Barela was received as a revelation. He was featured in Time magazine. Critics compared his work to that of European modernists such as Brancusi, Modigliani, and Picasso, to early medieval stonework, to African ceremonial masks, to ancient American steles. Russell Vernon Hunter, who headed the Federal Art Project in New Mexico and had nominated Barela for the New Horizons exhibition, said that his works “are closely related to the simple patterns of his daily life, but there is in them always a search for the universal.”2 Who was this Everyman, and what did his work really mean?
