Roland F. Dickey

Roland F Dickey Interview at his home in San Luis Obispo, CA on September 9th, 1998.

The interview was done by Kathy Flynn, who is the Executive Director of the National New Deal Preservation Association and the New Mexico Chapter of the NNDPA.

Roland was born in 1914, in Clovis, New Mexico. He received a Degree in English from the University of New Mexico; worked for the New Mexico Federal Art Project and served as director of the Roswell Museum of Arts and Culture.

Fresh out of the University of New Mexico, Russell Vernon Hunter hired him to be a local county supervisor in Bernalillo County. Dickey’s job was to supervise between 15 and 20 artists for the New Mexico Federal Art Project. His job was to make Contracts with artists, collect time slips, record hours, and do progress evaluations. It was tough, Dickey says, telling people they weren't doing a good job. Most often, Hunter took that responsibility. Dickey's wages reached $95 a month. Only one supervisor did better at $100. He recalls that wages began at $66. "No bonanza," he says, "and yet people were grateful to have something on which they could live." He himself worked out a system whereby he could eat on fifty cents a day. Most of the time, he claims, he managed to do that. Like Hunter, Dickey was enthusiastic about the program. "There was a great deal of remarkable talent,"

Under Hunter's direction, the WPA set up art centers not in the towns where most of the artists lived and showed their work, but in the outlying communities of Gallup, Melrose, Las Vegas and Roswell. Roswell opened in 1938, Hunter appointed Roland Dickey to be the Director. A challenging task for a young man just out of college. Dickey was as enthusiastic about Roswell as he had been about Bernalillo County. Under the leadership of Dickey the Center thrived.

Part of the Roswell success must be attributed to the commitment of the town itself. The centers in Melrose and Las Vegas and Gallup were all old buildings. But the Roswell Center was built by WPA labor on city land. The city owned the building, and the city council paid for utilities. The building was done in Spanish Colonial style, and Hunter was the genius planner. Roland Dickey describes what he could do:

Vernon had a very remarkable talent, and this was the ability to visualize real things before they happened. He could sit down and draw an entire room or a building or a mural or pieces of furniture as it was going to look.... He would do something very exciting, very beautiful. And then he had the ability to give artists and craftsmen something to work with that was real enough so that they could achieve this.

In this effortless way, Dickey tells us, Hunter planned the interior of the Roswell Center: there was a stage that would also work for lectures, stage curtains embroidered in Colcha stitch that "knocked your eyes out," tall-gilded candlesticks on either side of the stage, a carved lectern copied from a church design. The ladies' powder room was done in a mid-nineteenth century version of Spanish Colonial, the walls painted to imitate embroidery, the mirror framed in a handcrafted tin work. It was "a gorgeous piece," Dickey says, "a perfect kind of thing."

The Roswell Art Center combined the WPA ideals of offering employment and, at the same time, creating something beautiful to be enjoyed by all. It survives and continues to hold its place as one of the finest small museums in the country.

The WPA art program ended in 1943, the last of the Federal programs to shut down. For almost ten years artists in New Mexico had been paid by Federal agencies. They had produced a prodigious amount of work: fifty-five murals, over a thousand individual pieces, a significant portion is still on the walls of public buildings, in museum collections and libraries throughout the state.

In his and his post-FAP career Dickey served as an Editor at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology (1948-52) and the University of New Mexico Press (1953-66). In 1956 the Regents of UNM appointed Roland Dickey Director. In 1966 Dickey accepted a position with the University of Wisconsin Press as their Director.

Dickey wrote several articles and books. One of his best known books is “New Mexico Village Arts” (1949). Perhaps what Roland F. Dickey is noted for, among other things, is that he became president of the New Mexico Historical Society, retiring after several years.

Roland Dickey died in February of 2000 at the age of 86