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History Museum/KNME Documentaries Take Two Steps Forward

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The 15 mini-documentaries produced by KNME for the New Mexico History Museum have two pieces of good news to share.

First, Executive Producer Michael Kamins recently learned that one of them, USS New Mexico BB40: The Drinan Diary, has been nominated for a Rocky Mountain Emmy in the Historic/Cultural-News Single Story category. The awards will be announced Oct. 15 in Phoenix.

Second, nine of the videos now have online curricula attached to me, making them a nifty tool for classroom teachers looking for new ways to make history come to life.

“Education is central to the New Mexico History Museum’s mission,” said Dr. Frances Levine, director of the museum. “We created these mini-documentaries for classrooms, home-schoolers, book groups and anyone who has a curiosity about our heritage. The films supply them with facts, and do so in a way that engages their emotions.”

The Moments in Time project began in 2009, when KNME and the History Museum won a $147,000 grant from the Institute for Museum and Library Services to underwrite their production. Working closely with Levine and curators throughout the museum, Kamins immersed himself in maps, artifacts, archival photos, and scholarship of the state’s history.

Kamins, an award-winning cinematographer, also produced the movies that show in the museum’s main exhibition, Telling New Mexico: Stories from Then and Now. They include a history of the Santa Fe Trail projected onto the canvas of a covered wagon; Setting the Stage, blending New Mexico landscapes with the words of noted authors; and pieces on Route 66, hippies and Tierra Amarilla firebrand Reies Lopez Tijerina.  Kamins is no stranger to the Emmy stage, most recently picking up a 2010 statue for his work on the Colores documentary, Painting Taos.

“Being nominated is a great way to honor the terrific collaboration we have with the New Mexico History Museum,” he said. “They brought to the project a remarkable understanding of New Mexico’s history and have a genuine enthusiasm for sharing the rich history of New Mexico. The Emmy nomination is also a great way to acknowledge the talent and ambition of former-UNM student Ryan Montaño, who was the co-producer on this program.”

“Working on the USS New Mexico documentary was such an extraordinary opportunity,” Montaño said. “Not only did the project help me garner a new sense of pride for my home state of New Mexico, but it helped me to understand and feel why the individuals of WWII, the era in which my grandparents lived, are considered America’s `Greatest Generation.’ What an opportunity!”

Some of New Mexico’s top historians and performers contributed their talents to the Moments in Time productions, including actor Dean Stockwell; flamenco artist Maria Benitez; famed New Mexico santero José Ramon Lopez; Dr. Estevan Rael-Gálvez, director the National Hispanic Cultural Center; historian and author Paul Hutton; and Torrance County historian Morrow Hall.

All of the films are available by clicking here. Lesson plans for the remaining videos are in the works. Go directly to the documentaries that have curricula by clicking on these links, then on “lesson plans.”

Buffalo Soldiers in New Mexico
The Estancia Press
In Her Own Voice: Doña Teressa Aguilera y Roche and Intrigue in the Palace of the Governors, 1649-1662
The Last Hurdle: El Camino Real de Tierra Adentro
Rough Riders
New Mexico’s Segesser Hide Paintings
Tesoros de Devoción
USS New Mexico BB40: The Drinan Diary
Fashioning New Mexico: Victorian Secrets

Thus, It Is Written: The Saint Johns Bible Reaches its Final Word

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On Oct. 23, the History Museum opens its doors to an exhibit that celebrates an epic achievement in the book arts. Illuminating the Word: The Saint John’s Bible features 44 pages from the first handwritten and illuminated Bible commissioned by a Benedictine monastery.

Detail from Letter to the Seven Churches with the Heavenly Choir, Donald Jackson, 2011. The Saint John's Bible, Order of Saint Benedict, Collegeville, Minnesota.

You can find out more about our exhibit here. But for now, we’d like to send out heartiest congratulations to Saint John’s Abbey and University in Collegeville, Minn., along with Donald Jackson and his team of scribes and calligraphers. On Thursday, the abbey announced that 15 years of transatlantic work had been completed, with the word “Amen” having been written on the final page of the seventh and final volume of the Bible, Letters and Revelation.

