Category: Uncategorized
November 12th, 2007 by sandyadmin
Bunky Echo-Hawk, painter, poet, DJ, graffiti writer, etc. is above all a great activist in the Native American art community. Is there anyone alive at this point who hasn’t received an email from Bunky about some cause or another? Is there anyone left on myspace or facebook that isn’t Bunky’s pal? I get his news everywhere I go. Within days of joining a new social network, he finds me, as does whatever he’s promoting or involved with. Like the other day, when I got this announcement that Bunky will be donating a live painting to Red Ink, a student publication from the University of Arizona:
Nawa Tsatiks-si-tsatiks . . .
I am very proud to be able to offer this opportunity. My art is being featured again in the upcoming issue of Red Ink Magazine, a student publication produced at the University of Arizona. The issue release party is coming up, on November 9, in Tucson, AZ.
Here’s the goodie. At this premiere party, I will create a ‘live’ painting…48″ x 60″. This is a big painting, needless to say. This size canvas sells, off of my easel, for $4,300.
HOWEVER…I am donating this painting to Red Ink Magazine. They are pre-selling raffle tickets (online, too!), as a fundraising effort to sustain the publication. You DO NOT have to be present to win!
So, please consider purchasing AT LEAST ONE raffle ticket, for $5.00. Your generosity will empower artists, the students, the future of the magazine, and ALL who read it. You can have a hand in the Native Art Movement!
You can purchase online at: www.redinkmagazine.com
Ta’Tura Tsiksu (With Much Respect),
Bunky Echo-Hawk
(Pawnee/Yakama)
I first met Bunky Echo-Hawk thanks to America Meredith, who told me I had to meet this crazy artist activist from Colorado. If America thought he was cool, he probably was, and so I sought him out at Indian Market 2005. We shot the shit over drinks at Evangelo’s in Santa Fe, and I found out about a few of the things that Bunky was into, including NARF (the Native American Rights Foundation) and NVision, the youth arts organization that he co-founded and currently serves as the Executive Director. Bunky is a cool guy and his enthusiasm for Native America’s art and people is infectious.
As a painter, Echo-Hawk uses a bright, almost flourescent palette that is reminiscent of rock’n’roll silk-screen artists like Frank Kozik and others. His style reveals his skills as a graphic designer, and most of his paintings are like wild cartoons, each of which has a “punchline” that tends to comment on Native issues. Echo-Hawk style de guerre is to deliver the meme within the punchline and spread it far and wide through whatever the medium, be it paint or poetry or through his activist existence.
As Echo-Hawk says on his myspace profile, “I live to be a voice. I live to see, in my lifetime, change for the better. I live for proactive action. This is how I’m living. How are you living?”
To own or collect Echo-Hawk isn’t really so much to cultivate a great fine artist as it is to assist and support a master propagandist with what I’d call a damn righteous agenda. Buy a raffle ticket and support the cause – of Native art, and Echo-Hawk. He may never win any grand prizes for his paintings, (thought he certainly paints better than I do) but for his unending support of everything and everyone Native, Bunky Echo-Hawk is in a class by himself. And that makes an Echo-Hawk in the living room an utterly priceless objet d’art. (I don’t yet own one – but I bought three tickets for $10.)
For more Bunky Echo-Hawk paintings, click.
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September 28th, 2007 by sandyadmin
James Luna and toy pose as coloful pomo Kokopelli Saturday, September 29 at 3:30 pm at the IPCC in Albuquerque
In 1987, a then relatively unknown artist James Luna enacted a piece for which he would become as famous as Native American performance artists can hope to be. The show, which went up at San Diego’s Museum of Man, was titled “The Artifact Piece,” and it featured Luna lying inside a display like an anthropological “indigenous man,” mocking Western modes of objectifying Native American bodies and artifacts.
Overnight, the Native American art world had “discovered” (or perhaps had thrust upon them) their own avant-garde weirdo performance artist, on par or exceeding the mainstream’s heroes like Laurie Anderson, Karen Finley, and others of the period. Through spoken word, performance, and installation, (including digital installations like this one), Luna was certainly been at the forefront of the movement to fashion a new kind of Native Art, one that is quite far away from the “stuff for tourists coming off the train,” that a lot of us would like to see a whole lot less of in the Native Art world..
