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Sample articles of our commitment to reflecting the diversity and cultural interdependence of our communities Water is Life: Communities Merge in a Common Cause ………………………………………………… 1-12 a photo essay about the Standing Rock protest, published in 2017 By Design: An Albuquerque screen-printing company elevates the art of the everyday—along with the lives of the people who work there………………………………….. 13-18 an article about a women-owned company that hires immigrants and refugees, published in 2019 Kicking It: A recovering addict finds redemption & healing in the photographic arts …………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. 19-26 an article about a recovering addict who began photographing gang culture in Albuquerque with sensitive portraiture, published in 2019 The Art of Survival: A unique Albuquerque initiative addresses homelessness through pencils, paint, and purpose …………………………………………………………………………….....…. 27-34 an article about ArtStreet, a nonprofit studio where people experiencing homelessness can make art, published in 2014 Boomtown: A new complex in the Siler Road neighborhood will provide rentals and a maker space for creatives ………………………………………………………………………………………… 35-50 an industrial area of Santa Fe propelled by the studios and workshops of diverse artists and immigrants introduces affordable housing for creatives, published in 2017 Taking It To The Streets: Native American street art sparks a dialogue about cultural and environmental issues ……………………………………………………………...……………………... 51-62 published in 2015 Trend Magazine Art+Design+Architecture+Cuisine, P.O. Box 1951, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 87504 505 988 5007
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in his Prime
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Art Meets Industry on Siler Road
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New Mexico’s Transcendental Painting Group:
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Water is Life Communities Merge in a Common Cause
CREDIT
Reflection on the Cannonball River as it threads its way through prairie and grasslands to reach the sacred Missouri, which is the primary water source for the Standing Rock Reservation. Photo by Noreen O’Brien
Mne Wiconi
Water is the life blood of our earth, the source of all things, and essential to survival. It nourishes us and the land we inhabit; access to clean water should be a fundamental human right. Just as the oceans, rivers, and streams on our planet are all connected, so are the hundreds of tribes and nations from around the world who are answering the call to join the Standing Rock Sioux and rally around that right. Honoring and protecting the sanctity of water has united millions of people in a common cause. Conversely, the Dakota Access Pipeline (DAPL) project has emerged as the Machiavellian corporate villain, the proverbial head of the Black Snake (oil pipeline), willing to compromise, if not sacrifice, human and civil rights in the relentless and merciless pursuit of oil and money. Militarized police and the National Guard, in concert with local law enforcement, launched warlike tactics and employed “less-than-lethal� weaponry like rubber bullets, ice-cold water, and concussion grenades on peaceful, prayerful Water Protectors, guardians of the earth and Native American ancestral cultural sites. There seems to be no limit to this insatiable greed, and the fierce moral battle that has emerged is nothing short of an epic confrontation between corporatocracy and humanity. The gathering of nations at Standing Rock is unprecedented in its magnitude and importance as a pivotal moment in the history of environmental stewardship and the future of our natural resources. —Rima Krisst
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The day after bulldozers desecrated sacred grounds, Water Protectors chained themselves to several bulldozers while others in the group lit cedar boughs and prayed in solidarity. Opposite: An assembly of intertribal warriors. Photos by Tony Abeyta trendmagazineglobal.com
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While waiting to drive across the Bay Bridge to a protest in front of the federal building in San Francisco, artist Tony Abeyta grabbed some paint and poster board to create this image. Even though it got soggy in the light rain, the poster held up. Abeyta later auctioned it off to raise funds and awareness for Standing Rock. He believes it was blessed by the rains, and he was reminded that water is, indeed, life. Photo by Zoe Urness
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Military veterans arrived at the Oceti Sakowin Camp in December 2016 to march with the warriors in support of the Water Protectors. Photo by Zoe Urness trendmagazineglobal.com
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I see a time of Seven Generations when all the colors of mankind will gather under the Sacred Tree of Life and the whole earth will become One Circle again. —Crazy Horse
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This page and opposite: The Water Protectors, organized by Taos Pueblo, stand with the Standing Rock Sioux in a peaceful demonstration at the New Mexico State Capitol in Santa Fe. This page, bottom left: Christopher Lujan from Taos Pueblo has been active from the very beginning of the protests. He worked at the camp school, hauled firewood, and built winter shelters, and was sprayed by water cannons and tear gas. Photos by Rima Krisst
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Young warriors on their horses and other peaceful Protectors gather for prayers in the face of the forces on the hill. Top: The Backwater Bridge on Highway 1806, north of the Oceti Sakowin Camp, now quiet after a barrage of bullets, tear gas, and water was sent into the crowds by law enforcement. Photos by Noreen O’Brien 126
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Bottom left: Hundreds of flags, representing more than 300 nations, fly as they outline the camp of Oceti Sakowin. Bottom right: The world is represented. Top: A view of Oceti Sakowin Camp. Oceti Sakowin means Seven Council Fires, the original name of the the Great Sioux Nation. Photos by Noreen O’Brien trendmagazineglobal.com
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Sacred wood Photo by Noreen OBrien
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Dawn’s early glow warms morning prayer on the Cannonball. Photo by Noreen O’Brien
Warriors are not what you think of as warriors. The warrior is not someone who fights, because no one has the right to take another life. The warrior, for us, is one who sacrifices himself for the good of others. His task is to take care of the elderly, the defenseless, those who can not provide for themselves, and above all, the children, the future of humanity. —Chief Sitting Bull
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BY RENA DISTASIO | PHOTOS BY DOUGLAS MERRIAM
By Design An Albuquerque screen-printing company elevates the art of the everyday—along with the lives of the people who work there
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chile roaster happily tending his fire, dinner guests gathered around a bountiful table, a young girl fishing with her father . . . these are just a few of the whimsical, folksy tableaux—rendered in bold single color on towels, totes, and T-shirts—that distinguish the Kei & Molly brand. Established in 2010, Kei & Molly Textiles is one of Albuquerque’s most successful homegrown ventures, notable not only for its distinctive design aesthetic, but also for the way in which its owners redefine what it means to do good business. It wasn’t the idea for a product or service that inspired Kei Tsuzuki and Molly Luethi to go into business together, it was a group of people—specifically, the immigrants and refugees who live in southeast Albuquerque’s International District. The two women had close ties to the area since moving to the city in the mid-1990s. It’s where their children went to school, where Tsuzuki’s husband taught AP-level English and art history at Highland High School, and where Luethi, a language educator, offered classes in English as a Foreign Language. And the women were immigrants themselves—Tsuzuki was born in Japan but grew up in Montreal, and Luethi was born and raised in Switzerland—so they understand the difficulties of adjusting to a new homeland. The two became friends in 2006, when Tsuzuki’s young son took a class in Japanese that Luethi was teaching in one of her after-school programs. In 2010, with an MBA and career’s worth of experience in economic development under her belt, Tsuzuki talked to Luethi about starting a social enterprise. From the start, their mission was clear. “We thought, ‘Let’s do something that creates good jobs in our community,’” Tsuzuki says, “something that supports its refugees, that uses economic development to improve their lives.” The key was to come up with something that required no formal training and would be relatively easy to teach their employees. Tsuzuki, who knew how to screen print, hit on the idea of producing a short run of decorative dish towels that featured a simple, single-color design and testing them out at a craft fair or two. Luethi, tasked with creating the design, looked to the papercutting traditions of her homeland for inspiration. “Traditionally,
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Kei & Molly owners Kei Tsuzuki (left) and Molly Luethi in their retail showroom at their production facility in Albuquerque’s International District.