(That volume goes on exhibit today through Nov. 13 at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.)

From the official press release:

“Today we celebrate the culmination of a fifteen year commitment to revive a monastic tradition in the modern world and create a work of art that will ignite the spiritual imagination of the world,” said Abbot John Klassen, OSB, Saint John’s Abbey. “We also celebrate the beginning of The Saint John’s Bible’s journey to inspire people from all backgrounds through the many ways they can experience the project, beginning with this exhibition at the Minneapolis Institute of Arts.” …

The Saint John’s Bible is a fifteen year collaboration of scripture scholars and theologians at Saint John’s Abbey and University in Collegeville, Minnesota with a team of artists and calligraphers at the scriptorium in Wales, United Kingdom under the direction of Donald Jackson, one of the world’s foremost calligraphers and Senior Scribe to Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth’s Crown Office at the House of Lords. Written and drawn entirely by hand using quills and paints hand-ground from precious minerals and stones such as lapis lazuli, malachite, silver, and 24-karat gold, The Saint John’s Bible celebrates the tradition of medieval manuscripts while embracing 21st century technology to facilitate the design process and collaboration between Saint John’s in Collegeville and the scriptorium in Wales.

“Now that I have inscribed the final Amen, I realise that over the long years of this task, a boyhood dream, I have gradually absorbed an enduring conviction of the pin-sharp relevance of these ancient Biblical Texts to the past, present and the future of our personal and public life and experience,” said Jackson. “These texts have a life of their own and their life is a mirror of the human spirit and experience.”

The Saint John’s Bible illustrates scripture from a modern perspective, reflecting a multicultural world and humanity’s enormous strides in science, technology and space travel, as well as recent wars and genocide. “Illuminated manuscripts have always marked the time and place in which they were created, and The Saint John’s Bible will reflect our world at the beginning of the twenty-first century for future generations,” said Fr. Robert Koopmann, OSB, President of Saint John’s University. “The illuminations in The Saint John’s Bible provide a new way for people to see and experience scripture, which is a particularly exciting in our increasingly visual culture.”

(BTW: Donald Jackson, at left, will be in the house at the Lensic Peforming Arts Center on Nov. 7 for a 6 pm lecture. Tickets cost  $15. A $50 private reception with Jackson follows. Tickets at www.ticketssantafe.org, or call 505-982-1234.)

With his fellow scribes and illuminators at a to-die-for scriptorium in Wales, Jackson carried out the monks’ request for a monumental Bible. When opened, it will measure 2′ tall by 3′ wide, with its nearly 1,150 pages bound into seven volumes. Saint John’s Abbey and University are dedicated to ecumenism, and the text, translation and imagery in The Saint John’s Bible reflect this commitment. Theologians and scholars at Saint John’s University selected the New Revised Standard Version (NRSV) as the translation for The Saint John’s Bible. Though each letter is rendered by hand, The Saint John’s Bible uses state-of-the-art computer technology to create and manage page layouts as well as employing contemporary scripts and illumination.

Illuminating the Word will share its exhibit space and spirit with Contemplative Landscape, which uses archival and contemporary black-and-white photography to reveal how people have responded to New Mexico’s art, architecture, land and sacred rituals.

 

From Mexico City to Santa Fe: How the Camino Real Changed the Santeros’ Craft

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Earlier this year, History Museum Director Frances Levine and Josef Diaz, curator of Southwest and Mexican Colonial Art and History Collections, were in Mexico City, talking to officials at the Museo Franz Mayer about their museum possibly exhibiting some of the retablos and bultos from our Treasures of Devotion/Tesoros de Devoción exhibition. At one point, Director Héctor Rivero Borrell brought out a few retablos he had recently purchased for the Franz Mayer.

“He asked what we thought of them,” Diaz recalls. “They were very similar to New Mexican pieces but were not New Mexican. I could tell they were not made in New Mexico.”

At that moment, the seed of a future exhibition took root.