The National Museum of the American Indian seemed to think very highly of him when it sent him as their sole representative to the Venice Biennale in 2005. There, Luna, (a member of the Luiseño Tribe of California Mission Indians) performed a piece called “Emendatio”, which was dedicated to a Luiseño leader named Pablo Tac who, in the 1830s, was sent to Rome to learn Western ways and Catholicism, but died before he could return to his people.
Research this fellow, if you’ve a mind for that new kinda art, for this cat is the real McCoy, as interesting an artist as anyone working today, Native or not. And now you have a chance to see him, this Saturday, September 29 at 3:30 pm the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center. Show up to the event on Saturday at the IPCC in Albuquerque – it should go without saying that I have no idea what kind of performance Mr. Luna will enact – but I’m sure it will be interesting and worth yer precious time.
Admission $6 for adults, Native Americans free.
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January 30th, 2007 by sandyadmin
From 2007 after meeting the artist in Mexico
Abraham Mauricio Salazar, Master Painter, Papel Amate
Abraham Mauricio Salazar
Master Painter, Papel Amate
Abraham Mauricio Salazar is a Nahuatl Indian living in Oaxaca, Mexico. For most of his life, Salazar has been working as a farmer, painter, and teacher. His primary medium is papel amate, a folk craft tradition that his people have used for over two millennia. The painting style takes its name from the medium that is used ñ ìpapel amateî, paper that is made from the bark of the ficus tree.
ìBeginning in the early 20th century, several tribes among the Nahuatl language speakers of Mexico began developing papel amate paintings as an art-form primarily for trade or sale to tourists or other outsiders. Today, examples of the form can be found throughout southwestern Mexico, particularly in the states of Guerrero, Oaxaca, and Jalisco, ranging from low-art and very inexpensive prints on papel amate to elaborate narrative scenes that can fetch much higher prices in city markets and fine art galleries.î
From the article on Amate on Wikipedia
Abraham is one of the finest, most highly respected traditional bark painters in the State of Oaxaca. In a highly distinctive style, he depicts the sights and sounds of his home village through sophisticated compositions and juxtapositions of color. Along with his brother, Roberto Mauricio Salazar, Abraham has painted on papel amate since he was a child, learning from his father and other family members. Though unschooled in any formal setting, Salazar has studied art and executes pastoral scenes of Mexican campesino (agricultural) life that are outstanding examples of the form.
While many in the tradition never become known for their works, Abraham was the subject of a seminal (now out-of-print) book on the high-quality papel amate paintings of the Nahuatl. He has also contributed illustrations to Antonio SaldÌvar’s CICLO M¡GICO DE LOS DÕAS. TESTIMONIO DE UN POBLADO INDIGENA MEXICANO, (Magical Cycles of the Days. Stories of the Indigenous Towns of Mexico) published in Mexico City in 1985.
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September 27th, 2006 by sandyadmin
“The Path to 9-11”
On September the 11th, 2006, I made a short journey from my house in Santa Fe over to the east side of town, to try and clear my head and maybe even gain new insight into the paths that we had taken since that fateful day five years prior.
The Labyrinth finds its historical roots in the Greek Labyrinth of King Minos, who ruled the Isle of Crete. According to Greek mythology, the original Labyrinth was built by famed Greek artificer Daedalus to hold the Minotaur, a half-man half-bull creature who was fed each year with fourteen sacrificial youths and maidens from Athens, as tribute from Athens to Minos for losing a war. The Minotaur was eventually killed by Theseus in the course of his six trials to become the King of Athens. A high-walled structure fashioned with hedges, Theseus was able to find his way into and out of the structure with help from the ball of thread he received from Ariadne, and he killed the Minotaur and rescued the sacrificial offerings.
