Culture:

Winkler’s legacy

by Kathleen Sloan | February 16, 2021
9 min read
Joy
"Joy," installed at Main and Pershing in downtown Truth or Consequences in 2007, was inspired in part by the Winkler family's history as ranchers. Photograph courtesy of Rebecca Speakes copyright © 2007

Editor’s Note: R. William Winkler, Dadaist sculptor, patriarch of a family of artists and longtime resident of Hillsboro, passed away on Feb. 4, 2021, at the age of 92. In his memory, the Sun is republishing two pieces written by chief reporter Kathleen Sloan about Winkler—like Beyoncé or Cher, he was known to everyone by a single name—and his work. The first Sloan article—a feature story about a Winkler sculpture of a longhorn —was published in The Herald under the headline, “Cattle Art Drive Brings ‘Joy,'” in 2007, when the sculpture was installed on the southwest corner of Main and Pershing in Truth or Consequences. The second piece—a review of group show displaying the work of Winkler, his wife Nolan and Winkler’s two sons and daughter-in-law—was first published under the headline, “Family Winkler,” in THE Magazine in October 2006. Winkler’s artistic legacy lives on in his creation of one of Sierra County’s most beloved pieces of public art, in museum and private collections and in the ongoing artistic endeavors of the Winkler family.

It took one year to round-up enough greenbacks to purchase, install and landscape the site for the public sculpture, “Joy,” by R. Wm. Winkler. The Sierra County Arts Council ran herd on the project, selecting the sculpture and site, raising money and getting donations.

The sculpture was installed recently on the corner of Main St. and Pershing in T or C—a spot of land donated to the city by State National Bank.

Paula Green, a board member of the Sierra County Arts Council, said the City of T or C gave 1 percent of the money for the project, which is in conformance with federal requirements for public art on public land. Other major donors were Sierra County, Turtleback Mountain Resorts, Sierra County Arts Council and Sierra Grande Lodge.

Winkler said he has done four longhorn steer sculptures so far. “Joy” was actually his wife Nolan’s sculpture—Winkler got her to part with it for the greater good of the herd—but must do another for her. A native Californian, from a family with a history as ranchers, his searing interest in mustangs and longhorns, cowboy lore and cattle drives has remained as permanent as a brand.

Winkler began to notice in the 1990s that “wealthy people” began to raise longhorns as a “hobby” in California. There he owned an art gallery, and among his stable was a photographer whom he commissioned to photograph these longhorns. When he moved to Hillsboro, N.M. in 1993, he felt “this is real cattle county.” His new surroundings, echoing his youthful origins, incited him to “do some sculpture that deals with the longhorn. They, and the mustangs, have been increasingly romanticized.”

Pedigreed
“Pedigreed,” Winkler’s homage to wild mustangs slaughtered for dog food Source: Family

“Without longhorns you have no cowboys,” relates Winkler. “In the late 1800s, after we kicked the Mexicans out, the longhorns were running wild. Some enterprising businessmen decided to gather up the wild cattle and eventually breed them. Cowboys drove cattle out of Texas and New Mexico, north, to the railroad lines. They were slaughtered and dressed in Kansas City and other places, then shipped to the East. That’s why I quarter them in my sculptures. The slaughter houses first quartered them, then each quarter was cut. I quarter my mustang sculptures too because they are slaughtered for dog food.”

“Joy” is so named because Winkler found “an old stove out on the range” and incorporated its metal-cast trademark emblazoned ‘JOY’ into the sculpture. Winkler also gave “Joy” his family’s ranch earmarks and his personal brand.

This realism, mixed with romance and sentiment for the disappearing cowboy way, demonstrates Winkler’s usual narrative depth and breadth. Out on the range, a man has room to do a powerful lot of thinkin’ and feelin’.

****

The art of five Winklers and the theme, FamilyWinkler, at Main Street Gallery in Truth or Consequences, include stories of forebears back to the 1870s—the same timeframe historians call “Modernism.” Their individual artistic DNA shares common traits with art’s “Modern Man.”

