The Museum Hill complex rests on land donated by two philanthropic sisters who settled in Santa Fe in the early 1920s, Amelia Elizabeth White and Martha Root White.
The White sisters were the daughters of Horace White, the Progressive publisher/owner of the New York Post and the Chicago Tribune. They grew up on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and attended Bryn Mawr, a women’s college in Pennsylvania, where they engaged in women’s suffrage. Elizabeth White first visited New Mexico in 1913 to stay with a Bryn Mawr classmate, Alice Day Jackson, wife of Percy Jackson, a New York attorney who owned a “dude” ranch in Wagon Mound. Elizabeth was entranced by the landscape, indigenous culture and local art and architecture. After serving as a nurse in WWI in France, Elizabeth, accompanied by Martha, traveled back to New Mexico in their own car. They decided to stay and make a home for themselves in Santa Fe.
By this time, other friends from Bryn Mawr were settling in Santa Fe. Word got out that in New Mexico a woman could live with a sense of independence away from the prying eyes and inherent restrictions of Eastern society. In addition to dear friend Alice, the Bryn Mawr group included, among others, Charlotte Lansing Wilson, President of the National League of Women Voters; suffragette, Margretta Stewart Dietrich, the widow of Nebraska governor, Charles Henry Dietrich, and her sister, artist, Dorothy Stewart; journalist, Elizabeth Shepley Sargent; and Eleanor Brownell and Alice Howland, life-partners who owned Bryn Mawr’s “feeder” school, the Shipley School. Together, this group planned and took part in the social and cultural life and philanthropic activities of the town’s Anglo-American settlers and members of the Santa Fe art colony.
The White Sisters formed a partnership with attorney, Francis C. Wilson, called the De Vargas Development Company, which purchased, subdivided, and sold large tracts of land in and around Santa Fe. It was through this enterprise that Elizabeth and Martha donated the land for the ambitious Museum Hill project. They also helped purchase and refurbish the historic Sena Plaza in downtown Santa Fe, in 1927. After Martha’s death from cancer in 1937, Elizabeth and her younger sister Abby established Santa Fe’s first animal shelter in 1939. In the 1940s, Elizabeth purchased an old adobe home on Garcia Street, refurbished it and created the Garcia Street Club for Boys and Girls, where she taught piano. The club continues to operate to this day. Elizabeth’s final act of benevolence upon her death in 1972 at the age of 94 was to donate her estate, El Delirio, to the School of American Archeology, now the School for Advanced Research (SAR), for use as its campus, devoted to the study of anthropology and Indigenous art.
The White sisters and several old friends from Bryn Mawr also used their influence to lobby for the rights of the local Indigenous people. While the group exhibited many of the same underlying biases of the day inexorably linked to their class, education, wealth, and social privilege, they seemed to recognize the harm that Hispano colonization and Anglo-European settlement perpetrated on the Indigenous population, better than most. Elizabeth and Martha, with the backing of their late father’s newspaper and political connections, led the fight to defeat.
the Bursum Bill. Introduced by Senator Holm O. Bursum (R, NM) in 1922, the bill tried to establish the rights of non-Pueblo claims on Pueblo lands. At the time, nearly 60,000 acres of Spanish, Mexican and U.S. land grants were in dispute. If the bill passed, settlers who proved at least 10 years of residency could lay claim to the Pueblo’s property. With the help of the Santa Fe and Taos community of artists, writers, anthropologists, archeologists and their networks across the country, the bill was defeated in 1923.
The Whites rallied against the federal policy of assimilation of Indigenous people into the “American” way of life, which extended to tribal art practices. They helped promote New Mexican Indigenous art as a pathway toward self-sufficiency, during a time of land loss due to colonization and decreasing agriculture owing to drought. Elizabeth, a self-described woodworker, became interested in ethnic and Indigenous forms of art and craft as a young woman. The American version of the English Arts and Crafts Movement, with its decidedly anti-industrial, reformist roots, was in full swing at Bryn Mawr during the early 20th century. Similarly in Santa Fe, the Whites funded the New Mexico Association on Indian Affairs, Arts and Crafts Committee. They commissioned art and craftwork and opened a shop in 1922 named Ishauu (changed to the Gallery of Indian Art in 1931) near their New York City apartment with the intention of spurring appreciation of the traditional workmanship and design of Indian art. The sisters also coordinated the Exposition of Indian Tribal Arts in New York in 1931. The Whites attempted to use their privilege to organize practical solutions during a time of intense social and economic change.