Tag Archives: new mexico history museum

Lowriders Hanging High

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JackParsons-installation

Wander into the Palace of the Governors’ entrance and you’ll get a taste of the renovations being planned for our favorite National Historic Landmark. The front desk has been converted into a smaller, more appropriate size, clad in copper and topped with granite. On the walls, you’ll see a contemporary take on New Mexico’s Hispanic culture.

A few of Jack Parsons’ images of Northern New Mexico lowriders make up a temporary exhibition that also celebrates the Photo Legacy Project. As dreamed up by the Palace of the Governors Photo Archives, the project collects the works of contemporary photographers. Parsons was an early and eager contributor.

The photos on display first appeared in the 2005 Museum of New Mexico Press book, Low ’n Slow: Lowriding in New Mexico, by Parsons, Carmella Padilla and Juan Estevan Arellano. Through Parsons’ images, Padilla’s essays and Arellano’s slang-style dialogues, the book explored the lowrider lifestyle in ways that honored its dignity.

“The lobby area is the first step of a larger effort to freshen up the Palace’s rooms,” museum Director Frances Levine said. “Jack’s photos give it color and liveliness while underscoring the Palace’s 400-year-old tie to Spanish culture in the United States.”

Parsons, who lives in Santa Fe, won a 2006 Governor’s Award for Excellence and Achievement in the Arts. His work can be seen in numerous books, including Dark Beauty and Santa Fe Style.

Las Posadas and Christmas at the Palace, a virtual journey

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The weekend of December 13, 2013, saw the 29th annual version of our two most popular events, Christmas at the Palace, on Friday evening, and Las Posadas, on Sunday. More than 1,500 people turned out for each event, some eager for some quality time with Santa, som72-BoyWithSantae looking to help recreate Mary and Joseph’s search for an inn. The Palace Press let folks work one of the antique presses. Local groups provided live music, hot cider and cookies were abundant, and we even pulled out some kids’ crafts and a few pinatas.

Couldn’t come? Take a virtual visit here… Continue reading →

Yippie-Yi-Oy-Vey: Nice Jewish Cowboys and Cowgirls

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4-72-Cowboys_JewishCowboys_007890Members of pioneering Jewish families, Bernard Seligman, Zadoc Staab and Lehman Spiegelberg became freighters on the Santa Fe Trail. Married to a Jewish merchant in Deming, Ella Klauber Wormser took what may be some of the earliest photographs documenting the transition from cattle drives to rail transport in the early 1890s.

In the second half of the 19th century, Jewish families began playing prominent roles in cattle ranching and sheep raising – roles that continue into 21st-century New Mexico. At 2 pm on Sunday, Oct. 27, the New Mexico History Museum joins with the New Mexico Jewish Historical Society and Temple Beth Shalom to present “Nice Jewish Cowboys and Cowgirls” in the History Museum auditorium. The event is free with admission; Sundays are free to NM residents.

Award-winning news: Before the event begins, Bethany Braley, executive director of National Day of the Cowboy, will present the museum with a 2013 Cowboy Keepers Award in recognition of its work documenting the life of cowboys in its main exhibit, Telling New Mexico: Stories from Then and Now,and its latest exhibit, Cowboys Real and Imagined. (For more on the award, log onto http://nationaldayofthecowboy.com/wordpress/?p=1634.)

For “Nice Jewish Cowboys and Cowgirls,” Noel Pugach, professor emeritus of history at the University of New Mexico, will lead a panel discussion featuring members of the Gottlieb and Wertheim families, who will share their families’ stories and explain what “the cowboy way” means to them. Meredith Davidson, curator of 19th- and 20th-century Southwest collections, will present a selection of Wormser’s images also on view in Cowboys Real and Imagined.

The event is part of a layered programming schedule for the exhibit that explores the diverse cultural backgrounds and heritage of New Mexico’s cowboys and ranching traditions.

