VECINOS Y AMIGOS
Couse-Sharp Historic Site
Taos, New Mexico
couse-sharp.org
through February 28, 2025
The Couse-Sharp Historic Site (CSHS) has opened “Vecinos y Amigos: Bert Geer Phillips and His Neighbors,” an exhibition that explores, for the first time, a small yet revealing aspect of one of the co-founders of the Taos Society of Artists.
In 1898, Bert Geer Phillips (1868–1956) and his fellow student Ernest Blumenschein came to Taos on a painting trip. Phillips remained there until shortly before his death in 1956. When he painted figures, he usually depicted Native Americans, so, as CSHS executive director and curator Davison Koenig explains, “This exhibition seeks to expand our knowledge of the context of those few paintings in which people in the Hispanic community modeled, to identify them, and to enrich Bert’s stories with theirs.”
Phillips knew that his buyers were part of a mainstream U.S. public fascinated by, but largely ignorant of, the cultures of the Southwest. Guest curator James C. Moore, director emeritus of the Albuquerque Museum, notes, “These paintings are not portraits as such, but imaginative tableaux in which people served as actors in stories that Phillips felt would have success in broadening his reputation on the exhibition circuit.”
When he first arrived in Taos, Phillips exhibited bigotry toward many of his neighbors, famously provoking a deadly riot when he refused to remove his hat for a religious procession on the street. In time, “He learned to appreciate the area’s cultural milieu and foster more respectful relationships,” Koenig says. Phillips later was part owner of a curio shop, trading in Native artwork and santos, local religious art objects in a Spanish colonial tradition.
Research into the models’ families and recognition of who they were “gives significance to those who have long been anonymous, broadening our view of the larger social dynamic of Taos,” Koenig adds. He is quick to credit CSHS site coordinator Jake Cisneros and members of the Hispano Advisory Council, as well as Alicia M. Romero, curator of history at the Albuquerque Museum: “Their work has broadened the scope of the Lunder Research Center here on our campus, and is a perfect illustration of the kind of enrichment of narratives that we aim for.”
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