Welcome to Indian Country II

This is a version of a post from a few years ago when I first wrote about feast day at the Indian pueblos. Feast day at San Ildefonso Pueblo was Friday.


One of the things I love about New Mexico is the culture, particularly that of the Native Americans, whose spirituality I have been fascinated with for quite some time. A couple times a year the various pueblos open their villages to the public and welcome people to share the experience of honoring their ancestors, the land, and the spirits. Tribal feast days celebrate the birth of their patron saint; each pueblo's feast day occurs on a different day throughout the year. Dances are performed and traditional food is served; smoke from juniper-burning fires fills the crisp air like incense. You are not allowed to photograph, nor make any audio or video recordings during ceremonials (there are signs everywhere reminding people of this). The feast days are not advertised other than a short listing on some of the tourism and cultural websites because the Indians do not intend their celebrations to be tourist attractions. Most of the people who come are Natives from other tribes who have been invited or have family in the pueblo. In part this is what makes the experience so special.

San Ildefonso Pueblo is just north of Santa Fe and the home of the famous potter Maria Martinez. Two different dances were performed in the north and south plazas which are divided by a huge cottonwood tree. The first one we saw was the buffalo deer dance in the north plaza; as the dancers left the kiva (where they rest between performances), they bent over and began dancing on "all-fours," holding a long stick in each hand and tapping them on the ground simultaneously with their feet. They wear traditional clothing, antler headdresses, and bells attached to belts around their waists. Following the dancers was the group of drummers, who played a continuous, pulsing beat along with their chanting; the whole procession lasts about 15 minutes. In the south plaza was the Comanche dance. These dancers wore large feather headdresses similar to the Plains Indians; they were also accompanied by a group of chanting drummers. Every 20th beat or so the dancers would stop and make a loud bird-calling noise like an eagle. Although just as I thought I had the timing down, it would change with the next round... 20...23...19...30... 

For a number of years I have had the privilege to go to feast day at this pueblo and it has always had some personal meaning. When my mom was young there was a woman from San Ildefonso who came to clean her house and became good friends with my grandmother. It is always nice to know someone in the pueblo if you are going to their house to eat, and due to the nature of their connection the family was invited to Angelita's house on feast days. Angelita and my grandmother have since passed away, but whenever we go to the pueblo we make a point of stopping at the house which her daughter Eva now occupies. According to my mom, the house looks almost exactly the same as it did when she visited as a little girl. Eating at any of the Indians' homes is a communal, family-style activity. We wait in the living room until space opens up at the kitchen table and when we are called to eat there is set before us a plethora of traditional dishes to choose from. People are constantly coming and going so within the 20 minute time period we sat at the table, there were half a dozen different groups of people who joined us. The women also cook for the dancers and periodically take food to them while they are resting in the kivas.

Find the Hidden

"I don't know what it is about people who see things in other people that they don't see in themselves."

"It's really important in all of our lives, in what we do, we treat each other fairly and we give each other a chance; and we see the hidden talent in the person you work with, in your mother and father, in your your kids..."

Right In Tune: Recent Paintings

I have had a lot of time on my hands lately, thus I've started painting again. Needless to say, it feels really good; in the last few weeks I 've cranked out at least half a dozen. I consider these exercises to get me back in the groove of having a brush in my hand; there is no agenda for the finished piece. Oftentimes I'm listening to music, tuning into the flow of a song or playlist, visualizing what the rhythms look like and orchestrating my hand accordingly. This is a similar practice to something my mom used to do with me as a kid: sit down with paper and markers, close my eyes, listen to a piece of music and draw what I saw or felt. During my most recent painting sessions I've been into some form of soft techno beats and hip hop.

Spring Winds

The Cosmos

Untitled

Electric Feel

The Oregon Coast

Back in September I flew to Portland with my parents to visit my brother, his girlfriend and their two dogs. It had been a few years since I'd been to Oregon and even longer since I'd visited the coast. We spent three days at a beach house in Manzanita, a small town about two hours from Portland.

Ginger (in front) and Aias

12x12 for $144 V

This year, my 12x12 was inspired by a knot on the right side of the wood panel, which I've left untouched throughout the process of creating the artwork. Looking at the organic shape led to me thinking about satellite images of the Earth and the mixture of patterns and colors we don't realize are there when we are on the ground.

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6x6s by the students of Escuela del Sol

Chihuly in the Garden

A mind blowing (pun intended?) exhibit of blown glass sculptures by Dale Chihuly at the Desert Botanical Garden in Scottsdale, AZ.

Arcosanti: An Urban Laboratory?

"In nature, as an organism evolves it increases in complexity and it also becomes a more compact or miniaturized system. Similarly a city should function as a living system. Arcology, architecture and ecology as one integral process, is capable of demonstrating positive response to the many problems of urban civilization, population, pollution, energy and natural resource depletion, food scarcity and quality of life. Arcology recognizes the necessity of the radical reorganization of the sprawling urban landscape into dense, integrated, three-dimensional cities in order to support the complex activities that sustain human culture. The city is the necessary instrument for the evolution of humankind." —Paolo Soleri

Mom and I arrived at Arcosanti and immediately said to each other "What the hell is going on here?" The place looked desolate and run down and the feeling was made even more clear by the fact that there was only one other car in the parking lot.... here we go on another one of our crazy adventures, this one inspired by me. I first learned of Paolo Soleri's "urban laboratory" from my foundations professor during my freshman year of college. He was a man who spoke in riddles constantly and somehow managed to link the seemingly most obscure topics to the study of art. That "somehow" continues to confound me to this day, though looking back on it, some of the topics weren't that far fetched, such is the case with Arcosanti.

We stumbled into the cafe 30 minutes before dinner was over and got the last of pretty much everything. A man at the table next to us struck up a conversation with me; he introduced himself as Bob and called himself an inventor. Bob was visibly enthusiastic about all things solar energy and was brought to Arcosanti to help them figure out how to incorporate solar into the site. We soon figured out we had no idea what to do next; no one had officially checked us in or given us any directions. Bob caught on to this, as he had with other new visitors, and offered to show us to the guest rooms and take us on a tour of the site. We walked back to the car with Bob and drove down an unmarked road that wound around to the bottom of the hillside. The single row of rooms looked like individual storage sheds. The front of each room was a wall of windows looking across the shallow valley to the next mesa. The next morning we took the "official" tour of Arcosanti. We and everyone else who had the priviledge of taking "the Bob tour" all agreed his was better. His enthusiasm for the project and Paolo Soleri was more apparent that our resident guide. He took us to the "off limits" places and stuck us in front of his computer while he went on and on about all the inventions he had patented.

Arcosanti is Soleri's "city of the future," an environment where people's home, workplace and food source coexist in a single self-sustainting complex. It is an living experiment, or as the name suggests a "laborartory," a place where the architect's theories are actually being tested. So far, only a fraction of the master plan has been built, but the work is ongoing with the help of residents and teaching workshops.

 Roof of our guest room

Ceramics

Vaults

Amphitheater

Roof of the Foundry

Guest rooms (directly below the crane)