Her proclivity for color, and her equally strong shop-by-touch tactile 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 paid 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.” Info: 8 Modern/eightmodern.net
Below: detail and overview of the carpet Sakiestewa designed for the Tempe Center for the Arts in Arizona.
june/july 2011
santa fean
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