In a grand partnership resembling the mash-up of three U.S. museums and a Spanish museum behind last year’s exhibition, The Threads of Memory: Spain and the United States, the History Museum is now partnering with the Franz Mayer, the Museum of Spanish Colonial Art in Santa Fe, and the San Antonio (Texas) Museum of Art for yet another bi-national exhibition. We recently received a $23,000 convening grant from the Terra Foundation for American Art in Chicago to lay the groundwork for a collaborative exhibition on the art of santos, one of the most definining art forms of this region.

(Santos are carved and painted images of saints. Santeros are the people who create them. Santos include bultos, three-dimensional figures, like the one above, and retablos, two-dimensional pieces painted on wood, like the one below. Both of these santos are from Treasures of Devotion.)

“ Images of saints that are manufactured like this are often treated like stepchildren in Mexico because they’re not done in the academic tradition,” Diaz said. “They’re a little naive in how they’re painted.”

When he and Levine saw the Franz Mayer pieces, Diaz recalls, “We thought maybe they were produced along the Camino Real corridor, outside of the academic center, where they didn’t have the formal schools but were aware of the academic training. Maybe they were a prelude to what was being made in New Mexico along the corridor.”

With the grant, the museums are looking at the larger picture of the art of santos and may revise historical interpretations of the  tradition from the mid-18th century to the first quarter of the 20th century in New Mexico, using works from the New Mexico History Museum/Palace of the Governors, Museum of Spanish Colonial Art, other museums and private collections.

The plan is to mount an exhibit that will illustrate how the art form developed as it moved beyond the academic center of Mexico City into the colonial “wilds” of northern New Spain. Were different native materials used? Did the long distance and relative isolation affect santeros’ artistic interpretations? By  juxtaposing Mexican and New Mexican devotional pieces, organizers hope to emphasize their connections in terms of style and religious conviction.

“Maybe these Mexican pieces can fill in the scholarly gap between Mexico City’s and northern New Mexico’s styles,” Diaz said. “We know that there was a strong artistic connection along the Camino Real, and this makes me think that these pieces are predecessors to what was eventually made in New Mexico.”

Anyone who’s visited Santa Fe during Spanish Market knows that this artistic tradition is still a vibrant part of the lives of Hispanic communities in New Mexico. To emphasize that, the exhibition will include a sampling of modern works.

The exhibit is anticipated to run from 2015 through 2016. It will first travel to Mexico City, then San Antonio, and finally to the Palace of the Governors.

In July, museum directors and scholars from Mexico, Texas, Colorado, and New Mexico gathered at the History Museum to begin their planning. Attendees brought their expertise on santos and Mexican religious craftsmanship. The group visited the Palace of the Governors, Museum of Spanish Colonial Art, and Museum of International Folk Art to begin assembling a collection for the exhibit. They also discussed conceptual material and a research plan to move the project forward.

Next step? The group reconvenes in Mexico City in October.

 

The Officially Unofficial Kind of Illegal 47-Star Flag Comes in for Repairs

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On April 4, 1818, Congress enacted the Flag Act of 1818, setting forth a rule that no new stars could be added to the flag until the Fourth of July immediately following a state’s admission to the Union. Thanks to that once-a-year-and-only-once-a-year mandate, New Mexicans hoping to share their pride at becoming the 47th state were essentially forced into committing their first illegal acts as U.S. citizens.

And flag manufacturers, only too happy to supply the demand, made their day by stitching together 47-star flags in willful disobeyance of that 1818 law.

In celebration of New Mexico’s centennial, the History Museum will commemorate that dip into the dark side with 47 Stars, an exhibit of the officially unofficial 47-star flag. (Actually three of them, shown in rotation to reduce the strains of being on display.) From January 6 through November 25, 2012, the flags will join a collection of long-term exhibits about statehood and a tongue-in-cheek front-window installation marking our entrance into the Union.

Here’s the news nugget: This week, Rebecca Tinkham Hewett, part of the crackerjack conservation team for the Museums of New Mexico, began prepping the smallest of the three flags for display.

