The Seton Legacy

When the Academy acquired Seton Castle with its adjoining property and art and book collections from Dee Seton Barber, (the adopted daughter of Ernest and Julia Seton) she and Aaron Stern (the Academy’s director and founder) agreed that the Academy would make known Seton’s accomplishments to the broadest possible audience. Taken together, his work in art, writing, education, science, and fostering cultural understanding comprise what has become the Seton Legacy. This part of Academy programming includes lectures and public events, exhibitions, publications, and television.

The Seton Gallery will be located on the first floor of the Academy Center. The Gallery will show changing displays of Seton’s drawings, paintings, furniture, and books. The Gallery will house an extensive collection of Seton artwork and other materials, serving as a research center for all aspects of his life and work. The Gallery is expected to open in the autumn of 2009.   The New Mexico History Museum, located on the Plaza in the heart of Santa Fe, will present a major exhibition, Ernest Thompson Seton, Legacy of an Artist-Naturalist from May 2010 to April 2011. The show is a look at Seton’s historical importance as a scientist and educator, activist and world renown personality through his art, writing, and associated artifacts.   The exhibition will be accompanied by a catalog from Gibbs Smith, Publisher, in late 2009. Written by New Mexico art historian and Seton Legacy Project curator David L. Witt, Ernest Thompson Seton is an interpretive consideration of the meaning of Seton’s work as a conservationist, artist, and proponent of outdoor education for youth.   The Academy has consulted on Seton-themed television programs, two for Japanese television networks, and another for PBS/BBC titled, Lobo, The Wolf That Changed America, premiering in the U.K. in April 2009, and in the U.S. the following November as part of the Nature series.

Seton Tearsheet from Outlook Magazine 1901

According to Witt, “Seton traveled to the northeast corner of the New Mexico in the winter of 1893-1894 on behalf of Union County cattle ranchers to hunt wolves, including one known as Lobo, featured in a dramatic short story, The King of Currumpaw. Seton’s meeting with Lobo had an unexpected outcome – the death of this Mexican gray wolf changed Seton from wolf-killer into the founder of the American wildlife conservation movement. He was among the first to promote environmental consciousness on a large public scale.

“Seton’s book Wild Animals I Have Known made him a world-famous author and one of the best known personalities of the early twentieth century. His subsequent contributions to the sciences of ecology, mammalogy and animal behavior, as well as advocacy for the outdoors life through Woodcraft, the Boy Scouts, and promotion of Native American traditional values made him a pivotal figure in the English-speaking world.

“Seton lived his last years in a stone “castle” he built outside of Santa Fe, cementing his relationship to New Mexico where today his art, book, and natural history collections are maintained by two institutions – the Academy for the Love of Learning, and the Philmont Museum, a property of the Boy Scouts of America, outside of Cimarron, just east of the plains where he had his fateful encounter with Lobo.”

For more information, please contact David L. Witt, Seteon curator, at davidlwitt[at]cybermesa.com