• Adobe Gallery
• Shiprock Trading Company

• Lapahie

Museums, Schools and Foundations

• Museum of New Mexico
• New Mexico Museum of Indian Arts & Culture
• California Academy of Sciences, Ruth and Charles Elkus Collection
• The Amerind Foundation
• Institute for the Study of the American West, Autry National Center
• Navajo Nation Museum
• Gilcrease Museum
• Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, The University of Oklahoma
• Sam Noble Museum of Natural History
• National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum
• Museum of Indian Arts and Culture
• School of American Research
• Heard Museum
• Koshare Indian Museum
• National Museum of the American Indian
• National Museum of the American Indian - Smithsonian 
• Southwest Museum of the American Indian
• Arizona State Museum

We welcome your inquiries and input about Tahoma.

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The Research Journey

Vera and Charnell on a research trip in Tuba City, Arizona. April, 2006

Charnell Havens is a retired business executive, an expert in knowledge management, who has developed a second career in photography. Long intrigued by Tahoma’s paintings and his legend, she began to probe into details of his life in 1996, hoping some day to write his biography. The idea for the book evolved from her curiosity about several paintings that she inherited.

She was just 13 years old when her Aunt Mary returned home from a trip to New Mexico with five Tahoma watercolors in hand. Havens’ second cousins, Marie and Eddie Strosser, owned a jewelry store on the Plaza in Santa Fe during the 1940s and 1950s. Quincy Tahoma and Marie Strosser knew each other because of their shared fondness for alcohol. Tahoma gave and sold her several paintings. Years later, Havens inherited the five original paintings and, as she studied them, she wondered about the painter’s life and premature death.

When Vera Marie Badertscher, a friend from the Ohio State University college days, interviewed Havens for an alumna magazine, Havens asked the writer if she would be interested in joining a project to re-discover the life of Quincy Tahoma and share it through a published biography. Badertscher is a freelance writer who specializes in travel and the Southwestern United States. A resident of Arizona since 1963, she was a member of the committee that presented the Scottsdale National Indian Art Exhibition in the 1960s and ’70s, and has a deep interest in Native American art.

The research partners have been gathering information about Quincy Tahoma and his paintings for many years and now are completing the process of writing a book about his life. Additionally, Havens and Badertscher are compiling a registry of Tahoma’s paintings (which has never been done before) to determine how his art developed.

They have made research trips to Santa Fe, Albuquerque, Gallup, and the Navajo reservation as well as to Dallas, Tulsa, Tucson, Phoenix and Modesto, CA. They have carried out an unfathomable amount of internet research and have conducted numerous interviews by telephone and in person, joined of late by an indispensable volunteer researcher, Mark Rosacker.


Harrison Begay, Elmer Jenkins, and the Saganitso family that adopted Tahoma—folks who knew him for many years—were among the interviewees.

During their research, Havens and Badertscher discovered that since Tahoma’s death, publications have tended to repeat much incorrect information about his life.

The teaming of an award-winning photographer and an award-winning writer, both of whom are passionate about uncovering the life story of Quincy Tahoma, should make for an interesting book. Stay tuned!