The Artist

Peshlakai returned to the Navajo homeland at Canyon de Chelly after surviving capture, the Long Walk, and four years of confinement at Bosque Redondo. During that period he learned silversmithing, establishing an artistic and cultural lineage that preceded R.C. Gorman by several generations.

Carl Nelson Gorman was born near Chinle, Arizona. He later became a recognized artist who moved beyond conventional expectations for Native painting and served with the U.S. Marine Corps as a Navajo Code Talker during World War II. His example connected artistic experimentation, Navajo identity, and public service within R.C. Gorman’s immediate family.

Gorman was drawing by the age of three. Helping his aunts tend sheep in Canyon de Chelly, he used whatever surface was to hand — rock faces, sand, and mud — and shaped small figures from clay he found there. His earliest recorded subjects were characters he had seen rather than the Navajo women who would later define his work: Mickey Mouse and Shirley Temple.

He grew up in a traditional Navajo hogan, and his grandmother had a central part in raising him. She recounted Navajo stories and traced his descent through a line of artist ancestors, which he credited with giving him the ambition to become an artist himself.

Gorman began at Chinle Public School and later attended St. Michaels, a Catholic boarding school on the Navajo Reservation, followed by a Presbyterian mission school. He graduated from Ganado Mission High School in 1950. These years exposed him to several educational environments while he remained connected to the landscapes and communities of northern Arizona.

Among the several schools Gorman attended across northern Arizona, it was at the Ganado Presbyterian Mission School that a teacher named Jenny Lind recognised what he was doing and pressed him to take it seriously. He named her throughout his life as the person who convinced him that a full-time career as an artist was possible.

Following his graduation from Ganado Mission High School, Gorman enrolled at Arizona State College in Flagstaff, the institution now known as Northern Arizona University. He majored in literature and took art as his minor — a detail worth noting in an artist whose titles and published books show a writer’s ear.

His formal studies were interrupted by military service, but he later returned to the college and continued developing as an artist.

Gorman served in the United States Navy from 1951 through 1955. While stationed in Guam, he attended Guam Territorial College. The experience broadened his perspective beyond the Southwest before he returned to Arizona and resumed his college education.

While studying in Flagstaff, Gorman created and printed his first etching, Apache Devil Dancer. This early experiment introduced a printmaking practice that would become central to his career and eventually connect him with major workshops and master printers around the world.

Gorman entered Mexico City College on a Navajo Tribal Scholarship, one of a small number awarded for study outside the United States. Living and studying in Mexico exposed him to modernist art, mural traditions, new printmaking methods, and a cosmopolitan art community that helped shape his independent visual language.

In Mexico Gorman encountered the work of the social realists — Diego Rivera, David Siqueiros, and Rufino Tamayo — and their handling of colour and form redirected his own. He moved away from abstraction and toward what is usually described as abstract realism: recognisable figures built from simplified, abstracted shapes.

That approach became the basis of the style collectors recognise immediately. He also learned stone lithography there from the master printer Jose Sanchez, often drawing directly onto the stone, and returned to the medium for the rest of his career.

After Mexico, Gorman studied art at San Francisco State University. He supported himself during this period partly by working as a model. The San Francisco years placed him in a large urban art community for the first time and set up the exhibitions and organising work that followed there in the mid-1960s.

Gorman received his first recorded gallery exhibitions in San Francisco at the Zieniewicz Gallery and the Coffee Gallery. These presentations marked his emergence as a professional artist and placed his work before audiences outside the Southwest.

R.C. Gorman and his father, Carl Nelson Gorman, were featured in a two-person invitational exhibition titled New Directions in American Indian Art at the Philbrook Art Center in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The exhibition presented contemporary Native artists as individual innovators rather than treating their work only through traditional categories.

Gorman travelled to Taos and met Henry Manchester, who ran a gallery there, and the painter Dorothy Brett. The introduction produced an agreement to show his work the next year. It was the beginning of the association with Taos that would define the rest of his career and, four years later, give him a gallery of his own.

R.C. and his father Carl exhibited together at the Heard Museum’s Gallery of Indian Art in Phoenix. Reviewing the show in the Arizona Republic, the critic John Becklaw ran it under a headline describing the Gormans as father-and-son rebels in Indian art — an early public framing of R.C. as an artist working against the expectations then placed on Native painters.

