Juan Mirabal
   HOME

TheInfoList



OR:

Juan Mirabal (1903 – 1981), also known as "Tapaiu" or Red Dancer, was an artist from
Taos Pueblo Taos Pueblo (or Pueblo de Taos) is an ancient pueblo belonging to a Taos language, Taos-speaking (Tiwa languages, Tiwa) Native American tribe of Puebloan peoples, Puebloan people. It lies about north of the modern city of Taos, New Mexico. T ...
, New Mexico.


Three Taos Pueblo painters

Albert Looking Elk, Albert Lujan, and Juan Mirabal have been identified as the "Three Taos Pueblo" painters. As the Taos art colony grew, these men studied oil and water color painting and made works of art about their community, from a Native American perspective. An exhibition of their work "Three Pueblo Painters" was held at the
Harwood Museum of Art The Harwood Museum of Art is located in Taos, NM, Taos, New Mexico. Founded in 1923 by the Harwood Foundation, it is the second oldest art museum in New Mexico. Its collections include a wide range of Hispanic works and visual arts from the Ta ...
in
Taos, New Mexico Taos () is a town in Taos County, New Mexico, Taos County, in the north-central region of New Mexico in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. Initially founded in 1615, it was intermittently occupied until its formal establishment in 1795 by Santa Fe ...
January 24 - April 20, 2003. Occasionally Mirabal modeled for Taos artists. As an artist, he was a realist painter and muralist. His inspiration and subject matter was the pueblo, people and landscape of the Taos Pueblo lands. His was the longest painting career of the three men.


Taos Pueblo

Located in a tributary valley off the
Rio Grande The Rio Grande ( or ) in the United States or the Río Bravo (del Norte) in Mexico (), also known as Tó Ba'áadi in Navajo language, Navajo, is one of the principal rivers (along with the Colorado River) in the Southwestern United States a ...
,
Taos Pueblo Taos Pueblo (or Pueblo de Taos) is an ancient pueblo belonging to a Taos language, Taos-speaking (Tiwa languages, Tiwa) Native American tribe of Puebloan peoples, Puebloan people. It lies about north of the modern city of Taos, New Mexico. T ...
is the northernmost of the
New Mexico New Mexico is a state in the Southwestern United States, Southwestern region of the United States. It is one of the Mountain States of the southern Rocky Mountains, sharing the Four Corners region with Utah, Colorado, and Arizona. It also ...
pueblo Pueblo refers to the settlements of the Pueblo peoples, Native American tribes in the Southwestern United States, currently in New Mexico, Arizona, and Texas. The permanent communities, including some of the oldest continually occupied settlement ...
s. For nearly a
millennium A millennium () is a period of one thousand years, one hundred decades, or ten centuries, sometimes called a kiloannum (ka), or kiloyear (ky). Normally, the word is used specifically for periods of a thousand years that begin at the starting ...
, it has been occupied by the Taos tribe. It is estimated that the pueblo was built between 1000 and 1450 CE, with some later expansion. The Taos Pueblo is considered to be the oldest continuously inhabited community in the United States by
Ancestral Puebloans The Ancestral Puebloans, also known as Ancestral Pueblo peoples or the Basketmaker-Pueblo culture, were an ancient Native American culture of Pueblo peoples spanning the present-day Four Corners region of the United States, comprising southe ...
. The Pueblo, at some places five stories high, is a combination of many individual homes with common walls. There are over 1,900 people in the Taos pueblo community. Some live in more modern homes near their fields, moving to the pueblo during cooler weather. There are about 150 people who live at the pueblo year-around. The Taos Pueblo became an
UNESCO World Heritage Site World Heritage Sites are landmarks and areas with legal protection under an treaty, international treaty administered by UNESCO for having cultural, historical, or scientific significance. The sites are judged to contain "cultural and natural ...
in 1992, considered a significant world historical cultural landmark. Similar sites include the
Taj Mahal The Taj Mahal ( ; ; ) is an ivory-white marble mausoleum on the right bank of the river Yamuna in Agra, Uttar Pradesh, India. It was commissioned in 1631 by the fifth Mughal Empire, Mughal emperor, Shah Jahan () to house the tomb of his belo ...
in India, the
Great Pyramids The Giza pyramid complex (also called the Giza necropolis) in Egypt is home to the Great Pyramid, the pyramid of Khafre, and the pyramid of Menkaure, along with their associated pyramid complexes and the Great Sphinx. All were built during the ...
in Egypt, and the
Grand Canyon The Grand Canyon is a steep-sided canyon carved by the Colorado River in Arizona, United States. The Grand Canyon is long, up to wide and attains a depth of over a mile (). The canyon and adjacent rim are contained within Grand Canyon Nati ...
in the United States. For centuries, Pueblo painters have painted in tempera, clay slips, and earth pigments on woven textiles, interior walls, ceramics, and hides. Looking Elk, Albert Lujan, and Juan Mirabal adopted and mastered European painting materials and techniques.


