ON A QUILT THAT’S NEARLY A CENTURY old, a line of embroidery by Policarpio Valencia captures what makes the wordplay-loving textile artist an enigma of his time (1853–1931).
Not even the lion is the way it is painted, no matter how good the painter marches across the blanket in spidery stitched Spanish. And then, a few rows later, What is does not seem to be and what seems to be is not. Appearances deceive. That goes without saying.
The little-known story of Valencia—a farmer, salt trader, acequia mayordomo, mill operator, elected justice of the peace, Hermano Penitente, and folk philosopher of Santa Cruz de la Cañada, whose painstakingly embroidered tapestries contain colorful and occasionally confounding instructions for living—is still unfurling. It’s currently on display in the artist’s first retrospective, at the Museum of International Folk Art, in Santa Fe. In Appearances Deceive: Embroideries by Policarpio Valencia, 10 works with portentous, inspirational, and tongue-in-cheek messages are presented in dimly lit reverence, along with new English translations of Valencia’s wit and wisdom that are read by descendants and scholars in accompanying videos.
A 1922 embroidery on a Río Grande blanket.
Courtesy of Heard Museum.
“I heard a story from my grandmother—she just remembers him knitting on wagons,” says Jade Archuleta-Gans, a great-great-grandson of Valencia. For most of a life that spanned New Mexico’s transition from territory to statehood, the artist and his four burros traveled the wagon-wheel ruts of a trade route from his home in the Santo Niño neighborhood near Santa Cruz. In Santa Fe, he’d swap homegrown produce for salt, then sell the salt in Taos before returning home, a looping journey that took around two weeks to complete.
During his seventies, Valencia began recycling old clothing and blankets into canvases he covered with designs and declarations. He peddled the unique creations to local collectors, who were beginning to take an interest in the revival of traditional Hispanic arts. That’s how E Boyd (1903–1974), the Museum of New Mexico’s first curator of Spanish colonial art, began finding and acquiring his embroideries for the museum.
Archuleta-Gans only recently discovered that six of his ancestor’s artworks were in the collection of the Museum of International Folk Art. When he contacted the museum for an appointment to view them in the archives, textiles curator Carrie Hertz, who had never seen all the works unrolled before, laid them out for viewing.
Four generations of Policarpio Valencia’s family gathered at the Museum of International Folk Art in 2024.
Photograph courtesy of Chloe Accardi and the Museum of International Folk Art.
“Oh! This is an exhibit!” Hertz remembers realizing upon seeing the collected pieces. “And I want to know what’s going on here!”
Appearances Deceive displays those works with others from the collections of the New Mexico Heritage Arts Museum, the New Mexico Museum of Art, and the Heard Museum. The exhibition also includes a showcase of intricate colcha embroideries from the same region and era, which lend context and nuance to the traditions Valencia was working within.
“Policarpio Valencia is often treated as an outsider artist,” Hertz says. “But I think that’s a completely wrong framework for understanding him. It’s clear he was very much deeply engaged in his community, very intentional, and pulling from all these different cultural and artistic traditions and philosophies.”
Valencia’s embroidered verbal gymnastics and quoted dichos, proverbs, and even an ex-libris poem were newly translated by a curatorial team that includes experts in the regional historic Spanish dialect. In the texts, strong Nuevomexicano themes of Catholic faith, family, and respect for animals and land prevail. The textiles’ juxtaposition highlights Valencia’s distinctive hallmarks: the use of bright bands and patches of color, over which he employs buttonhole stitching with white thread to emblazon iron crosses, softly rounded animal shapes, asterisks, webs, and carefully lettered statements. Some quilts bear the curves of repurposed, sewn-in peplums or jacket sleeves; others use repurposed weavings, as in a Río Grande–style blanket from 1922 with orange, blue, red, and black accents.
I am a work of art made of fabric, it states in part. The tone is playful and administrative, with a healthy dash of mystery. I am wool, and the service I provide I do so most willingly. My owner wants me to speak, and that is why I’m speaking to you now. The Spanish script goes on to name the owner as Valencia, signs and dates the work (December 23, 1922), and closes with, I am concluding what I have written to those who read it. I can respond to those who do not understand it, but we must just let them see for themselves.
A color-coded page shows translation work on the textiles by curators Carrie Hertz and Kemely Gomez. The corresponding circa 1927 embroidery is the most complex.
Courtesy of Benjamin Brunt, Addison Doty, and the Museum of International Folk Art.
