A669 Pablita Velarde
Stylized roadrunners by Santa Clara artist Pablita Velarde. The 15.5” x 17” casein painting is of five roadrunners feeding on a Yucca.
Pablita Velarde (1918 - 2006) was one of New Mexico’s best known Pueblo artists. She painted for much of her long life. Pablita Velarde's art captured the essence of Pueblo life.
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About the artist
Pablita Velarde
Pablita Velarde (1918-2006) Tse Tsan - Golden Dawn was well known to Indian art collectors for several decades. She was born in 1918 at Santa Clara Pueblo and was active up until her death in January, 2006.
After the death of her mother when Pablita was about five years old, she and two of her sisters were sent to St Catherine's Indian School in Santa Fe. At the age of fourteen, she was accepted to Dorothy Dunn's Santa Fe Studio Art School at the Santa Fe Indian School. There, she becomes an accomplished painter in the Dunn style, known as "flat painting". She was the first full-time female student in Dorothy Dunn's art class at the Santa Fe Indian School (The Studio); she also studied with Tonita Peña. She painted in the "traditional" style of Santa Fe and did accurate portraits of Native American life and culture. At first she worked in watercolor, but later learned how to prepare paints from natural pigments (a process called Fresco secco).
Pablita Velarde was best known for her earth paintings, where she used mineral and rock elements, which she ground on a metate and mano until the result was a powdery substance from which she made her paints. She painted almost exclusively on paper supports, and used watercolor and casein in addition to the earth pigments.
Pablita Velarde painted a series of paintings for Bandelier National Monument in New Mexico (1939-1948). Following her work at Bandelier, Velarde went on to become one of the most accomplished Native American painters of her generation, with solo exhibitions throughout the United States, including her native New Mexico, as well as Florida and California. In 1953, she was the first woman to receive the Grand Purchase Award at the Philbrook Museum of Art’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Indian Painting. In 1954 the French government honored her with the Palmes Académiques for excellence in art. In 1960 she published a book of stories and paintings, Old Father, the Storyteller. Following the forest fire in 2011, the paintings have been put in storage for their protection. She was also known to create art derived from the Navajo sandpainting tradition.
Well known author, historian and professor, Clara Tanner (1905 – 1997) called her the “greatest woman artist in the Southwest”.
