We're standing in the storage room for some recently acquired works by Art Bridges.
And we're looking at these three tall structures by Nora Naranjo Morse.
And the title is The Black, White, and Brown of It.
And we're looking at three of them, but there were originally nine.
They were created almost as a sort of chorus, these nine totems, as she refers to them.
I can only imagine standing in front of these three.
What it would feel like to be surrounded by all nine at once.
They do read to me like human figures, I guess simply because of their verticality.
They're about the size that we are.
Nora is coming from generations and generations of Santa Clara Pueblo potters and clay workers.
She has this really diverse artistic practice, but throughout she returns to clay.
She considers that also a defining aspect of being a Pueblo artist.
She is sourcing all of her clay herself from the ancestral Santa Clara Pueblo clay vein.
This is a matter of digging the clay, purifying the clay, drying the clay.
This is a long process that takes several months and involves a tactile, physical relationship with the clay and therefore its connection to the land.
Nora has been critical throughout her career of the commercialization of Pueblo pottery and the way the white Western art market has interfered with that tradition.
And when we think about pottery, we think about bowls, we think about containers.
So much of what this work is about for me, I think in a way we could interpret it is an experimentation of the surface of clay.
We have slip and acrylic that is dripping, it's running, it's splattered, swathed on.
There's moments where there's almost an impasto thickness scraping.
It's this really active negotiation with the surface here and she has likened that to her leaving her mark on the landscape.
She's talked about the way that throughout santa clara, you're surrounded by petroglyphs, by meaningful ancient markers of pueblo, relationship with that ancestral homeland.
These symbols look as though we should be able to interpret them, but we can't.
I get the feeling that there is a visual language here, a building of motifs and iconography.
Some of the symbols are maybe universal in recognition, some of them are private and some of them are cultural and there's knowledge here that we don't have access to and that refusal is an aspect of the piece.
And I think for many people coming from a Western academic tradition, the idea that there are bodies of knowledge or protocols that are off limits to you is an unusual one.
I think a lot of people are uncomfortable with that idea.
They think it is secretive, they think it is withholding, but that is a really integral aspect of Nora's practice and it's an integral aspect of Pueblo culture and a vital way that Pueblo communities have safeguarded and maintained really vibrant cultural traditions amidst colonial violence.
In fact, I think the idea of what we can read and what we can't read is very much a part of the application of the paint and the materials here.
There are places where I can see that there are layers underneath, but I can't quite make out what's there.
Or places where, for example, we see a circle with some black paint, with a geometric design inside it, but we get the feeling we're not seeing all of it.
There are so many different textures and layers.
And I think that layering is so crucial as a measure of accumulation and relationship over time.
They have a powerful presence and I think part of that is the reduction of the color palette the browns and the whites and the blacks that their designs are simplified, their colors are reduced, the shapes are simplified.
We're accustomed to talking about clay and talking about tactility, talking about craft, but really she's presenting this piece in some ways to us as a surface.
And it's absolutely in the round.
It asks you walk around it to take it all in.
But at the same time, she's really treating these forms as surfaces, as skins.
Let's go to the title, the black, white and brown of it.
I'm not entirely certain the specifics of the title and what it's pointing us towards, but one thing that comes to mind, for me at least, is these brownish clay colors that are coming through, being so reminiscent of the landscape where Nora is working, and then this jet black being characteristic of the Santa Clara pottery tradition.
So she's simultaneously in conversation between the contemporary and the ancient.
You have these forms that we know were built slowly gradually, from this clay that is thousands of years old.
And then, at the same time, you have these expressionistic brushstrokes that feel like they were made in an instant.
So you have this simultaneous conversation between history, between the present, between different media.
It's very exciting and it's very dynamic.
