Women's worlds

This is quite a topic! But it's going to be short because I want to just focus on three women who happen to belong to the same family, all three incredible artists with their own distinctive style.

They were, and one is, from a pueblo in Northern New Mexico, they shared a passion for following their inspiration and thinking outside the box, far from the boundaries of their times, their culture, and the art world establishment.

The books -three, written by different women- that just recently launched in Santa Fe, are precious in that they each give an insight into the human as well as artist being, all immersed in the history of their respective times.

Can you guess who these extraordinary women are? Let me help you.
Pablita Velarde, her daughter Helen Hardin, and Helen's daughter Margarete Bagshaw.

Pablita Velarde and her father Herman

Helen Hardin

Margarete Bagshaw

Margarete has put an enormous amount of energy into the book project. She convinced other two special women to write a book each, and she herself wrote the third. Shelby Tisdale, who was until a few months ago the director of Santa Fe's Museum of Indian Arts & Culture/Laboratory of Anthropology, is an award winning author and an anthropologist specializing in the arts and cultures of the native people of the American West. She moved to Los Angeles to become the Vice President of Curatorial and Exhibitions at the Autry National Center. We miss her.

The second book is by Kate Nelson, an award winning journalist who found her home in New Mexico 23 years ago. She is the super active Marketing Manager at the New Mexico History Museum/Palace of the Governors.

The crown jewel of the whole project about the extraordinary artists' family, is the recently opened The Pablita Velarde Museum of Indian Women in the arts, in downtown Santa Fe.

Believe me, the books are worth your time and money! Great design too, and lots of pictures!
They open up a cornucopia of information, feelings, anecdotes, lifestyles, dreams, failures and successes, fears, culture clashes, love and death.

Enjoy!

Pueblo Ceremonial. Pablita Velarde

The Women. Helen Hardin

Messages. Margarete Bagshaw