Mary Colter and the Muralists

Architect and decorator Mary E. J. Colter (1869 – 1958) collaborated with many artists and craftspeople during long her long career with hospitality giant Fred Harvey. Among these were furniture makers, metal workers, and painters. Two artists who painted murals in spaces Colter designed in the 1930s are Fred Kabotie and Hildreth Meière.

Colter worked with Hopi artist Kabotie (1900 - 1986) for the first time at the Desert View Watchtower that she designed on the rim of the Grand Canyon in the early 1930s. Colter considered Kabotie to be “one of the three greatest modern Indian artists.” Since her building design for the Watchtower adapted elements of ancient ancestral Puebloan architecture from the region, Colter thought it fitting for Kabotie to decorate the tower’s walls. Kabotie later said he chose to paint the Snake Legend to show that the first man to float through the Grand Canyon was a Hopi.

Kabotie’s paintings in the Desert View Watchtower. (NPS/Michael Quinn, 2010)

Kabotie remembered the then sixty-three year old Colter as “a very talented decorator with strong opinions, and quite elderly. I admired her work, and we got along quite well…most of the time. But once in a while she could be difficult, especially when it came to mixing colors….She was quite a woman. We didn’t always agree, but I think we respected each other.” In 1948 when Colter redecorated the dining room of in Petrified Forest National Park’s Painted Desert Inn—located in the desert that could be seen in the distance from the Desert View Watchtower—Kabotie was commissioned to paint murals of the Salt Legend and other ceremonies on those walls.

In the mid-1930s, Colter decorated and selected furniture for the Westport Room, the Fred Harvey dining room and cocktail lounge at the Kansas City Union Station. There she worked with Hildreth Meière (1892 – 1961) who was known for collaborating with architects in her murals, reliefs, mosaics, and other work. An accomplished artist with a national reputation, Meière reported enjoying working with Colter. In November 1936 after Colter visited Meière’s New York studio, Meière wrote to client Byron Harvey that “She [Colter] is a thoughtful, constructive critic and I have been delighted to have her near during this vital time in the work. She really is an extraordinary person, and a delightfully salty one! and she certainly knows her job.”

After her murals were mounted in the Art Deco-style Westport Room, Meière wrote to her friend Katherine Harvey, “Miss Colter could not have been more helpful, and working with her has been a liberal education. If the paintings have virtues, a great many of them are due to her suggestions.” Colter was also well-pleased with Meière: when Katherine Harvey visited the Westport Room immediately after Meière’s work was installed, she wrote that “Miss Colter met me with a cheer and a couple of dance steps.” View photos of Meière’s Westport Room murals here.

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Sources:

Mary Elizabeth Jane Colter, Manual for Drivers and Guides: Descriptive of The Indian Watchtower at Desert View and its Relation, Architecturally, to the Prehistoric Ruins of the Southwest. Grand Canyon National Park: Fred Harvey, 1933.

Fred Kabotie and Bill Belknap, Fred Kabotie: Hopi Indian Artist. Flagstaff: The Museum of Northern Arizona with Northland Press, 1977.

Restaurant Management, “Kansas City Likes Westport Room.” February 1938: 82-85.

Hildreth Meière Papers, Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, DC. 

Arnold Berke, Mary Colter: Architect of the Southwest. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2002.