For quick perspective, harken back to the Renaissance, when artistic families, such as Holbein and Cranach used the appellations The Elder and The Younger. Elders apprenticed their progeny, bestowing techniques and methodology; introducing them to society and patrons who dictated the subject matter.

winkler and his wife and fellow artist nolan
Winkler and his wife and fellow artist Nolan at the Hillsboro General Store Café in 1995, two years after they moved to Sierra County Source: Family

In contrast, Nolan Winkler, third wife of R. William, his two sons Mark and Todd, and Todd’s wife Anne, are typical of today’s’ re-stretched family canvas with pentimentos preserved. Elder influence is vague but fundamental: bestowing a ballast of character and will by “role modeling” being an artist as a viable occupation, even though there is little institutional or societal patronage. Modernism means facing the high gale of options, where all techniques, all subject matter are valid, yet not loosing your way among the morass.

Yeats wrote “the centre does not hold” in 1919. The Salon Des Refusés in 1881 is often cited as initial evidence of the “widening gyre.” Schools of thought could not fit art back in the box but continued to spin out and factionalize, witnessed by their very names: Vorticism, Impressionism, Cubism, and Constructivism. By the time R. William and Nolan are in full swing, Pop Art is the last identifiable movement. The prevailing certainty for the artist is similar to the Buddhist warning: If you think you have found Buddha or the way, kill him/her/it, figuratively, because there is only the individual path.

What is a commonality among the Winklers and indicative of art of our age, is a desire to gather up the pieces from the diaspora, and to present a spiritual whole. Or the flip side of that same coin: to identify causes of alienation and anomie.

Dadaism and Surrealism, dating roughly from 1914 to 1935, were reactions against the paradigm that science would provide truth and cure all ills. WWI was the culmination of that applied science—Yeats’s “Anarchy is loosed upon the world.” Dadaism and Surrealism, in the aftermath, were not reconnecting or trying to heal the “Spiritus Mundi,” but offering up parallel anarchy that seemed as valid as rationality.

Even though the Winklers use similar means: chance, propitiation, memory, non-rational cognition, unlike the Dadaists and Surrealists, they, like many artists today, make art as a shamanic act, seeking wholeness from the uber-, un- or subconscious. Jung has been digested and subsumed into the artistic DNA since Modernism’s inception.

Just as shamans use power animals and animal guides, four of the Winklers use animals as messengers or as metaphors for man’s spiritual malaise, indicating that their healing is also our path to spiritual wholeness.

Winkler’s “Advanced Corporate Procedures #45”: The succeeding generation of family artists has embraced their father’s use of animals as messengers or metaphors. Source: Family

Mark Winkler, eldest son, works in “a semi-frenzied state which allows for jumps in logic, chance fortune . . . images are conjured.” The subject matter is “trans-human, a flux of genetic mutation, pseudo-science and spiritual transgression.” He points to connections among species and interplanetary species, and thus to a universal family.

Anne Winkler has on view a series of paintings that explore the “goat as a symbol of evil . . . because it stays apart.” Her search for goat images led her to chance upon photos from the 1930s ,when it was popular for children to have portraits done with cart and goat. Her images depict scapegoating, or projecting “other” onto child and/or goat, and their wounding by it. She hits at our alienated and therefore deadened center, prodding our awareness, the first step to wholeness.

Todd Winkler’s imagery includes suits of cards, phases of the moon, voodoo symbols, the voodoo death god (Niambo), thrift store paintings he cut up and incorporated. These chance pastiches build narrative using synchronicity as a guide.

One painting even depicts the collective unconscious (brains, pink, with the usual wrinkles), steaming and pricked by the hateful thoughts of the characters below. The childlike drawing softens the message that our individual hates build cosmic hate, again prodding us to the awareness that wholeness, healing for the planet starts with our own thoughts.

“Sister Rita Took the Veil Numerous Times” is Nolan Winkler’s distillation of a family member’s passage through five rites of marriage: her Catholic confirmation as a child (a marriage to Christ), three marriages to men and two other “religious indoctrinations.” The number of veils speaks to the failure of religion to provide—and the religious ecstasy on the face, addresses the desire for—spiritual completion.

Opiate
“Opiate,” found objects on a wooden cross, acknowledges that “our dangerous need to rewrite history starts at home.” Source: Family

In “Opiate,” R. William Winkler has created essentially a family tree using visual metaphors, mostly from found objects, composed on a wooden cross. He titled it “Opiate” to acknowledge his romanticizing of his forebears and that our dangerous need to rewrite history starts at home.

