Contemporary Art

June 12th, 2008

There were several poignant stories. One was the medicine man that stole a sacred female deity from the pueblo kiva and sold it to a collector back east. The people were devastated. The diety was located in a shop in New York city. She was returned to New Mexico and the Federal government claimed "as she had a value of over 100 dollars" they had jurisdiction. The head medicine man wept in anguish and shame that this great diety, this Great Goddess, was wrapped in a paper bag and exposed for all to see. The government won the case and the diety was returned to the rightful owner. A tribal court held another hearing against the man that had stolen the very sacred diety and in this hearing they also found he had sold one of his children for a bag of groceries. They decided in this hearing, rather than impose execution for these heinous crimes - the worst punishment of all would be the banishment of he and all heirs from the pueblo forever.

After remembering this story I wrote this poem;

MOTHER SPIRIT, EARTH MOTHER, GODDESS

Mother Spirit - Earth Mother
Goddess
What do you look like?
I strain my eyes and strain my eyes
and all I see is a Sistine Chapel god.

I have seen man-made images of you.
White men built vast temples for their man god
but for you,
a woman,
a tiny glass case in a museum
is
enough.
A tiny pedestal in a corner.

And the man-made images
Goddess
Are you the one with the long,
pendulous breasts.
Bulbous eyes and extended belly
squatting with your
huge vulva
shamelessly exposed?

Did you preside over swirling kiva smoke religious
ceremonies Koshare clowns eating watermelons, while
ancient medicine men teach pubescent girls to be
good wives after old women have broken hymens with
pointed sticks, their new blood staining the hard
mud floor? And children of this union, called "Altar Babies,"
that are sacrificed to you assuring fertility,
good crops, the rising sun perpetuated.

And the man-made images
Goddess
Are you the one
with shy eyes-
round, full breasts
with a
modest stone skirt
covering your
shameless vulva?

Or did you moisten the parched earth with gentle rains
that made the corn grow so tall I could hardly see
the clouds? Are you a stolen ripened cantaloupe?
Rivers were swam in naked like tadpoles, the silt
covering our summer bodies? The fish we laughingly
caught with our hands but could not keep "because they
are our brother"? Winds dancing over alfalfa fields?
Great flocks of tiny birds floating out in a yellow
haze from wild plum blossoms that lined the ditch?

Mother Spirit,
Goddess of nourishment,
Vessel of transformation,
Rain magic,
Animal voices,
Sacrifice,
Earth goddess,
Moon goddess of the night sky -
"our Mother who are everywhere - not just in heaven"
is that how I should address you?

June 18th, 2008

Growing up in the pueblo, in Northern New Mexico, I learned there was white man's time - a linear time, and there was Indian time. This time had many layers of reality or one could call it a universal movement. This is much of what Carlos Castenda was talking about in his series of books about Don Juan and a Yaqui way of knowledge. Also Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell wrote about this in their work on the Hero's journey - an altered reality.

I remember a pueblo boy that was a friend of mine. He had a scratched cornea and the eye doctor said that he should have surgery to correct the problem - a "simple surgery". Two times something happened to the transplant in transit - the third time, the plane carrying the corneal transplant crashed destroying the transplant. The medicine man - the Indian doctor - told them not to go ahead with the surgery as the signs clearly warned against it. The parents ignored the medicine man and listened to the white doctor. In surgery he was denied oxygen for a period of time and came out of surgery in a permanent vegetative state. The Santa Fe hospital tried to suppress the evidence.

This story reminds me of the recent Triple Crown horse race. The horse, Big Brown, was the darling of the press. He won the first race by seven lengths. In the second race he was racing neck and neck with the only filly in the race. Almost at the finish line, the filly, Eight Belles, collapsed and died and Big Brown surged ahead and won the second of the three races. As a Democrat, I told my friends that Hillary wasn't going to make it to the general election - a sign.

In the third and final race, with much expectation, Big Brown came in last in a field of seven with the New York times calling it "one of the biggest media hype debecales in racing history".

I told my friends that "Big Brown" wasn't going to make it in the general election and they asked me why. I answered that it is an interesting thing the parallel universe. And signs. And an altered reality.

Something is going to happen.

