Painting in Focus: Sandy, oil on canvas, 22 x 30", 2023

The Intentional Fiction of Historical Painting

By Taylor Spence

This painting depicts an enslaved person named Sandy, for whom there exist exactly three archival references, none of which are images.

The first comes from Thomas Jefferson’s financial records pertaining to his dealings with the Jefferson Family. It reads:

“To hire for Sandy from my father's death 1757 to Dec. 31, 1762 5 ½years @ £18"[1]

 The second comes from a 1769 advertisement, and reads as follows:

“Run away from the subscriber in Albemarle, a Mulatto slave, called Sandy, about 35 years of age, his stature is rather low, inclining to corpulence, and his complexion light; he is a shoemaker by trade, in which he uses his left hand, principally, can do course, carpenters [sic], work, and is something of a horse jockey; he is greatly addicted to drink, and when drunk is insolent and disorderly, in his conversation, he swears much, and in his behavior is artful and knavish. He took with him a white horse, much scarred with traces, of which it is expected, he will endeavor to dispose; he also carried his shoemakers [sic] tools, and he will probably endeavor to get employment that way. Whoever conveys the said slave to me, in Albemarle, she’ll have 40 s. reward, if taken up within the county, 4 l. If elsewhere within the colony, 10 l. If in any other colony. From

                                                                                                                     Thomas Jefferson.”[2]

The third again comes from Jefferson’s own accounts, January 29, 1773:

"To negro Sandy sold to Colo[nel] Charles Lewis £100."[3]

To recap: Jefferson rented Sandy out after inheriting him from his father for the consideration of £18, after which, presumably, the slave was returned to work for him. Then, Sandy escaped with a white horse, and later Jefferson apprehended and sold him.

Before, between, and after those three archival references, all from the hand, mind, and perceptions of an enslaver, Sandy’s real lifeblood flowed and filled in the gaps. But even as minimal as this record is, we know more about Sandy than we do about the vast majority of the poor, exploited, and oppressed, for whom there is little recorded data.

These three pieces of evidence tell the story of a person defiantly and gloriously resistant to dehumanization and overweening domination. They tell the story of a horse, who had been worked so hard that his skin was notably scarred. I can see Sandy freeing this horse from his harness and bridle, leaping onto his back, and the two of them riding away together into freedom. Theirs was a courageous but doomed undertaking. A swift and sure punishment awaited one of them, once they were caught, and both would be returned to hard labor. My painting depicts a moment in the interregnum of these two imprisoned lives.

After much wrestling, I decided to create a face from my imagination rather than use a live model as a stand-in. I believe that every individual’s life and a history are their own possession, and equal. It felt more honest to create a face rather than use someone else’s. However, I realized that in making this decision, I had entered into the world of historical fiction, unfamiliar territory for me, a trained historian.

The towering African-American sociologist, historian, and activist W. E. B. Du Bois did not shy away from historical fiction, believing it could serve the greater purpose of “imagining . . . the unknown truth[s]” of the past.[4] His affinity for historical fiction came out of how he understood the artist as creator, and then how he understood the role of the Black artist in a racist society. In a 1926 speech, “the Criteria of Negro Art,” he explained:

 “[The artist] has used the truth—not for the sake of truth, not as a scientist seeking truth, but as one upon whom truth eternally thrusts itself as the highest handmaid of imagination, as the one great vehicle of universal understanding.

 Again, artists have used goodness — goodness in all its aspects of justice, honor, and right—not for the sake of an ethical sanction but as the true method of gaining sympathy and human interest.

 Thus all art is propaganda and ever must be, despite the wailing of the purists.”

The artist seeks truth not for a moral or political aim, but because they try to meet the demands of their imagination, which itself springs from their own human experience. They are drawn to and use the good, not for praise, but to persuade, attract, and win converts, because the good is seductive and attractive. Beauty is not an ideal to strive for but a byproduct of these two aspects of art creation.  

Art arises out of these inner “compulsions,” as Du Bois calls them, but he recognized that the artist was subject also to outer compulsions. The artist seeks an audience, so the things that are shown, sold, and deemed “art” naturally reflect the social and political agendas of power. Art is propaganda in that it cannot but help to seek to persuade and influence based on such agendas.  In a racist society those agendas are white agendas.

The African-American artist has a unique role to play in the development of the United States, according to Du Bois. The propaganda the Black artist produces will offer a completely new vision for the entire nation. “We who are dark can see America in a way that white Americans cannot,” Du Bois says. This clearer perspective was a gift and an opportunity, and meant Black artists and art had the potential to transform how all artists created, as well as how all people understood the value of art to the society.[5]  

Being a social scientist, it is perhaps not surprising that when Du Bois himself decided to make art, he chose historical fiction, which enabled him to draw on his many years of research into the United States and African-American history. Similarly, with “Sandy,” as well as with the other paintings in this series, I imagine into the gaps, shadows, and silences of my historical research in an effort to create a more fulsome narrative of American History.

[1] “Founders Online: Advertisement for a Runaway Slave, 7 September 1769” (University of Virginia Press), accessed November 22, 2023, http://founders.archives.gov/documents/Jefferson/01-01-02-0021.

[2] Virginia Historical Society, cited in L. Scott Philyaw, “A Slave for Every Soldier: The Strange History of Virginia’s Forgotten Recruitment Act of 1 January 1781,” The Virginia Magazine of History and Biography 109, no. 4 (2001): 374.

[3] “Founders Online: National Archives.”

[4] W. E. B Du Bois, The Black Flame: The Ordeal of Mansart, vol. 1 (Mainstream Publishers, 1957), 315–16 cited in:; Amir Jaima, “Historical Fiction as Sociological Interpretation and Philosophy: On the Two Methodological Registers of W. E. B. Du Bois’ The Black Flame,” Transactions of the Charles S. Pierce Society 53, no. 4 (2017): 598.

