Ravens soar, nest and forage all around us.

In the morning, they fly to the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, then head back toward town, where they drink, bathe and preen while croaking and cawing at each other.

Ramona Sakiestewa was fascinated by the ravens flocking in her Santa Fe yard. Her insights produced the series of monoprints “Raven @ the Big Bang,” on view at Tai Modern from Aug. 13-30.

“They’re very entertaining,” she said. “They’re loud and I have a little pond in the back and they bathe and bring their young to the pond the next year.

In her latest work, she combines the texture of fabric and papers with prints and painting to make works sometimes sewn together into layered color and images.

Sakiestewa is Hopi; ravens figure prominently in Native American culture. The second half of the exhibition’s title reflects Sakiestewa’s belief that the birds have existed since the Big Bang.

The artist grew up in Albuquerque, where she attended Bandelier Elementary and Wilson Junior High. She had always been interested in the arts and making things.

“I loved sewing,” Sakiestewa said. “When I was like 5, I got a little Singer sewing machine and I made doll clothes.”

By the time she was in second grade, she was stitching her own clothing.

Fiber and texture feature prominently in her work. A former weaver, Sakiestewa added fabric to the printing plate of her raven pieces, tore it up, then reconstructed it with her own painting in Japanese inks.

“I like constructing and deconstructing them,” she said. “Sometimes I sew them back together because paper’s sort of like fabric. I sewed the wings on.”

The series also features sandhill cranes, images from a scene the artist witnessed in Utah.

“It’s about an event I saw when a group of cranes were grazing in a field. A hawk was circling above them. Literally, they flapped their wings and lifted off the ground and then they flew in a circle facing inward with each circle, their long legs hanging down. They made a vertical column as they rose up in the sky and the hawk left them alone. It was like watching a 747 take off vertically.”

A fiber and texture fan, Sakiestewa shops by feeling the fabric on the clothes rack. She studied textiles at New York’s School of Visual Arts and was known as a tapestry weaver until the 2008-2009 recession.

“The gallery owner died,” she said. “The economy had tanked and you could see people pulling away from collecting.”

She began experimenting with print work. For more than 30 years she has written and lectured about Native American weaving and contemporary art, including a lecture tour of Japan. Her weavings hang in numerous corporate, private and museum collections. She also has worked with a series of nationally known architects designing for buildings and their interiors. She has worked in stone, metal, carpet and glass. Some of her work can be seen in the Tempe Center for the Arts in Arizona, Marriott Hotels in California and Washington, D.C., and in the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.

She isn’t sure where her work will go next.

“I really like this whole bird figure,” she said. “It might be some different birds or something more abstract.

“I like making things,” she continued. “I’ve had jobs where the only product I had at the end of the day was a nice contract. It’s a kind of problem solving.”

Sakiestewa was awarded the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts in 2006 and was inducted into the New Mexico Women’s Hall of Fame.

From curious types and those mildly interested in sprucing up their walls to lifelong art lovers looking to realize their personal vision of a finely curated, art-filled residence, finding the right artwork for one’s home can be quite the challenge.
Traditionally, when it comes to incorporating fine art into interior design, most homeowners start with the most conventional of all art forms, paintings. But even once the medium is settled on, how does one go about finding the right painting, or artist, for their home?

Some merely keep an eye out for whatever strikes their fancy, while others enlist the aid of professionals like Suzanne Lovell, CEO of Suzanne Lovell Inc., a Chicago-based architectural interior design firm specializing in luxury residential projects.

“Always buy what you love, what moves you. The more you acquire as an art collector, the more that you learn about yourself and what you prefer,” Ms. Lovell said. “There are rules when it comes to paintings. A good discussion around value means review of public and private past sales, and look at the career of the artist, where have they exhibited and what collections are they in. What’s next for them?”

Among traditional collectors, some are drawn to acquiring paintings based on perceived value as an investment opportunity, but “you should first and foremost be visually drawn to a piece you’ll be living with before considering it as a purchase for your home,” explained Los Angeles-based interior designer Jamie Bush. “If a work is valuable yet you don’t care for it much, then it’s an odd thing to bring into your home. That said, I feel to have the privilege to be able to acquire art as an investment is something, given the opportunity, that one should definitely do. To be able to enjoy something that is exciting, beautiful, controversial, seductive or monumental in your home—instead of stocks, for example—is one of the great joys of life.”

In speaking with new clients, Ms. Lovell encourages them to select paintings “to build a story based upon historical precedent, teacher/student, contemporaneous works, or similar subject matter,” noting how “that’s the fun and passion behind collecting with an idea of the story that you would like to tell and experience as it unfolds, and meanders with each new find/acquisition.”

Firms like Mr. Bush’s can sometimes help. “During this process, we do a lot of precedent analysis, reviewing past auction records, condition reports, market fluctuations—getting all the pertinent information together to help them make an informed decision helps put the client in the best position to decide if the purchase is right for them,” Mr. Bush said.

Here are four artists and painters to keep an eye out for:

Kara Walker (b. 1969) is a contemporary African-American artist whose work explores race, stereotypes and gender throughout American history. She has gained international recognition for her cut-paper silhouettes depicting complex historical narratives, and has used drawing, painting and sculpture to expose the ongoing psychological effects of the legacy of slavery.

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“Walker’s use of the silhouette attracts the viewer’s attention in crisp black and white, while the depiction commands contemplation and invokes an awareness of history and what that story means today,” Ms. Lovell said.

When suggesting Ms. Walker and other similar artists to clients, Ms. Lovell encourages them to “be brave, be bold and collect the work of the artists whose messages you believe deserve a platform.”

