Crash Report

By Candace Walsh

BY CANDACE WALSH

One of my least favorite jobs was working as a ghostwriter for a website’s figurehead. The part about being anonymous wasn’t so bad because I was churning out personally fulfilling writing on my own time. What bothered me was that my client had such a hard time letting go of the articles that much of the work we toiled over never saw the light of day.

Remembering that gig makes me appreciate my position at El Palacio all the more. Now, my work involves creating a magazine that people can hold in their hands. El Palacio readers encounter a product that showcases the most beautiful accomplishments of our museums and historic sites. But so much work goes on behind the scenes to get to the point where the truck pulls up to the Stewart Udall Building and drops off pallets of magazines. For instance, among many other tasks, Caroline Broussard creates contracts, shepherds writers’ and photographers’ payments through their paces, and makes sure that each and every subscriber gets their copy. Her diligence prevents a lot of unhappiness.

Invisible work behind the scenes is a theme that kept coming up as we produced this issue. Michelle Gallagher Roberts at the New Mexico Museum of Art took on the role of project manager of the museum’s epic centennial renovation. Because the institution’s architecture is so intrinsically intertwined with Santa Fe and the museum’s mission, to read the story of its hydra-headed execution is to become even more intimate with Santa Fe’s history, culture—and climate, too. (That celebrated light, if unchecked, can be wreak a heck of a lot of damage on the art it inspired.) First-time visitors to the museum won’t notice the updates, but they will appreciate the reflective quality of the newly polished concrete floors, which are now lighter than they used to be. A century of wear and maintenance darkened them; this new light tone is a close match to the light floors that graced the museum when it first opened.

We look at so much of what is around us as if it just materialized out of thin air; as if it were inevitable. Take license plates, for example. I happen to know two of the people who designed those license plates: El Palacio’s own art director, David Rohr, designed the turquoise and yellow plate, and the New Mexico Tourism Department’s digital media director, Jordan Guenther, designed the new red and green chile plate. This knowledge tightens the weave of my everyday experience, turning something otherwise ubiquitous and impersonal into a reminder of connection and community.

A little-known fact about the National Trails System and Wild and Scenic Rivers Acts, which turn 50 this year, is that before the legislation was passed, Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall courted ally Lady Bird Johnson by inviting her to float on the Snake River in Wyoming as part of his charm offensive. Trouble was, the river in question was too shallow that day. In a brilliant behind-the-scenes move, he quickly called Dan Ogden, the assistant director of planning and research for the Bureau of Reclamation, who arranged for the release of an upriver dam.

Most artists do behind-the-scenes prep work before touching paintbrush to canvas, but Frederick Hammersley elevated pre-painting to an art form in itself. He filled notebooks with diagrams, sketches, paint formula data, and columns of free-associated painting names. Hammersley clearly valued this practice, and the value has only increased since his death in 2009, as conservators and scholars use the notebooks to support their pursuits. His notebooks star alongside the paintings in the Museum of Art’s exhibition Frederick Hammersley: To Paint without Thinking.

When did Hammersley move from California to New Mexico? To search for that fact without turning to Google, I picked up the beautiful exhibition catalog and flipped the book open to a random page. There it was on that very page, in the first sentence I laid eyes on: 1968. More invisible help behind the scenes? I’m going to go with a grateful yes.

Candace Walsh (opens in a new tab) is a former editor of El Palacio. Currently, she is an assistant professor of creative writing at Central Washington University. Walsh holds a PhD in creative writing from Ohio University and an MFA from Warren Wilson College. Candace has worked on staff at Condé Nast International, Mothering Magazine, and as the managing editor of New Mexico Magazine. Her writing has appeared in numerous national and local publications. Walsh is the author of Licking the Spoon: A Memoir of Food, Family, and Identity (Seal Press 2012), a 2013 New Mexico – Arizona Book Awards winner, and two of the essay anthologies she co-edited were Lambda Literary Award finalists: Dear John, I Love Jane and Greetings from Janeland.

Family Affair

Carol Warren’s gift to the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, unwrapped

By Ross Altshuler

BY ROSS ALTSHULER

How do skill, talent, and creativity run through New Mexico’s Native families of artists? When you visit What’s New in New: A Selection from the Carol Warren Collection, you won’t just experience a survey of the best in contemporary pottery rarely seen in one place at one time. You’ll also be able to notice the way family connections express themselves in the assembled works.

The show consists of pieces from Warren’s significant donation of contemporary works of Native art: mostly pottery, but also painting, sculpture, and jewelry. Artists represented include Tony Abeyta, Autumn Borts-Medlock, Preston Duwyenie, Tammy Garcia, Dan Namingha, Les Namingha, Jody Naranjo, and Roxanne Swentzell.

Warren has had a discerning eye since she began collecting in 1990, when, at a gallery in New York, she purchased a small Native-made pot signed JN. She didn’t know until later that it was made by Jody Naranjo. It didn’t matter—she loved the pot and wanted it in her home.

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One year later, she moved to Santa Fe, and immediately immersed herself in Native arts and culture. Warren became a volunteer at the MIAC museum shop and worked there for 26 years, and volunteered in the museum’s collections department for 19 years. Though she sometimes purchased from dealers and the MIAC Museum Shop, Warren developed personal connections with the artists she chose to collect. After she decided to donate her collection to MIAC, she began to consider what was needed to enhance the museum’s collections. As a result, the pieces included in her collection reflect her own tastes and aesthetic, coupled with a careful nod toward legacy and historic preservation.

Tammy Garcia typically creates less than ten clay pots each year. Garcia also expresses similar themes in works of bronze, glass, and jewelry. Garcia has cast lead crystal into a solid three-dimensional sculpture of a water symbol found on ancestral Pueblo pottery. Referring to this and other motifs, she has said, “These are fragments of design taken from Anasazi pottery—powerful symbols for the nourishing quality of water. On their deeper meaning, they represent eternal life.” Garcia is a descendant of Margaret Tafoya’s sister Christine, and learned the basics of pottery-making from her mother Linda Cain, and her grandmother, Mary Cain. Her sister, Autumn Borts-Medlock, is also represented in this exhibition.

Les Namingha is a scion of the great Hopi potter Nampeyo of Hano. He is a cousin of Dan Namingha, whose mother, Dextra Quotskuyva, taught Namingha pottery making. His family is known for their innovative approach to pottery, and Namingha continues to build on that legacy. Like his teacher and his family in general, Namingha has become renowned as an innovator.

The small, tightly detailed painted surface sets this pot apart. On the top half, you can see a mixture of Sikyátki and ancient Puebloan designs such as birds, feathers, lightning and kiva steps. The checkerboard represents rain, and the fine line section represents turquoise. Just below the shoulder is stippling within geometric shapes, representing pottery sherds. Radiating from the bottom is an eight-pointed star interspersed with rows of small motifs including clouds, water, feathers, and a katsina face.

Tito Naranjo is from a well-known and accomplished family of artists. His mother was Rose Naranjo, and his pottery and sculpture-making siblings are Jody Folwell, Dolly Naranjo, Nora Naranjo Morse, and Michael Naranjo. A retired professor, Naranjo taught at universities in New Mexico. He only produced at most three pieces a year to sell at Indian Market, and the museum is fortunate to have this piece and two other works that Warren was able to acquire. Figure of Clown with Child is hand-built of micaceous clay, stone-polished, carved and reduction-fired. Naranjo believes representing Pueblo traditions in writings and images is important to maintaining them for future generations, and this sculpture is a part of
that effort.

