A rejoinder to art-historical scholarship that focusses solely on how East Coast transplants conceived of New Mexico, as both inspiration for artistic creation and a retreat from the ills of urban life, Stephanie Lewthwaite's A Contested Art explores how an intercultural milieu of Hispanos (peoples of mixed European and Indigenous roots) and Anglos created and exhibited a spectrum of traditional and modern art within and beyond New Mexico during the interwar years. According to the author, at the same time that Anglos crafted a premodern vision of northern New Mexico in art and literature, Hispanos and their artistic production were not static, but rather “a complex, shifting and multifaceted reality tied to the varied experiences of being modern and being mestizo” (22).

Lewthwaite organizes the book into two parts. The first, “‘This Landscape of Strange, Austere Beauty’: Modernism and Primitivism,” outlines the networks wherein Hispano and Anglo artists and cultural workers circulated, especially during the years when the Federal Art Project operated in northern New Mexico. The historical archives Lewthwaite consults and the detail with which she paints Anglo patronage of Spanish colonial art – sculpture and painting based on Catholic iconography – and Hispano responses to new market forces and “mainstream modernist aesthetics” is extensive (74). Throughout, she deftly relays the contradictions that arose between Anglo-sponsored taste-making institutions, Hispano intellectual figures, individual artists, and wider communities.

The second section, “‘New Horizons’ in Hispano Art: Modernism and Mestizaje,” comprises four case studies examining the artwork of Patrociño Barela, John Candelario, Edward Chávez, and Margaret Herrera Chávez as a reflection on the “restless world around them and their own shifting subjectivities” (13). Beyond the regionalist narratives they typically occupy, Lewthwaite positions each within the national and international contexts of modernism, pan-Americanism and World War II. In the first case study, Lewthwaite contends that Patrociño Barela, a New Deal sculptor, should be “placed firmly within the narratives of modernist art” (104). Countering the opinions of New Deal administrators and even museum curators of the era who often saw Barela as a “modern primitive,” Lewthwaite illuminates Barela's art within his complex life as a teamster and migrant worker. In his abstract anthropomorphic carvings, which deviated from typical Spanish colonial fare, Barela profoundly reflected upon the themes of psychic and physical transformation and itinerancy that occupied his life.

In the second case study, Lewthwaite focusses on the photography of John Candelario, who not only interacted with Pueblo and Navajo peoples as a mercantile trader in Santa Fe, but also looked to Edward Weston, Georgia O'Keeffe and Alfred Stieglitz for creative mentorship. In the role of “cultural broker” between these poles, Candelario fashioned intimate images of local populations that broke with the aestheticized landscapes, the “architectural structures and relics” favored by Weston and Ansel Adams (122, 138).

The third case study explores how Edward Chávez's oil paintings mediated the artist's desire to return to New Mexico after moving to the East Coast. Working from a position of artistic exile in Woodstock, NY, Chávez, once a New Deal artist working in Colorado and New Mexico, painted abstract landscapes that recalled his former home as an actual locale and site of memory. Finally, Lewthwaite introduces Margaret Herrera Chávez in the closing case study, analyzing her role in tandem with the gendered spheres of Hispana art. While most Hispanas were confined to weaving and embroidery, the author explores Herrera Chávez's adoption of landscape painting, a genre mostly dominated by Anglo men. After voyaging across Latin America and studying under Mexican muralist Rufino Tamayo, Herrera Chávez eventually fashioned her own artistic language of landscape that introduced elements such as crosses, electrical lines, and buildings to challenge the often empty terrains that the genre typically engendered.

Throughout, Lewthwaite embarks on a project of reclamation, rethinking “the chronological and geographic perimeters of modernism” as they unfold in the Southwest. This work is necessary and contributes to the growing number of studies that address the role of intercultural exchange as a primary component of modernity. While the author acknowledges a “series of modernisms” at work within these artists’ output, she also capitulates a Euro-American art-historical narrative that assumes the existence of a monolithic “mainstream modernist” aesthetic (13). Repeatedly framing the existence of a dominant modernism positions art of European or American origin as the foil against which “alternative,” “subaltern,” or “mestizo” modernisms oppose. In contrast, as the late David Craven posited, modernism or modernismo has a Latin American rather than a European etymology. In this way, exchange, appropriation, and hybridity across the Americas (North, Central and South) and Europe have long defined a heterogeneous set of practices that originated in the nineteenth century.Footnote ¹ Indeed, the book proves indispensable in its critical reassessment of these Hispano artists’ awareness of the uneven modes of modernization within and outside New Mexico. Yet it falls short in continuing to reify a European or US-derived modernism as the prime aesthetic standard.