Indian Market Award Winner
The History Makers
LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT RECIPIENTS: SAM ENGLISH, SOFIA MEDINA, AND OSCAR HOWE (not pictured)
Sam English
The phrase “art heals” might sound cliché, but Ojibwe painter Sam English is living testament that it actually can. Long before overcoming his struggle with alcoholism, English—who’s as open about his personal life as he is about his art—experienced a spiritual awakening in Albuquerque’s Old Town, one that foretold his future as a painter. “I was standing on the south side of the plaza, looking at the church, when suddenly something told me that I would be here and have a gallery,” recalls English, 67. Indeed, in 1982 he opened his first gallery. Even better, by that time he’d not only realized his dream of becoming a professional artist; he’d achieved sobriety as well.
Since then, English has made it his mission to give back to his community, donating both his time and his art to auctions, events, books, and posters—anything that supports American Indian advocacy work. Currently, with the help of the Kellogg Foundation, he is donating 300 copies of his new book, Sam English—The Life, Work, and Times of An Artist, to libraries serving Native peoples.
Still sober and still painting, English continues to work out of his Albuquerque studio, creating his trademark elongated figures and scenes from contemporary Indian life. These days, though, he’s using oil and acrylic, having left behind the watercolors of his earlier works. He admits to being shocked—and honored—when told he’d been chosen for a Lifetime Achievement award. “My family and friends are extremely proud that I received this award,” says English. “And to be associated at the same time with one of my mentors, Oscar Howe . . . what more could one ask for?”
Sofia Medina
Sofia Medina carries herself no differently than most of her fellow Zia Pueblo grandmothers: soft-spoken, humble, giving. Born on the pueblo in 1932, she learned how to make pottery from her husband’s grandmother, fellow pottery matriarch Trinidad Medina. Like Trinidad, Sofia has passed on her pottery-making knowledge to a younger generation, including all eight of her children.
Infusing each of her hand-coiled pieces with song and prayer, Medina crafts ollas and bowls that come to life with earthy multicolored birds and geometric designs. “She is part of the continuum of Zia pottery,” says Bruce Bernstein, SWAIA’s executive director. “Carrying forward the beauty that exemplifies Zia pottery.”
Collected at institutions such as Harvard University and the Peabody Essex Museum, and featured in the Albuquerque Museum’s 1979 One Space, Three Visions exhibit, Medina continues to carry Zia pottery forward. “She exemplifies the inseparability between life and pottery making,” adds Bernstein, “and has been able to share the values of her community to a world audience.”
Oscar Howe
Overcoming obstacles in pursuit of his art was a constant for Yanktonai Sioux painter Oscar Howe (1915–1983). As a teenager, he suffered from tuberculosis before enrolling in an art program at Santa Fe’s Indian School. And in 1958, when judges from the National Indian Painting Competition at the Philbrook Museum in Tulsa, Oklahoma rejected his entry as not traditional enough, Howe responded, “Are we to be herded like a bunch of sheep,” he wrote, “with no right for individualism, dictated to as the Indian has always been, put on reservations and treated like a child?” Shortly thereafter, the museum changed its guidelines.
“It is my greatest hope that my paintings may serve to bring the best thing of Indian culture into the modern way of life,” Howe once said. Having taught hundreds of University of South Dakota students over a 25-year period, taken part in more than 60 solo exhibitions, and tirelessly advocated for Native people via the arts, it is hard to argue that he did anything less.
FELLOWSHIP RECIPIENTS: PHILLIP CHARETTE, LIZ WALLACE,
JARED CHAVEZ, SHELDON NUNEZ-VELARDE, AND DANIEL MOYA (not pictured)
Liz Wallace
One day, when Liz Wallace was young, her father showed her a book titled The Master Jewelers. “Up until then I thought he was the best,” says Wallace. At that time, her father, Alan Wallace, was an acclaimed jewelry maker, and exhibited at Indian Market. The book, though, showcased designs and works by international stars such as René Lalique, Charles Lewis Tiffany, and Peter Carl Fabergé. After that, simply making good jewelry—in Wallace’s mind—would not suffice. “I always remembered how haunting it was,” recalls Wallace, now 33. “If I could make art like that . . .” she says, trailing off in wonder.
