“Mabel Dodge Luhan & Company: Creating Southwest Modernism”
Mabel Dodge Luhan—patron, muse, writer, and cultural catalyst extraordinaire—played a dominant role in shaping an American Modernism with a singular northern New Mexican flavor, one that embraced the physical and cultural landscapes and honored the cultures and traditions of Pueblos and Hispanos, to whom these Moderns looked as the basis for forging a multi-ethnic nationalism and original American art forms.
Lois Rudnick is Professor Emerita of American Studies, University of Massachusetts Boston. She has published and lectured extensively about the artist and writer communities of New Mexico, the complex and contested issues of Anglo patronage, and American Modernism. Her most recent book, Mabel Dodge Luhan & Company: American Moderns and the West accompanied a travelling exhibition with the same title, in 2016-2017. She is currently writing a biography of Taos Pueblo artist Eva Mirabal and her family. Mirabal was the first Native American to publish a comic strip, G. I. Gertie, which she did while serving as a WAC during World War II.