Located in a tributary valley off the Rio Grande, Taos Pueblo is the northernmost of the New Mexico pueblos. For nearly a millennium, it has been occupied by the Taos tribe. It is estimated that the pueblo was built between 1000 and 1450 CE, with some later expansion. The Taos Pueblo is considered to be the oldest continuously inhabited community in the United States by Ancestral Puebloans. The Pueblo, at some places five stories high, is a combination of many individual homes with common walls. There are over 1,900 people in the Taos pueblo community. Some live in more modern homes near their fields, moving to the pueblo during cooler weather. There are about 150 people who live at the pueblo year-around. The Taos Pueblo became an UNESCO World Heritage Site in 1992, considered a significant world historical cultural landmark. Similar sites include the Taj Mahal in India, the Great Pyramids in Egypt, and the Grand Canyon in the United States. For centuries, Pueblo painters have painted in tempera, clay slips, and earth pigments on woven textiles, interior walls, ceramics, and hides. Looking Elk, Albert Lujan, and Juan Mirabal adopted and mastered European painting materials and techniques.
Beginning of his artistic career
Mirabal began painting under the tutelage of Marjorie Eaton and later after serving in the U.S. Army during WW II, studied in the late 1940s with Louis Leon Ribak, a Taos modernist painter who ran an art school after the end of World War II. Unlike other established painters from the Taos Pueblo, Mirabal was low-key. He did not have a shop in the pueblo, but he built a following of people who visited him and likely purchased his paintings.
Professional career
Mirabal was ground-breaking in his realistic depiction of pueblo ceremonial dances. He was influenced by modern art and by the 1930s Cubism. Marjorie Eaton, a painter schooled in modernism in Europe, came to Taos in the late 1920s and lived there in the early 1930s. Of the same age, Eaton befriended Juan and he became her model, student and dear friend. She is the one who taught him the basics of modernism prior to his studies with Louis Leon Ribak. Mirabal painted many murals, a large mural still exists in a home that is now the Adobe & Pines Inn Bed & Breakfast. Mirabal is known for the liveliness that he brought to his work, both in composition and color. Mirabal's Taos Pueblo painting inspired the following poem, by Enrique Pinedo, a student of Lawrence Intermediate School.