The Copenhagen-based Astrid Krogh (b. 1968) is known for combining traditional techniques with innovative materials to produce a kaleidoscopic assortment of light installations, textiles and gilded surfaces. Many of the artist’s best-known works explore the nuances of sensory experience, triggering emotion through light, color, and touch. Her work can be spotted at the artistically-themed 21C Museums, as well as Design Miami Basel, Longchamp, PAD London, and other international, public sites.

Meadow // Astrid Krogh

“Living with art can alter your experience of the everyday, as it does for our clients for whom we installed a wall piece by Krogh in the entrance to their Manhattan pied-à-terre,” Ms. Lovell said. “Krogh’s ‘painting with light’ is ever changing, it is interesting when off and on, and it defines the space at night that is visible from the dining and living areas.”

A central figure among contemporary Native American artists, Ramona Sakiestewa (b. 1948) was born of Hopi ancestry and raised in the American Southwest. The versatile Sakiestewa has impressed the art world by evolving and adapting ancient Pueblo techniques, and is renowned for her tapestries, works on paper, public art and architectural installations.

Ramona Sakiestewa Light Echo 5, 2019 silver-leafed acrylic paint 24 x 24 x 2.25 in. TAI Modern

In recent years, the artist has been focusing on what she terms “constructions,” for which she first deconstructs earlier prints, then paints and draws on additional pieces of fabrics and papers, and finally manipulates the palette of images, patterns and surfaces into dimensional constructions. The Frank Lloyd Wright Foundation commissioned Sakiestewa to weave 13 tapestries from the architect’s drawings, and she has served as a design consultant working to build the National Mall facility of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian.

“Ramona Sakiestewa is an incredibly accomplished artist and her work ranges greatly in medium and style. Her knowledge of technique comes through in everything she does,” said Amy Weber, director of communications for TAI Modern, a Santa Fe, New Mexico-based fine arts gallery that has worked with the artist numerous times. “The color and modern feel of much of her work is a stunning addition to any collection.”

The artist’s bold tapestries, which serve as an elegant platform for her culture’s ritual imagery, work well as a striking focal point when displayed on a large wall in a foyer or sitting room.

Erik Benson Still Life (Eating Tigers), 2017 acrylic on canvas over panel 20 x 16 in. TAI Modern

The Minneapolis-based artist Erik Benson (b. 1974) has made a mark on the contemporary art world by using a unique process in which he pours acrylic paint onto sheets of glass, allows the material to become solid and elastic, and then cuts it into shapes and removes by peeling. These pieces are then collaged onto canvas to build up an image, a process that echoes the built environment of urban life, thus investigating the physical and psychological infrastructure of the man-made landscape.

Mr. Benson’s works, which have been widely displayed in the U.S. and Europe, “often reminds me of a winter’s day in Brooklyn,” Ms. Weber said. “He brings out the bright cheerful colors of otherwise drab landscapes.”

Given how the artist’s paintings often feature urban fragments and spaces, his works are a particularly effective tool for city dwellers looking to add a piece that will engage and demand reflection on the outside world.

One thousand years of Native American women’s art is currently traveling around the country, being featured at major museums.

“The whole idea to wipe us off the face of the Earth didn’t work,” says Anita Fields, an Osage artist in the show. “So we’re still very powerfully here.”

“Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists” is now on view at Smithsonian Institution’s Renwick Gallery in Washington, D.C., just across the street from the White House. It’s the third stop on a tour that also includes Minnesota, Tennessee and Oklahoma.

Of course, legendary Native women artists — such as Pueblo potter Maria Martinez — have been featured in solo exhibitions, including at the Renwick Gallery. And Native women’s work has long been shown in major museums such as the Smithsonian. But that does not mean it was recognized as such.

“It wasn’t being called Native women’s art,” points out Fields. “It was: The war shirt that was worn by the warrior, and so it was named for him.”

Native women’s art was usually anonymized and identified by tribal affiliation when exhibited in museums, says co-curator Jill Ahlberg Yohe. “This was a Nez Perce object, or an Apache dress,” she explains by way of example. The names of the artists have been lost.

Yohe and co-curator Teri Greeves, who’s Kiowa, assembled an advisory board in 2014 of Native women artists, curators and scholars who selected the work represented in “Hearts of Our People,” along with some non-Native scholars. The exhibition’s art ranges from an ancient pot from 1,000 CE — presumably made by a Hohokam woman in the part of the country that’s now Arizona — to the colorful, contemporary tapestries, ruminative and reminiscent of watercolors, created by Hopi artist Ramona Sakiestewa called Nebula 22 & 23.

“I’m very interested in deep space,” Sakiestewa explains in an exhibition video. “Like the cosmos, and stars, because that’s a scientific vocabulary that indigenous people in the Americas have had. But I think everyone thinks we’re just out collecting nuts and berries, and that’s it — not that our cultures are based in really deep science.”

Or science, art and environmentalism, in the case of mother-daughter Ottawa Pottawatomi artists Kelly Church and Cherish Parrish, whose work is also on display in the show. Their family has been weaving baskets in Western Michigan for generations.

Parrish has a piece in the show that speaks directly to regeneration — the shape suggests a pregnant woman — and her mother recently won a major fellowship from the National Endowment of the Arts for her art and her activism. Kelly Church says the black ash trees her family has long harvested for their baskets have been largely destroyed by an invasive species called the emerald ash borer.

“It’s a lot harder to find our trees,” Church says, adding that her family may have to skip a generation in teaching how to weave. “I admit I go out there and I get tears in my eyes when I see all of those dead trees.”

Devastation and trauma is inevitable in art that helped people survive genocide and cultural erasure. Co-curator Jill Ahlberg Yohe — who is not native, but curates Native art at the Minneapolis Institute of Art where this exhibition first opened — points to a disturbing work called “Fringe.” It’s a life-sized, lightbox image showing a woman curled up, facing away, unconscious, and nearly nude, with an ugly gash crossing her back.

