Last month, the Roswell Museum column focused on the painting entitled The Lone Sentinel by Grace Spaulding John. The column is now titled “It’s Your Art” to emphasize that the Roswell Museum’s collection is your collection. Despite the museum’s closure due to the October 2024 flood, staff continue to work behind the scenes on care and restoration of collection objects.

This month, I am focusing on artist Barbara Latham who was born in 1896 in Walpole, Massachusetts as the second child of Allen and Caroline Walker Latham. Barbara Latham was raised in a farmhouse in Norwich, Connecticut by a family of naturalists. Growing up in a family prioritizing the study of plants and animals, she grew up without access to electricity, telephone, or automobile. Latham’s father built a house in Cape Cod and that’s where they spent their summers. Teresa Ebie, former Roswell Museum registrar, wrote of Latham’s early years on the Remarkable Women of Taos blog that “Latham described herself as a tomboy, and recalled her youth as a happy time filled with ice skating, sailing, and other outdoor activities, punctuated with quiet periods spent reading and drawing.”

Latham traveled to the area of Pueblo, Colorado while on vacation in 1925. As an extension of this trip west, she went to Taos, New Mexico. Ebie quoted Latham as saying “I had lived under the brilliant western sky all summer, but I had never experienced such brilliance, contrasted with such fragrant desert… I loved Taos from the moment I stepped off the train.” Like many white artists drawn to the Southwest, Latham became transfixed by the apparent foreignness of Native American culture. It was less reverence and respect that drew many white artists to the Taos Pueblo and more so a sense of novelty and entertainment, unfortunately, despite what were likely well-meaning intentions at that time. It should be no surprise, then, the experience of Latham’s first visit to the Taos Pueblo. Ebie explained, “Latham borrowed an enormous white gelding and rode out to the Pueblo in her English riding habit. Already feeling conspicuous, she took a photograph only to have her camera confiscated by a Pueblo member.” The artist would continue visiting the Pueblo throughout her career and her perspective on Indigenous life can be seen through much of her artistic output.

Howard Cook, another artist from the East, arrived in Taos around the same time as Latham. Fellow artist Victor Higgins introduced Cook and Latham and they were married in 1927. “Barbara Latham’s career was profoundly affected by two fellowships that Howard Cook won from the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in 1932 and 1934.,” Ebie wrote. “Latham and Cook traveled to Mexico in 1932-1933 on his first Guggenheim fellowship. They lived in the small silver mining town of Taxco… They shared models and both artists soon adopted the dry brush watercolor technique used by Mexican muralist Diego Rivera. While Howard Cook mastered Rivera’s fresco technique that he later utilized in Depression-era federal mural projects in the U.S., Barbara Latham produced drawings, watercolors and wood engravings… In 1934 Cook won a second Guggenheim grant, enabling him and Latham to travel throughout the American South and Texas.”

One subject matter Latham is known for is town views of daily life in Taos. Tourist Town, Taos is an egg tempera painting Latham created around the early 1940s. For Nedra Matteucci Galleries, an unidentified author has described this artwork as “an example of her painting of the village and its Indian and Anglo inhabitants milling about in front of one-story adobe shops and strongly-constructed, purple mountains beyond.” The painting depicts a part of Taos bustling with activity where various vignettes invite the viewer to look more closely at individual interactions Latham depicts. Two men of different heights walk past the entrance of Hoffman House Bar wearing the same purple hat, both with cigarettes protruding from their lips. A trio of women stand under a large tree looking at the tourists passing by, one of whom walks with a camera in front of her face. And there’s a group of men in suits and hats sitting hunched over in the foreground on the left, engrossed in conversation. Are they tourists as well, or locals? Latham outlines certain figures using black or white to draw our attention to them. As the title implies, the Taos depicted here is a tourist hotspot, but many of the figures in the foreground, with their backs to us, looking in the same direction as us, are likely locals.

Latham and Cook were the first participants in what would become the Roswell Artist-in-Residence (RAiR) Program in 1967, the same year Latham donated Tourist Town, Taos to the Roswell Museum’s collection. Conceived of and funded by petroleum investor, artist, and Roswell Museum volunteer curator Donald Anderson, RAiR, which continues to thrive to this day, is an invitation to a “gift of time” where an artist can focus on their creative output without the economic stressors of daily life. RAiR artists now participate in the program for a one-year duration, but as the trailblazers, Cook and Latham were involved for more than a decade. In the winter months, they shared the art studio in Anderson’s home and they lived in a house adjacent to Anderson‘s. The couple officially moved to Roswell for three years in 1973. Ebie wrote, “By 1976 Howard Cook’s health had declined severely from multiple sclerosis and the couple made their final move to El Castillo retirement home in Santa Fe.” Cook passed away in 1980 and Latham died in 1989. About the two of them, an unidentified author for David Cook Galleries wrote “Latham and Cook had a long-lived marriage, which was grounded in keeping their creative life separate. Latham even confessed that she did not recognize some of her husband’s work upon exhibition.”

Please stay tuned for more from the Roswell Museum. We appreciate the outpouring of support from the community during our closure. And remember, “It’s Your Art.”