Through March 16, 2014, in the museum’s Herzstein Gallery, Cowboys Real and Imagined explores New Mexico’s cowboy legacy from its origin in the Spanish vaquero tradition through itinerant hired hands, outlaws, rodeo stars, cowboy singers, Tom Mix movies and more. Guest curated by B. Byron Price, director of the Charles M. Russell Center for the Study of Art of the American West at the University of Oklahoma, the exhibit grounds cowboy history in New Mexico through rare photographs, cowboy gear, movies and original works of art. It includes a bounty of artifacts including boots and spurs, ropes, movie posters, and the chuck wagon once used by cowboys on New Mexico’s legendary Bell Ranch.

Photo: Freighters on the Santa Fe Trail, Bernard Seligman, Zadoc Staab, Lehman Spiegelberg and Kiowa Indian scouts. Palace of the Governors Photo Archives 007890.

Tom Leech of the Palace Press Wins a Mayor’s Arts Award

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PrintingThorpCover-72_3-2013

We already knew we had a winner in Tom Leech, curator, director of the Palace Press, marbled-paper artist, writer, and printer extraordinaire. Now all of Santa Fe knows he’s a winner, too.

On Oct. 10, Tom and other recipients of the 2013 Mayor’s Awards for Excellence in the Arts will be honored at the Santa Fe Convention Center. We’ll have a table or two of our folks there to cheer him on (along with cheering on Charmay Allred, another recipient and a dear friend of the museum).

Join us in congratulating all of the fine people being recognized. From the city’s press release announcing the recipients:

Mayor David Coss and the City of Santa Fe Arts Commission are proud to announce the recipients of the 2013 Mayor’s Awards for Excellence in the Arts. Each of this year’s recipients have made outstanding contributions to the arts in Santa Fe, demonstrated artistic excellence and exceptional achievement, and embrace an ongoing commitment to the arts in Santa Fe. …

Tom Leech

Tom Leech is the Director of the Press at the Palace of the Governors, and has more than 35 years of experience in printing, paper-making, and related book-arts. A curator at the New Mexico History Museum since 2001, Leech has organized a number of successful exhibits, including The Saint John’s Bible, Jack Kerouac and the Writer’s Life, and Album Amicorum: Gems of Friendship in a Frightened World. With Pamela Smith, he directed the exhibit Lasting Impressions: the Private Presses of New Mexico. An advocate for the Book Arts, Leech has drawn appreciative audiences to events at the museum for lectures, readings, demonstrations and workshops featuring artists, poets, printers, scholars and musicians of national and international renown. At the Palace Press he regularly demonstrates printing and discusses its history and importance with school groups and visitors of all ages. Books and broadsides that he has printed include Jack Thorp’s Songs of the Cowboys, O’Keeffe Stories, and Word Art Poetry Portfolio. Additionally, Leech collaborates with Santa Fe’s Poets Laureate on fine limited editions. He is a member of the Santa Fe Book Arts Group and the Eldorado Art and Craft Association. …

Collections Textiles Are Safe at Home

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RollingUp_72-7x5The New Mexico History Museum’s assistant collections manager, Pennie McBride, recently hit a major milestone, successfully rehousing the final object in the History Museum’s clothing, accessories and textile collection. It marked the end of a five-year effort that represented one of the primary reasons we needed to build a 92,000-square-foot museum: We needed a better place to store all our stuff.

McBride saved the biggest for last, pulling in collections and other staffers to help her unfold a 19×27’ 48-star U.S. flag and then carefully, with archival precision, re-roll it onto a custom-ordered 20’ tube. (To find one that large, she had to go to a construction-materials firm and adapt something usually used for creating concrete pillars.)

In 2005, an Institute of Museum and Library Services awarded the museum a $140,000 grant to rehouse the 3,406 items in the textiles collection – a group that ranges from wedding dresses to purses to rugs. The grant lasted until 2009, though work continued into this summer. The grant helped hire a textile conservator and train staff, volunteers and interns how to handle, treat and rehouse the objects.

