Lifetime Achievement Awards
Honoring the Elders
Photo courtesy The Dept. Cultural Affairs
Sculptor Michael Naranjo, one of the recipients of SWAIA's Lifetime Achievement Awards
Michael Naranjo
Michael Naranjo jokes that he’s “much too young” to be receiving a Lifetime Achievement Award. Yet the Santa Clara Pueblo sculptor has perhaps experienced more in his 62 years than many with a couple more decades under their belts. Born into a family of renowned Santa Clara potters and artists, Naranjo spent much of his childhood helping his mother prepare clay and exploring the mountains and canyons of Northern New Mexico. When he was 23, he lost his sight completely, and most of the use of one hand, in a grenade explosion in Vietnam. As he recuperated, the familiar feel of clay in his hands helped set him on the road to healing.
As a young man, Naranjo was given special permission to caress the cool marble of Michelangelo’s David in Florence, and was invited into the Louvre when the museum was closed, to touch the Venus de Milo. These experiences stayed with him, and not only as artistic inspiration for his own sculptural work with bronze and stone. A retrospective, long-term exhibition of his figurative sculpture, in the Atrium Gallery of the Bataan Memorial Building in Santa Fe, was designed expressly for tactile appreciation. Naranjo and his wife, Laurie, have also established the Touched by Art Fund, through the Santa Fe Community Foundation, to offer area schools and teachers the means to take young people to museums.
These days Naranjo’s award-winning sculpture explores the forms of animals, Native dancers, and nudes. And while his work is in such collections as the Vatican, the White House, and Phoenix’s Heard Museum, Naranjo is a strong critic of his own art. “It’s hard to stop working on a piece sometimes,” he admits. “I keep thinking I can always make it just a little better.”
Pearl Sunrise
In 1988, when Pearl Sunrise learned she had received a Fulbright scholarship to spend time in New Zealand, her brothers teased her, saying the people down there must 
have heard she was a good sheepherder. In fact, the third-generation Navajo weaver and teacher absorbed and practiced many cultural values and skills while caring for sheep. As a young girl, her mother would send her out with the animals, giving her wool to card and spin; later she took along a small loom. And, as many hours as she herded, she sang, teaching herself the traditional social and ceremonial songs she had heard her father sing.
Since that time Sunrise has journeyed far from her childhood home on the Navajo reservation. With a B.A. and master’s degree in education, she has taught textile arts at numerous colleges and universities. She has traveled as a cultural ambassador to South Africa and Canada, and in 1988 she received the Governor’s Award for Outstanding New Mexico Women. At Santa Fe Indian Market and elsewhere, she has earned accolades for her weavings, which combine traditional and contemporary elements. She’s been an Indian Market judge, SWAIA board member, and New Mexico arts commissioner, and served as an adviser for the National Museum of the American Indian when it opened in 2004 in Washington, D.C.
Today, Sunrise lives in Albuquerque—where she still dyes wool in her backyard. She teaches fiber arts and the Navajo language at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. Weaving is “very connected with all aspects of life and the way I perceive the world,” she says, her voice soft and bright. “When I travel around the world it keeps me in balance in harmonious ways; it keeps me strong and makes me feel connected to my ancestors. I carry it with me, and I renew it when I come home.”
Harry Fonseca
Harry Fonseca (1946–2006) could have coasted on the popularity of his iconic Coyote and Rose paintings and never veered off the comfortable course of commercial success. But Fonseca, a contemporary artist of Maidu, Hawaiian, and Portuguese heritage, was not one to stay still—and through the wealth of experiences and influences he opened himself to in his 60 years, his art was constantly transformed.
Fonseca grew up in California and was a longtime Santa Fe resident when he died last year. As a young man he was deeply inspired by learning about his Maidu culture, hearing his people’s creation story, and taking part in traditional dances. He began studying art at Sacramento City College but soon stepped away from formal instruction, relying instead on his own vision and sense of artistic process. Fonseca’s earliest drawings, paintings, and prints reflected geometric designs and warm colors from the Maidu’s basketry and dance regalia, yet he also readily acknowledged the impact of Abstract Expressionism on his art.