“A wound that seems so deep that it is incapable of being healed,” Ahlberg Yohe observes quietly. Anishinaabe artist Rebecca Belmore created the gash with special effects makeup and scarlet beads that look like blood. “It is stitched together through beads,” Ahlberg Yohe continues. “It is stitched together through women’s work.”

Native women face a shockingly disproportionate amount of violence, and that is what this piece reminds the viewer. More than half of Native women have been sexually assaulted, according to a 2012 National Institute of Justice study. They face some of the highest rates of domestic abuse, and on some reservations, Native women are murdered at a rate more than 10 times the national average.

“This kind of making is about our survival. That’s what I love about all these pieces here,” says Church. “They speak to that strength and resilience that we’ve had for thousands of years right up until today — and thousands of years into future.”

And this show puts Native women right where they belong, she says — credited, contextualized and celebrated in some of the most important museums in the country.

MICHEL MARTIN, HOST:

And finally today, an art exhibition at one of the oldest museums in Washington, D.C., is making history with the first major show of Native American women artists. NPR’s Neda Ulaby has this report. It’s from the Smithsonian Institution’s Renwick Gallery.

NEDA ULABY, BYLINE: Of course, Native American women’s work has been shown in the Smithsonian almost from the beginning, but that does not mean it was recognized as such.

ANITA FIELDS: It wasn’t being called Native women’s art. It was the war shirt that was worn by the warrior, and so it was named for him.

ULABY: That’s one of the artists in the show. Anita Fields is Osage, from Oklahoma. Her bright red, lavishly embroidered ceremonial wedding coat is part of a survey that begins with a thousand-year-old geometrically painted pot, presumably crafted by a Pueblo woman, to a video interview with a contemporary artist from the Santa Clara Pueblo. Rose B. Simpson painted a pickup to look like pottery.

ROSE B SIMPSON: When I was a little kid, my mom was fixing the truck. When I was a little kid, my mom was growing our food.

ULABY: This show, called “Hearts Of Our People,” celebrates traditional art forms and pushes back against the idea that Native women’s art is mostly beadwork and pottery. Ramona Sakiestewa is a Hopi artist who’s also in the video.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

RAMONA SAKIESTEWA: I’m very interested in deep space, like, the cosmos and stars because that’s a scientific vocabulary that Indigenous people in the Americas have had. But I think everybody thinks we’re just out collecting nuts and berries and that’s it, not that our cultures are based in really deep science.

ULABY: The exhibition is co-curated by Kiowa artist Teri Greeves.

TERI GREEVES: Really, from the moment I was born, I didn’t understand anything other than Native women being, you know, main creators of our art.

ULABY: She says she’s been preparing for it since she was a girl on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming.

GREEVES: My mother ran a trading post, and it was mostly women that she dealt.

ULABY: Women selling their art and passing on cultural knowledge to their children. That legacy lives in this show with an Ottawa Potawatomi artist named Cherish Parish from Western Michigan.

CHERISH PARISH: My mom really pushes the idea that, you know, I’m a sixth-generation basket weaver, but we’ve been doing it for years and years before cameras were even invented as well.

ULABY: Her mom is here at the museum. Kelly Church recently won a major fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She says the black ash trees her family’s always used for their baskets have been largely destroyed by invasive species, so her grandkids might not learn the craft.

KELLY CHURCH: We still harvest. We still teach. But it’s a lot harder to find our trees. And we’re possibly going to have to skip a generation. And when you go to a ash stand, I’ll admit, you know, I go out there and I – I’ll get tears in my eyes when I see all of those dead trees.

ULABY: Devastation and trauma are inevitable in art that’s helped people survive centuries of genocide and cultural erasure. Jill Ahlberg Yohe is the show’s other curator. She is not Native, but she curates Native art at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, where this traveling exhibition started. Yohe points to one disturbing image, a life-sized lightbox photo of a woman lying curled up, facing away, seemingly unconscious and nearly nude.

JILL AHLBERG YOHE: And a large gash crosses her back, a wound that seems so deep that it is incapable of being healed.

ULABY: It looks real, but it isn’t. Artist Rebecca Belmore, who’s Anishinaabe, created the gash with special effects makeup and scarlet beads that look like blood.

YOHE: It is stitched together through beads. It is stitched together through women’s work.

ULABY: And it speaks to the disproportionately high rates of violence faced by Native American women, says artist Kelly Church.

CHURCH: This kind of making is about our survival. That’s what I love about all these pieces here. They speak to that strength and the resilience that we’ve had for thousands of years right up until today and thousands of years into the future.

ULABY: For now, artist Anita Fields says this show puts Native women right where they belong – with credit and context in some of the most important museums in the country.

FIELDS: You know, the whole idea to wipe us off the face of the earth didn’t work. And so, you know, we’re still very powerfully here.

ULABY: Being here in the nation’s capital is great, Fields says, but it’ll mean even more to her when the show travels next to her home state to the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, Okla.

I had a very anxious and harried early childhood. Drawing and making things was my way of creating order and having purpose.

By age seven I knew that I wanted to be an artist. I started like most children with coloring, drawing and then sewing and building. At age four I got a small Singer sewing machine for Christmas and started making doll clothes. I also got a carpentry set that same year and made birdhouses. By the second grade I made some of my school clothes. In elementary school I made the obligatory reports and notebooks and they were always very illustrated with cutouts, collage, and sometimes with movable parts.

I grew up in the American Southwest under sundrenched abstract skies and horizons a hundred miles distant over open desert. I like space and light and rich color. This was reflected in my early tapestry work and now in my constructed works. I have combined the texture of fabric and papers with prints and painting to make constructed works that are sometimes sewn together. It satisfies my interest in layering color and images.