First, the items had to be moved from the old Armory Building to the Halpin Building and then, in 2009, to the new museum. How big of a job was that? We’re talking along the lines of 296 shoes, 275 hats, 20 parasols, 47 floor coverings, 153 pieces of underwear, 67 fans, 27 art samplers, 32 U.S. flags of various starriness and more.

With the volunteers, McBride created padded hangers, cut and pieced together boxes, built mounts for hats and fans, stuffed shoes and boots, and entered every item’s details into a new database—all of it a build-up to one giant flag.

“Everything went according to plan,” McBride said. “We could have opened that flag and found an infestation or a tear, but it went very smoothly.”

Next up: Photographing all 3,406 pieces. But first, a moment of relief.

“It’s a good feeling,” McBride said. “With 10 volunteers, interns and a textiles conservator, it was a real team. For the last piece to be the largest one in the collection, that was great.”

A Year of Centennial Letters

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Sell everything, I’ve found a place where I can breathe and sleep at night.

So began Kelly Murphy Lamb’s submission to the Centennial Letters Project. Hers was among an end-of-the-Centennial-year spurt of letters that has delighted us. Throughout the year, we’ve heard from people in nearly every part of the state, including quite a few schoolchildren. Some have told us how foreign the experience of writing a letter is; one complained that her hand hurt. Enough of them described a New Mexico sunset that we’re pretty darned sure we’ve got it down pat. Almost all of them shared some detail about their life–where they live, where they shop, what worries them, what makes them happy.

If we were of the unyielding sort, today would be a day to cut off all submissions. New Mexico, after all, became an official entrant in the United States of America on Jan. 6, 1912. But who are we to tell a willing writer not to write? Keep those centennial letters coming. We’ll open them, read them, and stash them in our archives so that future historians might know what all of us were up to in New Mexico’s centennial statehood year.

Here are some excerpts from the most recent batch, starting with Kelly Murphy Lamb of Albuquerque:

“Sell everything, I’ve found a place where I can breathe and sleep at night.” My great-grandfather William Murphy telegraphed to his wife, Mary, in Mammoth Spring, Misouri. The year was 1906. He was in Albuquerque, New Mexico Territory, where he spent the night after shipping a boxcar of race horses to El Paso, Texas.

William and Mary, after selling their holdings in Misouri, rode the train to Texico, New Mexico, first stop in the Territory. They established the Murphy Hotel, Dining Room and Saloon, where they served nearly all newcomers to New Mexico Territory. William also established a livery stable and wagon yard to help new homesteaders. …

From Monica Duarte, a student at New Mexico State University:

… I live in a little town called Mesquite; it is 20 minutes (15 miles) away from Las Cruces and 45 minutes (35 miles) to El Paso, Texas. There are lots of dairy farms on the road to my house and lots of planting fields. In the summer everything is green and alive, but in the winter everything looks desolated and withering. My neighborhood consists of 22 houses and one empty lot. … Every house has a basketball hoop, many have trampolines, and almost every family has some sort of pet. During the summer afternoons you can always hear children playing outside, screaming, yelling, and laughing for no reason at all. Many families have cookouts and they invite the neighbors. The day before school starts in August, most of the older kids get together around a camp fire to make s’mores and just have a nice time together. …

From Joshua S. Johnson, another student at New Mexico State University:

This fall semester will be my last semester as an undergraduate student. In a month from now, I find out whether or not I get active duty in the Army once I graduate and commission as an officer. It has been really hard just waiting to see if I will have a full-time career or not in the Army. It is crazy to think that in just one year from now I could be over in Afghanistan or wherever else the U.S. will be fighting overseas. … All I can do now is to enjoy this last semester with friends that I will probably not see for a long time and to make the best of it. …Thank you, New Mexico, for letting me be a part of this great state.