[5] Jaima, “Historical Fiction as Sociological Interpretation and Philosophy: On the Two Methodological Registers of W. E. B. Du Bois’ The Black Flame,” 585–89.

Painting in Focus: The American Adam and Eve, or the Scarf Skin Works Both Ways, oil on canvas, 22 x 30,” 2023

This little allegorical painting explores the ways that our beliefs affect how we see the world, even to the point of changing our perceptions of reality.

In the Bible, Eve and Adam experience a moment of radical vision when they eat of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. Once they take a bite of that apple, they see that they are naked and are ashamed.[1]

What awareness might the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of settler-colonialism have provided people in 18th-century America? In fact, some people clearly saw that stealing others’ homes and resources and kidnapping and exploiting human beings for profit was evil. Others either could not or would not believe the evidence of their own eyes.

The American Adam, Thomas Jefferson, wrote the foundational document of the United States, the Declaration of Independence in 1774. Later, while governor of the state of Virginia, he wrote Notes on the State of Virginia (published in 1780) to answer a series of questions posed by François de Barbé Marbois, Head of the French legation to the new nation.

A passage in this document provided the basis for my painting.

The Frenchman asked Governor Jefferson “why not retain and incorporate the blacks into the state . . .” rather than deport them back to Africa, if, as Jefferson had contended, slavery would naturally come to an end with democracy?

While Jefferson believed that chattel slavery would end, he did not think that the integration of the two races could work in the new nation. He based this view on the historical grievances between the races – what he termed “political” reasons -- as well as his belief in the inherent inferiority of African people, what he called “physical and moral” reasons. Regarding this latter set of reason, Jefferson writes, “the first difference which strikes us is that of colour:

“Whether the black of the negro resides in the reticular membrane between the skin and scarfskin, or in the scarf-skin itself; whether it proceeds from the colour of the blood, the colour of the bile, or from that of some other secretion, the difference is fixed in nature, and is as real as if its seat and cause were better known to us.”

Skin color, according to Jefferson, was the visible sign of a fundamental difference in the capabilities of African-Americans and Caucasian-Americans. Jefferson believed that white skin was more beautiful than black, and that physical beauty was itself a sign of intellectual and moral capacity:

“And is this difference of no importance? Is it not the foundation of a greater or less share of beauty in the two races? Are not the fine mixtures of red and white, the expressions of every passion by greater or less suffusions of colour in the one, preferable to that eternal monotony, which reigns in the countenances, that immoveable veil of black which covers all the emotions of the other race?”

Physical beauty and the ability to express sentiment were the hallmarks of refinement and intelligence according to Jefferson, who was a typical Enlightenment thinker. In his opinion, a white person’s superior beauty was based in their skin’s ability to reveal the play of emotions. Black skin, according to him, was like negative space, revealing nothing. Yet he knew that African-American People possessed a nearly infinite range of skin colors. He lived in close and intimate proximity to them, even to the extent of engaging in sexual relations with them. He had sired children, who possessed a variety of skin tones. He also knew that African-Americans felt the entire range of human emotions. He called for and witnessed their punishments and heard and saw their emotional appeals to not be sold or to not see their children or spouses sold. This is Jefferson at his most blind.

The cause of his blindness was racism and his belief in a particular racist lie about desire. As he elaborates, African-American people represented a significant threat to the well-being of the nation because they were inexorably drawn to want to have sex with white people:

“Add to these, flowing hair, a more elegant symmetry of form, their own judgment in favour of the whites, declared by their preference of them, as uniformly as is the preference of the Oranootan for the black women over those of his own species. The circumstance of superior beauty, is thought worthy attention in the propagation of our horses, dogs, and other domestic animals; why not in that of man?”[2]

While not the originator of this particular lie (dark-skinned lust for white skin), Jefferson gives it a new lease on life by employing a supposedly scientific fact about a non-human animal, the orangutang, to buttress his claim. The European discovery of the orangutang in the seventeenth-century fueled racist theories that placed Europeans at the most civilized end of an evolutionary spectrum, orangutangs at the other end, and Africans somewhere in the middle.

Jefferson’s view of human progress was predicated on desire. He believed that inferior beings naturally desired superior ones. As orangutangs wanted African women rather than females of their own species, so too did African people naturally want whites. Africans’ cross-racial desire was proof of their inferiority, and it made them dangerous, while whites, Jefferson implies, naturally desired only other whites.[3] Thus, the real danger of allowing African-Americans to remain in the nation, a threat which they themselves were incapable of hiding, was that they their desire would result in mixed-race children, denigrate the white-skinned population, and thus weaken the nation as a whole.

The irony here is, of course, staggering, but also tragic. Jefferson was in love with the idea of whiteness, yet his deeper love was for racism itself. Racism clarified the identity of the new nation and supported everything that mattered to him: his beliefs in the fundamental nature of white liberty and equality, his sense of white superiority, and his belief in his right to govern as a white man. Even as he could not see African-Americans as they were, he could not see himself as he was.

In the painting, the eyesight of the American Eve is not similarly impaired. She understands that the white man holding onto her and lost in a racist reverie poses a mortal threat. Once she has the knowledge of good and evil, she understandably tries to get away.

Both Adam and Eve stand in puddles of their scarf skins, one black and the other pink, which eating the apple has caused them to shed. These membranes lie on the ground as inverted reflections of how they used to see. Like Eve, we also see clearly, understanding the difference between good and evil.

[1] Book of Genesis, Chapters 2 and 3 “OFFICIAL KING JAMES BIBLE ONLINE.”

[2] Jefferson, Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia; with the Appendixes--Complete., 147–48.

