The impact of the Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) on New Mexico is often forgotten, mainly because the subsequent cataclysm of World War II erased it from the public’s consciousness. This book is designed to document the state’s ninety CCC sites (camps) where 55,000 young men (including 32,000 state residents) actually worked and lived during the grim Great Depression of the 1930s. The impact of the CCC on the state and the nation is incalculable. This book details where the camps were located, how to recognize the sites today, and how to appreciate them in context.

Dirk Van Hart earned Bachelor’s and Master’s degrees in geology and began a professional career as a petroleum geologist in 1965. During the next two decades a gypsy life took him and his family to residences in Oklahoma, Texas, California, Guatemala, and Ecuador. In 1986 a career change brought him to Albuquerque, New Mexico. For the next seventeen years he worked as a geologist in Italy and Belize, and also for a short while as a student high-school teacher in Albuquerque, and as a contractor to Sandia National Laboratories working on characterization of the geology of Kirtland Air Force base. After semi-retirement in 2003 he worked for five years as a geological consultant until final retirement. In 1998 he began his twenty-year affiliation with New Mexico’s only alumni chapter of ex-CCC “boys” (as they were called), and was the chapter’s president for the last fifteen years. He learned firsthand about the CCC, its achievements, its men, and its enormous impact on the “Greatest Generation.” The “boys” are now all gone. This book is his tribute to them. Van Hart is also the author of Old New Mexico Route 44 from Sunstone Press.

Hardcover:
8.5 x 11
ISBN: 978-1-63293-339-3
278 pp.,$34.95

Softcover:
8.5 x 11
ISBN: 978-1-63293-294-5
278 pp.,$26.95

LAVISHLY ILLUSTRATED IN COLOR AND B&W

Order from Sunstone: (505) 988-4418

Artists began coming to New Mexico in the late nineteenth century. They came from everywhere, from Maine to California and a few from Europe. They were attracted by the dazzling New Mexican landscape, the hospitality of town and village life, and very important, the Indian and Hispanic cultures that had shaped the artistic imagination of New Mexico for centuries.

From an artist’s point of view it was a rich mix, and between art and odd jobs, they managed to make a living. Until the Great Depression of the 1930s. Then, as the artist Louie Ewing said, “the jobs ran out.” No matter what you were willing to do, there was no work, and nobody was buying pictures and pots.

Help came from Washington. New Deal planners offered artists jobs to “beautify” the community. Almost immediately, artists in New Mexico picked up their brushes and chisels, and for almost ten years, between 1933 to 1943, signed onto Federal programs.

How did artists, traditionally loners, like working for the government? When the Santa Fe artist William Lumpkins was asked, he said: “We thought it was heaven on earth to be paid to paint.”

Fortunately, many New Deal artists had the opportunity to speak for themselves. In state-sponsored interviews they tell us in their own words what the New Deal art programs meant to them. Their rich interpretations of that experience and a selection of the work they produced is what this book is about.

JACQUELINE HOEFER’s publications include Imagining the Garden, a book of poems; Weather Songs, three poems set to music by Lanham Deal; and critical essays on contemporary writers, among them, Samuel Beckett, Harold Pinter and Norman Mailer. Her latest book is Night in a White Wood, New and Selected Poems.

Mrs. Hoefer received a Ph.D. in American literature from Washington University, St. Louis, Missouri, and in the early 1960s taught at the University of California, Berkeley, and at San Francisco State University. In 1967, she joined her husband Peter Hoefer in starting Hoefer Scientific Instruments, a San Francisco company specializing in producing instruments for biological research. After Peter Hoefer’s death in 1987, she carried on as chief executive officer. She is currently an editor for Sunstone Press.

Website: http://www.newdeallegacy.org
Website: http://books.google.com/books?id=TsiVodGK2cAC

Hardcover:
8 1/2 x 11
ISBN: 978-0-86534-305-4
196 pp.,$60.00

Softcover:
8 1/2 X 11
ISBN: 978-0-86534-371-9
196 pp.,$45.00

Order from Sunstone: (505) 988-4418

Do you like to go treasure hunting in obvious or out of the way places? Do you like to view fine art in galleries large and small? This book will give you directions to New Mexico’s amazing New Deal treasures and to buildings and bridges, murals and sculptures, paintings and people who made them. They are not necessarily in the most obvious places, and yet many are in places that one routinely visits. They have been patiently waiting in our cities, our villages, our parks, rarely witnessed as being “treasures.” They were constructed perhaps even by your own artistic ancestors. This book is full of clues. Go sleuthing!

