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“Abstraction and Figuration: Decolonial Aesthetics in Pueblo Modernist and Contemporary Native Art,” art history research paper

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Excerpt: This essay explores decolonial methodologies—methods of making art that resist settler colonialism—in the work of San Ildefonso potter Maria Martinez (1887-1980) and Santa Clara potter and mixed media artist Rose B. Simpson (b. 1983). Maria Martinez’s pottery, and the art of her Pueblo modernist contemporaries, especially Awa Tsireh (1898-1955), utilizes abstraction as a decolonizing method. As curator and professor Nancy Marie Mithlo argues, “abstraction serves indigeneity,” and indigenous artists can use abstraction to communicate ideas to a specific audience (especially members of their own community) and to veil information that is secret, sacred, or too personal. This is an important form of decolonial resistance that helps to maintain indigenous culture and identity. I will examine abstraction and identity in art as decolonial methods through an analysis of the pottery of Maria Martinez, the paintings of Awa Tsireh, and contemporary artist Rose B. Simpson’s El Camino lowrider “Maria.” Since indigenous artists are not limited to abstraction as a decolonial method in their art, this essay will also discuss the use of figuration as a decolonial method, especially in the paintings of Kent Monkman (b. 1965). Indigenous artists use decolonial methods in their art to resist the colonial demand for “authenticity,” whether they choose abstraction or figuration in their work.

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“Reconstructing Narratives: Images, Revolt, and the Individual in the Work of Julia Kristeva,” undergraduate philosophy thesis

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Excerpt: This essay combines Julia Kristeva’s concepts of the “symbolic” and the “semiotic” as constituting humans as speaking beings, and situates the “speaking being” within her work on the “culture of revolt” as opposed to the “culture of the show.” I use these aspects of her thought to argue that the individual as a free, autonomous being is compromised in our consumerist society, where the culture of the show has overtaken and threatened the culture of revolt that is crucial to the health of the individual’s psychic life. We are no longer “citizens,” but “owners of our organs.” As I demonstrate, Kristeva’s understanding of revolt is essential to any emancipatory project in that it emphasizes the capacity of the individual to fight the overdetermination of her being in relation to society, specifically, the appropriation of the individual to roles and functions that perpetuate the hegemonic order where “commodity is king.”

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Queer Saints Project (Pride 2022), Juneteenth, Lucy Hicks Anderson

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https://sites.google.com/view/queer-saints/lucy-hicks-anderson?authuser=0

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“Kachinas on Pottery, the Orayvi Split, and Abstraction as Resistance: Reframing the Art and Legacy of Nampeyo,” an art history research paper

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Excerpt: "The life and work of Hopi-Tewa artist Nampeyo (~1857-1942) has been the subject of many extensive works by anthropologists, art historians, and amateur aficionados. However, the existing non-Native narratives about Nampeyo most often describe either an innovative artist responding to the demands of the capitalist art market spawned by the advent of tourism to the Southwest—and the introduction of the cash economy to Hopi—or an anthropological specimen of Hopi artistry that feeds into non-Native tropes about Indigenous women. While these narratives sometimes attempt to give Nampeyo agency as an artist, they focus mainly on external motivations and ignore the impact that internal political and religious influences at Hopi must have had on Nampeyo and her work. Many of these narratives also firmly place Nampeyo in the canon of Western artists, highlighting her success as the first commercial Pueblo artist, and in doing so, assume ultimately that money, success, and being able to provide were her biggest motivators as an artist, which I argue is erroneous and contradictory to accounts of Hopi and Tewa identity and values. Of course, pottery did provide a real way for Nampeyo and her neighbors and relatives to provide for themselves and their villages after the introduction of the cash economy, but narratives that give primacy to this idea erase deeper motivations behind Nampeyo’s creativity, and portray her art as merely a reaction to capitalism.

Some of the earliest known works by Nampeyo frequently depict imagery of kachinas, often from the waist up or focusing only on the mask or face of the kachina. However, by the year 1906, this pictorial imagery and figuration disappeared almost completely on Nampeyo’s pottery, with only the Palhik Mana being depicted instead of other kachinas. Through Hopi artists’ accounts, I assert that while Nampeyo almost certainly molded these pieces and should rightly be considered their maker, her husband Lesou painted the kachinas. Nampeyo herself did not paint kachinas because she was a woman, and men are in charge of kachina ceremonies at Hopi—only men with specific ritual knowledge would have depicted them at all. I will argue that internal political factors at Tewa village, Wàlpi, and the other Hopi villages, which led to the split of Orayvi and the founding of Hotvela in 1906, had a much greater influence on Nampeyo’s work than which designs she thought would most likely appeal to the non-Hopi tourists and anthropologists frequenting Hopiland. I will argue through historical accounts and interviews with contemporary Hopi artist Bobby Silas and others, that Lesou mainly painted kachinas for tourists, and this was a high-demand design that Nampeyo and Lesou would not have stopped producing if they were motivated by the art market alone. Specifically, I will argue that Nampeyo’s transition from depicting many different kachinas on her pottery to only depicting the Palhik Mana—which would have possibly been deemed more acceptable by religious leaders and her peers in the Hopi villages, and by Nampeyo herself—is further evidence of this thesis. I will examine pottery with boht kachina figuration and Sikyatki Revival abstraction to document this transition.