What’s New in New: Selections from the Carol Warren Collection can be seen from June 3 through February 26, 2019 in the Lloyd Kiva New Gallery at MIAC. The show was curated by C.L. Kieffer, collections manager of archaeological research collections.

Ross Altshuler was co-author of the Turquoise, Water, Sky exhibition catalog, and is a contractor at MIAC, helping with the revision of the permanent Here, Now and Always exhibition.

Ross Altshuler works as a contractor for the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture. He is the co-author of Turquoise, Sky, and Water, the catalog of the exhibit of the same name, and has written for El Palacio and other professional journals.

Lives and Half-lives

Reckoning with atomic history’s local legacies

By Melanie LaBorwit

BY MELANIE LABORWIT

The Santa Fe Opera’s sense of place is extraordinary; operagoers watch world-class productions ensconced in the great outdoors, surrounded by Santa Fe’s gorgeous sunsets, stunning vistas, and starry skies. With this summer’s production of Doctor Atomic, the sense of place factor expands dramatically to include not just the scenic, but the historic and the geographic.

John Adams’ opera focuses on the scientists who developed the atomic bomb at Los Alamos—just thirty miles from the Santa Fe Opera—during World War II’s Manhattan Project. The story, written by acclaimed librettist Peter Sellars, follows J. Robert Oppenheimer, director of the Los Alamos Laboratory, and other scientists as they weigh moral and ethical questions about their responsibilities and the impact of their game-changing discovery. The drama unfolds in June and July of 1945, set in Los Alamos and at Trinity Site in southern New Mexico, where scientists detonated the first atomic bomb.

Atomic Histories, a New Mexico History Museum exhibition opening June 3, expands the breadth of the opera’s offering in an iteration much more accessible to the public. As part of the museum’s Tech and the West partnership with the Santa Fe Opera, the museum honors our state’s role in this pivotal geopolitical development. With a shared authority borne of a collaboration with the Los Alamos History Museum, the Atomic Heritage Foundation, the Santa Fe Opera, Los Alamos’ Bradbury Science Museum, and the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History, Grants’ New Mexico Mining Museum and the nascent Manhattan Project National Historical Park, the New Mexico History Museum assembled a wide variety of resources to tell our state’s nuclear story.

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Atomic Histories focuses on the people who played a role in producing the atomic bomb in New Mexico in the 1940s, and of many New Mexicans who work in our national labs, uranium mines, and related industries. The exhibition will also share about the bomb’s lasting cultural and environmental impact on New Mexico. Visitors can map the arrival of scientists in Lamy, their stops in Santa Fe, and how the city of Los Alamos was built by workers from northern Hispanic villages and Pueblos.

The exhibition also examines the environmental impact of the detonation on small towns in southern New Mexico downwind of the original Trinity site, and the effects and legacy of uranium mining on western New Mexico’s Native communities.

From 1944 to 1986, tens of millions of tons of uranium ore were extracted under mining leases on the Navajo Nation and nearby Laguna Pueblo.

The exhibition includes the tumultuous history of uranium mining in New Mexico, the lives of miners in these communities, and the Environmental Protection Agency’s current mitigation of the risks of contamination in and around abandoned mines.

Other contemporary subject matter includes ongoing scientific research at Los Alamos National Labs and Sandia National Labs, whose scientists come from all over the world. Atomic Histories attests to the growing role of women in scientific innovation, like Cheryl Rolfer, who served for decades as the head of the toxic waste division at Los Alamos National Labs, and whose story illuminates what life was like on “the Hill” during this time.

In addition to familiar names involved in historic scientific achievement, visitors will meet many of the men and women behind the scenes of the Manhattan Project whose stories are rarely told, and will hear the voices of participants in different scientific endeavors over the last fifty years.

The exhibit also chronicles the creation of the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad, its infrastructure, and how it stores nuclear waste. Visitors might be surprised to find out that tiny Eunice, in southern New Mexico, is home to URENCO, the country’s most advanced uranium enrichment facility; it’s the only one to be built in the U.S. in thirty years, and the first to use centrifuge enrichment technology.

Many of the institutions we take for granted today sprang from the atomic era. The Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) originated in the Cold War as part of the Office of Civil Defense. The sirens used today to notify people about impending hurricanes, fires, and floods were originally designed to be able to announce potential Soviet missiles. The end of the Cold War allowed the agency’s resources to change from civil defense to natural disaster preparedness.

In 2003, FEMA joined twenty-two other federal agencies and programs to become the Department of Homeland Security.

Innovations in supercomputing and satellite telecommunications, used for innumerable applications today, were originally intended to measure potential nuclear explosions and to maintain national communications. The fields of microelectronics, seismic and atmospheric measurements, computer memory, and high-speed photography all initially supported nuclear programs. Reflective of the pervasive nature of the nuclear legacy, Atomic Histories includes related artifacts from many different collections, including one of the original high-speed cameras devised for documenting the powerful Trinity test, as well as a lead brick that shielded equipment from the power of the blast. Berlyn Brixner was the head Manhattan Project photographer for the Trinity test, and his continued work with high-speed and motion photography helped to capture images of many other explosions and the dropping of dummy bombs to help the scientists better understand the science and physics behind them.

During the Cold War, Americans developed a vigilant mindset and acquired tools to protect themselves. The exhibition shares Civil Defense documents, scale models of fallout shelters, and different models of Geiger counters and dosimeters (instruments for measuring radioactive activity) including those once manufactured in Santa Fe.

In addition to scientific and historical items, the exhibition includes artists’ interpretations of the atomic legacy and its lasting impact on New Mexico. The exhibition features a selection from artist Meridel Rubenstein’s Critical Mass, a mixed-media installation made up of glass, photographs, video, and steel. Critical Mass examines the cultural crossroads found in station agent Edith Warner’s train station/tearoom/home, popular with both Los Alamos scientists and residents of neighboring San Ildefonso Pueblo.

In July 1995, SITE Santa Fe opened its first biennial on the 50th anniversary of the first atomic test at the Trinity Site. Rubenstein’s pieces The Meeting and Oppenheimer’s Chair were commissioned for that opening, and are also part of Atomic Histories.

Finally, inquiring minds of all ages will be invited to master scientific ideas like What is radioactivity, anyway? and How do you measure this naturally occurring energy? in hands-on ways. We’ll share about the tools Los Alamos human computers used to calculate the mathematical equations, and new inventions created to further atomic research.

Atomic Histories presents seldom-seen views of the Manhattan Project at the same time that it highlights how these phenomenal discoveries continue to impact the present and future. Many questions remain, but there’s no doubt that when it comes to reckoning with this epic topic, New Mexico is the most apt place to do so.

Melanie LaBorwit is an educator at the New Mexico History Museum and the Palace of the Governors.

Melanie LaBorwit is a former educator at the New Mexico History Museum with specialties in museum education, cultural programming, historic and cultural research, and exhibition research and planning. She held prevous positions in the education and enrichments space with the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History, the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center, and the Anderson Abruzzo Museum.

By the Book

A traveling exhibition about Frederick Hammersley’s work on and off the canvas spends the summer at the New Mexico Museum of Art

By Dr. James Glisson

BY JAMES GLISSON

After nearly twenty years in Los Angeles, Frederick Hammersley (1919–2009) moved to Albuquerque in 1968 after accepting a teaching position at the University of New Mexico. By his own account, the move to New Mexico was the best decision he ever made. The change of location did him good, and he soon embarked on what would be his most productive decade, the 1970s.

