1890s - Arthur Rockford Manby built a 19-room Spanish hacienda adobe
In the late 1890s, when the refined Englishman Arthur Rockford Manby built his 19-room Spanish style hacienda adobe mansion near the central plaza in Taos, New Mexico, he filled it with art treasures of the day. However, no matter how refined he was, he was a loner and not a friendly man. In truth, he stole most of what he accumulated, and years later he was murdered. And no matter who took over the mansion and surrounding gardens, or how it was used, it never flourished.
1950s - Taos Art Association formed - the oldest non-profit arts organization in NM
Not until the 1950s when a group of Taoseños got the idea to form an art association and they needed a location for their project. They put together the money to buy the Manby property, turned the mansion into art galleries and created a fledgling "open-air" community theater in the gardens. The Taos Art Association (TAA) was in action and it was immediately embraced. It was the first, and is therefore the oldest, non-profit arts organization in the state.
1970s - the Taos Community Auditorium was built
By the 1970s private and corporate funds were raised to build the current Taos Community Auditorium and more ambitious productions were possible. For the next 30 years the TAA produced original theatrical productions, welcomed traveling performers, and sponsored the exhibition of work by visual artists, both local and from around the world. TCA advocacy has extended from budding organizations such as MC Productions to established groups such as Taos Talking Pictures Film Festival. It has spanned the globe from Taos Living Treasures to the Chicago Jazz Ensemble, to the National Theater for the Deaf, to Golden Dragon Acrobats, Missoula Children's Theatre and back again to the Taos Children's Theater and Robert Mirabal.
2000 - Taos Art Association becomes Taos Center for the Arts
In the year 2000 great change occurred. With the agreement of the community, TCA temporarily closed the facilities and restructured the organization and the Board of Directors. Both of these actions were critical to preserve the venue. In public meetings, the new Board promised to raise the money to complete required renovations, to reopen the auditorium and to modify the Stables Gallery/Carriage House to accommodate more and varied activities. Through generous anonymous donations of $400,000, those promises were kept and the auditorium reopened in November, 2001 followed by the Stables Gallery in April, 2002.
Taos Art Association (TAA) became the Taos Center for the Arts (TCA) and could return focus to the quality and diversity of productions and exhibitions at the facilities and the result that produces for the community. TCA venues offers world-class art in a familiar, user-friendly, renovated setting. It provides our citizens with world-class opportunities for their involvement as artists, students, audience, and volunteers. This is TCA's mission.
One hundred plus years later Arthur Rokford Manby could never have imagined the art treasures that would ultimately be in his adobe mansion. Art treasures for the people of Taos.
For artists such as Cliff Harmon, Charles C. Stewart, and Beatrice Mandelman, just to name a few, the Stables Gallery of the Taos Art Association would become central to their lives, a meeting ground for friends and a defining institution for the Taos Moderns.
The TAA actually borrowed its name from an earlier organization. In 1939, the Karavas brothers, local businessmen, founded the La Fonda Gallery at their La Fonda Hotel. Long a gathering place for artists, the lobby became well known for its ongoing chess games between artists and their friends. The gallery seems to have grown out of the first Taos Artists' Association of 1937, since the membership of both closely correspond. The first TAA dissolved prior to 1952, although the La Fonda Gallery continued well into the 1950s.
This left the TAA name free to be applied to the new organization formed in 1952. Charles Reynolds, president, and Perry Moore, treasurer, wrote the guiding philosophy of the organization, and in order to make sure these principles were followed, the credo was printed on membership cards and given to everyone who joined:
- 1. To work diligently, striving always to improve the quality of my work.
- 2. To aid and assist, whenever possible, other artists in developing their creative talents.
- 3. To aid the layman in the developing of a keener appreciation of the arts.
- 4. By no word or deed depreciate the efforts of fellow artists or craftsmen.
- 5. To maintain the dignity of art by physical, mental and moral conduct.
