'A Southwest Maverick': New book sheds light on artist Mac Schweitzer

A new book rediscovers an artist whose immense talent has been buried under the dust of decades.

The artist, who died in 1962, is Mac Schweitzer. She took the initials of her birth name — Mary Alice Cox — and hitched them to the surname of her first husband, John “Jack” Schweitzer. That fusion resulted in her artist name.

“Mac Schweitzer: A Southwest Maverick and Her Art” is a deeply researched, eminently readable biography chock-full of images.

Maverick is an apt one-word description of Schweitzer as a person and as an artist.

“She was in love with the American West,” Ann Lane Hedlund, the author of the book, said in a phone interview.

“I looked (maverick) up. It means an unbranded calf or a yearling. Or as I like to say, ‘unbridled.’ She was that. She was a free spirit.”

However, Schweitzer was neither a feminist nor a member of any women’s organization for the arts, Hedlund said.

The oldest of three siblings, Schweitzer was born in suburban Cleveland, Ohio, in 1921 and grew up with a deep love of horses. She rode horses and painted images of them.

Schweitzer is shown in a black-and-white photograph with her hair cut short, posing for her 16th birthday carrying a rifle.

Her brother John is quoted as saying that for football games on an empty lot, Mary (Mac) was the fullback … and the best player.

She attended the Cleveland School of Art and moved to Tucson, Arizona, after a stop in Wyoming.

Hedlund writes that Schweitzer divided her art into three categories, “the horse and cowboy art, regional Southwest pictorial subjects that became her best-known body of work, and early modernist works headed toward deeper symbolism and abstraction.”

Those pictorial subjects included scenes of Tohono O’odham, Hopi and Navajo family life, studies of desert plants (e.g. tumbleweed, sagebrush, cactus), wildlife (e.g. coyotes, sparrowhawks, goats, desert fox, desert falcons, raccoons, javelina and buzzards), structures (e.g. a Navajo hogan, a house in a Yaqui village in the city of Tucson) and landscapes (e.g. Hopi Second Mesa and Tsegi Canyon in Navajo National Monument).

Schweitzer was an award-winning artist who created hundreds of works.

She worked in a dizzying array of media, including oil on canvas, oil (thick impasto) on Masonite, watercolor on paper, tempera on Arches paper, ink on pebble mat board, lithographs, serigraphs and ceramics.

Mac and Jack Schweitzer married in 1943. They had a son, Christopher, nicknamed “Kit,” who was born in 1944.

The Schweitzers divorced in 1952.

In the book, Hedlund cites a number of reasons for the split up — “a youthful marriage with an idealistic start, competing careers, and diverging dreams.”

Maybe there’s another factor — Schweitzer’s ingrained independent spirit as an artist. As a single mom, she arranged her art-making and child-rearing schedules. Via pickup truck, she took Kit with her on many trips, visiting the people and landscapes that became subjects of her art.

Schweitzer’s art gained recognition and she exhibited at museums and galleries across the country.

Then in 1958, after a whirlwind courtship, Schweitzer married Art White. At the time, White was the bachelor superintendent of the remote Navajo National Monument in northern Arizona. The job took precedence in his life, just as being an artist had long dominated Schweitzer’s.

Schweitzer’s new life at the monument demanded she give up her primary focus on her art and realign into the unfamiliar and uncomfortable role of housewife and hostess, the book explains.

That lifestyle change created tension and distress for Schweitzer, Hedlund writes.

Schweitzer and White became parents in 1959 with the birth of her second son, Tom White.

Hedlund writes that “Mac found herself in a marriage where not only did her identity as an artist take a back seat to the classic role of wife and mother, but her partner did not meet her emotional needs.”

Schweitzer reputedly died by suicide in 1962. She did not leave a note.

“I am very uncomfortable with the notion that she took her own life,” Hedlund said.

That same year, Kit was living with his father and step-mother in Oklahoma.

Schweitzer, Tom White and Hedlund have, or have had, their own connections to New Mexico.

Schweitzer, with Kit in tow, often attended Shalako ceremonies at the Pueblo of Zuni and portrayed the imposing figures in serigraphs.

Schweitzer also exhibited artwork in a state museum in Santa Fe and at a Taos art gallery.

White is a graduate of the University of New Mexico and lives in Albuquerque. A chef and restaurateur, he is the owner of Il Vicino restaurant chain in three states and is the owner of Two Fools Tavern in Albuquerque.

Hedlund, a longtime cultural anthropologist, resides in Silver City.

White has praised Hedlund’s book.

“Ann is exhausting, thorough in her research and I am grateful for her doing (the book),” he said in a phone interview. “I am proud of my mom and I’m glad that her art is getting some exposure after all these years … And the book makes me realize the impact she made in her day.”

Hedlund also had her own connection to the Schweitzer family.

She and Kit married in 1982. They divorced 35 years later, but remained close and, Hedlund said, began talking about a biography of Schweitzer and her art.

Kit died at age 74 from injuries in a fall from a ladder, she said.

“Mac was the mother-in-law I never got to meet,” Hedlund said.

'A Southwest Maverick': New book sheds light on artist Mac Schweitzer