Frederick Hammersley: To Paint without Thinking is the first exhibition to take advantage of a trove of archival materials, including notebooks, sketchbooks, and voluminous lists, to reconsider his lifelong interest in systems and rules for creating his art. While organized by The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens in California, the exhibition’s homecoming will be at the New Mexico Museum of Art (co-curated by Merry Scully) when it opens on May 26, 2018, in the state which was Hammersley’s home for fifty years. The following article is a condensed and revised version of the introduction to the exhibition catalog I edited, Frederick Hammersley: To Paint without Thinking (The Huntington, 2017), which accompanies the exhibition and is available for purchase at the Museum of Art’s bookstore.

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Frederick Hammersley is best known for his geometric “hard edge” paintings. Their elegant simplicity, however, is the result of a rigorous process of refinement, worked out in a set of sketchbooks and other archival materials now at the Getty Research Institute. The Notebooks, as Hammersley designated them, reveal him running through possibilities until he happened upon the solution. The page where he tests out options for the composition of Adam & Eve shows that he used the Notebooks to resolve the precise geometric composition and to establish a basic color scheme, which he returned to later as he mixed and applied paint. Although he still had to make choices as he executed the paintings, the studies in the Notebooks, like a set of instructions, largely guided him. By figuring out the big decisions before he began the paintings, Hammersley could sit down and focus on applying the paint with a palette knife to achieve his fantastically crisp edges, which he did by hand without the aid of masking tape. With the “geometrics,” as he called these paintings, he could “paint without thinking” because the thinking, so to speak, had been done in the Notebooks. The question of what to paint was settled, and he had to worry only about the how.

When I first saw the Hammersley archival material at the Getty in January 2014, I immediately wanted to organize an exhibition around it. On that afternoon I looked, in a rush, through hundreds of small lithographs, examined dozens of color swatches, leafed through the artist’s Notebooks, and passed my eyes over his sheets of titles. The sheer quantity of materials and the evident care the artist had lavished on creating and preserving them impressed on me that they were neither mere records nor material ancillary to his paintings. This exhibition is the first to highlight the archival trove Hammersley left in his home/studio at the time of his death, and to argue from its abundant evidence that the artist was profoundly concerned with the process by which he created artworks—the technical elements he used (canvas, paints, and varnishes) and the decision-making—all the choices that, little by little, bring an artwork into the world.

After a stint at Idaho State University in Pocatello, in the late 1930s, Hammersley moved to Los Angeles, where he studied at the Chouinard Art Institute. He then served in the U.S. Army during World War II, stationed first in England and later in Paris and Frankfurt. He returned to Los Angeles, where he reenrolled at Chouinard in 1946 before going on to Jepson Art Institute, studying and teaching there from 1947 to 1951. After nearly a decade of art school and the time he spent in Europe imbibing the Western artistic canon and meeting such modern masters as Constantin Brancusi and Pablo Picasso, whose studios he visited, he was ready to end his long artistic apprenticeship.

That proved difficult, however. Having completed a traditional course of study and having learned to fulfill the needs of the clients who commissioned him to do graphic design, he found the freedom of noncommercial work inhibiting rather than liberating. He was lost: “…I didn’t know what the hell to do, so I did a lot of self portraits.” As the artist recounted, he broke through this impasse with his First hunch painting on September 15, 1950. He had begun the work assuming he would produce yet another self-portrait, but something else happened. “I thought about the last element [of a self-portrait]—the eye, which in fact dictates the position of the head that supports it. I thought it would be interesting if instead, I painted that square entirely blue.” From there, he painted from square to square, choosing colors “just by feeling,” by hunch. He filled in the grid, and something clicked: “I said, ‘Boy if I can paint without thinking, that’s for me.’” Pick a color, fill in a square, repeat. This meant making fewer choices than were required to reproduce the complex geometry of a nose or hairline, and much less mixing of the paints needed to suggest the fall of a shadow or to articulate the line of a neck. He narrowed his options, set down constraints, and then, according to the rules of his game, so to speak, got on with art-making. He did not stop thinking but rather limited what he had to think about and thought about it in a different way. This breakthrough moment reverberated throughout his career.

Hammersley’s account, like any story of epiphany, elicits skepticism. He used grids to organize his compositions before his First hunch painting. In 1948, in a series of paintings, Hammersley used a step-by-step process to abstract a still life. Hammersley also used a grid format in making a set of lithographs beginning in 1949. This exhibition opens with forty-five lithographs chosen from hundreds that utilize a grid format.

What Hammersley called his Painting Books and Notebooks are key parts of this exhibition. In the late 1950s, he began keeping the Painting Books, which are essentially illustrated inventories of each step he took when he produced a painting, from stretching the canvas to applying the varnish coat at the end. These inventories, which specify the formulas the artist used for the mixtures of ground, paint, and varnish, are a boon to the co-curator of this exhibition, Alan Phenix, a scientist at the Getty Conservation Institute, who examines the intricacies of the painting process as well as Hammersley’s fastidious attention to his materials. In the Notebooks, he tweaked compositions for his geometric paintings in a two-step process. First, he tried out compositions, generally with color pencil, although ballpoint pen, black electrical tape, and oil paint appear, too. Then, often in oil, he enlarged those he found satisfactory in “composition books.” Finally, from those oil-on-paper studies, he chose compositions to enlarge further on canvas. From the mid-1960s to 1996, when he stopped making geometrics, these studies were a wellspring, and the tinkering and refinements in them bring to light the labor hidden by the serene finished canvases.

In 1968, when Hammersley moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, he seized the opportunity to learn the computer program ART 1 and made what he dubbed “computer drawings.” Though hardly user-friendly by today’s standards, the program was among the first designed for visual artists without coding skills. In the late 1960s, when Richard Williams, the UNM faculty engineer who invented ART 1 in collaboration with Katherine Nash, explained that the program “does not require a computer programmer to hold the artist’s hand,” computers were still the province of highly trained scientists at universities and government research facilities. Although Hammersley’s excursion into computer art did not change the look of his geometric paintings, his documentation of their production became far more complete. Indeed, starting in the 1970s, the Painting Books break down a painting’s creation into a series of steps, with dated entries for each and details of every application of paint as well as the paint mixture applied. A computer program is nothing more than a set of instructions, and as the artist struggled to master the complex protocols of ART 1, perhaps he began to regard the process of paintings as following a set of instructions, like those on the punch cards fed into the IBM mainframe that printed the drawings. As this exhibition catalog excerpt suggests, the apparent simplicity of Hammersley’s abstract art belies a complicated creative process. His art was not a spontaneous, all-at-once act, but the outcome of a systematic approach that allowed him to “paint without thinking.” By this phrase, he did not mean becoming a machine, but working within constraints. Like chess, with its inflexible rules but vast number of possible games, Hammersley’s art is one of variations and play within boundaries.

James Glisson is the Bradford and Christine Mishler Associate Curator of American Art at The Huntington Library, Art Collections, and Botanical Gardens. He and Alan Phenix, a recently retired scientist at the Getty Conservation Institute, were the co-curators of the exhibition at the Huntington.

