Figurative Art Galleries

Figurative Art in the Southwest: From Taos to Today

Figurative art in the American Southwest carries a historical weight that no other region of the country quite matches. The tradition begins not with European arrival but with thousands of years of human figures depicted in petroglyphs and pictographs on canyon walls across Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado. These ancient images, the hunting figures of Canyonlands, the Kokopelli flute player recurring across hundreds of sites, the anthropomorphic kachina figures of Hopi rock art, establish a figurative tradition whose depth of time gives even contemporary figurative work in the region a dimension of meaning unavailable elsewhere in North America.

The modern figurative tradition in the Southwest is most closely associated with the Taos Society of Artists, founded in 1915 by Ernest Blumenschein, Bert Geer Phillips, and five other painters who had been drawn to northern New Mexico by its extraordinary light and the living culture of Taos Pueblo. The Taos painters were trained in the academic European tradition and brought the skilled figure drawing of their Paris and Munich educations into direct contact with Pueblo life, producing portraits and genre scenes of Pueblo people that, whatever their ideological complications in retrospect, remain among the most technically accomplished paintings produced in the American West. The tradition they established, of placing the human figure in the dramatic landscape of the Southwest, continues to define much of the figurative art produced in the region.

Spanish colonial painting, which arrived with the first European missionaries in the 16th century, introduced a parallel figurative tradition centered on the religious image. The santos and retablos produced by Hispanic santeros of New Mexico, carved and painted wooden religious figures and devotional panels, represent a living tradition that continues through contemporary santeros working in the same towns and villages where the tradition was established four centuries ago. The Museum of Spanish Colonial Art in Santa Fe holds the definitive collection; comparable examples can be found in the collections of the Millicent Rogers Museum in Taos.

Contemporary figurative painters working in the Southwest range from artists who work directly in the Taos Society tradition, placing figures in landscape with academic rigor, to painters engaged with global contemporary conversation about the figure's political and psychological dimensions. Galleries in Santa Fe, Scottsdale, and Denver show both, often in the same exhibition program. The Nedra Matteucci Galleries in Santa Fe represents some of the finest figurative painters working in the Southwest today, while galleries in Phoenix's Roosevelt Row show a younger generation engaging the figure through lens-based, mixed media, and large-scale painted work. The breadth of the tradition gives collectors extraordinary range of choice.