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ART&DESIGN you see some kind of depiction of a chalet surrounded by cows,” she says, “so that’s what I came up with.” As a nod to New Mexico and reflecting the humor that would soon become a company trademark, she included a few roadrunners as well. Not only did the little Alpine scene help sell out their first run of 135 towels at the Bandelier Elementary School holiday fair that fall, the two women sold out a second run at Luethi’s house that Christmas. Within a year they opened their first production facility in the International District, and in 2017 they expanded operations, buying a building at the corner of Washington and Silver Avenue SE, which serves as a production facility, offices, and retail shopping space. That neither woman had formal artistic training actually worked in their favor. “We didn’t know at that point that we wanted to create a folk-art look,” Luethi says, “because Kei was more into repeat abstract designs.” But since customers responded to the homespun quality of that initial design, they melded their aesthetics into a single look. “We work around our limitations,” says Tsuzuki, who says the process begins with a piece of paper and a hand drawing. While they eventually scan the resulting image into the computer and tweak it there, the designs all retain that lively, folksy feel. “I think people really respond to that, to the handmade element of it, the old-world look,” she says. Their designs range from single repeats of animals and flowers to animated scenes of everyday life—people out in nature, pots steaming away on a stove, even cars motoring along the “Big I” interchange in Albuquerque. “We try to stay away from really cliched images,” Luethi says,
This isn’t your average production line—the goal is for every employee to master the series of steps that go into producing a run of towels. Top: Esther Kapinga, a refugee from the Republic of Congo, says she loves her work because “it teaches me how to develop ideas, how to support others, and how to welcome and accept others.” It has also, she says, given her a family from which she draws the strength to make Albuquerque her home. Opposite: Over 75 designs appear—on a rotating basis—on towels, cleaning cloths, T-shirts, tote bags, and notecards. 78
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“Instead, we look for those things that are a little insider-ish, like the chile roaster or the Very Large Array—things that insiders get, that make them smile, and that tell a story in a unique way.” Storytelling is important to Tsuzuki and Luethi, not just because it distinguishes their dish towels from all the others out there, but because it establishes a more personal connection between the product and the buyer. “Many towels have beautiful graphic designs, but they don’t really relate to an emotion or a memory,” Tsuzuki says. “That’s what we’re trying to do, to keep the human element.” As beautiful as they are, the towels are meant to be used. Made from a highly absorbent but durable flour-sack cotton that
is manufactured in Pakistan, they soften up perfectly after the first wash and soak up water instead of spreading it around. Likewise, the European-style sponge cloths, tote bags, and T-shirts are intended to be used, and to last. When the dish towels are spent, they make great multipurpose rags, and the cleaning cloths can be tossed in the composter instead of the landfill. “We’re really lucky we chose housewares because I’ve learned over the years that having a pretty kitchen is really important to people,” Luethi says. “We found the perfect niche.” They did recently veer from that focus by accepting a commission to design the poster for this year’s ¡Globalquerque!, an annual celebration of world music and cul-
ture in Albuquerque. “We always ask our artists to give us their vision of the event,” says the festival’s cofounder Tom Frouge, who has known the two women for a long time, including as regular attendees. “And Kei and Molly went for the whimsical, dance party, celebratory aspect of it.” Their towels are no doubt their most popular product, though. Their website includes a comprehensive list of where they can be purchased, both locally, including at their facility in Albuquerque and at stores throughout New Mexico, and at 400 stores across the country and in Australia. Towel production alone averages about 400–600 a day, each one pinned, smoothed, vacuumed of lint, and silk-screen printed by hand atop a 44-foot-long table. trendmagazineglobal.com
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Even so, there isn’t a hint of chemical smell anywhere in the building. From the start, Tsuzuki and Luethi knew that they didn’t want to expose their workers to the dangers of inhaling the fumes that arise from drying plastisol inks. Instead, they use water-based inks, which they run through a sophisticated filtration system before sending them back out into the wastewater system. When they bought the building, they also inherited its long-neglected solar power system, which they’ve since refurbished to be up and running. Sustainable practices aren’t the only way in which the duo rethinks the for-profit manufacturing model. Ask each of their nine employees what they like best about their jobs, and you’ll hear similar answers. To these women the job is not just a job, their coworkers not just fellow employees. Instead, they use words like “family” and “support system,” and express thanks for the opportunity to develop not only occupational skills but also an overall sense Tsuzuki folding towels with Remy Davis, who hails from the Philippines. “Kei and Molly were the first ones who gave me the opportunity to work for them, and it’s like a dream come true,” she says. “My steady income has helped me support my kids.” 80
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of confidence and belonging—the latter especially important given that the majority of these women are refugees new to the city. Tsuzuki and Luethi work with Lutheran Family Services, which sends them qualified applicants whenever a position opens. While they don’t have a policy against hiring men, and have in the past, an all-women staff is just how things have worked out. “Sometimes it’s a comfort for women who have been in difficult situations in the past to be among women,” Luethi says, “because who knows what happened to them at the hands of men?” While they are working to meet sales goals that will eventually allow them to pay at least $15 per hour, they also offer a host of benefits designed to make their employees’ lives easier, both on and off the job. In addition to donating up to $500 to those who want to learn English or take a business class, they also offer flexible hours and shut down entirely during the Albuquerque Public Schools’ winter break in order to accommodate the needs of the women with children. “To be able to say, ‘You need to go to your parent/teacher conference? We’ll pay you for two hours—go and do that,’ that’s important to us as moms,” Tsuzuki says.
They also try to foster a sense of community among the women, pointing out that they eat lunch almost every day with their employees, have a potluck once a month, take them out to dinner or bowling, and even organize group classes, like a recent one on making jewelry. “While we worked really, really hard, we also weren’t desperate for every dollar,” Luethi says of why their model has been so successful. “We wanted to create a social enterprise, and that’s where our efforts went. Whenever we hire somebody, we have to know we can keep them on. Because this was always about our staff, not about how much money we could pocket or hiring a ton of people for a big project and then letting them go.” They are also thankful for the support of Albuquerque’s artistic community in their early days. “For first two years, Molly and I were out every weekend at every market that we could get ourselves into—out there selling and figuring it out,” Tsuzuki says. “So many people were willing to help us and support us, and we all wanted to see each other succeed. It was amazing to have that kind of support going forward.” In turn, they give back by opening their retail shop every February for local artists to sell their wares. They also hold summer workshops, regularly donate items to nonprofit fundraisers, and sponsor a yearly scholarship at Highland High School that provides grants to three of the school’s college-bound immigrant students. Finally, simple respect has always been a guiding tenet of the business. “Regardless of whether you are university-educated or someone who never went to school,” Tsuzuki says, “we never look down on anyone here. We all learn so much from them—what they’ve survived, what they have overcome, what they aspire to for themselves and for their kids. It’s amazing to be that resilient and survive, and it’s amazing for us to learn from that.” And to share the fruits of all their labors. “It’s what America is about,” Tsuzuki continues. “It’s not about, ‘Oh, I don’t have enough so you can’t have any.’ It’s more like, ‘Look at our potential, and what we can do together and how great it can be.’” R
A recovering addict finds redemption and healing in the photographic arts
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BY NANCY ZIMMERMAN
rank Blazquez is only 31, but he’s ready for the next chapter in his life. The first one had taken the Chicago native to a dark place by the time he was 21, despite his suburban upbringing and his newly acquired financial independence as a certified optician. Like so many young people who get caught up in situations they could have avoided, Blazquez found
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himself living the life of a club kid, drinking heavily and using cocaine on his nightly forays into the city from his parents’ home. “I started going to clubs as soon as I turned 21,” he says of his introduction to powder cocaine. “My friends and I developed our routine of driving into the city, doing coke on the way. We’d drink in the car, too, ‘DUI-ing’ while on the highway. We would visit a friend and do
more cocaine once we reached Chicago, then go out to the clubs at about 1:30 a.m. Afterward we’d drive home, DUI-ing all the way back. It’s a wonder we never got stopped or had a wreck. In those days I could get by on two or three hours of sleep, so I thought I was fine.” But Blazquez began to grow weary of that rather pointless lifestyle, so when his parents decided to take early retirement and move to New Mexico, he jumped at the chance to join them and restart his adult life away from the temptations of Chicago’s club culture. A change of scene was just what he needed, he reasoned. Unfortunately, his resolve didn’t last long. “I originally planned to help my parents move and then go back to Chicago, he says. “I was thinking about my life there and thought maybe moving a thousand miles away might help me. I submitted my resume to some eyeglass shops and got a good response, so I moved to Albuquerque and got my own place, while my parents settled in Grants. It only took me two or three months to meet up with the wrong
crowd. I didn’t have the emotional resources to help me get off the cocaine completely. You think you can move somewhere new and it will be different, but it’s not. You learn in rehab you should change your playground and your playmates.” In Albuquerque, Blazquez discovered, cocaine wasn’t the predominant drug. OxyContin ruled the streets, and he adapted to the new drug in short order, selling it and using it himself. He teamed up with a guy who showed him how to buy prescriptions from veterans who needed the money more than they needed the pain relief. “We did some doctor-shopping, too,” he says. “I would go in and say I had hurt my leg, and they’d give me the painkiller. My biggest connection was a disabled gentleman who lived in my apartment complex. He didn’t want Oxy, so he’d sell his prescriptions extremely cheap.” “I was the devil back then,” he continues. “I pretended I was his friend just to get his prescriptions. He was lonely but couldn’t drive, so I would find him pros-
The Gallegos twins, Bunny (left) and Aubrey (right) live in Belen, New Mexico. Opposite: Frank Blazquez trendmagazineglobal.com
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Carlos, shown here in his Albuquerque home, now works as an executive assistant for Albuquerque’s Heading Home shelter.