Dr. James Glisson is the curator of Contemporary Art at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. His five books, some co-authored and co-edited, have been recognized by the American Library Association, American Alliance of Museums and Choice Magazine, which gave him an Outstanding Academic Title award. Prior to Santa Barbara, he was Interim Virginia Steele Scott Chief Curator and Mishler Associate Curator at The Huntington Library, where he contributed to the establishment of a regular program for contemporary art.

A Sketch in Time

Frederick Hammersley’s Notebooks and the Conservation of Couplet

By Peter BG Shoemaker

BY PETER BG SHOEMAKER

They are words—jaw-dropping, amazing, wondrous—one doesn’t usually hear from science-minded professionals. Particularly those who spend their days with Van Goghs and Pollocks and other apex denizens of the art world, for whom, let us be honest, such expressions are mostly passé. And Alan Phenix and Tatyana Thompson—the former a conservation scientist at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles, and the latter a conservator at her eponymous firm in Santa Monica—aren’t even talking about a painting.

Because in the world of painting and painting conservation there is something even more rare than the work itself: firsthand accounts of what the artist was up to when he or she was making the work. And, should the painter in question be beyond questioning, those thoughts are lost. That is, unless the painter in question kept detailed records of how and often why he or she did the things he or she did when creating.

In the contemporary period there is but one record: the notebooks of the abstract classicist Frederick Hammersley. For Thompson and Phenix, it’s nothing so banal as a gold mine; rather it’s like finding a particularly talkative unicorn.

Leonardo da Vinci wrote in his own notebooks that “light and shade [should] blend without strokes and borders but looking like smoke.” There may be no bit of advice that Hammersley would have been less likely to follow than that. Hammersley (1919–2009) did almost precisely the opposite, and his striking geometric abstractions with rich, plenteous color fields and strong visual symmetry became known as West Coast Hard-Edge. There were no smoky borders—just circles, unwavering lines, and, yes, hard edges.

Hammersley was born in Salt Lake City, and as a teen moved to San Francisco, where he took his first painting lessons. By the time the war arrived, he had the beginnings of a reputation.

In 1959, that modest reputation grew immensely when he participated in the traveling Four Abstract Classicists show, which graced museums in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Belfast, and London.

After teaching for a number of years at area schools, and with his work slowing and inspiration flagging, Hammersley undertook “the best move [he] ever made” and came to Albuquerque in 1968. There he joined the faculty at the University of New Mexico, and established what would turn out to be a lifelong relationship with the New Mexico Museum of Art.

The museum holds a number of Hammersley works, among them one titled Couplet, #15, a painting of two half-black, half-white intersecting circles with the area of intersection—and the background overall—a field of blue. Hammersley painted three versions of this painting: the first in 1965, the second in 1968, and the third in 1973.

It’s that second one—held by the museum—that needed to be restored before it joined Frederick Hammersley: To Paint without Thinking, first at the Huntington in Los Angeles and now at the Museum of Art in Santa Fe.

Thompson describes a scuff on the second Couplet, with a little paint loss in the middle of the painting; bulges and ripples (planar deformation), as well as some vertical cracks that one might expect from the painting’s removal from its stretcher nearly 40 years ago, and its subsequent rolled-up storage.

Working with the Frederick Hammersley Foundation in Albuquerque, Museum of Art Curatorial Director Merry Scully obtained funds for its restoration.

And that gets us back to those extraordinary notebooks.

Information Systems

From the early- to mid-1950s, Hammersley jotted memoranda down here and there, occasionally adhered to the back of paintings, giving little hints of what he’d done and in what order. But in 1959 he began to systematize and formalize his recordkeeping—and so the notebooks were born.

He kept three sorts. The first contains sketches wherein he played with various ways to arrange shapes and color; the second, his efforts to work up—in color—those initial sketches. It is with the third sort of notebook, those that Hammersley called his Painting Books, that people like Phenix and Thompson find their hearts racing. There are four Painting Books, spanning from 1959 to 2008.

These notebooks capture almost every creative and artistic decision and effort Hammersley undertook for most of his geometric paintings. Early entries, like this one from 1963, were like inventory records:

approx. 5 ¾ × 5 ¾ rough side

of Masonite, ground: 4 coats

gelvatex, drawing start 11 April

1963, painting start 12 april 1963. finish

July 1963 Title: Part Two

collection—Florence Arnold 10 July 68 $45

By the late 1960s, Hammersley was recording paint types and brands, mixing ratios, the number of times a canvas was stretched, what sorts of canvas he was using, types of glue, number of coats, as well as recording experimental results in technique and color mixing. But why?

“I don’t know,” Phenix says, “whether Hammersley was particularly interested in letting conservators in on what he was doing, but it’s very clear that he was concerned with his legacy.” And it is for conservators that the notebooks are the most useful.

Conservation in the case of this sort of damage is straightforward, but there are inevitable obstacles. And that’s where Hammersley’s hypergraphia and those notebooks dance into the spotlight.

Color, finish, structure

Firstly, the notebooks reveal that Hammersley almost always used the highest-quality artists oils, like Winsor & Newton, Talens, Grumbacher, and Lefèbvre-Foinet. And we know—explicitly in some cases, and generally in others — how he mixed those paints to get the effect he was going for. For the first and third Couplets, he recorded the paints and their admixture. For the second, for whatever reason, he didn’t —at least not in a notebook. Instead, he just jotted down Manganese Blue and Cerulean Blue on the frame.

Which would be fine; except those blues, when combined, create what’s called a metameric pair. And for conservators, that’s a potential problem: a metameric pair reflects light differently depending on the angle and the sort of light. This makes inpainting—that is, replacing the paint loss from cracking or scratching—a matter of tedious trial and error.

Phenix, who’s working on transcribing all of the notebooks, combined his reading of Hammersley’s entries on Couplet and other paintings with spectral analysis to identify the pigments and confirm Hammersley’s frame notation.

Secondly, Thompson also had to contend with the use of varnish on Couplet. Most of Hammersley’s contemporaries—and in fact many modern and contemporary artists—don’t bother with varnish; they regard it as too finished, too classical. “Knowing what sort of varnish he used meant that cleaning, and of course the inpainting, went much more smoothly,” Thompson says.

Finally, Hammersley was hands-on all the way through the production of a painting—from concept to hanging—and that included making his own stretcher bars (the wooden supports onto which the painting was affixed) and frames.

With Couplet, Hammersley records the unusual use of 1-inch half-rounds (imagine a wooden dowel, cut lengthwise) at the edges of these. “We could have maybe figured it out based on deformation of the canvas,” Thompson suggests, noting some really obvious bulges. But Hammersley’s description made that deduction unnecessary.

Thompson made a mock-up of the stretcher bars and then found a firm that could do the necessary custom work. When she put it all together, it fit, Thompson says, “like a glove.”

Phenix notes that the soft edge of the canvas hardens the edges of the composition itself—which of course was the point. “The difference it makes in how you see the painting,” Phenix says, “is extraordinary.”

Peter BG Shoemaker is a Tbilisi-based writer and frequent contributor to El Palacio on conservation matters.

Peter BG Shoemaker is a Tbilisi-based writer and frequent contributor to El Palacio on conservation matters.

The Science behind Frederick Hammersley’s Modern Art

By Joseph Traugott

BY JOSEPH TRAUGOTT

I met Frederick Hammersley in the early 1980s. We bonded quickly around our shared penchant for making bad puns in public, and never apologizing to those who suffered from them. After making a particularly obnoxious pun, Hammersley would respond after a long pause, “Yes . . . okay.” Our friendship lasted until his death in 2009.

