art
by Kate Nels on
PROFILE
Margarete Bagshaw celebrating t he legacy of a mode r n-day ma ste r IN ONE OF HER EARLIEST photos, Margarete Bagshaw is laced into a cradleboard strapped to the back of her grandmother, Santa Clara Pueblo artist Pablita Velarde. Her arms reach forward as if she can’t stand being contained and can’t wait to grasp all that lies beyond her. This March, those arms were finally stilled when an aggressive tumor took the modernist painter at the age of 50. Left behind was a galaxy of masterfully rendered pieces—including a final 209 that were polished off during a five-year burst of artistic glee. To the manor born, Bagshaw was the only child of Helen Hardin, Velarde’s daughter. Together, the women raised young Margarete between their Albuquerque homes, trundling her to whichever artist was less busy preparing for the next show. Bagshaw’s earliest memory, she wrote in Teaching My Spirit to Fly, her 2012 memoir, was the smell of fresh paint. Perhaps it was merely house paint. But how much better to imagine it as one of the caseins or hand-ground earth pigments Velarde preferred, or Hardin’s obsessively detailed and deeply layered acrylics. Both were masters of traditional forms—Velarde as one of the Dorothy Dunn–trained prodigies at the Santa Fe Indian School, Hardin as a breakout star of contemporary Native art. Bagshaw initially found her calling with a pastel palette and modest canvases. Though they found a ready audience, the early
Flying Lessons, oil on panel, 24 x 24" 34
santafeanNOW.com
Woman Made of Fire: Margarete Bagshaw–The Last 5 Years, Little Standing Spruce Publishing, 2015, is a compilation of Bagshaw’s final paintings over the last five years of her life.
paintings seem the product of a woman who clenched too much inside. When she upended her life in 2004, her paintings began to soar with outsized abstract ambition. Canvases ranged from 8 x 8-inch delights to 10 x 7-foot theses combining the tribal motifs she absorbed at her forebears’ knees with world religions, ethereal landscapes, and a global mix of women who rule. Bagshaw moved among several paintings at once, often at Golden Dawn Gallery near the Santa Fe Plaza, the space she and her husband and business partner, Dan McGuinness, christened with Velarde’s Tewa name in 2009. On a blank surface, she envisioned complicated shapes in multiple layers of oil paint that she buffed, sanded, scratched, and incised into brand new elements on the Periodic Table. It was full-body painting, her grasping arms carrying her into a metaphysical realm where, she often said, she spoke with the spirits of her mother and grandmother. The monumental Ancestral Procession heralds Bagshaw’s command of brilliant color and psychedelic imagery. Hatshepsut evokes a formidably calm and confident female pharaoh. Her Avanyu water spirits heeded an annual command, eerily summoning each year’s monsoons upon her brush’s final stroke. Entering “Margarete Land” required an appreciation for the way that forces beyond us drop clues, issue warnings, and open paths. She looked for omens and demanded optimism, honesty, hard work, and quite a few good times. Maybe the spirits told her the end would arrive too soon. Maybe that explains the hyper pace of her creative arc. At Golden Dawn Gallery, McGuinness continues what he and his wife began six years ago. A new coffee table book of all 210 paintings that Bagshaw did between 2009 and 2014 is now available, as are limited edition bronzes of her clay work and paintings. Pay a visit to Golden Dawn. Stand before her paintings and listen. You may hear her answer, mixed with the voices of the ancients. The legacy of Margarete Bagshaw continues. Golden Dawn Gallery, 201 Galisteo, goldendawngallery.com