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Refashioning an icon
Artists reinterpret the legend of Our Lady of Guadalupe, toying with tradition while constructing eccentric images
By J.M. Baról
Tribune reporter
In a charming courtyard, hidden from the bustle of the Santa Fe Plaza, holiday shoppers and tourists may stumble upon the legend of Our Lady of Guadalupe.
At M¢ntez Gallery rustic wooden statues and soft-toned paintings are delicately displayed in a sunny room off to the side, while kitschy folk art fills the remainder of the pocket-size gallery. An excess of objects adorned in sequins and glitter, covered in festive, radiant colors occupies virtually every inch of wall and counter space, with Guadalupe the dominant image.
"This is Guadalupeland," Rey M¢ntez says of his gallery. "At any given time we have at least 100 Guadalupes."
M¢ntez is one of the six gallery owners taking part in "Arte Guadalupe," a citywide art festival featuring images of the patroness of the Americas, traditional and contemporary, north and south of the Mexican border.
The idea for the Santa Fe festival manifested in 1994, when gallery owner Lena Bartula mentioned to Santa Fe Council for the Arts executive director Larry Ogan that she envisioned a celebration of Guadalupe.
The two turned Bartula's vision into reality, creating what has become one of the city's most renowned celebrations.
You're probably familiar with her radiant figure, but you might not know the legend behind it.
The story of Our Lady of Guadalupe begins in the early-morning hours of Dec. 9, 1531. On that day, a 58-year-old Aztec Indian named Juan Diego was on his way home to Tlatelolco, outside of what is now Mexico City, to attend Mass and to continue his studies of catechism.
In an explosion of music and singing birds, the Blessed Mother appeared to the humble peasant, instructing him to go to his bishop and ask that a church be built on the site of her appearance. As a sign to prove her appearance, the Virgin had Diego pick roses from a plot of frozen ground. She touched the flowers -- which were in full bloom despite the cold weather -- and instructed Diego to deliver them in his cactus-fiber tilma, or cloak, to the bishop. Upon opening his cloak before the bishop, the flowers spilled forth and revealed an image of the Virgin on his tilma.
M¢ntez says the Virgin of Guadalupe is unique among the Madonnas worshipped the world over.
"You can pray to 5,500 versions of Mary -- one for sadness, one for money, one for health," he says. "But you can pray to Our Lady of Guadalupe for anything."
So what makes an image of Guadalupe different from that of the Virgin Mary? There are several symbols, -- in a sense, hieroglyphics -- that reveal part of the message Guadalupe brought through Juan Diego.- There are the eyes, which look down, a position of humility, revealing that as great as she is, she is not a god.
- There's the dark skin and hair -- like that of the Aztec Indians -- unlike the Virgin Mary's ivory color.
- As for her hands, they're not poised in the traditional Western style of prayer, but in an Indian manner of offering.
- The band around the Guadalupe's waist is the sign of a pregnant woman. It was a sign to the Indians that something -- or someone -- is yet to come.
- Her cloak is covered in stars, a sign that a new era or civilization is beginning. In the Indian culture, the destruction of a particular civilization or era was always accompanied by a comet or a body of stars.
- Sun rays always accompany images of Guadalupe. The rays recalled for the Indians that the sun played a key role in their civilization. But the woman in the image is greater than even the sun. She hides the sun and only the rays come forth. She hides the sun but does not extinguish it.
"As a child, I was enamored by the altar screen, including the sacred heart image which has always held my attention," M¢ntez says, referring to the large painting devoted to Guadalupe, which has hung in the Santuario de Guadalupe in Santa Fe since the 18th century.
While Guadalupe's image has become highly recognized as a traditional folk art form, many contemporary artists find the Virgin an inspiration for their work.
Nestled at the end of a gravel path off Santa Fe's Canyon Road, Lena Bartula's contemporary gallery, Guadalupe Fine Art, welcomes wanderers with its red adobe exterior and charming landscape.
Inside, ceremonial candles burn in a kiva fireplace, and late-morning sun radiates through broad windows, warming the spacious rooms and creaky wooden floors.
On white-washed walls hang contemporary images of Our Lady of Guadalupe in all her manifestations, mysticism and mystery.
