THE DeGRAZIA FABRICS
A Collision of Western Art and Fashion
A Collision of Western Art and Fashion
The evolving, emotive and often contradictory approach to ne art by Ted DeGrazia (1909–1982) shaped not only the artistic identify of Southern Arizona, but the style of the southwest. Born in the mining town of Morenci, Arizona in 1909, DeGrazia attended the University of Arizona under Katherine Kitt before traveling to Mexico City to study with modern muralists Diego Rivera and Jose Clement Orozco.1 His earnest contribution to Arizona’s culture and artistic identity was in many ways eclipsed by the popularity and mass production of his saccharine images of children, owers and Native Americans that graced countless greeting cards and Goebel figurines. Although for many, the DeGrazia name became synonymous with “Western Kitsch,” De- Grazia’s remarkable and in uential artistic identity shaped Tucson’s style at a time when interest in the Southwest was becoming an American obsession.
The surging popularity of western gun-slinging lms created an iconographic visual language of wagon wheels, dude ranches and saguaro cacti which permeated the American populist vision of the Southwest. These nationally accepted notions of exotic western life were more aligned to a pervasive fantasy of mythic individual ruggedness, rather than emerging modern cities. Nationwide consumer demand for western trappings fueled a regional exportation of ideas. Tucson, like many of the emerging twentieth century south- western cities, struggled to reconcile con icting identities of a “wild-west” past and a future de ned by progressive modernism. These colliding intersections often produced cliché: ranch houses, ornamental desert landscaping, ranch oak furniture, rodeo parades and western wear all com- bined to create a popular vision of the southwest, which was entirely authentic in its own context. Cultural appropriation of visual ideas from Native American and Mexican cultures, blending with the idealized and unrealistic notions of cowboys and ranching, swirling into a romantic construct that permeated the 1950s and 60s. Howdy Doody, Rex Allen, and Gunsmoke all fueled the ames.
Following World War II, Tucson was poised to become an epicenter of western style and design. By 1950, a group of designers had created a robust western fashion industry, cultivating an array of western wear trends which swept the nation and helped cement national views of the southwest. The patio dress, the Tohono dress, the circle skirt and the pejorative “squaw dress”2 were created and recreated in endless variations to appeal to this new national market.
By the early 1950s ten garment designers were producing eight million dollars of annual product sales in Tucson.3 Designers like Sonora-born Delores Barcelo Gonzales launched Delores Resort Wear4; George Fine, who moved to Tucson from New York by way of Los Angeles in 1950 to start Georgie of Arizona, quickly became the industry’s biggest booster.5 A 1952 Tucson Daily Citizen article examined the signi cant and rapid growth of the fashion industry, with Fine concluding that Ettore “Ted” DeGrazia had jump started the industry in the Tucson Valley.6
DeGrazia was not a tailor or a fashion designer, he was ne artist. Before WWII, his work was substantially in uenced by social realism, expressing the milieu and often harsh re- alities of the Arizona-Mexico borderlands. After his time in Mexico City, he returned to Tucson and challenged the traditionalist gallery system by opening his own adobe stu- dio and gallery on the southeast corner of Campbell Avenue and Prince Road. DeGrazia’s work following WWII embraced the popularization of Southwestern vernacular iconography, while his larger than life persona began to attract regional and national attention.