Callers

This painting captures an everyday, yet deeply poetic moment among New Mexico's Pueblo Indians. Ufer was a German émigré who brought to America an intense sympathy for ordinary people instilled in him by his socialist family. He did not romanticize his sitters, because he understood that the Indian "resents being regarded as a curiosity—as a dingleberry on a tree." The two men on horseback pay their respects to a woman who lives, like millions of Americans, behind a picket fence. Their costumes show that they have held on to their tribal culture. Not long after Anglo Americans had effectively reduced the Pueblo tribes to touristic curiosities, Ufer quietly underscored the human dignity of a timeless ritual of courtship.

Exhibition Label, Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2006