[3] Though jarring to our present-day moral sensibilities, Jefferson’s reasoning was part of a larger intellectual undertaking then happening in late-18th century Europe and America, where people were beginning to use science to justify imperialism with racism. Buchan and Andersson Burnett, “Knowing Savagery,” 122–25; Orangutangs, first brought to Europe in the 17th century, became part of a developing racial discourse that situated Africans somewhere between savage and civilized. Sebastiani, “A ‘Monster with a Human Visage’: The Oragngutan, Savagery, and the Borders of Humanity in the Global Enlightenment,” 90.

I Was an Out Gay High School History Teacher, until I Was Fired Without Cause

When Sandia Preparatory School terminated my contract in the middle of the 2022 school year, I did not yet understand that I was a casualty of what would become two national (and still on-going) waves of social persecution sweeping across these United States: one against gay, lesbian, and trans folks (LGBTQI+ people) and the other against teachers of American history and civics. At one time I proudly identified as both of these identities. I am still a proud, out gay man, but I no longer teach high-school history.

In the spring of 2021, Sandia Preparatory School, a private, independent school in Albuquerque, New Mexico, hired me to teach American History to its Middle and Upper School students. After more than 10 years teaching at the college level on various contracts, I decided that rather than move again, I would stay put and do something else. Teaching at an independent school seemed like a good option for me. With terminal degrees in both history and visual art (three masters and a doctorate), I hoped I could combine both of my passions into innovative lesson plans that would get students excited about American history.  

I threw myself into my new position with zeal. Before my contract started, I met several times with colleagues to create a new American Studies curriculum that combined history, literature, and art. Besides writing lesson plans, conducting field trips, and developing creative projects, I volunteered at school events, served as a senior advisor, sponsored extracurricular activities, and attended parent-teacher conferences and faculty meetings.

Perhaps most significantly (in light of what happened), I undertook two initiatives aimed at promoting an inclusive and equitable culture at Sandia Prep. First, I was asked to participate in discussions with some faculty and administrators in advance of hiring a new Head of School, about how to make DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) a priority at Sandia Prep. As part of this work, and also as the faculty advisor of the school’s social justice activity, Empower Prep, I was asked to represent the school at a national conference about diversity and inclusion put on by the National Association for Independent Schools (NAIS).

Second, and along with another (female) gay colleague, I started the first LGBTQI+ affinity space at the school, True Colors Prep. Sandia Prep already had a Gay-Straight Alliance (GSA): a mixed queer and straight group for (younger) middle school students. Responding to the stated needs of our students, my co-sponsor and I conceived of True Colors as an upper school only activity, for young people who already had a sense of their identities as LGBTQI+ people. It was to function much like similar groups for African-American or Native American students.

Based our own experiences as queer faculty, as well as the stories many students told us of the harassment, bigotry, and even violence they had experienced at Prep because of their LGBTQI+ identities, we believed such a group was vitally needed.

I became aware of the hostility at the school towards the LGBTQI+ community after my first day. The Head of School, Bill Sinfield, sent me an email stating that a parent of one of my juniors accused me of “harming children” because I had identified as “the gay, white, descendant of settlers on the Front Range of the Rockies” – a true statement. He said his white, straight son felt singled out, and recommended to Sinfield that I be punished with more than just a “slap on the wrist.” I know this because my boss, the man who had just the previous week signed my contract, wrote back to this parent “well said Pete,” and then forwarded me the entire thread, not realizing that I could see his response. He said to me, “obviously, we need to discuss this.” We never did.

Having this traditional blood libel invoked – that we gay men are inherently predatory – on my first day of class, and then to have my boss condone such bigotry, was deeply shocking and disturbing to me. I wondered if taking this job had been a mistake. Now, of course, I know that some people in this country equate being a gay man with being a groomer and a pedophile.

I expressed my dismay at this incident to the head of my department. He was unsympathetic. He recited a litany of complaints and criticisms I was receiving from anonymous sources. My tone of voice, how I talked, the readings I assigned, how I tested, what movies I showed – nothing seemed to be right for some people. On the other hand, many students were enthusiastic and vociferous in their praise for my courses, as were some parents. They often expressed surprise at learning about the things I was teaching, and declared that based on what they were seeing going on in the wider world, they had often felt that their history education had been misleading or even dishonest.

When my co-sponsor and I submitted True Colors to the school administration for approval as an official activity, the Head of School stated that there was “no room on campus” for another activity. However, many colleagues offered to supply us a space, and so he reversed course. True Colors met at lunch for the first time in the second week of January 2022, and we had between 20-30 students sign up. We shared our coming out stories, and then we listened as students began to share about what they had experienced at Prep, experiences which were uniformly discriminatory and hostile.

About 2 weeks after True Colors first met, the Head of School’s secretary came to my classroom and tearfully told me that I was required to go to the office. When I got there, Bill Sinfield told me that he had some bad news for me. I was fired. When I asked the reason for my termination, he told me that the school’s legal counsel had told him he could not tell me. I offered to finish the school year out for the benefit of my students, but he said no; I would have to leave the school immediately.

He offered to purchase my silence with the remainder of my annual salary and health care benefits through the end of the school year. Campus security accompanied me to my classroom, watched as I packed up all my stuff, and escorted me off the campus. The security guard said to me: “It’s a shame Dr. Spence. I always thought you were a decent guy.” I was not allowed to speak to anyone, colleague or student. My name was stripped from the school, its walls, and its website. An email went out to the entire Sandia Prep community: “As of 2 pm today, Dr. Taylor Spence will no longer be employed at Sandia Prep. Please direct all inquiries to the Head of School, Bill Sinfield.”

The Head of School had fired me with no provision for my replacement, leaving 100 students, seniors preparing to graduate, and parents, who had presumably paid a premium for a high-quality historical education, with no qualified American history instructor. He simply forced the other history faculty to take on my students and teach material for which they had little expertise. The parent who had singled me out as harming his children had been wrong. Objectively speaking, it was Bill Sinfield who hurt Sandia Prep’s children.