Puns dominate the titles he chose for many of his works, such as his computer drawing DO YOU Z (a play on the words “Do you see.”). He kept lists of words and phrases that could describe the actions of the forms in his art. Often Hammersley included small sketches of pieces alongside potential titles to keep the image in front of him as he freely associated words and images. When a phrase worked with a specific piece, he circled it, or underlined others. The freewheeling exchange with himself in one section (see first column below drawings on page 63) goes “mirror / mirror mirror / on the wall / complete with our / hand is to you / tootsie roll / square / uptight / yellow pages . . . .”

I’ve written about the range of Hammersley’s images, and curated the breadth of his artmaking in Visual Puns and Hard-Edge Poems: Works by Frederick Hammersley (Museum of Fine Art, Museum of New Mexico, 1999), but I never got it quite right, until now. I never understood he was tipping his hat to science, not art, with his compulsive activities. Hammersley fused together three seemingly contradictory aesthetic approaches in his studio: 1) He used science-like controlled experimentation to clarify ideas; 2) He then foiled them with his freewheeling “hunch” paintings, and 3) He finally emphasized his Modernist outlooks by enclosing his smaller works with funky frames that feign a lack of sophistication.

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Perhaps his pseudo-scientific approach jelled in the late 1940s when Hammersley taught himself to make lithographs, no mean feat. He printed an extended series of three-inch square images that explored the nature of modernist compositional ideas he discovered while a soldier in Europe at the end of World War II.

Hammersley’s notes foil the freewheeling title pages that act like free verse. But the compulsion in his written notes allowed him to repeat materials and images, and reject events that were unsatisfactory, just like a scientist. His note from a stenographer’s pad makes this point as he described Four awhile, a large square oil painting from 1974 with a punny title.

After his meticulous production of experimental lithographs during the late 1940s, Hammersley moved in the opposite direction: his hunch drawings and paintings. With these works, he would draw a line or paint a shape in color, and then wait for a hunch before making the next move. In some ways Hammersley’s hunch paintings were like playing chess with himself. Sometime his hunch worked well, and other times the next element had to correct a previous mistake.

Hammersley continuously flipped between science and his intuition, both based on years of visual thinking: small scientific lithographs, large hunch paintings, large geometric works noted for their pristine “hard edges,” organic paintings that moved from hunch to hunch, a series of computer drawings created through punch cards directing a mainframe computer, and then back to the hunches with a long series of small organic works.

You may have already noted Hammersley’s unusual frames; they look like something an outsider artist might make from found objects. Aesthetically, these handmade frames were diametrically opposed to his sophisticated imagery. But this unique synthesis made his jewel-like small prints, paintings, and photographs sing in a harmony that is difficult to realize. An incredible achievement. Or as Hammersley would say, “Yes, okay. . . . Marrrvelous.”

Joseph Traugott is the former curator of twentieth-century art at New Mexico Museum of Art, and a member of the Frederick Hammersley Foundation board of directors.

Joseph Traugott is the former curator of twentieth-century art at New Mexico Museum of Art, and a member of the Frederick Hammersley Foundation board of directors.

The Petition(-ing, er) of Peace(-ful)(mak -ing, -er)

By Esther Belin

BY ESTHER G. BELIN

This poem accompanies Hampton Sides’s story, “Straight Back to Our Own Country.”

How can the spine of a synapse misalign, or be removed?
And what of the gorge-forming groans Dinétah has spoken?
And who is tending the fields that hold the tádídíín of peace?
And where is the sacred horizon from the morning star of strength?
If I were to be the last testimony of memory,
I would tether to the prayers and songs still lingering in the land.

O to be cleansed, purified by the essence of hard goods, a vertebra for the land
I ascend to the clifftops, carrying my soft goods, fragmented thoughts removed
At the doorway, I petition the sentinels for passage, for the weaponry of memory
Recorded as the Long Walk of the Navajo, millions of neurons synapse when Hwééldi is spoken
Millions of tears flood arroyos, carrying away the debris from Fort Sumner, restoring strength
Like the rhythmic wefts of wool tamped down by a master weaver’s caress, peace

Ahéhee’ shidine’é, I am the future generations the People prayed for to live in peace
I am the tempestuous arroyo sprouting, expansive as hardy seed rooting in desert land,
I am the embodiment of this year’s planting season, my whole being drawing upon the strength
The stories, the hand-sewn strips of cloth and feeble rations reformed, the suffering removed
I am the receiver of blessings, extending the wind of Bíla’ Ashdla’ii, prayer offerings spoken
Over Diné, over me, below me, above me, before me, behind me, beside me, inside memory

An arrow awakening my spine, synaptic screams, seared flesh, colonial clusters clogging memory
O how I seek the fractured precious stones and suck, sharpening, scarring, polishing peace
Makers, O to be joined with the shed blood of shidine’é, shimásání dóó shicheii hól , jiní.
They were attacked on all sides, jiní. The enemy looked like your neighbor, jiní. The land
Was scorched—cornfields, orchards, waterholes destroyed, the People forcibly removed,
Captive, some escaped to canyons, some perished, some walked in collective strength

The Long Walk to a military fort, 300 miles away from the boundary mountains, dził, dziil
Buried deep in the marrow of the People, a repository of forgotten and folded memory
Adornment of white shell, sparkling stones, and corn pollens—beauty not to be removed
The remaining earth I will walk, its thoughts are my thoughts, its peace is my peace,
Its beauty is my beauty with movement like a rainbow extending east to west over the land,
Over the Emergence Place where earth and sky meet, the original teachings are spoken

The original teachings bless, bik’eh hozhoo shidine’é, we live by the words that are spoken,
We are the remnant restored, we carry the internal wind of prayers and actions of strength,
We declare a new dawning, a piercing white sun beam to emerge from a devastated land!
Our hope is intertwined as a braided yucca leaf rope, a tannic testimony of memory,
A stronghold, hooghan – a refuge from historic trauma, so-called Agreements of Peace
From this place of Pity, we marked the earth, footprints, fallen warriors, firmament removed

O diné bikéyah, O enduring land, May you be healed with the daily prayers spoken
O shidine’é, May the captive veil be removed, May the Blessingway restore strength
O God diyin, May you keep us in your Memory, Bind us with protective arrows of Peace

ARTIST STATEMENT

This poem is inspired by the living descendants of the People. The poem is written as a sestina, which is a form that weaves a lexical repetition of six words at the end of each six-lined stanza, and there are six stanzas with a final triplet that completes the poem. I have woven in the Diné language, bizaad, as well, and even used the equivalent as part of the pattern of six words. I was also inspired by fellow poet Luci Tapahonso, who has written several beautiful sestinas. The title is my play on language. It is an interactive title and gives choice to the reader. The variations are numerous and dependent on the reader: The Petitioning of Peace or The Petitioner of Peacemaking or The Petition of Peacemaker, etc.

Esther Belin is a writer and multi-media artist. In 2000, her first book of poetry, From the Belly of My Beauty, won the American Book Award. She holds degrees from Antioch University, IAIA, and UC Berkeley. She is a Navajo Nation citizen and lives in southwest Colorado with her four daughters and husband.

