CARA ROMERO GALLERY TO OPEN GROUP EXHIBITION OF INDIGENOUS
ART: SLOW WATER
WHEN: Opening August 15, 2024 with a reception from 4-8pm, will remain up through October 2, 2024
WHAT: Contemporary Show Features 7 Artists at the only Native-woman-owned Gallery in Santa Fe, NM
WHERE: Cara Romero Gallery, 333 Montezuma Ave #5, Santa Fe, NM 87501
MORE INFO: Kate Crowley, Crowley Communications, [email protected],480-277-4178
Cara Romero Gallery, [email protected], 505-218-6588
Artwork above by Leah Mata
Leah Mata-Fragua, Porfirio Gutierrez, Ian Kualiʻi, Lehuauakea, Erica Lord, Diego Romero, and Cara Romero. Multidisciplinary works on view feature handmade kapa (bark cloth), textiles, jewelry, photography, ceramics, cut paper, and more. Works in the exhibition will be available for purchase and institutional acquisition and will remain on view through October 2, 2024.
Located between the Santa Fe Plaza and Railyard District, Cara Romero Gallery is at the center of the bustling arts community of Santa Fe, New Mexico. Opened in 2022, Cara Romero Gallery is the first Native-woman-owned gallery in Santa Fe and also serves as a studio space for Chemehuevi photographer Cara Romero. Beyond the gallery’s namesake, the gallery often features work by Indigenous artists working across disciplines. Open year round, Cara Romero Gallery creates an accessible environment for learning and gathering and hosts seasonal programming for all.
All artists exhibiting in Slow Water have rich cultural experiences that inform their artistic practices. Following the success of the group exhibition Throughline in the summer of 2023, Cara Romero Gallery continues to create opportunities for contemporary and emerging Indigenous artists to show their artwork in a prime gallery locale in Santa Fe. The opening reception will feature Native foods catered by Cleo’s Blue Corn Kitchen (Hopi/Kewa)and is free and open to the community and public.
According to gallery owner and artist Cara Romero, “this exhibition encourages visitors to slow down, take time, and remember water’s importance in our artistic practices and lives. As it evaporates, water leaves us, and our art forever changed into perfect forms. These artworks could not exist without water visiting briefly, spending time with and around us, and then moving on with its ephemeral and unending cycles.”
Slow Water speaks to the empirical knowledge of Native artists and makers that reaches back thousands of years and informs the pace and rhythm of processes related to fibers, paint, clay, and shell. Water, used in myriad ways, whether gathered and incorporated in slips or pigments, used to submerge and soften materials, and perhaps dried slowly or quickly in the sun. Too much water or working too fast can cause structures to fail, turn, or mold. But just the right amounts of water and time—combined with thousands of years of intergenerational knowledge—can help Native artists wield magic with ancestral materials and techniques. Water is a tie that binds us across ice, oceans, lakes, rivers, mountains, and deserts, and the six artists represented in this exhibition come together to demonstrate the power of slow water in its many forms.
ABOUT THE ARTISTS:
Leah Mata Fragua is an artist, educator, and member of the Yak Tityu Tityu Yak Tiłhini (Northern Chumash) tribe located on the Central California Coast. As a place-based artist, Leah’s kincentric approach seamlessly blends shared iconography with personal imagery, highlighting the impact each has on the other. She uses diverse materials, from found to organic, traditional to modern, to explore the interconnectedness and dependence between land, kinships, and self. Leah is an adjunct professor in the Indigenous Liberal Studies department at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Leah was honored with a Smithsonian Artist Research Fellowship in 2011. She was selected as a Master Artist recipient for the Alliance of California Traditional Arts (ACTA) in 2013 and, most recently, for the 2020 Barbra Dobkin Fellowship at the School of Advanced Research. Her education includes a B.A. in Anthropology, an M.A. in Cultural Sustainability from Goucher College, and an MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts.
