'Painters in the Valley' a guide to the artists that have called Albuquerque home

As a hobby, Albuquerque resident Carl A. Hanson would go to thrift stores and estate sales looking for bargain works of art.

“I kept spotting paintings selling cheap,” Hanson said in a phone interview, “but I didn’t know who the artists were.”

About 15 years ago, what had been a hobby grew into a minor project with the help of late Albuquerque art appraiser Jack D’Ambrosio.

“Jack spurred my recognizing the need for a reference tool that would provide biographical entries on the hundreds of Albuquerque area artists active since the 19th century,” Hanson wrote in acknowledgement.

That reference tool grew into his reference book titled “Painters in the Valley: A Biographical Dictionary of Albuquerque, New Mexico Area Artists — 1880-1990.”

Hanson said D’Ambrosio passed along to him obscure ephemera and used his appraiser’s knowledge to answer Hanson’s many questions about Albuquerque artists.

Hanson also took D’Ambrosio’s suggestion to contact famous local artist and art teacher Frank McCulloch.

He took D’Ambrosio’s advice. McCulloch, who died last year, helped Hanson expand his focus “from gathering names to writing biographical entries.”

Hanson wrote a lengthy introduction for the book. He said that it serves to give historical context to the artists, their art and the art community infrastructure.

An artist identified in the introduction — as well as in an entry — is Gerald Cassidy, who resided in Albuquerque for about nine years starting in 1899. Cassidy moved to Denver, then relocated to Santa Fe.

Among other turn-of-the-century Duke City painters named in the introduction were Joseph Imhof and Emma Albright. Another artist, Carl Redin, was a Swedish émigré who moved to Albuquerque for health reasons in 1916.

Redin, according to the introduction, was an early tenant of the restored Casa de Armijo, a residential/commercial compound in Old Town in the ’30s. The casa became Albuquerque’s “informal answer” to artist associations in Taos and Santa Fe, Hanson wrote, as well as the occasional home — or close neighbor — for such artists as William Lumpkins, Esquipula Romero de Romero and Carl Von Hassler.

The introduction discusses other artists who settled later in the Albuquerque area. Among them was Raymond Jonson, an abstractionist who had moved to the city in 1947 after having settled in Santa Fe years earlier. Jonson cofounded the Transcendental Painting Group.

Soon after World War II, artists from California moved to Albuquerque to teach and/or to paint. The “invaders” included Harry Nadler, Florence Pierce, Richard Diebenkorn, Clinton Adams, Garo Antreasian and Patrick Nagatani.

In the 1960s, new galleries sprang up that exhibited representational art by local artists. Hanson notes that one gallery, Galeria del Sol, was founded by four female artists — Betty Sabo, Pat Harrison, Jane Mabry and Carol McIlroy.

One entry refers to Ralph Berkowitz, who moved to Albuquerque in 1958. For decades, he was known widely as a classical pianist, an accompanist, a music teacher and an arts administrator. The entry said that in the ’70s, Berkowitz began painting, in watercolors and pastels, and created drawings, collages and woodcuts.

Indian Pueblo Cultural Center, which opened in 1976, showcased the work of Native American artists, among them Pablita Velarde, Helen Hardin and Jose Rey Toledo.

In the 1970s, Albuquerque artist Wilson Hurley began receiving national acclaim for his large panoramic landscapes, Hanson wrote.

Nearly all of the biographical entries contain artists’ place and date of birth, where they studied, the medium or media they painted in, what art awards they received, what local galleries, museums and/or organization-sponsored shows artists exhibited in, when they lived in the Albuquerque area and in other cities, and the sources for that information.

Early on in his research, Hanson thought the number of biographical entries would total 100 and that it would likely take a year to compile.

“The longer I looked, the more I found. It grew like topsy. I didn’t know there were that many people of talent who hadn’t gotten noticed, who were not hardly known at all,” he said.

By Hanson’s count, the book has almost 1,000 entries.

Hanson wrote in the book’s preface that before he began gathering names of artists, he needed to define the “Albuquerque area.”

He decided on these boundaries — San Felipe and Zia pueblos to the north; Laguna Pueblo to the west; Isleta Pueblo and Belen to the south; and Tijeras, Cedar Crest and Placitas to the east.

Next, the author wrote that he had to define what painting meant. He “broadly construed” the word to include media such as oil, acrylic, watercolor, gouache, pastel, encaustic, tempura and mixed-media, as well as painted metal, wall hangings, batiks, lithographs, serigraphs, woodcuts, murals and other “painterly” media.

Near the back of the book is an appendix with biographical sketches of 12 artists who settled in the Albuquerque area after 1990.

Perhaps the most famous of that dozen is Judy Chicago, known for her large collaborative art installations. Chicago and her husband, photographer Donald Woodman, bought and moved into the historic Belen Hotel in 1996. However, Hanson wrote, Chicago had in fact come to Albuquerque in 1972 as the recipient of a fellowship at the Tamarind Institute.

Hanson, 79, is a historian whose specialty is Portuguese history.