the regis university santo collection

The collection, which currently numbers over 800 items, is housed at Dayton Memorial Library, the main library on the Denver campus. Father Thomas J. Steele, who retired as a Regis College faculty member in 1997, has been assembling the collection since the mid-1960s. A selection of santos from the collection is on display in the library’s third floor gallery whenever the library is open. Other santos are on display in the Adult Learning Center on the Lowell campus, and at the Interlocken, Colorado Springs and Henderson (Las Vegas) campuses.

Santo, translated literally from the Spanish, means saint, although these devotional objects include saints as well as other Roman Catholic holy persons. Santos generally are in the form of retablos, or paintings on wood panels, or bultos, which are sculptural carvings in the round.

A distinctive santo style developed in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado in the 18th and 19th centuries. Using materials at hand, such as pine and cottonwood, and creating pigments from natural materials, santeros (saint-makers) plied their craft making objects for use in religious observances as well as for home devotions. Some santeros were itinerant and created santos on commission. Santos were actively venerated as intercessories—that is, they were prayed to for particular reasons according to their individual powers. For example, Saint Barbara might be prayed to for protection against fire; Saint Isidro might offer special protection against drought or other problems facing farmers.

Traditional santo production waned in the late 19th century as mass-produced consumer goods, including painted plaster saints, made their way into New Mexico via the Santa Fe Railroad. While a few traditional santeros continued to work into the early 20th century, the tradition was no longer being passed along in a sustainable way. At the same time, a group of Anglo patrons in Santa Fe began collecting traditional santos as art objects while they encouraged New Mexican Hispanos to revive their cultural traditions, primarily as a means to improve their economy through production and sale of tourist arts. During the Great Depression, traditional santos were recorded and reproduced, and other more contemporary works created under the auspices of the Federal Art Project of President Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal. One enduring result of the early 20th-century “revival” is the annual Spanish Market featuring the work of contemporary santeros, held the last weekend of July in Santa Fe.

All the saints represented by New Mexico santeros from the eighteenth century until the end of the nineteenth are listed in the following six categories: divine subjects, titles of Mary, angels, male saints, female saints, and other. Each listing gives pertinent biographical and devotional information about the saint or holy person, his or her iconographic properties, and any information about patronage. The lists are illustrated with examples from the Regis University Santo Collection.

For more information on santos and the Regis collection, see: Steele, Thomas J., Barbe Awalt and Paul Rhetts, The Regis Santos: Thirty Years of Collecting 1966-1996 (Albuquerque: LPD Press, 1997); Steele, Thomas J., Santos and Saints: the Religious Folk Art of Hispanic New Mexico (Santa Fe: Ancient City Press, 1994).

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