Walking into the gallery space that is off to the left upon entering Eight Modern, where Marie Watt is showing her work, is like stepping back in time. Watt uses old woolen blankets as canvases for sewn-on images that evoke a sense of nostalgia. Watt’s work, along with that of Edda Renouf and Ramona Sakiestewa, is featured as part of Redefining the Canvas, a show that erases and reinvents the distinctions between painting, quilting, and weaving. Watt’s tartan plaid blanket titled Stadium: Jim Thorpe and Other Relationsis a complete narrative suggesting significant events of Thorpe’s career as an athlete through the use of hand-sewn portraits of men he played with or against. It hangs in the gallery from a set of antlers, one in each upper corner, as a tribute to the great athlete but also as a more personal statement about the artist, who is of Scottish, German, and Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) descent. Drawing on quilting traditions and oval portraiture, Watts’ blankets are cozy-looking reminders of a time when, as children, athletes were our heroes and our parents swaddled us in blankets to protect us from the cold.

The work of the three artists in Redefining the Canvascouldn’t be more different. Sakiestewa’s weavings, a series she titled Nebula, show a blend of colors in abstract imagery suggestive of landscapes: vibrant, earthy colors beneath patches of milky blue sky. There are no Scottish patterns here, and though Sakiestewa, like Watts, relies on wool for her canvas, her treatment of the medium is more in keeping with tapestry’s tight weave that Watt’s blankets are. The connection is that quilting and weaving both have long histories in Native communities, but Eight Modern is highlighting these mediums as forms of contemporary art. One thinks less about how they resemble older traditions and more about how they are different from them. Watt, for example, once stacked piles of blankets into columns as part of an installation that drew more on sculptural form than on textile design. In Redefining the Canvas, her work includes a lithograph with a star quilt design given a minimalist rendering.

Sakiestewa’s work offers the complete transformation of painting into tapestry, as though it were a translation into another language. The Nebulaworks are not copies, although they are based on original watercolor designs made by the artist. The colors are dense and lush, seemingly built up like layers of paint.

Of all the work in Redefining the Canvas, Renouf’s is the most traditional in terms of painting, although it has a contemporary, minimalist appearance. Renouf takes threads from the linen she uses as her canvas and reapplies them to the surface, bringing a textured, even sculptural, quality to her acrylic paintings. Unlike most painters working with oil or acrylic, Renouf makes the fabric itself a visible part of the work. For all their monochromatic, stark color choices and geometric designs, they are almost the inverse of Sakiestewa’s rich tapestries and Watt’s narrative poems.

There is no doubt that these artists successfully represent the theme of the show. Placing them in separate galleries, as if they were three concurrent exhibits, is effective, because all three take you into different places and states of mind. But there is a logic—a progression from the figurative to the highly abstract that shows off the range of possibilities in the often-taken-for-granted relationship between painting and textiles.

Ramona Sakiestewa is about as clear and forthright and sweet as any person could hope to meet or be. Which explains in part why her woven abstract paintings, often devoid of anything figurative, narrative, or perceptible, have appealed to so many people: as nonrepresentational as they are, they’re beautiful but full of sinew and depth, elegant, straightforward but inherently, deceptively complex. And in a way—much like Sakiestewa herself—almost defiant and reluctant at being put into a box. (How, after all, can anyone delimit the range of someone who, after teaching herself how to weave based on the writings of anthropologists, went on to create her own versions of Navajo textiles, who abstracted katsina motifs, and who had the intuitive genius to make pieces based on designs by Frank Lloyd Wright and paintings by Kenneth Noland?)

“When I was a teenager, I had a very bad experience with my mom’s second husband when we spent one year living in Daytona Beach, Florida,” recalls Sakiestewa, seated in the cozy A-V kitchenette of the large studio she shares with her husband, Andrew Merriell (who designed their spacious atelier, across from their house, and whose company plans and designs museums and exhibits). “It was a household of No. So when people say No it’s pretty much not relevant when I really want to do something.”

So never mind her Native roots. Never mind her gender. Never mind the traditional assumptions about what weaving is or where it belongs or who should or shouldn’t be doing it. Sakiestewa, without ever making an issue out of her Hopi background, her femaleness, her medium, simply put forward herself and her art, clearly, candidly, confidently. Which is how she’s approaching her latest incarnation—having given up weaving for the worlds of printmaking and architectural design. But the fact that her weavings practically demanded they be viewed on much the same terms as any fine art, most of her prints and designs will no doubt center on the same concerns her tapestry-paintings did: color, texture, and composition.

“I knew as soon as elementary school that I’d be an artist.” Says Sakiestewa. “Why? I just liked making things.” She started off at four when she was given an electric Singer sewing machine. By second grade she was making most of her own clothes. Born in Albuquerque’s old Indian Hospital in 1948, she spent most of her childhood there (excepting that one dismal stretch in Daytona Beach) before moving to Sedona, Arizona, where she spent her first three years of high school until she was kicked out for having a bottle of scotch in her bedroom. “It was traumatic,” she remembers, “but it was the best thing that ever happened.”

Ever precocious (true to her only-child status), she returned not to Albuquerque but to Santa Fe, where she talked the headmaster of Santa Fe Prep into letting her finish out her senior year there, and stay at his place in exchange for taking care of his kids. “I grew up at a time and place where women were doctors, lawyers, administrators, they could do anything they wanted, it wasn’t an issue,” says Sakiestewa, whose mother worked as a nurse. “So I believed women ran the show. It wasn’t until I went to the East Coast for school that I realized women didn’trun everything.”

School was New York City’s School of Visual Arts, where she studied textiles at night after a day of fulltime administrative work at Columbia University’s engineering department. After three years at SVA, she moved to Mexico City for one year. There, she saw her first Josef Albers show and, although she didn’t fully appreciate it at the time, absorbed the country’s ever-present murals and indigenously influences architecture. “Later, I realized that I draw on all that in my work—the murals, the architecture, the landscape,” says Sakiestewa. “In a way, I was a visitor of life back then.”

