Embroideries by Rebecca James — Museum of International Folk Art, Santa Fe (1963)

What this catalog is

Rebecca Salsbury James (1891–1968) was an American painter and folk-textile artist who lived in Taos, New Mexico, from the late 1930s until her death. She was the second wife of the photographer Paul Strand from 1922 until their 1933 divorce, and her early career as a painter intersected with the Stieglitz circle in New York. After moving to Taos she turned increasingly to textile work and to the revival of regional craft traditions, and the colcha stitch — the surface-couching embroidery technique used in colonial New Mexico to ornament Spanish-style hangings — became the medium of her mature work.

The 1963 Museum of International Folk Art exhibition was the museum’s first solo show of her textile work. The catalog includes a foreword by E. Boyd, the museum’s curator of Spanish Colonial Art and one of the foundational scholars of New Mexico folk art (her Popular Arts of Spanish New Mexico would be published posthumously in 1974); a catalog essay on the colcha knot stitch by Rebecca James herself, with technical detail on materials and method; reproductions of her embroidered pictures; and a checklist of works in the show.

The catalog is small (saddle-stitched, modest production) but the contents are scholarly. It’s a primary document for two distinct fields: the historiography of the colcha-stitch revival in 20th-century New Mexico, and the biography of Rebecca Salsbury James. Both fields are continuing today; modern colcha embroiderers in New Mexico cite this catalog as the bridge between the colonial-period source material and the contemporary practice.

Why this copy matters

Museum exhibition catalogs are notoriously elusive in the secondary market — the print runs are small (a few hundred to a few thousand for a regional show), they don’t go through wholesale book channels, and most copies were given away to opening-night visitors and discarded a generation later. A clean 1963 MOIFA catalog, sixty-three years on, is the kind of object that turns up only through estate-library cleanouts in Santa Fe and Albuquerque.

The E. Boyd foreword is itself an authorial datapoint: Boyd’s signature pool is closed (she died in 1974), and any document carrying her authoritative voice on Spanish-colonial folk art is incrementally important. The catalog is also one of the few sources that documents Rebecca James writing about her own technique in her own voice; most of the secondary literature on her work is by later art historians rather than the artist herself.

Multi-part bibliographic record

How it came in

Donated in May 2026 through NMLP. Donor scenario anonymized per archive policy. The catalog is in clean, lightly used condition with no markings; the corner of one early page carries a faint pencil notation "125" that is consistent with a long-ago private price.

Where it's going

Likely route: a Spanish-colonial textile scholar, a contemporary colcha-stitch practitioner, a regional-folk-art collector, or a museum library — the Harwood Museum in Taos, the Couse-Sharp Historic Site, or the Museum of International Folk Art's own library if their catalog file is missing this issue. The scholarly value of the document substantially exceeds its retail price.