 pages

I met Poteet Victory in 2019 when he became interested in and eventually stepped up as the buyer of the Historic Santa Fe Foundation’s former Delgado House on Palace Avenue. He had known the building for many years and fell in love with it, then wanting to make it his gallery, Victory Contemporary. He is an honest, direct, caring, and talented gentleman, and his wife Terry is as genuine a person as you can be. He had to weather COVID in his new gallery and did so thanks to internet sales. He and Terry are fine stewards of this important property in Santa Fe. Poteet also works in his studio on the upper floor.

They had donated to our publication of the 5th edition of Old Santa Fe Today, so several weeks ago I visited them to deliver a copy of the finished, published book. Poteet and I caught up and when I left I saw a rack with copies of this book for sale.

The biography by Mr. Keating is adventurous…a “Biographical Novel.” Being a self-proclaimed literary snob, I was quite leery. No need. Most of the book plays out as an interview conducted by Elliot Jacobs, a filmmaker (fictional character) interested in Poteet’s life. The dialogue is real, as captured by Keating on tape, and the tone of Poteet’s and Terry’s voices are right on the mark, capturing the rhythms, inflections, and vocabularies of both. There is a sense of sitting in Poteet’s studio, upstairs at the Delgado House, listening to him tell you the stories of his life.

Poteet was born Robert Lee Poteet, and took his grandmother’s family name at the end – Victory. So, today he has two last names, and doing so recognizes the importance of his American Indian heritage, his grandmother was Cherokee, his father Cherokee and Choctaw. What Elliot Jacobs, and I am sure Keating, thought he was going to hear was an Indian story. What Poteet’s life has been to this point is that, but really something different, so very individual to the nature of the individual. When asked how he wished to be described he says “’American Indian.’ ‘So you prefer American Indian (rather than Native American)’ “Yeah. I do. You’re native American.’” To the point but with a smile.

Poteet, surprisingly to me, was a scrapper, a street fighter. As a boy and then a man, he would try anything as a living: bull riding at age thirteen, pipeline work in high school, National Guard in the Viet Nam era. He learns and then builds a silkscreen print operation in Hawaii, that makes him some good money. In his twenties he goes and lives in New York City where he helps Andy Warhol develop his own screen print capabilities. Through Warhol he knows the rising reputation of Basquiat, and pulls no punches in what he thinks about it. “It’s like….It’s what I mean about artists like him bein’ a big hoax.”

In Michigan, during a job working with an oil company negotiating mineral rights with landowners, he is told by a woman that he would quit his job, move west, and work “…somethin’ to do with art.” West turned out to be Santa Fe, and his first job was as a bartender at Vanessie’s. He is invited to bring his paintings to hang in the restaurant (he studied at the Art Students League of New York), and they sell. He attends AA and works on his art, and begins selling by word of mouth. The University of Oklahoma commissions Poteet for a mural about The Trail of Tears. The mural became extremely controversial and was stopped by the University, incomplete. This goes to the core of Poteet’s being, with emotion and anger deeply felt to this day. His idea for the massive three-panel mural was the American Holocaust, and he is distraught that this history is not taught in our schools.

Keating writes forty pages on Poteet’s explication of the mural. It is important to Poteet’s story, perhaps the ghost in the machine of a very American success story. His success is via exemplary art sales, and the operation of a gallery, Victory Contemporary. As the story enters 2019 Poteet says, “Did I tell ya I’m in negotiations for a building?” That is our building, or was before his purchase - the Delgado House. And so we have come full circle. When he starts telling the stories that make up his life he is asked if they are true. His only answer is “Yeah, it’s all true.”

Which is what is so compelling about this book. Most autobiographies tell the edited life, the one that presents the subject’s view of his or her own self, and that view is a deluded model, not a reality. I remember reading a memoir by the poet and novelist Jim Harrison many years ago, and expected to find a gritty, unvarnished look at his fascinating, if not rowdy life. The disappointment was in the lack of substance. Granted, this is not an autobiography, but it may as well be as it is told in Poteet’s voice through an interview narrative technique. It is nothing except bald truth – warts and all. It is the warts that makes it a read about a very human success story, but one not without turmoil and angst. “Yeah, it’s all true.”

