Books published by Museum of New Mexico Press

"I must have seen the Black Place first driving past on a trip into the Navajo country and, having seen it, I had to go back to paint even in the heat of mid-summer. It became one of my favorite places to work. . . . the Black Place is about one hundred and fifty miles from Ghost Ranch and as you come to it over a hill, it looks like a mile of elephants grey hills all about the same size with almost white sand at their feet. . . . such a beautiful, untouched, lonely-feeling place part of what I call the Far away." Georgia O'Keeffe, from Georgia O'Keeffe (Viking Press, 1976) Few people have ventured into the remote, uninhabited badlands of the Navajo Reservation in northwest New Mexico known, by the artist who made the location famous, as the Black Place. During the 1930s and 1940s, Georgia O'Keeffe and her friend Maria Chabot braved the harsh conditions of baking heat in summer, bitter cold in winter, and ferocious winds to make many camping trips to the area, which inspired one of the great outpourings of creativity in O'Keeffe's artistic life. Photographer Walter Nelson, who share's with O'Keeffe what writer Douglas Preston calls "a great affinity for geology," went in search of the Black Place twenty years ago and has returned more than thirty times to photograph it, first in black and white with a large-format 8 x 10 camera and, over the last five years, in color with a digital camera. The two seasons of his title refer to the fact that in this region virtually devoid of vegetation, only the presence of snow visually distinguishes the landscape from the non-winter months. Inexhaustible in scope, with geological complexity dating back some sixty-six million years, the Black Place must be patiently experienced for its mystery and infinitude and deep secrets of time.

It all begins when the sandhill cranes leave, and it ends as they come back. When they leave, you plant. When they return, you harvest," writes Spragg-Braude in the opening to her deeply observant extended homage to orchard farmer Evelyn Curtis Losack and her village of Corrales, New Mexico. Corrales is an agricultural village where if you come on horseback to the local pizza place you get a discount. When she isn't in the fields or teaching piano to her students, or canning or making fruit leather or pickling, Evelyn loves to drive the roads between fields, scanning the landscape like pages in a scrapbook, moments and images fixed in time. She passes by the crumbled adobes of her ancestors that anchor old orchards where her grandchildren once played. This book is a journey with Evelyn as she drags the hoe through the earth making her furrows, and we follow on hands and knees behind her, dropping in the seeds. The story shares with readers how someone finds fulfillment, happiness, and a sense of self by connecting to those who came before her and those who will inherit all this when we're gone, to the land beneath her feet and the water flowing, to the seasons, to her food and to those who grow it, and to her community. In this way, it is at once a biography of a person and in the larger sense a valuable parable for our times.

Examines six centuries of human history: hunters and gatherers, Southern Tewa people, Hispanic settlers, and Anglo ranches that occupy the land today.

This biography of one of New Mexico's most distinguished citizens, J Paul Taylor (born 1920) recounts the life of the legislator, educator, community leader, and arts patron. J Paul Taylor was born to a pioneering New Mexico family. Taylor's mother, Margarita Romero y Lopez, was born in 1881 in Romeroville, near Las Vegas, New Mexico, to wealthy traders and merchants on the Santa Fe Trail who were instrumental in the development of Las Vegas as a commercial centre. Margarita and her husband Robert Taylor, settled in the Mesilla Valley near Las Cruces, where, in 1945, son J Paul and his bride Mary Daniels set up home. In 1947 the young couple relocated to Mesilla, where J Paul Taylor began his thirty-nine-year career in education. He was first elected to the New Mexico House of Representatives in 1986, a position he held until his retirement in 2004. In 1953 Taylor and his wife purchased the historic Barela-Reynolds property on the plaza in Old Mesilla, two miles from Las Cruces. The Taylor's home today is one of the great architecturally and historically significant properties in southern New Mexico, filled with a world-class collection of art from New Mexico, the Southwest, North and South America, Mexico, and Europe. On the National Register of Historic Properties, the property was dedicated a New Mexico State Monument in 2004. Ana Pacheco extensively interviewed Taylor and many of his family members while writing the story of Taylor's remarkable life in New Mexico. The book is illustrated with historical and family photographs as well as contemporary photographs of the Taylor Monument and art collections.

Offers penetrating views of the richness of the basketmaking tradition of Southwestern tribes and the current revival of the art and the beauty of the baskets themselves.

A field guide, reference on home remedies, and treatise on the applications of herbal medicine.

The Galisteo Basin is an ancient seabed, site of volcanic upheaval. The fertile basin provided temporary hunting and farming grounds for wanderers, and then became the home of Pueblo peoples who survived drought, warfare, disease, and invasion for almost a thousand years before the arrival of the Spanish. Down Country is the history of five centuries of the Southern Tewa Pueblo Indian culture that rose, faltered, reasserted itself, and ultimately, perished in the Galisteo. The basin, twenty-two miles south of Santa Fe, is widely regarded as one of the richest archaeological regions of the country. It is unknown where the Galisteo Basin's very first permanent settlers came from, nor the exact origins of the Tano, or Southern Tewa. The Indians of the northern Rio Grande referred to the basin as the "Down Country Place" or "Place Near the Sun". Into this place the Tano Indians entered about 1250 AD and for three centuries made the place a centre for culture and trade before they were finally expelled by the Spanish in 1782. Their story is a powerful human history that is a microcosm of New Mexico's dramatic, complex history of pre-European settlement and post-Spanish occupation. Renowned writer and Galisteo resident Lucy R Lippard synthesises archaeological and historical research to create this landmark study ten years in the making, weaving together the many viewpoints of a century of study and research. Acclaimed New Mexico photographer Edward Ranney contributes a portfolio of eighty documentary images of the Galisteo Basin's ancient sites, shrines, rock art, and striking landscape.

"Third Views, Second Sights" presents 43 pairings of photographs, documenting two periods of geologic and environmental changes to the Western landscape while exploring changing human perceptions of landscape.