Born in 1964 and passing in 2015, artist Margarete Bagshaw was known for her use of color, composition and texture. This exciting Modernist was featured in national publications and museum shows.
Margarete was a featured lecturer and has spoken across the country – including the Smithsonian N.M.A.I. in Washington DC for “Women’s History Month” to San Jose State University to the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. Bagshaw was the opening speaker for the National Association of Art Educators first ever Leadership Conference in 2014 and was scheduled to be one of their keynote speakers at their National Conference in New Orleans, LA in March of 2015. Her memoirs "Teaching My Spirit To Fly" was published in 2012.
Recent solo museum shows include: The SMOKI Museum in Prescott, AZ, The Museum of Indian Arts & Culture, Santa Fe, NM and the Ellen Noel Museum, Odessa, TX.
Painting in complex compositions that feature a dynamic color palette, her work is instantly recognizable. Her large monumental canvases honor the work of her mother and grandmother and are truly a testament to the significant place the women of her family hold in the art world – together they form the only documented full-time professional female painting dynasty ever – anywhere!
Margarete Bagshaw didn't just see color. She heard it – in tones, chords and moody melodies. She tasted it – cold, sweet and chile hot. If we could enter the interior of her brain, the sensory fabulousness of it might persuade us to never leave. The closest we’ll get, though, are her brilliant oversized canvases and their testament to a spirit unleashed and on fire.
From a stark white canvas, a controlled riot of colors sweeps on in a swirl of coiling shapes layered with other colors, with glazes, with more colors, then with patterns, then more colors, the surface sometimes scratched with a razor blade, a 3D wonderland.
“As soon as I started working with these colors, it’s almost like I got out of my own way, and there was this liberation,” she said. “I felt like I could do anything I wanted.”
A fearless Modernist, Bagshaw’s recent achievements include opening a Santa Fe museum dedicated to Native American women artists, writing a memoir, and populating a solo 20 year retrospective show at the New Mexico Museum of Indian Arts & Culture. Those successes and their rapid pace make it hard to believe she once restricted herself to faded pastels, smaller canvases, and a life held in limbo.
She was born in Albuquerque in 1964 into a family of internationally acclaimed women artists (her mother is Helen Hardin, her grandmother Pablita Velarde). Through them, she earned a grounding in the traditional themes of Native American art, but her heart pulled toward the parallel universe beyond her family’s doors: the anything-goes ethos of the 1960s and ‘70s that aimed at breaking boundaries. Initially, one “boundary” she broke was following in the family way. Although she originally rejected a career as an artist, at 26, she found herself married, pregnant with her second child, and struck with an insomnia that compelled her toward making art. Using a chalky palette reminiscent of her mother’s and grandmother’s, her hand moved to the rhythmic imagery of Cubist and Bauhaus artists.
Galleries and collectors took notice, but the marriage was unhappy. Eventually, it showed in her work.
“I was totally repressed and using the Bauhaus movement to justify that repression visually: Less is more.”
As her eye became enchanted with the Taos Transcendentalists and particularly the playful work of Raymond Jonson, a flirtation with color overwhelmed her fascination with form. The dance turned irresistible, and her personal transformation demanded a top-to-bottom life change. She left the marriage and, with a new love, encountered a world beyond “wow” in the waters of the Virgin Islands.
“The water was Caribbean blue, a turquoise more turquoise than turquoise stones. I started scuba diving, and there were fish that were colors I never knew existed. The coral and the patterns of stingrays and eels and turtles. The colors of fish. The little fish eyes looking at you.
“It became my mission to buy every color of paint that existed. And I did. I bought them in metallics. I bought things to enhance oil paint, like pearl essence, things to thicken and liquefy and add sand to – anything I could do to manipulate the color. I wanted the spirit to be able to drink the color. I wanted it to feel hot when colors were hot and cool when colors were cool.”
“Oil has a quality of luminosity that’s luscious. It also does not dry as fast as acrylic, so it’s versatile. Besides that, I think it’s historically significant.”
And given the dawn-to-dusk, seven-days-a-week schedule she keeps, it’s good that she simply likes “the way it smells.”
In 2009, she returned to New Mexico and with her husband, Dan McGuinness, opened Golden Dawn Gallery in Santa Fe, christening it with the English version of her grandmother’s Tewa name. She determined to establish herself as an artist independent of her lineage while also re-establishing her mother’s and grandmother’s considerable influence in the art world. By 2012, she drilled down into a production cycle driven by demands both internal and external, charting career highs that included: mounting Margarete Bagshaw: Breaking the Rules at the Museum of Indian Arts & Culture; creating original paintings for every chapter of her memoir, Margarete Bagshaw: Teaching My Spirit to Fly; and opening the Pablita Velarde Museum of Indian Women in the Arts, its initial nest egg fueled by her Mother Line series.
“I’ve been on this groovy adventure with my DNA in my back pocket,” she explained. “When that point came to break out of my suppression, when that window of opportunity was made to open, it was literally like, jump. I’ve been able to use color in ways that my grandmother and mother never would have considered. Grandma didn’t use translucent colors. Mom perfected the spray veils and used metallics, but I change color by layering color over color or color over pattern and pattern over color. Everything becomes a three-dimensional production of images.
