In 1990, Nicholas Herrera, then in his 20s, was in a nearly fatal car crash. When he got out of the hospital, he went to jail for driving under the influence at the time of the accident, as well as for several outstanding warrants for speeding and driving with a revoked license. A guard liked his sketches of other inmates, and he told Herrera that his wife, a curator, wanted to give him a show when he was released.
Feeling as if he’d been given a second chance, Herrera became a santero, or saint maker, committing himself to making devotional paintings, carvings of saints and other religious pieces.
His bold work, which often incorporates wood carving and found objects, is now held in collections at places like the American Folk Art Museum and El Museo del Barrio, both in New York, the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles, and the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, N.M.
One of his pieces, “Protect and Serve” (1994), a sculpture of Jesus Christ in the back of a police car, with a sign reading, “Forgive them Lord they know not what they do man,” is in the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.
Herrera, a 15th-generation New Mexican whose forebears arrived in the area in 1598, before the first Anglo settlement in Santa Fe, has Spanish, Mexican and Comanche ancestry. Herrera grew up on his family’s land in El Rito, a town of less than 1,000 people in northern New Mexico. He still lives there, working in his studio on the property. He picks up materials on his land, such as old car parts, wood and wire, to use in his art, something he has done all his life.
His mother cleaned houses, and her clients included local artists. As a little boy, Herrera would go often with her, and they sometimes gave him paintbrushes and other supplies. He said that he once met Georgia O’Keeffe in nearby Abiquiú, N.M.
“People are always asking me, ‘How was she?’” he said. “I remember the oatmeal cookies — that’s all I remember. I was only 12.”
Herrera’s first solo museum show, “Nicholas Herrera: El Rito Santero,” opened on Sept. 21 at the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos, N.M., and is on view through June 1. Along with “Protect and Serve,” on loan from the Smithsonian, the show includes wooden snakes and pigs that Herrera carved as a boy; religious art with a contemporary take, such as the three wise men babysitting Jesus; and paintings of the Virgin of Guadalupe. “She’s the Chicano saint, big time,” the artist said, adding that she often appears in murals, tattoos and on cars.
Herrera, 60, talked about using natural pigments in his art, painting the patron saint of farmers with his wife and kids and how Ritchie Valens’s “La Bamba” is his “death song.” The following interview has been edited and condensed.
I understand you’ve been involved with putting this show together. What did you want to include?
Some of the pieces that I’ve done over the years are about my life, growing up in northern New Mexico, here in El Rito where I’m from, and the experiences that I have had with drinking, and with all that growing up. A lot of that, that I have been through, is in my art.
Like an accident, this wreck I was in, and that’s the whole scene. I was in a small Yugo, which was a Yugo that I bought. Who thought I would have bought a Yugo? But I went with my brother to buy a car, and we ended up buying a Yugo. I was drunk when I bought it, so the next day, I was like, “What the hell did I buy?” So, they didn’t want to give me my money back.
That evening, when I almost died in that car, and I went head on with his truck and I flew out of that Yugo going 80 miles per hour out of the windshield, and I almost froze to death, and somebody covered me up.
They never knew who it was. They said that some tall hippie was on the side of me there, so I did a tall hippie that was Jesus Christ. I have it in my private chapel.
When you were younger, you drank and did drugs. In a show at Evoke Gallery in Santa Fe, N.M., your bio said that as a young man you “walked a wild and precariously thin line,” until your accident. How did the accident change you?
When I almost died in this wreck, I kind of came out of my body. They call it an out-of-body experience. I could see myself on one side of the road, and then I could see the car, and the only thing that survived in that car was the stereo and the cassette tape.
It kept playing Ritchie Valens, so my death song is “La Bamba.” I was dying, with “La Bamba” playing over and over. Here I am dying with “La Bamba” playing full blast.
After that, some people found me there, and they took me to the hospital without an ambulance. I was in the hospital for a while there, and I was in bad shape. I had a broken collarbone, and my wrist was all messed up. I had all kinds of surgery, and there was always a cop on the side of me, on the door, because I had so many warrants.
What happened when you got out of the hospital?
I ended up in jail, and of all places, in Los Alamos, N.M. I was there for I think four or five months, and there was this cool jailer. We got along really good. He’s like, “I really like your sketches.”
There was nothing else to do, so I was sketching stuff and all of a sudden, he says, you know, when I was ready to get out, he’s like, “You know, my wife is a curator at the Fuller Lodge Art Center, and she wants you to have a show.”
I’m like, “Dear Lord, I’m not going to screw this one up.” To me, it was a sign.
Is the color in your work influenced by the work of other santeros?
A lot of the work is, like the greens, the yellows. And I learned this friend of mine, Ramón José López and Charlie Carrillo and all these guys.
I went and I learned about natural pigments. We were gathering up different colors of clay and yellows and greens and the black soot. And so those are the very traditional pieces that I’ve done.
Can you remember a piece that a gallery took right away?
I did a San Isidro. He’s the patron saint of the farmers, and he has a plow. But San Isidro had a family and a wife, and nobody had ever done San Isidro with his wife, and it reminded me of my mom and my dad.
The mother has a lot to do with the farm, and then the kids are the angels. So that’s what I took.
And [the gallery owner] was like, “Wow, I’ve never seen anything like this. I love this.” I sold it right away.
Tell me about your work in the Smithsonian.
It was a very different piece. It was Jesus in the back of a cop car, my interpretation of how Jesus would be treated today.
And now that this show is happening in Taos, they’re sending two people from the Smithsonian to open the crate. I’m like, “What?” So that made me feel like, “You know what? I think I am a real artist.”
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