Seamus
Berkeley

One in a series of biographical video interviews with Jeff Jaeckle.

This short video responds to the question of the choice to make Taos, New Mexico a base for an artist to live and work.

Jeff Jaeckle: Why Taos? Obviously, Taos has a long history of that [art colony] with Taos Society of Artists and Georgia O’Keeffe very much, with D. H. Lawrence maybe as an exception, very much a visual artists community.

Seamus Berkeley: I want too go back to just a little earlier though, of DH Lawrence, and let’s say the anglo segment of the population that arrived here at that time because another piece that was appealing to me was the multicultural aspect and in particular because the Taos Pueblo is here. So the Tewa people and. very fascinating to me, that they have been here for, if I get the numbers right, 1000 years continuously occupied Pueblo and that to me is significant. And they also had their own arts and then their own culture, so that’s a big piece of this that I think may tend to be overlooked. It’s like, ‘oh, those guys arrived in their broken broken wagon’, then they brought arts here and all that kind of stuff, but there was a whole culture that’s been here for, before New Mexico, before the United States, and that also is really significant to me. And in fact, I would call it almost settling: to have a history in a place that’s so long is worth appreciating.

Jeff Jaeckle is a writing and film studies professor who has published extensively on Hollywood cinema, including Film Dialogue (2013), Refocus: The Films of Preston Sturges (2015), and Refocus: The Films of Barbara Kopple (2020). He also serves as a writing consultant for the UNM-Taos HIVE, helping local entrepreneurs and nonprofits to make their visions a reality. You can learn more about his work at Taos HIVE.