While the Labyrinth of King Minos is the most famous, Pliny’s Natural History mentions a total of four labyrinths known to the ancient world. Differing from mazes, all labyrinth forms – classical, medieval and modern – are examples of Eulerian paths. Each form is designed to have one clear route to the center and one clear route back to the entrance and none is meant to be difficult to navigate. Thus the idea of a labyrinth as a place in which it is easy to lose one’s way is just the opposite of the truth – while the path might be somewhat confusing and may require following the threads, it leads one back, despite twists and turns, to the point where one began. But as its origin myth is symbolic of both death and symbolic return, those who deliberately set out to walk the Labyrinth may not returned unchanged from their experience.
******
This is one of the assumptions I tend to make when I head off to Walk the Labyrinth. The Labyrinth is a twisting turn road, but one that may provide some insight at mid-point, where once the Minotaur lived. At the Labyrinth where I go to walk in Santa Fe, the path is marked by red bricks and the “walls” are marked by green bricks.
“Pathways to the Divine”
According to the International Labyrinth Society, there are 36 Labyrinths in the city of Santa Fe.
Labyrinth symbolism is complex, and just as attuned to the expectations of the participant as many other ritual entertainments. Entering the Labyrinth is all on its own a kind of leap of faith, for the very nature of a labyrinth is to decide to walk a path that has been deliberately laid so as to create the greatest possible distance between Point A & Point.
Cut-back: Man at the beginning of the path. “So, for example, if the point of walking the Labyrinth was merely to get to the center and back, you’d ignore the tile mosaic pathway and just head straight to the center.” He walks to the center. “And back again. But there’s a little more to it than that.”
Different schools of thought have different ideas about the Labyrinth. Some believe that, in the case of the Chartes especially, that there is an intersection between the symbolic nature of the Cross combined with the organic perfection of the circle to create a kind of map of the brain, with each of the four main section representing a different aspect of human existence – body, mind, emotion, and soul – and that these areas of the Self are triggered as one wanders in quiet meditation along the path. Some believe that the unicursal nature of the labyrinthine form reminds one that while Western time is shown and measured as a linear process, older cultures believe that time had a circular, almost spiral nature of the beginning, journey, and return.
Cut-back to man: I myself tend to think of the Labyrinth as a combination of classical and newer ideas, with the threads of Ariadne there to guide me on the path, a path that leads me through the thickets of my mind to a clear understanding of a situation by the time I reach the center, and some kind of solution – or at least a place to begin – by the time I reach the end. Some problems by their very nature, however, are so intractable that it takes the following of many threads before clarity can be found.
Just think back to the time following the day itself, the year moved at dizzying speeds unimaginable in the early days of the Bush 2 Presidency, vacation time was over, Crawford was but a dim memory…
Remember how it went? The towers fell and a name floated up out of the debris – Osama bin Laden. It would later be revealed that on the morning of the day, at the time at which the planes hit, the President’s father, George Bush the First, was in a New York City hotel room with Osama bin Laden’s brother, as part of his duties as a consultant for the Carlyle Group, so it shouldn’t have surprised anyone that even after all commercial air was suspended and all planes were grounded in the United States and Canada, that the Saudi government was still permitted to charter jets to fly from Los Angeles to Denver to Chicago to Orlando to Boston to pick up twenty-four members of the bin Laden family and whisk them out of the country.
For safety’s sake, but what about the safety of the 3,000 that died while Bush One collected a check, blood money and oil money are all the same in his world, oil magnate, head of the CIA, father of the President, murderer.
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September 22nd, 2006 by sandyadmin
Pick of the Week: “Santa Fe Skies” by Dave Hoover & Gentry Bronson,
September 22, 2006
Something magical happened in Albuquerque in June of 2006. Two disparate musicians met each other more or less by accident. Pianist Gentry Bronson was a pop singer from the Bay Area – while harpist Dave Hoover from Albuquerque was a musical magician with a penchant for playing any instrument he could get his hands on. The two of them jammed in someone’s backyard, and Bronson, an accomplished producer with just a little bit of time on his hands, saw possibilities for the two of them to lay down a few tracks in Hoover’s livingroom studio – just to see what would happen.