titutes and bring them to his house, just to maintain the prescriptions. This gentleman was my connection for a solid year, providing a treasure trove. There was a lot of Ecstasy around too—it was everywhere, on all the street corners.” Whereas many high-functioning users remain straight during the work week and only indulge on the weekends, Blazquez did the opposite, taking OxyContin and Ecstasy while at work and spending his weekends in withdrawal. “I thought that because I was ‘cleansing’ every few days, I didn’t really have a problem.” At that time he still hadn’t realized he was doing something he really didn’t want to do. “I loved the routine, and I was making good money, a stable income. I’d spend half of my paycheck on drugs and go three or four days without even eating. I was smoking the pills
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off of tinfoil. I hit bottom at one point and quit for a few months, but it was impossible here in Albuquerque to stay away from drugs. They were everywhere.” “Everywhere” included Albuquerque’s infamous War Zone, the area along Central Avenue between Wyoming and San Mateo boulevards that was renamed the International District by Albuquerque officials trying to put a more benign face on the scene. Blazquez would often join his drug-using acquaintances in seedy motel rooms there, where they’d get high and share their pipe dreams of getting clean. “We all had this regret right after we’d get done smoking,” he says. “They’d say things like, ‘I was a star athlete in high school’ or ‘I’m gonna get clean.’ I realized that we were all trapped in our addictions. That’s when I decided I wanted to get out.”
Justine cradles her daughter in the family kitchen in their home in Rio Rancho. New Mexico. Top: Raymond “Sleepy” Gutierrez holds his daughter in a bedroom of his grandparents’ home, where he lives. He flashes his gang sign, a rare and risky act. trendmagazineglobal.com
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Deko and Monique pose for a portrait in a Central Avenue motel room in Albuquerque.
Blazquez withdrew from the drugs in earnest this time, and he enrolled as a history major with a minor in English at the University of New Mexico, where his fellow students were nonusers who took their studies seriously. “That helped me stay straight,” he notes. He graduated magna cum laude in 2018 and began to plan the next chapter in his life. Blazquez had always been fascinated by movies, particularly documentaries, and he decided it was time to pursue the art form seriously now that he was off drugs. He didn’t start filmmaking right away, however; he preferred to start with photography because it required him to learn how to frame his subjects, a skill that would be necessary for film as well. With his Canon Mark III camera in hand, he’d return to the War Zone
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frequently, asking his old acquaintances if he could take their portraits, meeting with rejection most of the time but getting enough subjects to consent that he was able to build a body of work. “I’m self-taught, but because of my years working with eyeglasses I already knew about lenses—how light goes through them, what a diopter is. I used what skills I already had to record the people and places that I thought were interesting. I wanted to capture the people who were leading a life of addiction, to show that lifestyle, because it’s an important part of my own story.” Blazquez’s portraits have a rawness and immediacy that can be startling, and his subjects’ enigmatic expressions reveal a variety of emotions simultaneously: pain, anger, defiance, sadness, fear. There’s very
Julianna in her bedroom at home in Grants, New Mexico.
little joy in these photos, but the complexity of the emotions they portray gives them a haunting quality, and we get a sense of the subjects’ humanity. Blazquez shows us their fragility as well as their strength, and these people become more to us than mere drug users captured on camera. Their backstories are hinted at in their gazes, and we find ourselves mourning their wasted talents while celebrating their efforts to get and stay clean in an environment that encourages relapse and despair. “I don’t tell my subjects to make any particular facial expressions or to smile,” he says. “I mainly want to capture their stares, so I just tell them to look directly into the lens. If they want to smile that’s up to them, but 99 percent of the time they don’t. I think that neutral glance, that default
stare, is really who they are. They’re giving me what they want to give rather than my dictating what to do.” What began as an exercise turned into the exhibition Barrios de Nuevo Mexico: Southwest Stories of Vindication, which has been displayed at a number of galleries and museums, including solo exhibitions for the Historic Santa Fe Foundation at El Zaguán on Canyon Road and Secret Gallery at 505 Central in Albuquerque, as well as a group show at the History Colorado Center in Denver. Blazquez treats all of his subjects with respect, and he pays them for allowing him to photograph them for his project. He speaks of them with an understanding born of their shared struggles with addiction; his approach is never judgmental or disapproving. “I’m honored and
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Chloe is an amateur boxer from Albuquerque.
grateful that they let me shoot their portraits and tell their stories,” he says. “They’re all actually doing well at the moment. At the time I shot them they were all doing something positive for themselves or for their families, so that’s where the ‘vindication’ comes from.” He also gives all his subjects digital images of themselves, and oddly enough this serves as an incentive to stay clean. “I like that I can give them a digital image that’s better than a cell phone image. They take pride in these shots and put them up on Facebook, and they let me use the images in exhibitions.” His secret to a powerful photograph? “You have to get that snap of one thing that you think is singular about a person,” he observes. His photo of a man called Sleepy, for example, captures him showing a gang sign for Los Padillas, something that gang members rarely do in front of outsiders because it can be dangerous for them to let the world know who and where they are. It
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also violates their code against snitching. “I was never a gang member,” says Blazquez. “My associations with them were on the margin. It’s a big deal for them to allow me to photograph them and to use the photos for a public project. Even on the TV reality shows like Gangland they tend to do old stories from the 1970s and ’80s, because otherwise it’s not safe.” He notes that most of the portraits have a landscape orientation, with the subjects in the center of the frame. “I don’t like cropping the sides to do vertical images,” he says, “because I learned in the vision-care industry that humans navigate our world laterally, and our eye muscles on the sides, the ones that move our eyes right and left, are the strongest.” Blazquez believes that his photography gives viewers a safe place from which to view another culture that they may find somewhat scary. “When we know each other we feel less fear,” he notes. “Capturing their
Felipe “Deko” Vigil is a lifelong Albuquerque resident.
anguish on camera humanizes them. Substance abuse and fragmented families happen at all levels of society.” He also has found that even hardened gang members have a soft core somewhere. “I’ve never met a gang member who said, ‘Hey, I’m a gang member because I love killing people.’” At his recent solo show at El Zaguán, he says, the people in attendance were all white and over the age of 50. “I felt a little out of place there,” he says, “but I also felt that I needed to be there, too, to represent the subjects of my photos and show that we’re still out there, that we bleed the same, we breathe the same air that they do, that we have the same family issues and traumas. It’s to make a connection with their humanity.” In addition to his photography, Blazquez has also begun making short films—Duke City Diaries—that he posts on his YouTube channel. These films offer wrenching glimpses of the lives of his subjects and the
challenges they face in overcoming obstacles and trying to establish a life amid the wreckage of their dreams. He partners with John Acosta, an Albuquerque filmmaker he met at UNM, and together they work to chronicle the day-to-day difficulties of life in the War Zone. They are currently working to raise money to combine the vignettes into a feature-length documentary film. Blazquez now devotes himself full-time to his photography and film projects, and he acknowledges that telling the stories of these forgotten people has been therapeutic for him at a lot of levels. “I still think about drugs every day because they’re part of my content, and I’m putting myself in that world, taking photos of street signs and signifiers, so of course I get reminded of my own drug use,” he says. “I’ve learned how to keep it in a safe place in my mind so I can use drugs for my art rather than ingest them. I ingest them in a different way and put it out as my art form. That’s a lot more rewarding.” R
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BY HEIDI UTZ | PHOTOS BY KATE RUSSELL
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SURVIVAL A unique Albuquerque initiative addresses homelessness through pencils, paint, and purpose
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or 27 years, Jimmy Lujan was an active member of the community, running his funeral home in Taos and playing guitar in a rock band on weekends. But when a close family member was murdered in 2006, life as he knew it ended. Lujan began to experience mania, depression, nightmares. He couldn’t focus enough to hold a job and began to wreck cars. Eventually he lost his apartment—then everything else. Lujan fell into using alcohol and even crack and heroin. After ending up on the streets of Albuquerque, he slept behind Dumpsters and desperately tried to numb the pain of his trauma—now compounded by being homeless in a part of the city known for being as rough as it is hot. One afternoon as he sat waiting for a bus at 1st and Mountain, a friend came by and invited him into a place she thought might engage him: ArtStreet, a massive studio where anyone could come in off the streets and work with a diverse range of artmaking supplies and materials. Lujan was immediately intrigued. “Here was this great place to be creative and get out of the heat,” he says. “And it was free.” ArtStreet was created in 1994 after a Leadership Albuquerque economic development committee conducted a series of brainstorming sessions that included people experiencing homelessness, Albuquerque Healthcare for the Homeless (AHCH), community advocates, and dedicated art therapists. The studio has since served as a gateway for people in crisis, providing a welcome escape from the intense isolation and danger of life on the streets, in a largefamily ambiance. “The homeless are shunned in many other places,” Lujan says. “It’s the complete opposite at ArtStreet. It’s a loving, safe place to be.” The program asks just two things of Jimmy Lujan. Opposite: René Cirilo with his its clients: show up sober and participate work in progress, at ArtStreet.
