"The Grand Old Man of the Pueblos.", Mabel Dodge Luhan, on Joseph Imhof
Joseph Adam Imhof (1871–1955) was an American painter, lithographer, and ethnographic chronicler of Pueblo culture, born in Brooklyn, New York, and a permanent resident of Taos, New Mexico, from 1929 until his death. Self-taught as a lithographer, he worked early in his career for the print firm Currier and Ives in New York; in 1891 he sold the small bookstore he had purchased with his lithography earnings and travelled to Europe for four years of formal artistic training in Paris, Brussels, Antwerp, and Munich. The decisive encounter of his European years came in Antwerp, where he met the Native American performers travelling with Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show on its grand European tour and made the sketches that would set the direction of his lifelong subject.
Returning to the United States, he studied the Iroquois of New York State and Canada before making his first trip to the Southwest in 1905 with his wife Sarah to record the ceremonies of the Pueblo peoples. He built a studio in Albuquerque in 1906, lived between New Mexico and the East over the following two decades, and settled permanently in Taos in 1929, where he installed the first lithography press in the city and built a body of paintings, drawings, and prints recording the religious, ceremonial, and daily life of the Pueblo communities. His final and most famous work, the sixty-painting Kivas and Corn series concerned with the central role of corn in Pueblo culture, was given to the University of New Mexico. His paintings are also held in the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian and other regional collections.