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Corrales Heritage Day May 16 Features Early Days of Arts Colony |
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Written by Jeff Radford
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Sunday, 10 May 2009 |
Corrales Heritage Day Saturday, May 16 will be followed by Fiesta de San Ysidro on Sunday, May 17.
San Ysidro is Corrales’ patron saint, Sunday morning mass will be
celebrated outside the Old Church with a procession carryng the santo
to the new church on Corrales Road where the feast day will continue.
Heritage Day is staged at the Old Church and nearby Casa San Ysidro Museum on Saturday 10 a.m. to 4 p.m.
Among the exhibits this year will be artwork produced by villagers
living here in the 1950s and 60s, as well as “family tree” charts for
Corrales settlers including the Alary, Salce, Gonzales and Gutierrez
families.
The Corrales Historical Society’s Archives Committee will also have
numerous old photographs, some recently acquired, and
genealogical materials.
Also this year will be a special exhibit on lesser known buildings here and those that have been demolished.
Members of the Corrales Historical Society will also show the new video
on the history of the Old Church. A model of Corrales’ irrigation
ditches demonstrating how they work will be shown.
Activities run from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the Old Church and the museum
across the road, in addition to tours of the adjacent cemetery. Those
include sheep shearing, weaving and blacksmithing. Activities for
children involve tin-punch ornaments and corn shelling.
The art exhibit features those artists who came to Corrales soon after
World War II and who, by their art and their efforts, made Corrales an
important N.M. art center.
“They were drawn by the community’s beauty, inexpensive land and the
possibility of building their own adobe homes,” said the Historical
Society’s Mary Davis. “These homes were open to many artists then
working in Albuquerque, and several of these artists also regularly
showed at the Corrales Art Association gallery established here in
1957, as well as the Camel Gallery founded some ten years later.”
Artists in the Heritage Day show range from Adja Yunkers, an
internationally recognized printmaker when he came to teach at the
University of New Mexico, to sculptors Pat Smith and Paul Wright, as
well as photographers Dick Kent and Harvey Caplin and potters Bette
Casteel and Betty Colbert.
Davis said Yunkers built an adobe home in Baja Corrales where he hoped
to start an art school. It never happened, but Pete Smith, who had
driven one of the school’s prospective teachers to New Mexico, stayed
on in Corrales. Smith met and married artist-sculptor Patricia Waterman.
He designed and built their two-story adobe home on Old Church Road,
and with his wife, helped start the Corrales Art Association.
Filmmaker Ken Marthey came to Corrales in 1947, where he built his
adobe house which still stands on Aaramar Lane. Marthey, who was also a
photographer and painter, is best known for his work on And Now Miguel,
a film about the life of a Taos sheep-herding family, which won the
first Flaherty Award from the Museum of Modern Art.
Marthey lived here for only a few years, but though his efforts, Dick
Kent came to live in Corrales in 1950. Kent became one of New
Mexico’s premiere photographers. Marthey went on to a successful career
in advertising in New York City, and then returned to northern New
Mexico to make movies and to paint.
The exhibit will include pottery by Bette Casteel and Betty Colbert,
paintings by Paul Wright, Bill Howell, Bob Walters and John Tittmann, a
print from an oil painting by Ken Marthey, a woodblock print by Adja
Yunkers, ceramics by Tommie Findley, sculpture by Pat Smith and
photography by Dick Kent.
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