One hundred years ago the Spanish Colonial Arts Society launched with the goal of collecting and preserving New Mexico Hispanic art. It also created the annual Spanish Market.

A centennial exhibition about the society is currently at the Nuevo Mexicano Heritage Arts Museum in Santa Fe, and Wednesday evening in Albuquerque at Los Poblanos Historic Inn & Farm a panel will discuss the women behind the arts society and their legacy. One of those will be Donna Pierce, current board member and former curator.

DONNAPIERCE: The two real moving forces behind it were a woman named Mary Austin, who was a well-known writer from back East. She was a lecturer at Yale, and she did research projects for the Carnegie Foundation, and she had moved here and one of her neighbors was a man named Frank Applegate and his wife, Alta, and they had begun collecting the Nuevo Mexicano art. Mary Austin became very close to them, and they got excited about the art and realizing that much of it was leaving the state, it was being sold by dealers outside of the state, also, they realized that a number of the pieces were in need of preservation or conservation. So they founded the organization to promote and preserve the art and also to encourage the continuation of the art. So the people who were still doing the art in New Mexico, they wanted to help them find a market to sell.

The actual first piece was brought into the collection in 1928 when the artist Gustav Bauman heard that there was an altar screen in the town of Llano Quemado, which is just south of Rancho de Taos, the problem was at the time, the organization did not have a museum, an office, anything, and so they put it on loan to the Palace of the Governors, and it was at the palace from early 1929 until a couple of years ago. And then just last month, it was brought to the Nuevo Mexicano Heritage Arts Museum. And so the altar screen finally has its own home with the organization that acquired it, and that is the centerpiece of the new exhibition, the 100 years of collecting, 100 years of connecting.

KUNM: Tell me about how some of the items in the collection tell a larger story about New Mexico's history.

PIERCE: Well, one of the things the organization did from the beginning was collect not exclusively pieces made or manufactured in New Mexico, but also comparative pieces from other parts of the world, particularly the greater Spanish world. And so it's one of the few collections that can place New Mexico in the context of the rest of the world. For example, there are things like strike a lights, which, of course, everybody used before matches to start a fire. So we actually have strike a lights from Tibet and China and all sorts of places. And it's great fun to be able to look at these, because everyone in the world used them. They focused initially a lot on the bultos, which are sculptures made locally, and retablos, which are paintings on wood, which are collectively known as santos or saints. So these are images of saints, but they also collected horse, gear, clothing, textiles. So it's a really comprehensive collection of daily life in New Mexico.

KUNM: Of course, New Mexico was quite isolated for a long time. How does the collection reflect that isolation and how art arose?

PIERCE: We have realized recently that New Mexico wasn't quite as isolated as we thought. Wagon trains didn't come frequently, but when they came, they brought a lot of stuff, but because it was isolated, it's part of what caused New Mexico to develop its own particular artistic esthetic. For example, large statues of saints and big oil on canvas paintings of saints were expensive and hard to import on those wagon trains, you know, over thousands of miles. So local artists began to make them themselves. But instead of just trying to copy the images brought from Mexico, local artists really quickly began to develop a kind of new and different style here that speaks more to the people and the landscape of New Mexico, for example, in the background of some of the retablos, the paintings of saints, you'll find images of local plants. Partly, it's a result of the materials, because they didn't have access to the oil paints. And so what local Spanish settlers did was learn from Native Americans locally how to make paints locally and what woods were easy to carve. And so it's this wonderful merger of cultures that you get here, this sort of interface, that makes the New Mexican art distinctive and different from any other kind of religious art anywhere in the world.