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in making art, in the medium of your choice. You don’t have to have art skills, aptitude, or even be experiencing homelessness (though 85 percent are or have been). In addition to providing the open studio, ArtStreet holds several closed art therapy groups for people in recovery of all kinds, stages client art shows for the general public, and helps its artists sell their work at farmer’s markets and recycled art shows throughout Albuquerque and Santa Fe. Its 2,680-square-foot space with 20-foot-high ceilings holds a web of loosely connected substations for painting and sketching, a wheel and kiln for making pots, a sewing area with fiber art materials, wood- and metalworking tables, a shelf of donated recycled 58
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materials for mixed-media artists, art books and magazines for inspiration, and paper and pen for those of a more literary bent. In deference to Albuquerque’s 7,000 unhoused children, there’s a separate area where kids and families can create. At any given time, 35 to 40 artists are working away at their individual projects, self-directed, though with the potential support of five staff members. One such staffer is program coordinator Mindy Grossberg, a Chicago-area native and 13-year ArtStreet veteran whose dedication to building close relationships and trust with and among her clientele is palpable. “You might have someone come in who’s in the middle of a crisis, and so we would sit down with them and
recommend art that would be good to help work through that process—such as pounding some clay. Some people come in and really settle down when they do their precise pen-and-ink drawings. This is their sense of ‘I have control of this,’ because these people don’t have a lot of control over their environments.” The clients she sees come from varied backgrounds—some attended art school, while others haven’t seen a paint box since childhood. The 1,500 or so individuals who enter the studio each year range from the very young to the very old, evenly split between male and female, as diverse in their ethnic and cultural backgrounds as Albuquerque itself. “A lot can happen when people sit next to each other, making art,” Grossberg
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Grossberg and her staff enjoy creating art alongside the clients. “We get to be fellow artists and experience the trials and tribulations that are art-making,” she says. “I think that helps new individuals who come in . . . and really helps people see that we don’t define art in a very specific way.” Top: artists Emmett Valenski (left) and Lucrecio Lopez (right, in red shirt) at ArtStreet. Left: ArtStreet program coordinator Mindy Grossberg (left) and artist Arlaine Ash. Opposite: the ArtStreet teaching staff (left to right): Carol Rig, Mataji Graham, Amani Malaika, Mindy Grossberg, and Karli Waters.
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“It’s not just the finished product, it’s the process, it’s the interaction, it’s the where do people decide to sit, what kinds of little things do they tuck away and hide because they don’t want anyone to take them, the little books that people create for themselves, the space that becomes their own. It’s sort of like an unspoken thing, even though there are no assigned seats. It’s almost like being here itself is an art piece.” —Mindy Grossberg Artist Victor Moya. Opposite, clockwise from left: artists Joey Goss, Holly WygandtO’Keath, and Clifton Blanchard, who goes by the street name of Hobbit, with Trippy.
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notes. “We don’t necessarily define each other—you’re homeless, or you’re this or that. We’re all artists making art, and we discover our similarities, not differences.” So what do the ArtStreet clients make? Much of the work isn’t necessarily conceptual or didactic in its aims but instead veers toward universal themes. Artists will frequently use objects found on the streets and sometimes create collages, which has led to their work being exhibited at recycled art shows in Albuquerque and Santa Fe. “They’ll do things around addiction or mental illness, things that show they’re passing through dark into light or light into dark, maybe religious themes . . . There’s a rawness to the art,” Grossberg says. At ArtStreet, Lujan was encouraged to paint, something he’d enjoyed doing since junior high school. Soon he met several
mentors whose work he admired, and he tagged along with them to learn techniques. After showing up every week for a year at Thursday and Friday afternoon open studios, Lujan discovered that some artists were selling their pieces at markets and shows—and keeping 100 percent of the proceeds. That got him thinking: selling his art could put a roof over his head. But first he needed to address his health. ArtStreet connected him with a doctor at its parent organization, AHCH, and a medical evaluation turned up mental health issues. The agency suggested he apply for Social Security benefits, started him on medication, and offered him a slot in a men’s art therapy group. Meanwhile, his art was steadily improving, and as he worked to make it more professional, it began to command higher prices. >
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“I think what’s great about ArtStreet is that it came out of focus groups and conversations with people experiencing homelessness, particularly families in this case. The gap was identified by people in need, and then people like the director of Albuquerque Healthcare for the Homeless at the time, Jennifer Metzler, and Leadership Albuquerque worked to make this program possible.” —Anita Cordova
Artist Albert Rosales working on his woodburning piece, Please, Not Another One Lost. Opposite: artist Mikol Hall.
