Mabel Dodge Luhan & Company: American Moderns and the West

The Foundation is pleased to support the Mabel Dodge Luhan & Company exhibition organized by the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos, New Mexico. Opening May 22, 2016, the exhibition explores the life and times of Mabel Dodge Luhan (1879-1962), one of the early 20th century’s most significant and under-recognized cultural figures. The Foundation has loaned Gene Kloss’s Horseplay of Taos Indian Jesters, c. 1938-39 to the exhibition and has made a $30,000 grant to support curatorial and exhibition design and bilingual interpretive materials.

This exhibition will be the first to explore the impact Mabel Dodge Luhan had on the art, writings and activism of the 20th century American Modernism. D.H. Lawrence, Georgia O’Keeffe, Ansel Adams, John Marin, John Collier, Marsden Hartley, Paul Strand and Andrew Dasburg—among scores of other luminaries—were summoned to Taos by Mabel and subsequently found, in the remote high desert, intellectual and spiritual inspiration for their work. The work of these artists will be presented in relation to Pueblo and Hispano artists to examine the cultural exchange that formed a unique “Southwest Modernism”. From the Harwood Museum, the exhibition will travel to the Albuquerque Museum of Art and History and the Burchfield Penney Art Center in Buffalo, New York.

More information about the exhibition and participating venues is available on the exhibition’s website: http://mabeldodgeluhan.org.

Artwork: Nicolai Fechin, Mabel Dodge Luhan, 1927. Oil on canvas. Courtesy of American Museum for Western Art. The Anschutz Collection, Denver, CO. Photograph by William J. O’Connor.