Esther Belin (opens in a new tab) is a writer and multi-media artist. In 2000, her first book of poetry, From the Belly of My Beauty, won the American Book Award. She holds degrees from Antioch University, IAIA, and UC Berkeley. She is a Navajo Nation citizen and lives in southwest Colorado with her four daughters and husband.

Unnatural Resources

Indigenous artists from the two different hemispheres talk trash—and discuss the vital alchemies of their art-making

By Amy Groleau and Marla Redcorn-Miller

BY AMY GROLEAU AND MARLA REDCORN-MILLER

As artists, Aymar Ccopacatty (Aymara) and Nora Naranjo Morse (Santa Clara Pueblo) each explore the question of non-biodegradable waste in Native communities through their art. Independently and on separate continents, Ccopacatty and Naranjo Morse both noted the overshadowing presence of landfills on their respective ancestral lands, and saw the trash as a kind of natural resource—similar to the way that artists have harvested natural fibers from sheep to make weavings, or pulled clay from the earth to make pottery.

Ccopacatty, who grew up in a textile-producing community in Peru where wool and camelid fiber were the predominant natural resources from which to weave and knit, now uses plastic bags and trash found in and around Lake Titicaca for weaving. Naranjo Morse, who was raised in a family of potters in northern New Mexico, produces kinetic mixed-media sculptures from the refuse found in the landfill outside of Santa Clara Pueblo. Both artists apply traditional core values of resourcefulness, ingenuity, and respect for the environment in a decidedly unromanticized, modern context. As the following telephone conversation unfolds, old dichotomies, such as traditional versus contemporary or natural versus synthetic, are absorbed into their projects—then dissolve as they work through and reconfigure what it means to practice art as an indigenous artist in today’s world.

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Nora Naranjo Morse: I’m curious about where you live, what the landscape looks like, and how you got interested in making art this way.

Aymar Ccopacatty: My family is from Lake Titicaca in Peru. It’s on the border with Bolivia, and that is kind of where the influence and techniques come from for weaving, knitting, crochet, braiding: many creative fiber art techniques from the Aymara tradition and colonial European influences. My mother is from the U.S., so I’ve always been back and forth between places. But the traditions of textiles, and the native language, Aymara, have definitely really impacted me. At 12,000 feet, the landscape in Peru is very mountainous and dry. There are a lot of uses of natural resources; my people make braided rope and reed boats out of tall grasses. There are a lot of old traditions and handwork still in daily life. The people have a self-sufficient farming lifestyle.

I realized when I was twelve years old that if I didn’t learn a lot of these weaving techniques, they might be lost, both within my family—my grandmother just passed away about eight years ago—and in the larger community. I remember when my family got electricity in the nineties. The Socca community doesn’t yet have to pay taxes because they are a Native community, but the government is trying to erase those lines and make them like any other municipality of Peru that receives funds from the government. The Peruvian government is big on records; they want to push birth certificates and death certificates. My community faces the challenge of maintaining traditions in the face of overwhelming government interventions on all levels, aimed at homogenization of a very diverse, multilingual area.

Nora: My community, Santa Clara Pueblo, used to be agrarian, but now we are dependent on food sources from outside of the community. Santa Clara has also been inundated with social and cultural transformation. We are struggling with these shifts in our communities, and struggling with the consequences every single day. One of those shifts prompted me to start looking at what we’re embracing as contemporary Native people. We are consumers now, going to Walmart with our meager incomes and buying a lot of plastic-based products, and then basically throwing that stuff away at our community dump. One day when I went to gather clay—something that I had been doing almost all my life—I saw so much discarded material in close proximity to a traditional clay pit, and I was greatly affected.

At that moment, I realized I’d been living in denial about what I consumed and how and where I discarded waste. Without reasoning why, I walked into the dump and started collecting everything from plastic to fencing wire. I took it to my studio and started cleaning it up. I began deconstructing the materials I had collected, but in a way, I was also deconstructing my own attitudes as a consumer. I began to question so many issues. What did it meant to be a contemporary Native person consuming in this sort of careless manner, especially since I was raised with an entirely different value system and consciousness?

Stepping into this new creative portal has transformed me and the way I make art. I now am reconstructing my attitudes and creative intention concerning my work, culture, and community. Since this realization I’m even more determined to challenge expectations by a non-Native audience of what Pueblo clay art should look like. This makes earning a living far more challenging, but in the end, protecting my creative and cultural integrity is most important to me.

Aymar: It is absolutely tormenting. I have bags of plastic that I brought from my community [near Puno, Peru] all the way to where I am now in Rhode Island. And it is sitting there, and it is some kind of an experiment, because supposedly some of it is actually supposed to biodegrade with time, and break up. And some of it does and some of it doesn’t. Some of us can just go on living in a dream state of ignoring reality, and some of us just can’t take it and have to sit there and do this dance with it. I spent a year asking that stuff: Who are you? Where do you come from? Why are you here?

I make these pompon kind of things from plastic, which creates a thousand little pieces that are so small that I have these crazy thoughts of boiling it all up and trying to pour it into a mold. But then I’d be poisoning myself. I am not supposed to be burning and melting plastic, but I have these fantasies of finding a place for those small pieces, because it’s just painful to throw it in the trash when that’s the whole point: Get it out of the trash!

Nora: Well, that is what is so great about art. Art forces you to think out of the box, and traditionally, that’s what Pueblo people did all of the time. For my ancestors, thinking that way was a form of surviving. Trash is my biggest resource at this point, besides the clay and other organic materials I use in my work. Some of the pieces I made of trash are very tall, wire pieces; they are wonderfully kinetic. What I discovered with these pieces was that when the wind blew through the studio and caused movement, they would dance, but eventually topple over. I ended up making clay stabilizers for the bottom of the forms, so that they could still be kinetic, but they would be stabilized. What this meant to me is that whatever we do to this earth, it is still the stabilizing force of our existence.

Aymar: Wow, that’s a wonderful metaphor, because it’s the opposite of what we would like on so many levels. We would like to be without trash; I’m noticing the potent symbolism of counterbalancing the found materials (trash) with the clay, the Mother Earth. To participate in the modern world, you buy something—even if you are buying a necessary thing, like diapers—that will end up in a landfill. I have small children and diapers drive me crazy.

People are always really amazed by the stuff you can make in plastic, like textiles, but then they go back to seeing plastic as mundane, something they can throw out on the street. And it is just collecting. It just piles up. It can be really depressing, it can be really too much. Whatever you can do, keep that spark of energy, that original intent of an honest conversation with the refuse—so the refuse can be welcome. As weird as that sounds, that has to continue.

Nora: Yes, that is really true. I think the thing that keeps me going with this new creative expression is that I’m always going back to the main reference point: the Earth. As a contemporary Pueblo woman, I am articulating my relationship with the Earth. It’s a relationship that’s been influenced by the people that I come from. And how I articulate that in my work and share it with people, whether they understand it or not, is an important element in my process as a human being. It is my passion. I make art every day. It’s become a nutrient to my soul. And now I know, Aymar, that there is someone else, somewhere else, doing and thinking the same thing because that really does help, and I hope that someday we can cross paths so that we can continue this conversation.

You can see Ccopacatty’s sculpture Ch’ullu for a New Leader at the Museum of International Folk Art’s exhibition Crafting Memory: The Art of Community in Peru through March 2019. New works from Nora Naranjo Morse’s series Remembering will be coming to the streets of Albuquerque as the artist takes out bus ads to encourage others to remember and protect “the sacredness of life, no matter who we are, where we’re from, or where we’re going.” For more information on this project, visit noranaranjomorse.squarespace.com.

