Mabel Dodge Luhan in Taos–and at the Harwood
Portrait of Mabel Dodge Luhan, Nicolai Ivanovich Fechin, 1927, 50x40"
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
Disillusioned with New York after World War I, Mabel Dodge Luhan traveled to Taos and arrived on New Year’s Day 1918. Within five days, she had seen Tony Luhan at Taos Pueblo whose face she would later write that she recognized from a dream. Her life in Taos instigated an ensuing four and a half decades of living her vision of utopian society and fostering social progress that she had first worked toward as a young woman writing for the Masses, and mingling with American expatriate artists in Paris.
Mabel Dodge Luhan and Company: American Moderns and the West continues at the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos until September 11, 2016. It was co-curated by MaLin Wilson-Powell, an art historian and curator, and Lois Rudnick, Mabel Dodge Luhan’s biographer. Co-curator MaLin Wilson-Powell first conceived the exhibition in 1979. Wilson-Powell first received a research grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities in 1980. In 2012, back in Santa Fe along with Luhan biographer Lois Rudnick, Wilson-Powell and Rudnick began working in earnest on this show.
MaLin Wilson-Powell talked to me in my Santa Fe studio 10 days ago.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download