SFO poster’s serenity has violent roots
Artist reached back to his training in the 1960s to create the art
With its golden cottonwoods and streaming autumn light, Dan Namingha’s 2018 Santa Fe Opera poster projects the classic serenity of a New Mexico landscape.
But behind the mesas and mountains lurks a more sinister force behind “Autumn at Otowi Pass.”
“It’s the only route to Las Alamos near San Ildefonso Pueblo,” the multi award-winning Santa Fe artist said. “It’s a bridge going across the Rio Grande. There’s a woman who used to run a small teahouse near the bridge named Edith Warner.”
Warner’s San Ildefonso teahouse entertained the top-secret Los Alamos physicists, including Robert Oppenheimer, considered the father of the atomic bomb.
The opera commissioned Namingha, better known for his bold Hopi meets-Picasso and Van Gogh abstractions, to paint the poster during its first presentation of John Adams’ “Doctor Atomic” beginning July 14.
The opera takes place in Los Alamos during the summer of 1945, moving to the detonation of the first atomic bomb.
The poster is Namingha’s seventh work created for the SFO.
The irony of beautiful scenery paired with the birth of an object of mass destruction is deliberate, Namingha said.
“I took out the (newer) pavement and I imagined what it was like back then with a dirt road,” he said. “Off to the right is the little house Edith Warner occupied. It’s more of an impression of the place. I wanted to make the juxtaposition that way.
“In spite of what was being done — this contraption of destruction — this is a place of serenity.”
The artist read Peggy Pond Church’s “The House at Otowi Bridge” as part of his research.
The clouds over the Jemez Mountains bear an eerie resemblance to the mushroom cloud created during a nuclear explosion.
“It’s almost circular,” Namingha said of the cloud formation. “I believe it’s called lenticular. They almost form rings.”
The artist reached back to his training as an illustrator in the 1960s to create the poster art.
“My schooling was in illustration and realism,” he said. I just kind of returned back to that period.”
Born in Keams Canyon, Ariz., Namingha is also Hopi and Tewa, and studied at Santa Fe’s Institute of American Indian Arts and at Chicago’s American Academy of Art.
IAIA awarded him an honorary doctorate in 2009. He won a New Mexico Governor’s award for excellence in the arts in 1995.
Namingha’s paintings hang in the collections of Arizona’s Heard Museum, the New Mexico Museum of Art, the Millicent Rogers Museum in Taos, the Museum of Northern Arizona, London’s British Royal Collection, the NASA Art Collection in Washington, D.C., the IAIA Museum, the Sundance Institute and in the collection of Robert Redford. He owns the Niman Fine Art Gallery in Santa Fe.