Now a master jeweler herself, Wallace, of Navajo and Washoe/Maidu heritage, creates gracefully crafted bracelets, pendants, and tiaras. Still, “It’s so labor-intensive I can’t do it a lot,” admits Wallace. Which is why, in between such concentrated work, she switches gears: her butterfly pendants, and cicadas and starfish, are wildly popular. “I need to do these things that get my juices flowing and then the major projects go easier,” she says.
Wallace credits Indian Market, and its roaming community, with contributing to her creative flow. “We all travel the same circuit,” she says. “We go to the Indian Market, to other shows, and to New York. We eat together, drink together, and exchange ideas and information.”
As for the fellowship money, Wallace has already used some of it to set up her website, www.lizwallacerocks.com. Her original goal, however, remains the same: making great jewelry, and making it great by working with the materials. “They tell me what they need to be,” she says. “Especially the stones.”
Phillip Charette
Phillip Charette, whose Alaskan Yup’ik name, Aarnaquq, means “the dangerous one,” integrates past and present into both his work and his life. Aarnaquq, for example, came down to him from his great-great grandfather, who in Yup’ik tradition now abides in and as—or as part of—Charette. And his masks, which range from the playfulness of a child’s awe-filled expression to a sage storyteller with a cheek wet with tears, betray a sense of the tension that lies between the now and a past one can only sense. “I’m not just making art,” he says. “I’m doing art and culture and all that’s tied with it—carrying our values forward. The masks make the intangible, tangible.”
Charette, 47, has the talent for transforming many an intangible into the tangible—fast—and no matter what the medium—metal, feathers, glass. He remembers taking just one pottery class before being asked to teach the course himself. “It just happens naturally,” he says. “That’s part of who your spirit is—you’ve already done it in the past.” Despite that knowledge, however, Charette hasn’t had the right equipment, something the fellowship will allow him either to acquire or build himself, such as a small forge and a blast furnace.
Charette, who also plays the flute and tells traditional Yup’ik stories, acts as the point man for other Alaskan artists, ushering their voices into the larger world. “I’m introducing a different style of art,” emphasizes Charette. And one of his greatest partners in this endeavor has been Indian Market. Of the experience, he says, “We hang out with each other and support each other.” www.yupikmask.com
Daniel Moya
Daniel Moya, a Tewa, may hail from New Mexico’s Pojoaue Pueblo, but he creates from an international palette. Having traqveled extensively as a child, with grandparents who took him all over the U.S. and to Mexico, Moya deveopled an interest in cultures far outside his own.
Nevertheless, there was a moment when his destiny appeared far more circumscribed—when he found a well-paying gig as a casino supervisor. Having worked with clay in his younger years, though, he soon felt a higher calling; and when his pueblo sent him off to college, he rediscovered his desire to see the world, learn other languages, and expand his artistic ambit.Various study programs took him to Italy, Russia, China, and Mexico, where he studied art and language and met other indigenous peoples. “Learning from them was a big influence on my art, the way I live and the things I believe,” says Moya, 42. Today all that exposure to other cultures and other arts enhances Moya’s already Tewa-rich wall sculptures, two of which won awards at Indian Market in 2007 and 2008.
In the same way that his travels expanded his palette, so too has Indian Market. “The market has done so much for so many good people,” says Moya. “I love to see who does what each year because it helps me push my style.”
Moya plans to push himself and his art to even greater lengths with his Fellowship money: having recently purchased a set of Swiss-made tools (with hardwood handles), he has been using them to carve on his patio at nighttime, his most productive period. The works, combining cured aspen with gesso (a form of plaster), egg tempera paint, and pine sap, manifest images that come to him—as is fitting with nighttime sessions—in his dreams. www.tewa-art.com
Sheldon Nunz-Velarde
Flames. Flames are the key to Sheldon Nunez-Velarde’s pottery. Flames that dance across the surfaces of his golden micaceous pots, his water jars, his serving bowls. “The direct contact with the flames,” says Nunez-Velarde, 37, who grew up in Dulce, on northern New Mexico’s Jicarilla Apache reservation. “That’s what gives them the black spots.”