I signed the non-disclosure agreement the school offered me because I needed the money. But then after a little thought, I realized I could not live with such dishonesty. Contrary to what the school’s email implied -- that I had done something so egregious as to have required my immediate termination -- I knew I had done nothing wrong. Moreover, I had never received any written indication that my work was subpar, or that my contract was in jeopardy. They could not or would not tell me why they fired me.

The day after I was fired, I received an email with the subject: “What You Meant to Me:”

Hi Dr. Spence. 

I know this is absolutely none of my business. But I heard what happened and just wanted you to know how crushed I am that you will no longer be teaching me. Your class was the only class I looked forward to . . .I felt comfortable to speak my mind and I learned so much from you. Not just about history but life. I will miss you dearly and I’m so sorry. 

I have no doubt this happened for a reason and you are destined to move onto a place where you’re able to teach freely and be allowed to speak about things that actually matter in this day in age. Again. I’m quite literally tearing up writing this knowing I won’t be taught by you any longer. 

Thank you for what you’ve done for me. 

Students like this were the reason I had to disavow my acquiescence to Sandia Prep’s silencing tactics. I hand-delivered a recension letter to the Head of School (the NDA allowed me to rescind my signature within 2 weeks), and made sure to receive a receipt with his signature on it.

Two weeks later, I heard that my co-sponsor of True Colors had also been let go.

Why am I telling this story now, more than a year since my firing? Obviously, litigation is not my aim. I am telling my story because all across this country and every day demagogic politicians and feckless school boards are hurting queer and trans kids. They are doing so to gain power and influence, and because a few vocal parents, who themselves received poor historical education, think they can stem the tide of change with suppression, discrimination, and cruelty, rather than listening and learning. Young people show us the future.

I worry every day for the mental health and safety of all queer kids in this country, including those at Sandia Prep. The person who ran Prep’s gay-straight alliance was one of the most toxic and dishonest people I have ever met. She still works there and I worry for the kids under her control. Did the trans kid get their own bathroom yet? Is True Colors still around? I really hope sharing my experience can help bring a little more care and attention to the LGBTQI+ community at Prep.

I also worry for the many wonderful and dedicated teachers and administrators at Sandia Prep. I have heard of several other teachers wrongfully dismissed as I was. How many people are living out there, silenced by non-disclosure agreements? I hope the new Head of School is making things safer, more inclusive, and more ethical for the many dedicated people who work at the school.

I want to add my story to the historical record. Journalists are writing about this wave of discrimination against the LGBTQI+ community. They are exploring why so many teachers are leaving the profession, why the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) – the “National Report Card” – for American history is going down, and why and how America’s overall educational system is failing our youth. Someday historians will research and write about these topics as well.

The tragedy of discrimination, prejudice, and harassment is that they make people feel smaller and cause them to not want to share their gifts with the world. The truth is I did feel smaller after my experiences at Prep. But now, after rereading the many letters I received from students and parents, and understanding that being smaller (or non-existent) is exactly what the forces of darkness currently assailing this democracy want people like me to feel, I am surer than I ever was that I will continue to teach American history. Enlightment for everyone has been the idealistic aim of this democratic nation from its origins. All people ARE created equal, but they can only learn the truth of that statement, and how to fight for that inborn right, in the honest, safe, and belonging classroom. This is an ethic and an ideal for which I am willing to fight.

Painting in Focus: Portrait of a Dog (2023)

I have been carrying this little painting around half-finished since 2005. I started it during the fall of my first semester in history graduate school, when I still reflexively turned to paint and brush to record and reflect my feelings and thoughts. Through seven years of school and four moves (even as far as another continent), I carried this remnant from my previous life as a painter, thinking that in a spare moment I would finally finish it.

But that moment never came. As long as I had research, writing, teaching, job applications, interviews, job talks, and teaching demos to do, I had no time for painting. My attempt at attaining the status of an academic position became a totalizing obsession, filling my every waking hour.

All the while, little Maevie was growing older. The silver around her lips and eyes grew more pronounced. She arose from her bed slowly and stiffly. She cried out in pain occasionally. One day I found myself holding her in my arms in the bright New Mexico sunlight and wailing “don’t leave me! Don’t leave me.” She just looked bravely off into the distance, absorbing my grief as she had done for most of her life. From the beginning of my time as an historian in 2005 to nearly the end of my academic career in 2021, Maeve was my companion. Her life spanned my academic life, filled with its many joys of discovery, so much struggle, such profound disappointment, and even injustice.  

Maeve in fact invigilated me into life. When I asked the Cowboy for one of his border collies, what I imagined I wanted was something or someone to watch over me. I recalled Maeve’s grandmother Lula taking in the Cowboy’s every move, her eyes following him as he moved from the kitchen table to his Lazy-Boy recliner. He told me “the city is no place for a border collie,” but then called me one day and said, “I got one. She doesn’t like cows.” He put Maeve on a jet plane in 2004 and I picked her up in JFK with my friends Bruce and Diane.

Maeve did watch over me, and helped me to become real.

Her facial expressions were legion. They spanned the gamut from jolly, to skeptical, from judgmental, to loving, to straight out verbal communication -- get me this, I am not well, what is wrong? Her watching me from the corner of my Brooklyn studio may have been the first time in my life I felt truly seen. What I saw through her russet and golden eyes I did not much like. One day I threw my cell phone against the wall in a pique of abject frustration, and then caught her looking at me from her corner. Really?? She seemed to say. I was often ashamed of how I behaved around her and sometimes towards her.

Yet, over the course of her seventeen years with me, I got better. I improved. I became more patient, kinder, more of a human being. In her final years, I discovered (to my amazement and joy) a deep well of patience, caring, and nurturing as I picked her up, moved her around to make her more comfortable, cleaned her teeth and her ears, purchased delectable foods to tempt her, and stroked and loved and adored her with complete abandon. Finally, I made the decision to end her life. On June 19, 2020 she died and I buried her in my backyard.

