Juan Mirabal

Juan Mirabal (1903 – 1981), also known as "Tapaiu" or Red Dancer, was an artist from Taos Pueblo, New Mexico.

Three Taos Pueblo painters Albert Looking Elk, Albert Lujan, and Juan Mirabal have been identified as the "Three Taos Pueblo" painters. As the Taos art colony grew, these men studied oil and water color painting and made works of art about their community, from a Native American perspective. An exhibition of their work "Three Pueblo Painters" was held at the Harwood Museum of Art in Taos, New Mexico January 24 - April 20, 2003.

Occasionally Mirabal modeled for Taos artists. As an artist, he was a realist painter and muralist. His inspiration and subject matter was the pueblo, people and landscape of the Taos Pueblo lands. His was the longest painting career of the three men.

For centuries, Pueblo painters have painted in tempera, clay slips, and earth pigments on woven textiles, interior walls, ceramics, and hides. Looking Elk, Albert Lujan, and Juan Mirabal adopted and mastered European painting materials and techniques.

Beginning of his artistic career Mirabal began painting under the tutelage of Marjorie Eaton and later after serving in the U.S. Army during WW II, studied in the late 1940s with Louis Leon Ribak, a Taos modernist painter who ran an art school after the end of World War II. Unlike other established painters from the Taos Pueblo, Mirabal was low-key. He did not have a shop in the pueblo, but he built a following of people who visited him and likely purchased his paintings.