There are two times in the year that Santa Fe celebrates Spanish Market. There is one in August just before the Indian Market, and in the first week of December.
Spanish Market like Indian Market gives the visitor the true history of many generations of people who continue to celebrate their faith, culture, and art style.
Many of the items one would see at the Spanish Market today could have been seen in the Spanish Colonial period in Santa Fe in the1600’s. The style lives on and has quite a following. There is a Contemporary Spanish art style too that can be seen in these markets, but the majority is the Colonial style.
Spanish Market celebrates the Spanish Colonial culture in many art forms. The Spanish style is typically very religious and replicates Spanish religious history.
The art in these two markets and in the form itself you will see Spanish Colonial Art in tinwork, straw appliqué and many carved Santos.
The tinwork is done with pliable tin (silver in color) that is hammered to create borders, designs, and forms. Frames, mirrors, ornaments with pictures of saints, and crosses are examples of the items tinwork produces.
The 1930s also saw the revival of "poor man's silver," the tin art, much of it religious that began to flourish after the United States Army occupied New Mexico in 1846. The appearance of imported tin cans coupled with Bishop Lamy's 1850 appointment to New Mexico in part caused certain forms of local religious art, such as retablos, to fall out of fashion while European prints framed in tin came into vogue Typically this art is passed on from generation to generation. In Santa Fe you can find artists of the 8th generation carrying on the work of their ancestors.
Straw Appliqué is an art form where straw is weaved into different elements creating a design. Straw appliqué decoration on chests, boxes, and crosses in New Mexico appears to be a variation of European marquetry work. Marquetry is a method used to decorate a surface with small, thin pieces of variously colored and contrasting materials, Current thought holds that the art of straw appliqué died out in New Mexico in the late nineteenth century and was revived in the early twentieth century by master artist Eliseo Rodriguez
The religious artwork New Mexico produced between the 1700's and late 1800's are known as Santos. The term translates into two separate, but related words in English: "saints" and "holy." Because Santos were religious and devotional works of art representing God, Christ, the Virgin Mary, the angels and saints, they were not meant for detached contemplation or for aesthetic purposes, but for religious use.
Even after New Mexico became part of the Republic of Mexico in 1821, it still remained isolated from the outside world. New Mexicans, by necessity, had to be self-sufficient. In part they did this by crafting their own Santos, or images of the saints.
Since Spanish-occupied New Mexico was Catholic, churches were erected for religious services. The churches needed adornments and objects of devotion and prayer. Large Baroque paintings were brought in from Mexico in the nineteenth century, but these were few and mainly bought by rich Santa Fe patrons. Therefore, most New Mexicans adorned their churches, homes and moradas with images of God, the Virgin Mary, and the saints made by local santeros who had no formal academic training in art.
Two types of Santos that were produced in eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in New Mexico: retablos and bultos.
Retablos are Santos painted onto hand-hewn wooden panels, usually pine. After the panel is cut out and shaped, gesso is applied to the wood. When the gesso dries the image is painted. The retablo is then sealed with a native resin varnish, such as the sap from a pinon tree. Retablos were hung in the walls of the churches as well as in moradas and private homes.
Bultos are three-dimensional representations of the saints, God, Christ, and Mary. They were usually carved out of the roots of the cottonwood tree. After they were carved they were gessoed and painted. Again, they were sealed with pinon sap varnish.
The artists who made Santos in New Mexico are now called santeros. Because New Mexico had no formal art schools in the nineteenth century, most New Mexican-born santeros were self-taught, or as apprentices learned from their masters. The materials they used, for the most part, were indigenous to New Mexico: pine, cottonwood root, gypsum, pinon sap, yucca fibers and horse and human hair for paintbrushes, and natural home-ground pigments made from the vegetation, clays, ocres and minerals.
Santos were an important and necessary part of the religious lives of New Mexicans in the colonial period. Churches and moradas were adorned with retablos, altar screens and bultos and many families also had private devotional altars graced with Santos. As objects of veneration and devotion, Santos embody the spirit of Hispanic New Mexico through their unique style, traditional Catholic subject-matter, focus on function over form and strong ties to the land in the materials used to create them.
These are the main types of art forms at the Winter Spanish Market but there are other interesting historical forms as well. Check out the Spanish Market at the Sweeney Center in the first week of December.
Check out the website for more information: http://www.spanishmarket.org/
Book you lodging by clicking here
Eileen Richardson
Information in part was taken from the Museum of Spanish Colonial Art site http://www.spanishcolonial.org/index.shtml