The exhibition arranged the previous year opened at the Manchester gallery in Taos — Gorman’s first there — and sold out. The result settled the question of whether his work could support him, and it tied his reputation to Taos rather than to San Francisco or Arizona. When the gallery came up for sale three years later, he bought it.

Gorman produced his first lithographs with printer Jose Sanchez in Mexico City. During the same period he helped organize the American Indian Artists Group in San Francisco and served as chairman of its painting committee. His work received top awards at several prominent Native art exhibitions, signaling a major advance in his national reputation.

Following an exhibition at Manchester Gallery in Taos, Gorman purchased the gallery and renamed it the Navajo Gallery. The space became both a commercial base and a cultural landmark, giving him direct control over the presentation of his work and helping establish Taos as the center of his public career.

At Tamarind Institute in Albuquerque, Gorman began a sustained collaboration with professional lithographers and produced his first prints there. Work also began on the Homage to Navajo Women suite, an important body of images that brought his monumental treatment of Navajo women into the medium of fine-art lithography.

Gorman completed the Homage to Navajo Women suite and the Bodies by Gorman suite at Tamarind Institute. Together, the projects demonstrated the range of his figure studies and strengthened his reputation as an artist who could translate sensuous drawing into technically sophisticated editioned prints.

Of all the artists represented in Masterworks from the Museum of the American Indian at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gorman was the only one still living. Two of his pieces were chosen for the front and back of the exhibition catalogue.

Reviewing the show, the New York Times described him as the Picasso of American Indian art. The comparison followed him for the rest of his life and remains the phrase most often attached to his name — a measure of how far his standing had moved in the ten years since his first exhibition.

Gorman created the Gorman in Taos suite at Tamarind Institute while the Navajo Gallery expanded under director Virginia Dooley. His exhibition schedule included the Museum of New Mexico and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, reflecting the growing institutional recognition of his work.

Gorman’s paintings were among the works added to the Museum of the American Indian in New York. Writing about the museum that year, the New York Times observed that no living American Indian painter stood higher. Institutional collecting, rather than exhibition alone, now placed his work in a permanent public record.

During another period of work at Tamarind Institute, Gorman produced a new series of lithographs and incorporated a Navajo rug motif into a lithograph for the first time. The geometric textile reference created a formal dialogue between the figure, Navajo design traditions, and contemporary printmaking.

Gorman exhibited at the Museum of the American Indian, Heye Foundation, in New York and was included in a book on individual Native artists. He was also one of seven artists featured in a public-television film series produced in Phoenix. In printmaking, he began working with Windmill Press in Taos and Hand Graphics in Santa Fe.

Gorman widened his network of printers and publishers by creating his first lithographs at Western Graphics Workshop in Albuquerque, Origins Press in Tucson, and Editions Press in San Francisco. These collaborations helped support the technical range and distribution of his graphic work.

Gorman made his first trip to Europe, beginning a period of increasingly international travel and production. He also created his first serigraphs at Serigraphics in Albuquerque, adding another print process to a practice already grounded in etching and lithography.

Gorman opened a Navajo Gallery in Albuquerque’s Old Town and conducted lithography workshops in Arizona and Kansas. He received an honorary Doctorate in Fine Arts from the College of Ganado, and the first book devoted to his lithographs was published. A national television appearance on Good Morning America further expanded his public profile.

Gorman traveled to Paris to produce lithographs at Atelier Mourlot and was honored by the State of New Mexico with R.C. Gorman Day on January 8, 1979. That year also included meetings and friendships with prominent cultural figures, a White House reception, and continued work with major print publishers. The chronology records visits with Salvador Dalí and Elizabeth Taylor during this period.

Gorman traveled to Japan to publish his first woodblock prints and returned to France for additional lithography. He created his first etching for Taos Editions and his first ceramics with Greg Grycner in Taos. He also posed for portraits by Andy Warhol and received an honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters from Eastern New Mexico University.

Gorman traveled to Spain with collaborators Ben Q. Adams and Richard Newlin to produce two lithographs in Barcelona. Northland Press published Nudes and Foods, Gorman Goes Gourmet, linking his figure drawings, hospitality, and interest in food within a distinctive artist’s book.

