Nicholas Herrera is a man of the land—land that his family has worked since the 1820's. “My family came from Extremadura, Spain, through the Canary Islands then to Mexico. They came into New Mexico in 1598 with the earliest Spanish settlers and then some came later with de Vargas.”

Those earliest Spanish settlers crossed the Rio Grande near El Paso and claimed the land to the north for Spain which became the New Spain territory of Santa Fe de Nuevo México. Diego de Vargas came about 100 years later and became its governor.

“So these people, when they came, there was nothing here,” Nicholas explains. “They had to clean up all these lands, they had to plow it and you know, take all the rock out and dig all the ditches.” The ditches, or acequias, are gravity-fed channels that bring water to the fields and gardens. He still maintains them today.

When I visited him recently in El Rito, north of Santa Fe, I met his horses, dogs, a very noisy rooster and ate peaches from his orchard. The land is flat beneath the El Rito Mountains where his ancestors grew potatoes. “The first settlers that were up there were killed by the Comanches. One of my great, great, great grandfathers decided to reclaim it. He started planting potatoes and he knew how to make vodka.”

He says, “You know, I'm always in the mountains alone and I pray to God and I do my thing. You know what I mean? I try to be nice to people because before that, I wasn't that nice. Before that wreck. You know, everything changed. Because you realize that life is too short.”

The “wreck” was a car accident when he was in his early 20s that left him in a coma in the hospital. His life as a rebel came to an end and he emerged with a vision to become a santero, a saint maker. The vision was of a muerte, a death figure, carved by his great uncle José Inés Herrera known as the Santero de la Muerte (Saint-maker of Death) because he specialized in carving death carts and death figures. His Death Cart, carved at the beginning of the last century, is in the collection of the Denver Museum of Art.

On September 21, the Harwood Museum in Taos will open Nicholas Herrera: El Rito Santero, his first solo museum exhibition. The museum notes, “As a modern santero, Herrera creates bultos, retablos, and large-scale mixed media works, many of which detail rich and often challenging chapters in his storied life. Through varied mediums, this exhibition surveys Herrera’s personal identity, family history, relationship to place, and political ideology. Still a ‘village artist,’ Herrera continues to reside, regenerate, and create on the land of his family.”

Self-taught and carrying his youthful rebellion into his art, Nicholas found himself among the great santeros with works in the Smithsonian and major museums across the country.

“There's a lot of sophisticated artists that were well educated at the university,” he says. “They went to art schools. I’m the bandido, that came from the mountains. You know what I mean? It's like I'm competing with big time artists, but you know, I'm my own deal. I got my own thing going.

“I was just doing art that I liked. My mom used to work for people. There was this woman called Eleanor Haas and her husband Lez Haas and they were artists. There were all these artists and my mom would go clean their homes and they became friends. And I would sometimes go with my mom. They give me brushes and canvases, so I just got into it.”

While getting into art he also got into trouble, ending up in jail in Los Alamos for a few months. While there, a guard admired his drawings and he started trading them for cigarettes.

“He was a really cool guy, Native American. When I was gonna get out, he says, well, my wife's a curator at the Fuller Lodge and she wants you to have a show. So, it's like the good Lord put everything in place for me. Like, you have a chance now do it. If not, that's going to be the end. So that's when I went all the way with my art. I just started hustling with my art. Just going to museums. Some of them laughed at my work and wanted nothing to do with it. They were all freaked out, like it's a little too crazy.”

In the early aughts I was a novice in the world of the art of the American West and what is referred to as contemporary Spanish Colonial art. My friend Stuart Chase was executive director of the then Rockwell Museum of Western art in Corning, NY, where I lived, and introduced me to the best of the best. He always said, “You’d love Santa Fe!” to which I always responded, “Who the hell wants to go to Santa Fe?” Having lived here for 17 years now, I can attest to this being not only the “Land of Enchantment” but the “Land of Entrapment.” Stuart and his wife, Julie, now live in nearby Chimayó.

I first came to the area at the invitation of Michael Bergt whose work I had shown in an exhibition. I kept coming back and on one visit went to a gallery on Palace Avenue and saw a piece by one Nicholas Herrera. It wasn’t work I expected to see from a santero.

La Virgin Nos Guia Pro el Camino (The Virgin Guides Us Down the Road) was an image of the Virgin of Guadalupe behind an old car grill and two headlights (one lit and one unlit) above a rusty license plate and a car bumper.

Nicholas explains, “It was inspired by an event in my own life that happened when I was in my 20’s. I remember going down the road one night back, all drunk. I was seeing three roads in front of me and I knew I might not get home. I prayed to the Virgin of Guadalupe to get me home safely. Then I closed one eye and saw just one road and I was able to follow that. So that is way just one of the lights is working and why I carved and placed the Virgin behind the grill.

The car parts come from a pile of “collectibles” he has brought home since he first went with his father to what we used to call “the dump”. Walking into the field of accumulated stuff I saw a rusted car that was still recognizable as a Studebaker--minus the bumper that I had seen in the sculpture.

Some of the stuff composes sculpture placed around the property, including La Corona, inspired by COVID-19, the Coronavirus.

“To me,” he says, “this sculpture is a reminder that this virus is real and happening all around us – it represents the Angel de la Muerte or Angel of Death, who can come for any of us at any time. She holds the scales of heaven and hell, weighing your sins. She is made of recycled vintage car and tractor parts – the main body is a hood from a 1947 Chevy Master Deluxe, the ribcage is a Case tractor from the 1940’s, the bumper is from a 1930’s Chevy and the head is formed from a headlight from a 1929 Dodge. The hair is made from snow chains and the crown is an old chamber pot or pail. The head of the raven on her arm is an auto horn from the 1920’s and the feathers are cut from an old 1920’s Dodge hood. She holds a scythe from the 1800’s.”

When I referred to Nicholas as a man of the land, I was thinking of a smaller, carved and polychromed bulto of San Isidro Labrador, the patron saint of farmers and rural communities. I live in Agua Fria Village, a Traditional Historic Community founded in 1640 and whose local church is dedicated to San Isidro. I often attend the traditional blessing of the fields and river on the saint’s feast day.

As a farm worker in Madrid, San Isidro would attend Mass in the morning while his fellow workers began their hard labors. They complained to the landowner that he was shirking his duties but they found that while he was at Mass, two angels had been doing his work in the fields.

San Isidro II depicts the saint with 2 angels carved in wood, polychromed, and mounted in front of a painting of a village church with its open doors and pews and stations of the cross visible inside. Generations of ancestors are buried in the churchyard.

I looked and saw a lot of art when visiting Nicholas in El Rito, but San Isidro II, in a way, sums him up—his faith, his dedication to the land and to those who came before, and his unique talent for creating art with roots in tradition that is capable, sometimes, of making people “all freaked out”.

“You know,” he says, “I do traditional art, but like I completely changed it--to my way.

It's a new time. It's a new era. You know my grandfather, my ancestors, did their thing in their time. Now it's my turn.”

When I referred to Nicholas as a man of the land, I was thinking of a smaller, carved and polychromed bulto of San Isidro Labrador, the patron saint of farmers and rural communities. I live in Agua Fria Village, a Traditional Historic Community founded in 1640 and whose local church is dedicated to San Isidro. I often attend the traditional blessing of the fields and river on the saint’s feast day.

As a farm worker in Madrid, San Isidro would attend Mass in the morning while his fellow workers began their hard labors. They complained to the landowner that he was shirking his duties but they found that while he was at Mass, two angels had been doing his work in the fields.

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