Fine original condition, taped edge painted on artist board. Signed lower right and dated as shown. Rare Native American artist. Approx. board size: 12" x 20". Juan Mirabal (1903 ? 1981), also known as "Tapaiu" or Red Dancer, was an artist from Taos Pueblo, New Mexico. Albert Looking Elk, Albert Lujan, and Juan Mirabal have been identified as the "Three Taos Pueblo" painters. As the Taos art colony grew, these men studied oil and water color painting and made works of art about their community, from a Native American perspective. An exhibition of their work "Three Pueblo Painters" was held at the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos, New Mexico January 24 - April 20, 2003.Occasionally Mirabal modeled for Taos artists. As an artist, he was a realist painter and muralist. His inspiration and subject matter was the pueblo, people and landscape of the Taos Pueblo lands. His was the longest painting career of the three men. Mirabal began painting under the tutelage of Marjorie Eaton and later after serving in the U.S. Army during WW II, studied in the late 1940s with Louis Leon Ribak, a Taos modernist painter who ran an art school after the end of World War II. Unlike other established painters from the Taos Pueblo, Mirabal was low-key. He did not have a shop in the pueblo, but he built a following of people who visited him and likely purchased his paintings. He was influenced by modern art and by the 1930s Cubism. Marjorie Eaton, a painter schooled in modernism in Europe, came to Taos in the late 1920s and lived there in the early 1930s. Of the same age, Eaton befriended Juan and he became her model, student and dear friend. She is the one who taught him the basics of modernism prior to his studies with Louis Leon Ribak. Mirabal painted many murals, a large mural still exists in a home that is now the Adobe & Pines Inn Bed & Breakfast. Mirabal is known for the liveliness that he brought to his work, both in composition and color.

12 x 20 in