Helen Hardin

Helen Hardin was born in 1943 to painter Pablita Velarde, of Santa Clara Pueblo, and Herbert Hardin, an Anglo civil servant. Due to her mixed parentage, Hardin struggled to fit into the worlds of both her parents, not being allowed by the Santa Clara elders to participate in Pueblo ceremonies. She grew up speaking Tewa and English and lived at Santa Clara Pueblo until she was about 6, and attended school in Albuquerque, New Mexico. She graduated from St. Pius X High School in 1961 and attended the University of New Mexico, where she studied art history and anthropology. Hardin also briefly studied waving and textile design at the University of Arizona. She had a difficult relationship with her mother, which improved in the 1980s, and worried that people only bought her art due to her connection to Velarde. Hardin moved to Bogotá, Columbia, where her father was living, in 1968 with her daughter to get away from an abusive relationship. When she exhibited her work at the US Embassy in Bogotá and sold 27 paintings to people who had never heard of Velarde, Hardin became more confident in her art and began to develop her own style. Hardin's early work reflect the traditional style of her mother, but the style she developed was modernist, abstract and contemporary. She combined the ancient designs of Mimbres black-and-white pottery and symbols of the Native American heritage with geometric abstractions and influences of modern artists, like Picasso, to create visually three-dimensional space and colorful images with multiple layers of paint and varnish. She was one of the first female Native American artist to cross over into contemporary modern style. When she returned to New Mexico, she won first prize for innovation at the Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial in Gallup, her work was featured on the cover and main article of a 1970 New Mexico Magazine, and married Cradoc Bagshaw, a freelance photographer, in 1973. After she was diagnosed with terminal breast cancer in 1982, she continued to paint and create copper plate etchings. Hardin died in 1984 at the age of 41. Her daughter, Margaret Bagshaw, also became a painter. Today, Hardin's work is in collections including the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona, and the Museum of New Mexico in Santa Fe.