From Alyssa Ruben, a student at the Santa Fe Indian School:

I am from the pueblo of Laguna. I am currently 14 years old. … One thing that our leaders and elders are very worried about right now is preserving our language. The only fluent speakers are the elders of the pueblo. My grandpa is a fluent speaker and my younger brother is learning a lot from him but is not a fluent speaker. My ba-ba is very passionate about preserving our language. One thing that he is doing to keep the language alive is he got permission to start a language program at Laguna Elementary School. This is his first year working with the kids. … We still have our traditional practices that still go on but it is very sad because when you go into the kiva, you don’t hear very many people that speak the language in there, you mostly hear English. …

And finally, just a snippet from a lovely and haunting letter by Napoleon Garcia of Abiquiu:

Dear Future Grandchildren,

Today we celebrated our Indian heritage here in Abiquiu by honoring our patron saint St. Tomás de Apostle. The event started with eight newly trained children dancing our traditional dances dressed brightly in shades of red festooned by multi-colored ribbons. I proudly watched as two of my great-grandchildren danced with this group. My girls danced this fiesta as did some of my grandchildren. I was always an able dancer but now I’m on the sidelines with my drum to keep the beat going as they twirl around.

They danced into church where we had a special Mass for St. Tomás and then the dancers led the congregation next door to the Joe Ferran Gym for a festive meal of posole, beans and biscochitos—what else? Are you still honoring our traditions in this way in 2112? Is the church, dedicated to St. Tomás, built in 1938, still standing? Are you still feasting in the Joe Ferran Gym next door? Are you still dancing?

 

 

A Bittersweet Farewell to an Exhibit that Touched Our Souls

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On Monday, Dec. 31, 2012, museum staffers will begin tearing down Illuminating the Word: The Saint John’s Bible and Contemplative Landscape. Housed together in the museum’s second-floor Herzstein Gallery, the exhibits speak not only of art, of the history of the printed word, and of the role that spirituality plays in our state, but they also speak to a place uniquely special within each of us.

A hallmark of the exhibit has been a golden-hued meditation space nestled within its center. As we headed into the Christmas holiday, we decided to hold a small ceremony in that space to honor the exhibit with our thoughts about what it meant to us and how we saw it change others.

Tom Leech, who curated The Saint John’s Bible portion in concert with Saint John’s University and Abbey in Collegeville, Minn., kicked it off.

“We pulled off something great, something above and beyond what we were expecting,” he said. “Fran (Levine, the museum’s director) keeps talking about teamwork, but this proves that it really happens. At times it felt like pulling teeth, but we sailed through a lot of heavy stuff.”

Here’s the thing: Several years ago, Tom fell in love with the Saint John’s project — the first calligraphed and illuminated Bible commissioned by Benedictine monks in something like 500 years. Donald Jackson (at left), Queen Elizabeth’s calligrapher, conceived the project while on an artists’ retreat at Ghost Ranch in New Mexico, then oversaw it from his scriptorium in Wales. The Ghost Ranch piece that kicked off years of fund-raising, hand-writing, and the final “Amen” last year, was displayed for the first time in our museum’s version of the exhibit, which has appeared in other cities.

Pairing our 44 pages with photographs of sacred places — from Tony O’Brien’s work at Christ in the Desert Monastery, historical images from the Palace of the Governors Photo Archives, and interpretations by contemporary shooters — initially sounded like an odd shoe-horning. But in meeting upon meeting, we brought our ideas out, sanded here, excised there, and together built an exhibit so eloquent that Saint John’s Abbey extended its run in Santa Fe and is borrowing elements of it for future exhibits in other cities.

“I’ve had so many people say, `Whose idea was this to bring these exhibits together?'” Fran said. “And I say, `Our team.’ It was an iterative process. It was building this — this meditation room (I really hate to see this go). It comes from that respect we have for each other as museum people. I suppose we could get to the place where we say, `No, the walls have to be white and you can never put a nail in the floor,’ but that’s not what we do.”

“It’s a community and it’s how it is molded by us together,” said Caroline Lajoie, the exhibition designer. “We catch ideas from one time or another, and we all came to a place where it makes sense. My daughter, who was in my belly when I was designing exhibits years ago, she is a fanatic of this. It’s her completely favorite exhibit. She cares very little for the work I’ve done, but she goes straight to the pages whenever she’s here.”