She started by pinning it to an acid-free board covered with fabric and will next stitch it to the fabric around the flag’s edge and in a network pattern within it to ensure it doesn’t sag when the board is hoisted to a wall in the museum’s Telling New Mexico: Stories from Then and Now exhibition. The statehood section within that exhibit already includes:

·        Audio re-enactments of arguments for and against New Mexico’s entry into the Union, produced by aural historian Jack Loeffler.

·        A photo of the 1910 Constitutional Convention.

·        President Taft’s proclamation of statehood and the pen he used to sign it.

·        The top hat worn by William McDonald to his inauguration as New Mexico’s first governor.

What makes the flags officially unofficial? Just 39 days after New Mexico became a state on January 6, 1912, Arizona stepped up to the statehood plate on February 14, 1912. By virtue of coming in second, Arizona would receive its just due on July 4, when the official flag of the United States was to switch from 46 to 48 stars. In the meantime, patriotic New Mexicans wanted a flag of their own , and eager U.S. flag manufacturers came up with the unofficial 47-star flag.

How the three flags ended up in the museum’s hands involves a whole lot of out-of-state miles. The 34½-by-72¼” flag Tinkham Hewett is working on was delivered to the museum in 2001 by a Mrs. James Hetzler, office manager of a church in St. Louis. While cleaning out a closet, she found the flag and figured it was left by a since-disbanded Boy Scout troop. The medium-sized, 43½-by-93½” flag was donated by a Fredrich Liberet in 1988, who said it had been passed down by his great-great-grandfather. And the largest, 65-by-115¾” flag arrived in 2000 from a woman who said it had belonged to her father in Drexel City, Penn.

Made of a plain-weave wool, the small flag is missing a few stars on the side visitors won’t see. On the side they will, a few of the stars show slight stains. Tinkham Hewett isn’t certain what made the stains, but said she won’t take pains to remove them.

“It’s earned these stains,” she said. “It’s part of the evidence to a life an object has had. To remove them takes away that evidence, part of its history.”

Come Jan. 6, Tinkham Hewett’s careful work will come to fruition, helping the museum bring the centennial to life.

“Conservation concerns have kept us from bringing our 47-star flags out of collections for public view,” said Dr. Frances Levine, director of the History Museum. “But the Centennial was too good of an opportunity to pass up. By letting visitors see these artifacts in specially designed display cases, we hope they’ll become engaged in the amazing story of New Mexico’s struggle for statehood.”

Is this a museum … or a cave?

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Judging by the comment cards that visitors leave at the front desk, the main drawbacks of the History Museum are that it’s too cold and too dark.

If you’ve shivered or squinted, you know what they mean. What’s up?

We talked with Associate Conservator Mina Thompson and Building Manager Emanuel Arnold to get the lowdown on our cave-like conditions.

Start with this: The temperature inside the museum is kept at a constant 72 degrees in the summer, 68 degrees in the winter— give or take a degree.

“Temperatures that are too hot will accelerate the degradation of organic material — plant fibers, like baskets, paper, wood, fabrics,” Thompson said. “Cooler is always better.”

Ideally, she said, artifacts like those in the current Home Lands: How Women Made the West exhibit (at left) would prefer 55 degrees, “but we have to keep a certain level of personal comfort.”

Kicking the temperature up even a notch can reduce the 35- to 40-percent humidity levels also needed to preserve the artifacts. “That’s much drier than other museums,” Thompson said. “Usually, they have 50-percent humidity. But that’s too hard on our mechanical system. And much of our material comes from New Mexico, so it’s not unusual for them to be in a drier climate.”

The wear and tear on the mechanical system was most apparent this summer when wildfire smoke kept Arnold busy.

“I monitored wind directions every day to make sure it didn’t get into the system,” he said. “All the units have smoke detectors and they can shut the whole building down. I had to change the filters several times when ash residue built up.”

Then came the monsoons, which, Arnold said, “kept us nice and juicy.” That’s not necessarily a good thing: Humidity can cause mold and mildew that also damages artifacts. Because of that, the system needed to take the humidity out of the museum, and the process ended up dropping the temperature a little more.

