Snyder: Artist Peter Miller Comes Home

Tilano Montoya, left, and artist Peter Miller. Courtesy/Los Alamos Historical Society Archives

By SHARON SNYDER
Los Alamos Historical Society

An exhibition of 31 American Modernist paintings opened at the Peyton Wright Gallery in Santa Fe earlier this month. The opening of an exhibition in Santa Fe isn’t something unusual, but for the people of Los Alamos, this one is special. It touches our history.

The artist, Peter Miller, gained much of her inspiration from the time she spent at Otowi with Edith Warner and Tilano Montoya, where she fell in love with the landscape of northern New Mexico and the Pueblo culture.

Peter was born Henrietta Myers in 1913, the daughter of a well-to-do Pennsylvania family. As she grew, Peter realized that the thing she loved to do most was paint, and she eventually graduated from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. While there she met another artist, Earle Miller, who would become her husband.

In the book The House at Otowi Bridge, author and poet Peggy Pond Church wrote: “A young girl from the East, seeking a period of stillness before her marriage, was directed to Edith’s house in the roundabout way in which most of her contacts were made. She called herself ‘Peter’, a name that she loved because it means rock or stone. She stayed with Edith two months, there where the river rolls the broken stones into music, where the rocks in the hidden canyons are covered with the gay and reverent drawings of an ancient people for whom everything that lived was both holy and humorous. Later on, she was joined by the young man who was to be her husband, and there, with Edith and Tilano as witnesses, they were married.”

Church went on to say, “To Tilano this meant far more than a perfunctory legal act. It meant that he had in the most true and serious sense become godfather to young Peter and Earle Miller; that Edith was now their godmother. Their duty toward them both was that of spiritual guidance.”

Edith Warner never married and Tilano had lost his young wife and child during childbirth many years before. For both Edith and Tilano, Peter and Earle filled a void.

For the young couple, New Mexico became their spiritual home. They bought land near Black Mesa and built a ranch house where they stayed part of each year, alternating between their adobe home and their farm in Pennsylvania. Many letters were exchanged between Edith and Peter, a collection that has been donated recently to Los Alamos Historical Society archive. The letters from Peter begin with “Godmother”, and the ones sent to Peter from Edith are signed “Godmother”.

Peter’s art was greatly influenced by the Native American art and culture, obvious in much of her work, but her painting has also been compared with the work of Joan Miro, the Spanish Surrealist who Peter met in her fledgling years, along with Pablo Picasso and Henri Matisse, while on a trip to Europe.

Earle Miller died in 1991. He was followed by Peter in 1996. Her remaining paintings were left in a storage facility and were found in need of conservation. Learning of that situation, Pennsylvania conservator Paul Gratz of Gratz Gallery & Conservation Studio spent the months of the pandemic bringing back, in his words, “amazing paintings of color and exquisite beauty”. He was also instrumental in bringing the paintings to New Mexico.

The exhibit “Peter Miller: Coming Home” will remain at Santa Fe’s Peyton Wright Gallery through Nov. 15, the first time Miller’s work has been seen in New Mexico since 1948.

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