Applying his highly personal, emotional treatment of color to a wide range of subjects, John Nieto's art mirrors the complicated heritage of the Southwest, as well as the intertwining threads of his own ancestry. John Nieto is a leading figure in American contemporary art, celebrated for his emotionally resonant paintings of Southwestern, Indigenous, and wildlife subjects conveyed in heightened, expressive color. He is renowned today for his richly modulated images, painted with an intensely fauvist palette and powerful brushwork, of Indigenous warriors, fancy dancers, chieftains, potters, weavers, bead makers, as well as his portraits of other contemporary and historical icons of the Southwest. Nieto was inspired by both his own heritage and his deep study of the history and culture throughout the Southwest. His ancestry—a mix of Spanish and Native American—Mescalero Apache and Navajo—can be traced back more than three hundred years in New Mexico. During his distinguished career that spanned six decades, Nieto’s distinctively expressive works became known for their use of bold, expressive, and intuitive color combinations. The vibrancy and eloquence of these colors, and the adept combinations he made of them, provides a visual language that captivates and enraptures his viewers. “We are born with a genetic memory or consciousness of color, and everyone’s choice of color is personal,” he observed. Inspired by his Native American and New Mexican roots, Nieto painted a wide range of figures from Southwestern culture and lore. Nieto was known as a brilliant colorist and throughout his entire body of painting his use of color is raw, expressive, and intuitive. A notable aspect of Nieto’s paintings are the bold ribbons of color that outline his figures and animals, which have been referred to as auras or halations. Inspired after traveling to an exhibition of Fauvist art at the Dallas Art Museum in 1959, Nieto visited museums in Paris with collections of art by prominent Fauvist artists Henri Matisse and Andre Derain. His discovery of the fauvist treatment of color—which enlisted striking, non-naturalistic color to communicate emotional meanings—was crucial to Nieto’s development. Nieto concluded that creating work with this form of intense color to rivet attention, grasp emotions, and galvanize memory would be his life’s calling when one night, in the late 1960s, he took his elderly grandmother, Maria Gonzales, to the Mescalero Apache Reservation for a ceremonial Mountain Spirit Dance. There he was moved by her desire to connect with her ancestral and spiritual roots through ceremony and remembrance. On the drive back, Maria asked her grandson for a favor that changed his life and affirmed his direction as an artist. She said, “Johnny, would you paint about my people?” Nieto says about that pivotal moment: “That is what set me on painting Native American subject matter. I made it my business to be an authority on the Indian part of my heritage. In a serendipitous way, I was being told that color, my color, was really okay. In retrospect, it was what psychologists call a ‘peak moment’ when the world is at peace, and you are at peace within it.” In addition to their significance as works of cultural and historical documentation, Nieto’s paintings are obviously creations of aesthetic excellence and achievement. Their vibrant colors, masterful configurations, and engaging subject choices give them distinctive visual beauty that, without the need for their additional conceptual meanings, make them worthy additions to outstanding collections of first rate contemporary American painting and will sustain interest in them long into the future. Another artist Nieto counted as among his major influences is the esteemed 19th century French Neoclassical painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. A great colorist in his own right, Ingres declared that “color is the animal part of art.” For Nieto, painting a century later, a more apt truth would be hard to find. Nieto was deeply influenced by the beliefs and culture of his Native American heritage, including the importance of animals as part of the creation story and as sacred carriers of spiritual meanings. For him, color expressed his deepest impulses, passions and feelings. In his words, “My colors express my worldview.” “In the history of art only a select number of artists distinguish themselves as originators of a personal idiom that reverberates beyond place and time,” writes art historian Susan Hallsten McGarry. “John Nieto is one of those originals. His eye-dazzling paintings rank him among the vanguard of contemporary American colorists.” He believed that, through his powerful colorations, he might help his audience to understand the nobility, dignity, pride, and hurt of Native Americans that many of his paintings quietly carry. In the rich interaction of his colors, he created images that are worthy of study and act as enduring totems of times and events in the nation’s history that he felt must never be forgotten. Over the course of his career, Nieto's work was exhibited across the United States and in Europe, Japan, Latin America, and Africa. After participating in an exhibit at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, DC, John met with President Reagan in the Oval Office of the White House and presented him with his painting, “Delegate to the White House.” The work was hung in in the White House for many years and was later included in the collection of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library in Simi Valley, California. In 1994, Nieto received New Mexico's Governor's Award for achievement in the Arts, the state’s highest honor for a living artist. He received Southern Methodist University’s Distinguished Alumni Award in 2006. Today, Nieto’s work is represented in numerous prominent museum and private collections across the world.