Erica Lord is an interdisciplinary artist who explores concepts and issues that exist within a contemporary Indigenous experience and how culture and identity are affected in a rapidly changing world. Lord draws on her experience of growing up between Alaska and Upper Michigan and her mixed-race cultural identity drawn from her Athabaskan, Iñupiat, Finnish, Swedish, Japanese, and English descent. To address a multiple or mixed identity, Lord uses a variety of mediums to construct new, ambiguous, or challenging representations of race and culture. Lord received her Bachelor of Arts from Carleton College and a Master of Fine Arts at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Lord has exhibited nationally and internationally, including the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe; the Musée du Quai Branley, Paris; the National Gallery of Canada, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Renwick Gallery. Most recently, Lord was named as a 2024 Creative Capital Grant recipient. Currently, Lord lives in Santa Fe, NM, where she continues her art practice and teaches at the Institute of American Indian Arts.
Ian Kualiʻi is a self-taught interdisciplinary artist of Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian) and Mescalero Apache ancestry working in murals, large-scale hand-cut paper, and site-specific installation. Ian fluidly merges urban contemporary art with his ancestral iconography and history, drawing from occult symbolism, Indigenous politics, and Native Hawaiian cultural practices. From a single sheet of paper using only an x-acto blade as his tool, Ian’s portraits and compositions are carefully rendered in hand-cut paper, blending boldly geometric traditional patterns with delicate lenticular linework. The artist currently has a studio practice in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and is sought after for his monumental installations, touring exhibitions, and innovative cut paper pieces. With a career spanning over two decades, his works have been featured by Wall\Therapy, UrbanArt Biennale 2017, Universal Pictures, Art Basel Miami, National Museum of Mexican Art, National Hispanic Cultural Center, National Trust for Historic Preservation, Moniker Art Fair UK, Millicent Rogers Museum, Heard Museum, and more. Residencies and fellowships with numerous institutions include: the Red Bull House of Art, de Young Museum, Hawaiʻi State Foundation, Institute of American Indian Arts, School for Advanced Research, and the National Parks Arts Foundation. In 2021, Ian Kualiʻi received his Knighthood with the Royal Order of the Crown of Hawaiʻi, furthering his dedication to representing his Native Hawaiian community and culture both at home in Hawaiʻi and abroad.
Lehuauakea is a Native Hawaiian interdisciplinary artist and kapa maker from Pāpaʻikou, Hawaiʻi. Lehua’s Kānaka Maoli family descends from several lineages connected to Maui, Kauaʻi, and Moku O Keawe where their family resides to this day. With a particular focus on the labor-intensive making of kapa (bark cloth), ʻohe kāpala (carved bamboo printing tools), and use of natural pigments, Lehua is able to breathe new life into patterns and traditions practiced for generations. Their work addresses themes of environmental relations, Indigenous cultural resilience, and contemporary Kanaka Maoli identity. Lehuauakea has spent the last several years learning from well-known barkcloth maker Wesley Sen of Moanalua, Hawaiʻi, who trained in barkcloth-making with Pua Van Dorpe, Beatrice Krauss, Malia Solomon, Carla Freitas, and Dennis Kanaʻe of Hawaiʻi, and Mary Pritchard of Sāmoa. Lehuauakea’s work has been shown in exhibitions nationally and internationally, and is held in many private and public art collections around the globe. The artist is currently based between the continent and Pāpaʻikou after earning their Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Painting with a minor in Art + Ecology at Pacific Northwest College of Art.
