IT felt like the center of the universe. For 17-year-old Daniel McCoy Jr., a Mvskoke Creek/Citizen Potawatomi kid newly arrived in Santa Fe from small-town Oklahoma in the mid-1990s, the gas station and convenience store near Cerrillos Road and St. Michael’s Drive was home to the most interesting mix of folks he had ever seen.
“I just always felt very accepted,” the La Mesilla–based artist remembers of the years he spent hanging at Allsup’s while attending the Institute of American Indian Arts. “You can see some nice BMWs, you can see a cool lowrider, and you can see a car that barely makes it in the parking lot. It’s a place of equality.”
Some of his most memorable college experiences went down at that store. “One time, we helped an old gangster change his tire,” he recalls. “We needed money that day, made friends, and he gave us a $20 bill and bought us a bunch of burritos. We were like, ‘All right!’ ”
More than a decade ago, McCoy decided to honor Allsup’s food in his paintings. In the artist’s signature punk, Americana, and Pop Art–influenced style, a hot-sauce-packet character has a pair of white-gloved hands and a jaunty grin. “I thought, Oh, nobody’s gonna understand this piece.” The work took second place at Santa Fe Indian Market in its category that year.
Images of Allsup’s taco sauce, chimichangas, and burritos continued to appear in McCoy’s works,, in which he combines images of colorful mountains and foothills with the gas station’s iconography. “How does the artist return to landscape after the colors of sugar water and hot sauce have tainted the palette?” the gallery description read.
