Snow Bird Dance

Artist William Penhallow Henderson (American, 1877-1943)

Date1917

Mediumpastel

Dimensionsmat: 20 × 24 in. (50.8 × 61 cm)
image (flush): 9 1/4 in. × 12 in. (23.5 × 30.5 cm)

Credit LineGift of Miss Fillette Many

Label TextWilliam Penhallow Henderson was already an established artist and art teacher in Chicago when his wife’s illness with tuberculosis led the family to relocate to New Mexico in 1916. By this time New Mexico had a decades-old reputation as a salubrious destination for white Americans with health struggles – a reputation grounded in the Southwest’s warm climate and the false narrative that native New Mexicans were immune to “consumption” because of it – that was intentionally stoked by territorial leaders in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in an effort to encourage the growth of the territory’s white population. Having visited Santa Fe as a child and studied religion as a youth, it is perhaps unsurprising that Henderson (alongside his wife Alice, a writer) took a serious professional interest in the religious cultures of the region’s Indigenous and Hispanic peoples soon after arriving in 1916. The Snow Bird Dance, pictured here, was a subject featured in depictions of San Ildefonso Pueblo by numerous early twentieth century artists. Henderson’s drawing recreates and reiterates touristic fascination with Indigenous ceremonials that helped make them arguably the Southwest’s greatest attraction to white visitors in the early twentieth century. Though tourists typically knew little about the religious or cultural significance of such ceremonies, the elaborate costumes and dances that they incorporated fueled the fires of exotic fascination that propelled the region’s tourism industry as a whole.

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