Porfirio Gutierrez is a Zapotec-American textile artist and natural dyer based in California. He grew up immersed in color and surrounded by the wildness of Oaxaca’s mountains, and by the knowledge of plants for healing and for color. His life’s work has been revitalizing and preserving traditional Zapotec natural dye techniques with a focus on reinterpreting traditional textiles and materials. Gutíerrez’s art practice maintains his ancestor’s spiritual belief in nature as a living being, sacred and divine. His grounding in Zapotec traditional knowledge manifests in his textiles, reinterpreting the traditional weaving language, subverting and re-imagining the symbols and forms, morphing his textile designs toward the fractal forms and spaces of architecture and the movement he sees in cities and urban environments. Always reliant on the deep knowledge and spiritual dimensions of his work, his designs also draw on his experiences of two cultures, moving between the traditional and the modern. The story of his art has been told in ARTnews, The New York Times, PBS, and the BBC London. Gutíerrez has been featured in Vogue Magazine and the Smithsonian’s American Indian Magazine. In 2015, he was named a Smithsonian Institution Artist in Leadership Fellow, and in 2021 he received the Carolyn Glasoe Bailey Foundation Art Prize. His work is in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, National Museum of American Indian, and the Tucson Museum of Art. A selection of Gutiérrez dye materials was also documented and added to the Forbes Pigment Collection at Harvard Art Museum, the world-renowned archive of artist materials. His work has exhibited nationally and internationally including at Chinati Museum, Black Mountain College Museum + Arts Center, Sharjah Institute for Heritage, among others.
Left: Porfirio Gutierrez_Espejo de Agua; right: Porfirio Gutierrez_Desde otra Mirada
Diego Romero firmly positions his work within an Indigenous visuality. He has built a career constructing ceramic vessels that elevate Pueblo life to Olympian stature. A third generation professional artist, Romero was born and raised in Berkeley, California to a Cochiti father and a non-Native mother. Upon completing high school, he returned to ancestral Pueblo lands and attended the Institute of American Indian Arts, before subsequently attaining degrees from Otis College of Art and Design (BFA) and University of California, Los Angeles (MFA). Since earning an MFA in 1993, Romero has developed an extensive exhibition record with works housed in significant public collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Cartier Foundation, the Peabody Essex Museum, the Denver Art Museum, the Heard Museum, the British Museum, and the Scottish National Museum, among others. Working in a narrative style that evokes pre-contact Mimbres pottery, Greek amphorae (two-handled vases), and Anasazi ceramics, Romero’s earthenware vessels investigate the marginalized status of Indigenous history and society. By using historically situated oral traditions as source material, Romero departs visually from the canonical work of Pueblo pottery and instead relies heavily on a graphic style gleaned from comic books and popular culture, specters of a lifetime spent mingling in comic book stores. The resulting composition transcends the materiality of the object and engages the viewer in humorous and subversive interplay in which the author’s anti-colonial content is seen as non-threatening to audiences and collectors.
Cara Romero is a contemporary fine art photographer and an enrolled citizen of the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe, Romero was raised between contrasting settings: the rural Chemehuevi reservation in Mojave Desert, CA and the urban sprawl of Houston, TX. Romero’s identity informs her photography, a blend of fine art and editorial photography, shaped by years of study and a visceral approach to representing Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultural memory, collective history, and lived experiences from a Native American female perspective. As an undergraduate at the University of Houston, Romero pursued a degree in cultural anthropology. Disillusioned, however, by academic and media portrayals of Native Americans as bygone, Romero realized that making photographs could do more than anthropology did in words, a realization that led to a shift in medium. Since 1998, Romero’s expansive oeuvre has been informed by formal training in film, digital, fine art and commercial photography. By staging theatrical compositions infused with dramatic color, Romero takes on the role of storyteller, using contemporary photography techniques to depict the modernity of Native peoples, illuminating Indigenous worldviews and aspects of supernaturalism in everyday life. Maintaining a studio and gallery in Santa Fe, NM, Romero was featured in PBS’ Craft in America (2019). Her award-winning work is included in numerous public and private collections, domestically and internationally, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Guggenheim Museum, Amon Carter Museum, and the Peabody Essex Museum, among others. In January 2025, the Hood Museum of Art in Hanover, NH will open Cara Romero: Panûpünüwügai (Living Light), Romero’s first major traveling exhibition featuring work from the past two decades of her career and accompanied by a catalogue published by Radius Books. Romero travels between Santa Fe and the Chemehuevi Valley Indian Reservation, where she maintains close ties to her tribal community and ancestral homelands.
Left: Ian Kuali‘i Kū Ki‘i; Right: Danse Sauvage by Erica Lord
