Dunn taught the most basic fundamentals of painting while deliberately refraining from teaching life drawing, perspective, or color theory. Her so-called Studio Style featured heavily outlined flat fields of color and illustrative and narrative portrayals of ceremonies, dance, and mythology, usually painted in watercolors. It was a style influenced by Pueblo mural and pottery painting, by ledger art drawing, Plains hide painting, and rock art. And even though it was a sensation at that time (anthropologist and Museum of New Mexico founder Edgar Lee Hewett, upon seeing Montoya’s work in 1936, marveled, “This painting is new, but it is Indian”), others would later characterize it as stifling and not representative of Native art or the potentialities of Native artists. Montoya, though, has always cited not so much Dunn’s technical influences as important but what Dunn gave to her and other Native students on a deeper level. In a 1996 biography The Worlds of P’otsunu, Montoya told authors Jeanne Shutes and Jill Mellick, “She made us realize how important our Indian ways were, because we had been made to feel ashamed of them. She gave us something to be proud of.” Or, as Montoya put it more recently, “Dunn wanted us to keep hold of that traditional style because it was so quickly disappearing. I saw that type of painting as a traditional art form. I want to keep that style alive. Share what was going on in the past—the lifestyle, the ceremonials, the dances.” And although she became a community leader, a standout student, acculturated herself in almost every way to Anglo life, language, and culture, in her own words she remained “pure Indian.” “Mother,” her son Robert told Shutes and Mellick,
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“had a phenomenal ability to assimilate without loss of herself.” Part of that lack of loss surely came from her being able to express herself artistically, to remain connected to her Pueblo culture, her San Juan birthplace, her Tewa language, her parents and sisters and neighbors and friends and beliefs and worldview through what she laid down—and continues to lay down even today in the kitchen of her Santa Fe home—in her signature casein tempera watercolor on paper. Montoya worked under Dunn, for $840 a year, for all of two years before taking over as studio director (after Dunn was pushed out) in 1937. She then taught at the Indian School for 23 years, alongside her husband, Juan, a woodwork instructor from Sandia Pueblo. “Work was developed from memory and from research and authentic records,” Montoya said in P’otsunu. “My job was to . . . have them draw and paint in their individual way and style while still keeping it Indian. Each one did his own tribal life. . . . These children were trying to put their heritage down in a form which could not be distorted or misconstrued by others. They were doing it for their own people as well as for others.” All during that time, Montoya also busied herself with ceremonies and boards (she served several decades on SWAIA), Catholic rituals and Pueblo rites; sang in the Tewa choir and the church choir; raised three boys, traveled to Atlanta, Georgia, where she met the First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt and to Claremont, California, where she studied with Mexican muralist Alfredo Ramos Martinez and Jean Ames (whose design sense had no small amount of influence on Montoya’s work); finished college (getting her degree in 1958 from Albuquerque’s St. Joseph College);