Beginning of his artistic career

Mirabal began painting under the tutelage of
Marjorie Eaton Marjorie Lee Eaton (February 5, 1901 – April 21, 1986) was an American painter, photographer and character actress. Biography Eaton was born in Oakland, California, and raised in Palo Alto. She attended the Katherine Delmar Burke School and ...
and later after serving in the U.S. Army during WW II, studied in the late 1940s with
Louis Leon Ribak Louis Leon Ribak (3 December 1902 – 21 December 1979) was an American social realist and abstract painter who was a member of the " Taos Moderns" group of artists. Biography Born to a Jewish family in Grodno in the Russian Empire, Ribak e ...
, a Taos
modernist Modernism was an early 20th-century movement in literature, visual arts, and music that emphasized experimentation, abstraction, and Subjectivity and objectivity (philosophy), subjective experience. Philosophy, politics, architecture, and soc ...
painter who ran an art school after the end of World War II. Unlike other established painters from the Taos Pueblo, Mirabal was low-key. He did not have a shop in the pueblo, but he built a following of people who visited him and likely purchased his paintings.


Professional career

Mirabal was ground-breaking in his realistic depiction of pueblo ceremonial dances. He was influenced by
modern art Modern art includes artistic work produced during the period extending roughly from the 1860s to the 1970s, and denotes the styles and philosophies of the art produced during that era. The term is usually associated with art in which the tradit ...
and by the 1930s
Cubism Cubism is an early-20th-century avant-garde art movement which began in Paris. It revolutionized painting and the visual arts, and sparked artistic innovations in music, ballet, literature, and architecture. Cubist subjects are analyzed, broke ...
.
Marjorie Eaton Marjorie Lee Eaton (February 5, 1901 – April 21, 1986) was an American painter, photographer and character actress. Biography Eaton was born in Oakland, California, and raised in Palo Alto. She attended the Katherine Delmar Burke School and ...
, a painter schooled in modernism in Europe, came to Taos in the late 1920s and lived there in the early 1930s. Of the same age, Eaton befriended Juan and he became her model, student and dear friend. She is the one who taught him the basics of modernism prior to his studies with
Louis Leon Ribak Louis Leon Ribak (3 December 1902 – 21 December 1979) was an American social realist and abstract painter who was a member of the " Taos Moderns" group of artists. Biography Born to a Jewish family in Grodno in the Russian Empire, Ribak e ...
. Mirabal painted many murals, a large
mural A mural is any piece of Graphic arts, graphic artwork that is painted or applied directly to a wall, ceiling or other permanent substrate. Mural techniques include fresco, mosaic, graffiti and marouflage. Word mural in art The word ''mural'' ...
still exists in a home that is now the Adobe & Pines Inn Bed & Breakfast. Mirabal is known for the liveliness that he brought to his work, both in composition and color. Mirabal's ''Taos Pueblo'' painting inspired the following poem, by Enrique Pinedo, a student of Lawrence Intermediate School. :Taos Pueblo :The ground was rough under my feet. :The man was getting some wood. :The mountain looks like black paper. :The people look like Eskimos. :I smell honey in the village. :It sounds like drums beating and singing.


References


Further reading

* Nickens, P; Nickens, K (2008)
Pueblo Indians of New Mexico
Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing. . {{DEFAULTSORT:Mirabal, Juan Taos Pueblo artists Native American painters Painters from New Mexico 1903 births 1970 deaths 20th-century American painters 20th-century Native American artists