Even without fire and rain, the system works hard to maintain 3½ levels and 96,000 square feet. As it does so, it chews through dollars to pay for natural gas, electricity and water— another reason why Arnold must constantly monitor it for potential cost savings.

None of this applies to the Palace of the Governors, where historic preservation standards and exorbitant costs forbid installing a similar system. The temperature there, Arnold said, can range from 60 degrees in the morning to 90 degrees in the afternoon.

“But most of the stuff in the Palace is acclimated to the Southwest climate,” he said. “The artifacts in the newer building couldn’t handle that kind of temperature swing.”

As for lights, Thompson said, they pose a serious threat to the long-term health of color-sensitive artifacts – a significant concern when the museum hosted the precious documents featured in The Threads of Memory: Spain and the United States (at left). Most light doesn’t just illuminate an object, it also emits heat and ultraviolet rays that can make colors fade faster as well as change the molecular structure of things as precious as a signature on a historic document. “Once that happens,” she said, “you can’t get it back.”

Thompson and museum Director Frances Levine agree that it really isn’t quite as dark as visitors assume. It just seems so because the rest of the museum is so bright.

“Usually, an exhibit that needs to be quite dark will have a couple of transition areas before you get into it so your eyes can adjust,” Thompson said. “It’s very bright here in the lobbies, so it’s hard to get a good transition.”

The best answer to that is patience. Your eyes will eventually adjust to the dimmer light. Your internal temperature control, however, may never adjust to the cool air.

Bring a sweater and keep reminding yourself: It’s for the artifacts’ sake.

Civil War-style Printing at the Palace Press

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The Palace Press this week welcomed a guest printer and a rare replica of an even-rarer Civil War-era press.

Bruce Cammack, associate librarian for rare books at Texas Tech’s Southwest Collection/Special Collections Library, brought a replica of an 1861 Adam’s Cottage Press to demonstrate what printing on the battlefront took.

Patented on March 19, 1861, the original cylinder press was manufactured and distributed by entrepreneur Joseph Watson and the Adams Press Company in New York. Advertisements for the press proclaimed that it could make Every Man His Own Printer!

“During the Civil War,” Cammack said, “they needed a way to print dispatches close to the front. These presses are heavy, but they’re mobile. They’d be in the back of a wagon, and you’d do orders and dispatches, incident reports, casualties, then move it. It was at the heart of the action.”

When the National Park Service discovered an original version of the press at Harpers Ferry, they hired Stephen Pratt of Pratt Wagon and Press Works in Cove Fort, Utah, to build five replicas. Today, two of them are at the Appomattox Court House National Historical Park, two are in private hands, and one belongs to Cammack, who acquired it through a grant by the CH Foundation in Lubbock to use for demonstration purposes.

How the original press ended up in Harpers Ferry is a story unto itself: It was used when General Robert E. Lee surrendered to Ulysses S. Grant at the Court House, when it printed the officers’ release papers.

“After the war, these presses were used extensively throughout the American West,” Cammack said. “Newspaper editors would go out into communities with them. They were a nice size for newspapers, sturdy, with only a few moving parts. They’d print sales circulars, wedding invitations, everything you’d need from a frontier printer.”

Cammack likes printing with his replica for a few reasons.

“You don’t have to be so careful because it’s not 150 years old,” he said. “And the quality of the printing is the same as it was 150 years ago, because the metal hasn’t fatigued.”

Bruce and James Bourland, who keeps the working-press side of the Palace Press’ exhibits going, along with Director Tom Leech, showed visitors how simple it was to ink the type, and roll it under a piece of paper. The result had those little letter-press indentations that speak of a hand-operated press – along with a surprising amount of print clarity when you consider the conditions the original ones had to operate in.

After working with the press for a few days on a planned booklet, Cammack, Palace Press Director Tom Leech, and assistant James Bourland decided to cut their losses and go with something far more simpler. And far more memorable: Territorial Gov. Lew Wallace’s quote about New Mexico’s uniqueness in the world.

 

“All calculations based on experience elsewhere, fail in New Mexico.”