Even the meditation space was an idea in need of evolution. Originally, we dreamed of building a labyrinth in the space and inviting visitors to walk it slowly. As the design for it became complicated with questions that included how more than one person could walk it at a time without bumping shoulders, we decided to create a simple spiral — and even researched some lovely information about the way spirals appear in all of nature. Finally, we stripped it down to bare essentials: curved walls, four benches, and phases of the moon on high.

Surrounding the meditation space are the cases holding the Bible pages and surrounding them are the photographs. Outside the exhibition, in the museum’s Gathering Space, we grouped couches around a television showing documentaries about The Saint John’s Bible and Christ in the Desert Monastery. On occasional weekends, local calligraphers demonstrated their work in the space. A robust programming schedule included lectures by artists and photographers and several performances by Schola Cantorum and the monks of Christ in the Desert Monastery.

Larry Luck, one of our volunteer guides, became an expert on the project and has thus far conducted more than 60 tours of the exhibit. (He still has two to go.)

“I saw this exhibition in Phoenix several years ago,” he said. “It wasn’t as attractively presented and was kind of crowded. Here, when you’re looking at a page, your eyes go down, but the photographs make your eyes go up. What was interesting was the number of people who were repeat visitors and who would bring friends and then their friends would bring friends. I was so pleased when it was extended because that meant I could still use all the knowledge I’d gained.”

Those repeat customers were apparent to Mary Anne Redding, the museum’s former photo archivist who curated Contemplative Landscape. Now the director of the photography department at the Santa Fe University of Art and Design, she’s overheard students outside of her program talk about visiting the exhibit every week mainly to take advantage of the meditation space. At the space’s core is a slowly burbling fountain rising out of a glorious piece of granite that we weren’t quite sure what to do with after Dec. 31.

“I’m going to buy the fountain,” she said. “I have the place for it in my house, and it will keep the exhibit with me at home.”

Tony attended our gathering and was visibly moved at how visibly moved we were. His photographs, which included this favorite image of a monk at prayer, are included in his book, Light in the Desert: Photographs from the Monastery of Christ in the Desert (Museum of New Mexico Press).

“As one of the artists involved, I want to thank you all,” he said. “I feel honored to be part of this exhibition. You’ve created a space that respected our work beyond words, and you’ve created a safe space. Every time I walk in here, things change. It all calms down. It’s inclusive of our community, our religions.  When you’re in here, you’re allowed to be alone but you’re also part of a larger community. That is exceptional.”

One of the reasons we wanted to bring people together for this little gratitude ceremony was because of the wound we suffered as a nation last week from the shootings in Newtown, Conn. As we prepared to end the gathering and open the exhibition space to our visitors, we mutually and quietly agreed to a moment of silent prayer and reflection. It lasted longer than such moments usually do. We are, after all, so bruised and confused. But we were also, as participants in the exhibit, reluctant to say that this is it, this is the end, now we are leaving.

You have one more week. Please take advantage of these exhibits. Stand in awe, scrutinize the details, listen to the silence. They are our gifts to you.

 

 

USS New Mexico’s Bell Finds a Permanent Home

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By the time the USS New Mexico battleship was decommissioned in 1946, her bells had rung out alarms of attacks and tolled the grief felt by those who survived as they buried at sea the shipmates who had given their lives. The “Queen of the Fleet,” commissioned in 1918 and christened with both champagne and the waters of the Rio Grande, had served as the finest battleship of the Pacific fleet and endured attacks by kamikazes and bombers. For her World War II service, the ship received six battle stars and is still recalled with awe — even though she was sold for scrap in 1947.

The story might have ended there but for those bells — one of which arrived on Friday, Nov. 16, at the New Mexico History Museum after a circuitous post-war life. That part of the story goes back to New Mexico Gov. Thomas Mabry, who began working in 1947 on obtaining one of the ship’s two bells.