She returned to New York, but only briefly. In time, she moved back to Santa Fe. She worked as a waitress, she worked retail, then she got a job with the state arts commission, funding Native American and Hispanic arts projects. As satisfying as the job was, though, she wasn’t making her own art. So she got back on the loom, then started weaving with a group in Espanola, then began to show her work at Indian Market. In 1981, she opened her own studio.

“I did Indian Market for many years, from when my son was 5 until he left for college at 18,” says Sakiestewa, who at the time was married to the poet Arthur Sze. “Indian Market’s a great springboard, but it’s not completely who I am.” So, even while she was showing her textiles at Market, she also made a point of selling her work to galleries. Art galleries. “I have not shown my work at a crafts-based gallery—ever,” she says. “But I was also very lucky—I got into LewAllen early on.”

Lucky, but determined (or so it seems in hindsight) to make her own luck. Knowing that she’d never be able to make a living selling her work only at Indian Market, only at local galleries, or only to local collectors, Sakiestewa’s openmindedness—artistically and businesswise—opened up her opportunities. “Most of my collectors are on the coasts, and they’re well-educated and well-traveled,” she says. “But you have to work as through you’re in a universal artistic community. I really had a much broader experience than had I lived just on the reservation. So I had a broader idea of who Indians were.” And could be.

Still, as extraordinary as her work was, it initially ran into criticism. For one, in Hopi tradition, weaving was men’s work: it’s also very traditional and very specific as to designs and colors. But Sakiestewa, a freak for color, loved blending colors together. And she favored abstract designs, or she’s take a section of something she liked and blow it up. “I have a real respect for people weaving in the 19^th–century Southwest,” she says. “But my work has always been full of color. It comes to me really easily. It’s part of growing up out here.”

Her proclivity for color, and her equally strong shop-by-touch textile fascination with texture, has taken her all over. On a weaving expedition to Peru, for example, she was given a recipe for dyeing cochineal, which she blended into her own work with great success. Likewise, a trip to Japan yielded a newfound love for green, which she later paig homage to in some of her pieces. “Tapestry is really just an exploration of texture and the layering of color,” she explains. (On an extrapolated level, too, her artistic tastes and talents led to her helping to establish ATLATL, a national Native American arts and cultural services organization, and to her serving as the first Native American director of the Southwestern Association for Indian Arts, the group behind Indian Market.)

“Leaving weaving behind is a terrible risk,” says Sakiestewa, who’s been taking printmaking classes with Ron Pokrasso. (“He’s been great,” she says. “He’s so open, and he doesn’t guide you.”) “But I’d worked as a weaver for 30 years and felt like the last show I did was perfect. That was kind of it. I wanted to do different things. Besides, there’s a lot of layering of color in printing. With weaving, it was the visceral experience of color. With printing, too, you can assemble images and concepts and color that you can’t do in weaving. You have a lot more tools available. Plus, I’ve never done literal work like this with figures.”

Also, after working on the National Museum of the American Indian (1994-2005), work she calls “the project of a lifetime” and where she met Merriell, Sakiestewa got into the collaborative aspects of printmaking and design. “I don’t worship my work, so it’s been easy for me to work in a team environment,” she says. It’s something, too, that taps into her nature, into being able to be who she is—and accepted as that. “I just want to be seen at face value,” she adds. “As just another artist.”

SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO—Eight Modern is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Redefining the Canvas: Edda Renouf, Ramona Sakiestewa and Marie Watt.

The artists each use media and techniques associated with textiles but present and conceptualize their work in a way that blurs and then redefines the traditional understanding of the ‘canvas.’ For Renouf, Sakiestewa and Watt, the canvas functions as an art object, not just a foundational medium.

Sakiestewa’s work in this exhibition is the culmination of her 35-year career as a weaver. Stating “Change is good,” the artist has announced that the Nebula series of tapestries are the last weavings she will make.She will continue to explore other media and work as a design consultant.

Sakiestewa’s Nebula weavings show her exceptional mastery of the art, including her layering and blending of color. Synthesizing ancient techniques with abstraction, her framed tapestries are based on watercolor sketches, giving them what the artist describes as “a painterly quality.”

Sakiestewa’s work has been exhibited in the Heard Museum, the Smithsonian Institution, the New Mexico Museum of Art and the Denver Art Museum. Additionally, Sakiestewa is a member of the New Mexico Women’s Hall of Fame, a former chair of the New Mexico Arts Commission and the Southwestern Association of Indian Affairs and a noted design consultant whose consultations include the National Museum of the American Indian and the TempeCenterfor the Performing Arts.

Renouf, who now lives in Paris earned her B.A. from Sarah Lawrence College and her M.F.A. from Columbia University. Her work has been exhibited and collected by prestigious museums including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, as well as the National Gallery of Art, the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the British Museum and the Australian National Gallery.Her work is currently featured in two major exhibitions: Collected Thoughts: Works from the Dorothy and Herbert Vogel Collectionat the Indianapolis Museum of Art and elles@centrepompidou – artistes femmes dans les collections du Centre Pompidouin Paris, France.

Marie Watt, a descendent of Seneca Indians and Wyoming ranchers, describes herself as “half cowboy and half Indian,” a duality that is reflected by her unique, multidisciplinary art. Considered a post-medium conceptual artist, Watt uses wool blankets for both their aesthetic qualities and their rich personal and cultural associations.She draws from photographs, portraiture and biography, sewing together scraps of blankets to create narrative portraits that invoke histories both individual and universal.

“On a wall, a blanket functions as tapestry, but on a body it functions as a robe and a living art object,” Watt said. “Blankets hang around in our lives; they gain meaning through use. My work is about social and cultural histories imbedded in commonplace objects.”

