How is it that one small mountain town in northern New Mexico has succeeded in attracting and sustaining so many remarkable women over the years? This central question is at the heart of this exciting new celebratory book, The Remarkable Women of Taos. This book is the natural outgrowth of an unprecedented year-long community celebration honoring outstanding historic and contemporary women of Taos. The 167 women portrayed here share their passions, accomplishments, and advice - as well as their stories of challenges overcome. Taken together, these narratives provide a sampling of the breadth and depth of the remarkable women who call Taos home. From Mabel Dodge Luhan and Agnes Martin to Sherrie McGraw, Corina Santistevan and Sharon Dry Flower Reyna of today, Remarkable Women reveals the centuries-long role women have played in shaping this one-of-a-kind community.

Fifty full-color and 350 black-and-white photographs illustrate the Birth Project exhibit, conceived by Judy Chicago, based on nearly one hundred of her works, and needleworked by women across the country. Between 1980 - 1985, Judy Chicago designed dozens of images on the subject of birth and creation to be embellished by needleworkers around the United States, Canada and as far away as New Zealand. Formatted into provocative exhibition units which included both needleworks and documentary materials, these works toured the country and Canada, eventually placed by 'Through the Flower' in numerous institutions where they are on public view or used as part of university curricula. Prior to the Birth Project, few images of birth existed in Western art, a puzzling omission as birth is a central focus of many women's lives and a universal experience of all humanity - as everyone is born. Seeking to fill this void, Judy Chicago created multiple images of birth to be realized through needlework, a visually rich medium which has been ignored or trivialized by the mainstream art community.

"Winter in Taos" starkly contrasts Luhan's memoirs, published in four volumes and inspired by Marcel Proust's "Remembrances of Things Past." They follow her life through three failed marriages, numerous affairs, and ultimately a feeling of "being nobody in myself," despite years of psychoanalysis and a luxurious lifestyle on two continents among the leading literary, art and intellectual personalities of the day. "Winter in Taos" unfolds in an entirely different pattern, uncluttered with noteworthy names and ornate details. With no chapters dividing the narrative, Luhan describes her simple life in Taos, New Mexico, this "new world" she called it, from season to season, following a thread that spools out from her consciousness as if she's recording her thoughts in a journal. "My pleasure is in being very still and sensing things," she writes, sharing that pleasure with the reader by describing the joys of adobe rooms warmed in winter by aromatic cedar fires; fragrant in spring with flowers; and scented with homegrown fruits and vegetables being preserved and pickled in summer. Having wandered the world, Luhan found her home at last in Taos. "Winter in Taos" celebrates the spiritual connection she established with the "deep living earth" as well as the bonds she forged with Tony Luhan, her "mountain." This moving tribute to a land and the people who eked a life from it reminds readers that in northern New Mexico, where the seasons can be harshly beautiful, one can bathe in the sunshine until "'untied are the knots in the heart,' for there is nothing like the sun for smoothing out all difficulties." Born in 1879 to a wealthy Buffalo family, Mabel Dodge Luhan earned fame for her friendships with American and European artists, writers and intellectuals and for her influential salons held in her Italian villa and Greenwich Village apartments. In 1917, weary of society and wary of a world steeped in war, she set down roots in remote Taos, New Mexico, then publicized the tiny town's inspirational beauty to the world, drawing a steady stream of significant guests to her adobe estate, including artist Georgia O'Keeffe, poet Robinson Jeffers, and authors D.H. Lawrence and Willa Cather. Luhan could be difficult, complex and often cruel, yet she was also generous and supportive, establishing a solid reputation as a patron of the arts and as an author of widely read autobiographies. She died in Taos in 1962.

Contains an essay about the artists in Taos, New Mexico: brief biographies, portraits, and samples of their work. [Luhan often invited artists and writers to Taos.].

Ladies of the Canyons is the true story of remarkable women who left the security and comforts of genteel Victorian society and journeyed to the American Southwest in search of a wider view of themselves and their world. Educated, restless, and inquisitive, Natalie Curtis, Carol Stanley, Alice Klauber, and Mary Cabot Wheelwright were plucky, intrepid women whose lives were transformed in the first decades of the twentieth century by the people and the landscape of the American Southwest. Part of an influential circle of women that included Louisa Wade Wetherill, Alice Corbin Henderson, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Mary Austin, and Willa Cather, these ladies imagined and created a new home territory, a new society, and a new identity for themselves and for the women who would follow them. Their adventures were shared with the likes of Theodore Roosevelt and Robert Henri, Edgar Hewett and Charles Lummis, Chief Tawakwaptiwa of the Hopi, and Hostiin Klah of the Navajo. Their journeys took them to Monument Valley and Rainbow Bridge, into Canyon de Chelly, and across the high mesas of the Hopi, down through the Grand Canyon, and over the red desert of the Four Corners, to the pueblos along the Rio Grande and the villages in the mountains between Santa Fe and Taos. Although their stories converge in the outback of the American Southwest, the saga of Ladies of the Canyons is also the tale of Boston’s Brahmins, the Greenwich Village avant-garde, the birth of American modern art, and Santa Fe’s art and literary colony. Ladies of the Canyons is the story of New Women stepping boldly into the New World of inconspicuous success, ambitious failure, and the personal challenges experienced by women and men during the emergence of the Modern Age.

"Lorenzo in Taos," is written loosely in the form of letters to and from D.H. Lawrence, Frieda Lawrence, Robinson Jeffers, and Luhan. The book is a highly personal and most informative account of an intense relationship with a great writer.

In 1917 Mabel Sterne, patron of the arts and spokeswoman for the New York avant-garde, came to the Southwest seeking a new life. This autobiographical account, long out-of-print, of her first few months in New Mexico is a remarkable description of an Easterner's journey to the American West. It is also a great story of personal and philosophical transformation. The geography of New Mexico and the culture of the Pueblo Indians opened a new world for Mabel. She settled in Taos immediately and lived there the rest of her life. Much of this book describes her growing fascination with Antonio Luhan of Taos Pueblo, whom she subsequently married. Her descriptions of the appeal of primitive New Mexico to a world-weary New Yorker are still fresh and moving. "I finished it in a state of amazed revelation . . . it is so beautifully compact and consistent. . . . It is going to help many another woman and man to 'take life with the talons' and carry it high."--Ansel Adams

Agnes Martin: Works on Paper provides a unique focus on a lesser-known aspect of Martin's grand oeuvre. Most widely recognized for her large canvases, Martin also produces extraordinarily subtle investigations on paper, which are lavishly and faithfully reproduced here. This catalogue, which accompanied a rare exhibition of these works at the New Mexico Museum of Fine Arts, offers three-way insight into the working processes and driving forces behind one of America's best-known yet most elusive artists. There are the aesthetically and personally perceptive journal entries about her acquaintance with Martin from fellow artist Harmony Hammond as well as art professor Ann Wilson's expert historicizing treatment, and the curator's essay by Aline Brandauer, which addresses Martin's ability to embody the numinous in the material

This definitive documentary history of the Society that made the northern New Mexico town famous as an art colony.

In this family centered biography, independent scholar Simmons describes the lives of the three women who were married to frontiersman Kit Carson. They include Arapaho woman Waa-Nibe, who died three years after their marriage; Cheyenne woman Making Out Road, who divorced Carson after 14 months; and Josefa Jaramillo, the fourteen year old daughter of a prominent Taos family and mother of Carson's seven children.