Having left New Mexico in 1992 to see the world (Russia, Brazil, New York), Nunez-Velarde returned home in 1998 to take care of his grandmother. That’s when he rediscovered his artistic and cultural roots and took on the task of reviving the tribal art form. “I always looked at my great-great grandmother’s pots and wanted to make them,” says Nunez-Velarde, whose vessels utilize some of her design elements, including ropes and zig-zags.
To enlighten others about the Jicarilla’s pottery traditions, Nunez-Velarde created www.jicarillaapachepottery.com, an online museum and gallery, which displays ancient pots. “Seeing them,” says Nunez-Velarde, “will help people understand our history.”
Jared Chavez
Jared Chavez’s silverwork often depicts a place with a flowing river, a starry sky, and stacked adobe homes. These images, among others, appear on his silver bracelets, rings, necklaces, earrings, and vessels, always united by highly polished, deeply textured tones. “I’m constantly drawing,” he says. “These go into the work and a personal narrative emerges—bits and pieces of my life.”
Though he spent a number of years away from his San Felipe pueblo in New Mexico (most notably studying digital art at Georgetown University in Washington D.C.), Chavez has always maintained a connection to his home and family. “I have a very close relationship with my dad,” says Chavez, 26. “We share a career, a studio, and we travel together.”
In fact, at age 12 Chavez shared his first Indian Market booth with his father, acclaimed jeweler Richard Chavez. Over time Jared Chavez developed his own following. “It wasn’t until my designs started to mature that I got recognized on my own,” says Chavez. “That really started at Indian Market.”
Hardly content to rest on their laurels, father and son continue to push themselves, artistically and businesswise. Jared has put part of his Fellowship money toward upgrading his and his father’s marketing materials, including their already-dynamic websites. “We aim for a very specific feeling,” explains Chavez of his internet creations, using words that could just as easily describe his silverwork. “Very sleek, very stark, with little distraction.” www.jaredchavez.com
POVIKA RECIPIENTS: BARBARA REBER, CHARLES DAILEY,
KENNETH CHAPMAN, AND THE MUSEUM OF NEW MEXICO
Barbara Reber
Barbara Reber’s involvement in Native American culture began in 1944, when she witnessed an Indian parade while she and her family were driving through Flagstaff, Arizona. Since then, her devotion to all things Native has only intensified: She has traveled throughout the Southwest, she’s woven her own Navajo-style rugs, and, most importantly, the former laboratory scientist who lives in Newport Beach, California has volunteered at Indian Market now for over two decades, often doing whatever need be done (selling Coca-Colas, receiving work from artists, or returning art after the judging is done).
“There are nearly 500 volunteers representing over 20,000 hours of work,” says SWAIA’s executive director, Bruce Bernstein. “To say that we couldn’t do it without them is an understatement. Barbara’s long, dedicated years of service, her exemplary work as a volunteer, and the fact that she represents this vital part of Indian Market is the reason we are honoring her this year.”
Charles Dailey
An unabashed culture junkie who has visited hundreds of museums throughout Europe and North America, Dailey, 74, taught for 36 years at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), then served as curator of the Museum of New Mexico for eight years. Now retired but still a volunteer docent once a week at the IAIA Museum, Dailey has had a lifelong interest in Native peoples. (He “lived on horseback” as a boy, made his own breechcloth, then got totally hooked on Indians after reading Mari Sandoz’s Crazy Horse.)
As one who acted as a Indian Market juror for 20 years and helped bring many an IAIA student to Market (back when a Darren Vigil Gray painting or a Doug Hyde sculpture could be had for $60 to $80), Dailey espouses the same philosophy today he impressed upon his IAIA students: “Find something that expresses your heart the best way you can, then try to perfect it.”
