Black on Black & White

February 5 – April 15, 2012

The first exhibition of Philbrook’s 2012 series celebrates the work of two renowned American artists, photographer Laura Gilpin (1891-1979) and potter Maria Martinez (1887-1980) who were both contemporaries and friends. This Philbrook-generated show pairs over 40 photographs taken over a fourdecade period with dozens of ceramics drawn from the museum’s extensive holdings and the Eugene B. Adkins Collection. 

Laura Gilpin’s career spanned more than six decades. Throughout this time she deftly used her chosen media, black-and-white photography, to accentuate both the grand expanses of the Western landscape and the minute details of humanity etched on the faces of the Native people who lived there. Black on Black and White features many of Gilpin’s best-known images of aerial landscapes and Native sitters, along with rare photographic portraits of Maria Martinez and her family making pottery at San Idlefonso Pueblo. Such contextual references in Gilpin’s photography underline the complex interactions and combined muses these two contemporaries shared.

Maria Martinez, an accomplished potter, collaborated with husband, Julian, to create traditional San Ildefonso ceramics. Beginning in the 1910s, Edgar Lee Hewett, Director of the Museum of New Mexico, encouraged the two to experiment with various firing and painting techniques in order to reproduce a type of black-on-black finish that had been made by their Pueblo ancestors thousands of years before. Once they discovered the technique, the Martinez’s pots became widely popular very quickly and their work was celebrated at art shows, expositions, and fairs nationwide. Indeed, Maria’s pots were in such demand by the 1920s that she began signing her work, the first Pueblo potter to do so. Over the years, Maria perfected this black-on-black technique, and went on to teach the process to members of her family and others in her community. 

The artworks in this exhibition present an alternative perspective on the Southwest contrary to dominant nineteenth- and twentiethcentury precedents, which typically cast the American West as a masculine place of staged romance or rugged conquest. Instead these pieces produced by feminine hand and lens offer documentary and physical connections between the land, the people, and their art-making traditions. The artworks in this exhibition will overlap in content and display within the exhibition, underlying the artists’ relationship with each other, which transcended boundaries of place and ethnicity.

Black on Black and White will occupy half of Philbrook's Helmerich gallery for a 2-month run and in its final weeks will share the Helmerich gallery with the next exhibition of the 2012 schedule, Seeking the Sacred: Religious Ritual in Native American Art. The two exhibitions will be on view simultaneously for a period of only two weeks (March 31 – April 15, 2012) and will be jointly celebrated with opening events for Philbrook Museum Members the weekend of March 29-31, 2012.

Black on Black and White: The Southwest of Laura Gilpin and Maria Martinez is curated by Catherine Whitney and Christina Burke.