June 21st, 2008

Summer solstice was one of favorite times of the year. Summer at this time seemed to stand absolutely still - as if forever the air would smell of freshly mowed alfalfa, sunflowers, and Russian Olive trees in bloom. School was finally out!!!

Starting when I was four my father would take me once a week to Popovi Da's studio for art lessons. Po's mother was Maria Martinez, the famous potter that reintroduced black pottery making to the pueblo people. Po was a very contemporary abstract Santa Fe artist as well as a traditional artist in style. Po's son, Anthony, and I were best friends and we both set out to learn to paint in vivid colors. Maria would be there often with her gnarled brown hands shaping her pots. Maria tried to teach us how to make the pots but mine always turned out lopsided-and usually broke in firing. I didn't have the patience for it but Anthony went on to become an accomplished potter. I liked painting better and I spent many a summer day painting unaware of boundaries of time.

Then somewhere along the length of August, there came a day different from the rest - one that gave a sign of summers end. It may have been that the dirt road smelled like chalk dust, and the falling leaves. The sun cast longer shadows and tiny, painful knots of inevitability came upon me. Hated school would be starting again. Forever wasn't forever after all.

June 25th, 2008

It was a July day and I was 10 years old walking barefoot down the dirt road with a pueblo boy my same age. I had hazel eyes, long sun bleached pigtails and a sailor cap pulled low over my eyes. It was just before the pueblo feast day - a special time. It meant festival and celebration, remudding of houses in preparation for the big day. The road was lined with honeysuckle and alfalfa fields with the warm sweet fragrance of summer. We walked past Kramer Mercantile which was the hub of the pueblo. The mercantile was next door to the Catholic church and across from the convent. Also across the street was a small US post office where the old Hispanic Postmaster was always picking his nose and storing the big blobs of snot in a small tin container. Several horses and wagons were parked in front of the mercantile when a gun shot went off - then a wagon pulled by four horses came barreling down the road in a cloud of dust without a driver. My friend in one jump landed on the lead horse's back and brought the team to a halt. I thought my friend was the bravest person I would ever meet. When I told my parents, very enthusiastically the story, they both exclaimed in no uncertain terms, that they hoped I would "never do anything that stupid!!" Today's parents worry about drugs and alcohol - my parents had other worries.

The mercantile was a place where you could buy just about anything. Groceries, shawls, bright colored fabric, tractor parts, saddles, fencing, guns, watches, hoes, shovels, seeds etc. It was always a colorful and exciting place to wander through.

The Kramers' had a grand old "Boston style" house down by the river and next to the public school. In the summer I would ride my bike down to their home to buy fresh vegetables and eggs. Mrs Kramer was considered, by some, to be the local eccentric but I always enjoyed her. She was an artist and In her living room she always had a number of small impressionistic paintings of gardens behind adobe walls in varying stages of completion. The kitchen was warm and inviting and in the very large inset window lived a green parrot whose name was George. Someone had traded him for a blanket. George had quite a temper. Every morning he was fed coffee with cream sugar and a pancake. If he wasn't fed on time he would let loose with a stream of expletives : "cunt, bitch, whore". Then he would follow it with "naughty boy, naughty boy". When I went home with my new vocabulary and asked my parents what those words meant, they were not pleased.

In the late Spring I always stopped down by the river to pick wild asparagus that seemed to grow best next to the cow turds in the pasture. I remember one day racing home on my bike, as the hawks in the sky and I were trying to avoid the lightning and thunderstorms that were jolting the hills, then the rain came like silver threads from the dark, black clouds. The storm cleared as quickly as it came as I raced pass field corn thrusting its tassels up to reach the sun.

July 4th, 2008

Slowly, softly, summer began the downhill drift of days - moving towards little endings and the doneness of things, toward the last unwinding of adventures. It was August and that meant that we would go camping in Santa Clara Canyon . This particular summer I invited my best friend, a Hispanic girl by the name of Rebecca. We always stopped first at the tea house that Edith Warner ran next to Otowi Bridge on the Rio Grande. It was often filled with scientists from Los Alamos. Los Alamos was top secret then with tanks and machine guns blocking the entrance. The only people stealing their secrets were already inside Los Alamos. Gas was still being rationed and new cars were not yet available. We bounced along in a 1934 grey Ford anticipating hiking and playing in the stream. The road was dusty and washed out in many places as not many people went there and in the week we were there we didn't see anyone else.

