9 minute read
Where I Come From
I come from a long, long line of artists and creative people—and by a long line, I mean as far back as you can go. The idea of being an artist as separate from life is a very Western concept. To me it’s how you move through the world, and colonization was the very thing that separated art from our life—from everyday life.
But with Western ways of living, we’ve had to figure out how to market our aesthetic ways of being—and to make a living from that because we’re not sustaining ourselves from the land anymore.
For me it’s been a really interesting thing to watch how a lot of indigenous people have navigated that sort of new way of finding a livelihood.
My studio in late February, just before I left for a two-week residency at Anderson Ranch. It was a great experience and I was able to finish some work for my spring show at Jack Shainman Gallery in Kinderhook, NY. The show is now on hold due to the pandemic.
When I came to RISD for graduate school in ceramics a lot of the conversation was about art versus craft. And there was this attitude of, “Don’t call me a craftsman” because “craft” is apparently bad.
It was 2009—two years after I graduated from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe—and I left home not only to get a master’s degree in ceramics, but also because I wanted to know what it felt like to be anonymous.
I loved Rhode Island. I loved being away. I loved the freedom to build myself from what felt like scratch. I loved my classes and the pull and stretch of thoughts and creativity. I loved the time to consider—subject, process, material, culture.
“Rose comes from a family of potters,” one of my professors there once told a visiting artist. The woman looked up from her ceramic work and her not-very-dirty hands and studied me. “How long has pottery been in your family?” she asked. “About 700 years,” I said. “Give or take.” (It didn’t seem so long compared to the 13,000-year ancestry of ceramics in, say, Asia.)
“But why would someone with a cultural pedigree like that go to grad school for ceramics?” she asked. “Not quite sure,” I said. “Masochism?”
As much as I loved RISD, it was also painful to work with clay theory and ceramics there. It strummed at the rubber band that connected me to home—the place where I noticed usable clay in the dirt sides of roadcuts, where I lived in a mud house and dug my hands into the earth to plant, to clear the fields, to cook pots and to roast food. Where I come from, the entire context is clay.
But RISD also gave me opportunities like the study abroad course Clay in Japan. In Kashihara I lived with other students and worked behind a printmaking factory in a traditional ceramic studio with an anagama kiln. I wandered with my Japanese-speaking RISD buddies, intentionally getting lost and strengthening our aesthetic-appreciation muscles.
But over time, I still yearned to return to my center place— to return with new eyes and find these aesthetic moments in the density of the familiar.
Reclamation III: Rite of Passage (2019, ceramic, leather, steel, auto body filler, wood, 42 ½ x 17 x 12") was shown in Duo, my fall solo show at Jessica Silverman Gallery in San Francisco.
Doing ceramics at RISD meant talking a lot about how work that’s utilitarian can’t be art. And when I was there a decade ago so many people wanted so badly to not be seen as craftspeople. They wanted to be artists, and they wanted to make work that ended up in museums.
I actually did a piece once where I spent the same amount of time making a thing that hung on the wall as throwing cups that were useful—and then I tried to sell them for the same price.
Nobody would pay the same price for the cups that I had spent the same amount of time on as the wall piece. That little experiment was just my own sort of investigation into that endless craft conversation, but I guess it proved a point.
River Girls (2019), photographed in situ
Indigenous peoples have navigated multiple apocalypses— genocide, land loss and cultural decimation. Through it all, many of us have maintained our relationship with the creative process, and innovation and spiritual empowerment have been our life raft. During stressing times like these, we need to look to our indigenous people for guidance (without exploitation).
At the same time, indigenous people need to get into high art places, and say, “Hey, remember our power is in our hands, and you are powerless if you can’t make, and you can’t create, and you can’t live in this world.”
As this pandemic is reminding us, what happens if this all falls apart and we don’t know how to cook anymore and we don’t know how to make our own food, we don’t know how to grow our own food?
True power lies in all those things—in utilitarian ways of being. So I think what I’m trying to do is kind of enter into those places that still put high art at the top of the hierarchy, and try to wake people up to their humanity.
To me lineage has a lot to do with respect and humility. My mother—Roxanne Swentzell—supported her family with her ceramic sculpture. I remember watching her work from when I was still crawling and she was always telling me not to touch her work. I wanted to “help her” so bad and wasn’t aware that there was any difference between art and life.
My mother still works hard as a ceramic sculptor, but she would not have had the recognition and platform for her work that she has if my grandmother hadn’t created that for her.
And my great-grandmother also created that for my grandmother and I’m now trying to do the same for Nugget, my three-year-old. So we’re all sort of creating this next step for our next generations.
