Photograph by Don Roberts

I was born in Taos in 1941, the daughter of Grace Graham King from Austin, Texas and Alfredo Antonio Rodriguez, a native Taoseno of Mexican descent. Grace was a painter and had come to Taos to study with Walter Ufer. Alfredo, known exclusively by the nickname of "Skeezix", was a druggist. He had a drugstore on the Plaza, then the heart of a rural community.

From the beginning my world was characterized by cultural richness and contradiction and saturated with art.  My parents were friends with the Taos painters and remember art openings, bohemian parties, studio gatherings and art-talk.  My mother taught me to draw, sew, sculpt, use pastels, paint with watercolor and oil and to look critically at art.   My father was a renowned raconteur and a history buff. He loved his culture, and on Sundays we cruised the villages of northern new Mexico in our 1939 Studebaker, stopping at every capilla, santuario, descanso, church and morada to look at the Santos and Penitente art, and talk to the hundreds of primos (cousins) connected to us by the dense kinship of northern New Mexico. I am still mining Daddy's stories and using Mother's critical eye as an artist.

It is hard to describe our provincialism and the intensity of our xenophobia in those years - only half a century ago.  Northern New Mexico had been isolated from the rest of the world for 250 years before I was born, and had evolved a unique and in some ways eccentric colloquial culture.  Among the most valued of the art from that period were the Penitente saints and retablos and altar screens I saw in their original settings on those Sunday drives.  Although the American conquest of New Mexico became law in 1850, life in the villages had continued much as it had been for centuries of uninterrupted solitude.  My generation suspected that if you went beyond Albuquerque you would fall off into the void.  In our world there were only Spanish Americans and Indians, and everyone else was an Anglo - Blacks and Jews included.  (Except, that is, for my sister Sylvia and me.  We were “coyotes”, the only two in town.)

At the impressionable age of 16 my narrow world-view was exploded by a summer in Mexico City as an exchange student. I saw the work of Posadas, Rivera, Siquieros, Kahlo, Varo, Tamayo.  I enrolled in Colorado College as an art major but Mexico’s muralists, architecture, music and color had struck deeply at something inherited from my paternal grandfather, Justino Rodriguez Holguin, who was from Parral Chihuahua.  I have loved Mexico, especially Parral, ever since.  Colorado College, on the other hand, seemed tame and bland. 

I left college after my sophomore year, married briefly, divorced, and ended up in San Francisco renting a room above the Haight Street BBQ in 1962 while working as a window dresser for JC Penny in Oakland. Many adventures ensued, it as the 60’s! I met my daughter's father in 1963 in Berkeley and Shemai was born two years later. Suddenly I remembered the tranquility and safety of my mountain desert and the isolated villages of New Mexico and the extended family I had been so glad to leave seemed like a sanctuary of baby sitters. I thought about my daughter and smog, the racial violence, the materialism, impersonality and noise of California.

So Shemai and I came back to Taos and I started a business in traditional adobe finishing. For a thousand years Indian and then Hispanic women in northern New Mexico were the finishers of the all adobe architecture. Women plastered and embellished secular and religious architecture and were known as the enjarradoras. I took camera and tape recorder into the villages where my father has taken us as children and found the women, now in their 80's and 90's, who had been enjarradoras. They generously taught me their processes, I revived them and improved them and became the first woman in the north to get a license as a contractor. Shemai joined me, and at seventeen was running crews of men in their forties. We became experts in fireplace construction, which we treated as sculpture, waterproof mud floors, adobe plaster and earth wall finishes and we did historical restoration. In 1974 I went to Guatemala, to China in 1975, and 1979 I wrote the first history of the enjarradoras to appear in print, which was published in ADOBE NEWS.

In 1982 I was invited to Egypt to work with Hassan Fathy winner of the Aga Kahn prize for earth building, and in 1983 I won a Wonder Woman Award for my work. Those were hard-working and busy years slugging it out with the machos and raising Shemai. Tucked away in the back of my mind was always the desire to paint, and during all that time I was painting in my head.

When I was 47 and Shemai had finally flown the nest, I thought to myself, “If not now – when?” It was Christmas 1989. I began a body of work in colored pencil. All the painting I had been doing in my head came out, there was a style, the colors. A year later I had a show and sold half of it. In two years I retired my contractor's license, sold my equipment and was making a living as a painter - more to my amazement than anyone's. Every since then I have painted professionally. 

In 1996 I moved to Guanajuato Mexico where I continue to paint.

Anita Rodriguez , September, 2008
Guanajuato, Mexico