We always camped in a grove of aspens next to the stream and Rebecca and I liked to lie in the grass and watch the aspens dance in the winds that blew down the canyon.

We were in the third grade just getting ready to go into the fourth. I told her how mean the nuns would probably be in the fourth grade. We both went to a small rural school and until the famous supreme court case separating church and state many nuns taught in the public school in northern New Mexico. Rebecca's toes curled in alarm. So I changed the subject and told her that I had heard that babies come from mothers' stomachs. She crossed her eyes and fell over backwards, then sat up and asked "How"? I said we might find out in fourth grade but not from the nuns.

After a week eating wonderful food, fishing in the stream, making dams in the stream, picking wild raspberries, then, sadly it was time to return. In the car we wondered what fourth grade would be like with Sister Carlita hollering at us and how many times we would have to stay after school.

In developing the painting, Autumn Winds Dancing through Santa Clara Canyon, I was thinking of the aspen trees that turn a brilliant yellow on one hill and orange on another and yet, on another, they are still green. They shimmer and dance in the wind. To create the intensity of color for this abstract painting I used cadmium yellow, hansa yellow and cadmium orange. I added a touch of cobalt blue behind the color to represent the New Mexico sky, which in the fall, is a particularly deep blue. The middle picture in the group is done in shades of blue to represent the aspens dancing in the night air with a touch of yellow and gold to represent the September moon peaking through the leaves.

July 12th, 2008

I always looked forward to December in the pueblo because it was a very festive time. The air smelled heavily of pinon smoke and the aroma of bread baking in the outdoor hornos, and deer meat cooked with chili and pinones for the various celebrations. One of my favorites was on December 25th and it was called "The Dance of the Matachines". This tradition dates back at least 300 years, but its origin is still unclear. Some say that it has its roots in European medieval sacred dance and pre-Lenten carnival festivals from the Renaissance. It is also thought that perhaps prehistoric fertility rites were an antecedent. It is a dance of great drama with the choreography precisely set. As the dance proceeds there are two lines of dancers headed by a frightening, whip-bearing old man called "El Abuelo", The capitan, El Monarca, the leader, who represents the Aztec king Montezuma; La Malinche, a girl who is named after Cortes' mistress and El Toro, the bull. The costumes were always colorful with headdresses of beads covering their eyes. La Malinche was always dressed in white like a bride to emphasize her purity.

The instruments were always simple - several of the hispanic elders would play on the violin and guitar music that was passed down from generation to generation.

In portraying this dance in an abstract form I used a dark palette for the back ground as the dances would take place in the dark of winter just after the winter solstice and it was a somber dance with ancient roots with an almost mystical feel. Shades of purple form the dancers in swirling forms to symbolize the danzantes first ceremonial entrance. I use permanent green light to symbolize the boughs that the dancers carried and white to symbolize the dress that La Malinche wears. The touches of red in the painting symbolizes the killing and castration of El Toro. Some years the dancers would end with a maypole ritual and I added touches of bright colors to symbolize this final part of the dance.

August 8th, 2008

August was one of my favorite months in the Pueblo. It meant green Chili that was almost ready, tomatoes ripening, the smell of corn fields everywhere and the taste of roasting ears, and the sound of cicadas punctuating the heat of the mid-afternoon. I enjoyed hiking with my friends down to the old pueblo ruin. It was near San Gabriel which the Spaniards named the first capitol of New Mexico. The dirt road ran adjacent to a large irrigation ditch which was lined with hundreds of wild plum trees that in the springtime filled the air with a wonderful fragrance. This time of year the plums were ripe and succulent and in the trees lived great flocks of yellow birds looking very much like canaries. Walking by the trees they would fly out obscuring the sky in a yellow haze.

The Rio Grande River ran on the other side of the road and at this time of year, due to heavy rains up above, it was muddy, but catfish would be jumping up and down in the water. We enjoyed exploring the ruins as it seemed not many people knew about it. My father was an archeologist, and if he was there he would explain things about the inhabitants that lived here hundreds of years ago and sometime he would contrast it with Chaco Canyon and explain the summer solstice ceremonies and how it differed from the ceremonies here.