The result is a record called “Santa Fe Sky,” an instrumental record that features Bronson on keys and Hoover on a great pile of instruments, including the celtic harp, the chinese Gu Zheng, the Lakota flute, the appalachian mountain dulcimer, the kalimba, and ambient background loops that he collected from nature on an MP3 recorder. While it might be easy to dismiss a record like this as another “New Age” record, the speed with which it was recorded (a weekend) the serendipity of the meeting of these players, and the soulfulness of the performances point to a music that is just as easily informed by punk rock, jazz, and Americana musics that suggest no simple comparison – this is a soundtrack to a story that we who live in this place know too well.
That soundtrack is almost inherent in the desert of the great American southwest. You can almost feel the wind blowing through your hair on a dusty forgotten road as you hear the opening strains, and a sense of heightening drama as harp and keys first tease one another, then intersect and really play, singing to each other in their own unique voice, but coming together as one as the track hits its stride. This is the harp of dreams followed by the restrained pianos of a thousand saloons, aching to play a music that does more than call us to dance, but stirs the body to breathe deeply, stirs the soul to dream and feel a sense of wonder at the enormity of the sky above.
We’ve yet to hear the entire record at New Mexico Bands, but we’re fairly certain that there’s something greater going on here than just a few tracks carelessly thrown together. We do know that the whole record is available on It’s About Music – and you can find that track we love so much on our profile, or at either of the musician’s profiles involved.
namaste
nmbands
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September 2nd, 2006 by sandyadmin
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Though I could never afford his work, the paintings of Navajo artist Monty Singer delighted myself and a core group of supporters who admired his work. For awhile, we had this piece up in our living room on loan.
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September 30th, 2005 by sandyadmin
The Bed Show
Now I lay me down to nap, I pray my futon won’t collapse.
If the bed should sag whilst I do snore, I pray to Goddess I’ll find the floor…
To sleep, per chance to dream. Perhaps no other activity other than eating is as universal as the need to sleep. But while all humans do it, culturally, we have different ideas, attitudes, and artifacts about what constitutes the best way to sleep. Dream On: Beds from Asia to Europe, a far-reaching and innovative exhibition from the Museum of International Folk Art, offers a look at both the material and philosophical cultural differences about sleep, in an environment that might best be described as just dreamy.
Staged in the Neutrogena Wing of the Museum, this 4,000 square foot exhibition will focus on beds from Asia & Europe found in both the Museum’s own collections and on loan from other museums and private individuals. Breaking down the subject of sleep-styles into just three common denominators, the exhibit covers half the world’s approaches to one of the most essential human activities.
“When we look around the world, we see tremendous variations in the actual manner of sleeping,” said Joyce Ice, MOIFA’s director. “Given the amount of space we had to present a show of this size, as well as what artifacts were available to us, we settled on Asia to Europe because that range gave us gave us an extraordinary amount of variety.”
Dream On explores sleeping as a cultural activity and beds as objects that embody cultural mores. The exhibition will be presented in a “dream-like” fashion, featuring seventy examples of furniture, pillows, and bedding from around the world. Dream On curators Annie Carlano and Bobbie Sumberg have made an in-depth inquiry into the three predominant modes of sleep and have arrange their artifacts accordingly in an environment that will feature the gentle recorded sounds of real sleeping people.
The first section, “Sleeping Low,” features works from Japan and islands of the Pacific Rim, including a tatami, kimono-shaped quilts, Chinese head rests, woven rattan mats from Borneo, and embroidered silk sleeping cloths from Southeast Asia. Visitors will then move on to “Sleeping on the Move,” with works from Central Asia, the Middle East and Eastern Mediterranean, featuring nomadic piled bedding from Turkey and Uzbekistan. Finally, “Sleeping High,” with works from Asia and Europe, features the bed as furniture, offering the familiar bed-above-the-floor that most of us take for granted as “a proper bed.