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“I could sell pieces for $120, $130. That was enough for a motel room for a week.” Consistent therapy at ArtStreet and AHCH boosted his sense of purpose and self-esteem, and his substance abuse diminished. He began collecting Social Security, regularly making and selling art, and mentoring other ArtStreet participants in painting and guitar playing. By 2009, Lujan was off the streets. As Lujan’s experience shows, a vital ingredient in ArtStreet’s success has been its affiliation and shared facility with AHCH, a 30-year-old nonprofit that helps clients overcome health-related barriers to moving out of homelessness, a condition that dramatically increases one’s risk of illness, injury, and death. In addition to providing medical, dental, and psychiatric services to about 7,000 individuals
each year, the nonprofit offers residential recovery programs and manages 90 scattered-site housing units. Many people who walk into the open studio to make art later realize they need other services, which the program can link them to. And as a 1999 HUD study found, when those without housing access comprehensive services, 76 percent of families and 60 percent of singles find homes. AHCH works very closely with other housing initiatives, such as the Barrett Foundation/Casa Milagro and New Day, to make sure they can shelter as many people as possible. “We believe in housing first. So we don’t say, ‘When you’re sober for two months, come talk to us.’ We don’t ever put carrots in front of them. Our thing is to house them and wrap them around with care and services,”
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says Anita Cordova, AHCH director of development, planning, and evaluation. These comprehensive services are unique in New Mexico, and have earned the program funding from the National Endowment for the Arts on three occasions. The grants have pushed clients’ skills to a higher level via mentorship by professional artists such as Cynthia Cook, Catalina Delgado Trunk, and poet Valerie Martinez; encouraged collaborations with community arts organizations including the Harwood Art Center, Tamarind Institute, and the National Hispanic Cultural Center; and educated artists about their craft through lectures and field trips. They have also helped integrate ArtStreet’s clients into Albuquerque’s community of working artists. Among those most impacted by the first NEA project in 2008 was Terry Yazzie
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Begay, whose participation led to work as an assistant to a visiting artist. He was then invited to show his work in a South Broadway Cultural Center exhibit curated by another visiting artist, and he went on to attend the Institute of American Indian Arts. Now a working artist, he plans to teach art in the future. ArtStreet’s many other success stories include not only artists but leaders such as Kristin Leve, who helmed the AHCH board of directors and is now starting her own advocacy organization for and by individuals experiencing homelessness. In addition, a cadre of mostly female artists have recently banded together and used their ArtStreet-learned skills to create art on the fences surrounding the freshly remodeled Sundowner Motel, once home to Bill Gates, now a low- and
mixed-income housing project developed by NewLife Homes. And then there’s Jimmy Lujan—today fully sober, with a roof overhead, a working vehicle, and a thriving art career. “I tackle my art with vigor,” he says, describing his style as leaning toward Spiritualism or Surrealism. “I have a wonderful partner and just the cutest four-month-old baby. Life has become peaceful, and there’s safety and sobriety,” he reflects. Lujan paints in his home studio, does extensive street outreach and advocacy work through his church, and has stepped up to serve as a board member for ArtStreet. He’s shown his art widely and has sold his work to people in eight states and even abroad. And for those walking through ArtStreet’s doors for the first time, he serves as an example of how art can save lives. R TREND Spring 2015
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BY CHRISTINA PROCTER
| PHOTOGRAPHS BY KATE RUSSELL
BOOM TOWN A new complex in the Siler Road neighborhood will provide rentals and a maker space for creatives
When Hector Garcia left Juárez, Mexico, at age 13, he was making three dollars a week, one of which he’d spend on an English class. He crossed the border alone with high hopes and reached Santa Fe, where he lived at the Boys and Girls Club and soon got citizenship—but he never dreamed that someday he’d run Aztec Upholstery and become the city’s main supplier to high-end interior designers. w Garcia’s shop is located next to Java Joe’s off Siler Road, and his is just one of the industrial area’s many success stories. Garcia and his apprentices make the pieces that end up in Parade of Homes and ShowHouse Santa Fe each year, but this is nothing unusual in a neighborhood of makers. Next door, brothers Jorge and Rodrigo of Rodriguez Woodworks have made custom cabinetry for hotels and homes for 20 years. w “I love this neighborhood,” says Garcia, who built his career by plying the skills he learned making furniture and leather working with his father and grandfather. “At the body shop that used to be across the street from me, that guy gave me my first opportunity.” 90
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hat makes a neighborhood great? Those involved in planning the Siler Road affordable live-work apartments for creatives have been asking the question about this area of Santa Fe for years. In 2018, the dirt piles of an empty city lot will be replaced with the carefully designed Siler Yard Arts and Creativity Center (ACC), where makers of all genres will cohabit in affordable rental units designed to maximize their crafts. They’ll also have access, along with the rest of the neighborhood, to a maker space with the latest industry tools. The district, which extends along Siler Road between Agua Fria and Cerrillos and incorporates Rufina Street, has long been known for its industrial production, cheap rent, and affable commercial neighbors. The abundance of trade shops has formed the underpinning of the city and contributed to its style—not to mention providing paint jobs for its more fetching lowriders. Musicians, curators, and artists, along with technicians and tinkerers, are taking advantage of the economical accommodations and “anything goes” nature of the neighborhood, and they’re growing in numbers.
“One of the reasons I believe in this project is that it’s happening at the right time in the right place,” says Trey Jordan, one of the architects on ACC’s design team. “It’s not ‘build it and they’ll come.’ It’s ‘build it because they’re already there.’ ” This growth began long before Meow Wolf started making millions out of a formerly derelict bowling alley on Rufina Circle, back when the group was throwing house parMetal artist and sound ties and taking part in an underground savant Peter Joseph has arts scene that gave rise to venues like worked in the area for Radical Abacus, Ghost, and, more recentyears, producing multily, Fresh Santa Fe, run by architect and media installations that are exhibited internationartist Gregory Waits. Bucking the trends ally. Opposite: Joseph’s of Santa Fe’s traditional art markets and studio also houses an rising tourist prices, the area’s vigorous expansive metal shop. DIY scene has drawn attention to a wider creative market among the stonemasons, metalsmiths, and other makers who have shared their skills and networked among themselves for decades. Artists have long staked a claim in the area, among them blue-chip painter Paul Shapiro, sculptor Paul Bloch, trendmagazineglobal.com
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Hector Garcia founded Aztec Upholstery, which has been a hub for the city’s top interior designers for decades. Opposite, from left: Angelo Valencia, Reymundo Ochoa, and Efran Valencia of Angelo’s Auto Care and Repair shop on Rufina Street.
and metal designer Peter Joseph. At artist August Muth’s holography studio, apprentices come from all over the world to train with a master. “It’s really the center of the city,” says Zane Fischer, founder of MAKE Santa Fe, a nonprofit community workspace where people can access tools, resources, and workshops to help them realize their creative projects. “That’s not only true geographically and by population density, but it’s the heart and soul, where the real making has been going on since the ’60s.” Creative Santa Fe, an arts organization that works to strengthen the creative economy through collaborative projects, began investigating how to tackle community development in response to an economic study that identified the city at the top of the nation’s art markets, with $1.1 billion moving through annually. And yet, says director Cyndi Conn, “no one in our community was actively leading an affordable housing project for creative individuals to ensure this group’s long-term sustainability.” Meanwhile, explains housing consultant Daniel Werwath, the 92
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city has experienced a housing crisis, with rents rising unchecked and affordable rental projects repeatedly squashed by neighborhood associations. “Without affordable rental housing,” he says, “the city’s development will drive out the diversity we’re known for, and leave in its stead a retirement wasteland.” Creative Santa Fe called in experts from Artspace, a leading developer of affordable housing for artists, to conduct a feasibility study. The nonprofit, which has initiated 46 live-work projects across the country, confirmed the city’s dire need for something similar. When the City Council voted unanimously to donate a five-acre parcel of land worth $1.2 million, the project became viable. Creative Santa Fe then released a request for proposals to select a local developer. New Mexico Inter-Faith Housing (NMIF) was chosen, with chief operative officer Werwath at the helm. Creative Santa Fe and NMIF ran a competition to select a a design team of architects. “We’re hoping to create this ecosystem where it’s not just about low-cost space to be creative, but also being co-located with all these
Garcia and his apprentices make the pieces that end up in Parade of Homes and ShowHouse Santa Fe each year, but this is nothing unusual in a neighborhood of makers.
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TOP AND BOTTOM: COURTESY OF ATKIN OLSHIN SCHADE ARCHITECTS, TREY JORDAN ARCHITECTURE, DA SILVA ARCHITECTURE, AND SURROUNDINGS.
The Arts and Creativity Center’s west-facing entry. Center: Architects and designers of the project include, from left: Miguel da Silva, Sandra Donner, Tushita Vavas, Trey Jordan, Will Iadevaia, Shawn Evans, Garron Yepa, and Miriam Diddy. Bottom: An aerial view of the ACC site.
