Fremont F. Ellis, a famous landscape painter, was born in Virginia City, Montana in 1897. His father was a nomadic dentist and theater operator who traveled from the bustling gold towns of the American West to the metropolitan cities of the east. Ellis began painting at about twelve years of age although he had little art instruction or formal education of any kind. He had his first art showing in El Paso, Texas while still in his teens and was immediately praised for his work. However, his father thought he should have a profession along with his art work, so he studied optometry and had his own practice. But he wasn't happy with the life of a businessman, and after visiting friends in Santa Fe, New Mexico, he decided to make his home there and pursue his art work seriously. In 1921, Ellis joined with four other young painters in Santa Fe-Josef Bakos, Walter Mruk, Will Shuster, and Willard Nash-and together they founded an art society called "Los Cinco Pintores." They called themselves modern artists who encouraged freedom of expression and they made a definite impression on the art movement in Santa Fe. The group disbanded in 1926, but Ellis continued painting until his death in 1985. He showed his work actively in Santa Fe and Los Angeles, his unique impressionistic style earning him a large and dedicated following. His work is in many museum collections including the Museum of New Mexico, the El Paso Museum, the Art Institute in Lubbock, Texas, and the Stark Museum in Orange, Texas. Barbara Spencer Foster is a third generation native New Mexican. She grew up in the shadows of the Manzano Mountains where her ancestors had settled in the 1800s. She is the author of "Girl of the Manzanos," "Pecos Queen," "Fire in the Bosque," and "Santa Fe Woman," all from Sunstone Press.
Melzer offers an impressive new book about famous New Mexico gravesites, usually the only monuments left to honor the human treasures who helped shape state, national, and often international history.
Ladies of the Canyons is the true story of remarkable women who left the security and comforts of genteel Victorian society and journeyed to the American Southwest in search of a wider view of themselves and their world. Educated, restless, and inquisitive, Natalie Curtis, Carol Stanley, Alice Klauber, and Mary Cabot Wheelwright were plucky, intrepid women whose lives were transformed in the first decades of the twentieth century by the people and the landscape of the American Southwest. Part of an influential circle of women that included Louisa Wade Wetherill, Alice Corbin Henderson, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Mary Austin, and Willa Cather, these ladies imagined and created a new home territory, a new society, and a new identity for themselves and for the women who would follow them. Their adventures were shared with the likes of Theodore Roosevelt and Robert Henri, Edgar Hewett and Charles Lummis, Chief Tawakwaptiwa of the Hopi, and Hostiin Klah of the Navajo. Their journeys took them to Monument Valley and Rainbow Bridge, into Canyon de Chelly, and across the high mesas of the Hopi, down through the Grand Canyon, and over the red desert of the Four Corners, to the pueblos along the Rio Grande and the villages in the mountains between Santa Fe and Taos. Although their stories converge in the outback of the American Southwest, the saga of Ladies of the Canyons is also the tale of Boston’s Brahmins, the Greenwich Village avant-garde, the birth of American modern art, and Santa Fe’s art and literary colony. Ladies of the Canyons is the story of New Women stepping boldly into the New World of inconspicuous success, ambitious failure, and the personal challenges experienced by women and men during the emergence of the Modern Age.
Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.
The importance of citywide festivals like Mardi Gras and Fiesta for the LGBTQ community Festivals like Mardi Gras and Fiesta have come to be annual events in which entire cities participate, and LGBTQ people are a visible part of these celebrations. In other words, the party is on, the party is queer, and everyone is invited. In Queer Carnival, Amy Stone takes us inside these colorful, eye-catching, and often raucous events, highlighting their importance to queer life in America’s urban South and Southwest. Drawing on five years of research, and over a hundred days at LGBTQ events in cities such as San Antonio, Santa Fe, Baton Rouge, and Mobile, Stone gives readers a front-row seat to festivals, carnivals, and Mardi Gras celebrations, vividly bringing these queer cultural spaces and the people that create and participate in them to life. Stone shows how these events serve a larger fundamental purpose, helping LGBTQ people to cultivate a sense of belonging in cities that may be otherwise hostile. Queer Carnival provides an important new perspective on queer life in the South and Southwest, showing us the ways that LGBTQ communities not only survive, but thrive, even in the most unexpected places.
Udall's lively account of the quirky editor, poet, journalist, diarist, and printer Walter Willard "Spud" Johnson focuses especially on brilliant and diverse artists he befriended and published. Together they helped to create a new voice for the Southwest.
Founded in 1610, Santa Fe has been a beacon for those yearning for adventure, a different way of life, a place of expression, and the opportunity to meld the old with the new. Designated America's first United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization Creative City in 2005, Santa Fe is home to people from around the world. Legendary Locals of Santa Fe pays tribute to a diverse group of individuals, who through different eras have contributed to the city's vitality: Native American Po'pay, leader of the Pueblo Revolt; world-renowned sculptor Allan Houser; priest Padre Antonio Martinez, who brought the city's first printing press; Pulitzer Prize authors Willa Cather and Oliver La Farge; Fray Angelico Chavez, Santa Fe's preeminent historian; Santa Fe Opera founder John Crosby; Stewart L. Udall, former Secretary of the Interior under the Kennedy and Johnson administrations; and Sgt. Leroy A. Petry, the 2011 Medal of Honor recipient. All share an enduring spirit and belief in the community that the Spanish explorers had the foresight to name "the City of Holy Faith."