New Deal Reckoning

In retrospect, it all seems like a brilliant fire of creativity swept the nation before a dreadful downpour doused it. When the United States entered World War II, New Deal programs ceased overnight. Construction workers were pulled into military service. National attention shifted, and the artistic momentum stalled out. As the decades piled on, buildings were abandoned, artworks were lost, and those paintings and murals that survived faded into something like dated wallpaper—still there, but ignored and sometimes resented.

Except for Flynn’s efforts to bring attention to New Deal legacies, that’s largely where things stood in Gallup, until a plucky nonprofit began eyeing the paintings and murals in its western New Mexico midst. When it did, its members noticed that something was not only off but offensive about some of the city’s 51 paintings and 10 murals.

Read More: Cleaved by historic Route 66 in the sprawling northwestern part of the state, this former coal-mining town once served as a bustling rail-construction outpost. The chug and whistle of trains still resound.

Images of conquering heroes and primitive Natives bedecked the walls of a courtroom in the McKinley County Courthouse and in the Gallup High School library. Paintings by Indigenous people were forced into the “flat style” pioneered by Dorothy Dunn at the Santa Fe Indian School. Hispanic villages were rendered in pastel swoops that camouflaged—or ignored—the real lives within them.

The more Rose Eason looked, the more concerned she became. As executive director of gallupARTS and a woman who married into a Diné family, she lamented how the works are “rife with stereotypes and inaccuracies.” In an era when “tear it down” arises more and more as the only option, she saw a different opportunity. What gallupARTS did next could serve as a national lesson in how to grapple with the flaws of history and forge a better path forward.

“The art itself is so provocative,” she says. “It’s significant in American history and New Mexico art history, and the issues it raises are ones we still face today—how Native art is defined, what the market is for it, who has the authority to tell the stories. This is a chance to do community building, to have tough conversations, and to learn about our past.”

JERRY BROWN ATTENDED NAVAJO BOARDING SCHOOLS that were “more about pushing sports than art.” He wasn’t exposed to the simplistic paintings that Dorothy Dunn began promulgating in 1932, which came to define Indigenous art nationally. By the time Brown enrolled at the Institute of American Indian Arts, in Santa Fe, that style was mainly a topic for historical discussion. “They told us to leave our baggage at the door,” he says of the school’s aim to draw out the students’ individual styles. “I said, ‘I am here as a Navajo abstract artist,’ and I still am.”

One of his works, a glass-and-tile mosaic of the nearby landscape, sits high on the south face of the recent courthouse addition. Now 50, Brown had never set foot in the old courtroom where, in 1940, Minnesota native Lloyd Moylan painted a 2,000-foot-long mural from the top of the dark-wood wainscoting to the ceiling on all four walls.

On a winter day, Brown accompanies Eason past two security stations to see Moylan’s courtroom mural, The History of McKinley County, a collage-like creation in washed-out tones of blue, green, and brown. It begins in one corner with poorly outlined dinosaurs before creeping past warring tribes and the arrival of Spanish conquistadors and then American soldiers, followed by mountain men, miners, railroad workers, tourists, and archaeologists.

Read More: Gallup comes together through artists, war heroes, outdoor enthusiasts, and one mighty ceremonial.

The 1680 Pueblo Revolt, where tribes drove out the Spanish colony for its treatment of them, is summed up in a scene where warriors scalp a priest. Even as the 20th century’s tourism era cranks up in the mural’s chronicle, a Native child is depicted as naked and sorely underfed.

“Paint it over,” Brown says, his discomfort evident. The notion, he says, that a Diné person would stand trial among such images or that Native plaintiffs would seek environmental justice there seems plainly prejudicial. “What I’m seeing here is death,” he says. “Why is this acceptable?”

Eason agrees with him but hopes to seize a new narrative. Her long-held dream is to turn the courthouse—a 1939 Trost and Trost–designed Spanish Pueblo Revival building—into an art museum. It would include the first floor, currently occupied by the district attorney’s office, where New Deal decor blends sand painting–style murals, tin light fixtures, and brightly colored tiles with Southwestern graphics. The courtroom, she says, screams out for contemporary interpretations.

