Autumn at Taos Pueblo

LaVerne Nelson Black

Laverne Nelson Black (1887–1938) is remembered less for any single iconic work than for a career built almost entirely on distance from home. Born in Viola, Wisconsin, in the Kickapoo River Valley, his interest in art came early, when he mixed pigments with local earth and plants in order to draw. When his family moved to Chicago, his access to art supplies improved, and studying at the Chicago Academy of Art, he distinguished himself among his classmates and won a scholarship after his first year, training in painting, illustration, and sculpture. Illustration work then supported him across Chicago, New York, and Minneapolis for nearly two decades, though during the summers he would steal away to the West to paint and sketch Indian subjects, with Taos as the focal point of his travels.

Poor health made that escape permanent: he relocated with his family to Taos in 1925, a change that resulted in the finest paintings of his career. When his health declined further, he moved on to Phoenix, where in 1937 he was commissioned to paint four murals for the city's Post Office, tracing Arizona's progress from its first settlers to his own day. Shortly after finishing them his health collapsed, and he died at fifty-one — his friends believed from a form of paint poisoning contracted while painting them.

The cruelest detail is the one every account of him repeats: his reputation only grew after his death, and within a decade he had become far more famous than he ever was in life — murals that likely killed him now standing as some of his most visible surviving work.