The Tin Moon Gallery – Before and After

A conversation with Ton Haak

​By Jessica Rath

Ans and Ton in front of the Tin Moon Gallery (2002). Image credit: Ton Haak.

This is another chapter of Abiquiú’s more recent history, about a couple from the Netherlands who lived here for twelve years, from 1997 to 2009, and left quite a mark on the region: Ans Zoutenbier and Ton Haak. They ran The Tin Moon Gallery across from Bode’s, which some of you will remember as the Rising Moon Gallery, the name Jaye Buros and Bill Page gave it after they took over from Ans and Ton. “A couple from the Netherlands” – why were they in the United States, and how in the world did they land in Abiquiú, of all places? I was curious. Luckily Ton, now back in Holland with his wife and living near The Hague, agreed to a Zoom meeting.

First of all, I wanted to know how they ended up in the United States to begin with. Well, I was surprised to learn that it all started with the Saturday Evening Post – a (then) weekly magazine which dates back to 1821 and Benjamin Franklin. When Ton was eight or nine years old he received the Post every week from neighbors whose son worked in the U.S. and sent copies to them. They couldn’t read English. They looked at the pictures and then passed it on.  Ton was fascinated – this was in the 1950s, and images of big Cadillacs, fancy refrigerators, and television sets were immensely impressive. Many advertised  items simply didn’t exist or were extremely rare in post-war Europe. He loved the cartoons too, and Norman Rockwell’s paintings on the rear cover.

​When Ton was in high school and had become quite fluent in English, a teacher took his class to the American Embassy in The Hague, which was a friendly place at the time where everybody could easily walk in and out. It offered a library with lots of American literature and magazines, including Playboy – a favorite of the male high school students! The librarian had to eventually establish a rule that all magazines had to be checked, to make sure that no centerfolds had been torn out.

Ton with favorite dog Blondie at Plaza Blanca, 2004. Image credit: Ton Haak.

Even after he got married to Ans and had a successful career as a graphic design executive and art festival organizer he pursued his love of America, and  every year’s vacation (which is some five weeks in Europe!) took them across the ocean. They also spent a six-month sabbatical in Carmel, California, and later traveled all over the state and to Arizona as well.

“When one day in 1992 we were in Big Bend, Texas, hiking, we decided to move to America,” Ton told me. “We sold our house and finished our businesses in March 1994, and we had enough money to live on for four to maybe six years. We didn’t settle yet, we just traveled and visited all the states west of the Mississippi, renting cabins, camping out, staying in pop-and-mom motels. We traveled the whole length of the border with Mexico, rented a house in Tucson for five months, and we lived in Nanaimo for a while, which is on Vancouver Island in Canada.”

A plate created by Taos artist Judy van Heyst, with one of the ‘Abiquiu Abitare’ poems, handwritten by Ton (2008). Image credit: Ton Haak.

Ton went on: “For a short time  we lived in Matfield Green, Kansas, because when still in the Netherlands I had read William Least Heat-Moon's book, PrairyErth. He investigated just one county smack in the middle of the United States, Chase County, Kansas, cattle country, the last remaining tallgrass prairie. The book was so fascinating that we wanted to visit that particular place. When there, we met people we had read about in the book, especially Jane Koger, a rancher woman  who owned 7,000 acres and ran 300 beef cattle. She became one of the most successful ranchers of Kansas and quite a famous figure in the heart of the Heartland. We rented a cabin there because we fell in love with that area, then after a few months we continued to travel and eventually made it to Santa Fe. And by the end of 1997, our travels came to an end and we settled in tiny Abiquiú, deep in the beautiful red rock desert in northern New Mexico. Ans and I started The Tin Moon Gallery but we decided not to carry art related to Georgia O'Keeffe, because everyone was doing that already. So, we focused on other artists, contemporary artists  who lived in the area. And we added sellable stuff, like contemporary jewelry and pottery – among others from Jan Gjaltema (a jeweler from the Netherlands living in Mexico), Abiquiú jeweler Tamara Kay, Amber Archer, and Dick Lumaghi – and the gallery became a success.”

Ton reading from his poetry book ‘Abitare Abiquiu’ (1999). Image credit: Ton Haak.

The Tin Moon – why did you choose this name, I wanted to know.
​
“Ans  planned to study Spanish at the Community College in El Rito”, I learned.  “She had signed up for the course, but the class was canceled because there were not enough students. On the same day in 1998, a tin class started, and she took up tin working New Mexico style. She loved it. We made hundreds of tin mirrors and cups and whatever, everything we could think of. In the beginning we did traditional designs, but later on we began to explore and introduce contemporary designs. And we did really well.”

With Vanessa Muntinga and Dick and Anna Keller behind Ans and Ton’s home along Frijoles Creek in Barranca (2005). Image credit: Ton Haak.

But a change of scenery beckoned once more. Ans and Ton had kept up their friendship with Jane Koger, the innovative rancher in Matfield Green, Kansas, and after twelve years in Abiquiú, a nice, round number, they passed on the gallery and sold their house in Barranca. They ended up in another small community; this one had only 48 or so residents, with several writers and artists among them, not counting about ten rancher families miles away from town.

“We spent seven years in Kansas, starting and maintaining several galleries,” Ton recounted. “A foundation had bought an old ranch home from the 1870s, ‘Pioneer Bluffs’, but they didn’t know what to do with it. They knew we had owned and managed galleries, also in the Netherlands, so they asked us: ‘Do you have any ideas?’ And we said, ‘Great, let’s start a gallery!’ Right in the middle of nowhere, in the tallgrass prairie of ‘Flyover Country’, Kansas. And it became a success. We were drawing quite a crowd from Kansas City as well as other states. We attracted artists from everywhere, we even had an ‘Artist in Residence’ program, with artists from Europe, too. Matfield Green became rather well-known as an artist community, an inspiring place. The first artist we gave a show for at Pioneer Bluffs was Julie Wagner from El Rito.

