Fiesta Races—Taos Pueblo

or
[The Races, Taos Pueblo Fiesta

Generously provided by Gilcrease Museum

This painting depicts the annual autumn San Geronimo festival at Taos Pueblo and, like the subject, it contains a high level of latent energy. The figures in the foreground are warming up for a foot race between two clans. A number of onlookers in the background observe the activities. Bathed in dazzling sunlight, the gathered celebrants pose anxiously in anticipation of the ensuing competition.

The painting's chromatic elation reveals the enduring sense of joy that the artist brought to his Indian subjects even as his enthusiasm for Indian subjects in his art was waning.

Other artists were celebrating life at the pueblo as well. Sharp’s fellow TSA member Victor Higgins, for example, produced one of his most powerful canvases, Pueblo of Taos (related image 484a) with the same type of gathering in the mid-1920s. Dorothy Brett would present an explosively colorful abstraction of the fiesta day in the mid-1960s. The ebullience of the occasion, the colorful patterns established by the participants set against the earthen planes of the pueblo walls, infatuated painters over generations.

Peter H. Hassrick

Artist: Joseph Henry Sharp
Date: ca. 1929; [1900]
Catalogue Number: 484
Medium: oil on canvas
Inscriptions: LR: J.H.SHARP.

Penciled on verso: "The Races-Taos Pueblo Fiesta Sept 30th"

Penciled and glued to dust dover: Taos Pueblo Fiesta Sept. 30th The races between the two clans. The track several hundred yards with the rival groups at each side. Runners start at each end, several going at same time and kept up until all runners have competed. How they keep account and know who won is a puzzle! The Chief is touching up the legs of a runner to give him speed."

Dimensions: 19 3/4 x 16 3/4 in.
Credit Line: Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, OK. Gift of the Thomas Gilcrease Foundation, 1955.
Accession Number: 0137.311
Subjects: Pueblo, Taos, festival, group, race

The artist; [?]; Dr. Philip G. Cole, Tarrytown, NY; Thomas Gilcrease, Tulsa, OK, 1947; The Thomas Gilcrease Foundation, Tulsa, OK; present owner by gift 1955

This painting, under the title of Fiesta Races— aos Pueblo, is thought to have appeared for the first time in an exhibition titled Indian Paintings, Western Landscapes and Flowers at Cincinnati's Traxel Art Galleries in 1929. It may have been the last time Sharp showed there as the gallery went bankrupt during the depression.

Fiesta Races—Taos Pueblo

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