(1940 - 2021)

Jim William Wagner was born May 4, 1940 in Wauseon, Ohio. His mother, Maxine Powell, was a music teacher. His father, William Shartzer Wagner, was a high school principal. Jim’s father had a vision for Jim’s life. It did not include becoming an artist. During the years 1940 – 1952, Jim moved with his family to Bowling Green Ohio. In 1951 they relocated to Monmouth Oregon. It was in Monmouth elementary where Jim had his first artistic callings.  During third grade, Jim’s first epiphany came through an elementary arts educator. Jim described the experience (all Wagner quotes are from an interview with Stephen Parks for ARTlines): “I’ll always remember this – I had a teacher who would come in on Fridays and teach art. One day, I was drawing a ballerina, and I got down to the bottom of the paper, and I had to bend her legs across. I asked the teacher about that, if it was all right to do that, and she said, “You can do anything you want to do with that piece of paper”. The vision came again in sixth grade, again described to Stephen Parks in the same ARTlines interview: “It was more than just art. It was a bright light. I had it happen to me once in prison too. It was a bright light in my head, and it said, “Everything is all right. You can do anything.”

The years 1952- 1957 were spent with Wagner's family in the Pacific Northwest and included taking art classes at The Portland Museum of Art. In 1957 his family moved to Los Gatos, California. It was there that Jim Wagner met Agnes Martin. A close friend of Martin's was teaching school in Los Gatos. It was through her visits that Wagner first heard of Taos, New Mexico: “ I had always heard about her, living in mud huts and doing paintings in New Mexico. She told me, ‘if you want to be an artist, you have to go live in Taos.’ “After two years of college I came out here and started doing it.”

When Wagner arrived in 1961, he was 21 years old. Immediately he was thrown into the maelstrom that was ‘The Taos Moderns.” Serious painters like Andrew Dasburg, Louis Ribak, and Emil Bisttram became mentors, teachers and critics for Jim Wagner, as they were for so many young artists of their time. During Wagner’s three decades in Taos, he had many distinctive phases, primarily based on his life experiences at the time. They included explorations into landscape, constructions, furniture, printmaking, drawing, sculpture, ceramics and basically anything he could get his hands on. The purpose of designing “Trudy’s House” as a home installation is to demonstrate the degree to which Wagner covered every surface available to him.

During the Taos years Wagner worked hard and played hard. There were all kinds of marvelous bars in Taos then: El Patio, El Gaucho, Tano‘s, Antonio’s.  According to artist R.C. Gorman,  “La Cocina was our headquarters. None of us made any money then, nobody was married, but we were happy. We drank to laugh and giggle. I think people nowadays, especially artists, take themselves too seriously. Even drinking and smoking pot has become too serious. But Jim and I gobbled up the late '60s and early '70s with relish. We enjoyed our grape juice.”

Wagner’s offbeat, often naïve meanderings on canvas, wood, and ceramic reflected in unrivaled depth the trials he faced in life. Jim Wagner was dealt a cruel hand. In 1977, Wagner shot a reputed pedophile and was convicted of assault with intent to commit a violent felony. He was pardoned in 1978 by Governor Anaya. A testimony to Wagner’s unrelenting creative spirit is that, while incarcerated, he learned woodworking and ceramics and completed a series of pencil drawings called Prison Series. Later, he also became involved in a prison reform effort, training and joining forces with inmates to create and sell their own art. In 1980, the son he was previously trying to protect was shot and killed. Wagner was devastated. He battled alcoholism and drug addiction, conquering both with a “Wagnerian” power of will. The work that he produced during those years is a true and authentic manifestation of the redemptive powers of art and the creative spirit.

In 1996 Wagner moved to Hotchkiss, Colorado.  After more than a decade of living there, Wagner returned to Taos. “I left because I thought Taos was getting too big and the fishing was better up north,” Wagner explains. “But then I fell in love with a woman here, and now I don’t fish as much as I used to.”  (quoted from an interview with Stephen Parks).

Jim Wagner belongs to Taos. In recent years Wagner’s work has evolved into a melody of colors and free-form brushstrokes. He continues his autobiography of Taos, playing with motifs that have occurred on and off again throughout his life: fish, frogs, ducks and crows, mountains, canyons, women, churches.  Nobody paints a culture in the same way that Wagner does. It is evident that this man embodies a deep joy and compassion accomplished by overcoming some of life’s most difficult struggles. As Wagner puts it: “It's faith. I knew everything was going to be all right”.

-Jina Brenneman, Curator of Collections and Exhibitions