The last gift she gave me before she left me was to help me to realize that I was desperately unhappy. She showed me that I was still only living a half-life, one lonely and bereft of intimacy. Academia was draining me dry. My heart felt like dry husks. I was bitter and angry. When the tears flowed from my eyes onto her silky forehead, I felt pure, alive, a gushing human baptized in love. My love for her clearly contrasted with how I felt, and pointed me towards the man I could become.

Soon after her death, I began to paint again, even as I was still trying to get a job in academia. I was a finalist for two tenure-track jobs in 2021, both of which required job talks and teaching demos, one in French no less. Yet, I still did not get a position.  I had applied over 1000 times in the nearly ten years I had been in academia, and had been a finalist thirteen times – all to no avail. My academic career ended because I just could not do it anymore. I could not write one more cover letter. I could not try to explain my book in a new and hopefully exciting way. I could not move again and try to build a life in a new location with new people I hardly knew. I had done that four times with little Maevie as my constant, and now she was gone, and it was over.

Burnout is real and it took me a long time to heal up. Two and half years after her death, I pulled out this little canvas, and let little Maevie teach me again. This time she was showing me how to recall my first language, of color, stroke, and line. How to record or trap or capture a distinct personality: a compact little body, the gloss of a coat, and the luster of a set of eyes. My memories were my model.

I see now that she will always teach me, and mirror me, and gaze upon me for the rest of my life, and for her life I will always be grateful.

Portrait of a Dog, oil on canvas, 22.5 x 26,” 2023

"Our Story Continues"

Today is the 340th anniversary of the Pueblo Revolt, and was supposed to be the day that Kathryn (my friend and assistant) and I started the mural project. The Revolt represents the potential of Indigenous Technology (IT) to help people resist oppression and create better, freer lives. The events of August 9-11, 1680 “shaped the world we live in today,” according to San Ildefonso Pueblo member and University of Pennsylvania archeologist Joseph Aguilar. The Revolt continues to reverberate throughout region and the entire continent: the evidence of Puebloan ingenuity and courage, as well as a case study of what people can accomplish when they devise the means to communicate and collaborate together. More broadly, it stands as an enormous achievement, for it was the only successful and lasting reclamation of Indigenous space and time from European colonizers in the history of North America.

The significance of this reset to a time before colonialism cannot be underestimated. Today, many Indigenous Americans live with the awareness of incredible loss, the effects of intergenerational trauma, and a righteous sense of indignation born from historical and present-day injustice. This knowledge and these feelings make up part of the legacies of conquest. Yet they are not new. They fueled Indigenous resistance movements on this continent for hundreds of years. From Metacomet’s War in the seventeenth-century, to Neolin, the Delaware Prophet in the eighteenth, up through the Ghost Dance Religion of the nineteenth, Indigenous Peoples have cherished the hope of a return to a time before the shattering of worlds brought with Europeans. Part of the lineage of the history of colonialism is a longing to return to a time before its violence became a way of life.

(Photo: James Q. Jacobs) A rock art panel in New Mexico likely depicts two Pueblo warriors (Eric A. Powell, Archeology, “The First American Revolution: Exploring the Legacy of the New World’s Most Successful Native Rebellion,” (March/April, 2017)

The twelve years after Puebloan Peoples drove the Spanish out of New Mexico were probably times of both rejoicing and struggle. Indigenous archeologists such as Aguilar, working with the Pueblos, are bringing to light new stories from that interregnum. Puebloans rightly suspected that the Spanish would return and try to take back their colony, and so they spent a considerable amount of effort constructing new fortifications and preparing for war. Some abandoned Spanish-founded missions and relocated back to original home places. Puebloan spiritual practices and cultural traditions resurfaced. Digs at several sites reveal evidence that Puebloans destroyed Catholic iconography.

There was healing, but there were also probably nightmares. The effects of colonization had marked the faces and bodies of the colonized. It is well known that Europeans brought deadly pathogens with them, for which Indigenous New Worlders had no immunity. Contentious debates continue about the population of the Americas on the eve of contact with Europeans, debates which inform our awareness of the devastation wrought from pandemic disease. Yet all agree that 95% of Indigenous Americans perished over the span of the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries, from diseases such as smallpox, typhus, cholera, and dysentery. Think about that. 95%. As Charles Mann writes, at that rate New York’s population would be reduced to just 56,000 people — “not enough to fill Yankee Stadium.” This loss of life constituted perhaps the single most horrifying tragedy in human history.  

(Photo: Author) Petroglyph found at Chaco National Historic Site

Part of the shattering of Puebloan communities was the ongoing effects of epidemic disease. Some diseases, smallpox for example, caused pustules that blistered, scarred, and left marks on the face and neck. Other diseases like dysentery left people so weak they could not walk or work. Typhus destroyed the liver. Diphtheria smothered the lungs. Scarlet Fever weakened the heart.  Spanish depositions record that after killing Franciscan friars and other Spaniards, Puebloan people plunged into rivers to wash themselves, perhaps aware that physical contact with colonialism brought death in seen and unseen ways. The marks diseases left testified to both suffering and survival.  

Thinking about the ravages of an unseen killer brings seventeenth-century Puebloan fears, losses, and experiences into the present, where COVID-19 is bringing death, wrecked lungs, and a deep sense of worry about the future. The two experiences of epidemic disease are in no way comparable. Yet, as I daily wash my hands, wear a mask, and stay in my house for the next two weeks, I will have a chance to ponder the remarkable resilience of New Mexicans. When I imagine multiple, simultaneous epidemics, COVID-19 and four or five other diseases all at once, my admiration for Puebloan Peoples’ will to survive and ability to adapt rises into awe. Amidst sickness, suffering, and death, Puebloans and other Indigenous Americans continued to marshall their I.T. in order to resist, persist, and ultimately prosper. As Aguilar opines, “We are living where we are and we are the people we are thanks in part to the Revolt.” The Pueblo Revolt was only a symptom of the deeper and more enduring continuity of this region and its people.     

