Three Paths to Genius

Both definitions apply to a trinity of books about three trailblazing artists whose legacy flows from Santa Clara Pueblo, tumbles down the Rio Grande to Albuquerque, then back flips north to Santa Fe. The artistic legacy of Pablita Velarde and her daughter Helen Hardin lives on through their paintings and in the life and work of their granddaughter and daughter Margarete Bagshaw.

The only documented, professional three-generation female painting dynasty, Velarde opened the door, Hardin was the first Native woman to move from representation to abstraction, while Bagshaw gathered all of their work to the mainstream art world.

Three books about those intertwined bloodlines have been released, complete with prints illustrating the works of each artist: “Pablita Velarde: In Her Own Words,” by Shelby Tisdale; “Helen Hardin: A Straight Line Curved,” by Kate Nelson, and “Teaching My Spirit to Fly,” a memoir by Margarete Bagshaw, the owner of Golden Dawn Gallery in Santa Fe, named after Velarde’s Tewa name. The first 100 “premiere editions” feature an original Bagshaw painting on the cover of a boxed set linen box. A few are still available. The books are available through the gallery, 201 Galisteo, Santa Fe, and at www.thethreebooks.com, 505-988-2024.

A rebel

Pablita Velarde was the first Native American woman to paint as a career, persisting despite the taboos and prejudices of her own heritage, as well as a dominant culture that told women they belonged at home. Born at Santa Clara Pueblo, she would go on to claim a galaxy of awards and public acclaim. All three books deal honestly with Velarde’s dark side — the alcoholism, her black moods — as well as her triumphs.

Her words were transcribed from a taped interview done in the 1990s for an exhibition at the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian. Tisdale’s book weaves in and out of Velarde’s voice, presenting her direct quotes in italics and dipping deeply into her private life.

Velarde’s mother died when she was 3 years old. Her father left her marooned at St. Catherine’s Indian School when she was 6. He remarried, and her stepmother manipulated alcohol-fueled snubs, making her an outcast in both her biological and tribal families. Despite the rejection, she built her own home on what was once her father’s chile patch.

Her daughter Helen Hardin once said her mother grew up angry.

The book presents Velarde as a rebel and iconoclast who regularly broke boundaries. Her father torched her drawings to ignite the family fire. At Santa Clara, women were supposed to produce babies and pottery, not canvases.

She would go on to be the first female art student at the Santa Fe Indian School, surrounded by a cast of future luminaries like Allan Houser and Harrison Begay.

She broke another boundary when she married a white man, Herbert Hardin, unthinkable to other pueblo members. Elder pueblo men chided her for depicting sacred ceremonies in her work, but Velarde thought they needed to be recorded to prevent them from being forgotten. Her work exalted pueblo women: She painted them husking corn, baking bread, firing pottery.

As a struggling artist, Velarde created murals for the old Maisel’s Indian Trading Post in Albuquerque. Then the government commissioned her to paint murals depicting pueblo life at the Bandelier National Monument Visitor’s Center.

But in 1956, her marriage imploded. Commissioned to create a 21-foot-long corn dance mural for a Houston cafeteria, she scattered her Albuquerque living room with the panels. Her husband worked nights as a city policeman and resented confronting the “mess” every time he came home.

“My grandfather came from the Anglo world,” Bagshaw said. “Women stayed home, men were the head of the household. My grandmother came from the pueblo world where women are the head of the household and make all the decisions.

“She thought that painting was what she was put here to do.”

Finally, Herbert Hardin took a job in Washington, D.C., while Velarde remained in New Mexico. The divorce wasn’t final until two days after he married his second wife, Bagshaw said with a roar. Herbert Hardin would go on to marry five times. The divorce and the presence of a stepmother added a sense of abandonment to Helen’s outrage.

Complex psyche

Helen Hardin was born in 1943; she was 13 when her father left. Both beautiful and talented, she stirred up jealousy and resentment in her newly single mother. Hardin bridled at Velarde’s controlling nature.

“Everyone likes to think of my mother as this beautiful, saintly woman,” Bagshaw said.”But she was a hell-raiser like all the rest of us. She was credited with having the best parties at St. Pius,” she added with a laugh.

Helen met Bagshaw’s biological father, Pat Terrazas, at the University of New Mexico. When Velarde came home from traveling to exhibitions and museum shows, she learned her daughter was pregnant. Later a desperate Helen bought a dime-store wedding band to appease her Catholic mother, but the couple never married.