“My inclination would be to preserve the mural as a door into the attitudes of the time,” she says. “In a place like Gallup, where the Long Walk is just three or four generations past, we still need to address that. People give lip service to intergenerational trauma, but until you can see how that trauma was excused or written off, you don’t see how powerful it is.”

The Long Walk was the 1863–68 forced relocation of the Diné and the Mescalero Apache to the Bosque Redondo Reservation in Fort Sumner, far from the tribes’ sacred mountains. The Mescalero eventually escaped, while the Diné endured squalid conditions before a landmark treaty returned them to their homeland, with the tribe conceding they would adapt to American ways of life. Economic deprivations still mark the tribe, which drew national attention (though hardly a solution) during Covid, when the virus hit the Navajo Nation disproportionately and a lack of utilities, including clean water, hampered its recovery.

In 2018, well before the pandemic demanded a switch to virtual programs, Eason took a leap of faith and applied for a National Endowment for the Humanities grant. Just 8 percent of applicants succeed, and they tend to bear names like Harvard University. Her proposal was to create a virtual museum of New Deal art, then develop online critiques and analyses from Indigenous, Hispanic, and Anglo artists, historians, and scholars.

The grant got picked; the work began. Still in the development stage, the website already guides users through the city’s New Deal holdings. A beta site that could go public in fall 2024 gathers contemporary voices in guided “tours,” lectures, and Q&A’s. Participants include Diné artists like Brown and Eric-Paul Riege, Diné/Zuni Pueblo poet Roanna Shebala, Laguna Pueblo historian Teri Frazier, and Latina art educator Madalena Salazar.

New Deal art conundrums aren’t unique to Gallup. The University of New Mexico has struggled for years over what to do with four Kenneth Adams murals in Zimmerman Library. If you look past their welcoming pastel hues, the paintings show Hispanic and Indigenous people as laborers, with Anglos as both scientists and the centering force uniting New Mexico’s tricultural trope. At present, the murals are shielded by drapes.

Read More: A treaty’s anniversary opens a way for Navajo people to confront their memories of the Long Walk—and for all Americans to heal from it.

State Historian Rob Martínez remembers seeing the murals while attending UNM in the 1980s and ’90s. “They were controversial then,” he says. “The question was ‘Do we paint over them or preserve them?’ While they have some challenges, I thought they were a way of teaching us about attitudes back then.”

As debates over public art mount, Martínez has found himself struggling for an answer to issues that, he admits, must come from a community of voices, much as Gallup is attempting to do.

“Public art should speak to everyone,” he says. “But you have to give it the context of history. History is a teacher. It’s not supposed to make us feel good. We’re supposed to learn from it. We need to approach it with open minds and open hearts.”

THE EXAMPLE SET BY THE NEW DEAL'S COMMITMENT to public art remains bright in Gallup. Walking from gallupArts’ Art123 Gallery, on Coal Avenue, to the courthouse takes visitors past contemporary murals and even painted trash cans. In 2018, gallupARTS built on the mural craze by establishing its alleyway murals program. Diné artist Marina Eskeets took over two right-angle sides of a building for Óódááł/Everyone Moving Forward, which shows bubble-blowing, gum-chewing kids tending sheep. It draws on a childhood memory of helping her grandfather with his flock, she says in her artist’s statement, and brings her a pang of nostalgia.

“A few years later,” she writes, “my grandparents would sell all their sheep and instantaneously I didn’t walk across the land like I once did.”

Eason says local kids have showered this mural with their love. “They say it’s the only one that looks like them as they are today,” she says.

Seeing yourself in art and being seen by artists hits at the profession’s most fundamental purpose—to define us and unite us. In that, Lloyd Moylan’s courthouse mural holds a glimmer of hope.

In the section where he illustrated the Long Walk, Moylan showed rifle-toting U.S. soldiers above a huddle of Diné women. The women curl forward, their bodies wrapped tightly in blankets, their hair tied in buns. One of them angles her head toward her left shoulder and delivers the only example in the entire mural of a person with a direct gaze. It’s hard to say precisely where she’s looking—at a juror, a prosecutor, a defendant? It changes depending on where you stand.

Perhaps she speaks to something else, something too important to erase. With one focused eye, she has become history, an eternal reminder. She knows what was done. She remembers. She sees.