“Our Story Continues”

When I found out I was not going to be able to officially start the mural on such a symbolic and historic day, I asked Duane Arruti, the Chief Information Officer for UNM and Alesia M. Torres, its I.T. Director, to come down and write inscriptions on the wall about what the project meant to them. They made the first marks on the wall, which is only fitting, for they have been enthusiastic and open partners in this creative process, and the words they inscribed on the wall reflect their sincere aspirations for what public art, history, and technology can accomplish when done in community.

Duane Arruti, Chief Information Officer, University of New Mexico

Alesia M. Torres, IT Director, University of New Mexico

Their words are very personal, but also reflect their larger engagement with the layered meanings of information technology, painting, and history as forms of mark-making. History comes down to just that: marks on a wall, which will hopefully last to tell future generations stories about what particular moments of the past meant to the people who lived them.

Marks on a wall. Marks on a face. Both are archives.  

The Work of Public Art in a Decolonizing Age

This summer, as I have prepared to begin painting Can You Hear IT?, the world and my painting have come closer together.

I originally conceived of this project in the conviction that Indigenous New Mexicans hold the ground on which the University of New Mexico resides. I wanted any creation of mine built into UNM’s architecture to reflect that fact. August 10, 2020 will mark the 340th anniversary of the beginning of the Pueblo Resistance War (AKA the Pueblo Revolt), and will be the day that I begin this project. IT (Indigenous Technology) enabled Puebloan People to expel the Spanish and cleanse (at least temporarily) their lands of invaders. It has continued to enable diverse New Mexicans to resist layers of re-invasion and colonization. Now it can guide us towards decolonization. By embracing IT can we New Mexicans, and the University of New Mexico, move forward together and live into our promise as a learning community in this place..

Po’pay and the other Puebloan People who rose up against the Spanish in 1680 did not want to share the Upper Rio Grande Valley and its great riches and wealth with the Spanish. They communed with a return to the the time before the coming of the brutal and exploitative colonizer. I cannot blame them, and I salute their resistance and brilliance. That is why the center line of the mural is the maguey rope, the information technology that enabled many dispersed pueblos to rise up together united. This was and remains a great achievement, as I tell my students. That genius, on par with the many forms of IT which have supported all of us over these past months (and which will make the university viable this coming semester) would be enough to build a mural around and to celebrate.

But Po’Pay’s Indigenous Technology offers all of us another valuable lesson. The rope was just the symbol of his need — our need — for communal action. I and my assistant, artist Kathryn Villeneuve, will paint the mural. It’s hard to see the details of such a large canvas on a small computer screen, but we will stamp thousands of little network symbols to compose each figure in the mural and then connect them with thousands of lines. The ideas is to create a web of individuals utterances, communications, messages, ideas, that make up the aggregate, a whole. Each figure should be a cloud of connection.

I knew about Indigenous Technology before this project. My historical scholarship looks for the ways that Indigenous People have found to resist colonization. I have learned much more here at UNM from my students. The rewards of teaching at a Minority Serving university have been to teach me to be a better communicator, and open up to new technologies, new ways of testing, dialoging, and teaching: all of the possibilities of a new era in pedagogy. I thank my students for their brilliance and wisdom in helping me along my way of decolonization.

I knew very little about information technology before this project. As I sat with UNM IT’s employees and leadership, and listened to their hopes for what information technology could do for UNM and New Mexico, I thought they were impossibly utopian and idealistic. Yet, over this past several months, COVID-19 has brought me (and us) closer to how they are envisioning the future world. At the same time, the organizing and resistance work Black Lives Matter has been doing since 2016 nationally, as well as other organizations here in New Mexico, has come to righteous and fiery fruition these past weeks in nationwide and local protests against outrageous injustice.

These are dark times, but ones full of hope and promise. I bring this shaky hope to the making of this new work, one which will be on the UNM campus to preside over positive growth in our learning community, our city, and state for many years to come. I dedicate it to the future we must somehow create together to cohabit peacefully on this continent.

Digital renderings of the mural (thanks to alexroessner.com), Can You Hear IT?, oil on marouflaged canvas, 126” x 475”, 2020, UNM IT Building, UNM Campus, Albuquerque, New Mexico

Can You Hear I.T.?

Can You Hear IT? (2.0)

The title of the mural Can You Hear IT? (IT Building 153, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, 2020) is a play on words on several levels. Information Technology (I.T.) is both the computational and electronic hardware by which we work and communicate, and an abstract plain, encompassing various forms of connectivity, communication routes, and security shields and gateways. If asked what I.T. means to them, most people would most likely hold up a device, look at a screen, or point to the router overhead. They either see I.T.’s results or listen to them. Variously abled others may receive information via translators such as vibration, Braille type, or language software. But the emphasis is all the same: I.T. facilitates communication and reception of information between individuals. If it is working properly, I.T. should be a seamless interface between us and the rest of the world. So the question, Can You Hear IT? on one level simply asks, are you aware of how integral I.T. is to your life? The truth is, we don’t see or hear I.T. as much as live, breathe, and swim in it. I.T. is our context in the 21st century.  

I.T. could also stand for Indigenous technology. New Mexico is rich in Indigenous technological traditions, of the Ancestral Puebloans, the Diné and the Apache, as well as many others. Indigenous cultures adapted to and prospered in this region thousands of years before Europeans came in the 16th century. They are still prospering and adapting. Long-standing traditions of Indigenous thinking are the baseline for my mural about information technology at UNM. These two forms of I.T translate as the specific technologies and ways of doing things Lobos and New Mexicans have developed, but also will develop, reflecting their unique cultural and locational perspectives in this region and to meet their future needs.