“He was handsome,” Bagshaw said. “He was absolutely charming. He played football. He was a great dancer. I would have fallen for him.”

Hardin’s book describes the abusive Terrazas making both Hardin and Velarde’s lives miserable. He beat Hardin; she would leave him and then return, only to repeat the vicious spiral of domestic violence. Later Hardin would fly to Bogota, Colombia, to escape with her father. Bagshaw wasn’t told her mother’s Albuquerque address to prevent Terrazas from coaxing it out of her.

Terrazas was shot in the head in front of his Albuquerque bar, El Cid, in 1975. No arrests were ever made; witnesses “disappeared.” Bagshaw was 11 years old. To this day, she is reluctant to reveal more information than what appeared in local newspapers.

In Bogota, Hardin’s artistry blossomed. The U.S. Embassy hosted her first exhibition. She sold 25 of 27 paintings in a place where no one knew her famous mother. It was enough to return home and rent an apartment.

At first Helen mimicked Velarde’s style in her artwork, down to the traditional dances at pueblo plazas. But her imagery cracked open when she studied anthropology at UNM. Soon her paintings would bristle with petroglyphs and Anasazi imagery composed in an abstract context.

If all art is self-portraiture, Hardin’s work mirrored her complex psyche with its fractured geometry and sharp edges veiled in pottery designs.

The Santa Fe Indian Market played a central role in the careers of all three artists. Velarde and Hardin placed first or second more than 25 times. Bagshaw remembers her stepfather lifting her mother’s paintings out of the car and watching them sell before they reached the Palace of the Governors portal. Both women would generate a year’s income in a single weekend.

Fight for creativity

In 1973, Helen married Cradoc Bagshaw, who was more like a father to Bagshaw than her biological parent.

Meanwhile, Velarde was painting amid the cocktail culture of the 1950s, often balancing a glass of bourbon in one hand. At least one book has presented the artist in an abusive “Mommy Dearest” vein. But Bagshaw denied the characterization. The family finally staged an intervention in 1980 and Velarde largely quit drinking.

“In all three books my grandmother’s alcoholism is talked about,” Bagshaw said. “This woman had every right to be an alcoholic. She was going against everything that was expected of her. She was fighting to be a creative woman, fighting to be a mother. Look at everything she had to deal with.”

In her later years, Velarde would travel to Santa Clara like a reformed smoker and lecture her nephews and nieces on the evils of alcohol.

“She’d say, ‘Damn you, you need to sober up,’ ” Bagshaw said, laughing.

“It taught us a lot about relationships,” Bagshaw added. “It also taught us to be very supportive.”

Then one day Helen went for a checkup and came home with a diagnosis of breast cancer. The prognosis was dire. The disease raged despite aggressive treatment. The day Helen decided to end chemotherapy, she, Bagshaw and her stepfather told Velarde the devastating news together.

“My mother said, ‘I need you to stay sober,’ ” Bagshaw said. “My grandmother was 100 percent there for my mother.”

Helen died in 1984. She was 41.

Bagshaw took on the role of her grandmother’s caretaker.

Defiantly independent, Bagshaw worried about following in her famous family’s footsteps. Sleepless, bored and pregnant at 26 with her son Forrest, she started working in pastels to pass the long hours — anything but the paint that swirled across her forebears’ canvases. Her first work was in what she described as “primitive cubism” before she skated outside modernism with a geometric pull, incorporating the spirit of both her famous ancestors. She realized she could make a career of art when she juried into an Albuquerque show where her name was concealed. She sold out.

Today Bagshaw’s work fuses a vibrant color palette with precise shapes and texture illuminated by translucent layering.

When her grandmother died in 2006, Bagshaw fled to St. Thomas in the Virgin Islands. Three years later, she says, Velarde summoned her home to complete her own work and create a repository for the Velarde and Hardin legacies.

To this day, Bagshaw encounters whispery ties and lifelines connecting her to both women. She talks to them across both flesh and time — she calls the encounters “affirmations.” Objects appear. An old friend calls.

“They talk to me through my work,” she explained. “You just hear them saying things like, ‘This is a good thing.’ You sort of reflect back to what they may have gone through. Things happen — like the whole book project. Every time we needed money for the printer, something would sell.”