Accompanying the exhibit will be a lavishly illustrated book that will work in tandem to convey the primal nature of the bed in our lives, published by the University of Washington and available in the spring of 2006. With playful chapter heads like “Sleeping Around,” (an introduction), “Sleeping Small,” (about children’s beds) and “Sleeping Forever…Ever” (about coffins, the book clearly has a broader focus than the exhibition, perhaps illustrating that there’s a lot more to sleep than just dreaming. Indeed, the book discusses the evolution of the bed in the Ancient World, different cultural attitudes toward sleeping, and explores contemporary design solutions to beds and bedding. Attitudes and emotions about comfort, repose, intimacy, and the fertile world of dreams are explored throughout the text.
While sleep is a serious topic, the curators have taken a dreamy approach to the presentation of the issues involved, and are asking that attendees to the opening come in their pajamas. DJs, (who’ll play trance and downtempo, I suppose) will be performing at the event. Curators have also requested that opening-revelers bring along a stuffed animal, size appropriately for a child to sleep with. All furry creatures will be donated to the Esperanza Women’s Shelter after the evening’s festivities.
Dream On: Beds from Asia to Europe looks like a real sleeper hit – make sure you set your alarm for this one.
INFO BOX:
What – Dream On: Beds from Asia to Europe
When – Friday, December 16, 2005 from 5 to 8:30 p.m.
Where – @MOIFA, The Museum of International Folk Art, located on Museum Hill on Camino Lejo, off Old Santa Fe Trail.
Cost: $FREE
Special Preparations: The curators request that people dressed in their pajamas, along with a kid-friendly stuffed animal.
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May 8th, 2005 by sandyadmin
Burning Man Low-Cost Tickets Application Q&A (2005)
by Gregory J. Pleshaw (the artist at that time known as gregoryp(tm))
1) How many years have you attended Burning Man?
If I attend in 2005, it will be my fifth year, with previous attendance in 2000, 2001, 2002, & 2004.
2) Why do you feel you need a low cost ticket?
For the past two years, I have lived almost exclusively on SSI disability. Almost exclusively because I occasionally make a few hundred dollars here and there writing for money, as either a freelance arts journalist or a marketing copywriter. My total income for the past twelve months is probably eight thousand including my $579/month from the federal government, most of which goes to rent. (I live in New Mexico, rents are lower here.)
3) What do you do to pay the bills and keep the landlord off your back?
Thanks to the feds, I manage to keep roof overhead and am reasonably well-fed with the aid of food stamps. Again, I occasionally work for cash (most of it under the table) but spend most of my time in semi-volunteer type positions in my communities. (Santa Fe & Albuquerque.)
4) What is your average monthly income after evil taxes?
Including my food stamp grant of $125 and my SSI payment of $579, I generally average between $800-$900/month. Occasionally, I will get cash from the sale of my book (available on my website at http://www.gregoryp.com), but if I sell ten copies a month ($125) that’s fairly miraculous. And I occasionally sell a magazine article or manage to do some copy for a company that needs it for a website or brochure – such gigs are infrequent but they do happen. For either of those things, I’ll pull in $400-$500 in one shot – but in the past twelve months, that’s happened less than half a dozen times. I don’t really pay taxes, truth be told.
5) How do you plan to contribute to Burning Man 2005?
Well, let’s see – three out of the four years I’ve attended I’ve been involved with the Black Rock Gazette, generally as a writer, and I might do the same this year. However – most of my time there and now is through my involvement with a New Mexico-based theme camp called “Lucid Revolution.” With roughly 100 or so members, a school bus, a 60” dome, too much stereo equipment and a multitude of props (including two couches made of cloth-stitched penises and vulvas which I am pleased to say I helped to sew) there’s a really awful giant ton of logistics (rewarding in and of itself if we can actually PULL IT OFF) and I’d say a lot of my time is going to spent on that.
(A side project which may or may not happen: My friend has designed a new kind of electrically-generating wind-turbine, more or less an advance on the Air 404 which he’s created two prototypes of which he wants to test-drive in Black Rock City. We’ll set up at Alternative Energy Zone, pray for wind, take lots of pictures and notes, and just generally participate in the AEZ’s project of charging batteries or perhaps setting up a mini-grid.)