Coyote and Rose first showed up in his paintings in 1979. With humor and wit, these works held up a mirror to society, American Indian experience, and art. Sneaker-wearing Coyote appeared in contemporary settings like the Santa Fe Opera and tribal casinos. These images recurred periodically into the early 1990s and could have continued, no doubt, but Fonseca moved on. Traveling widely to lecture and paint, he visited Japan, Venezuela, New Zealand, and Europe, absorbing influences and bringing them into an ever-changing body of work. Among other honors over the years, he took part in the Venice Biennale in 1999, and received the 2004 Allan Houser Memorial Award.
“Harry should be inspirational to us all,” says one of Fonseca’s many friends and admirers, Chiricahua Apache sculptor Bob Haozous. “He took a lucrative career, found it unsatisfying, and went on to something less marketable.” Constant artistic exploration, Haozous remembers, is what satisfied Fonseca’s creative spirit. Adds Fonseca’s daughter Sarah, “He wanted to stay true to himself. He did art because it was what he loved to do.”
Peter Garcia
As head singer at San Juan Pueblo (now Ohkay Owingeh) for many years, Peter Garcia (1927–2001) continued a tradition that had been in his family for generations: 
preserving the pueblo’s age-old songs and dances, composing new ones, and leading the other singers as they provided words and music for dances and ceremony. It was a role Garcia’s brother held before him. The brothers learned the old songs from their father, who learned from his father. “At home, all they would do was sing,” says Peter Garcia, Jr., his son, who is continuing the family’s long practice of preserving and teaching his people’s culture.
Garcia’s influence extended well beyond the pueblo. Over the years he traveled around the country—including to the Smithsonian—and internationally, sharing his knowledge of pueblo life. He made numerous recordings of Tewa songs, many of which are still requested on radio programs devoted to Native music. Closer to home, Garcia sang and recorded songs for Ohkay Owingeh’s schoolchildren. He choreographed and taught drum-led Tewa dances and songs to the people of Pojoaque Pueblo, whose own traditions had been interrupted by invasion and disease that left the pueblo virtually abandoned in the early 1900s. Garcia also formed a dance group with his children and grandchildren, performing at Bandelier National Monument and other sites.
“He was a very passionate individual when it came to our tradition. He believed in it wholeheartedly,” says Garcia, Jr., who describes his father as a good-humored, talkative man who loved to tell jokes and was known to break into laughter before he reached the punch line. When it came to Tewa culture, though, he was seriously committed. “The way he saw it, the Europeans came and tried to take away our right to believe in what we believe. But we persevered.”
Lydia Pesata
Lydia Pesata recalls the advice she received from her husband’s grandmother when she was a young wife first learning to weave baskets: “Start early in the morning, she 
says, because as a mother you can’t be making baskets all day. When the children get up, you’ll have to stop.”
The master basketmaker, now 65, grew up and still lives in Dulce, on the Jicarilla Apache reservation in Northern New Mexico. She heeded the elder woman’s counsel, and when Pesata’s own five children were old enough she passed on the traditional arts in which she was skilled: coiled baskets, beadwork, moccasin making, and micaceous pottery. She taught basketmaking to students at the Dulce Public School and the Jicarilla Cultural Resource Center, among other places. Later she presented demonstrations at the Smithsonian Institution’s Folk Life Festival and the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.
“I wanted other people to learn, because I had a hard time learning myself,” says the friendly, soft-spoken artist. While the basketmaking women in her husband’s family offered pointers, Pesata believes that only with experience can anyone master the labor-intensive processes of collecting, preparing, and working with willow and sumac in the traditional way. Thin branches must be collected in the spring and fall. The sticks are split and the core removed, leaving the wood next to the bark for weaving. Plant materials, including berries, sumac leaves and bark, and mountain mahogany root are used to produce dyes for the multicolored baskets.
Pesata earned the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts in 1988, and her baskets are in the permanent collection of the Denver Museum of Natural History. After all these years, she still finds inspiration and simple pleasure in her work. “My favorite pastime,” she says, “is just to sit there and enjoy making baskets.”
