Pablita Velarde

1918 Santa Clara Pueblo, New Mexico - 2006 Albuquerque, New Mexico

BiographyPablita Velarde was born at Santa Clara Pueblo, New Mexico in 1918. Her grandmother, a well-known potter, named her Tse Tsan (Golden Dawn). By 1921, she had lost 3 brothers to a flu epidemic and her mother to tuberculosis. Then she and her sister Jane were blinded by an infection, cured a year later by their grandmother. When she was around the age of 6, her father sent her to Saint Catherine’s Indian Boarding School, where she was given the name Pablita and learned to speak English. She transferred to the Santa Fe Indian School when she was in eighth grade.

In 1932, when Velarde was 14, she and her sister Rosita became the first female students in painting in Dorothy Dunn’s Studio Program at the Santa Fe Indian School. In 1934, the Public Works of Art Program, part of the New Deal, funded a program centered at the Santa Fe Indian School to create artworks to decorate the Indian Service buildings being built by the Public Works projects. As part of the program, some of the students at the school worked with established Native American artists, which is how the sixteen-year-old Velarde met Tonita Peña of San Ildefonso (1893-1949), the only Pueblo woman easel painter of her generation.

Painting was not considered to be an appropriate role for a Pueblo woman, so the influence and support of Dunn and Peña, who remained her friends and mentors, encouraged Velarde to continue painting. By the time Velarde graduated in 1936, her art work had been displayed at the Museum of New Mexico, the Chicago Century of Progress Expositions, and the Corcoran Gallery.

After graduating, Velarde struggled to find buyers for her paintings and supplemented her income by working as a housekeeper, switchboard operator, and childcare worker. In 1939, she was commissioned by the superintendent of Bandelier National Monument to create a series of 84 paintings on daily Pueblo life as part of a Works Progress Administration project, which she worked on until 1945. Following this commission, Velarde became the most prominent Native American women easel painter with dozens of awards and exhibitions. She was the first women to receive the Grand Purchase Award at the Philbrook Art Center’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Indian Painting in 1953 and in 1954 she was honored by the French Government with the Palmes Academiques for excellence in art. She also received the 1977 New Mexico Governor’s Award, 1988 Santa Fe Living Treasure, and 1990 Lifetime Achievement Award for the National Women’s Caucus for Art. In 1960, she was the first Pueblo woman to publish a book, Old Father, the story teller.

Velarde’s early paintings were mainly watercolors but later works incorporated paints she made from natural pigments, her “earth paintings.” She is known for bringing a unique interpretation and a woman’s view of Pueblo life to work paintings. She continued being influenced by Dunn’s “flat style” but expanded it and experimented with backgrounds, patterns, and colors.

Velarde married BIA policeman Herbert Hardin in 1942, with whom she had two children, Herbert and Helen. They separated in 1959 and she moved back to Santa Clara Pueblo part time from Albuquerque. She died in 2006. Her daughter, Helen Hardin, and granddaughter, Margarete Bagshaw, followed in Velarde’s artist footsteps, in their own unique styles.

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