Bert Phillips’s life in Taos is well known. It began in the summer of 1898, when he and fellow art student Ernest Blumenschein came to Taos on a painting trip, a legendary event that has always marked the origin of the Taos Society of Artists (TSA). Phillips lived in the town until just before he died in 1956. Rather than survey his entire body of Taos work—landscapes, Taos Pueblo and its people, architecture—this exhibition seeks to expand our knowledge of specific paintings in which people in the Hispano community modeled.

Paintings of Hispano subjects are rare for the TSA. Research into the models’ families and recognition of who they were allows a new understanding of Phillips’s working method and greater insight into how paintings were conceived to fit the existing market—and appeal to the stereotypes held by potential buyers.

By focusing on these few remarkable paintings, some of his best work, the exhibition identifies the people, sets them in cultural and historical context, and enriches with their own stories Phillips’s visual narratives about friends and neighbors. With one exception, these paintings are not portraits as such, but imaginative tableaux in which people served as actors in stories that Phillips felt would have success, both in broadening his reputation on the exhibition circuit and in finding buyers among a public fascinated by, but largely ignorant of, Southwestern cultures.

Knowing more about these neighbors of Bert Phillips—in the broadest sense—gives significance to those who have long been unrecognized, broadening our view of the larger social dynamic of Taos. Guest Curator James C. Moore, CSHS staff, and members of the organization’s Hispano Advisory Council conducted research into the models, their descendants, Phillips’s life, his attitudes toward other cultures, and his paintings, including the objects, both sacred and everyday, depicted in them. This work has broadened the scope of The Lunder Research Center, a prime illustration of the kind of enrichment of narratives that CSHS aims to provide for the education of our friends and neighbors, and the greater public.

Couse-Sharp Historic Site thanks our partners who made this exhibition possible
James C. Moore, PhD, guest curator
     Director Emeritus, Albuquerque Museum
Alicia M. Romero, PhD, consultant
     Curator of History, Albuquerque Museum
CSHS Hispano Advisory Council
Albuquerque Museum
American Museum of Western Art—The Anschutz Collection
Harwood Museum of Art
Museum of International Folk Art
New Mexico Museum of Art
Sotheby’s