AVAILABLE AT VICTORY CONTEMPORARY AND ATMOSPHERE PRESS

Recap of HSFF's 2022 Annual Garden Party & Members' Meeting

By Hanna Churchwell

Each summer Historic Santa Fe Foundation (HSFF) invites members to the Annual Garden Party and Members’ Meeting. This year, reflecting HSFF’s goal of further opening the doors of El Zaguán to the public, we invited non-members to attend the meeting. Due to overwhelming interest, HSFF made the decision to host our Annual Garden Party and Meeting on both Wednesday, August 17 and Thursday, August 18. HSFF Executive Director Pete Warzel opened this year’s meeting with a recap of our ongoing programs and projects. The list was extensive; however, Pete delivered his recap of HSFF’s past year efficiently and thoroughly. Highlights from the recap include:

• The continuation of our Preservation Trades Internships. Three interns undertook projects at El Zaguán, Randall Davey, and Las Golondrinas and assisted Foundation staff with educational programming for the Youth Conservation Corps.
  

• Through our Mac Watson Fellow program, students were hired to research and write nominations to add properties to our Register of Properties Worthy of Preservation.
  

• The long-awaited 5th edition of Old Santa Fe Today hit the shelves of El Zaguán the first week of August. HSFF’s Deputy Director Melanie McWhorter took over this portion of the recap, to provide an overview of the behind the scenes work that took place to create the 5th edition and to update the attendees on the progress HSFF has made in the development of a corresponding app and maps.
  

• HSFF organized multiple tours, events, excursions all geared to the cultural and architectural history of the area. Highlights included a trip to Cordova to see Nuevo Mexico Profundo’s altar screen project and an excursion, overnight, to the Saint Joseph Apache Mission on the Mescalero Reservation.

This year’s guest lecturer, BC Rimbeaux, Mayordomo of Acequia de la Muralla– one of the last of the functioning acequias in Santa Fe, delivered a thoughtful and educational presentation on the history, significance, and contemporary state of acequias and water culture in Santa Fe and Northern New Mexico. Rimbeaux’s speech gave guests the perfect primer for the unveiling of HSFF’s acequia interpretive exhibit, which nods to the now defunct Canyon Road Community Ditch and was built utilizing the original stone from El Zaguan’s portion of the long-gone acequia. Pete Warzel turned the headgate for the inaugural demonstration of the interpretative exhibit, showing how water from the acequia may be diverted to irrigate the land of water right holders.

Thank you all for your continued support of Historic Santa Fe Foundation. HSFF staff continues to work on important projects as does our Board of Directors. We look forward to presenting even more exciting updates at next year’s Annual Garden Party and Members’ Meeting.

Tracing Time: A Book Review

Book Review
Tracing Time: Seasons of Rock Art on the Colorado Plateau
By Craig Childs
Torrey House Press
Paperback
228 Pages, $18.95

Review by
Pete Warzel

Craig Childs is a naturalist, environmental activist, adventurer, desert rat, and a wild man. Wild because of some of the risks he takes, like swimming in flash floods, maybe riding is a better description, and chasing bears in order to capture photographs. He is also an extremely talented writer.

Torrey House Press is a non-profit publisher based in Salt Lake City, focused on a “literary” approach to environment and landscape particularly in the American west. The firm is now twelve years old and publishes elegant, relevant books. Tracing Time: Seasons of Rock Art on the Colorado Plateau, is a fine, recent example.

Craig Childs and Torrey House are made for each other.

Childs puts the personal in his writing, starting mostly from a hand’s on, first person experience, that leads you into his vast knowledge and research on the subject. He is a master of the southwestern mountains and desert, all that inhabits that land, and has become an expert on the ancient ones who roamed the stark geography for thousands of years. House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest was Childs’ exploration of the roots and migration of the Anazasi. The Animal Dialogues: Uncommon Encounters in the Wild, presented his view of nature through reflective encounters with wild fauna, up close and personal. That book presents an amazing piece of writing in three pages, “Hawk”, that describes a hunt by a hawk for a rabbit, by simply describing the tracks, the sweeping wing traces, the dislodged fur, all in the record left on new snow. You never see the action; you know the action by following the signs.

