NAVAJO COUNTRY
Leaving Santa Fe early in the morning on March 7th seemed to take a burden off Charles’ shoulders. The gallery usually brought Bloom joy and allowed him to exercise his creative juices in arranging the displays and coming up with new shows, but the last year had been brutal. Working long hours and not making enough money to pay himself had started to take its toll on Charles Bloom, now 46. The thought of sitting in a lonely, cold gallery with nothing to look forward to but March’s frigid west wind was just too much this year.
Most people love coming to Santa Fe, “the city different,” and hate to leave. They dream of making it a permanent home. It has great art, architecture, and international cuisine. Cultures intertwine and it has an old-world charm that is not like any other Western city. But looking in the rear-view mirror of his Mercedes at the early morning smoke rising off the wood-burning chimneys, and seeing the tranquil scene disappear into the distance, made Charles smile for the first time in a long while. Charles found himself saying, “Hasta luego, my old friend. This may be the last we see of Bloom’s, another Santa Fe gallery that just didn’t have the right stuff to make it. Gave it a good try. Lasted longer than most, but just missed somehow….”
The grin got large and then something he hadn’t heard in a very long time—a deep belly laugh—came out of Charles’ mouth. Not forced as when he was trying to close a sale, but a real heartfelt laugh. The thought of just saying “fuck it” to the grind of the gallery world truly made Charles feel better about his life, even if it would mean he had failed and didn’t have a profession to fall back on. Somehow it didn’t seem to matter. He was out of the gallery, the heat was turned down low, and the inventory was miraculously still working at the Upper Deck Gallery, a good location with a great salesman. Maybe if the art gods were shining on him he might have a decent March, or even April if he so deemed. Hell, he might even go up to New York City and watch Willard Yellowhorse’s painting STRUGGLE get auctioned off at Sotheby’s. Maybe the artist-stealing dealer would be hiring after having made a cool two or three million dollars off the artist Bloom had discovered and he had stolen from Bloom.
For now, the thoughts of work were starting to fade and streams of images of what to try to accomplish next on the impromptu vacation to the rez were filling Bloom’s mind.
Everyone who lives long enough in the Southwest will sometime or other refer to the place where Indians live as the rez, short for the reservation. It’s like some hip way of saying, “Yeah, I’m from the West and know my way around the real Indian world, the rez.”
The truth was, Charles Bloom didn’t know shit about Indian life on the reservation other than what his Native artists told him, and many of those individuals didn’t really know much either. They were Native by blood; artists who fit his niche but were from Eastern tribes whose heritage had long ago been lost and was now primarily relived in history books. The place Bloom was headed was very much alive. A land dominated by Navajos where whites were only visitors and often felt uncomfortable.
To ascertain what had led to Yellowhorse’s seeming abandonment of his people and heritage, Bloom would have to infiltrate into that culture. What he knew so far: The Navajo—or Diné, as they call themselves—live in an area as large as many of the smaller states in North America. Over 200,000 Navajo live on the Navajo Reservation and it covers wide tracts of spectacular beauty but often open, inhospitable land through a variety of climates in three states: New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah.
Willard Yellowhorse was from the Bear Clan. His maternal ancestors were some of the great weavers of the early 20th century. They wove in the style of Toadlena/Two Grey Hills, known for its fine weavings of natural browns, blacks, and grays. The Toadlena/Two Grey Hills weavers are scattered in a 25-mile radius in New Mexico around two posts: the Two Grey Hills Trading Post and the more active 100-year-old Toadlena Post. Toadlena was the post with which Willard Yellowhorse’s family had always done business. They were known for their fairness and dealt with some of the best weavers in the entire Navajo nation.
Charles had never been to the Toadlena Post but was thrilled to finally visit it. He had heard Willard speak of it, fondly remembering his grandmother selling her rugs to the white trader at the post for money and canned goods. Bloom had even handled a piece Yellowhorse had done remembering one of those moments called TOADLENA DAYS. A large 4 X 4-foot canvas of hundreds of little bricks that represented the post and three stick figures engaged in some kind of conversation with the sky raining Navajo rugs down on the people. This would now be classified by those who have written books on Yellowhorse as one of his early formative pieces, those images where he was still using recognized Western forms like rugs in his works before he moved on to his mature stage of abstraction and collages that were primarily produced in New York.
Charles remembered the painting when Willard brought it in to his gallery—the paint so wet he had to carefully store it for a week so no smudges were added. He could visualize Willard’s interaction with the piece, explaining the history of the old trading post at Toadlena and how it had impacted his earliest memories. These were fond memories because selling a rug that had been woven over many months and then receiving a big chunk of money was a time of family celebration: new clothes, food, and a trip into Shiprock or Farmington. These rug sales only happened once or twice a year so it was always a big deal in a young boy’s life. It had made an impression in Willard’s mind and helped him produce TOADLENA DAYS.
Bloom had displayed the painting for a month before it sold and he also had fond memories, but they were of Willard’s interpretation of the old post he had never seen before. He remembered selling the work for nearly $10,000 almost 20 years ago. It would probably be worth close to $500K now. Not huge money for a Yellowhorse as it was not his so-called prime abstraction/collage work, but still an amazing price. The fact that what this one non-iconic Yellowhorse painting would bring was more money than that generated by the entire weaving production of a generation of Bear Clan weavers seemed wrong. That the value of hundreds of Navajo weavings which took tens of thousands of hours of work over generations would not equal the same value of a painting completed in maybe six hours seemed way out of whack in some karmic viewpoint. That was art though. If the New York crowd blessed the artist, then it had to be the best and worth a great deal of money. Bloom wondered to himself if he was in the right profession or if it was a deeper issue, an ethical conflict with regards to how one values humanity.
“Am I just so pathetic when it comes to my own shortcomings as an art dealer,” Bloom questioned as his Mercedes churned up the miles heading south on I-25, “that I can’t deal with the fact that I made $10K and my client will make half a million? Maybe I’m like the weavers; I will never be recognized for my true worth.”
Good dealers never think about these things because it’s a lost cause to do so. If you are an art dealer for any period of time and any good at your trade, this will happen to you repeatedly. The fact that a dealer can buy something and make money on it is why your clients listen to you when you tell them the hype about how this guy is a good investment. Often they really are great investments and they do go up in value, sometimes a whole lot. Yet it still comes as a bit of a shock to the dealer when it really comes to fruition as it did in Yellowhorse’s case.
Thinking deeply about Willard Yellowhorse gave Bloom chills. It brought up repressed feelings, many of them about his own inadequacies with regards to Yellowhorse’s career. Launching Willard’s career had catapulted Bloom’s own gallery into a different league. Never did either of them flaunt their success. Charles had always been in awe of Willard’s art. He viewed it as an innate gift, not something that could be taught. Willard seemed to feel the same way about his art; it was never a commercial entity to the artist, but his best expression of his life’s view. Which brought Charles’ thoughts around again to the same nagging issue with Willard’s untimely death. It still didn’t sit right. Something was wrong. He could feel it. Maybe the whole vacation bit was just an excuse to get some closure in his life and move on. Do a little legwork, meet the relatives, find Willard’s sister Rachael, and maybe things would seem better. By the time Charles had finished evaluating his poorly composed vacation plans, Santa Fe had completely vanished in the rear view mirror and so had Albuquerque. He was heading due west on I-40 to find answers to disturbing questions he knew he must ask.