“Mustang Pedigreed,” also by R. William, is a life-sized sculpture of a mustang, the scapegoat of the horse world. It is a breed apart, unbiddable and a despised range grass competitor, often ending up as Pedigree dog food. He patches the form with hearts to show his affinity with the animal.

Artist as shaman is not new. Lascaux paintings and other prehistoric art attest to that. It has always been in the artistic DNA. But the number of artists whose emphasis is on wholeness and reconnection with a collective spirit has reached such a groundswell, it feels like a movement. The Shamanic Age?

The Sun published a review by Kathleen Sloan of another group show of works by the family Winkler, this one exhibited at Rio Bravo Fine Arts Gallery in 2019. That review can be read here.

author
Kathleen Sloan is the Sun’s founder and chief reporter. She can be reached at kathleen.sloan@gmail.com or 575-297-4146.
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Understanding New Mexico's proposed new social studies standards for K-12 students

“The primary purpose of social studies is to help young people develop the ability to make informed and reasoned decisions for the public good as citizens of a culturally diverse, democratic society in an interdependent world.”
—National Council for the Social Studies 

Reader Michael L. Hayes of Las Cruces commented: What impresses me is that both the proposed standards and some of the criticisms of them are equally grotesque. I make this bold statement on the basis of my experience as a peripatetic high school and college English teacher for 45 years in many states with many students differing in race, religion, gender and socioeconomic background, and as a civic activist (PTA) in public education (My career, however, was as an independent consultant mainly in defense, energy and the environment.)

The proposed social studies standards are conceptually and instructionally flawed. For starters, a “performance standard” is not a standard at all; it is a task. Asking someone to explain something is not unlike asking someone to water the lawn. Nothing measures the performance, but without a measure, there is no standard. The teacher’s subjective judgment will be all that matters, and almost anything will count as satisfying a “performance standard,” even just trying. Students will be left to wonder “what is on the teacher’s mind?” or “have I sucked up enough.”

Four other quick criticisms of the performance standards. One, they are nearly unintelligible because they are written in jargon. PED’s use of jargon in a document intended for the public is worrisome. Bureaucrats often use jargon to confuse or conceal something uninformed, wrong or unworthy. As a result, most parents, some school board members and more than a few teachers do not understand them.

Two, the performance standards are so vague that they fail to define the education which teachers are supposed to teach, students are supposed to learn, and parents are supposed to understand. PED does not define words like “explain” or “describe” so that teachers can apply “standards” consistently and fairly. The standards do not indicate what teachers are supposed to know in order to teach or specify what students are supposed to learn. Supervisors cannot know whether teachers are teaching social studies well or poorly. The standards are so vague that the public, especially parents or guardians, cannot know the content of public education.

Three, many performance standards are simply unrealistic, especially at grade level. Under “Ethnic, Cultural and Identity Performance Standards”; then under “Diversity and Identity”; then under “Kindergarten,” one such standard is: “Identify how their family does things both the same as and different from how other people do things.” Do six-year-olds know how other people do things? Do they know whether these things are relevant to diversity and identity? Or another standard: “Describe their family history, culture, and past to current contributions of people in their main identity groups.” (A proficient writer would have hyphenated the compound adjective to avoid confusing the reader.) Do six-year-olds know so much about these things in relation to their “identity group”? Since teachers obviously do not teach them about these other people and have not taught them about these groups, why are these and similar items in the curriculum; or do teachers assign them to go home and collect this information?

Point four follows from “three”; some information relevant to some performance measures requires a disclosure of personal or family matters. The younger the students, the easier it is for teachers to invade their privacy and not only their privacy, but also the privacy of their parents or guardians, or neighbors, who may never be aware of these disclosures or not become aware of them until afterward. PED has no right to design a curriculum which requires teachers to ask students for information about themselves, parents or guardians, or neighbors, or puts teachers on the spot if the disclosures reveal criminal conduct. (Bill says Jeff’s father plays games in bed with his daughter. Lila says Angelo’s mother gives herself shots in the arm.) Since teacher-student communications have no legal protection to ensure privacy, those disclosures may become public accidentally or deliberately. The effect of these proposal standards is to turn New Mexico schools and teachers into investigative agents of the state and students into little informants or spies.

This PED proposal for social studies standards is a travesty of education despite its appeals to purportedly enlightened principles. It constitutes a clear and present danger to individual liberty and civil liberties. It should be repudiated; its development, investigated; its PED perpetrators, dismissed. No state curriculum should encourage or require the disclosure of private personal information.

I am equally outraged by the comments of some of T or C’s school board members: Christine LaFont and Julianne Stroup, two white Christian women, who belong to one of the larger minorities in America and assume white and Christian privileges. In different terms but for essentially the same reason, both oppose an education which includes lessons about historical events and trends, and social movements and developments, of other minorities. They object to the proposal for the new social studies standards because of its emphasis on individual and group identities not white or Christian. I am not going to reply with specific objections; they are too numerous and too pointed.

Ms. LaFont urges: “It’s better to address what’s similar with all Americans. It’s not good to differentiate.” Ms. Stroup adds: “Our country is not a racist country. We have to teach to respect each other. We have civil rights laws that protect everyone from discrimination. We need to teach civics, love and respect. We need to teach how to be color blind.”

Their desires for unity and homogeneity, and for mutual respect, are a contradiction and an impossibility. Aside from a shared citizenship, which implies acceptance of the Constitution, the rule of law and equality under the law, little else defines Americans. We are additionally defined by our race, religion, national origin, etc. So mutual respect requires individuals to respect others different from themselves. Disrespect desires blacks, Jews or Palestinians to assimilate or to suppress or conceal racial, religious or national origin aspects of their identity. The only people who want erasure of nonwhite, non-Christian, non-American origin aspects of identity are bigots. Ms. LaFont and Ms. Stroud want standards which, by stressing similarities and eliding differences, desire the erasure of such aspects. What they want will result in a social studies curriculum that enables white, Christian, native-born children to grow up to be bigots and all others to be their victims. This would be the academic equivalent of ethnic cleansing.

H.E.L.P.

This postmortem of a case involving a 75-year-old women who went missing from her home in Hillsboro last September sheds light on the bounds of law enforcement’s capacity to respond, especially in large rural jurisdictions such as Sierra County, and underscores the critical role the public, as well as concerned family and friends, can play in assisting a missing person’s search.

Reader Jane Debrott of Hillsboro commented: Thank you for your article on the tragic loss of Betsey. I am a resident of Hillsboro, a friend of Rick and Betsey, and a member of H.E.L.P. The thing that most distresses me now, is the emphasis on Rick’s mis-naming of the color of their car. I fear that this fact will cause Rick to feel that if he had only gotten the facts right, Betsey may have been rescued before it was too late. The incident was a series of unavoidable events, out of everyone’s control, and we will never know what place the correct color of her car may have had in the outcome. It breaks my heart to think that Rick has had one more thing added to his “what ifs” concerning this incident.

Diana Tittle responded: Dear Jane, the Sun undertook this investigation at the request of a Hillsboro resident concerned about the town’s inability to mount a prompt, coordinated response to the disappearance of a neighbor. From the beginning, I shared your concern about how our findings might affect Betsy’s family and friends. After I completed my research and began writing, I weighed each detail I eventually chose to include against my desire to cause no pain and the public’s right to know about the strengths and limitations of law enforcement’s response and the public’s need to know about how to be of meaningful assistance.

There was information I withheld about the state police investigation and the recovery. But I decided to include the issue of the car’s color because the individuals who spotted Betsy’s car emphasized how its color had been key to their identification of it as the vehicle described in Betsy’s Silver Alert. Because the misinformation was corrected within a couple of hours, I also included in this story the following editorial comment meant to put the error in perspective: “The fact that law enforcement throughout the state was on the lookout in the crucial early hours after Betsy’s disappearance for an elderly woman driving a “light blue” instead of a “silver” Accord would, in retrospect, likely not have changed the outcome of the search” [emphasis added].

I would also point to the story’s overarching conclusion about the inadvisability of assigning blame for what happened: “In this case, a perfect storm of unfortunate circumstances, many of them beyond human control, hindered the search that it would fall to Hamilton’s department to lead.”

It is my hope that any pain caused by my reporting will eventually be outweighed by its contribution to a better community understanding of what it will take in the future to mount a successful missing person’s search in rural Sierra County.

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