Painted: Our Bodies, Hearts, and Village centers Pueblo perspectives on the contexts that informed the social and cultural landscape of Taos from 1915 to 1927, when the Taos Society of Artists (TSA), a group of Anglo-American painters, was active. Featuring the Colby Museum’s collection, including a key group of works from the distinguished Lunder Collection, as well as select loans, it also sheds light on issues that affect Native people today, in the Southwest and beyond.

The exhibition puts paintings by TSA artists in dialogue with works by twentieth- and twenty-first-century Native American artists to illuminate the varied, complex, and rich art histories of the United States Southwest, in particular the city of Taos and Taos Pueblo, New Mexico. Presented in six galleries spanning the lower level of the museum’s Lunder Wing, it also includes writing, sound, and artworks from the featured artists and other Native culture bearers as part of new research supported by the museum’s Lunder Institute for American Art.

Sponsors:

Painted: Our Bodies, Hearts, and Village is made possible through the support of the Terra Foundation for American Art and Colby Museum endowment funds provided by the Lunder Foundation and the Mellon Foundation, which supported the 2021–22 Lunder Institute Research Fellows Program. The installation will be accompanied by a robust series of public programs, including a symposium in fall 2023; a publication documenting the installation and including additional reflections, interviews, and research is also planned.

A generative project grounded in the museum’s permanent collection, the exhibition will inform ongoing research, exploration, and presentations of American art at the Colby Museum while it is on view and in the years ahead.

Image Credit:

Tony Abeyta, Citadel. Oil on linen. 40 x 60in. The Lunder Collection, 2021.246