October 22, 2024 | By Jennifer Levin

St. John’s Santa Fe turns 60 this year! To celebrate, we’ll be looking back at key figures, moments, and movements from the campus’s past, all of which have proved instrumental in transforming the foothills of Monte Sol into a beloved home for generations of Johnnies.

It’s hard to imagine the existence of St. John’s Santa Fe without the late architect John Gaw Meem—which is why faculty and staff alike were puzzled when they learned in 2019 that a campus memorial tribute to Meem and his wife had long since gone missing.

Meem’s affiliation with St. John’s College began in 1961, when St. John’s President Richard Weigle headed out West in search of a suitable community for a second campus. Hearing of his quest, civic leaders in Santa Fe worked hard to convince him that the City Different was the perfect place for an outstanding liberal arts college. Among their ranks was Meem, who had achieved worldwide fame for developing the city’s Pueblo Revival architectural style. He hosted a luncheon at his home at the foot of Sun Mountain at which he and his wife, fellow architect Faith Beemis Meem, made Weigle an offer he couldn’t refuse: “Mrs. Meem and I have a little land over the hill here,” Meem said, “and we would be glad to give it to St. John’s College if you should decide to come to Santa Fe.”

Flash forward two decades, and New Mexico sculptor Una Hanbury, the artist behind busts of such famous men as J. Robert Oppenheimer and Enrico Fermi, had completed a bronze relief portrait of the now-elderly Meem couple and donated it to St. John’s Santa Fe. The sculpture was installed in the campus area on the south side of the student center now known as Schepps Garden. But somewhere along the line, the bronze vanished without anyone noticing it was gone. It remained missing until 2019, when a random phone call set in motion a chain of events that led to the Meems’ likenesses being restored to public prominence.

Fateful Friendships in the City Different

Meem is today synonymous with Santa Fe’s cultural legacy, but he initially thought he would only live in the city until his lungs healed. As a young man, he was diagnosed with pulmonary tuberculosis—then a leading cause of death in America. Based on the advice of his doctors, Meem headed to Santa Fe in 1920 to get well at Sunmount Sanitorium.

New Mexico was a prime destination for “lungers” like Meem, who lived outdoors in tent cities as well as in medical facilities known as sanitoriums—or “sans”—while recuperating in the high desert’s abundant sunshine. And Sunmount Sanitorium, which sat just a few thousand feet from where St. John’s College now stands, attracted numerous other creatives besides Meem. They produced plays, gallery shows, and poetry readings, collaborating on endless intellectual endeavors in a college-like environment complete with dormitory living and shared dining hall meals.

The longer Meem stayed at Sunmount, the more he fell in love with Santa Fe’s history, culture, mountains, and especially its architecture. So, in 1924, he opened an architectural studio in a spare Sunmount building and eventually bought all the surrounding land. Many other “lungers,” post-recovery, decided to call Santa Fe home as well, and the city gradually became an artistic and cultural destination with the establishment of the Museum of New Mexico, the School for Advanced Research, and the Santa Fe Indian Market.

Weigle had initially considered Santa Fe as a campus location due to the region’s plentiful attractions, which by 1961 also encompassed the Santa Fe Opera and the nearby Los Alamos National Laboratory. With Meem’s generous land offer, Weigle made an official decision: St. John’s College would put down roots in the Land of Enchantment.

Following several years of intense fundraising, master-planning, and construction, the first freshman class of St. John’s College Santa Fe arrived in the fall of 1964 at a scenic, fully functional 260-acre campus that paid homage to Meem’s signature style. (Although he had retired from his firm in 1960, he consulted closely on the building process helmed by his successors.) But the architect’s relationship with the college had only just begun: John Gaw Meem and Faith Beemis Meem served for many years on the Board of Visitors & Governors, and the two donated more than $1 million to St. John’s before the former’s death in 1983. (Faith Beemis Meem, who died in 1989, was instrumental in securing the funding for the library that bears their names.) St. John’s now stands among Northern New Mexico’s most venerable institutions, thanks in large part to the Meems. So how, then, were their likenesses lost?

Cracking a Cold Case

In the spring of 2019, a sculptor named Daniel Anthony contacted the Meem Library looking for Hanbury’s sculpture of the Meems. He had been commissioned to create a work in Hanbury’s style, whom he had known when he was director of the foundry at the Shidoni Sculpture Garden in Tesuque. She had poured the bronze there, and Anthony wanted to come by to see the artwork. There was just one problem: Meem Library director Jennifer Sprague contacted several people on campus and couldn’t find a record of Hanbury’s donation.

Several more years passed before senior acquisitions and archives librarian Craig Jolly stumbled across the sculpture’s casting photos in the archives. He sent these images to the Buildings and Grounds Department, hoping they would spark memories among staff members. In his search for the bronze, Jolly struck gold with longtime custodian Richard Salazar recalling that it had been moved to a storage room for safekeeping during construction in Schepps Garden during the 1990s. There, as sometimes happens at large institutions, it had simply been forgotten.

Conserving a College Treasure

Returning the Meems to pride-of-place on campus wasn’t a straightforward process. Sprague and Jolly re-installed the piece on the library portale in 2022, but the sculpture had aged poorly and needed rehabilitation. So, Jolly reached out for help through the Johnnie network the following year and contacted Mina Thompson, an art conservator in private practice whose husband, Caleb Thompson, is a tutor at the college. One of Caleb Thompson’s students, Sophie Frankel (SF25), had just completed a summer art conservation internship at the Smithsonian National Museum of American History and was looking for more experience in the field. Mina Thompson, in turn, volunteered to mentor Frankel through conserving Hanbury’s bronze relief.

“I wrote up a project proposal for how we were going to clean it,” Frankel explains, “which entailed buffing it with a soft cloth and washing it with mild soap, trying to get off the corrosion from the side where it had been lying in some moisture. There were insect remnants and dirt, as well as flecks of paint, which brushing and cleaning removed. We then used solvents to deal with tar-like discolorations. Before we cleaned it, it had this yellow-y green tint to it, and afterwards it was much brighter, with a richer, redder, more ruddy bronze.”

While it’s unfortunate that the artwork was hidden for so long, Thompson says this type of thing isn’t unusual even in major museums due to missing records, staff turnover, and “temporary” storage that winds up lasting for decades. “The Tate Gallery in London was flooded with eight feet of water in 1928,” Thompson says. “They thought they’d catalogued all the damage and gotten rid of everything that was [damaged beyond repair], but they found a couple of paintings rolled up in carpets fifty years later. They were able to restore them and they’re on display now.”

Hanbury’s sculpture received a similar happy ending at St. John’s Santa Fe. Today, the burnished bronze hangs not in Shepp’s Garden but on the wall of a portale at the couple’s namesake library on campus. It is positioned so that John Gaw Meem and Faith Bemis Meem appear to be staring out at the same distant mountain vistas that inspired the architect all those years ago as a young man, breathing in lungfuls of fresh air while contemplating his future.