Uruguay-born artist Jo Mora spent his career bringing the American West to life. Now, the Monterey History and Art Association is honoring his legacy with a new exhibition.
He was truly a Renaissance man of the American West. Born in Uruguay in 1876, and raised in the East, Joseph Jacinto Mora, better known as Jo, was a painter, sculptor, photographer, cartoonist, illustrator, pictorial cartographer, cowboy, and more. He studied art in New York and worked as a cartoonist for Boston newspapers. Fascinated with cowboys and Indians from a young age, he headed west in his 20s. He landed first in California in 1903; then in 1904 he moved to Keams Canyon in northeast Arizona, where he would spend three of his 71 years living among the Hopi and Navajo, learning their languages (among the seven he spoke) and photographing and painting an ethnological record.
Returning to California in 1907, Mora married and moved to Mountain View in Northern California and later, in 1922, to Pebble Beach, where he established a home and studio. He became a California cowboy, rode the 600-mile El Camino Real connecting the state’s 21 Spanish missions, and wrote two classic books on the American cowboy.
Now more than 75 years after Mora’s death in 1947, a new exhibition celebrates the unique work Mora may be best known for: his iconic “cartes.” “They are probably the item in his repertoire people are most familiar with,” says Peter Hiller, author of The Life and Times of Jo Mora: Iconic Artist of the American West.
Evolution of the Cowboy, 1939.
In the 1920s, skillfully employing a variety of mediums, Mora began creating a series of colorful pictorial maps with a touch of humor that he called cartes. “Their engaging, intricate images pictorially convey an immense amount of historical information and require close study to absorb completely,” Hiller writes. Telling the history and geography of famous destinations, the maps depict places in the West such Yosemite, Yellowstone, and Grand Canyon National Parks; the Monterey Peninsula; San Diego; and Carmel-by-the-Sea. The cartes Indians of North America and Evolution of the Cowboy (also known as Sweetheart of the Rodeo, a detail of which graces the cover of The Byrds album of the same name) tell the story of those two pillars of the West.
Twenty-two of Mora’s cartes are the focus of the exhibition Jo Mora: Cartographer in Monterey, California. The largest collection of his cartes ever assembled, the works are on view at the Stanton Center, near the town’s famous Fisherman’s Wharf, known the world over for the Monterey Bay aquarium and John Steinbeck’s Cannery Row. The show includes Mora’s Seventeen Mile carte, which delightfully details landmarks and anecdotes of Mora’s home turf around Monterey, Carmel, Pebble Beach, and Pacific Grove. Mora’s cartes of San Diego and Los Angeles, produced generations ago, are a time capsule of what those cities used to be. An entire book has been written on the L.A. carte alone.
A career art educator, Hiller was instantly hooked when he discovered his first Mora carte in the 1990s. “When people see his cartes, they just literally stop in their tracks and start to look at them,” Hiller says. “They’re just totally engrossing.” Engrossed himself, Hiller produced a series of lectures and articles on Mora, and eventually the book, all with the blessing and friendship of Jo Mora Jr. Born in 1908, Mora’s son was his busy father’s best promoter and often hit the road to wholesale prints of the cartes to trading posts and gift shops in the American Southwest. Those original prints that sold for 50 cents are today worth thousands of dollars.
“Visually they’re stunning. Historically they’re fascinating. And they are highly accurate,” says Scott Gale, a medical doctor and Mora fan, who curated the carte exhibition for the Monterey History and Art Association. “The beauty of the cartes, the detail — they are respectful of what they portray and portray it in a loving and sometimes whimsical fashion. And now enough time has passed that they are historic. They’re unique.”
In addition to his cartes, Mora produced many other kinds of art. Much of his public art and architecture can still be seen today from California to Oklahoma, including a life-size monument of outlaw Belle Starr at the Woolaroc Museum in the Sooner State. Hiller’s book includes a thorough list of those public pieces, and more are being discovered to this day. Meanwhile, Mora’s books — among them, Trail Dust and Saddle Leather and Californios: The Saga of the Hard-Riding Vaqueros — remain timeless treasures.
For a longtime fan like Gale, the exhibition of Mora’s cartes is an opportunity to introduce the artist to a wider audience. “Once people discover him, they kind of fall in love with him,” he says. “There are so many different components to his artistic creativity that everybody finds something intriguing and charming.”
Hiller agrees that for Mora newcomers, the cartes make for a compelling entrée into Mora the man and the artist — an enticement to further explore the amazing life and enduring work of someone who was endlessly creative, in virtually every artistic medium of his time. “Jo Mora’s the most captivating artist you never heard of.”
Jo Mora: Cartographer is on view through August 2025 at Monterey History and Art at Stanton Center in Monterey, California. For more information, visit jomoracollection.org and montereyhistory.org/stanton-center/.
From our February/March 2025 issue.
PHOTOGRAPHY: Courtesy of the exhibition