Mudhead Family Dancers

The backdrop for three traditional mudhead figures is one of Pablita's distinctive abstracted clouds.  Her balance of two different aesthetic treatments works !

Studio lighting reveal Velarde used some gold metallic pigment for the large mudhead's animal pelt.

(1918-2006) Pablita Velarde was born at Santa Clara Pueblo.  She attended Santa Fe Indian School with Popovi Da and Beatien Yazz. She painted with ease in oil, watercolor and casein, but in 1956 she created a form of earth paintings by grinding various colored rocks and mixing them with binding agents and applying them to masonite panels.

Pablita Velarde won nearly every major award in Native American art, including at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, the Philbrook Art Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the Indian Market in Santa Fe and the Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial in Gallup, New Mexico.

Velarde is cited in Who's Who in American Art, the Encyclopedia of the American Indian and the Biographical Directory of American Indian Painters.

Her work has been featured in American Artist magazine, Southwest Art magazine, American Indian Art magazine and The Indian Trader.

She was the mother of the late Helen Hardin, a renowned artist in her own right. Pablita Velarde's work was included in the exhibit "Beautiful Resistance: Works on Paper from the Heard Museum Collection" May 22 - December, 2005.