His correspondence with Secretary of the Navy John L. Sullivan reflects the state’s desire to spare the bell from the scrapyard. Sullivan shared the goal, but it was a weighty one — 1,100 pounds, according to a Dec. 22, 1947, letter from the Navy chief.

“It was the practice of the Navy to outfit some of the older battleships with two bells, and the U.S.S. NEW MEXICO was so equipped,” he wrote. “It would give me much pleasure to donate the bell of the U.S.S. NEW MEXICO to you on behalf of the State of New Mexico, but before doing so, there are two conditions which must be fulfilled. The first is that Congress must approve all donations. … The second condition is that the State of New Mexico must agree to defray all expenses incidental to packing and shipping.”

Our correspondence file includes Mabry’s request to obtain the portion of the ship’s bulkhead that held a painted record of how many Japanese planes and shore installations were destroyed by the ship’s guns. If the letters are correct, the bulkhead made it to New Mexico, but we’ve been unable to trace where it went. We do, however, know what happened to the bell.

In 1948, Gov. Mabry and Mayor Frank Ortiz officiated at a dedication ceremony as the bell was placed on the Santa Fe Plaza. (The photo above was taken at the event by Robert H. Martin. Palace of the Governors Photo Archives 41320.) It stood on the Plaza for nearly 30 years. An early 1970s Plaza renovation forced its removal, but the Manuel Lujan Sr. building in the state’s South Capitol Complex gladly took possession of it. It hung below a stairway near the building’s vending-machine area until a recent renovation there forced yet another move.

This time, we were ready. We have the storage space, we have a small exhibition dedicated to the battleship and its nuclear-submarine namesake, and we have staffers who feel an emotional tie to the ship and its mates.

“It represents to much,” said Tom Leech, director of the Palace Press and curator of our lobby-area exhibit, A Noble Legacy: The USS New Mexico. “When I think about what that bell has been through — it’s rung general alarms when the ship was under attack. It rang when those guys were buried at sea.”

(To learn more about the ship’s ordeals and heroism, check out this mini-documentary, USS New Mexico BB40: The Drinan Diary, produced by the museum and Michael Kamins of KNME-TV in Albuquerque.)

Getting the bell delivered to our loading dock was one thing. Figuring out how to get it to our lower-level almost-hermetically-sealed collections vault was another.

First, staff members eyeballed it. Warily.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then, four of our burliest guys tried to move it …

 

 

 

 

 

… but couldn’t even budge it.

 

 

Finally, we resorted to good old hydraulics.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As for what happened to the second bell, we know that the University of New Mexico acquired it, possibly with the help of the Alpha Phi Omega fraternity, but we aren’t certain where it is. Outside the Student Union Building? At the football stadium? Inside the ROTC building? If you know, drop us a line. (And if you know what happened to its clapper, which our records showed “disappeared, mysteriously, during the early 1970s,” we’d be interested in that as well.)

Our hope is to put our bell on display as soon as we polish off some other priorities. One popular suggestion is to place it in the Palace Courtyard. We’ll let you know when that happens. In the meantime, we’re pleased and proud that an important part of New Mexico’s heritage is sharing quarters with so many other artifacts that tell the stories of who we are.

 

Picture This: Photo Archives Intern Lauren Gray

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Ask most of us why we work here and “I love history” is sure to be one of the top three reasons. That goes double for Lauren Gray, an intern in the Palace of the Governors Photo Archives, former intern in the Fray Angélico Chávez History Library, and recent graduate of the University of New Mexico’s master’s program in U.S. history (with an emphasis in Colonial History and a secondary in Medieval and Early Modern Europe).

Since January, Gray has been working as part of a three-year grant to digitize and preserve the photo collections. She has fastidiously and meticulously scanned and archived thousands of photographs, bringing an acute attention to detail, careful handling of fragile photographs and the ability to organize large amounts of data to the job. Her efforts play a very important role in bringing the Photo Archives into the digital age and allowing the public to view photos wherever they happen to be on planet Earth.