Amy Groleau is the curator of Latin American collections at the Museum of International Folk Art. Marla Redcorn-Miller is the deputy director of the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture.

Amy Groleau is a curator at the National Museum of the American Indian, part of the Smithsonian. She is a former curator of Latin American Folk Art at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Amy holds a PhD and MA in Anthropology from SUNY Binghamton and a BA in Anthropology from teh Unviersity of Massachusetts Amherst. Amy’s work focuses on contemporary and ancestral Andean history and material culture, craft traditions and popular arts in Latin America, post-conflict memory work, and art in service of community.

Marla Redcorn-Miller is the director of the Osage Nation Museum in Pawhuska, Oklahoma. She is also a former deputy director of the Museum of Indian Arts & Culture. Her interest in art and the museum field stems from the influence of her father, who was a prominent Osage artist, and her mother’s people from the Redstone Kiowa community. Other notable roles include education curator positions at the Museum of Contemporary Native Art in Santa Fe and the Thomas Gilcrease Institute of American History and Art in Tulsa. She has a BA in art history from Dartmouth College and an MPhil in art history from Columbia University.

Project Indigene in Action

By Amy Groleau, Dakota Mace (Diné), and Marla Redcorn-Miller

In the spring of 2018, eight dynamic Santa Fe cultural institutions joined forces in a collaboration called Project Indigene to examine perspectives and create awareness of some of the issues facing indigenous art: authenticity, appropriation, activism, and artistic identity.

These complex issues sparking public discourse are addressed in works in the permanent collections of these institutions, or works that will be investigated in upcoming exhibitions. It is critical to this collective to examine issues of copyright and intellectual property, to be mindful of the power dynamics in the telling of indigenous stories, and to engage critically with contemporary political and social issues that artists face.

The collaborative partners include the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (MoCNA), the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture (MIAC), the Museum of International Folk Art, the Native Treasures Art Market, the Ralph T. Coe Center for the Arts, the School for Advanced Research (SAR), the Southwestern Association for Indian Arts (SWAIA, Santa Fe Indian Market), and the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian. The project is supported by the Santa Fe Arts Commission.

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IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts

Without Boundaries is an exhibition that grew out of a series of curated conversations led by guest curator and artist Sonya Kelliher-Combs (Iñupiaq/Athabaskan) at the Anchorage Museum, Anchorage, Alaska. The exhibition features indigenous leaders in the arts and the work of contemporary artists that encourages social action. Through July 29, 2018.

Museum of Indian Arts and Culture

The work of artists in MIAC’s permanent collection will be examined within the perimeters of the four themes. These artists include Mateo Romero (Cochiti Pueblo), a writer, curator, educator, and painter whose narrative scenes deliver social commentary on the contemporary Rio Grande Pueblo world; David Bradley (Minnesota Chippewa) who merges pop culture icons, appropriations from art history, and references to indigenous civilizations throughout the Americas in his work as a way to explore social and political justice from a Native perspective; and Cannupa Hanska Luger (Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota, Austrian and Norwegian), a New Mexico-based, multi-disciplinary artist raised on the Standing Rock Reservation in North Dakota, who uses social collaboration and, in response to timely and site-specific issues, produces multi-pronged projects that take many forms.

Museum of International Folk Art

Crafting Memory: The Art of Community in Peru is on exhibit through March 8, 2019. This is an important exhibition of contemporary folk art that expresses political, economic, and environmental ideas, and uses memory and heritage to forge the future.

Native Treasures Art Market

This market, which has generated sales for Native American artists, takes place every year over Memorial Day weekend, this year on May 25–27, 2018. Many Native Treasures artists address hot-button issues through messaging in their art, and others produce unique art that continues to evolve their artistic identities. The work of Nocona Burgess (Comanche) and the 2018 MIAC Living Treasure Maria Samora (Taos Pueblo) will be examined.

Ralph T. Coe Center for the Arts

The exhibition IMPRINT opens August 14, with a reception from 5–7 p.m. IMPRINT brings art to the public and the public to art in widely accessible ways through the use of repurposed newspaper boxes, wheat-pasted posters around town, and free print giveaways. It includes six leading Native printmakers: Eliza Naranjo Morse, Jamison Cha¯ s Banks (Seneca-Cayuga, Cherokee), Jason Garcia (Santa Clara Pueblo Tewa), Terran Last Gun (Piikani), Dakota Mace (Diné (Navajo)), and Jacob Meders (Mechoopda/Maidu), along with Coe curators Bess Murphy and Nina Sanders (Apsáalooke) who have spent the past year working collaboratively to build IMPRINT. The exhibition will not only appear on the Coe Center walls, but in public spaces as well.

School of Advanced Research (SAR)

In 2018, SAR and the Indian Arts Research Center celebrate the 40th anniversary of the latter, and will recognize the creativity of Native American artist fellows, their accomplishments, and the last forty years of innovative programming. IARC presented the series Trailblazers and Boundary Breakers: Honoring Women in Native Art on March 28, April 4, 11, and 18. It examined the indelible impact, and often untold stories of Native American women in art. The series culminates in a celebratory event on June 22 at the Poeh Cultural Center, where Nora Naranjo Morse will be presented with a a lifetime achievement award..

Southwestern Association for Indian Arts (SWAIA, Santa Fe Indian Market)

At Santa Fe Indian Market (August 18 and 19, 2018), authenticity is paramount. All participating artists must be enrolled members of a federally recognized U.S. tribe or Canadian First Nation. As a 100 percent juried show, in which artists must follow standards of quality, buyers are guaranteed only the best handmade work. In addition, individual artistic identity and expression are encouraged at Indian Market. Visitors will see both extremely traditional and highly contemporary works on display. Artists making political statements and social commentary are not controlled or censored by SWAIA. Themes of activism and appropriation are explored during Indian Market’s panel discussions on the Plaza, which are co-sponsored by the Native American Rights Fund.

The Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian

On exhibit through October 7, 2018: Memory Weaving: Works by Melanie Yazzie will feature works on paper and sculptures by the prolific Navajo artist. Peshlakai Vision will also be on exhibit through October 7, 2018. It is the first solo museum exhibition to honor master Navajo silversmith Norbert Peshlakai (born 1953, Fort Defiance, Arizona; Towering House Clan), whose career spans over 40 years. Peshlakai Vision will feature over one hundred pieces, including jewelry, vessels, and small sculptural works in gold and silver, inlaid with precious materials arked with Peshlakai’s signature stampwork.

Dakota Mace (Diné) (opens in a new tab) is an interdisciplinary artist who focuses on translating the language of Diné history and beliefs. Mace received her MA and MFA degrees in Photography and Textile Design at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her BFA in Photography from the Institute of American Indian Arts. As a Diné (Navajo) artist, her work draws from the history of her Diné heritage, exploring the themes of family lineage, community, and identity through alternative photography techniques, weaving, beadwork, and papermaking. She is an MFA in Studio Arts Faculty member at the Institute of American Indian Arts and the photographer for the Helen Louise Allen Textile Center and the Center of Design and Material Culture. Her work is in the collections of the Library of Congress, Forge Project Collection, Whitney Museum of American Art, Everson Museum of Art, Amon Carter Museum, National Gallery of Art, Museum of Contemporary Photography among other public collections.

