Jim O’Donnell
Taos Pueblo artist Dawning-Pollen Shorty
Bathing in creativity Dawning-Pollen Shorty carries on artistic legacy, her way
T
By Jim O’Donnell
here were no electric lights in her house when she was a child.
“I grew up out at the Pueblo. We only had natural light in the day. At night, we lit candles and kerosene lamps. My father brought out his sculptures and placed them so they created shadows that grew and danced on the soft walls of our home.” Dawning-Pollen Shorty grew up bathing in creativity. “That’s all I saw,” she says. “I didn’t know another way to be.”
Shorty, an award-winning sculptor of Taos Pueblo, Lakota and Navajo heritage is the inheritor of an artistic legacy enshrined for generations. Her father, Robert Shorty, is himself an award-winning sculptor — and a painter, an actor, a dancer and a jeweler. Her mother, Bernadette Track, studied ballet and modern dance at Juilliard and is a celebrated ceramics teacher. “She still does acrylic paintings. And she cooks. She loves to cook, and she is good at it,” Shorty smiles. “Oh. And that’s one thing to know about me. I may not drive a nice car and I don’t have fancy
shoes, but I do eat well. I love good food.” Dawning-Pollen is a direct translation of her Tiwa name. Or as close as you can come to rendering something along the lines of “gets corn pollen at first light” into English. “It’s more like a story,” she says. “It is the prayer-action at dawn when the corn is first opening and you can collect the pollen. The act is a prayer in itself. It isn’t a hippie name.” Shorty finds inspiration in her culture. It’s in the difficulty of the Pueblo ceremonial life, in
the physical exertion of it that she finds splendor, she says. “I hear that beauty; see the colors, experience nature, feel the wonder of my people.” As a kid, Shorty was fond of science and archaeology and anthropology and old portraits of Native peoples. Not the Edward Curtis shots, mind you, she found those much too staged. Instead, she gravitated toward the candid, immediate captures that documented what was real. She took to the camera herself at a very young age. “You can’t get that light and SHORTY continues on Page 48
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