Original - Ode to New Mexico

2020

16”x20”

Medium: acrylic on canvas   

While visiting New Mexico, I was fortunate enough to visit both the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, and the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center. I found it both astonishing and disgraceful, that although we all grow up on Native Land in the U.S., I had never been to a museum filled with Native American art, jewelry, humanstory, and culture.

This piece is a meditation on respect, love, and admiration for brilliant indigenous cultures that have produced some of the most beautifully powerful art I have ever seen. It is my interpretation of a building in space/on water that carries with it infinite indestructible jewel based longhouses, hogans, wigwams, adobe houses, igloos, wattles, and daubs of the future. A celestial building carrying the power of future generations as well as the secrets and traditions prevalent before the destruction and genocide brought by Europeans.