It was also fun to go there under the warmth of an August moon There was something mellow about the full-moon in August and it was a sweet antidote for the cicada heat and the dusty glare of an August afternoon. In the distance one could often hear the tentative howl of a coyote testing the air for a hint of autumn. Early windfall of apples would scent the breeze from the orchard, not quite a cider tang but the promise of cider to come and a reminder that summer was passing its peak and starting the glide towards fall and frost.

August 12,2008

In the summertime, on warm full moon nights, sometimes my friends and I would go to the ancient ruin and scare ourselves by listening for the spirits returning to the sipapu.

August 18, 2008

About one fourth of a mile from our home near the pueblo was a morada. This was the church for Los Hermanos or Los Penitentes, a lay confraternity of Roman Catholic men active in Northern New Mexico. The head of the morada was a man that mowed the grass under the apple trees in our orchard. I was always fascinated by the Penitentes as the men would leave the morada at lent and Easter time pulling a cart with a skeleton holding a bow and arrow , many of the men would be flagellating themselves with a whip and some of the whips had a cactus tied to the end of the whip. Many of the men would be dragging heavy crosses. Their backs would be raw and bloody. The Procession of the Penitentes would wander up into the hot dusty hills where there was a reenactment of Christ's crucifixion on Good Friday. As this was a very secret society, some said the person chosen to be crucified often died and his shoes would be left on his wife's doorstep to let her know he belonged to the brotherhood and had died. Some of my friends and I always wanted to follow them but were deterred by the story of two anglo anthropologists that followed them to secretly observe their ceremonies and years later their skeletons were found where they had been buried alive up to their heads in sand. Accounts of the the roots of Los Penitentes date back at least 1000 years to orders in Spain. When priests were withdrawn from areas in Northern New Mexico, and people could expect a visit from a clergyman once a year, the men in the communities came together in the absence of a priest for the purpose of prayer and to offer spiritual aid to the community. Archbishop Jean Baptiste Lamy unsuccessfully attempted to suppress the brotherhood in the latter part of the 19th century driving its membership underground. In creating the painting I chose the abstract expression style to show the pathos and pain involved in the procession. I used cadmium red to indicate the blood that was shed. Burnt umber and raw sienna were used to indicate the hot, dusty hills that they traversed. Dark green symbolized the pinon trees that coved the hills. A touch of phalo blue mixed with vermillion red created black to symbolize the ravens ever-watching of the ceremony. Ultramarine blue mixed with orange created another shade of brown to symbolize the cross that one man was nailed on.

August 28, 2008

I had many two and four legged friends growing up in the pueblo but my closest friends were the four legged ones. My horse and my dog.

My beloved wire-haired terrier had died and I was broken hearted for weeks. My mother was visiting her parents for a week when I saw an ad in the Albuquerque Journal advertising collies for sale. I had watched Lassie movies and was enamored by the idea of a collie. My father took me to Albuquerque to look at the dogs. There was only one left - the runt of the litter, skinny and frail without papers. The owner said I could have him for two dollars. After much convincing, my father agreed that I could buy the dog. It was love at first sight but my mother was furious when she returned home to find this skinny, frail creature, who also had seizures, in the house. I finally convinced her that he would grow into a small dog. Over time the "ugly duckling" grew out of his seizures and turned into a magnificent dog .

He was a white collie with a sable saddle over his side and a star on his forehead.

He walked one mile with me every day to school through the pueblo, across an irrigation ditch and through an orchard. Then at 4:00 PM, when school was out he was always there waiting for me at the school yard gate. Always. Then one day he wasn't there and I was frantic. Several of my Pueblo friends say they saw a tourist car full of anglos stop and throw a blanket over him and drive away. I was stricken. Everyday I called and called to him, La LLorona had nothing on me. Two months later I heard a weak bark and I jumped out of bed and ran to the door. There he was, all matted and the pads almost worn off his feet where he had traveled a long distance to return home. He was so beautiful, he was stolen one other time but the state police found the car and brought him back.

He was a ferocious protector and he made it safe for me wander around the country side with him always at my side.