In the News
“Wood a Natural Fit for Furniture Maker”
by Joe Szarek, Rio Grande Sun Arts Editor, October 9, 2003
A retired La Madera resident started his new life in the arts three years ago. He has shown in the last two Espanola Valley Arts Festivals and will be participating in the upcoming El Rito Studio Tour.
Furniture maker Ernesto Ulibarri retired early from his job as a heavy equipment operator at Universal Construction in Albuquerque after hurting himself on the job in 1980. He hung around for a few years doing nothing, trying to recover, until his wife said to him one day, “What do you want to do with your life?”
He said three years ago she dragged him out of their truck into Rick Gonzales’s woodworking class at Northern New Mexico Community College’s El Rito campus, and it hit him. “This is what I want to do,” he said. “I saw the beautiful carving Rick did and I fell in love at that moment.”
The first thing he made in class was a hand-carved nightstand in the Spanish Colonial style. Then he made a chair based on an 1800s design in the Spanish Colonial Museum in Santa Fe. A director from the museum was visiting the campus and saw the chair and loved it.
“I had a lot of problems making it,” Ulibarri said. “I was going to trash it, but Rick helped me put it together and it came out beautiful. I got more confidence after that.”
Ulibarri was born and raised in Tierra Amarilla. He dropped out of school in the ninth grade, moved to Los Angeles and came back to New Mexico to join the Army.
He served from 1958 to 1960 as a gunner operating 106 mm recoilless jeep-mounted rifles. The large anti-tank guns used 36-inch shells capable of penetrating 21 inches of steel.
He got out of the Army and married his first wife in Salt Lake City, Utah, in 1964. The couple had two boys and a girl, and Ulibarri worked as a meat cutter. He said one of his sons works at Mervyn’s in Albuquerque and the other has a PH. D. in linguistics from the University of New Mexico, and his daughter is deaf and has graduated from high school.
Ulibarri’s most recent wood project was a queen-sized, hand-carved bed in the Spanish Colonial style utilizing the “chip carving” technique for the ornate decorations adorning the head and foot boards.
“I finished it last week,” he said of the piece that took him one semester to make.
He had the bed at the Espanola Valley Arts Festival Oct. 3 and 4. The piece was not for sale. It was there for a sample of his craft. But he said he will make beds on commission for $3,300.
“I keep the first one of everything I make at our house,” he said. But he has been selling. “I have a cedar chest in Santa Fe and a chair in Chicago.”
He is working this year on the upcoming El Rito Studio Tour as a blacksmith’s helper at Michael Hennerty’s blacksmith shop at Stop #1. He has been studying with Hennerty for three months.
“I’m learning to make authentic hinges and hardware in the Spanish style for my own furniture,” he said.
The El Rito Studio Tour will be held Oct. 18 and 19, from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
“Build Your Own”
by Richard Mahler, Albuquerque Journal, March 29, 2002
The smell of sawdust is the first thing you notice entering the bustling Spanish Colonial furniture woodshop at Northern New Mexico Community College in El Rito. Within moments, however, your attention is riveted to the visual beauty of dozens of objects that are being lovingly created by the hands of men and women engrossed in their work. A large trastero (dish cupboard) is nearing completion, awaiting its shelves and drawers; while a narrow banco (bench) is getting its legs sanded. In one corner of the room, a cuna (cradle) is being born, in another, a silla (chair). Near a timber-milling machine, someone is preparing a viga while another student is carving a corbel.
“I love working with these people,” says Ernesto Ulibarri of La Madera, a third-year student who is making a cedar chest for a friend. “If you have a question or need a saw set up, someone is glad to help you. Everyone is so friendly that I always look forward to coming (to the woodshop).”
Ulibarri is one of about 65 students enrolled in four tiers of classes taught by the Spanish Colonial Furniture Program’s co-chairmen, Rick Gonzalez and Daniel Tafoya.
“I started here as a student myself,” says Tafoya, recalling the cabinet-making courses that preceded the current program, which launched in 1995. “I am one of those lucky people who does what he loves for a living.”
“When I’m not here,” Gonzalez agrees, “I’m usually making furniture in my woodshop at home. This is pretty much my life.” Home for the Carlsbad native now is only a few miles away from the college, where he lives with his wife and young son. Not long ago, the family converted an abandoned morada, or penitente chapel, to the state-of-the-art woodshop in which Gonzalez works nearly every day.
The enthusiasm and devotion that Gonzalez and Tafoya bring to their craft is infectious. They tell one story after another about students who, out of idle curiosity, take an introductory class in furniture-making and become so hooked that they can’t seem to stop building things.
“One man hadn’t a single stick of Spanish Colonial furniture in his house when he started,” laughs Gonzalez. “Now he’s replaced just about everything with what he’s made here.”
