ENDLESS CIRCLES

By Gussie Fauntleroy | Portraits by Lonnie Schlein

A top a hill that marks the highest point on Pojoaque Pueblo, just north of Santa Fe, George Rivera—sculptor, jewelry  
artist, and former Pojoaque Pueblo governor—stands at the edge of a 33-foot-wide circle of packed ground, a dance circle, beside his studio and home. As a breeze blows through the 60-year-old artist’s long white hair, he takes in the expansive views around him: the Sangre de Cristo Mountains off to the east, Jemez Mountains to the west, and down below, a winding green line of cottonwood trees along Pojoaque Creek.

Although the sight lines are vast, the dance circle itself, where the feet of young tribal dancers have lifted and returned to the earth hundreds of times, is “simple and humble,” Rivera says. It brings together age-old tradition and contemporary life, while on a larger scale the shape represents the circular movement of time, without end, in the Native worldview. And of course, it echoes the round forms of hoops carried and handled by the dancers in beautiful and seemingly magical ways.

For Rivera, the dance circle outside his studio holds a poignant and very personal message as well. His young son Valentino Tzigiwhaeno, whose name in the Pueblo’s Tewa language means “lightning,” was a boy “who couldn’t stop dancing.” He was an extraordinarily energetic child who had been taking part in traditional dances, including hoop dancing, since he was 5. In 2015, Tino was riding in a car when it was broadsided by a vehicle whose driver had a heart attack and whose foot, in that moment, pressed down hard on the gas.

Tino suffered a traumatic neck injury that left him paralyzed and unable to speak. Over the next 14 months, he underwent at least 20 surgeries, gradually regaining limited movement and the ability to eat and talk. But he knew he would never dance again or move in the ways that had given him so much joy. Rivera remembers his son in diapers taking off running, clearly inspired by Rivera’s own passion for running; he’s taken part in several marathons, including in Boston.

Eventually Tino told his family he was ready to go to heaven. He was 8 years old. “He begged us not to do more surgeries. He wanted to be known for who he was, not for his injuries,” Rivera says. “We had to let him go. We gave it our best shot, but at least we had those 14 months with him.” A year later the family, including Rivera’s wife Felicia Rosacker-Rivera, co-founded Lightning Boy Foundation. The organization carries on Tino’s legacy by providing Pueblo and other Native boys and girls with instruction and opportunities to perform and compete in hoop dancing, as well as other arts. The foundation’s beautiful short film, The Hoop Has No End, earned a Rocky Mountain Southwest Emmy in 2023.

The hoop dance is said to have originated at Taos Pueblo in the late 1800s as a healing ceremony, and later was almost lost. “When Valentino danced, he was focused, meditating before he started, to put out that healing energy. When people watch it, it brings out the best in them,” Rivera says. He adds that along with keeping the tradition alive, when young people are hoop dancing in public, “their confidence level goes through the roof. They do better in school and with other traditional dances.”

Rivera has another personal connection with the revitalization of Pojoaque Pueblo’s traditions and strengths. At the turn of the 20th century, the Pueblo’s population was virtually decimated by a smallpox epidemic. The few who survived moved away, and by 1912, the Pueblo had been abandoned. In 1932, several families, including Rivera’s great-grandfather Jose Antonio Tapia, returned to reestablish the tribe. Rivera remembers hearing the story from his grandmother Feliciana Tapia Viarrial, Tapia’s daughter. “I just knew there was a lot of hard lifestyle to bring the Pueblo back to being a community,” he says.

Several decades later, in the mid-1980s, the artist felt his own call to return home and help reinvigorate his community’s cultural and economic foundations. After studying at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe and the California College of the Arts in Oakland, he spent three years in France at the SCAD Lacoste school, where he focused on sculpture and served as a teaching assistant. Enormously inspired by visiting art museums around Europe and in New York City, learning about art history, and with his own creative energy turbocharged by the experience, he had a vision of what he could do for his people. “From the stories I heard about my ancestors, I felt like I was being called back to work with this community,” he says.

