Last month, the Roswell Museum column focused on the painting Tourist Town, Taos by Barbara Latham. 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 for and conservation of collection objects.

This month I’ll focus on the painting As We Move Through the Day by Oliver Enjady. “I don’t know if I carry the credentials to be an artist,” Enjady told former Roswell Museum curator of education Ellen K. Moore in an interview in 2000. “What is an artist? How do you identify an artist?” Enjady was born in 1952 on the Mescalero Apache reservation not far from the town of Ruidoso. In a biographical sketch soon after their interview, Moore wrote “Oliver Enjady and his father, Wallace, sat around the light of a little old kerosene lamp and drew on typing paper. Enjady’s father drew Apaches and horses well, sometimes selling his work. He encouraged Oliver to paint and draw.”

At the age of 15, “he applied to the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe,” wrote Kate McGraw in the 1995 article Mescalero Painter on Visionary Quest in New Mexico Magazine. “Then a prep school as well as a junior college, IAIA accepted Enjady in 1967.” Lauded sculptor Allan Houser was teaching there at the time and he became a mentor to Enjady. He reflected on his mentor to McGraw by saying “He taught us through sculpture, more or less about life.” His first experience at IAIA would have a profound influence on him and he ultimately returned decades later. Moore wrote “At IAIA Enjady met members of tribes he never knew existed, studied music, went on a cultural exchange to Mexico City, and sold his first painting for $75… In 1991 he earned an Associate of Arts degree in Museum Studies with a minor in painting.”

Defining the relationship between Enjady’s art and culture is complex. “I’m a painter that happens to be Apache,” he told Moore, which seems to indicate a desire to separate himself from labels like “Apache artist.” Some of his apprehensions related to that label undoubtedly stem from not wanting to cross sacred cultural boundaries through his art. Enjady was one of the participants in episode 4 of the 2009 PBS series We Shall Remain where he is quoted as saying “Everything an Apache does is sacred.” He also told Moore “I paint things, but I also have to watch what I paint, due to the sacredness of traditional themes.” In that same interview with Moore, Enjady expressed frustration about being painted into a box. “It seems that Indian art has to defend itself all the time,” he said. “We always have to have meaning… It has to have a meaning of sacredness, it has to have a meaning of spiritual. What does this color mean? What does this mean? How come this runs this way? Is that the way Apaches see it?... It seems that we always have to be answering all these things.” And he posed the question to McGraw “In an Indian community, you’re surrounded by art on belts, shirts, baskets. Somebody created each thing. Is it only art when non-Indians call it art?”

To Enjady, artistic inspiration is all around us. In his interview with Moore he said “Anything is inspiration… you just got to capture what it is… the trip is to learn to listen and to see. You can ask that tree a lot of questions. There’s a lot of answers. But you got to be patient enough and be able to know how to listen… You can actually… see quite a distance with your imagination. You can hear it, you can see it, you can smell it, you can taste it, you can feel it.” Some of this inspiration can be understood through the title of the painting: As We Move Through the Day. The Roswell Museum purchased this and one other painting from the artist as a result of the 2000-2001 invitational exhibition Two Apaches, Two Visions featuring the work of Enjady and Bob Haozous. In 1995 McGraw said “he won’t always sell his work if he thinks the potential buyer ‘won’t give it a good home.’” The Roswell Museum has aspired to be a good home for As We Move Through the Day. It was on display in the exhibition Here & Near: Surrounding Brilliance at the time of the October 2024 flood and, thankfully, it was not directly impacted by flood waters.

Enjady’s use of acrylic paint enables the quick pace of his production process. In the 2018 Ruidoso News article Mescalero Apache Artist Oliver Enjady assembles portfolio of new work, Enjady told Dianne Stallings “I work quickly and then I revisit. I lay down basic background colors, or concept and design, and then revisit. Right now I have three paintings going from a big one to a small one. I kind of like that. I jump from point A to B and C, and then back to A.” Stallings also quoted him as saying “I use paper towels, newspaper, my hands. One of the paintings I’m working on now, the background is all done with the palms of my hands.” As We Move Through the Day displays a field of nine squares. Four of the squares are blue, four have a spiral design, and the square in the middle is yellow with a barely visible left hand print that is textured with sand. “I see yellow as power, as sun,” Enjady told Moore. “The speckling came by experimentation, this hair technique by accident… I also use sand; I paint on sand sometimes—I try a lot of different things.” The speckled spirals in As We Move Through the Day are in the positions of the cardinal directions and have been described by Enjady as wind designs. About a different series, he told Moore “The handprints is more like a prayer series. It’s asking for a prayer for the nights, for the days, for the animals, everything we see on earth that is our responsibility. Which if we didn’t have, we would not be alive. Things we take for granted by thinking we’re the most important being on this earth.” Enjady’s artistic practice is both conceptually and materially experimental and diverse. He told Moore “I try to grow with every painting.” And, more recently, he told Stallings “I’m in a place now where I play with a lot of textures, layering colors. I guess as an artist, I really believe an artist doesn’t stay in one place, because it is a safe place. I feel I’m still tapping into some of the thoughts and songs about life.”

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.”