Here’s how the typeblock of the quote looked before they loaded it onto the press. You can use it to practice your upside-down-and-backwards reading.


By this weekend, the Palace Press expects to be pumping out copies of the Wallace quote, and Cammack, Leech and Bourland will be there to answer your questions. Drop by to pick up your free copy.

While you’re there, you can visit with another relic of the 1800s: the buckskin-clad folks participating in the Santa Fe Mountain Man Trade Fair, who’ve set up shop in the Palace Courtyard. Admission is free through the Blue Gate on Lincoln Avenue.

Sgt. Leroy Petry’s Homecoming…with Style

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The New Mexico History Museum has a soft spot for military veterans. In our exhibits, we honor the men who served aboard the USS New Mexico, who endured the Bataan Death March, who answered the nation’s call time and again — as far back as the U.S. Revolution. Today, outside our windows and on the streets of the Santa Fe Plaza, the whole state showed its soft spot for one veteran and Santa Fe native in particular.

Sgt. 1st Class Leroy Petry recently became America’s newest Medal of Honor recipient. Over the last few days, he’s enjoyed a series of welcome-home events, but today was the cream of them all: A parade with bagpipers, a Color Guard, Vietnam veterans on Harley Davidsons, Cub Scouts waving flags bigger than themselves from the sidewalk, and a host of people bearing homemade banners and snapping keepsake photographs.

The weather cooperated with turquoise skies and a mild temperature. Mayor Dave Coss and Gov. Susana Martinez joined the procession, beaming and waving to the crowd. You can find plenty of background about the Army Ranger on the U.S. Army’s web page dedicated to him, along with the Santa Fe New Mexican’s collection of stories. In short, here’s what it took to make a hero:

While under fire in Afghanistan, Petry was struck and severely wounded when a Russian-made grenade was tossed toward him and his men. Despite his wounds, Petry reached for the grenade and prepared to toss it away when it instead blew up, taking his right hand with it.

From President Obama’s remarks at the Medal of Honor ceremony: “Every human impulse would tell someone to turn away. Every soldier is trained to seek cover. That’s what Sergeant Leroy Petry could have done. Instead, this wounded Ranger, this 28-year-old man with his whole life ahead of him, this husband and father of four, did something extraordinary. He lunged forward, toward the live grenade. He picked it up…and threw it back – just as it exploded.”

If you haven’t already seen it, Petry’s appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart is well worth watching. (Warning: Your eyes will tear up, and you will laugh out loud when Stewart compares Petry to a Jedi warrior.)

In the meantime, check out our album of images from today’s parade, when New Mexico honored a favorite son.

 

 

Palace Windows Get Technical Support

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You don’t have to be a winner of HGTV’s Design Star to see that the windows in the Palace of the Governors could use some help.

Hey – when you’re a National Historic Landmark with a 400-year-old history, some of your edges can tend to the ragged side of things. Wood gets old and porous. Water seeps past cracked plaster into adobe bricks. Foundations shift and settle.

But budgets are tight all over, and the cost of repairing a historic building can soar beyond a new screen door for your average bungalow. What was the New Mexico History Museum/Palace of the Governors to do?

Well, we turned to some of our most trusty and energetic supporters, the members of Los Compadres.  Building on their shared love for the Palace of the Governors,  Los Compadres’ members have for years given their volunteer all for the museum. During the warmer months, its members lead the Downtown Walking Tours that give tourists and locals alike a learned look at Santa Fe’s history. At the History Museum’s grand opening in May 2009, they stood in the heat for hours, scooping ice cream that they provided to a hot horde of first-time visitors. During last year’s Christmas at the Palace and Las Posadas, those bizcochitos you might have nibbled were provided by none other than Los Compadres.

Most important, they dove into fund-raising efforts to create the History Museum, beating the odds and ensuring we opened with a stunning array of exhibitions.

The majority of that work is done so quietly that you might be unaware of it. But their latest project – “Windows on History” – will soon appear before your very eyes.