Growing up in Portales, New Mexico, Kathryn Akers Flynn lived in an area with a New Deal courthouse, a New Deal post office, and New Deal schools. She worked at the local swimming pool and partied in the city park, both built during the Depression era. In high school she was a cheerleader on 1930s football fields for onlookers in Work Progress Administration bleachers and camped out at a nearby Civilian Conservation Corps created park and lake. She never knew any of these structures were fashioned by the New Deal, nor did she notice the New Deal treasures in Salt Lake City while at the University of Utah where she received her Bachelor’s Degree or the New Deal structures in Carbondale, Illinois where she earned her Master’s Degree at Southern Illinois University. Returning to New Mexico, she had a career in the state health and mental health administration that included directorship of Carrie Tingley Hospital, a New Deal facility with many public art treasures. It wasn’t until she became Deputy Secretary of State of New Mexico that she realized what was around her. As a result she went on to edit three editions of the New Mexico Blue Book featuring information about New Deal creations all over the state.

This book presents the history and whereabouts of many such treasures found since Flynn compiling an earlier book, Treasures on New Mexico Trails, and another that focuses on New Deal programs nationwide, The New Deal: A 75th Anniversary Celebration. She also assisted with the compilation of A More Abundant Life, New Deal Artists and Public Art in New Mexico by Jacqueline Hoefer, also from Sunstone Press and an apt companion for Public Art and Architecture in New Mexico. She was instrumental in creating the National New Deal Preservation Association, and now serves as Executive Director.

Sample Chapter
Website: http://books.google.com/books?id=--dj-dDBFKwC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Public+Art+and+Architecture+in+

Hardcover:
7 x 10
ISBN: 978-0-86534-881-3
374 pp.,$120.00 Collector's Edition

Softcover:
7 x 10
ISBN: 978-0-86534-882-0
374 pp.,$45.00

“An absolutely fascinating and very special ‘time-lost’ treasure, this is a unique and unreservedly recommended addition to personal, professional, community, and academic library American Music History collections in general, and Hispanic/American music supplemental studies reading lists in particular.” —The Midwest Book Review

Order from Sunstone: (505) 988-4418

In 1933, newly elected President Franklin Delano Roosevelt summoned ideas that might allay the financial calamity that characterized the Great Depression of the 1930s. Among the myriad programs Roosevelt initiated was the WPA, the Works Progress Administration (later re-named the Work Projects Administration) that was created to provide meaningful work to the unemployed millions throughout America. Thanks to New Mexico Governor Clyde Tingley, a masterful politician who wended his way into Roosevelt’s good graces, New Mexico became the recipient of a significant proportion of federal WPA funding that supported thousands of otherwise unemployed men and women. One of the great programs to emerge was in support of the arts, and many painters, writers and musicians were employed to pursue their respective art forms.

Helen Chandler Ryan was appointed director of the Federal Music Project (FMP) in New Mexico that lasted from 1936 to 1943. In 1939, it was re-named the New Mexico Music Project, and by 1942, the name was changed yet again to War Services Program—Music Phase. The focus of this project was “music education, performance, and preserving of local musical heritage, especially Hispanic [Hispano] folk music.” Under Ryan’s direction and that of her co-administrators, musicians and folklorists collected songs and other material that otherwise might have been lost.

The transcribed folk songs were mimeographed and distributed to teachers who taught both singers and instrumentalists who then presented the music in public performances. This music project not only funded fieldworkers, it also brought music to the people of the villages of New Mexico in a time when little else was available to lift the hearts of la gente.

In this book, materials collected between 1936 and 1941 are assembled in five separate units. Units 1, 2, and 3 are comprised of a series of Hispano folk songs with transcribed melodies and English translations of lyrics. Unit 4 is a collection of thirty Hispano dance songs, some of which remain popular even now. Unit 5 is entitled “Guitar Arrangements of Spanish American Folk Songs.”

We are fortunate to have this taste of Hispano music of New Mexico from the early twentieth century now available to all. It is integral and vital to the repertoire of musical lore that greatly enhances New Mexico’s heritage.

On the Cover: “Leisure Hour” by Joseph Fleck from A More Abundant Life, New Deal Artists and Public Art in New Mexico by Jacqueline Hoefer, published by Sunstone Press.

Hardcover:
8 1/2 X 11 Illustrated
ISBN: 978-1-63293-181-8
222 pp.,$34.95

Softcover:
8 1/2 X 11 Illustrated
ISBN: 978-1-63293-180-1
222 pp.,$24.95