The tremendous artistic energy which characterized Taos in the early 1950s spilled over into the artists' new TAA, fueled in part by the desire many of them felt for reconciliation between Moderns and old-timers. Art lectures and social gatherings also contributed to the growth of the organization. By the early months of 1953, artist and lay membership had grown to well over one hundred. The sketch group drew as many as thirty-four to work from scantily clad models, often while listening to classical and jazz music. Out of this enthusiasm came the founding of the Stables Gallery, which allowed anyone to show but quickly became one of the centers for the Taos Moderns.
The Stables Gallery must have represented a particularly sweet success for Emil Bisttram, who seems to have been the Stables Gallery's prime booster, although he did not hold a bona fide office in the TAA until years after its founding. Among other events, he organized a group painting session that included teams of "aspen painters" and Moderns, then led them all in a group sing afterwards. It appears to have been his idea to display both modernist and "traditional" art together. This was appropriate, since he had an artistic foot in both of those worlds himself. A few months later, the gallery director hired to make the Stables a going concern, Leone Kahl, began hanging every sort of art produced in Taos at the time.
Naturally, the result was chaotic. Artists and would-be artists from throughout the Southwest took advantage of the opportunity to show at the Stables Gallery, which then charged only a twenty-five percent sales commission. In 1954, in an attempt to deal with the confusion, the number of exhibiting members was limited to one hundred from a six-state area. New members were elected by a three-person jury whose membership was apparently kept secret - possibly for the protection of the jury! In April 1956, all artists not living in Taos County lost exhibit privileges. The TAA expected the number of artists showing to level off at around eighty.
The TAA established that it could handle one major project (the gallery) and several lesser ones (the historical museum, the sketch group, the educational programs) successfully at one time. The era of the Taos Moderns had called for the creation of a new arts institution because the older art institution, the Harwood Foundation, was not in itself adequate to meet all the increasing needs of an ever-growing population of Taos artists. The expansion mood still upon them, the visual artists soon elected to take on a second major project - one which ultimately proved to be their undoing.
The artists, working with the Taos Little Theater and the Taos Chamber of Commerce, began planning development of an open-air summer theater on the grounds behind the Thorne House, the old Manby property where all TAA operations were located. Construction of the Encore Theater started in May 1955; the first play was produced in July. To the visual artists, many of them also amateur actors, the expansion of the TAA seemed like a logical development. They did not notice that the community's attention, and the focus of their own creative energy, began to shift slightly away from the Stables Gallery.
By June 1960, the number of artists showing at the Stables Gallery had dropped to forty-eight. In November, the gallery announced that membership would be further restricted. Among the new requirements were stipulations that an artist establish legal residence in Taos for one year before making application; that the applicant be a professional artist; that the applicant achieve recognition in the art field as determined by the screening committee; and that acceptance would be by majority vote of the art committee.
The TAA abolished its Historical Museum in 1957, but retained its interest in museums by renting the Thorne House to the Millicent Rogers Foundation for its museum the following year. With the Thorne House mortgage paid off in 1966, the TAA made a pledge to the community to become more active in promoting educational programs and theater, including renovation - and fire proofing - of its outdoor theater building. Fundraising began in 1969 for improvements on the theater facility and $91,000 had been raised when the place burned to the ground in November. The TAA then began making plans to build a new permanent auditorium, an important asset to Taos but one which put the TAA deeply in debt and forced the organization to divert increasing amounts of emotional, creative, and financial energy away from the operation of the Stables Gallery. With this new obligation came the gradual displacement of visual artists from the TAA board.
The Millicent Rogers Foundation moved its museum from the Thorne House in 1968, and following a time of vacancy and a short-term occupancy by a group involved in a weaving project, the Stables Gallery moved from the old stable to the larger Thorne House in 1971, where the TAA's visual arts operation was to remain. The new auditorium was completed but not paid for during the following year. By this time, the character of the Taos art community had changed due to the influx of new immigrants and the boom in both commercial art galleries and real estate.
