A Gallup landmark
Chief Manuelito sculpture gets well-earned rest

By Gaye Brown de Alvarez
Staff Writer

The statue of Chief Manuelito now rests comfortably inside Zanios Foods at Third Street and Historic Route 66 in downtown Gallup. [Photo by Jeff Jones/Independent]

GALLUP — Where is Chief Manuelito?

He stood looking over Gallup and the Santa Fe Railroad tracks for more than 100 years in the old AG Cash and Carry Building, which is now Zanios. But in September 1995, the old statue was taken down and restored, and the whole C.N. Cotton building was razed by the DiGregorio family. The 8 foot 2 inch sculpture is now being kept inside the building, away from the elements and protected from the sun.

"He's right outside of my office," said Martin Romine, manager of Zanios. "People like to come and tell their children and grandchildren about Chief Manuelito. We have lots of chairs in the lobby and the public is welcome. The hours we are open are 8-5 on Monday through Friday, 8-4 on Saturday, and Zanios is closed Sunday. There are information posters on the wall around the sculpture, explaining the history of the building and the art piece,

"It is my understanding this is the only Macneil sculpture that is not in a Smithsonian museum," Romine said, although he didn't know if that statement was entirely accurate.

Ready for retirement
The last and hautiest of the Navajo war chiefs had seen it all from his nicho in the old adobe building. He saw C.N. Cotton sell to Kimballs Grocery, who sold the business to Associated Grocers, then to Fleming Foods, then to AG Cash and Carry, then to Zanios, a firm from Albuquerque. No longer exposed to the elements, Manuelito looks tired and ready for retirement, not like the fierce Navajo chief he once was.

A restoration team from the New Mexico Conservation Department took samples from the old cement piece and talked about what may have happened to the great chief over 100 years of being exposed.

"The front shows evidence of being resurfaced," said Dale Kronkright, a senior conservator in a 1995 interview. "It started out as one piece, but what we have now is two pieces, the front, which received the weathering and the rest of the piece."

Repairs
Kronkright showed where repairs had been made along the collar area of the chief's blanket and where the contour and shape had been changed. There was a distinct line where the resurfacing stopped.

"The back surface is pretty original and intact," said Kronkright and touched the back of the sculpture, which was covered with years of grime and coal soot. He said the sculpture initially was a wooden armature to which the sculptor applied wet cement. Eventually, the cement started forming the shape of Manuelito.

"The sculpture found its own best points to relieve the stress of the internal structures shrinking and warping," Kronkright said. "You get a sense of what the piece was and what the sculptor was trying to say."

Kronkright had just finished working on the restoration of the large Henry Moore piece in front of the Davies Symphony Hall in San Francisco, and was in Gallup in 1995 with Ellen Rosenthal, who was working under a Getty Post-Graduate Fellowship in anthropological conservation.

They took paint samples and examined the surface during their visit 12 years ago.

The artist
The artist, Hermon Macneil (1866-1947) studied sculpture in France under Chapu and Falguiere. After his famous work on the Columbian Exposition at the Chicago World's Fair, he won a Rinehart scholarship and studied in Rome for four years. Macneil taught at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn. He received many public commissions and his most important works were the President McKinley Memorial Arch at Columbus, Ohio, and the frieze for the Missouri state capitol.

Macneil's smaller bronzes include many figures and groups illustrating the life of the Native Americans, such as "The Moqui Runner," "Moqui Praying for Rain," "Primitive Song," "Vow to the Sun," and "Primitive Chant."

"I've seen this artist's other works from the Chicago World's Fair," Kronkright said and explained what he knew about cement-skin sculptures from the 1890s.

"The sculptors wanted to work full scale with something they could work wet like mud," Kronkright said.

"Concrete was plastic, they could form it and it would dry hard. It was the most immediate translation of the artist's idea. Usually an artist has three to four levels of separation (from idea to finished piece)," Kronkright explained. By molding cement with their hands, there were no steps required in molding, pouring, transferring, etc. The concrete could be built up into a figure and the artist could work really quickly.

Kronkright and Rosenthal could not determine from their initial inspection in 1995 how many times the sculpture had been reslipped or repainted.

Repainting
"The way I heard it, it was last painted in 1951 by Bob Noe," the former owner of AG Cash and Carry, Pat DiGregorio, said. "He went next door to Bubany Lumber, got some paint and repainted it."

When questioned in a 1937 interview about his early success with Indian sculptures, Macneil said that he wished he could go back and revisit Indian Country, travel the old trails and smell the Western air once more. He talked of the Chief Manelito sculpture in Gallup.

He said he had made it one summer around the turn of the century when he was "doing the West," for the Santa Fe Railroad. Old Man Cotton, an Indian trader, came in and wanted to talk to the sculptor. He showed Hermon a photograph of Manuelito (who had just died) and asked if he could work from it. Macneil said "of course." He called Mr. Cotton in when he had finished, asking it the sculpture was OK. He said he would see. He let a Navajo woman into the room and closed the door. She came out a few minutes later, crying, Macneil said Cotton said it was OK ( the woman was Manuelito's widow).

DiGregorio recollected some of the history behind the old statue.

"One day, we were changing the glass in front of the sculpture," DiGregorio said. "I was dusting it off with a whisk broom before we put the new glass on and these people were walking by, yelling obscenities at me. They thought I was hurting the statue in some way. That's when I realized how important the piece was to the people around here. They love that sculpture."

Gallup history
DiGregorio knew the cement sculpture was a piece of Gallup's history, as much a part of Gallup as the abandoned coal mines, the maroon tiles, the McKinley County courthouse and the old post office on First Street.

When DiGregorio was contacted by the Smithsonian, who wanted to include the cement statue in a traveling exhibit, DiGregorio had to think for a while before he said no to the famous national institution.

"That statue belongs with this building. It should stay here and it shouldn't even leave this building, "DiGregorio said. "We didn't feel it was wise to take the statue out of the area."

DiGregorio said that the immigrant families who came out West to work in the coal mines told other family members, "You know you are in Gallup when you see the Indian man in front of the building."

That was where they knew to get off the train.