The Harwood Museum's Pursuit of Happiness: GI Bill in Taos, on view through May 31, follows twenty-seven artists who trained under the postwar GI Bill. One of the named artists is Eva Mirabal — and her own history reaches back further than the exhibit's framing suggests.
Mirabal was born at Taos Pueblo in 1920. As a child, her father sat for Nicolai Fechin, one of the outside painters then working in town — she grew up watching her own family become other people's subject matter before she ever picked up a brush herself. She later trained at the Santa Fe Indian School under Dorothy Dunn, who wrote in her notebook that Mirabal could turn "everyday events into scenes of warmth and semi-naturalist beauty."
In 1943 Mirabal enlisted in the Women's Army Corps. She spent the next four years as a war cartoonist, drawing a strip called G.I. Gertie — becoming one of the first women with her own published comic strip — and painting a building-sized mural, A Bridge of Wings, for the Army Air Service Command in Ohio.
She came back to Taos Pueblo in 1949 and enrolled at the Taos Valley Art School, run by two painters named Louis Ribak and Beatrice Mandelman.
Ribak and Mandelman are also in the Harwood's current show, credited as the two teachers who helped start a new wave of postwar abstraction in Taos. What the exhibit doesn't say is that one of their first students back from the war had already spent four years drawing cartoons for the Army — or that she'd grown up on the other side of an easel from a different generation of Taos painters entirely.
Mirabal's 1949 watercolor Night Chanters, painted the same year she came home, is now in the collection of the National Museum of the American Indian.