Tracing Time also begins with the personal: “My sport is seeing.” We could add interpreting as a related pastime. Childs is in the frame of each image discussed, then branches out with conjecture, and discussions with experts, he is not claiming to be an expert, simply an observer. It becomes more personal as it all takes place in the initial days and months of COVID, pointing to an exact moment in modern times that marks the long years back to the ancient. His musings are varied for each symbol, his observations so interesting in the detail. Some examples: 

• Handprints: ‘These were not the marks of generic lives or of gods in legends, but individuals with names and faces, each a different person, a crowd, a room of applause. Holding up your own hand to compare sizes is involuntary.”

• Spirals: “Spirals are the high verb of rock art. They are the trappings of motion, like stepping into a planetarium with stars and planets swiveling around a domed ceiling.”

• Galleries (meaning a space filled with hundreds or thousands of images, some overwritten through time): “If a rock is living and thinking, certainly the art painted on it is non-stop chatter.” And, “It is what Carol Patterson calls ‘the presence of meaning.’ You don’t have to know what it is, only that it exists.”

• The Hunt: “if you encounter rock art while walking randomly, know that it’s not random. You’ve stepped into a pattern. Suddenly you find you are a pin in a map, an axis around which the land seems to turn.”

 There are no photographs in the book, rather quite elegant drawings of images from the rocks by Gary Gackstatter, that front each chapter, representing isolated images of the subject pattern Childs specifically addresses.  The effect is spare and simple, giving us an idea of the “art”, but keeping the focus on the narrative.

Craig Childs has written a paean to the symbolic work of the Southwest, and the landscape that is integral to the images left for us to ponder. “I am not offering a guidebook to places, but a guidebook to context, meaning, and ways of seeing.” He may offer speculation, or his own reflections, but he never states that this is the translation, this is what it means. He knows his subject first hand, and is well equipped to write the stories in this fascinating look into the past.

A satirical (and suddenly shelter-seeking) artist returns to El Zaguán

By Anonymous

For those Historic Santa Fe Foundation members and supporters who were enjoying the El Zaguán gallery shows five years ago, images of oversize cartoons with a slightly satirical bent may trigger memories of former El Zaguán artist Dominic Cappello. Cappello moved into El Zaguán the Summer of 2012 and produced his first show called “GOV DOM”, featuring a series of large format cartoons that presented his fictitious campaign for governor. The polices he was pitching were all very real (Cappello’s background is in public health strategic planning) but the zany cartoons were not what one would expect in a real campaign. More than one El Zaguán artist resident asked, “Is this campaign real or what?” 

Cappello’s other shows were a shared show with Española fine artist Diego López that attracted art (and margarita) lovers from across Northern New Mexico. This was followed by his contribution to a group show that highlighted the political circus surrounding the launch of Obamacare. He also designed the HSFF newsletter as part of community service to the HSFF.

COURTESY OF DOMINIC CAPPELLO

Cappello left Santa Fe in 2017 for what he thought was to be a dream job in Seattle, developing a data-driven infrastructure-building program focused on ensuring health equity and care for vulnerable Washingtonians. His boss, after the first month, told him that she was not comfortable with data nor the term “data-driven” because “people are intimidated by numbers.” It turned out she was more comfortable with him facilitating convenings to talk about the problem of poverty instead of actually addressing it. “That surreal gig,” says Cappello with a grin,” turned into what I describe as my sabbatical year from hell.” 

This is where the El Zaguán connection comes alive, yet again. Upon returning to Santa Fe and seeking shelter, HSFF director Pete Warzel (proud collector of an original Cappello called “Zombies on Canyon Road”) told Cappello, “I have bad news and good news. First, we have no vacancies at El Zaguán but I do have a lead on a brand new state-of-the-art apartment complex going up in the Railyard and it might meet all your needs.” 

Dom jumped into his new Railyard Flats apt to begin work for NMSU on a statewide campaign called 100% New Mexico, providing leaders in all 33 counties with the resources to ensure all families had access to (what is coined in his book 100% Community co-authored with Dr. Katherine Ortega Courtney), the “ten vital services for surviving and thriving”–including healthcare, food security programs, fully-resourced community schools and stable, affordable housing. 

DOMINIC CAPPELLO (LEFT)

This is where the story gets ironic (though it might be a sign of the impending breakdown of the electrical grid heralding the apocalypse). It's now June 2022 and Cappello is visiting Las Cruces for a one week face-to-face course at NMSU, part of his doctoral studies. A call arrives from his Santa Fe apt. manager telling him in a sheepish tone: 1) The entire Railyard Flats building complex’s electrical system blew out, 2) it might take many months to fix because: “reasons”, and 3) you must find a new place to live in Santa Fe until the lights come back on. 