When I discussed the meaning, hope, and promise of I.T. with UNM’s I.T. employees, they used terms like embedded, enmeshed, and connected. They spoke of the promise of I.T. to liberate people from drudgery, to facilitate learning and enlightenment, and also to protect and nurture UNM’s students. These thoughtful employees were inspired by and full of hope for their work. I realized that any answer to the question Can You Hear IT?, needed to reflect their passionate commitment to the promise of information technology.

Yet, the historian in me could not help but temper their enthusiasm with a pessimism born of over ten years studying human beings’ various schemes of progress and advancement, all of which were born of similar aspiration, inspiration, and hopeful idealism, and many of which not only resulted in more drudgery, but explicitly excluded many different groups from their benefits. I would be remiss if I did not temper such optimism with the historical knowledge I possess about the complicated and even violent results of various information regimes in the highly contested history of the New Mexican region.

When I asked UNM’s I.T. employees what lay in the future of I.T., their answers quickly became the stuff of science fiction. And who can blame them? Klaus Schwab of the World Economic Forum says our era is characterized by a “blurring [of] the lines between the physical, digital, and biological spheres.”[1] This Fourth Industrial Revolution is changing our world so quickly we may have difficulty in knowing where we end and Artificial Intelligence begins. Responding to rapid-fire innovations seemingly on a daily basis, we may struggle to gain the perspective necessary to see where we are heading, or perhaps more disturbingly, where I.T. is taking us.

When we imagine I.T. at the University of New Mexico, we envision one, unified network serving all users in our campus community. We are all Lobos! But when we think of the rings of information technology outside of the campus, in the city, region, nation, and world, we begin to see that one aspect of I.T. is to create barriers between “us” and “them.” This is true today, and it has been true historically in this region, where we see a veritable war between different systems of communication with radically different agendas, not all of which have been hopeful nor inspiring.

This more sobering aspect if information technology informs the deeper, tenser question at the heart of this mural’s title: who gets to create, access, and use I.T., and for what ends? Can You Hear IT? asks: Can you hear the potential future of information technology as it races towards us? Can you here the Indigenous technologies already well-established here in New Mexico? Are you thinking where all this is going, and are you taking the necessary actions today to ensure that the I.T. of the future produces a net benefit for all our children and grandchildren? The questions at the heart of this mural are thus moral and political questions. 

History’s great benefit to the human race is that it provides a greater sense of objectivity and perspective. I am not so foolhardy that I am willing to attempt to depict a future I can barely imagine. Great art should be enduring and speak to aspects of the human condition which many, many future generations of viewers will be able to draw on and find meaning in. I can best accomplish that by grounding the image in past experiences of New Mexicans: in the longer, deeper, and site-specific history of UNM in the New Mexican land, in the homelands of multiple indigenous peoples, and within the layers of immigration and culture of New Mexico. Part of the purpose of this mural is to ask questions tinged with excitement and trepidation, but to also offer answers with a series of historical case studies from New Mexican history, each of which illustrates the powerful and inspiring potential of I.T. Thus, I can only create an image which offers multiple answers to the question, Can You Hear IT? Somewhere in the seven figures depicted in the New Mexican landscape in this mural, an answer to this question may be found.

Painting with I.T.

Before I briefly talk about the seven figures in this mural, I would like to explain the distinctive painting technique, which I developed for this mural. It is painting with I.T. I would like to thank my buddy Karl Benedict at UNM for helping me brainstorm this idea. He and a few beers are an amazing combination.

Networks and connectivity are what I.T. is all about. Early networks included large mainframe computers and ancillary hardware like printers, telephones, and fax machines. Today, the variety of elements making up a network are numerous and ever growing. Computer power is in fact based in networks. Paralleling hardware networks are social networks: the connections and relationships people form in the analog and the digital. A social network begins with the primary relationships of one person, and branches out to include secondary relationships contacts have with each other, and even tertiary relationships: friends of friends of friends. Social networks mirror I.T. networks to a degree, but the internet enables bridging to occur between unrelated members of a social network, and between networks, which is impossible for analog networks. Internet connectivity is unlimited. I.T. is thus a way to describe a framework encompassing the wired, the wireless, and the relationships crisscrossing around and between the two.

Various software platforms (OpManager, Ipswitch, Lucidchart, etc.) map I.T. networks into three-dimensional images called network diagrams or network maps (see examples). Network diagrams use a series of standard symbols (largely created by the company Cisco) to represent hardware and wireless capabilities, such as handheld devices, computers, cloud storage and firewalls. In the social arena, network symbols can be names, faces, internet handles, or GPS coordinates, etc. Both computer and social media network diagrams represent computer hardware, wireless, and/or social networks in three dimensions, so that I.T. builders, managers, and security teams can conceptualize, monitor, and secure networks. Using the electric connectivity of the I.T. network, these software can “discover” elements in a network in real time and manifest them on a screen, indicating if there are breaks in the network, as well as how and where individuals are connecting. Social network diagramming reveals when, how, and with whom people are connecting, and can be very useful for revealing the connections between contacts (or lack thereof), information which politicians and other network capital forms use for relationship building. Network diagrams can be simple, with just a few elements. Or they can be complex, with millions of hardware nodes. Network diagrams give I.T. managers a “macro” view of network connectivity in order to protect individual “micro” experiences with their devices or the internet. It is the I.T. manager’s job to see and understand the larger system, and to protect and shepherd hundreds and even millions of individual users as they roam the network. I.T. managers see and understand an important truth about the human condition: we are all connected.

I have produced a series of rubber stamps of I.T. network symbols, and with these stamps I have painted the water media studies for the mural. I will also paint the mural in the same way, with a larger set of stamps. Painting images with network symbol stamps, and then drawing the contours of images with lines between various aspects of I.T., replicates I.T. network diagrams. This technique makes the claim that today we are in fact made up of I.T. These images embody I.T. They also remind viewers that we are the sum of our connections. Each of us is a “we.” By means of I.T., we are all kin.

