LAGUNA & ACOMA PUEBLOS

Our visit begins at 11:00 at Laguna Pueblo’s St. Joseph Church, built around 1699. The interior exudes the mood characteristic of early missions. Features inside include one of the few surviving altar screens by the artist known as the Laguna Santero, nave walls painted with murals in abstract Pueblo motifs, and two large hide paintings.

In the 1930s Father Agnellus Lammert, a Francican pastor at Acoma and Laguna, collaborated with John Gaw Meem and parishioners to design and build four stone churches in pueblo villages. We visit three of these, in Paraje, Acomita, and McCartys. St. Anne in Acomita stands out among all New Mexican churches for its exquiste woodcarvings. The church has thirty-three ceiling beams each carved with the iconography of a saint, in addition to extraordinary carvings on the choir loft and communion rail. Acoma parishioners worked for months on these carvings, mostly at night—after work—by the…