Pueblo Couture
Virgil Ortiz—potter, designer, and all-around Renaissance man
Cashmere sweaters, silk scarves, leatherwork, pottery. Carpets, bedding, tapestries, pottery. Jewelry, painting, film, pottery. Pottery, pottery, pottery. “Everything orbits around the pottery,” says Virgil Ortiz, the multi-talented 40-year-old Renaissance man from Cochiti Pueblo.
“Everything,” in Ortiz’s case, being his fashion and hospitality designs, and various other examples of fine art. In addition to arriving at this year’s Indian Market with his most ambitious show to date (“I’ll have 15 pieces, whereas usually there are only about seven,” says Ortiz, “and all of them are really huge”), the 2006 Indian Market poster-award winner will be offering up a sneak peek at his VO Home Décor Collection of interior designs and home furnishings, as well as his 2010 Vagabond fashion line.
People respond to Ortiz because he’s as bold and daring as Jean Paul Gaultier or Isaac Mizrahi, and his Vagabond creations, like his pottery, are as eye-popping as they are complementary. “What Vagabond represents to me,” explains Ortiz, who still lives and works in Cochiti, “is when Native Americans started slowly seeing non-Natives coming around, they looked like freaks. Actually, both sides looked at each other as freaks.”
In fact, Ortiz’s fascination with all these freakish outsiders harkens back to a longstanding Cochiti artistic in-joke: In the late 1800s, the Cochiti depicted these non-Native oddballs in clay figurines called monos (Spanish for “monkeys”), then sold them to these unsuspecting odd-wads as collectibles—the non-Natives not realizing that the Cochiti were making fun of them while making money off of them as well.
Ortiz, though, whose mother (the renowned potter Seferina Ortiz) died two years ago, isn’t so much making fun of anyone as blending the traditional with the contemporary—and executing both with precision and panache. And aiming at a higher purpose—to use these images and designs as educational tools. “I’m completely blessed,” says Ortiz, who also founded a nonprofit that introduces kids from Cochiti to language, art, and fashion. “Everything I do is to help the kids. Everything comes full circle. Everything comes back to the pottery—and to language, to art, to kids.”