I also started a Burning Man-oriented blog called “Lucid Dreaming” in December which was intended to chronicle all the weird shit I’ve seen at Burning Man in the last four visits. I got bored with it (blogging isn’t really my medium) but I now use it as a hosting spot for all the weird essays and stuff I do write. There is one particularly choice piece in there about Chicken John & the Borg2 project – if you want to check it out, point Firefox to http://gregoryp.blogspot.com
6) What does the Burning Man community represent to you?
In my first year, (2000), I was fortunate enough to be invited to join the Spiral Oasis community, which as far as I know no longer exists, at the request of friend Mark Pesce. Through him and that community I met dozens of people who were doing precisely what I was trying to write about – intersecting art & technology in such a way that 30,000 people could affectively create their own damn Disneyland in the middle of fucking nowhere. In that year alone, I got over my fear of camping – bad experiences in junior high and Boy Scouts convinced me it wasn’t my scene, but after surviving Black Rock City I pretty much feel like I can go anywhere, and today I actually have two sleeping bags, numerous tarps and tents, a sunshower and portable toilet, and at least a year’s supply of suntan lotion. I camp a lot now – recently I spent two days in the East Mountains of New Mexico celebrating Beltaine with an equally weird bunch o’ folks, and four days last week in the Verde Valley of Arizona. Burning Man represents freedom, in a way – but my experiences at Burning Man have been enough to teach me that it ain’t all “Operation Desert Snuggle” – I spent a few weeks cleaning up after 2002 and hanging at the Eighty Acres to learn the other side, which I didn’t necessarily love but it gave me a broader perspective on the apocalyptical nature of it all…
I have kicked around an idea in my head for the last few years about a paper (for someone) about the evolving art aesthetic of Burning Man culture. I need to go back again to see if I was on acid (I was, but that’s not the point) when I determined that the confluence of Calfornia’s many diverse subcultures and Hakim Bey’s interpretation of lifestyle-oriented anarchism has created new forms of seeing and expression that don’t even necessarily need to reach the dominant culture in order to have viable impact. As an arts journalist who is completely jaded by the presentation of contemporary art vis a vis the Whitney Biennial and the Chelsea district, I am continually impressed, pleased, and inspired by art that is made simply to be burned, destroyed or even just taken down and packed away – pictures or video do not even begin to capture the grandeur of the Burning Man Arts Festival – one must be there or it makes no sense whatsoever.
Last year, in a triangular act of barter-ness for which I’ve become semi-famous, I simply observed a crew of folks huddled around the engine compartment of a ‘60s-era RV and wandered up to see what was up. The oil pan had simply exploded on the way into the city (it was Day Two), and it looked like that poor land yacht and all the newbies in it were going to be in Black Rock City for the rest of their lives. They knew no one and nothing about Burning Man – I knew where the mechanics were (at DPW, of course!) and so I rounded up someone and several hours later, all was well. That was when I learned that the newbies were also pilots who’d flown in a two-seater Cessna to play with while they were “in town.” For my hook-up, they gave me a ride over the Man (spectacular) and hooked my girlfriend up with a ride to Reno on Saturday morning (she had to leave early.)
By simply participating and creating a connection where none would’ve existed (without asking “What have you got to trade?”) I created a kind of bounty that I never would’ve been asking for. That, perhaps more than anything else, is what the Burning Man community represents to me – the Playa provides, as I once told a friend, for it is the collective unconscious writ large and we don’t always know the symbol sets in our own heads nor what precisely will set us free. In Black Rock City….those solutions can find you if you just relax and participate in the best way you can – and that is why I keep coming back, since my needs seem to change every year.
7) Is there anything else you would like to tell us?
