Eva Mirabal

Eva Mirabal, also known as Eah-Ha-Wa (which translates from the Tiwa language as 'Fast Growing Corn') (1920–1968) was a Native American painter, muralist, illustrator, and cartoonist from Taos Pueblo, New Mexico. Her primary medium was gouache, a type of watercolor.

Early life and education Eva Mirabal was born in 1920 in Taos Pueblo, New Mexico. As a child, members of Mirabal's father Pedro Mirabal posed as models for non-Native American artists, including Nicolai Fechin and Joseph Imhoff, working in Taos, New Mexico. The artist reflected in a 1946 radio interview, "My tribe produces very delicate works of silver. Many fine products are produced by the method of weaving. They also make Indian necklaces and bracelets from the beads...As you can see, I was surrounded by various phases of art in my everyday life while I was a youth."

In the early 1930s, after graduating from 8th grade at Taos Pueblo Day School, Mirabal studied with Dorothy Dunn and J.C. Montoya at the Santa Fe Indian School.

After the war, Mirabal taught and painted as an artist-in-residence at Southern Illinois University in Carbondale and in 1946 she was the only woman included in the First National Exhibition of Indian Painting at the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa.

Mirabal returned to Taos Pueblo in 1949 and studied at the Taos Valley Art School run by Louis Ribak and Beatrice Mandelman. Her painting, Picking Wild Berries, was included in the 1953 traveling exhibition, Contemporary American Indian Painting curated by Dorothy Dunn.

Mirabel died in 1968.

Awards

1940 – Margretta S. Dietrich Award for painting "Picking Wild Berries" (1940), Museum of New Mexico