For Bartula, the 469-year-old legendary image of Guadalupe is more than simply an icon.
"She guides my life," she says. "Not to mention my birthday is her feast day."
That would be Dec. 12, a day when young and old from all faiths around the world honor Guadalupe.
At Bartula's gallery, dried roses are scattered around the exhibit of Susan Charlot Jay, a Santa Fe artist. Her highly decorated mixed-media shrines honor Guadalupe in traditional retablo fashion. In a series of images about 3 feet tall, Jay features the figure of the Virgin in a silhouette surrounded by a corona of light, an essential component of the holy image. Each Guadalupe both holds and expresses elemental concepts of creation and existence.
In "Dance in the Dawn," the Virgin's shrouded form houses a copse of trees, a starburst of light and a group of figures dancing at her feet. Here the Guadalupe becomes a vessel for nature and the celebration of life en toto.
"Irrepressable One" embodies the spirit of sun and ocean, with a rose so open and full it implores the viewer to enter it. In "Attending the Flock," her cloak is comprised of roses and birds in abundance.
Jay says all the symbols she puts inside the coronas are the "realm of the intuitive and emotional . . . all things that I associate with the feminine." In contrast to Jay's exuberant colors, Rosalia Mariz's work is entwined in warm, earthy tones. Painting on Mexican amate, a heavily textured bark paper, Mariz explores the peaks and valleys of the bark, tracings the ghostly figures as they emerge.
In "La Virgen Reyna Madre," Mariz, a California visual artist and poet, depicts the Virgin entwined in birds and foliage, her dark face and hair peaking out from her mantle. Like an Escher print of vaguely spiritual imagery, the piece creates a nearly daunting density of line, shimmer and interlocking form.
Mariz superimposes layer upon layer of imagery to capture the multiplicity of Guadalupe's embodiment of human, animal and plant fertility -- the elemental forces that produce and maintain the order of the universe.
But it's Santiago Perez's work that stuns the gallery stroller who happens upon Guadalupe Fine Art. A painter from Tijeras, Perez portrays Guadalupe on four larger-than-life panels, working in oil on metal. The Virgin in his pieces fills her 8-foot vertical space, much like a stained-glass cathedral window piece.
Perez's strength of belief in Guadalupe as a "refuge of hope and love" can be seen in his expressionistic technique and his passionate rendering of imagery.
In "La Virgen de los Caballos," the image of the Virgin holds a cross engulfed in flames, as horse heads and hooves flare passionately behind her. In the lower half of the frame floats a horse pictured in an awkward, crucified position, which Perez describes as a "painful reminder of the crucifixion of Jesus and also the pain of the artist and anyone who attempts to express his feelings for Guadalupe."
Perez's imageries are made all the more powerful since the series of metal panels began as a parody of the Guadalupe legend.
"The metal is a material that shines through the paint -- and the pain," he says.
Perez calls his work "ecstatic painting."
"Through the paint, I basically try to communicate and express the gesture, the energy, the feeling of the spirit, both of the painting and the object, the Guadalupe," he says. "It's a very rich subject for the artist."
Despite the label, contemporary images of Guadalupe tend not to stray too far from traditional depictions.
"You have no trouble recognizing who she is," says Carol Pryharfka, assistant director at Guadalupe Fine Art, whose exhibit is "a revisioning, but it's not way out there."
While most of these artist use the image of the Virgin in a literal sense, Albuquerque artist Jinni Thomas strays a bit from that formula, using rolled newspaper roses to represent the connection between the masses (the newspaper) and the icon (the rose).
Thomas, whose work is featured at Karan Ruhlen Gallery, arranges the roses -- which are dipped in beeswax to encaust and enhance their colors -- in rows on square panels. The pieces range in size from a few inches to several feet. As the panels hang on the walls under warm lights, the subtle aroma of beeswax hovers throughout the gallery.
"Several years ago, I first heard her story when I was beginning to study Italian Renaissance, and I became familiar with her legend," she says. "I had been doing shrines to the Madonna and other female saints, and so I began using her as a central figure in several works.
"I think of Guadalupe as the patroness of the masses, the female figure we can all look to."
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