Emiliano Abeyta (1911–1981), also called Sa Pa, was a twentieth-century

Pueblo In the Southwestern United States, Pueblo (capitalized) refers to the Native tribes of Puebloans having fixed-location communities with permanent buildings which also are called pueblos (lowercased). The Spanish explorers of northern New Spain ...

-American

painter Painting is the practice of applying paint, pigment, color or other medium to a solid surface (called the "matrix" or "support"). The medium is commonly applied to the base with a brush, but other implements, such as knives, sponges, and ai ...

from the Ohkay Owingeh (San Juan Pueblo) tribe. From 1933 to 1934, he was an artist in the

Public Works of Art Project The Public Works of Art Project (PWAP) was a New Deal program designed to employ artists that operated from 1933 to 1934. The program was headed by Edward Bruce, under the United States Treasury Department with funding from the Civil Works Admin ...

as part of the

New Deal The New Deal was a series of programs, public work projects, financial reforms, and regulations enacted by President Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States between 1933 and 1939. Major federal programs agencies included the Civilian Cons ...

. Already an established artist by that time, he worked for the program out of the

Santa Fe Indian School The Federal Government established the Santa Fe Indian School (SFIS) in 1890 to educate Native American children from tribes throughout the Southwestern United States. The purpose of creating SFIS was an attempt to assimilate the Native American c ...

Santa Fe, New Mexico Santa Fe ( ; , Spanish for 'Holy Faith'; tew, Oghá P'o'oge, Tewa for 'white shell water place'; tiw, Hulp'ó'ona, label=Tiwa language, Northern Tiwa; nv, Yootó, Navajo for 'bead + water place') is the capital of the U.S. state of New Mexico. ...

. Later, in the 1950s, his work was part of the

University of Oklahoma The University of Oklahoma (OU) is a Public university, public research university in Norman, Oklahoma. Founded in 1890, it had existed in Oklahoma Territory near Indian Territory for 17 years before the two Territories became the state of Oklahom ...

European Tours, for which the university's College of Fine Arts curated a collection of paintings for the U.S. Information Service to exhibit across Europe. Abeyta's work is in the permanent collection of the

Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian The National Museum of the American Indian is a museum in the United States devoted to the culture of the indigenous peoples of the Americas. It is part of the Smithsonian Institution group of museums and research centers. The museum has three ...

and the University of Oklahoma.

References

20th-century American painters 20th-century indigenous painters of the Americas Native American painters Pueblo artists Painters from New Mexico 1911 births 1981 deaths {{NorthAm-native-bio-stub