Last year, Los Compadres adopted the Palace’s aging windows as a fund-raising cause, setting a goal of $40,000. They sold $5 raffle tickets, arranged a special showing of the Santa Fe Fiesta Melodrama, held private dinners with history experts as speakers, and offered 25 limited-edition prints of Jack McCarthy’s linoleum-cut version of a Palace window (left) as a premium. (The Palace Press stepped up by producing the prints, using handmade paper that included, fittingly, adobe mud.) The hustle caught the eye of the Santa Fe New Mexican, which wrote a lovely story that brought in a new wave of donations.

In the end, Los Compadres raised $54,000 – much of it in those highly cherished $5, $15, and $25-sized donations that show broad-based support for a fund-raising effort. With money in hand, the museum was able to look for a contractor, and soon as you know it, they’ll start replacing some of the most seriously impaired windows. (Just how many depends on what the contractors find once they open the building’s centuries-old walls.)

Los Compadres’ latest goal is to broaden its statewide reach, in part by creating a new category of supporters, the “Ambassadors.” Members want to reach beyond Santa Fe’s borders to carry the New Mexico History Museum/Palace of the Governors’ word to communities throughout the state and to welcome visitors from other historical societies to both the old and the new of our museum complex. Got an itch to devote some time to preserving New Mexico’s past? Interested in learning more? Contact the Museum of New Mexico Foundation at 982-6366.

 

Author Pam Houston and bluegrass band Breaking Blue headline El Palacio party

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“Party with El Palacio” on Friday, Aug. 5, features a free triple-header of an evening with award-winning author Pam Houston, Albuquerque bluegrass band Breaking Blue and spoken-word poet Carlos Contreras.

The event, hosted by El Palacio magazine, begins at 5 pm, with a reading and book signing by Houston in the New Mexico History Museum Auditorium. (Seating is limited.) At 6:30, come to the Palace of the Governors Courtyard for a toe-tapping and boot-scooting performance by Breaking Blue. (Wear your dancing shoes!). Preceding the band, Albuquerque spoken-word poet Carlos Contreras will perform his poem “Communion in the Desert (A Trip to the New Mexico History Museum).”

All the events are free. Come for one or for all three.

Each performer has a tie to El Palacio, the magazine of the Museums of New Mexico. Houston wrote about why she chose the Western life in the summer issue of El Palacio, “My Ranch, Myself: Making a Home on the Land.” (For an earlier El Palacio interview with Houston, go here.) Breaking Blue wrote a song based on an article in the winter 2008 issue of El Palacio, “Dearest Annie: Letters from Fort Selden.” And an interview with Contreras along with “Communion in the Desert” ran in the spring issue; a video of him performing it in the Palace Courtyard is on the magazine’s web site.

Houston’s new book, Contents May Have Shifted, will be published by W.W. Norton in early 2012. Among her earlier books are Cowboys Are My Weakness, Waltzing the Cat, A Little More about Me, and Sight Hound. Her stories have been selected for volumes of Best American Short Stories, the O. Henry Awards, the Pushcart Prize, and Best American Short Stories of the Century. She has won the Western States Book Award, the WILLA award for contemporary fiction, the Evil Companions Literary Award, and multiple teaching awards. Director of creative writing at the University of California, Davis, Houston also teaches in The Pacific University low residency MFA program, and at writers’ conferences around the country and the world, including the Taos Summer Writers’ Conference.

She lives on a ranch at 9,000 feet in Colorado near the headwaters of the Rio Grande. You can learn more about her on her web site.

Breaking Blue’s members come from different walks of music – from jazz to heavy metal to classical – but are united in a passion to perform what they call “shabby-chic Americana music.” Along the way, they’ve revived some traditional American “Old Time” songs and lyrics that have been forgotten or re-written over the years.

In 2009, the group won the Santa Fe Bluegrass Festival Song writing contest. Other awards include the 2011 New Mexico Music Award for Best American Song (“Old Roads”); the 2010 Santa Fe Bluegrass Festival Old Time Band Competition; and the 2010 Albuquerque Folk Festival Band Contest. The group’s web site has more information.

