For breakfast I toasted bagels and spread them with goat cheese and a slice of onion. On mine I put white fish also. I drank tea and Marty and YoYo drank coffee.
Then we left for Santa Fe. We first drove to Cochiti Purblo. At the Visitors’ center we showed an image of Marty’s story Teller ceramic piece. The attendant immediately told us it looked like a Jemez piece. We asked him how he knew and he said because it was not Cochiti because his mother and his aunt, Helen Cordero, were the two potters at Cochiti who made storytellers and it did not resemble their pieces.
Armed with this definitive information, we drove back to I-25 and continued north to Santa Fe. I navigated us to Stephen’s and we looked around there but found nothing that we wanted to buy.
It was 12:30 so we decided to go to lunch. We drove to Owings Gallery and Mark let us park in their lot. We walked the two blocks to The Shed, which was not totally packed and were shown to a table immediately. I guess the coronavirus has reduced travel to Santa Fe.
We decided to split a No. 5 with beef and double Posole, a guacamole salad, Spinach enchiladas, and a chocolate mocha cake, plus beers for Marty and me. The food was just as delicious as always, but the spinach enchiladas was revelatory. A second amazing New Mexican dish on the second day of Marty and Yoyo’s trip to New Mexico.
After lunch we walked west on the portal to 109 E. Palace to see the office for Los Alamos transit and mail that has been the Rain Man Gallery since 1945. It is my favorite non-art gallery in Santa Fe. It has more old and authentic pieces than any other gallery i am aware of in Santa Fe plus it has a room full of original Curtis and other vintage photos. We spent a while looking and Yo-yo bought a highly colored ceramic spoon rest for their kitchen for $18.00.
While Yoyo was shopping I sat and talked to the owner. I told her how much I liked her store and mentioned one particular instance. I had seen four or six ledger sheet paintings made by Indians at army bases shortly after capture by the army in the 1860’s or 70’s in the store shortly after seeing similar ones or the same ledger sheet paintings on the Antiques Roadshow that had garnered rather high appraisals.
The owner then told me that Madeline Albright bought all of those paintings while accompanied by a host of armed secret service agents that lined the roofs of the buildings across Palace and accompanied her and would not let her go beyond the front room. I guess that occurred when Albright was Secretary of State.
We then walked across the street to the Palace of the Governors and I waited while Marty and Yoyo looked at the Indian jewelers’ wares laid out under the portal and purchased a ring for Yoyo.
We then continued along Palace to the Fine Arts Museum and toured the exhibits. We particularly admired the Renaissance drawing exhibit from the British Museum. My favorite drawing was byAnnibale Caracci, but the Michelangelo of the three men on the cross was a close second.
After viewing the other exhibit spaces we headed back to Owings Gallery. Marty and Yoyo enjoyed the wonderful paintings. Surprisingly, I found a print I liked by John Sloan marked $3,000.
When I asked Mark how much the gallery would take for the small print, he said, “$2,000.”
I asked can we put it on layaway and he said, “We can do Four payments of $500.00 per month.
I said, “I will take it.”
Here is a summary from an American Heritage Magazine article:
When John Sloan—one of eight Eastern painters known as the Ashcan school—first came to Santa Fe in 1919, he was looking for new subjects to paint. He found a remote mountain town of about seven thousand citizens, two-thirds of whom were Spanish-speaking. Among the “Anglos” (persons neither Spanish nor Indian) was a sizable group of artists. To respect creative work is tradition in both Indian and Spanish society, and Sloan was delighted to find himself politely left alone. Above all, he was enchanted by the look of the place. That summer he wrote his friend Robert Henri, who had first suggested he try Santa Fe, “I have thirteen canvases under way …,” adding that he was at work in one of the studios that the Fine Arts Museum made available to visiting artists. The next year, he and his wife bought property, and from then until 1950, Sloan spent all but one summer in Santa Fe.
I loved the print of a tourist fashionably dressed wearing a fancy Concho belt buying pots from a poor Indian woman holding a baby.
After I wrote the check for my first payment and Mark wrapped the print in bubble wrap we put it in the car and drove back to Albuquerque.
We stopped at Sprouts and I went shopping. I bought a bunch of green onions, a head of romaine lettuce, two clusters of vine ripened tomatoes, two salmon fillets and two packets of fresh dill to make Gravad Lax, 1/3 lb. of Aji Tuna and ½ lb. of salmon for Sashimi, four small avocados, some chocolate dipped peanuts, and a bag of green beans.
Suzette and Willy were at home when we arrived around 6:30.
Willy left and Suzette and I discussed dinner. I had partially thawed a lb. of scallops. We decided to stir fry the scallops with a mixture of vegetables, including, bok Choy, onion, zucchini, 1 ½ blocks of deep fried tofu, a yellow crook neck squash, garlic, portobello mushrooms, ginger, and an orange bell pepper. Marty and I de-threaded about 1/3 lb. of snow peas. We thawed and diced the scallops and other vegetables and made a seasoning sauce by combining corn starch, so, sesame oil, Chinese cooking wine, Japanese rice vinegar, oyster sauce, and water.
We also made 1 ½ cups of white rice.
Suzette did the stir frying tonight, cooking the bell pepper, onion, bok Choy, ginger, and garlic first. Then she added the mushrooms, sliced squashes ,and tofu and finally the snow peas, scallops and the
seasoning sauce.
We called Marty and Yoyo to dinner I opened and poured a bottle of Trader Joe’s Petit Reserve Sauvignon Blanc.
We all enjoyed our meal.
Marty does not eat sweets, so after dinner Suzette and I split the remaining punch Bullard and the remaining chocolate Mocha cake from the Shed.
We went to bed by 9:00 after a long pleasant day of tourist activity.
Bon Appetit
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