Gorman returned to Europe for his first exhibition in Germany. The book The Drawings was published, presenting another concentrated view of the draftsmanship behind his prints and paintings. He also appeared again on Good Morning America and received a key to the city of Houston.

The New York Graphic Society published R.C. Gorman—A Portrait. The book arrived during a period of extensive exhibitions in galleries and museums across the United States, reinforcing the artist’s standing with both collectors and a broad public audience.

Gorman was appointed to the boards of the Taos Festival of Music and Music at Angel Fire. He appeared as a guest on the Today show and remained a highly visible host in Taos, where the chronology notes visits from Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis and Peter Fonda.

Following a period of recovery from surgery, Gorman extended his imagery into etched glass for the first time. Glass demanded the opposite of his usual method: instead of adding pigment to a surface, the image had to be cut, abraded, or chemically bitten away, and it reads through transmitted light rather than reflected colour.

The move continued a career-long pattern of carrying the same fluid figure drawing into whatever material would take it — stone, screen, clay, bronze, fibre, and now glass.

San Francisco named 18 March 1986 R.C. Gorman Day. The recognition came from the city where he had studied, worked as a model, held his first gallery exhibition, and helped organise a group of American Indian artists two decades earlier — a civic acknowledgement from the place his public career started.

Gorman traveled through Bangkok, Hong Kong, China, and Mexico City and hosted a major Taos gathering for his dealers, publishers, and invited guests. He received a Humanities Award in Fine Arts from Harvard University, a prominent recognition of his contribution to American art and culture.

Gorman was featured on the Today show in Albuquerque — national morning television, reaching an audience well outside the gallery world. In the same period a video portrait, Navajo Artist R.C. Gorman, was produced in Taos.

Both belong to a wider pattern in these years: he had become a recognisable public figure as well as a working artist, and documentary attention increasingly treated the man, the gallery, and the town as a single subject.

The major volume R.C. Gorman: The Graphic Works was published by Taos Editions in association with Western Graphics Workshop and Houston Fine Art Press. Taos presentations included a retrospective at the Millicent Rogers Museum and a twentieth-anniversary exhibition at the Navajo Gallery, closing the chronology with a broad assessment of his graphic legacy.

Gorman was given the Governor’s Award of Excellence by the State of New Mexico. The award recognised a body of work made largely in Taos and a gallery that had, by then, operated there for more than twenty years.

Gorman received the Alumnae of the Year award from the National Association of Colleges and Universities, recognition tied to the college education he had begun in Flagstaff and continued in Mexico City and San Francisco.

Two Santa Fe honours came in consecutive years: the Camino Real Award from the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in 1995, and the Los Amigos del Turismo Cultural Award in 1996. Both recognised his standing beyond the fine-art market, as a figure associated with the cultural life of northern New Mexico.

Gorman donated artwork in support of Tom Udall’s campaign for the U.S. House of Representatives, one of a number of instances in which he lent his work to causes and institutions in New Mexico rather than selling it.

Palm Springs dedicated a Golden Palm Star to Gorman on its Walk of Stars — a form of recognition normally reserved for figures from film and entertainment, and an indication of how widely his name had travelled outside the fine-art world.

At the request of Diné College’s president, Cassandra Manuelito-Kerkvliet, Gorman gave the college his personal library. The gift returned a working collection assembled over a lifetime to a Navajo institution, and stands as one of the clearest statements of where he understood his work to belong.

Gorman fell at his Taos home on 18 September 2005 and was taken to Holy Cross Hospital, then transferred to the University of New Mexico Hospital in Albuquerque on 26 September. He died there on 3 November at the age of seventy-four.

Governor Bill Richardson ordered flags across New Mexico flown at half-staff in his honour. He was buried at Colonias Cemetery.

Gorman’s professional career ran forty-two years, from his first gallery exhibition in 1963 until his death in 2005. In that time he produced more than five hundred lithographic and serigraphic works and at least twenty-eight bronze sculptures, alongside papercasts, ceramic editions, tapestries, and etched glass.

To that must be added an uncounted body of unique work: oil and acrylic paintings, oil pastel drawings, and sketches. The range is the point — he moved between processes throughout, and the mediums represented in this gallery are the direct result.