Image Description (refer to cartoon):



Can you hear IT? utilizes both sampled (i.e. appropriated) images from the historical record as well as original images, enabling viewers to engage with historical and visual content simultaneously. I.T. and I.t. have been the basis of community formation and cohesion in New Mexico, enabling its people to adapt to changing conditions over hundreds of years. The University of New Mexico is an institution that has emerged out of this long history of adaptation, resistance, and creativity, to help New Mexicans to be resilient and live better lives. At its heart Indigenous, Hispano, and mixed-race adaptations have entailed code switching, the process by which a person from one culture learns how to translate their ideas, feelings, and beliefs into the language of another culture, in order to survive and prosper. Another way to understand code switching is as a form of cultural information technology.

The knotted maguey rope stretching across the center of the mural is a symbolic example of I.t. It refers to a seminal event in New Mexico’s history, the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. The Ohkay Owingeh (San Juan) religious leader Po’Pay organized the revolt. [2] He sent runners out to each pueblo with knotted maguey ropes. Insurgent leaders were to untie one knot to demonstrate their adherence to the planned revolt, and then another one each day until they were all untied. When there were no more knots, the uprising was to begin. This ingenious form information technology enabled the rebellion to be successful. It completely expelled the Spanish from the region of modern day New Mexico for nearly 13 years, and remains the only successful Indigenous revolt against European colonizers in North American history.[3] John Gahate at the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center credited Indigenous social networks for the success of the Pueblo Revolt. The knotted rope represents both Indigenous Information Technology and Indigenous Social Networking.[4]

The heart of this mural is the Lady in Blue, New Mexico’s own distinctive Guadalupe. She emerges out of the blue and white of a New Mexican sky; she is sky, and she is also the soil of Spain. UNM historian Anna M. Nogar writes that “the Lady in Blue is unquestionably a persistent manifestation of miracle discourse born out of the region, written into the historical landscape.”[5] She was Sor Maria de Jesus de Agreda, a Spanish nun who lived and died in the Soria region of Northern Spain (1602-1665), and who claimed that six angels enabled her to travel to colonial Nuevo Mexico, to deliver a message about the Catholic Christ to Indigenous groups. First appearing in the region in 1628, the Lady in Blue was at once a code switcher, a translator, and a messenger. [6]

The Six Angels of Information Technology each offer a story about the centrality and importance of I.T. to the growth, evolution, and prosperity of New Mexicans.

From right to left, the figures begin with Malinche, La Malatzin, the original American code switcher. La Malinche, whose Indigenous name was Malintzin, was a complex character, about whom the Mexican people have never ceased arguing. Malinche had been born into a group dominated by the Aztecs – a powerful Indigenous confederacy that controlled all of central Mexico in the fifteenth-century. Her native tongue was Nahuatl, but she had been sold as a slave into a Mayan city, so she also spoke Quiche or Mayan. Cortez, who was nothing if not bold, had arrived on the coast of Mexico near Vara Cruz and had burned his ships, communicating to his men his utter dedication to his mission. He began to build alliances with local tribes who were chaffing under the yoke of the Aztec. One of these groups, the Tlaxcalans, gifted Malinche to Cortez, and the Spaniard rapidly ascertained that he now had in his possession a powerful secret weapon: a translator who spoke multiple languages. She quickly picked up Spanish as she became Cortez’s mistress. Bernardo Diaz—a soldier in Cortez's army who wrote the best Spanish account of the conquest of Mexico—Malinche was “the great beginning of our conquests.” Malinche is the Angel of Code Switching.

An anonymous UNM student writing an essay is the next figure. Taken from the UNM archives, this young woman symbolizes the importance of I.T. and I.t. to learning. She is the Angel of Education.

Henry Bake Jr., was one of the famed Navajo Code Talkers from World War II. He was one of many Navajo (Diné) troops who learned a secret, unbreakable code language, which the American military used to send information about tactics, troop movements and orders over the radio and telephone. The code was indecipherable to the enemy and a key factor in the American military victories at Iwo Jima, Saipan, and several other major battles in the Pacific theater. Bake is the Angel of Cultural Distinctiveness.

Soaring up to touch the sun is UNM Lobo and point guard Keith McGee, a junior from Rochester New York. His amazing physical feats represent the aspiration and courage of the future of I.T. He is the Angel of Hope.

Larry Casuse was a Diné activist and UNM student who challenged the Regents in the 1970s to be more accountable for their actions outside of the UNM campus, particularly as they pertained to the Diné. By all accounts, Larry was a persuasive and courageous orator. He occupied Regents’ meetings with his physical presence and his voice, shedding light on the immoral actions of some Regents. Larry is the Angel of the Just Voice, the Prophet who had the courage to speak truth to power.

The last angel is farm worker activist and New Mexican native Dolores Huerta, here using a megaphone to bath the people with inspiring and unifying words. Huerta represents the New Mexican tradition of translating the region’s wisdom and community power to improve the lives of other people in different locations. She, Cesar Chavez, and many others built a grassroots farm workers movement that has saved the lives of countless people. She is the Angel of the Healing Word.

[1] Klaus Schwab, World Economic Forum, https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2016/01/the-fourth-industrial-revolution-what-it-means-and-how-to-respond/, 14 January 2016.

[2] Joe S. Sando and Herman Agoyo, Po’Pay: Leader of the First American Revolution (Santa Fe, N.M: Clear Light Publishers, 2005), 89–90.

[3] Andrew L. Knaut, The Pueblo Revolt: Conquest and Resistance in Seventeenth-Century New Mexico (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1995).

[4] I am indebted to John Gahate for this important insight.

[5] Anna Nogar, Quill and Cross in the Borderlands: Sor María de Ágreda and the Lady in Blue 1628 to the Present. Notre Dame University Press, 2018, 3.

[6] Ibid., 43.