OUTSIDE GLORIA VALENCIA’S HOUSE GROWS an enormous spreading cottonwood tree planted on ancestral land by her great-grandfather Policarpio more than 100 years ago. Here, nestled beside the Acequia de las Herreras in the greater Española Valley, Gloria and her son Jacob Torres show me a few more glimpses of their ancestor’s legacy.
“All of us seem to go and get energy from it,” Torres says, gazing at the majestic old cottonwood.
Valencia’s artistic DNA can be seen in the riotous crumb quilt hanging on a wall in their home—a patchwork project that Gloria, a longtime self-taught quilter, recently pieced together. She first encountered one of his works by chance in a 1970s-era exhibition of regional works at the Museum of International Folk Art. “We weren’t even aware there was an artist in the family,” she remembers. None of Valencia’s artworks had survived among the family heirlooms. She then convinced other relatives to return to see his work on a Sunday when admission was free.
“I hand-quilt,” she says wryly. “Sometimes when I make a mistake, I feel somebody laughing at me.”
Jacob Torres stands near his great-great-grandfather’s grave in the Española Valley.
Photograph by Stefan Wachs.
When Appearances Deceive was in development in 2024, four generations of Valencia descendants gathered at the museum with curators to examine his works, using gloves to flip the delicate double-sided quilts over to read the sometimes teasing, often profound messages. “Policarpio’s son was an elected justice of the peace as well,” Hertz says. “A lot of the family members are still lawyers and judges, so they stayed within the law, and many have continued to farm.”
The idea of application heavily underpins Valencia’s messaging: If these are the laws of life, how then do we carry them out? The question lingers in the air as Torres—who is featured reading his ancestor’s words in the videos at the museum—shows me around the remnants of the house Valencia built in Santo Niño, a roofless, crumbling adobe on the sprawling family property.
Torres is a 46-year-old plant scientist, who is pursuing a doctorate in engineering at the University of New Mexico. As I examine the mostly vacant landscape surrounding the old house, he tells me it’s a regular campout spot for people in Española who have nowhere else to go. Torres is at the tail-end of a summer that started with a list of lofty goals aimed at reinvigorating his deep querencia for the land he inherited, much of which has been untended for some time. “It’s only a matter of time before the family gets tired of paying taxes and the water rights on it without doing anything,” he says, “unless I can step up and get my farming game going.”
"Here there is imitation of animals," begins Policarpio Valencia’s 1925 embroidery with animal figures, which warns, "Appearances deceive."
Courtesy of Addison Doty and the Museum of International Folk Art.
He aims to restore the farmland—long-dormant and blighted by Siberian elms and other invasive weeds—irrigate it with acequia waters, clean out the former bar once operated by his late grandfather Juan Valencia, and restart Juan’s 1957 Chevy dump truck, which has sat silent under the cottonwood for more than 25 years now.
Oh, and he’s also planting a crop of expensive, high-quality saffron seeds to test the newly rehabilitated soil.
Valencia’s great-great-grandson seems up to the tasks at hand. Torres earned an advanced engineering degree at Purdue, then became a horticultural expert, who advised NASA on growing Española Improved chile peppers aboard the International Space Station in 2021, part of an experiment to cultivate food in space. His current venture, the Moon Chile Challenge, is aimed at visiting and encouraging local school groups to contribute to “space chile” research and local agriculture by growing their own indoor Martinez Chimayó chiles. He calls himself Jacob Pepperseed in service of spreading the gospel of chile propagation. That messaging is helped by the fact that Torres is also a digital creator on Meta’s platforms with more than 10,000 followers. (He likens Valencia’s screeds to his own Facebook posts.)
The remnants of the house Policarpio Valencia built for his family in Santo Niño.
Photograph by Stefan Wachs.
Torres tells me he’s been frustrated by weeks of rain and flooding that may be upsetting the delicate balance of the newly planted saffron. “Appearances deceive, though,” he says with an optimist’s smile. He feels a unique synergy in the museum exhibition of his artistic ancestor having converged on this new effort to restore the land Valencia once cultivated so carefully, more than a century ago.
“That kind of energy only comes once in a generation,” he says, in words that sound as wise as the ones his great-great-grandfather left behind. “I have this creativity in me, and I need to get it out, say and do these things, and I only have so many years left.
“Now that I’ve heard his story,” he adds, indicating the ancestral tree with the rusted turquoise truck parked beneath it, “I like seeing myself in it.”
Managing Editor Molly Boyle capped her Santo Niño visit with a dinner stop at another Española family institution, El Paragua.