During the 1970s, the Stables Gallery admission process became so bogged down that the screening committee failed to reach consensus on which artists qualified for membership. Some local, full-time resident artists became alienated when nationally prominent artists who were only part-time residents, such as Lee Mullican and Larry Calcagno (from the same generation as most of the Taos Moderns) were admitted, while relatively unknown local artists were not. Gallery membership gradually drifted down to below forty, the Taos Moderns still hanging onto the last remnants of what had been their TAA. The Stables Gallery management began promoting some artists over others, thus factionalizing an already small group.
Concurrently, commercial art galleries increasingly became the most visible aspect of the art community. The atmosphere of a growing Taos, more integrated than ever with the economics of the rest of the art world, seemed to change from favoring the creation of art to favoring the selling of art. Most of the Taos Moderns remained in Taos, but their artistic dominance of the community had long since peaked, and their influence had waned. The TAA, now a reflector of change rather than a leader, was forced to sell its parking lot to the Town of Taos to raise funds, and would soon enter into an embarrassing deal with a real estate broker of questionable virtue in an attempt to capitalize on its remaining property holdings. Finally, in the 1980s, as if in a ritual of defeat and dementia, the TAA cut down most of the trees in its much-loved lilac garden. No longer meeting the needs of artists on a predictable basis, the TAA and its Stables Gallery were overshadowed by two successful arts festivals with which the TAA cooperated as a junior partner.
The TAA would survive, but the Stables Gallery as an artists' cooperative began to dissolve around 1980. In reality the old Stables was not merely dying, it was already dead, having outlived the era which spawned it by several years. Most of the artists did not even show up for the final, frantic effort to save what they had created. Only thirty-two members remained at the end. Those who attended the final save-the-Stables meetings (which I witnessed as an interested observer) exhibited emotions ranging from impotent anger to forthright despair. None of them knew what was happening, that a time still grasped, was lost. These meetings, in which the artists could do little more than voice complaints, seemed to be the wake for the era of the Taos Moderns.
There are various reasons for the cooperative's demise. Non-artists took control of the TAA and made it part of the social scene: they liked art far more than they liked artists. Commercial galleries wanted to see the demise of the Stables Gallery because they perceived the cooperative as representing unfair competition. The artists constantly bickered with management and with each other. Most importantly, during the 1970s the Stables Gallery moved into a position of no longer representing a cross section of community artists, thus ironically cutting of its own natural constituency. However, what was historically more important than any of these causes was that the old Stables was such an integral part of the 1950s that it could not survive in the colder, more impersonal environment which came to characterize the art community in the 1960s and later. An art community dominated by purely commercial concerns, and by artists paradoxically more isolated from each other than ever before, was one which was anathematized against the old ways. The cooperative had been an extremely personal kind of institution.
The Stables Gallery represented the very lifeblood of the era of the Taos Moderns, and it is remarkable that it held on to its old form for as long as it did. The artists could not have saved it. The final death knell came in December 1981, after all efforts by the artists to regain control of their organization had failed. In 1951, the Taos Moderns thought they had discovered new, significant answers to artistic problems, and thirty years later found themselves treated as harshly by newcomer artists as they themselves had treated the old Taos Society of Artists. There is neither justice nor a lack of it in this, only an inevitability. It is the peculiar fate of American artists to occasionally find themselves "buried alive" while they are still active and productive, victims of the larger, disposable-minded society over which they have no control. The inevitability of being buried under a subsequent layer of Taos is a sobering one, but this is a powerful valley, filled with romantic images and timeless legends. I believe that among the brightest of those legends will be that of the Taos Moderns, and the immensely creative era they originated. It has been my intent to use the plowshare of art history to dig into their layer of Taos so that it might be remembered.
Appendix B: The Rise and Fall of the Stables Gallery
The Taos Moderns; 1992
