‘Mabel Dodge Luhan Story’ premieres today
Mabel Dodge Luhan was ahead of her time.
For decades, the arts patron fought for women’s, artists’ and Native Americans’ rights.
For nearly a decade, Mark Gordon has worked on a feature film telling the story of Dodge Luhan’s life.
And “Awakening in Taos: The Mabel Dodge Luhan Story” is getting a premiere at the KiMo Theatre today.
KNME will present a free screening at 2 p.m. After the screening, Gordon will participate in a Q&A.
At 7 p.m., the film will have its Albuquerque premiere, with the producers, cast and crew at the KiMo in celebration of New Mexico PBS.
The PBS broadcast will air at 7 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 28, on NMPBS.
“It’s been quite a journey to get this done,” Gordon says. “We’re planning on having national distribution with the film.”
Dodge Luhan was born to a wealthy family in Buffalo, N.Y., at the height of the Victorian era.
As a child and young woman, she experienced little warmth and no sense of meaning within
the confining social conventions of the age. The role of women was passive and secondary in a world ruled by men.
Literally tricked into her first marriage, she became a widowed mother when her husband died in a hunting accident. She was confused and depressed, so her mother sent her to Europe, the customary cure for emotional distress among the Victorian upper class.
In Paris, she met architect Edwin Dodge, who became her second husband, and in her quest to experience aliveness, she acquired a villa in Florence, Italy, and soon launched a salon.
She met Gertrude Stein and hosted many now-famous modern artists, musicians and poets on the cutting edge of social change in pre-World War I Europe.
“She was friendly with all of the modern artists that we now recognize as great,” Gordon says. “They were unknown when Mabel met them. She had this way of intersecting with history. She called herself a collector of heads — heads of state, heads of social activism and heads of art movements.”
In 1917, she moved from New York City’s Greenwich Village to Taos and discovered the home she had been seeking — magical, untouched, luminous.
She fell in love with and married Antonio “Tony” Lujan, a full-blooded Tiwa Indian from Taos Pueblo, in a time when this was revolutionary.
Inspired by the Native culture and distinctive landscape, she invited many well-known artists, writers and social activists to Taos, forever shaping the character of the region.
She was responsible for bringing Georgia O’Keeffe, Ansel Adams, D.H. Lawrence and many others to New Mexico.
“Every day she would do a few hours of correspondence, and we had access to many of those personal letters from O’Keeffe and D.H. Lawrence,” he says. “We only had time to go through about 30 boxes. Having access to those made the film better.”