Contreras competed on the team that brought the National Poetry Slam Championship home to his native Albuquerque. His awards include the New Mexico Hispanic Entertainers Award for Poet of the Years in 2007. With the Voces program at the National Hispanic Cultural Center, he leads workshops in poetry composition and performance. Contreras has published poems in several anthologies, and a book, A Man in Pieces: Poems for My Father.

For “Communion in the Desert,” El Palacio commissioned him to tour the New Mexico History Museum/Palace of the Governors and compose a poem about the trip. Read more about him on this web site.

Founded in 1913 as the scholarly journal of the state’s then-only museum – the Palace of the Governors – El Palacio has covered the exhibits, public programs and scholarship of the Museum of New Mexico’s four Santa Fe museums (New Mexico History Museum/Palace of the Governors, Museum of International Folk Art, Museum of Indian Arts and Culture/Laboratory of Anthropology, and New Mexico Museum of Art), as well as the Office of Archaeological Studies and the six State Monuments (Coronado, Jemez, Fort Selden, Lincoln, Fort Sumner, and El Camino Real International Heritage Center). For subscription information, go here.

Someone’s In the Kitchen at the Cowden Café

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Museum-goers who wouldn’t mind a little nosh with their exhibits have reason to celebrate the re-opening of the History  Museum’s Cowden Café. Someone’s In the Kitchen, a longtime Santa Fe catering company, has begun serving light breakfasts and lunches in the second-floor space with a fabulous outdoor patio overlooking downtown Santa Fe.

Richard Derwostyp (“Just call me Richard,” he says, for obvious reasons) has owned and operated Someone’s in the Kitchen for 20 years.

“It’s going to be simple salads, sandwiches,” he said of the Cowden Café fare. “Some of them won’t be that simple, and some will have a Southwestern edge.

Typical lunch offerings might include gazpacho, smoked-turkey-and-pepper-jack cheese sandwiches, and salads like a Southwest Caesar; spinach with apples, Maytag blue cheese and pecans; and a chef salad. Service will be casual, with orders taken at the counter. With a minimum of two days’ advance notice, the café can prepare sack lunches for groups of visitors. The number to call for group orders is 505-424-8209.

The café is open from 10 am to 4:30 pm Tuesday through Sunday, with lunches from 11:30 am to 3 pm, and drinks, cookies and pastries until 4:30 pm. Lunches will cost $7-$13, and Richard will also have a variety of non-alcoholic beverages and breakfast pastries. Diners don’t need to pay museum admission, unless they’d also like to wander the exhibits. Besides good food and a great view of downtown Santa Fe from its balcony patio, the café has free wireless.

Set on the museum’s second floor, the cafe closed April 1 when its previous operators, the owners of the Plaza Restaurant, decided to focus on repairing their fire-damaged restaurant. A request for proposals was issued for another operator and resulted in a contract for Someone’s In the Kitchen through October, giving Derwostyp an opportunity to see how well his current operation adjusts to the space.

“Richard was the most responsive in trying to work with us and our needs,” said Dr. Frances Levine, director of the museum.

The café is named for New Mexico’s Cowden family who, from 1883 to 1915, ran the JAL Ranch (for which the southeastern town of Jal is named). The JAL was the open-range home to 40,000 head of cattle and a part of New Mexico history that included the likes of Oliver Loving and Charles Goodnight, skirmishes with Comanches, and tales of gutting out the pioneer life in dugouts and covered wagons. At its peak, the JAL occupied much of what is now Lea County, east and south into Texas.

So come on up to the Cowden and enjoy some tasty food from Someone’s in the Kitchen. (Just for the sake of it, and given the name of the new cafe operator, we just couldn’t resist adding this image from the Photo Archives of former First Lady Susie Miles doing her very best — and very prescient — June Cleaver imitation.)

Susie Miles, wife of John E. Miles, in the kitchen at the Governor’s Mansion. Miles served as New Mexico governor from 1939 to 1943. Photo by T. Harmon Parkhurst. Courtesy Photo Archives at the Palace of the Governors, No. 54376.