| During the twentieth century three major industries: fine art production, industrial agriculture, and nuclear power production were all introduced to the Rio Grande Valley region of northern New Mexico. The advancement of Pueblo Indian participation with these enterprises and with the growing capitalist economy of this area included private and federally supported art-making, agricultural, and military programs that were initiated and managed by an encroaching Euro-American population that included Pueblo art patrons, political activists, and federal agents. The first two programs, art-making and industrial-level agriculture, which began in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, shared a common goal of drawing Pueblo Indians out of their agriculture-based economies and into capitalist and tourist markets. The third enterprise, nuclear power production, which began in the mid twentieth century, required the participation of this area's indigenous populations via the appropriation of Native lands including the ancestral homelands of Pueblo Indian and Hispano peoples. Although these three enterprises have historically been treated as disparate topics, interconnections between these three industries are visually and materially present in American Indian and American art of this region and time period.;Drawing upon Indigenous concepts of memory and place, this dissertation draws out the interconnections between art, land, and law, and the political and intercultural tensions that are visually and materially present in the artwork of Tonita Peña, Georgia O'Keeffe, and Helen Hardin, three artists who painted throughout the twentieth century (1900-1986) in northern New Mexico. All three artists are women, and all three women visually and verbally expressed powerful personal connections to the land and landscape of the northern Rio Grande region. |
