Virtual Lecture Series

Doel Reed Center

Oklahoma State University’s Doel Reed Center in Taos invites you to participate in the 2025 virtual lecture series.

Pumpkin, Tamales, & Biscochitos: What traditional holiday foods tell us about New Mexico history and culture

December 11, 2024, 4:30 PM Central Time

Join Dr. Carol Moder, Director of the Doel Reed Center in Taos, for a holiday overview of New Mexico food & culture. Hear the story of how cultural exchange among Pueblos and Spanish settlers shaped the unique cultural foodways of the Land Enchantment. This virtual talk focuses on three distinctive foods that are part of New Mexico holiday traditions: pumpkin, tamales, & biscochitos. Recipes provided!

Carol Lynn Moder is Professor of Linguistics at Oklahoma State University. Since 2014, she has been the Director of the Doel Reed Center in Taos. Her lifelong interest in food, cooking and culture has led her into the investigation of how food expresses the history and culture of specific regions.

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Recipes

The High Road to Taos:

Plains-Pueblo Interaction between the 14th to 18th Centuries

Thursday, January 23, 2025, 4:30 PM Central Time

This presentation outlines the social and economic relations between the Puebloan peoples of New Mexico’s greater Rio Grande Valley with Native peoples of the Southern High Plains of Oklahoma and Texas. In the 13th century, food insecurity related to climate change forced Southwestern peoples of the upper San Juan region to migrate, many settling in Taos, Picurís, Pecos, and other “Eastern” pueblos. Situated on a frontier, these sedentary, agriculturally-based towns encountered and developed social and economic ties with a variety of nomadic, bison-hunting peoples of the Southern High Plains. As will be discussed, dynamic relations ensued, involving a succession of Indigenous peoples, leading to the development of a complex regional borderland.

Stephen M. Perkins’ first of many trips to northern New Mexico came in 1971 at the age of 7 when his family rented a cabin near Tres Ritos, NM. He received an MA and PhD in Anthropology from Arizona State University. He joined OSU’s faculty in August of 2002, where he has been engaged in a 20-year collaboration with colleagues from OU and the Oklahoma Archeological Survey in investigating fortified Wichita village sites across Oklahoma. At present he is working on a monograph concerning a 15th-century trade camp in western Oklahoma where the Wichita seasonally processed bison hides, and traded with affiliated groups further west, including Apache groups occupying the Texas panhandle.

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There’s a Place for Us: New Mexico’s influence on Joy Harjo’s Writing

Thursday, February 13, 2025, 4:30 PM Central Time

Joy Harjo came to New Mexico from Oklahoma as a young person seeking a change from her unsatisfying education and troubled home life. In her writings about New Mexico, Harjo provides insight into the area’s tremendous significance for Indigenous arts, especially in the contemporary era, and also the corresponding activism that propelled the Native American civil rights movement of the late twentieth century. This talk will provide some context for this area’s significance and share a brief selection of Harjo’s New Mexico writings for group discussion.

Lindsey Claire Smith, received her PH. D. in Native American Literature from the University of North Carolina. She is Professor of English at Oklahoma State University and the inaugural Director of NYU Tulsa. Her extensive publications in Native American and Oklahoma film and literature include Urban Homelands: Writing the Native City from Oklahoma (2023) and the forthcoming We Belong to the Land: Changemakers in Oklahoma. Since 2015, she has served as editor of American Indian Quarterly, a leading journal in interdisciplinary American Indian Studies.

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Parading Without a Permit:

Dennis Hopper in Taos

Thursday, March 6, 2025, 4:30 PM Central Time

When Dennis Hopper moved to Taos in 1970, he became part of a small but important group of Los Angeles expatriates that would include Ken Price, Larry Bell, Ron Cooper, and Ron Davis. Taos had long been a destination for the American avant-garde, yet the work that Hopper and his colleagues produced at the time pushed the boundaries of what art could be. In this lecture, we will delve into Dennis Hopper’s impact on the artistic and cultural landscape of Taos and how it dovetailed with the burgeoning counterculture of northern New Mexico.

Mark White earned his doctoral degree in art history at the University of Kansas. He taught art history at Oklahoma State University for eight years, and he served as the Director of the Fred J. Jones Museum of Art at the University of Oklahoma for 11 years. He is currently the Executive Director of the New Mexico Museum of Art. His major area of study is 20th century American painting and sculpture.

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Past Virtual Lectures

Oppenheimer to Ginsberg, The Manhattan Project to Project Ploughshare: New Mexico and The Bomb with Ed Walkiewicz
Women Artists of the Southwest with Amy Von Lintel
La Llorona: Just a ghost story, or more? With Ryan Slesinger
The Air and the Light: Looking Beyond the Literal in Landscape Art with Mary Claire Becker
Winter Solstice Pueblo Feasts and Dances with Martha Yates