Spring Exhibit 2018
Claver Garcia & David Naranjo
We welcome you to join us for the Opening Reception with our featured artists David Naranjo (Santa Clara Pueblo) and Claver Garcia (Ohkay Owingeh)
Reception begins at 5pm and will include Fashion Showcase by David Naranjo. A lecture on the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 will follow by Institute of American Indian Arts Faculty Porter Swentzell (Santa Clara Pueblo) at 6pm.
For more info please call (505) 455-5041
Remember the Revolt to Create a Revolution
Curatorial Statement
Revolution is as much action as it is prophesy, and those motivated to act often do so with the hope of producing enduring positive change. While remembrances of revolution, such as the 1680 Pueblo Revolt are important as centennial commemorations, the works of Claver Garcia (OK) and David Naranjo (Santa Clara) reveal through different media and process, the spirit of revolution made personal in every day life.
Claver’s paintings remind us of the importance of retelling the story of the Revolt any time of year. Whether it be the faceless runners in Po Pay Day, into which any face can be superimposed, to the rear of Tesuque Runners Warn Their Village, the urgency of memory is apparent. His paintings, as well as the chromatic patterns rendered on magnets, remind us of the challenges contemporary Pueblo people face to retain identity in the midst of drastic cultural adaptation and change. The urgency of memory cannot be diminished, even in the ashes of razed villages and churches, so that people can continue to ask themselves, “What have we learned from this trauma, and how can we grow as we look to the future?”
David’s work stands at the fore of that future, as he utilizes contemporary digital technologies to render traditional Tewa designs in new media. His work shows us how “traditional” media changes as new materials are made available to each generation. They are interpretations of patterns that have been created and rendered with digital plotters and printers that have revolutionized the creative process and products of culture-based thought. His work stands like a young moccasin-clad man straddling the divide between analog and digital. We must remember that tradition is as much, and maybe even moreso a behavior as it is media, and that the tradition expressed in David’s work is that of adornment.
Stephen Fadden, 2018
David Naranjo
David Naranjo is from the pueblos of Santa Clara, San Juan, Cochiti, and resides in Santa Fe, NM. He is working toward a Bachelor’s in Fine Arts at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Recently, Naranjo is working in multiple mediums to depict cultural symbolism through stylized Puebloan pottery designs and fine geometrical linear work. Currently, His work merges contemporary Puebloan traditions with non-traditional materials and elements to create meaning and purpose in each composition.
My inspiration for my work comes from the beauty I experience from my community of Kha’Po Ohwingeh. My work integrates modern forms and concepts combined with traditional Puebloan aesthetics to create contemporary Puebloan art. I want to depict, reimagine, and re-contextualize such designs and iconography and apply them in a different format while being respectful and keeping the designs integrity intact. Puebloan pottery designs and geometrical linear work serve a purpose and have meaning within a cultural context which are inclusive of the natural world, change of seasons, and emotional cognitive meaning.
I find our way of life to be a form of poetry and seek to show understanding and respect while making my art as a form of prayer. In my work, I try to apply that same level of intimacy, understanding, and respect in order to create the beauty that exudes from my community of Santa Clara Pueblo. I am using and incorporating traditional forms and techniques and various forms of technology as a way to create, adapt, and preserve our cultural traditions. Although my work isn’t traditional art, they serve as examples to the ever changing, adaptation of modern culture and indigenous Puebloan traditions.
Claver Garcia
Tony Chavarria is the Curator of Ethnology at the Museum of Indian Arts & Culture. He was the first Branigar intern at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe and has served as secretary and board member for the Council for Museum Anthropology in the past. He contributed to the publications A River Apart: The Pottery of Cochiti and Santo Domingo Pueblos, Painting a Native World: Life, Land and Animals, and Here, Now and Always: Voices of the Native Southwest. Among the exhibitions he has curated are the traveling exhibition Comic Art Indigene and Heartbeat: Music of the Native Southwest. He also served as a community liaison and curator for the inaugural Pueblo exhibition at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC.
Joseph Aguilar is an enrolled member of San Ildefonso Pueblo, and is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Anthropology at the University of Pennsylvania. His primary research focuses on the archaeology of the North American Southwest, with a specific interest in Spanish-Pueblo relations during the late 17th century. His general research interests include Indigenous Archaeology, landscape archaeology, and tribal historic preservation. A collaborative research project with San Ildefonso, his dissertation research examines Tewa resistance to the Spanish Reconquest efforts in the latter part of the Pueblo Revolt Era (1680-1696) as evident in the archaeological, historical and, oral records.
Born in North Dakota on the Standing Rock Reservation, artist Cannupa Hanska Luger comes from Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota, Austrian, and Norwegian descent. Luger’s unique, ceramic-centric, but ultimately multidisciplinary work tells provocative stories of complex Indigenous identities coming up against 21st Century imperatives, mediation, and destructivity. Luger creates socially conscious work that hybridizes his identity as an American Indian in tandem with global issues. Using his art as a catalyst, he invites the public to challenge expectations and misinterpretations imposed upon Indigenous peoples by historical and contemporary colonial social structures.
Joseph M. Sánchez is an American artist from Trinidad, Colorado, by way of the White Mountain Apache Reservation and Taos Pueblo. A leader in Indigenous and Chicano arts since the 1970s, Joseph has worked with hundreds of artists creating work, developing exhibitions, and advocating for the rights of minority artists, most importantly with the Professional Native Indian Artists (Native Group of Seven). A spiritual surrealist, Joseph’s work is sensual and dreamlike, provocative and thought-inducing. Still producing work, and exhibiting across the United States and Canada, Joseph M Sánchez is simultaneously a community elder, and an instigator at the front lines of the battle for the creation of art and how we define it as a culture.
