Eva Mirabal

Eva Mirabal was a Native American artist and cartoonist born in 1920 as Eah Ha Wa (which translates from the Tiwa language as 'Fast Growing Corn') in Taos Pueblo, New Mexico located near Taos, New Mexico. Her primary medium was gouache opaque watercolor.^[1]

Early life

As a child, members of Mirabal’s family posed as models for non-Native American artists working in Taos including Nicolai Fechin and Joseph Imhoff.^[2] The artist reflected in a 1946 radio interview, “My tribe produces very delicate works of silver. Many fine products are produced by the method of weaving. They also make Indian necklaces and bracelets from the beads…As you can see, I was surrounded by various phases of art in my everyday life while I was a youth.”^[3] Unlike more romanticized Indian scenes common in the portraits from non-Native American painters in Taos, Mirabal painted scenes depicting individuals participating in the daily life at the Pueblo.^[4]

In the early 1930s, Mirabal studied with Dorothy Dunn and J.C. Montoya at the Santa Fe Indian School.^[5] Dunn noted Mirabal’s talents writing in her notebook “Eva had the ability to translate everyday events into scenes of warmth and semi-naturalist beauty.”^[6] Mirabel attracted attention early and was singled out for a Chicago gallery exhibition while still in her teens.^[7]

War years

In 1943, Eva enlisted in the Women’s Army Corps. She served as a cartoonist where she designed a series called G.I. Gertie distinguishing her as one of the first female cartoonists to have her own published comic strip. In addition, she designed war posters and a building-sized mural entitled A Bridge of Wings at the Air Service Command in Patterson Field, Ohio.^[8]

Later career

After the war, Mirabal taught and painted as an artist-in-residence at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale and in 1946 she was the only woman included in the First National Exhibition of Indian Painting at the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, OK.^[9]

Mirabal returned to Taos Pueblo in 1949 and studied at the Taos Valley Art School run by Louis Ribak and Beatrice Mandelman. Her painting, "Picking Wild Berries", was included in the 1953 traveling exhibition, Contemporary American Indian Painting curated by Dorothy Dunn. Mirabel died in 1968.^[10]

In 2013 the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos, New Mexico hosted an exhibition featuring Eva Mirabal and her son, Jonathan Warm Day.^[11]

References

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