By Gina Rae La Cerva

One of Cynthia Burke’s many creative endeavors is hosting a radio show for her town of two hundred people in the Australian outback. Called “CB” by her friends, she loves playing country and gospel music ranging from the 1950s to 2000s. She tells me this as we sit on a stone bench at the 2024 International Folk Art Market (IFAM), eating popsicles and watching the first day of the market begin to buzz with energy.

CB had never left Australia before coming to Santa Fe. She lives nine hours out in the bush. It took them thirty hours to travel here, and by the time I’d met her, she had already met with hundreds of people—writers, photographers, administrators, other vendors, and buyers. English is her third language. I watch as she poses timidly for her official IFAM portrait, as people weave in and out of the booth, picking up her woven baskets, or turning her grass sculptures over with care. Her contemporary fiber art depicts animals such as camels, dogs, and birds. The baskets and sculptures are made from dried native grasses, wool, and raffia. They are colorful and whimsical, with a surprising level of detail, given the coarse natural materials.

Tjanpi Desert Weavers, the organization CB has partnered with, is a social enterprise of the Ngaanyatjarra, Pitjantjatjara, and Yankunytjatjara Women’s Council, which makes important decisions for the larger community. Formed in 1980, this council delivers health, social, and cultural services for several Aboriginal Australian groups collectively known as the Anangu. Tjanpi has been operating for over thirty years and has served as a lifeline for women in the remote Central and Western Australian deserts through paid opportunities for their artwork, skills development workshops, and grass-collecting trips. By supporting these activities, the organization has empowered women for decades, creating income streams that have allowed for the preservation and sharing of cultural heritage through contemporary fiber arts and crafts.

CB and the other artists from Tjanpi were featured artists in the women’s empowerment category at the 2024 IFAM. It was their first time at the market, and they were among 167 artists from fifty-one countries. The Santa Fe International Folk Art Market is the largest folk art market in the world, and its economic impact is very important for artists’ home communities. According to IFAM, which celebrated its twentieth year in 2024, on average, nearly $20,000 per booth is repatriated to artists’ native countries. Artist cooperatives make up the heart of the market, supporting entire families and villages, thus impacting thousands of lives. This is particularly true for women artists. Due to the sales made during the four-day market, nearly three hundred women around the world have a year-round source of employment and income.

Beyond the financial opportunities the market creates, there are other special benefits to taking part. For instance, global artists, who might otherwise remain isolated, get to meet and inspire each other. An Afghani glass artist with the most beautiful Herat blue cups is located a few booths down from a Mexican ceramicist. Textile artists from India can meet textile artists from Kyrgyzstan, Indonesia, and Nigeria. The ability to reflect and share creatively from so many cultures, each rooted in distinct places, makes for a remarkable cauldron of ideas and inspiration. Again, this opportunity is particularly beneficial for women artists, who may not otherwise be able to travel to meet others and share in the pride created in producing their heritage crafts. Often, their crafts employ techniques that have been on the brink of extinction. Like oral histories, living artists keep this expertise alive.

IFAM would not be what it is today without the Museum of International Folk Art (MOIFA), a division of the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs. Founded in 1953, MOIFA is a world-class museum that showcases the diversity and artistry of the world’s folk artists and cultures. It has a collection of more than 162,000 objects, representing more than one hundred countries. After eighteen years of hosting IFAM on Milner Plaza on Museum Hill, MOIFA and IFAM continue to have a close relationship. Together, they host cross-cultural exchanges between local and international artists, as well as joint public symposia. Additionally, MOIFA buys folk art at the market every year for their collection, and IFAM artists have been featured in MOIFA exhibitions.

When global artists visit, MOIFA often provides private tours of its collections—which benefit both the artists and MOIFA curators. During these encounters, an artist might explain a deeper meaning or technique used in the museum’s collection, or a piece in the collection might reveal to the artist how the skill they practice has evolved from an older traditional method. “The museum does an amazing job of preserving folk art and sharing the stories of these traditions with the public, while IFAM furthers the living tradition of folk art, bringing practicing artists to Santa Fe to tell their stories directly,” says Stacey Edgar, director of IFAM. “I think this is what is most exciting about our collaborations—finding ways to both preserve and advance folk art in a community that cares deeply about the artists and the traditions.”

