Pablita Velarde
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Pablita Velarde was born Tse Tsa (Tewa, "Golden Dawn"} at Santa Clara Pueblo, New Mexico in 1918. She died in Albuquerque on January 12, 2006. At the age of fourteen, she was accepted to Dorothy Dunn's Santa Fe Studio Art School at the Santa Fe Indian School. There, she become an accomplished painter in the Dunn style, known as "flat painting." In 1939, Velarde was commissioned by the National Park Service under a grant from the Works Progress Administration (WPA) to depict scenes of traditional Pueblo life for visitors to the Bandelier National Monument.
Following her work at Bandelier, Velarde went on to become one of the most accomplished Native American painters of her generation, with solo exhibitions throughout the United States, including her native New Mexico, as well as Florida and California. In 1953, she was the first woman to receive the Grand Purchase Award at the Philbrook Museum of Art’s Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Indian Painting. In 1954 the French government honored her with the Palmes Academiques for excellence in art.
In a 1979 interview she said, "Painting was not considered women's work in my time. A woman was supposed to be just a woman, like a housewife and a mother and chief cook. Those were things I wasn't interested in."
Velarde's work is exhibited in public and private collections including the Museum of New Mexico, the Bandelier National Monument museum, the Avery Collection at the Arizona State Museum, the Ruth and Charles Elkus Collection of Native American Art, and in the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History.