Fundamentals for a Diné Gathering

By Luci Tapahonso

BY LUCI TAPAHONSO

The enticing scents and dishes of a Diné family meal are always accompanied by children running around and playing nearby, dogs who have that hungry look, and quiet teenagers who lounge about and sometimes help cook and serve. And the large get-togethers are replete with stories, laughter, and sometimes, nostalgic tears. Our family gatherings usually take place at my late parents’ home in Shiprock, which faces Dzil Náóooldilii (Huerfano Mountain), one of the six sacred mountains

Interestingly, the main dishes at these gatherings are connected to the sacred mountains which outline Dinétah (Navajo homeland), and the places where our primordial deity, Changing Woman, was born and raised. It is said that when the world was created by the Holy People, they placed sacred mountains in each direction to designate boundaries. In the north, they placed Dibé Nitsa, Big Horn Sheep, and thus, sheep and goats became a part of our tradition and lifestyle. Traditional stories also teach that the holy people, First Man and First Woman, were made from perfect ears of white and yellow corn, and thus nadáá, corn, also holds deep spiritual and cultural significance.

When our families gather in the house where we were raised, we share memories of preparing food together. Although our parents have now passed on, the same atmosphere exists. We enjoy nitsidigo’i (kneel down bread) or other corn dishes, tortillas, fry bread, coffee, lemonade, and tasty courses of mutton or lamb. New generations of children play and run about and the dogs still hope for a bit of food amid stories and laughter.

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CORN

I remember the early summer mornings when our parents went to the corn field to collect pollen from the tips of the stalks. They prayed as they carefully shook the fine yellow powder into a white enamel bowl. The bowl of pollen was set out of reach on a high shelf. It is an essential element in prayers and ceremonies and is considered food of the Holy People.

In summer, we children slept in a chaha’oh, a shade house constructed of leafy tree limbs and logs. The night breezes and drifting sounds of sheep or goat bells and snorting horses lulled us to sleep. At dawn, we bounded out of bed and ran barefooted down the slight hill to the fields and orchard. There were just-ripened tomatoes, long crispy green beans, cantaloupes, watermelons with the telltale creamy oval resting on the damp soil, crisp apples, fuzzy peaches, apples, and bunches of purple and green grapes. We’d come back to the chaha’oh with armfuls of our spring efforts: planting, irrigating, hoeing and finally, harvest.

I also recall the making of nitsidigo’i. My mother asked the boys and men to dig a large, round hole about four feet deep which would serve as an oven for the nitsidigo’i. They built a fire alongside the oven.

Traditionally, the corn was ground while kneeling before a metate, or grinding stone, thus the name kneel down bread. Instead of a metate, we had a corn grinder attached to a pole between two trees. The entire process was a family endeavor. One child shucked the corn, another cut off the kernels (saving the corn liquid, or milk) and set aside the husks and corncobs—the husks to wrap the ground corn and the corncobs for the animals. The grinding of the corn required three or four helpers: one to feed the grinder, another to turn the handle, and still another to hold a bowl beneath for the ground meal. After filling several bowls, we stirred in the corn milk. One person held the husks open, and another poured the thick batter into the bowls of the husks. Then we folded the husks on both ends and tied them closed with thin strips of husk.

Meanwhile, those taking care of the fire spread hot coals into the pit, which were removed when the nitsidgo’i were ready to be placed on the hot bottom of the pit. We covered the nitsidgo’i with foil or a large piece of cardboard, shoveled dirt in, followed by a layer of hot coals, then topped it all with fresh kindling. The bread baked for an hour or so, and was nicely browned when unearthed.

The scent, taste, and texture of fresh nitsidigo’i is unsurpassed: sweet, chewy, and slightly crispy. Other delectable corn dishes include steamed or dried corn, ‘alkaan (sweet corn cake), k’íneesbízhii (corn dumplings) and leeh shibéézh (pit-steamed whole corn).

Nitsidigo’i is considered a delicacy and is especially cherished when made in this traditional way because of the family effort, from the initial planting to the underground baking. Another rare dish made similarly is the Kinaaldá cake, which is made only during a girl’s puberty ceremony. In this instance, the grinding and mixing of the corn batter is the primary duty of the Kinaaldá, as part of her introduction to womanhood.

The ceremonial Kinaaldá cake, nitsidigo’i, and nadaa lees’áán (cornbread patties) were the Navajo people’s only breads before flour was introduced in the late 1800s, when our ancestors were captives at Fort Sumner. Thereafter flour, salt, baking powder, and lard became staples that we transformed into thick, tasty tortillas and fluffy fry bread. Coffee was also introduced to the Diné table during this time; the combination of corn breads and cakes and black coffee remains a favorite.

MUTTON AND LAMB

Similar to corn, sheep figure prominently in Navajo philosophy and lifeways. Spider Woman, a holy person, taught women to weave so that they could contribute equally to a household and to the community. Her husband, Spider Man, constructed a loom, a symbolic replication of the Diné world view. These tapestries made from wool have evolved into refined works of art which contain intricate creation stories, prayers, ritual songs, and ancient ceremonies. Sheep and goat wool also provide blankets, clothes, toys, and bedding. Early on, bones were made into knives, needles, serving ware, hoes, and other utensils.

It is said that “sheep are our parents.” They nurture us, clothe us, keep us warm, and provide companionship. They also symbolize mental and spiritual well-being, and embody healing qualities. When feeling ill or lonely or depressed, we are encouraged to eat a bowl of mutton stew. It’s one of those entrées that elicits the remembrance of specific events, family members, the scent of a particular place or season, and the voices of loved ones. Stews and freshly made breads are the essence of what it means “to eat for” someone in celebration of a graduation, new job, homecoming, birthday, or other success.

Mutton and lamb dishes are imaginative and varied. Roasted mutton/lamb sandwiches on a tortilla or fry bread are a favorite at roadside food stands, and garnishes vary by region. When we order sandwiches with green chile, it signals that we’re from “around Shiprock.” Navajos in Arizona favor lettuce, onions, and tomatoes instead.

Food that is cooked on an open fire lends a distinct flavor to everything; the scents mingle with the shouts of children, dogs barking, and laughter. As we move to tables, other classic dishes appear, including the ubiquitous pink or green stuff that consists of marshmallows, cottage cheese and canned fruit; potato and green salads, yeast bread, lemonade or Kool-Aid, fast-food chicken, baked pastries, and ice cream. Other typical dishes include pueblo oven bread, pinto beans, and Jell-O with whipped cream.

There are always a few minutes of stillness when the blessing is offered. Even the dogs pause and lie down. Little ones run to be held by their parents or siblings. The prayer evokes the Holy Ones, the sacred mountains, nearby irrigation ditches and river, the compassion and teachings of our parents and other elders, the fields that continue to sustain us, the animals, and finally, our families, which are both nearby and widespread.

Prayer, gratitude, and memory are the required appetizers and desserts which complete the quintessential family dinner of corn, bread, coffee, and mutton.

In writing this, I remembered that in my father’s final weeks, he consumed only blue corn mush and water, which had provided sustenance for all of his 101 years.

Luci Tapahonso is the inaugural Poet Laureate (2013–2015) of the Navajo Nation, and Professor Emerita of English Literature and Languages (University of New Mexico).

Luci Tapahonso is the inaugural Poet Laureate (2013–2015) of the Navajo Nation, and Professor Emerita of English Literature and Languages at the University of New Mexico.