Members of the ACC outreach team include designers, artists, and other makers gathered by affordable housing consultant Daniel Werwath (front left). Top: Creative Santa Fe director Cyndi Conn (center) and board chairman Bill Miller (right) rallied groups around the city’s affordable rental housing crisis, receiving unanimous support for a land donation from the City Council and Mayor Javier Gonzales (left). trendmagazineglobal.com
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The neighborhood’s many converted industrial spaces are home to such wonders as those chiseled in marble by sculptor Paul Bloch, whose work is influenced by jazz and more than a decade of work and study in Italy. trendmagazineglobal.com
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other creative people,” says Werwath. “Thrown into the pot are resources that make new tools and technologies available, coupled with courses that help people become more economically vibrant in their practices.” The complex includes a shared resources space that will house MAKE Santa Fe (currently located around the block), where anyone can become a member and gain access to tools like an industrial sewing machine, a laser cutter, a 3-D printer, a plasma cutter, and a CNC router. The ACC’s 60 units will primarily target low-income tenants, renting for somewhere between $363 and $606 a month. But this project cannot solve the city’s rental housing crisis by itself. “There should be air-raid sirens going off right now with the statistics,” warns Werwath, citing the city’s latest housing needs assessment, which concluded that 3,000 additional units of affordable rental housing are needed just to meet today’s demands. With a miniscule vacancy rate, waiting lists for affordable rentals are dauntingly long. On top of that, says Werwath, the past two years saw doubledigit increases in rents across the city, with a 13 percent increase in 2016 and a ten percent increase in 2015, leaving the puzzled and dwindling population with a near 25 percent rent inflation. “It’s at a crisis point,” he concludes. Fortunately, he says, the ACC is one of two affordable rental projects approved by the city this year, a 98
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signal to developers that there’s support for a new direction. The ACC requires that tenant selection reflect the diversity of the low-income sector, not of the entire population, thus avoiding the mistake made by some well-intentioned affordable projects. “The area is under a bunch of unique gentrification pressures that are really serious,” admits Werwath. “It’s no longer the edge of town, and when other places are so restrictive, it makes this area precious.” Securing affordable rental space there is a proactive measure against the dangers of gentrification, he explains, and he hopes the ACC becomes a model for what the city can do with other swaths of unused land. The units are designed for flexible use, with north- and southfacing windows that take in the northern light desired by painters and maximize energy efficiency. A central spine of greenery will connect the complex, with units situated to promote interaction among the residents, explains Shawn Evans of AOS Architects, known for affordable housing and community development projects. Jordan says the team aims to leave the design open to whatever character the community takes on. Much of the exterior walls of the buildings, for instance, are reserved for mural or projection work to be curated by residents. “This is going to be a place that, like the neighborhood, is loud
Metal artist Diego Velรกzquez crafts custom commercial and art pieces at Santa Fe Metal Design on Siler Lane. Opposite: Blacksmith, woodworker, and Spanish Colonial artist Rene Zamora has designed many of the doors and gates found throughout Santa Fe. trendmagazineglobal.com 99
Will Wood designs custom furniture elements at Ironwood Forge on Trades West Road. Top, from left: MAKE Santa Fe regulars include artists Cia Thorne, Anaid Garcia, and Katrina Mendoza. Opposite: Tools of the trade at Ironwood Forge and other smith shops in the neighborhood. 100 TREND Summer 2017
“Without affordable rental housing the city’s development will drive out the diversity we’re known for, and leave in its stead a retirement wasteland.”
Artist Michael Freed of Offroad Productions hosts quarterly curated shows in his Trades West Road studio.
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and messy and permissive,” says Evans. “This is part of a movement to recognize the cultural and economic diversity of this town, to position this place and these people as the real makers of the future of Santa Fe.” “What makes this project so successful is the outreach they’ve done,” says Heidi Zimmer of Artspace. Of concern to organizers, however, are other livework projects that sank like lead balloons in other cities, likely due to failed outreach. “It’s not easy,” says Werwath. “It’s always the same dozen people who show up at meetings, and they’re not the people you’re trying to serve.” But when Creative Santa Fe won a National Endowment for the Arts grant to fund outreach, Werwath pulled together a team to tap into the city’s creative groups to determine what diverse makers want and need. “We’re working with artists from different subsections of the community and saying, ‘Here’s the funding, here’s the information we want to gather. Let’s work together to produce events that reach your constituencies.’ ” Such events include last year’s lowrider festival hosted by Enchanted Expressions Car Club and organized by lowrider aficionada Justice Lovato, whose family owns a car shop across the street from the ACC plot. With increasing access to shared tools and potential collaborations, there’s no telling what tinkerers will do. When sought-after auto artist Carlos Muñoz checked out MAKE Santa Fe, he started thinking about how his business could use a laser cutter to create patterns for stencils to paint cars. Project organizers express faith that they can represent and amplify the neighborhood’s strengths. “We’re giving the city a platform to be larger problem solvers and create a pilot project,” says Conn. “We want to show the world that this is replicable, and that true collaboration is always better.” Flux and development remain the area norm. While some people keep to themselves in refurbished warehouse studios, others start new businesses, like Christian Moreno, who teamed up with Adam Griego to start Honest Automotive. A typical cluster forms where Trades West Cabinet Shop shares a complex with painter and curator Michael Freed, who leases space on either side of his building to metal artist Adam Rosen of Metal Mogul and painter John Vokoun, who does printing and pre-press at Fire Dragon Color. Nearby, thousands of participants have practiced circus arts at Wise Fool, trendmagazineglobal.com 103
Multimedia artists Crockett Bodelson (left) and Sandra Wang of SCUBA have recently taken up residence in the area. Opposite: Lowrider guru Justice Lovato organized a festival for ACC’s outreach last year.
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and while Diego Velázquez at Santa Fe Metal Clad smiths elements for contemporary design around town, dozens of other makers toil at their trades. Back at Aztec Upholstery, Garcia marvels at his good fortune. “I don’t know why they come for me,” says the go-to consultant for carpenters and designers. “I think it’s because I’m interested in making the industry better. The style, comfort, and quality have to get better every time in order for us to be content with ourselves.” At this point, Garcia feels obligated to pass on his skills. He teaches with Delancey Street Foundation, which provides workforce training to former substance abusers, ex-convicts, and others in need. He’s trained workers in San Juan Pueblo and even San Francisco, where participants were inspired to open an upholstery shop after his weeklong visit. Across the street is longtime resident Ed Crist, who sculpts and does auto welding, along with recent neighborhood additions Sandra Wang and Crockett Bodelson. The artist duo bought their warehouse after finding that a rental downtown provided little foot traffic to their gallery space. Wang has set up a communal ceramics studio there with two kilns, a pottery wheel, and a separate room for glazing. “It takes a
lot of effort for ceramic artists to collect all that expensive equipment,” she says. “When you have that, it almost feels like [you have] an obligation to share.” Wang is pleased to hear about the incoming ACC space, which she thinks will further the area’s creativity. “We had to look to the Siler area to find more affordable studio space, and we feel more at home now. We’re around other artists, people who understand what we’re doing—and nobody cares if we’re playing loud music or having an event.” Wang does express caution about expansion. “It’s exciting to hear about things coming in, like a grocery store or a restaurant, but you have to consider the impact, and how that can price out families who have been here for a long time,” she says. “Crockett and I always try to keep a DIY status, keep things low-key. We want to contribute to the creative community, but we want to do it responsibly.” Her one complaint? “We need more women. It’s a bunch of dudes around here.” R Select photos in the article come from a project commissioned by Creative Santa Fe as part of the outreach and design process for Siler Yard, which was supported by a National Endowment for the Arts grant. trendmagazineglobal.com 105
Taking It to the Streets
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Native American street art sparks a dialogue about cultural and environmental issues BY NANCY ZIMMERMAN
KATE RUSSELL
Jaque Fragua creates a mural on the wall of the New Mexico Museum of Art during the Live Art event at Santa Fe’s 2013 Indian Market.