​And then another foundation in that same place owned the old bank building, and we got that to create the second contemporary art gallery in hick town Matfield Green. In The Bank Art Space we mostly presented young artists, graduates from Wichita and Kansas and other Midwest colleges. We gave them their first exhibition, and The Bank became a success, too.”

Ans and Ton with a friend, hiking in a Groningen, Netherlands “polder” marshland (2023). Image credit: Ton Haak.

Ton continued: “This brought us in touch with the Ulrich University Museum in Wichita, and a couple of Dutch artists participated in their ‘Artist In Residence’ program and exhibited in the museum. Later, I got another gallery to just curate, the Gallery of the Symphony on the Prairie in Cottonwood Falls, Chase’s county seat. For more than ten years the Kansas City Symphony Orchestre came to play out in the Flint Hills and they drew an attendance of thousands. At that time I could play with three galleries. We stayed for seven years.”

By the end of the seven years Ton was 73 years old and he decided to leave the galleries to younger people. He found a young artist couple and a young designer couple willing to take over. Ans and he were ready to move on, and one of the couples bought their house. “At the time, we ‘smelled’ the coming of a change to America the Beautiful. We moved to Portugal just before Trump was elected president for his first term.”

Kansas Tourist Board roadside sign along Highway 177, mentioning “the Dutch folks” who created an artist colony in tiny Matfield Green, Flint Hills, Kansas (2015). Image credit: Ton Haak.

“And then we were in Portugal, a country with a totally different culture, history and atmosphere,” Ton told me. “No more galleries, but I worked with artists to create books and catalogues, and did translations for them. I also wrote 75 ‘chapters’ about living in Portugal and the country’s history for the blog Portugal Portal. No more galleries, we had nothing to offer to Portugal, which has a ton of museums and art galleries and not just in Lisbon or Porto.”

​So what made you choose Portugal, of all the places in Europe, I asked.

“We looked for country names starting with a P, I don’t remember why. Poland. Peru. Portugal it became. We had kept the Dutch nationality which allowed us to settle in any EU country, and it has a better climate and political status than Poland. Better food too. And the wine! Eventually Ans wanted to see more of her family, so after seven years in Portugal we moved back to the Netherlands. First to Groningen to live on a river barge, and in 2023 to a suburb of The Hague, the seat of the Dutch government and parliament. Since 2020 I have been involved with editing of, and contributing to a series of richly illustrated books about the parliament buildings, which date back to the 1200s and were extended onto in all years since. The books are about the buildings’ rich history and architecture and their amazing art collection from all times.”

Ans and Ton visiting a Portuguese museum (2017). Image credit: Ton Haak.

Ton added, “It’s funny, having been living in other countries for so long, to be back in the Netherlands and see the changes (I had never visited in those 30 years). Now writing about the seat of government and parliament I am learning more about the country’s history than I ever knew before.”

Ton visiting a Dutch contemporary sculpture garden (2019j. Image credit: Ton Haak.

Before we ended our talk,  Ton added something about his time in New Mexico: “We got two dogs from the shelter in Española, and I hiked practically every day with them, all around Abiquiú. I took them up into the mountains, to Plaza Blanca, into Cañones Canyon, to the Pedernal, all over the Piedra Lumbre and along the Monastery road. We hiked every corner. That was the best experience in my life. I never planned the trail we went, the dogs were never on a leash. They ran around and I followed them. That’s how I discovered canyons that I would never have found or dared to go into all alone. I did this for practically twelve years. The only times when I didn’t go hiking was when I had gallery duty or shopping to do in Santa Fe. On all other days I was out in the desert, yeah, and up the mountain along Frijoles Creek, behind the house that we built near the Rio Chama in Barranca.”

The 1910 Groningen river barge aboard which Ans and Ton lived after returning to the Netherlands (2023). Image credit: Ton Haak.

He had received great news about this house recently. Ton added, “The daughter of one of our closest Abiquiú friends is buying it, Alfonso and Ninfa Martinez’s daughter Christina, the jeweler, and she intends to fix it up and to live there with a view of the ranch land that was her grandfather’s and still is owned by her family. We are so glad that the house that was boarded up for a while is going to be in Christina’s competent hands.”

​What an interesting and rich life. It takes quite a bit of courage to leave the comfort and familiarity of your current life behind and start again in a different country, possibly with a language you don’t understand. It’s one thing to go on a vacation or a business trip when you know you’ll be back home soon. But to go halfway around the world and settle, and do that several times, that’s quite exceptional. Ton told me that Ans and he never said “No” when an opportunity offered itself. Even when this opportunity would take them out of their comfort zone. Even when it meant they’d have to do work they were unfamiliar with, like the first time on the ranch in Kansas,  where they mowed and bailed prairie grasses and alfalfa and bottle-fed calves that were abandoned by their mothers. I think one has to be open and curious, be interested in the new and unusual, if one can do without a strong safety net while following  the call of exploration and discovery.

Ton is a prolific writer. You can find many of his essays at his website, www.tonhaak.eu.  Some are in Dutch, many are in English. “Alas, scores of my writings about New Mexico,” says Ton, “have disappeared during one of our moves. There’s a bunch of them about Kansas, though. And about artists.” Thank you, Ton, for this interesting interview!