Watt is based in Portland, Oregon, received her M.F.A. from Yale and also holds degrees from Willamette University and the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. Her work has been collected by the Smithsonian Institution, the Seattle Art Museum, the Portland Art Museum and the Museum of Fine Arts in Santa Fe and Microsoft. In the past five years, she has had solo exhibitions at the Boise Art Museum, the Seattle Art Museum, the Institute of American Indian Arts Museum in Santa Fe, the Missoula Museum of Art, the Nicolaysen Museum of Art in Casper, Wyoming, the Wright Museum of Art in Beloit, Wisconsin, and the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in New York.

Ramona Sakiestewa’s Shalako Mana: Critical Comments comprises a set of Japanese woodblock prints designed by the artist and executed by woodblock carver, Mr. Kitamura, and master printer, Mr. Sato, both of Kyoto, Japan. Deconstructing the critical merit assigned to Primitivism, the prints juxtapose the image of the Hopi katsina Shalako Mana with hand-written excerpts from Art in America, which become stripped of meaning as they are co-opted from critical reviews. In this context, the prevailing hierarchy of cultural expropriation – in which non-Eurocentric iconographies are appropriated toward and appraised in relation to their suitability for Eurocentric ends – is revealed as absurd through both inversion and the artist’s ironic participation in the history she critiques.

Two artists with concurrent solo exhibitions at Eight Modern, though wildly different in their respective approaches to art making, prove to be an uncanny and appetizing fit.

Ramona Sakiestewa, the revered Hopi artist who has long made contemporary work, is celebrated alongside Ming Fay, whose trashy, alternate-reality constructions respond and reverberate so as to elevate both bodies of work to a lovely and strange discourse.

Imagine a tea party with Alice that turns into My Dinner with Andre, but the Wallace Shawn character is obsessed with color. If that doesn’t make any sense, just keep in mind that making sense of art is overrated.

Ming Fay—it will surprise no one who sees the exhibition—spent a great deal of his youth in a wax museum, where his mother worked. His works are rubbery, monstrous and alien. Many of them look like wax figures that have been melted down into strange balls and, like a corn dog, put on a stick. But these sticks are branches crafted from wire, foam and papier-mâché.

On more considered inspection, the sculptural forms and additions that Fay pries out of such standard forms and crafty materials become exotic fruits, unlikely creatures and generally bizarre but inspired specimens. As a sculptor, he sees his responsibility as one of fostering a sense of adventure and folksy mystery, and envisions art-making forays like jungle expeditions in search of undiscovered life.

Pinned to the wall, hanging from the ceiling and recessed into skylights, nooks and low corners, Fay’s constructions succeed in evoking such sentiments in many ways.

Titles and descriptions offer implications of the artist’s intentions and original inspirations, but the experience of them is just as rewarding by imagining oneself to be in a room full of dragonflies or algae or anything or that comes to mind. The constructions tend to be spindly at the top with bulbous polyps forming toward the base, like inverted, grotesque lollipops.

The forms draw more from botany than from body and are exemplary of so much of contemporary art’s withdrawal from object and formalism, and movement toward more spirited and emotive works. Despite the exaltation of craft evident in the materials and the almost haphazard exuberance of many of the works, a formalized practice is apparent. The blending and placement of color and the balance of elements, whether occasioned by intuition or careful consideration, are elegant and perfect. Many pieces read like large gestural still lifes, part real, part referential and part imagined.

Though satisfying as lone works, it is when installed together in laboratory form that Fay’s efforts become a constellation-like barrage of wonder. The otherworldly, deep space sensation is reinforced when a line of the pieces are placed in one, sparse room directly across from three recent works by Ramona Sakiestewa.

Known for bright tapestries, pinpointed with brilliant focal points of color and detail, Sakiestewa demonstrates a far-ranging mastery of color with her Nebula series.

The series portrays swirls and spots of color akin to imagery from the Hubble Space Telescope or middle distance aerial photography that tends toward abstraction. Not only are Sakiestewa’s choices of color and juxtaposition of hue remarkable, but her blending of colors and capacity for shading follow a bold O’Keeffian shadow, encouraging the eye to finish what the materials cannot do alone. These distilled works, like images from deep space or Mark Rothko paintings, contain vast rumblings of energy with a sliver of quiet, a momentary calm.

Staring back across the room at Fay’s work, Sakiestewa’s nebulae echo and sound across the room, whale calls of composition and captured momentum.

The artists could hardly be more different in materials and approach, but that diversity makes for a much improved conversation.

“Today the world belongs to the peoples of all nations…and to this world each one of us is responsible.”

–  Hamilton Warren, Founder, Verde Valley School, Sedona, AZ

I was born and raised in the American Southwest.  My upbringing and my view of the world, I realize now, were different from those of women who grew up in other places.  I knew women who had families, owned businesses, raised livestock and managed ranches, and flew their own planes.  I grew up believing everything was possible.

Early on, I was interested in art.  Art is the vocabulary of the soul and the one thing we most remember when we stitch together the fabric of the great civilizations of the past.  My own artwork has led me to arts administration, partnerships with arts organizations, and work in the architectural field, where culture and aesthetics merge.

Art bridges age, gender, ethnicity, and economics.  It is a vehicle that brings communities of all sizes together.  It is an individual idea and a collective dialogue.  Art is a necessity, not a luxury.

I have a deep understanding and appreciation of Native American cultural values, arts, and community.  As an artist, arts administrator, and art advocate I bring a unique approach for developing funding strategies and partnerships to Native America.

My professional focus for the last thirteen years has been on seamlessly designing culturally meaningful artwork into the environment—both natural and architectural.  The art becomes part of the place, and it is a fundamental component of the project form the very beginning of the design process.

