Everlasting Gifts: The Legacy of Eugenie Shonnard

Eugenie Shonnard was a highly respected sculptor in her day, known for whimsical animal figures, Southwestern religious iconography and respectful depictions of Indigenous peoples. In an era when women artists usually entered commercial fields like lacemaking and wallpaper design, Shonnard followed her own vision. She exhibited her work in Paris, New York City and Santa Fe before moving permanently to the City Different in 1927, when she was in her early forties.

Shonnard spent the bulk of her life in a rambling historic adobe home and studio on Paseo de Peralta. Originally built in 1890 for Nuestra Lucero de Kirchner, the wife of a local merchant, the Italianate Style hipped-roof cottage was constructed by Philip Hesch, a Canadian who settled in Santa Fe in 1876 and became a noted local contractor. When Shonnard died—in 1978, at a wizened 91 years of age—she left her property, artwork, papers and correspondence to the Museum of New Mexico Foundation.

“She knew that by giving her entire estate to us, we would do right by her,” says Jamie Clements, the Foundation’s president and CEO. “We donated her artwork and archives to the New Mexico Museum of Art, where she would want them to be. And we retained the property that would ultimately become the Foundation’s campus. Today, her estate supports the entire Museum of New Mexico system.”

Creating a Campus

The Foundation took up residence on the Shonnard property in 2019 after outgrowing its offices in the Hewett House on Lincoln Avenue. A realtor who leased the Shonnard House from the Foundation for 30 years had given it an award-winning restoration. With a fresh coat of paint, the building was ready for occupancy.

Today, Clements works in a spacious corner office that was once Shonnard’s kitchen, while members of the Foundation’s development team share the string of offices that line a central hallway. Santa Fe architect Beverley Spears added a triangular, one-story building to the campus. Named for Thomas B. Catron III, who established the Foundation in 1962, it houses finance, operations and Museum Shops staff. Shonnard’s art studio—which she converted from a barn—became the Bob Nurock Conference Center, honoring a trustee who died in 2017 and whose generous bequest supported its construction.

Foundation staff interact with Shonnard’s life’s work every day. Her animal figures are affixed to a wall inside the Catron building, and one of her sculptures of St. Francis stands in the hall. Ducks decorate the garden fountain, and a Stonehenge-like assortment of broken pottery outside the conference center pays homage to the kiln that exploded when Shonnard was inventing her own sculptural, cement-like material.

“It was called Keenstone,” says Christian Waguespack, former head of curatorial affairs and curator of 20th century art at the New Mexico Museum of Art. “When she was in her seventies, this technical innovation allowed her to maintain her independence because it was lightweight, and she could move it by herself.”

Despite being a pivotal figure in the 20th-century history of Southwestern art and architecture, Shonnard has fallen out of the public eye in recent decades. To revive her legacy, the New Mexico Museum of Art opened the first posthumous exhibition of her work, Eugenie Shonnard: Breaking the Mold, on March 8. The show is on view at the museum’s downtown Plaza Building through August 24.

Ahead of Her Time

Shonnard was born in 1886 in Yonkers, New York, descended from a storied New England family that included a signer of the Declaration of Independence. Although her pedigree surely gave her a measure of social status, Waguespack says her artistic success was largely a result of talent, drive and serendipitous timing.

“She met Alphonse Mucha at the New York School of Applied Design, and that relationship opened doors for her that wouldn’t necessarily have been open otherwise, and certainly not to women artists,” he says. “A lot of her career developed in the face of other people telling her no.”

Unsatisfied with design’s repetitive nature, Shonnard explored drawing and painting, and eventually gravitated to sculpture. She and her mother moved to Paris after her father died, where she studied with Auguste Rodin and Antoine Bourdelle at Académie de la Grande Chaumière. She moved to Santa Fe after Edgar Lee Hewett offered her studio space at the then decade-old Art Gallery of the Museum of New Mexico (today’s Museum of Art). Her mother came, too, and by the early 1930s Shonnard was married—although not much is known about her husband, the entrepreneur Edward Gordon Ludlam.

“I know more about her relationships with animals,” Waguespack says. “Her parrot spoke Spanish. And she had a horse, named Peggy, that she rode all over Santa Fe. Peggy used to knock on the studio door with her hoof when Shonnard was working.”

Shonnard was known for incorporating sculpture into architecture, as she did in creating the La Conquistadora altar screen for Santa Fe’s Rosario Chapel. She also crafted the decorative tiles and sculptural altarpieces for the Taylor Memorial Chapel in Colorado Springs, a church designed by John Gaw Meem in 1929. Among her other well-known commissions were a 1939 wooden relief depicting Native peoples and cattle for the post office in Waco, Texas, and a fountain for the Carrie Tingley Hospital at Hot Springs, New Mexico, today known as Truth or Consequences. She created several pieces for the Works Progress Administration, which dovetailed with her passion for public art.

“One of her crusades was the power and importance of public art, particularly empowering sculptors to work with architects to incorporate that kind of material into buildings and into the lived environment,” Waguespack says. “She invented Keenstone in part so that it wouldn’t put too much weight on the walls.”

Beloved Benefactor

Although Shonnard hoped other sculptors would embrace Keenstone, Waguespack doesn’t know of another artist who ever used the material. “But she wanted it available. She never patented it,” he says.

With the opening of the Foundation campus, and now, the museum exhibition, Clements says people have begun inquiring about its ingredients. Unfortunately, “the recipe seems to have been lost to time,” he says, standing in the garden next to the Shonnard House. The landscaped oasis with a central fountain is the site of numerous Foundation receptions, including donor parties and the annual staff appreciation event for the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs.

The garden was named for the family of former Foundation board chair Michael Pettit, who made the first gift to the capital campaign that raised $1 million for the campus renovation. The garden borders the backside of the Nurock Conference Center, where barn doors that were once the entry to Shonnard’s studio still stand. They’re painted turquoise blue, and if you look closely, you can see the gentle indentations that Peggy the horse made with her hoof when summoning her faithful rider.

“When Ms. Shonnard came here in the 1920s, she became very integrated into the art community. She was very highly regarded, but she’s not well-known today,” Clements says. “She’s an under-recognized artist—and a beloved benefactor of the Museum of New Mexico system. It’s important for the Foundation and the New Mexico Museum of Art to recognize who she was as a living artist, and to honor her incredible support of us.”

See the Exhibition | Eugenie Shonnard: Breaking the Mold
March 8—August 24, 2025
New Mexico Museum of Art, Downtown Plaza Building

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Artwork: Wilford S. Conrow, Eugenie Shonnard Sculptor (detail), 1930. Oil on canvas, 33½ x 30 in. Collection of the New Mexico Museum of Art, gift of Eugenie F. Shonnard Estate, 1978. Courtesy New Mexico Museum of Art.