A suddenly homeless Cappello reached out to Warzel (altruist extraordinaire) and as luck would have it–the lovely Apt #1 at El Zaguan was going to be vacant for two months, awaiting the start of construction on the interior phases of the EZ Master Plan. Cappello’s misadventure in housing insecurity was averted thanks to the welcoming arms of HSFF. 

Cappello, in what might be called a cameo appearance at El Zaguán, will be busy with his full time initiative work, his studies, and his ongoing political cartooning. He hopes to find a way to do a show even though the El Zaguán gallery is booked up until 2024. “If I can’t get the El Zaguán gallery space, I might just put on the show in my cozy 400 sq foot studio but forgo the DJ, band, dancers and pop up bar,” shares Cappello, “Either way, I am thrilled to be back in this historic adobe, a far more secure and inspiring place than the so-called modern complex I was living in.” 

To see Cappello’s illustrations visit the book Attack of the Three-Headed Hydras (downloadable free-of-charge) at www.fighthydras.com. To view the groundbreaking “100%” initiative visit www.1ooNM.org. Cappello welcomes your emails to dominicpaulcappello@gmail.com. To read more about the displacement of Railyard Flats residents visit https://www.santafenewmexican.com/opinion/my_view/when-crisis-hits-santa-fe-who-survives-and-who-thrives/article_40d26448-f80e-11ec-99f9-83f03b17354f.html.

Note from Executive Director: It is quite obvious that this piece was written by Mr. Cappello, himself, in the third person, which is interesting in itself.  I find it necessary to correct some of the facts presented here. I did not, in fact, suggest the Railyard Flats to Dom, rather he asked if we had any connections there, which we made, obviously, successfully. Dom in fact loved the place until this unfortunate circumstance. It is ironic that a 160-year-old apartment is the safehouse following a modern design breakdown…a very good reason for preservation and use of historic structures in our city. - PW

Dr. Chris Keegan to Research New Mexican Identities in El Zaguán's Stilwell Room

Article by Pete Warzel

The Historic Santa Fe Foundation welcomes scholar, Dr. Chris Keegan, associate professor of philosophy at State University of New York, Oneonta. Chris will be utilizing the space in our Stilwell Room for research and writing through mid-July, on a project that came to mind during a stay in Santa Fe in early 2021. He has received grants and is on sabbatical to complete his project. The impetus was the multi-layered social and cultural identities he encountered during his 2021 visit just following the 2020 summer and autumn of social unrest and protest in the wake of the COVID shutdown and the monument question nationwide.

The project is twofold:

1. Understanding the ideological landscape that has created identity in New Mexico, and

2. Using that empirical evidence to understand how Identity (universal, not just NM) is constructed.

His belief is that given the unique nature of New Mexico, it may hold the key to understanding the complexity of American Identity generally. Our state is in many ways still on the periphery of the United States, and so has always had, socially, personally, a great sense of independence. It is still something of a border that is not, or feels it is not, quite America. The ideological battle lines in the country may not make sense here.

Americans have an urge to pinpoint identity when in fact there is a multiplicity of the self. It is fluid, never stagnant. The advantage of approaching it from a philosophical discipline is that Philosophy asks the questions, hopefully the right questions, and has the discipline to clarify the answers.

Sitting with Chris, and making introductions to our friends and colleagues from other disciplines– history, anthropology, cultural preservation – it is apparent how complex the history and so the importance of place to social, political, personal identity, that New Mexico has to offer this project. Chris will share his work with us, and perhaps we can have him write a short article for our blog as he progresses in his research and thought.

His bio, developed for the grant process for this project follows.

Chris Keegan is Associate Professor of Philosophy and affiliate faculty in Africana and Latinx Studies at The State University of New York at Oneonta. He has published, presented, and taught on topics in philosophical psychology, urban philosophy, racial and ethnic identity, the philosophy of protest, and democratic theory. His current work explores the complicated forces—often unseen, misunderstood, or dismissed—that shape personal and collective identity and lead to distorted and confused personal, social, and national narratives. This work exposes the dynamics that lead to ideological and cultural prestidigitation and contribute to contested identities and civil unrest regarding monuments and memorials.

We welcome Chris Keegan to the Historic Santa Fe Foundation.