Her biggest challenge? Learning how to use new software and restoring old photographs that have been badly damaged by time.  “It’s extremely frustrating to see history deteriorating right in front of you,” she said while scanning a pinhole photograph. “But it’s also really rewarding to be able to preserve these artifacts and even restore them.”

Gray’s appreciation for the museum extends beyond the northeast corner of our campus. Her favorite exhibit was Fashioning New Mexico, the inaugural changing exhibition in the Herzstein Gallery when the museum opened in 2009. “I love tactile things and anything that brings history alive in an interactive and intriguing way.” (See the interactive web version of the exhibit here.)

Her favorite event is the Santa Fe Mountain Man Trade Fair because “mountain men are unique to American history, and it’s fascinating to see people keeping the tradition alive.”

Just how deep is her love for the History Museum? In September, Gray and her fiancée, Christian, were married in the Palace Courtyard. The couple shares a love of history and wanted to make a lifelong commitment there, Gray said, because of its long and diverse history and its beauty – a perfect fit for a happy marriage.

Theatrical Secrets Spill from a Long-Closed Trunk

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Almost everyone’s had a daydream about finding an old trunk in the attic, brushing off decades of dust, and opening it up to unknown treasures within. Minda Stockdale and Pennie McBride have gotten to indulge of bit of that fantasy with their work on an early 20th-century steamer trunk in the collections vault.

Originally acquired by the Museum of International Folk Art in 1964 from the estate of Felipe Perea, it was recently accepted into the History Museum’s collections. “It had been accessioned, but the items weren’t catalogued,” McBride said.

“It was kind of a mystery project,” Stockdale said.

The trunk itself is a beauty, with a roller top and adorned with mother-of-pearl and metal accents. But opening it and dealing with its many contents was a job McBride wasn’t sure she had time for. Then along came Stockdale.

Stockdale (that’s her at left, holding the costume for the Boy Angel), a 2010 art-history graduate of Colorado College, had worked in a Park City art gallery, but missed the history part of her degree. The museum brought her on as an intern, one who wanted a project she could experience from start to finish.

“The trunk was sort of sitting off to the side under a piece of plastic,” Stockdale said. “Pennie said, `This’d be a perfect project.’”

“It gives her experience cataloguing, inventorying, photographing, and rehousing, and she’s been doing a lot of research,” McBride said.

As for herself, she said, “I was totally excited about seeing the devil’s costume and the horns.”

The devil? Oh, that was just the start.

Since early July, Stockdale (who, yes, is the granddaughter of onetime vice-presidential candidate Admiral James Stockdale) has been coming to the museum three to five days a week to work with the trunk’s contents.

Perea, the former owner, was an actor, and the costumes appear to have been used in a local production of Las Pastorelas (Shepherds’ Tales), a traditional Mexican play typically performed around the Christmas holiday. A 1915 photograph inside the trunk (see it at below) shows the actors dressed up, with Perea as the devil, Felipe Boen as the boy angel, and Frank Montoya as the hermit. A note written on the photo didn’t say who played the reclining shepherd.

This was no ordinary devil’s costume. It’s festooned, folk art-style, with vintage Monopoly game pieces, silver medallions, an 1894 dog-tax tag and, for reasons Stockdale has yet to decipher, President Taft campaign buttons. The accompanying hat has goat horns, and the pants have metal bells sown down the sides of the legs.

Props used by the actors included a comically large rosary and silver sheriff’s star, and a knife that turned out to be a real bayonet made for a 1903 Springfield rifle.

“I’ve been e-mailing with Dr. Enrique Lamadrid at UNM because he’s been researching Las Pastorelas,” Stockdale said. While he’s been able to provide a lot of helpful information, she said, even he’s stumped by the connection to Taft, the president who signed New Mexico’s statehood bill in 1912.

Also in the trunk were items for a ragtag circus, including a hand-painted banner and velvet shorts possibly worn by the strong-man actor. “I don’t know much about those items yet,” Stockdale said, but added that the task of finding out keeps her going.

“I just get excited to come in every day and learn,” she said.