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ack in the mid ’60s, when Simon and Garfunkel sang that “ . . . the words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and tenement halls . . . ,” graffiti was perceived by the Establishment as vandalism and its purveyors as criminals. Fast-forward a few decades, and the landscape has shifted a bit. Simple graffiti phrases—from “Kilroy was here” to “U.S. Out of Vietnam” to “No Blood for Oil”—are still seen by many as an urban blight, but enough graffiti writers have revealed themselves as witty and talented provocateurs to establish the practice as an art form. Add to that a recent proliferation of highly creative murals, billboards, posters, T-shirts, and performance pieces conveying political statements and cris de coeur, many of them produced by formally trained artists and graphic designers, and what was once a crime has become a movement. This outlaw activity has since moved into the salons and galleries of such highbrow bastions as Art Basel Miami and the Venice Biennale, and street artists like Shepard Fairey, Banksy, and the late Jean-Michel Basquiat have become household names. But even as public understanding of its importance and quality as an artistic expression has grown, street art has managed to retain its youthful, gritty immediacy, along with its power to shift the collective conversation to new modes of thought and aesthetic appreciation. And it’s no longer a purely urban phenomenon: now it’s come to the rez. The remote expanses of South Dakota’s Pine Ridge Reservation and the Navajo Nation, which straddles New Mexico and Arizona, might seem unlikely venues for street art to flourish, given their lack of population density, few roads, and even fewer buildings. But flourish it has, and the messages conveyed by its practitioners now resonate with an urgency that extends far beyond the confines of the reservations. “Native American graffiti has actually been around forever,” observes Jaque Fragua, who was raised in New Mexico’s Jemez Pueblo and currently resides in New York. “My first inspiration as an artist came from my people’s ancient petroglyphs and pictographs. They were so minimalist in their expression, getting to the core values of life and speaking volumes in their simplicity and beauty.” Moving from the rustic canyons surrounding his pueblo to the concrete canyons of the city was a natural leap for Fragua, who began his foray into public art as a teenager, dodging the cops while writing graffiti in Denver. “Graffiti was a challenging boot camp,” he says. “I had to represent and defend myself, and fight off the authorities and other graffiti writers.” While he acknowledges the adrenaline high of evading detection while asserting his message, he soon tired of the
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arrests and confrontations, and sought other media to give voice to his Native perspective on issues of identity, cultural appropriation, and institutionalized inequality. “It’s about educating people who are ignorant of the fact that there are highly developed cultures that have existed within the Americas for hundreds of years,” says Fragua, who studied at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe and has led community-based art workshops, mural projects, and studio classes in figure drawing and painting. He also has helped create exhibits highlighting Native issues for the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., and the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts and the Museum of Indian Arts & Culture in Santa Fe. “Our differences need to be not just tolerated, but celebrated,” he adds. A major subject of Native street art is cultural appropriation, the general public’s tendency to freely adopt Native themes and symbols without permission, attribution, or, indeed, any real understanding of their meaning to the people from whom they’re taken. From the sports world to the movie industry to history textbooks, Native identity has been exploited in ways few other ethnic groups have endured. After several centuries of watching the Anglo world distort cultural icons, perpetuate insulting stereotypes, and appropriate images for monetary gain, Native Americans are now wielding their power as street artists to reclaim their identities and assert their self-respect. Although galleries and museums around the country and beyond are increasing their recognition of fine art produced by Native Americans, Fragua feels that the art’s inherent messages of cultural autonomy need to be disseminated more widely—and that’s where street art comes in. “Cultural appropriation is kind of an entry-level issue, something a lot of people can understand,” he says. “There are millions of people who never set foot in an art gallery, but they see billboards along the highways and murals and posters on the walls of their city,” he says. “When we put our message beside a freeway or on a building, we can speak to people directly on both a spiritual and intellectual level.” To that end, some of his colorful posters bear tersely worded messages that would be difficult to misconstrue: “Sovereignty,”
“Stop Big Oil on Tribal Soil,” “Protect Mount Taylor.” All speak to the assault on the integrity of Native lands, while informing and engaging people in struggles that ultimately affect all of us. Honor the Treaties (HTT) is a loose collective of street artists that came together organically around 2010 after internationally renowned photojournalist Aaron Huey began exploring the issue of the 1868 Fort Laramie Treaty, which preserved 27 million acres in the Black Hills of South Dakota for the Sioux Nation. The land was illegally usurped and opened up to prospectors and homesteaders despite the treaty, and the Sioux Nation sued to enforce it. Litigated until 1980, the case became the longest-running lawsuit in U.S. history. The Supreme Court finally acknowledged the land theft but awarded the tribe a mere $106 million in compensation. The Sioux refused the payment, declaring, “The Black Hills are not for sale!” That rallying cry fueled a movement to publicize the injustice of the court’s decision after Huey gave a TED talk on the topic, and renowned artists Ernesto Yerena, a Yaqui/Chicano originally from California, and Shepard Fairey, best known for his 2008 Obama “HOPE” poster, collaborated on a street-art campaign to plaster hundreds of walls throughout the country with posters bearing the slogan. Since then the HTT collective, directed by an advisory board whose members include Native American civic leaders, lawyers, educators, musicians, and entrepreneurs, has brought together a diverse group of Native street artists who use their talents to further the effort to protect the culture, water, air, and land by pursuing enforcement of treaties that have been systematically breached. Fiscally sponsored by the Lakota People’s Law Project, the group promotes individual ventures as well as collaborations among Native artists and advocacy organizations. One such effort is the Painted Desert Project, which came into being initially when African-American physician James “Chip” Thomas, a longtime resident of the Navajo Nation, began venturing out into the reservation to photograph the Navajo residents as they went about the business of their daily lives. In 2012 he decided to turn his hobby into a public art project by enlarging the photos and wheatpasting them onto buildings along the roads that wound through the reservation. The idea was to create
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COURTESY OF TOM GREYEYES; TOP: COURTESY OF JAQUE FRAGUA
CHANGO BLANCO
Street art is no longer a purely urban phenomenon: now it’s come to the rez.
Tom GreyEyes addresses the degradation of the environment caused by coal-fired power plants with a mural at the Inscription House, a clinic at the junction of Highway 98 and Indian Route 16 in Arizona. Top: The mural is the message—Jaque Fragua collaborated with Shepard Fairey to create poignant but pointed wall art in Los Angeles’s Indian Alley. Opposite: A detail from Nani Chacon’s billboard on Central Avenue in Albuquerque, which urges viewers to “Save Mount Taylor.”
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COURTESY OF THE JOURNAL MEDIA COMPANY; OPPOSITE: COURTESY OF HONOR THE TREATIES (5)
cultural and environmental messages that could be seen by the local residents as well as visitors traveling through the area. Among those participating in both HTT and the Painted Desert Project is Navajo artist Tom GreyEyes, an Arizona resident and recent college graduate who has already achieved acclaim as an artist, teacher, and social activist. In 2012 he was awarded the Phoenix New Times’s Big Brain award in visual art, and he used the prize money to participate in a training camp for nonviolent, direct activism. “I believe in the power of art as a political megaphone,” he says. “It can break through language barriers with visual statements, and it becomes almost a language in itself. Chip Thomas was my introduction to the street-art community, and those artists involved in the Painted Desert Project have taught me a lot. You need stamina and commitment to create art in remote locations, to withstand the hot sun and the dust storms, and the artists really impressed me with their passion for their work.” While the project is directed toward the residents of the Navajo Nation, designed primarily to inspire the younger generation by giving them a positive way to see their culture, GreyEyes observes that both this art and street art in general offer important means of speaking back to power in addition to speaking to each other. “We’re trying to build a movement to inspire people and to engage in dialogue about issues important to our survival. Neocolonialism is still alive in this country, and cultural appropriation is a big issue. Through our art we can make critiques and propose solutions; we can offer a vision of how things could be.” GreyEyes approaches his forays into issue-based street art as research projects, first
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“We’re trying to build a movement to inspire people and to engage in dialogue about issues important to our survival.”
Shepard Fairey’s poster helped mobilize protesters at South Dakota’s Pine Ridge reservation. Opposite: Poster art is a quick and compact way to package and disseminate a political message. The artists are Ernesto Yerena (top left), Gregg Deal (top right and bottom left), and Jaque Fragua (bottom center and bottom right).
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BOTTOM RIGHT: COURTESY OF NADINE NARINDRANKURA; BOTTOM LEFT AND TOP: COURTESY OF TOM GREYEYES (2)
Above: Nani Chacon (top right) offers a contemporary take on mythological Navajo figures like Spider Woman, who graces the mural She Taught Us to Weave, along a railroad corridor in Albuquerque. Top left: Chacon creates the mural Manifestations of Glittering World in the Allan Houser Art Park at Santa Fe’s Museum of Contemporary Native Arts. By integrating ancient archetypes and designs into pop culture, she gives them new relevance and immediacy.
BOTTOM AND TOP RIGHT: COURTESY OF NANI CHACON (2); TOP LEFT: RYAN RICE, COURTESY OF MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY NATIVE ARTS
From the sports world to the movie industry to history textbooks, Native identity has been exploited in ways few other ethnic groups have endured.
Above right: Tom GreyEyes at work on the streets. Above left: In this digitally composited image, GreyEyes explores the concepts of identity and the “masks” people wear in their lives. Top: GreyEyes painted this work on the wall of the Taala Hooghan Infoshop in Flagstaff, Arizona, to protest environmental injustices in the region.
