”Sagrada Art Studios: Program in Sacred Art” (Brochure)
“The Pearl of Great Price,” by Sister Giotto Moots
Patio Escondido Listing on the Historical Marker Database
Building the Chapel
Sharings From Former Students
“Later in life, I became a printmaker and made a series of serigraphs about the back roads of New Mexico. None of this would have come about if I had not met Sister Giotto. She was George Sandovals’s sister-in-law, and also a Dominican nun who had taken the name of the famous Florentine artist. I wasn’t Catholic but sometimes I would accompany her to mass at the San Felipe de Neri Church built in 1706. She introduced me to woodcuts, the saints of New Mexico and the feast days. Over those two years, I helped Sister Giotto build a chapel from adobe. If you know what you are looking for, you can still find it behind the Albuquerque Museum. What an education it was to learn to lay the adobes just right on top of the wet mud, mixed by hand or in a small cement mixer. It was for me the beginning of many decades of living and working with adobes. I loved the sculpted form, rounded edges and curving walls that seemed so feminine and earthy and the way it created a bond between the workers…everybody took turns at various tasks and got all dirty and sweaty and then usually ate together at the end of the day.”
-Excerpt from A Story of Mountain Road by Julianna Kirwin
Further reading: “Sister Giotto Moots: Dynamo of the Desert,” by Mary Carroll Nelson, American Artist, June 1976 (Magazine Article)