Yes. Almost every year I’ve gone to Burning Man, over-the-top efforts have been required of me. Perhaps that’s true of everyone. My first year, I flew from across the country on a whim at the request of a friend who actually wrote a short story about my “Meltdown” in the Super K-Mart in Reno because I’d left my Adivan at home. I survived to tell the tale, but it was harrowing nonetheless. In 2001, I got mugged at gunpoint in the West Village the night before I was supposed to fly out of JFK, was drugged and left for dead, overslept my flight, and had an equally harrowing adventure trying to get out of New York and to the Playa. In 2002, I had absolutely no business being at Burning Man. I was living on the streets in Seattle and grew and sold mushrooms in a closet at work to get a ticket to go. Once it was over, I had nowhere to be and knew that going in, but I pulled an “over-the-top” effort to go anyway. In 2004, I was on SSI and housed but also unemployed and had to beg, borrow and plead to get ticket and supplies together to get there.
I’m not going to do that again. I think I actually have pretty solid support and ground beneath my feet and journeying off to some unknown adventure (while appealing) isn’t going to do me any good if it completely de-centralizes me when it’s all said and done. Before this year, it never would’ve occurred to me to apply for this – but I think of it like fate. If I’m granted the low-cost ticket, I’ll go. If not, I’ll probably sit at home and keep working on other things, or maybe catch a ride up to southern Colorado for a little sightseeing at Mesa Verde and other spots I haven’t been to. My main reason for wanting to go again in the first place is that I’ve always learn so much and answered a lot of internal questions – but if I can’t do it this way then maybe I need to do that some other way this time around.
Thanks. I enjoyed filling this out. Most forms aren’t nearly this fun (and trust me, I’ve filled out a lot of them.)
Gregory J. Pleshaw
aka gregoryp™
May 8, 2005
Posted in Uncategorized
November 22nd, 2004 by sandyadmin
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: November 22, 2004
Contact: Gregory Pleshaw, publicist, 505-316-1163
Local Author Denise Kusel to Donate New Book Royalties to School Lunch Program
November 22, 2004: Local writer and communtiy journalist Denise Kusel knows the power of the written word. From her desk at The New Mexican, Kusel pens the wildly popular thrice-weekly column “Only in Santa Fe,” where she writes about anything that affects the local community, both serious and funny. Past columns have included pieces about animal lovers and the ones who love them too much; humorous pieces about growing old and working at home; and many delightful pieces about her twenty-six years in the City Different.
Her new book Only in Santa Fe is a compendium of these columns put together by local publishing house Sunstone Press. The book is Kusel’s first and will be widely distributed around the state – but Kusel has no plans to get rich from it. Instead, she will be donating all royalties from the book to the Santa Fe Public Schools “No String Attached” program, a school lunch program that she helped to create.
“I received a call one day from someone telling me that some kids were coming to school without any money for lunch, and I just thought that was terrible,” she said. “I complained to the schools. I complained to the school board, and they all told me nothing could be done. Then I contacted the New Mexico Women’s Foundation [of which Kusel is a member], and I said ‘We’ve got to do something.'”
The “No Strings Attached” program allows any student who doesn’t have lunch money to order a lunch ‘no strings attached.’ No names or IDs are taken – cafeteria staff simply mark off a checklist and the NMWF is billed for the cost of the lunch. Previously, the program was funded exclusively by private donations, but now ‘No Strings Attached’ has another patron to add to their list.
Recently, Kusel was the author of honor at a booksigning at Garcia Street Books, where over three hundred friends and well-wishers appeared to buy the book and get it signed by one of Santa Fe’s favorite scribes.
“When I arrived in Santa Fe, I knew no one,” said Kusel. “I didn’t have a job or any friends or a place to live. Life has never been easy here, but people opened their arms to me and I am just such a lucky person. And I get to share that luck with people every week with my work – which makes me even luckier, I think.”
Denise Kusel will be appearing at (some grocery store) on such-and-such date to sign her books. (Such and such grocery store) will be dedicating 5% of the day’s gross receipts to help the “No Strings Attached” program.