The idea that craft could be considered art, honored and displayed in museums, solidified over various periods of history. Creating functional objects that are also aesthetically pleasing has been part of human culture since prehistoric times. In many cultures, there is less distinction between fine art and craft. Functional objects are valued as much for their beauty as their practical uses.

But during the Renaissance period in European culture, the line between craft and fine art became more pronounced. Craft made useful objects. Art was meant to transform people. Artists were thus seen as creators channeling personal expression, whereas craftspeople such as carvers, weavers, and goldsmiths were merely considered skilled technicians without that extra spark of genius.

In the twentieth century, the line blurred again as Western artists began incorporating traditional craft techniques into their work in reaction to the increasing industrialization of society. This became so popular that it spawned the Arts and Crafts Movement in the late Victorian period in England, which celebrated the merging of utilitarian crafts—carvers, weavers, woodworkers, and goldsmiths, et cetera—with the creative expression of fine artists. It sought to promote useful objects that were handmade and beautiful.

In other cases, objects originally made for everyday needs were increasingly regarded as fine art, to be collected and displayed rather than used. This was true for Native American pottery in the Southwest. Indigenous groups have been crafting exquisite pottery for almost two thousand years, using these objects in their daily lives. In the 1800s, as railroads spread West, trading posts were established to accommodate the bourgeoning tourism from the East Coast. Native American pottery increasingly came to be seen not just as an everyday craft but as an art form that could be sold to outsiders who would acquire these vessels and sculptures for both private collections and museum exhibitions.

The category of folk art is best described as a handicraft tradition rooted in a specific cultural history, but created as an art object to be sold. Often misconstrued as amateur art, folk art has become an important part of the art market. Folk artists often have a history of living on the fringes of society.

In the case of the Tjanpi Desert Weavers, their isolation from society is quite literal, given their geographic distance from larger population centers. This collective of women includes the weaving styles of the Ngaanyatjarra, Pitjantjatjara, and Yankunytjatjara cultures of Australia’s Central Desert region, an area approximately 350,000 square kilometers in size, spanning the tri-state border region of the Northern Territory, Western Australia, and South Australia.

The raffia used to make their fiber art is soaked in an old bathtub with a fire underneath. After cooking, it is hung longwise between the trees to dry. The grass coil baskets can be made relatively quickly, while the sculptures take more time. Wool is often used to give form and structure to more intricate shapes. Artists also incorporate string, wire, animal fur, beads, seeds, and found objects. Each piece is considered a story, passing down ancestral knowledge and honoring the rhythms of the land. The communities are deeply rooted in the area, having continuously occupied the Australian continent for fifty thousand years. Their art is thus embedded with spiritual and practical connections to ecology. Referred to as Dreamtime or Tjukurrpa, this is a set of teachings that underpin an understanding of the world, its creation, its great stories, and its spirit ancestors who created everything. These Law stories teach the wisdom of an unchanging network of relationships between the human and non-human world, which can be traced back to the beginning of time.

Tjanpi Desert Weavers, named for one of the Aboriginal names for the local spinifex grasses used in their weavings, offers one of few opportunities for income in the Central and Western Desert region, enabling women in these remote communities to maintain their lives and families through fiber art sales. The benefits of supporting these craftswomen extend beyond individual income to include positive social outcomes that arise from having meaningful employment. It brings women together to celebrate their cultural heritage and mutual care as they go out on grass-collecting trips or prepare materials together. Tjanpi represents over four hundred artists from twenty-six different communities, and this range of artists means that women who first started making baskets in 1995 can help teach the younger generations who are taking up weaving today.

CB is a member of the Ngaanyatjarra community and splits her time between the Warakurna and Irrunytju (Wingellina) communities in Western Australia. She learned painting and weaving skills from her mother, Jean Burke, who was herself an esteemed artist. From large-scale baskets to intricate animal figurines, her work is wide-ranging. She only began weaving ten years ago, and her artistic practice encompasses a broad range of disciplines. She likes to paint landscapes in silence—often at night when the house is quiet. Her acrylic works are made up of thousands of tiny dots—dark blues, white, and shades of pink—that come together to reveal a whole world of mesmerizing geometric shapes. They celebrate her love of the aerial views of the land from an airplane, and her unique ability to put herself in that place, as if looking down, while she works.