Using collaborative working methods, I am able to distill and synthesize design vocabularies into working documents for landscape architects, architects, exhibit designers, educators, and clients.  I often begin by experiencing a space, noting plants, animals, birds, humans, traffic, weather, geology, agriculture, and water.  I conduct personal interviews with stakeholders, users, and others who have an interest in the project.  I have developed a Cultural Values document that I use in these conversations.  I interview a project’s detractors as well as its proponents, which can help unify the community.

In the beginning of a project, I am the human sponge, absorbing and ingesting information, photographs, stories, maps, textures, dreams, important ideas, desires, colors, attributes, and nuances.  Synthesized, these become my working palette.  I blend what I’ve learned together and present concepts to my team to be reworked and defined.

In Ramona Sakiestewa’s new tapestry series she refers to her pieces as nebulae, but this work seems more earthy to me.  Instead of looking up and off into distant spaces, I feel like I’m looking down at landcapes color coded the way Landsat mapping systems appear.  It is as if Sakiestewa has been taking readings of the planet’s continental geography by way of remote sensing devices, following the contours of land and oceans, or the configurations of escarpments, ridges, mesas, or mountains.  But to call this work earthy does not limit the effects of these intensely vibrant tapestries, where color is above all pulsating.  This work exists at the interface of textiles and abstract painting, and the addition of texture deepens the experience of Sakiestewa’s palette.
    Perhaps the most “nebulous” of all these tapestries, and the one I liked the best, was Nebula 11B, hung in the office and seen through a doorway.  The distance between the viewer and the work itself was advantageous and enhanced the perception of the subtle gradations of color.  This work is the most nuanced of the series – the least eye-grabbing but the most luminous.  The red/red orange/orange/pink/violet/violet pink appeared as if the tapestry were a face blushing in all directions.  You couldn’t quite say where one color began or ended; there were no clear boundaries in the abstract shapes depicted.  It looked like two waves rolling, as opposed to crashing, into one another.  And it made for a soft collision, a sensual chromatic absorption of forms and, in this case, a luscious bleeding of hues very much akin to those distant clouds of interstellar dust and gas.
    Turning away from the dreamy state induced by Nebula 11B, the viewer was struck anew by Sakiestewa’s use of red—as if she had single handedly invented that color as her own representation of the life force that fuels her passion for creating and her multiple roles in the art world.  Sakiestewa is protean in her visions of art as a direct evolution of techniques grounded in her Native American roots and yet she is freewheeling in her interests, which encompass astrophysics, urban environments, the history of abstract painting, and the quest to identify with the grandness of the cosmos.  These new tapestries offer a breadth of vision that embraces not only the reality of stellar formation but also the universality of our own bodies, each one with its own driving pulse.  This is something we all share, something that serves to unite us rather than divide us—blood, pulse, passion.

One of Santa Fe’s newest galleries has garnered two distinguished contemporary artists for its homage to Indian Market:  Ramona Sakiestewa and G. Peter Jemison have a show of new works opening today at Eight Modern.

“We are so excited we are just ecstatic,” Eight Modern co-owner Jaquelin Loyd said.  Jemison is one of Eight Modern’s stable of artists and Sakiestewa agreed to join her friend of more than 30 years for this exhibition.  Both artists are Native American, but as the show testifies, they long ago moved beyond categories.  In face, Loyd noted, the Eight Modern exhibition specifically confronts issues of cross-cultural communications and interdisciplinary practice.

Sakiestewa is showing a set of woodblock prints she designed and collaborated on with a carver and a printer from Japan and then gave additional fabrication.  Jemison’s contributions include his trademark paintings on paper bags and paper parasols, plus two acrylics on canvas and one on paper.

“Ramona Sakiestewa is a contemporary artist,” her Web site intro states, and is she ever.  Of Hope ancestry, she is renowned for her tapestries and works on paper, her influence on New Mexico art policy and the designs of the new National Museum of the American Indian at the Smithsonian.  Her work hangs in multiple museum, corporate and private collections.

Based in Santa Fe, she has been working lately on a series of woodblock prints that combine her respect for her ancestry with her disrespect, to put it bluntly, for most art criticism.

Specifically, she collaborated with Japanese master carver Shoichi Kitamura of Kyoto, who carved her design evoking the Hopi kachina Shalako Mana into woodblocks that were then meticulously printed by the master printer Sato.  “We did it all by e-mail and FedEx,” Sakiestewa told the Journal.  “It was amazing, and such a pleasure to collaborate with them.”

Sakiestewa then supplemented the prints with a collage-type addition of handwritten excerpts from Art in America, co-opted from critical reviews but stripped of meaning.  Some are affixed upside-down to the print.

“I guess I’m interested in juxtaposing critical reviews with the art,” Sakiestewa said.  “I always laugh at art historians and critics who don’t know how to make art, or even, how it is made, but they’re reviewing it according to what they think it should be rather than the content itself.

“The reviews I find interesting are the ones that other artists have written about an artist’s work.  I guess I just think they know more about what they’re talking about.”

Having traveled and lived around the world, Sakiestewa is quite familiar with the plight of artists from any minority – gender, tribal or ethnic – trying to make art against the mainstream majority’s preconceptions of what that minority’s art “should” be.  “That’s the battle for all artists, isn’t it?” she asked.  “To do what you want to do.”

Breaking out of the “Indian artist” mold has not been as much of a struggle for Peter “Pete” Jemison.  He simply never accepted the mold in the first place.  A member of the Heron clan of the Seneca Nation, Jemison now manages a Seneca historic site in upper New York state.  But like Sakiestewa, he has traveled and studied widely.  Although his later work is concentrated more on acrylic paintings on canvas and paper, he became most widely known for his beautiful and sometimes whimsical paintings on paper bags and paper parasols.  He explained to the Journal that he found universality in the bags.