To feel like I’m independent of that lineage—or that kind of foundation and establishment—would be very naive and disrespectful.
When Jessica Silverman invited me to participate in a group show at her San Francisco gallery a year ago, it was the beginning of my representation by JSG and a really amazing friendship with both her and her partner, Sarah Thornton. I made Root 1 (2019, ceramic, glaze, linen, jute string, steel, leather, 70 x 20 ½ x 16") for my fall solo show there, which pushed my creative process in really vulnerable and exploratory ways.
I now live where I grew up—in Santa Clara Pueblo, a reservation in New Mexico. It’s directly adjacent to Espanola, which is a small city in northern New Mexico that’s sandwiched between two reservations and has a strong heritage of Hispanic culture.
Like the women in my family, my dad’s an artist, too— Patrick Simpson. He works in wood and metal. When I was a kid my mom decided to turn off the electricity just to see if we could live off the grid.
She’s a very do-it-yourself woman, so we were very empowered to figure things out on our own. She was always the one out there with a chainsaw, fixing cars, building the house. I definitely didn’t grow up with any specific gender roles for work.
As a teenager I’d be hanging out with my friends and when we drove through town we would see these amazing cars, because Espanola is the so-called Lowrider Capital of the World. (It has more lowriders per capita than even Orange County in California!)
I would see these spectacular works of art on the street and I remember as a kid being like, “When I grow up, I’m going to have a custom car.” I just wanted to feel that fabulous, you know? There was something about the sense of accomplishment making a custom car represented.
In retrospect I realize that that came from disenfranchisement and what I call “postcolonial stress disorder”—something our communities are wrought with. It’s this daily struggle of being in a world that isn’t necessarily in line with your ancestral ways of being. So it sort of jars everyone, and that causes a lot of trauma, and a lot of difficulties—alcoholism, drug abuse, domestic violence, things like that.
For a performance piece I first did during an artist residency at the Denver Art Museum, I drive my lowrider Maria flanked by a squad of indigenous and queer warriors wearing this post-apocalyptic gear I made. A loud heartbeat throbbing through the car’s 1,000-watt speaker system creates a kind of drum beat for the parade.
As a child I feel like I was sort of up against a lot of things that I probably shouldn’t have been—that were sort of unhealthy. But it was in the entire community, and everyone goes through that, and we’re all figuring out ways to try to survive it—and a lot of us don’t survive it.
One of the ways that I found out I could survive was to escape through cars. I bought my first car from my mom when I was 12. It was a Jeep Cherokee that was always breaking down. I kept having to fix it on my own because I needed it to run.
And I drove myself to driver’s ed at 14 and got my driver’s license when you could—at 14. My car became my freedom, and it became my safety, and it became a true comrade in my survival.
Because I didn’t have a lot of money, I worked on my car a lot and I think it wasn’t just that it broke down a lot and I had to fix it, but actually in a world where things are incredibly psychologically confusing and hard to process, an engine is very calming.
It’s all very dependable. Gear A turns right, gear B turns left, gear C turns right. Even if it’s breaking down all the time, there’s a way to fix it.
I think I projected myself onto my vehicle—and throughout my life, all of my vehicles. By understanding that it is fixable and it is customizable, you can make it fabulous. And if it does break down, there’s a way to get it running again. My car was always so much a projection of myself.
So when I came back to Santa Clara Pueblo from Rhode Island, and I had been studying relational aesthetics at RISD, I drove through Espanola and I was like: “Man, talk about relational aesthetics. These lowriders—these custom cars— are everything they’re talking about. This is performance art.” This is like your house is missing windows and half burnt down, but you have a nice car in the yard—and that’s survival. I understand the psychology of needing a car as a projected source of self-worth. When your life is crumbling but you can drive through town with a sense of pride, it might just keep you alive.
And I think the reason that it makes sense that my lowrider Maria is in this major traveling exhibition at the Smithsonian is because I was trying to stay very true to applying my aesthetic integrity to my personal, psychological investigation. And so, I wasn’t like, “Oh, I’m going to make it so that she makes it into a museum.” I was like, “I’m going to make it so that it changes me.”
If it changes me, and it transforms me, and it makes me just walk with my head a little bit higher today, that was the whole point, right? She is one of a kind, and very, very specific. She has so much heart. That car is dripping with my heart.
I poured my heart and soul into making Maria. She’s a 1985 Chevy El Camino lowrider I built and named after Maria Martinez, the Pueblo potter who developed the look and feel of Santa Clara black-on-black ceramics in the early 1900s. And of course, just before I was supposed to drive her to the Smithsonian to be part of a big traveling exhibition, she broke down and I had to scramble to fix her.