CB was born in Alice Springs in 1973 and began painting at about age ten. “Every time I looked at my mother, she was painting,” she once said of how her art practice began. Her paintings are also part of a larger cultural remembering. Her mother was once quoted as saying, “We want to do the paintings so we can teach the younger ones the old stories—so they can learn. If we finish, it’s their turn to do dot paintings, to tell the Dreamtime stories—keep the stories strong. That’s why we do the dot paintings, so they can say, ‘That’s my country, that’s my mother’s country.’ Like that.” Cynthia remembers the elders telling Dreamtime stories when they were out in the bush. While Cynthia’s paintings do not directly tell Tjukurrpa or Law stories, they demonstrate a connection to the spirituality of the land and the changing nature of seasons and ecosystems.

For CB, the creation of her art is partly to continue her family’s legacy (in addition to her mother, her uncle Tommy Watson was also a famed artist) and partly to infuse her style into the creations. Her mom and aunt taught her bush dying: they went out onto the land to collect natural dyes, which were then used to dye the raffia to create more complex and colorful weavings. CB would drive the car and learn as much as she could from these two older women. Now, she brings her creative spin to these traditional elements to create contemporary art. For instance, she likes adding emu feathers into a weaving, or incorporating detailed stitching techniques. She also makes punu, or traditional carvings from native trees, depicting animals and stories. Dogs are also a big inspiration for her work. The stop animation film she helped make, Ngayuku Papa (My Dog), is a loving portrait of her dog, Tiny, made with grass sculptures.

CB’s radio program has been on the air since 2012 and features a weekly selection of music, local news, and interviews. In 2013, she won a Best Emerging Radio Talent broadcasting award at the National Remote Indigenous Media Festival Awards. She also works as a camera operator for Ngaanyatjarra Media, was a key collaborating artist in a project with FORM and Polyglot Theatre, and regularly spends time out in the bush creating videos that have appeared on the Indigenous Community Television Station of Australia, for which she has also won awards. In one of her first major exhibitions in 2013, she contributed a weaving and some media to a show on string theory held at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney. Her work has also been exhibited at Ellenbrook Gallery in Perth in 2013, Fremantle Arts Centre in 2017, 2018, and 2019, and at AIATSIS–Resurgence at the National Museum of Australia, Canberra in 2019, as well as overseas.

Perhaps one of the most interesting shows she participated in was at the National Museum of Australia, an exhibition called Songlines: Tracking the Seven Sisters, which tells one of the central creation stories or songlines in Australia. Referencing the Pleiades star cluster, it is a saga of seven women who use magical powers to elude a pursuer as they flee across three deserts. A songline, also called a dreaming track, is the path taken across the land (or sometimes the sky) by ancestral creator-beings in the Dreamtime. A songline is both a navigational aid; providing directions for how one might traverse a region, including descriptions of landmarks, water sources, and natural features; and a repository of cultural knowledge and spiritual lessons, embedded within artistic expressions. This exhibition is now part of the permanent collection having toured the world with major stops in Finland and France.

CB recognizes the importance of showing her art around the world, explaining in an interview with Japingka Aboriginal Art Gallery, “Exhibiting my art all over the world is important because I get to learn new things and show my work to a new audience.” Still, for the Tjanpi weavers, traveling with their work is not always easy. Obtaining passports can be challenging, as there is often a lack of documentation and no birth certificates in these remote communities. 

CB began working with Tjanpi Desert Weavers in 2016, running some of the core operations at the remote Warakurna office, nine hours away from the core development office. She regularly visits over eight communities to support the far-flung Tjanpi artists. Her days unfold in a beautiful rhythm, with the mornings often spent in the art center painting or weaving, before she moves on to her work with Tjanpi in the afternoon. On the weekends, she goes to church, listens to Gospels, and sings hymns on Sundays. Her colleagues describe her as a level-headed and compassionate advocate dedicated to supporting the next generation of women weavers and creative business leaders.

The women in CB’s community are constantly pushing the boundaries of their arts practices and trying different things. They are creatively juiced up, excited to mix the tradition of craft with the inventiveness of the artist. When I ask CB if she thinks she will come back to the IFAM, she says she’s not sure. She likes her community, and she misses her two dogs. But she radiates a sense of empowerment, as piece by piece, her booth at the Santa Fe market heads toward selling out.   

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Gina Rae La Cerva is a writer and painter from Santa Fe, New Mexico.