“A number of years ago, I was living in Brooklyn and taking the subway into the city to work each day.  One day I was sitting there and doodling on my lunch bag, and I realized that was what most of us had in common – we were all carrying a “bag” of some sort.  Might be a lunch bag, might be a shopping bag, might be a briefcase or a knapsack, but everybody had a bag.  I got to thinking about how our ancestors all had bags, too, from woven and textile bags to leather bags with elaborate beadwork.  There is this whole history of some kind of containers for humans.

“So mostly on a whim I began producing painted bags and showing them with my other work.  When the bags got mentioned first and most often in any reviews, I realized they were hitting some kind of nerve,” Jemison said.

He found a spray that will de-acidify the paper and stop the natural deterioration, although he acknowledged that the bags, like his parasols, are fragile.  That, he said, is part of the appeal.  Painting on the paper parasols began with a show called “Indian Humor.”

“At that time it was hard to find anything in this country that wasn’t ‘Made in Japan,’ so I took some parasols and painted them,” he said. “It was tongue-in-cheek, a way of taking something Japanese and putting Native American art on it.”

Jemison’s humor is often present in the paper work.  Acknowledging the slapdash way many of us travel, he’s taken two paper shopping totes and painted them to be “Matching Luggage.”

His recent work has been landscapes of the gorgeous Seneca historic site he lives on.  “It is a very varied and very beautiful terrain.  My closeness to this landscape really became a part of what I wanted to paint.  Probably in the last seven years my work has been focused on capturing the changes to that landscape during our four very distinct seasons.  It’s about how I relate to Mother Earth and to the natural landscape.”

Jemison, who said he was lucky to receive basic training in almost all media, also has been producing videos on the site, and he’ll be bringing some to Eight Modern.

“That’s my nature, too- keeping myself interested,” he said.  “I started showing my art at age 19,” the 62-year-old Jemison said.  “The challenge is to keep myself working.

SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO — Eight Modern is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, Ramona Sakiestewa: Vortex of Color.
Long celebrated for her tapestries and works on paper, Sakiestewa is a central figure among contemporary Native American artists because of her seamless synthesis of abstraction with ritual imagery and ancient techniques.

Sakiestewa’s weavings show her exceptional mastery of the art, including her famed layering and blending of color, which give her tapestries what the artist describes as “a painterly quality.”

“I’m interested in the whole idea of layered color, when you look at a color and it’s not just one color, it’s an assemblage of molecules of color,” Sakiestewa said. “It’s like looking at color under a microscope. The simpler it seems, the more complex it becomes.”

Sakiestewa was born of Hopi ancestry and was raised in the Southwest. In addition to Native American influences, Sakiestewa’s work is also informed by the cultures of Japan and Latin America. A recent inductee into the New Mexico Women’s Hall of Fame, Sakiestewa has chaired the New Mexico Arts Commission, is a founding member and former director of Atlatl, a Native Arts organization, was the first Native American director of the Southwestern Association on Indian Affairs and continues to influence state and federal arts policies.

She has also made drawings, watercolors, clay prints and woodblock prints, in addition to extensive work as a design consultant. Her public art and design projects include the National Mall facility of the National Museum of the American Indian, the Tempe Center for the Performing Arts in Arizona, the America West Heritage Center in Utah and the Chickasaw Cultural Center in Oklahoma. Sakiestewa has received numerous awards, including the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, the Governor’s Award for Outstanding New Mexico Women and several first-place prizes for Contemporary Weaving at Santa Fe Indian Market.

The artist’s work has been exhibited extensively in America and abroad and is held in the collections of numerous public institutions, including the Heard Museum, the Smithsonian Institution, the New Mexico Museum of Art and the Denver Art Museum.

East Meets West
Ramona Sakiestewa & G. Peter Jemison

August 17 – September 16

Reception: Friday, August 17, 2007 5:30 – 7:30pm

SANTA FE, NEW MEXICO–Eight Modern is pleased to announce its upcoming exhibition, East Meets West: Ramona Sakiestewa & G. Peter Jemison. Featuring works by Ramona Sakiestewa and G. Peter Jemison, two of the United States’ most celebrated Native American artists, the exhibition specifically confronts issues of cross-cultural communications and interdisciplinary practice.

Born of Hopi ancestry and raised in the American Southwest, Ramona Sakiestewa is renowned for her tapestries and works on paper – clever compounds of postmodern critical method, highly individuated abstract language, and her culture’s ritual imagery. Most recently, Sakiestewa has designed a set of woodblock prints executed in Kyoto, Japan, by woodblock carver, Mr. Kitamura, and master printer, Mr. Sato. Deconstructing the critical merit assigned to Primitivism, the prints juxtapose the image of the Hopi katsina Shalako Mana with hand-written excerpts from Art in America, stripped of meaning as they are co-opted from critical reviews. In this context, the prevailing hierarchy of cultural expropriation – in which non-Eurocentric iconographies are appropriated toward and appraised in relation to their suitability for Eurocentric ends – is revealed as absurd through both inversion and the artist’s ironic collusion in the history she critiques.

A member of the Heron Clan of the Seneca Nation, G. Peter Jemison is highly regarded for his paintings, videos, and mixed media works on parasols and brown paper bags. The works draw upon the concept of orenda, the traditional Haudenosaunee (Iroquois Confederacy) belief that every living thing and every part of creation contains a spiritual force. Presenting a challenge to reductive and exclusionary art historical structures, Jemison synthesizes the dual traditions of academic and traditional Native American arts. Moreover, Jemison’s artwork is intrinsically related to his overarching focus on Native American artistic and cultural heritage, which has led him to become a leading authority on the history of the Haudenosaunee, as well as one of the Seneca Nation’s most esteemed curators, writers, administrators, and political representatives.