Mary E. J. Colter’s use of Sand Paintings

Architect and decorator Mary E. J. Colter (1869 – 1958) often incorporated references to Native American cultures in her designs for hospitality company Fred Harvey. For her Southwestern projects, she frequently took inspiration from the region’s Pueblo and Navajo peoples.

In 1923, Colter called for wall paintings in the lobby of the El Navajo hotel in Gallup, New Mexico, to be based on Navajo sand paintings. Colter always strove for accuracy in her depictions of indigenous cultures. With the help of several of Colter’s Fred Harvey colleagues, the company obtained watercolors made by four Navajo singers that depicted sand paintings, Arnold Berke writes. At Colter’s direction, Fred Harvey artist Fred Geary, with assistance from Navajo medicine man Miguelito, copied some of these onto the walls of the El Navajo hotel.

To the Navajo people (who call themselves Diné, or The People), sand paintings are sacred, not decoration. “They are used in curing ceremonies in which the gods' help is requested for harvests and healing,” navajopeople.org tells us. Not all of the local Navajos accepted the use of their sacred imagery on El Navajo’s lobby walls.

Courtesy of New Mexico History Museum (052154)

Owing to these objections, Berke reports, Fred Harvey called for the decorations to be removed. But the parties worked out an agreement whereby the paintings could stay but some of the local Navajo people would conduct a ceremony to remove any evil spirits. They also agreed to do a blessing ceremony for the hotel.

This house-blessing featured prominently in the hotel expansion’s dedication ceremony and resulted in a publicity bonanza for Fred Harvey. One newspaper reported that Gallup’s businesses closed so the local people could attend the ceremony, and the locals were joined by a thousand visitors who traveled to the mining town for the festivities.

As Colter wrote in the program for this Navajo house blessing, “In a previous ceremony the evil spirits had been thrown out and the ritual contained no words of any evil or unlucky thing or spirit. Instead all that is good and beautiful was invited to take possession of the dwelling and its occupants and leave no room for evil spirits to return.”

The eight-page program, designed and illustrated by Geary and written by Colter, was distributed to attendees and the media. Several newspaper reports quoted it liberally. Colter described the “Blessing-of-the-House” custom in detail before describing each of the sand paintings replicated in El Navajo and the subjects they represented. While the cultural details were of great interest to Colter who conveyed these as accurately as she could, she also admired the images as a designer and artist. Colter wrote of the replicated sand paintings:

[E]ach subject has been chosen, not alone for the interest of the legend or ceremony depicted, but because of its decorative suitability to the architectural space to be ornamented….Enough cannot be said of the decorative character of these paintings,—of their structural composition and beauty of line and mass and color. In rigid adherence to the accepted laws of design, the ephemera of the Navajo rank with the best that has been done in decorative art by any people.

Hopi and other Pueblo peoples also have a long history of ritual use of sand paintings. Colter included a sand painting in conjunction with a Hopi altar in her 1932 design of the Desert View Watchtower at the Grand Canyon. In 2015, these were removed and returned at the request of the Hopi Tribe, which did not believe they should be on public display.

Sources:

Arnold Berke, Mary Colter: Architect of the Southwest. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002.

Harold Belt, Feb. 23, 1978 letter to Virginia Grattan,MS656_Box_F2, Virginia Grattan Collection, Special Collections, University of Arizona Libraries.

Program, “Navajo House Blessing on the Occasion of the Opening of the Santa Fe Hotel El Navajo, Gallup, New Mexico,” May 25, 1923.

“Gallup Holds Novel Fete,” Spokane Chronicle [Washington], May 25, 1923: 5.

Colter, Mary Elizabeth Jane. Manual for Drivers and Guides: Descriptive of The Indian Watchtower at Desert View and its Relation, Architecturally, to the Prehistoric Ruins of the Southwest. Grand Canyon National Park: Fred Harvey, 1933, reprinted by the Grand Canyon Association in 2015.