Zozobra Mural

Will Shuster was one of Cinco Pintores (“The Five Painter”), a group of young artists who moved to Santa Fe in the 1920s and helped establish Santa Fe’s reputation as an art colony.  Shuster built the first Zozobra, a mere 6 foot tall papier-mâché figure, in 1926 with the help of Gustave Bauman and they burned it in a private Fiesta night celebration attended by the other artists in the community. The inspiration for Zozobra,  who’s name in Spanish mean “the gloomy one”, came from the Yaqui Indians of Mexico’s Holy Week celebrations during which an effigy of Judas, filled with firecrackers, was led around the village on a donkey before being burned. These paintings show how Zozobra, now towering 50 feet above the crowd, has grown into one of Santa Fe’s most celebrated community gatherings.  Shuster painted these murals for El Nido Restaurant in Tesque where they hung for almost 30 years before coming to the New Mexico Museum of Art.