I will also argue that as curator and professor Nancy Marie Mithlo writes, “abstraction serves indigeneity”: Nampeyo’s abstract designs are often coded with meaning for a Hopi audience, and not meant to solely appease the aesthetic taste of her non-Native pottery collectors. I will use accounts from Hopi and Tewa artists I know personally, including Bobby Silas, Dan Namingha, Arlo Namingha, Rachel Sahmie, Vernida Polacca, and Neil David, Sr. as primary sources in this essay to discuss Nampeyo’s work and legacy. This methodology resists what Mithlo describes as the current logic of the art world: "The value of objectivity has long been discredited in a number of fields. It is associated with the values of science. The premise of objectivity holds that, to be real scholarship, the findings of research cannot have any relation to a social context—cannot have subjectivity, or the presence and influence of the researcher. This value is still often at play in Native arts criticism today, but it is masked, as many developments in the field are, under the rubric of quality … one’s subjectivity as a researcher should always be present."

Acknowledging positionality and centering relationships is itself an anticolonial method used intentionally throughout this essay because it rejects the idea that art history and other disciplines must be objective and impartial in order to “protect the quality of research.” No human is capable of being completely objective—we bring our experiences and biases to any research project, from the questions we ask to the methodologies we use. The sciences’ obsession with objectivity distorts both the researcher’s own subjectivity and positionality, as well as that of their “subjects.”

The essay will conclude with a discussion of abstraction as an anticolonial method and a form of resistance, through Nampeyo’s transition to using more abstract imagery in her work, beginning with her revival of Sikyatki designs in the 1890s and leading up to and after the Orayvi split and the founding of Hotvela. The idea of abstraction as resistance, and Nampeyo’s near-abandonment and rare use of kachina imagery on her pottery after 1906, dramatically alters the interpretation of Nampeyo’s art and legacy.

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“Two Spirit Identities in Pueblo Art” (working title), exhibition proposal, co-curated by Hollis Chitto

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This exhibition proposal will be my final project for Marcella Ernest's "Queer Indigenous Expressions" class.

Hollis Chitto (Mississippi Choctaw/Laguna and Isleta Pueblos) (he/they) is known for their beadwork, and has been featured in Vogue and InStyle. He was the 2022 Ron and Susan Dubin Fellow at SAR and explored two spirit themes as part of his residency.

The exhibition will show Hollis' beadwork in conversation with his relative Arroh-A-Och's pottery, who is also two spirit. We also plan to include Bobby Silas (Hopi), who uses designs in the style of his ancestors to discuss two spirit identity on his pottery. We will announce more collaborators as the project develops.

We are specifically designing this exhibition for the Wheelwright Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico because the Wheelwright used to be called the Museum of Navajo Ceremonial Art. The museum opened in 1937, right after the artist it was built to honor passed away. Hastiin Klah created huge weavings of the ceremonial sand paintings he knew, and the museum originally had exhibits that showed actual sand paintings. Because Klah's art is sacred, it is not appropriate for public exhibition, although the museum continues to co-steward the weavings with Navajo Nation. Klah is an important artist not only because of how monumental his works are, but because he was two spirit—he never married or had children, and he was a weaver (which was considered a feminine power), as well as a medicine man (a masculine power). We will physically hold space for Klah in the exhibition in place of his artworks, so that we can still tell his story and honor him as a two spirit artist.

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“Sikyatki Reframed,” exhibition proposal, co-curated by Bobby Silas

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This is an exhibition proposal I am currently working on. This exhibition will place contemporary, historic, and prehistoric Hopi pottery from the last 1000 years in conversation with each other, with "Community Voices" labels written by Hopi artists that interpret the pieces and give context.

Bobby Silas is a Hopi artist from Bacavi. He is known for Zuni and Hopi traditional pottery, as well as his revival of Sikyatki, Jeddito, and other hisatsinom ancestors’ pottery; his work is in many museum collections across the country. Bobby co-curated the de Young Museum exhibition Nampeyo and the Sikyatki Revival, and contributed to Native American Art from the Thomas W. Wiesel Family Collection.

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“Nampeyo Reframe,” zine with Bobby Silas

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A zine version of "Reframing the Art and Legacy of Nampeyo" with a QR code that links to the research paper it is based on. I used this zine to gather community feedback from Hopi and Pueblo artists during the Free Market in Santa Fe in August 2024.

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Queer Saints Project (Pride 2022), June 12th, Joan of Arc

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https://sites.google.com/view/queer-saints/st-joan-of-arc?authuser=0

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This was my final project for Marcella Ernest's "Contemporary Native Art" class. It explores contemporary Native art aesthetics, themes, and methodologies.