Over the seven years of its existence, the El Rito courses have fueled growing interest not only in Rio Arriba County, but throughout the region.
“Because we are the only program like this,” Tafoya explains, “we get people from all over, including Espanola, Taos, and Santa Fe. There’s a group of six or seven students that car-pools up from Albuquerque once a week.
Special skills
The compelling attraction, both instructors agree, is a chance to make custom furniture in a uniquely northern New Mexican style that has dramatically increased in popularity since it almost faded into obscurity several decades ago. The handsome, solid style is distinguished by its use of locally milled wood, including ponderosa pine and aspen, that is worked by hand with minimal use of power tools and hardware. The grain and texture of the wood is often shown off through the use of clear, natural finishes.
Decorative elements generally include hand-tooled roping of vertical elements, rosetas (scalloped wheel designs) on panels, chiseled texturing of flat areas and the use of painted panels or carved juniper inlays.
“During the 1960s,” Tafoya recalls, “many local people were getting rid of their old furniture and replacing it with modern stuff that had nothing to do with New Mexico traditions. They were just throwing the old stuff out. Now we are going in the opposite direction, with lots of modern furnishings being replaced by pieces that look more traditional.”
The term “Spanish Colonial” is a misleading description for such furniture, however. According to Gonzalez, the style now being emulated is a synthesis that emerged during the 1930s and ’40s, when the federal Works Progress Administration program set up a number of woodshops in northern New Mexico to produce furniture for government buildings throughout the Southwest. These items combined techniques, materials, and appearances used here during periods of Mexican and U.S. control as well as the nearly 300-year era of governance by Spain.
“The real Spanish Colonial furniture was plainer and lighter than this,” says Tafoya. “Also, some pieces had painted decorations that incorporated Indian designs.”
Individual flair
For the furniture-makers in El Rito, each creation is often as idiosyncratic as its creator. Few students use standardized plans, and each brings his or her own vision to bear, often as a result of consultation with the instructors or fellow students. A few of the region’s foremost santeros and tinsmiths, for example, use the college facility to make nichos, altar screens, and other furniture that will display their artwork to good advantage, sometimes collaborating with students. Others may experiment with “distressed” finishes, cane their chair seats or marry wood and glass. Some follow the entire furniture-making process, from the selection and harvesting of trees in nearby forests through the final polishing and waxing of a completed piece.
The El Rito program holds great value for the U.S. Forest Service, which controls much of the area’s natural resources. The local Forest Service office enthusiastically supports the program, which is creating a demand for small-diameter timber that must be harvested in order to create a more healthy forest and reduce fire danger. Other rewards of the program are less tangible.
“It’s a good therapy,” says Ulibarri, who raises cattle and sheep in the nearby Vallecitos River valley. “I get so relaxed and happy when I’m working here that all of my troubles seem to disappear.”
Furniture-making in El Rito is a stress reducer for many, it seems. Weary professionals from Los Alamos National Laboratory show up directly after work in coats and ties, change into jeans and sport shirts, then contentedly absorb themselves in shaping a tricky mortise-and-tenon interface or carving an ornate door panel.
“We have husbands and wives making furniture with each other,” notes Gonzalez, “and at least one father and son team. It’s great to see families working this way.”
He describes an Albuquerque businessman who enrolled in the program after selling his store: “Now he is so excited about designing and making furniture that he wants to make it his new career.”
Such students are the exception, says Gonzalez, whose own prize-winning work is featured at Santa Fe’s Spanish Market each July. “Most of our students are hobbyists who are making furniture for themselves and their friends. They may sell a piece occasionally, but it’s not their livelihood.”
He is quick to distinguish this type of highly customized Spanish Colonial furniture from that which is mass-produced, sometimes outside New Mexico, for a number of retail outlets in Santa Fe, Taos, and other cities.
“For most of us,” says Gonzalez, “it’s boring to use the same design twice, so you are usually getting something completely unique from us, with a lot of close attention to detail.”
Looking around the two main rooms of the shop, crowded with cluttered workbenches and pulsing to the rhythm of piped-in ranchera music, it is obvious that the El Rito program has broad appeal. Every category of age, gender, race, and economic status seems to be represented on this corner of the campus, which features such student handiwork as doors, handrails, and chairs in several locations. What those enrolled have in common, sums up Tafoya, who commutes 120 miles round-trip from Penasco to teach here, is a desire to continue a cultural tradition that has its 500-year-old roots in the Espanola Valley.
“There’s been a revival of interest locally in creating furniture that we can have real pride in,” he concludes. “Here we are carefully making pieces by hand that may be used every day, but are very beautiful and really hold their value. You can’t buy something like that in a store.”