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COURTESY OF GREGG DEAL
COURTESY OF GREGG DEAL (2)
Gregg Deal’s performance pieces and artwork satirize stereotypes and insulting representations of Native Americans. Opposite: In this Banksy-like image, Deal injects an edge of humor by adding a simple element, a balloon, to alter a romanticized version of an Indian.
steeping himself in the background and details before engaging his creative skills. He cites his work with Save the Confluence, a movement organized in response to the proposed Grand Canyon Escalade project, which has split the Navajo Nation and occasioned a groundswell of protest. The project is a multimilliondollar tourism development that would brings tens of thousands of visitors to the eastern edge of the Grand Canyon, threatening a fragile ecosystem and displacing people from their homes in the process. “I did a mural about the political issues surrounding it, but I first had to get information from everyone, read the environmental impact report, and learn the details of the project. Once I had the information, it was up to me as an artist to conceptualize it, create it, and disseminate it.” Another HTT artist, Navajo/Chicana painter and illustrator Nanibah “Nani” Chacon, also paints murals with a message. Raised on the Navajo reservation and now living in Albuquerque, Chacon says her intention is to create a connection between traditional culture and contemporary social perspectives. She accomplishes this through abstracted illustrations featuring a character for whom she crafts a visual narrative. “I really want to create pieces that make a statement that brings Native philosophy into a contemporary context,” she explains. “I feel that the only reference for Native philosophy has been an archaic culture, a relic of the past. I want to show its contemporary relevance through my art.” Her mural She Taught Us to Weave, which was commissioned in 2012 by the City of Albuquerque for the International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA) to adorn a railroad corridor in downtown Albuquerque, stars the archetypal Spider Woman and addresses her relationship to technology and the responsibility that goes with it. “In our creation stories, Spider Woman taught us to weave, and to weave with beauty and harmony,” she says. “At the beginning of the mural, the pattern around Spider Woman resembles a rug motif. As it proceeds down the wall, the pattern appears as a circuit board, raising the question, ‘How will we now use the modern technology we have?’” In addition to incorporating elements of traditional textile patterns into the story, Chacon also likes to use the architecture of the building to make each mural site-specific. “My work is definitely different in the respect that I focus on the beauty, the compassionate side of the cultural issues. I believe battles will be won with positive messages. And I feel a sense of responsibility about what I paint because once I put it out there it no longer belongs to me. My particular interest is in
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reaching young people with my HTT work,” she adds. “We’re not always going to change the world, or even change a law, but we can open the dialogue.” A more confrontational but wryly humorous approach can be seen in the performance art of Gregg Deal, a Pyramid Lake Paiute painter and graphic artist originally from Utah who now lives in Washington, D.C. His trenchant social commentary is ironic in tone as he explores the misappropriations of Native culture that go back centuries, as seen in his project The Last American Indian on Earth. For this performance piece, Deal dresses up in a stereotypical Indian costume complete with headdress and feathers, then positions himself around town doing ordinary things like buying coffee at Starbucks, mowing the lawn, or visiting the Washington Monument. Video and still cameras record people’s reactions to seeing this Hollywood-style Indian in their midst, and Deal reports that the stunt has occasioned a wide variety of responses and conversations. “The perception of indigenous people in and out of Native culture needs to change,” he says. “We need a dialogue. I take stereotypes and regurgitate them, take relics and place them in the modern world, and people are forced to reconcile the odd juxtapositions. Irony and humor can get through in ways that earnest exposition can’t. Being angry and defensive all the time doesn’t work.” Deal underscores the difference between honoring a culture by borrowing positive elements and acts of true cultural appropriation. “With appropriation, you don’t have a conversation,” he points out. “No one’s asking for permission or even an opinion. Some argue, for example, that naming the city’s football team ‘the Redskins’ is a way of honoring us, but it only ‘honors’ romanticism, the nostalgic notion of an Indian that never actually existed.” Despite the frustration of having to counter these notions—“On the East Coast, the novelty of being Native American is alive and well,” he says—Deal believes that the digital age is “a good time to be Indian. With the advent of social media and the Internet, hashtags, posters, and stickers, we can reach more people than ever before in new, more immediate ways.” > 15 YEARS OF TREND MAGAZINE | SUMMER 2014
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COURTESY OF CHIP THOMAS; INSET: CHANGO BLANCO
The movement continues to spread, not just via the streets and social media but also through film, television, and music. It has attracted support from such notables as Neil Young, who performed a concert to fund a lawsuit against the Tar Sands development in Canada that featured Fragua’s poster and T-shirt designs. “The artists are the ones leading the way for how we see things,” says Fragua. “We connect the issues with the external world to get the message out at the same time that we internalize the message for the Native communities.” Important as it is to Native Americans for the process of decolonization to continue, it is, in fact, equally important to the culture at large. By reclaiming and reasserting their true identity as a people, Native artists open up and share a world that broadens everyone’s understanding of human history and the human condition, and exposes us to a new aesthetic and worldview. Likewise, by drawing attention to the environmental degradation that threatens traditional lands, air, and water sources, they fight for environmental integrity for everyone. Beyond the hip visuals and edgy messages, the Native street-art movement presages a saner, more inclusive world that benefits us all. R
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The Painted Desert Project sprang from Dr. Chip Thomas’s photos of Navajo Nation residents. With the help of volunteer artist crews (opposite), he wheatpasted the photos onto structures throughout the reservation, offering positive images to bolster the Navajo sense of identity.
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FROM THE EDITOR
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TREND Fall 2019/ Winter/Spring 2020
There are some who say that there is no such thing as coincidences, that they’re merely patterns, threads through points in time that seem to disrupt our linear assumptions. One such ripple occurred during this issue when our publisher, Cynthia Canyon, obtained The Diary of an Art Dealer, the unpublished manuscript by Tally Richards, a former heavyweight in the Taos art scene. Skimming through her diary entries, I saw one from February 3, 1969, when Richards was fresh off the train from New York City and flat broke but thinking about opening a contemporary art gallery. She wrote: “Marcia Oliver, a painter who is at the Wurlitzer Foundation on a grant . . . is going to do some small commercial paintings that I can sell.” Indeed she did, and the two collaborated for years. I was amazed to realize that 50 years later, Marcia Oliver is still at work in her studio, as described on page 150. Richards’ instincts about the artist’s longevity were correct. We hope ours are too, and that the ripples Trend helps make in our community have a longevity and full circle of their own. Christina Procter, Editor
LEFT: COURTESY OF WIKIPEDIA COMMONS; RIGHT: ANDY JOHNSON
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n her letter from the publisher on page 45, Cynthia Canyon talks about the “full circle” that characterizes her decades publishing Trend magazine. Each story in Trend sends forth ripples that go on to sometimes unseen outcomes, but often these ripples return to our team in new and enlightening ways as the creative visionaries we cover proceed in their careers. It’s a happy coincidence, then, that the last name of one of our featured artists, Judy Tuwaletstiwa (page 104), is Hopi for “the wind making ripples in the sand.” In a similar manner, our team has fluctuated and grown over the years. I’m honored to be back with Trend as editor of this issue with Kristian Macaron, who helmed our previous 20th-anniversary issue. I took a break to cowrite the documentary Meow Wolf: Origin Story, co-executive produced by George R.R. Martin, whose library features the stained-glass sigils from Game of Thrones that appear in our story on Spin Dunbar (page 128). It seems to me that since I moved here from New York City seven years ago, the ebb and flow and evolution of the arts in New Mexico could well be symbolized by the ancient Egyptian symbol of the ouroboros. This serpent eating its own tail represents the beginning and end of time, and the quantum mystery of the inseparability of these extremes. Navigating in the now, the artists, architects, culinary creatives, and designers of interiors, textiles, and soundscapes covered in this issue are all making their work at the nexus of past and future. They are creating their art in a region where history remains alive and relevant far more than in other parts of the country, and where multiculturalism defines who we are. This is evident in how interior designers find their inspiration, as explored on page 96. In this issue we also look at sustainability in architecture, as exemplified by the work of Tamarah Begay on page 50 and Jonah Stanford on page 86. We also examine trends that strengthen local economics, such as how national laboratories in New Mexico are helping businesses innovate (page 60), and how Kei & Molly Textiles (page 76)—a far cry from the likes of Amazon and other monolithic retail operations—cares for its employees. Of particular interest are the stories that survive beyond the artist’s lifetime, such as the legacy of the late sculptor Tony Price and his propeace, anti-nuclear message, which has found new life via a nonprofit organization formed by his friends (page 116).
CYNTHIA CANYON PUBLISHER/FOUNDER
Inspiration and grace is what drives me to do what I do as publisher of Trend Magazine. I work first and foremost to preserve the publications legacy and quality of the magazine.
Thank you for your time.
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