And today, his paintings are in numerous private collections and more than 30 museums, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. Near the end of his life the French government honored Awa Tsireh with the Palmes d’Académiques, an award for artists and academics. In 19, the work of Awa Tsireh and other Native American artists was represented at the Ibero-American Exposition in Seville, Spain. Other Anglo-American patrons, including painter John Sloan, writer Mary Austin and philanthropist Amelia Elizabeth White, became involved in championing Awa Tsireh’s art, which, over two decades, was included in numerous exhibitions around the United States - at the Arts Club of Chicago, the Art Institute in Indianapolis (along with Santa Fe muralist Olive Rush), and the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, among others. In 1922, Awa Tsireh won first prize in painting at the first-ever Santa Fe Indian Market. Active in preserving and promoting Native culture and arts, Hewett provided studio space in Santa Fe’s Palace of the Governors for Awa Tsireh, Hopi painter Fred Kabotie and Velino Shije Herrera of Zia Pueblo. Edgar Lee Hewett, first director of the Museum of New Mexico and the School of American Research (now known as the School for Advanced Research). In 1925, Alice wrote an article about the artist for The New York Times, illustrated with four of his paintings.Īwa Tsireh also received early support from archeologist and anthropologist Dr. The Hendersons provided the young man with high-quality art supplies, purchased a number of his paintings and welcomed him many times into their Santa Fe home. Alice became one of Awa Tsireh’s key promoters, believing him to be the best among a small group of rising Pueblo painters. In 1917, when Awa Tsireh was 19, his own quickly advancing watercolor skills were noted by poet Alice Corbin Henderson, wife of painter and architect William Penhallow Henderson and an active figure in Santa Fe, New Mexico’s early-20th-century cultural life. Awa Tsireh took to it naturally, perhaps also encouraged by his uncle, Cresencio Martinez, a skilled watercolor painter who died young in the 1918 influenza epidemic. As a boy, he attended the Pueblo’s day school, where teacher Esther Hoyt gave her students paper and paints and encouraged them to draw and paint what they knew, including ceremonial dances and daily life. Born in 1898, he was the son of Juan Estabal Roybal and Alfonsita Martinez, a San Ildefonso potter on whose pots her son is thought to have painted traditional Pueblo imagery as a young man. It was perfect timing for Awa Tsireh, also known as Alfonso Roybal, whose name in San Ildefonso’s Tewa language means Cattail Bird. Significantly, this attention came at a time when American artists, collectors, poets, writers and anthropologists - some of whom became patrons - were beginning to appreciate Native art for its aesthetic and artistic qualities, rather than simply in an ethnographic sense. Sandfield, authors of Awa Tsireh: Pueblo Painter and Metalsmith. The reporter may have been disappointed, but in the 1930s and ’40s Americans in New York City, Chicago, San Francisco and other major cities were clearly impressed with the paintings of Awa Tsireh (pronounced A-Wa See-day), one of the first Pueblo artists to receive national and international recognition, according to Diana F. When he mentioned that he and the other Pueblo artists had been taken to the top of the Empire State Building, the reporter excitedly asked, “What did you think of it?” Awa Tsireh replied, “I thought it was high.” The quiet, intelligent artist expressed genuine wonder at seeing the ocean, but he wasn’t taking the bait when repeatedly asked what impressed him about the city and its tall buildings. When San Ildefonso Pueblo artist Awa Tsireh traveled to New York City in 1931 for the Exposition of Indian Tribal Arts, which included several of his paintings, a reporter seemed intent on eliciting a “golly gee” in response to his first experience in the big city, according to a newspaper article at the time.
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