The Santa Fe New Mexican from Santa Fe, New Mexico • Page Z032

Paul Weideman I The New Mexican -5. EcjrHtj-Wcj cmd Jonci'ihcjf) Warm Day Coming "Eva Mirabal (Eah-Ha-Wa) had the ability to translate everyday events into scenes of warmth and seminaturalistic beauty" noted arts instructor Dorothy Dunn wrote in her 1968 book American Indian Painting of the Southwest and Plains Areas. "She was an unintentional portraitist, achieving character with a few deft lines." A trove of diverse works by the artist and by her son is on display in the exhibition Eah-Ha-Wa (Eva Mirabal) and Jonathan Warm Day Coming at the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos. Mirabal (1920-1968) was an acclaimed artist from Taos Pueblo. Her birth name was Eah-Ha-Wa and her artworks, at least into the early 1940s, bear that name but most of her paintings were signed Eva Mirabal, and that's how she is known in the art world.

Her father, Pedro Mirabal, worked as a model for Nicolai Fechin and other artists, so his daughter grew up with some knowledge of art and that it was a possible career. She was educated in a variety of arts, and when she embarked on a career in the visual arts, she chose to draw and paint scenes from daily life on the pueblo rather than anything thematically European. At the Harwood on the last day of January, Warm Day Coming marveled at the variety of his mother's work, which was being framed and installed. He offered some insights about her. "After eighth grade at the Taos Pueblo Day School that's as far as they went back then she went to the Santa Fe Indian School.

She was in Dunn's Studio School for fine arts at SFIS. He pointed to a poster for a World War II-era war bond campaign. "Because it was a government-run school, they used the talents of the art students there to do these posters. This part of it a painting of a young man sending the smoke signal 'Buy War Bonds' is what she did." She was also commissioned by the Association of American Indian Affairs to do part of an illustrated map of Native American tribes. Eah-Ha-Wa's 1940 painting Picking Wild Berries won the Museum of New Mexico's Margretta S.

Dietrich Award and was selected for inclusion in the 1953 exhibition Contemporary American Indian Painting at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. She served in the Women's Army Corps from 1943 to 1947, and during that time she developed a comic strip, based around the G.I. Gertie character of her own creation, for WAC publications. She was quite possibly the first published Native American cartoonist and one of the country's first female cartoonists. Upon her return from the war, she was an artist in residence at Southern Illinois Normal University in Carbondale.

Then she enrolled at the Taos Valley Art School, which was run by Beatrice Mandelman and Louis Ribak. Warm Day Coming picked up a plaster figurine of a robed Native person, which she made during this period. Perhaps this is an example of sculpture skill she learned working clay as a young girl. "I imagine that's right," her son said. "A lot of the kids are introduced to micaceous clay at that time.

She probably did some clay work, like most of the kids growing up at the pueblo. This is a plaster piece, and she did an accompanying painting, The Cacique's Wife." The Harwood show includes artifacts from Mirabal's life. One is a 1949 exhibition program from the Thomas Gilcrease Foundation (now the Gilcrease Museum) in Tulsa. She shared exhibition space with Oscar Berninghaus, Frederic Remington, George Catlin, Joseph Henry Sharp, Pop Chalee, and Maria and Julian Martinez. On at least one occasion, Mirabal spoke out about a wrong.

On an Illinois radio program in 1946, she said schoolchildren in the United States were done a disservice by being educated about Mexican, Asian, and European art but not about "the one that is really most important" to Americans, Native American art. She painted large-scale works from the 1930s into the 1960s. Her murals could be seen at the Santa Fe Indian School, the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, the Buhl Planetarium in Pittsburgh, and the library of the Veterans' Hospital in Albuquerque. Some of these have been lost; a building-length mural was destroyed when the All Indian Pueblo Council demolished most of the old buildings at the Santa Fe Indian School in 2008. "That's craziness," her son said.

"They could have saved that somehow." Warm Day Coming graduated from Taos High School, attended Dine College in Tsaile, Arizona, and studied art at the University of New Mexico. He is the author of Taos Pueblo: Painted Stories, published in 2002 by Clear Light. In a statement about his paintings, he said he hopes "to help preserve a record of the traditional life of our people and to educate those who know little of us, desiring that increased knowledge and understanding will help all of us to live better with one another and with the natural world." One of the best known of his brightly colorful acrylic paintings is A Night for Songs and Stories. "I did this for the then-very-alive Taos Talking Picture Festival. I was the inaugural festival poster artist.

I was commissioned to do this in 1994. I'm glad it's here in Taos. It belongs to Ed and Trudy Healy who are great supporters of the arts in New Mexico." He also does paper castings; one in the Harwood show is titled Taos Plum Harvest. "I did the original in Plasticine, the oil-based clay, then a rubber mold continued on Page 35 Left, Jonathan Warm Day Coming at the Harwood Museum of Art, Taos, holding a plaster figurine made by his mother; right, Warm Day Coming: The Last Supper, 1991, acrylic on canvas, 38 47.5 inches PASATIEMPO 33.