– Kate Nelson, 2013
Margarete was a featured lecturer and has spoken across the country – including the Smithsonian N.M.A.I. in Washington DC for “Women’s History Month” to San Jose State University to the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs. Bagshaw was the opening speaker for the National Association of Art Educators first ever Leadership Conference in 2014 and was scheduled to be one of their keynote speakers at their National Conference in New Orleans, LA in March of 2015. Her memoirs "Teaching My Spirit To Fly" was published in 2012.
Recent solo museum shows include: The SMOKI Museum in Prescott, AZ, The Museum of Indian Arts & Culture, Santa Fe, NM and the Ellen Noel Museum, Odessa, TX.
Painting in complex compositions that feature a dynamic color palette, her work is instantly recognizable. Her large monumental canvases honor the work of her mother and grandmother and are truly a testament to the significant place the women of her family hold in the art world – together they form the only documented full-time professional female painting dynasty ever – anywhere!
Margarete Bagshaw didn't just see color. She heard it – in tones, chords and moody melodies. She tasted it – cold, sweet and chile hot. If we could enter the interior of her brain, the sensory fabulousness of it might persuade us to never leave. The closest we’ll get, though, are her brilliant oversized canvases and their testament to a spirit unleashed and on fire.
From a stark white canvas, a controlled riot of colors sweeps on in a swirl of coiling shapes layered with other colors, with glazes, with more colors, then with patterns, then more colors, the surface sometimes scratched with a razor blade, a 3D wonderland.
“As soon as I started working with these colors, it’s almost like I got out of my own way, and there was this liberation,” she said. “I felt like I could do anything I wanted.”
A fearless Modernist, Bagshaw’s recent achievements include opening a Santa Fe museum dedicated to Native American women artists, writing a memoir, and populating a solo 20 year retrospective show at the New Mexico Museum of Indian Arts & Culture. Those successes and their rapid pace make it hard to believe she once restricted herself to faded pastels, smaller canvases, and a life held in limbo.
She was born in Albuquerque in 1964 into a family of internationally acclaimed women artists (her mother is Helen Hardin, her grandmother Pablita Velarde). Through them, she earned a grounding in the traditional themes of Native American art, but her heart pulled toward the parallel universe beyond her family’s doors: the anything-goes ethos of the 1960s and ‘70s that aimed at breaking boundaries. Initially, one “boundary” she broke was following in the family way. Although she originally rejected a career as an artist, at 26, she found herself married, pregnant with her second child, and struck with an insomnia that compelled her toward making art. Using a chalky palette reminiscent of her mother’s and grandmother’s, her hand moved to the rhythmic imagery of Cubist and Bauhaus artists.
Galleries and collectors took notice, but the marriage was unhappy. Eventually, it showed in her work.
“I was totally repressed and using the Bauhaus movement to justify that repression visually: Less is more.”
As her eye became enchanted with the Taos Transcendentalists and particularly the playful work of Raymond Jonson, a flirtation with color overwhelmed her fascination with form. The dance turned irresistible, and her personal transformation demanded a top-to-bottom life change. She left the marriage and, with a new love, encountered a world beyond “wow” in the waters of the Virgin Islands.
“The water was Caribbean blue, a turquoise more turquoise than turquoise stones. I started scuba diving, and there were fish that were colors I never knew existed. The coral and the patterns of stingrays and eels and turtles. The colors of fish. The little fish eyes looking at you.
“It became my mission to buy every color of paint that existed. And I did. I bought them in metallics. I bought things to enhance oil paint, like pearl essence, things to thicken and liquefy and add sand to – anything I could do to manipulate the color. I wanted the spirit to be able to drink the color. I wanted it to feel hot when colors were hot and cool when colors were cool.”
“Oil has a quality of luminosity that’s luscious. It also does not dry as fast as acrylic, so it’s versatile. Besides that, I think it’s historically significant.”
And given the dawn-to-dusk, seven-days-a-week schedule she keeps, it’s good that she simply likes “the way it smells.”
In 2009, she returned to New Mexico and with her husband, Dan McGuinness, opened Golden Dawn Gallery in Santa Fe, christening it with the English version of her grandmother’s Tewa name. She determined to establish herself as an artist independent of her lineage while also re-establishing her mother’s and grandmother’s considerable influence in the art world. By 2012, she drilled down into a production cycle driven by demands both internal and external, charting career highs that included: mounting Margarete Bagshaw: Breaking the Rules at the Museum of Indian Arts & Culture; creating original paintings for every chapter of her memoir, Margarete Bagshaw: Teaching My Spirit to Fly; and opening the Pablita Velarde Museum of Indian Women in the Arts, its initial nest egg fueled by her Mother Line series.
“I’ve been on this groovy adventure with my DNA in my back pocket,” she explained. “When that point came to break out of my suppression, when that window of opportunity was made to open, it was literally like, jump. I’ve been able to use color in ways that my grandmother and mother never would have considered. Grandma didn’t use translucent colors. Mom perfected the spray veils and used metallics, but I change color by layering color over color or color over pattern and pattern over color. Everything becomes a three-dimensional production of images.
– Kate Nelson, 2013