From 1993 to 2003 Rivera was Pojoaque Pueblo’s lieutenant governor under Governor Jacob Viarrial, his uncle. Following Viarrial’s death, Rivera served as the Pueblo’s governor from 2003 to 2014. Alongside Viarrial, and then as governor himself, he made numerous trips to Washington, D.C., meeting four presidents and working on issues of importance to the Pueblo and other Native tribes, including water rights and economic and jurisdictional matters. Later, Rivera’s daughter Poqueen and son PaaWee both worked at the White House on tribal affairs. The Riveras’ younger daughters, Paloma and YsaDora, are still at home.

Back at the Pueblo, Rivera’s vision resulted in the establishment of the Poeh Cultural Center, which opened in 1991 and is aimed at teaching, sharing, and preserving the culture and arts of Tewa-speaking peoples and other Pueblos and tribes. The Poeh Center Museum followed in 2000. One Native artist, internationally known contemporary ceramic sculptor Roxanne Swentzell of Santa Clara Pueblo, enlisted her family in finishing the interior of a three-story adobe tower on the Poeh Center property and opened it in 2006 as the Roxanne Swentzell Tower Gallery.

Rivera was also instrumental in having the Hilton Santa Fe Buffalo Thunder Resort and Casino built at Pojoaque Pueblo, a project for which he had final say on the aesthetics and architectural style. “When I was asked what the design theme would be, I said we don’t need a theme, we are the theme,” he recalls proudly. He brought in other renowned Native artists as consultants, including Swentzell, Mateo Romero, Michelle Tapia, and Tony Abeyta, whom Rivera first met as a fellow student in Lacoste. The resort’s exceptional Native art collection now numbers more than 300 pieces.

 Rivera’s own artistic path began early, with clay—or at least mud. One morning when he was 6, he woke early and went outside before the rest of the family was up. To occupy his time, he opened the water hydrant and “built a massive bowl of clay under the hydrant,” he recalls, smiling, adding that he’s been drawn to large-scale creations ever since. At 12, he moved to Santa Fe to live with his father and became involved with the Boys and Girls Club of Santa Fe, taking art classes, competing in athletics, and, as a teen, teaching art to the younger boys. The strong support he received there is among the reasons he pours his heart and efforts into helping youngsters of all ethnicities, work that has led him to being inducted into the Boys and Girls Club of America’s Alumni Hall of Fame. He was the first Native so honored.

In 10th grade Rivera put his hands to a potter’s wheel for the first time and felt an immediate resonance. “I was gone!” he remembers. During his senior year of high school, his art instructor, Phil Karshis, and Swentzell, an IAIA student at the time, both encouraged him to enroll in IAIA. In his first year there he was producing oversized plates and vases, along with teapots more than two feet tall. “I was already making sculpture, but I didn’t call it sculpture,” he says. His penchant for pushing the boundaries of what could be done in clay continued at the California College of the Arts. There, instructor Viola Frey, whose monumental ceramic figures were later represented by Riva Yares in Santa Fe, nudged him further in the direction of experimentation and sculptural art.

By the time he returned from France in the mid-1980s, Rivera had been exposed to so many styles and genres and periods of art history that his creative spirit could not be contained in any single one. “I’m still not locked into a style,” he says. For a number of years, his primary means of expression was monumental bronze, typically work that honored his Pueblo culture. His 12-foot-tall Buffalo Dancer stands outside Buffalo Thunder Resort, and Buffalo Dancer II is at the entrance to the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. Another large-scale commissioned piece, now on permanent residency at the New Mexico History Museum in Santa Fe, commemorates Pueblo runners who served as messengers during the 1680 Pueblo Revolt. Watching over the dance circle next to Rivera’s studio is The Great Horse, a 21-foot-high bronze horse and Native rider, holding a stainless steel spear, on a four-foot-tall stainless steel base.