Posted in Uncategorized
March 3rd, 2003 by sandyadmin
Cody Sanderson’s “Outside the Cube”
At the 50th Annual Heard Indian Fair & Market this past weekend, I spent about an hour following Santa Fe artist Cody Sanderson as he made his rounds through the booths. Sanderson, 43, is an artist at the top of his game, having won the Heard’s Best in Show for his jeweled marvel entitled “Out of the Cube.” Succinctly put, the piece is a cast silver working model of a Rubik’s Cube which featured six repousse faces rather than colors in homage to the famous cubes that so boggled minds and fingers in the 1980s.
Sanderson shook hands, delivered compliments and received many congratulations as he walked from booth to booth. “Shaking hands and kissing babies,” is one of his many sales techniques, which he claims rival his abilities on the workbench. If that’s really the case, maybe Sanderson should take up sales full-time, because he has consistently delivered cutting-edge objets d’art since becoming a silversmith less than ten years ago.
“Shocked,” was how he described his feelings when he heard that he received the award. “I mean, sure, it took me about six solid weeks to make this thing and there’s a lot of work in it that cannot be calculated,” he said. “But there are people in this market who have a lot more experience than I do and who take a lot more time to make their pieces. Some people are saying, ‘A toy won best in show?’ and they’re shocked and on some level I can really feel for them.
Words cannot describe the beauty of this object, which features six sides of nine matching motifs that make up the game aspect of the device. Though the object screams “Play with Me!” it was handled only by the artist while wearing gloves. Such protocols are perhaps necessary when one is handling a toy with a value of $10,000 and over a pound of pure silver in its architecture. It can also be taken apart, just like a regular Rubik’s Cube, revealing a number of individuals pieces as well as the spoke-like central axis that allows the faces of the cube to spin in any direction.
The astonishing thing about the win is that it probably wouldn’t have been possible at The Other Big Indian Market, namely, the Indian Market in Santa Fe, whose winners tend to be more from a traditional bent than Sanderson’s pieces. Though Sanderson said he finished the piece just in time for this show, it may have been a strategic move on his part to enter this piece into the Heard Show first rather than Indian Market.
“My experience has been that the Heard is a lot more open to artistic innovation than Indian Market,” said Sanderson. “They care less about the political correctness of materials and more about the artistry that goes into the work.”
A notable artist who may benefit from that attitude was displaying work alongside Sanderson’s. Laguna/Chiricahua Apache artist Pat Pruitt is a metalsmith who works exclusively in stainless steel, producing jeweled objects that have become the hot ticket for young Native artists and collectors alike. Sanderson sported a Pruitt on one of his wrists, and Pojoaque potter Melissa Talachy also was seen wearing one. In addition to his killer jewelry, Pruitt also makes stainless steel sculptures, one of which won a Best in Category award at the Heard show.
In general, the Heard show had a more intimate feel than Indian Market, which certainly owes itself to the fact that it all takes place on the grounds of the Museums and all it’s closed to all but a paying public. Regardless of those differences, one thing that remained the same was just the incredibly diversity available to those of us who are fans of Native Art. It’s a community that re-unites itself at shows like these and presents a “family” of sorts of different people, personalities, tribes and mediums, with everything from traditional weaving to the latest cutting-edge offerings of folks like Sanderson and Pruitt.
Such diversity makes Native Art a joy to cover, because there’s always something new to uncover and learn about. Perhaps one of the biggest highlights of the show for me came from listening to a relative of artist Merced Maldonado recount the history of the Yaqui Indian tribe and their struggled with both the Mexican and U.S. government.
Shows like these are more than just markets – they’re opportunities for artists and fans alike to meet each other and talk about the work and the ideas and communities that inform that work. The Heard show brought that all back home for me this past weekend – and now we wait until Indian Market in Santa Fe does it all again.
ps: “Outside the Cube” sold for its asking price to a private collector on the final day of the show.
Addendum: Cody Sanderson was quick to point out that Indian Market has always treated him well personally, but that he has seen other jewelry artists who have been stifled by the process of getting into Market. We’ll be discussing this issue in upcoming articles.
I have issued an open call for information regarding the stifling of artists at Indian Market. It’s posted over here.
six sides of nine matching motifs that make up the game aspect of the device. Though the object screams “Play with Me!” it was handled only by the artist while wearing gloves. