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](https://sierracountysun.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/pedigreed-1-298x300.jpg)
“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’.
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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](https://sierracountysun.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/winkler-and-nolan-at-the-Hillsboro-General-Store-in-1993-300x213.jpg)
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.
![](https://sierracountysun.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/Advanced-Corporate-Proceedure-45-RWWinkler-225x300.jpg)
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](https://sierracountysun.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/opiate-118x300.jpg)
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.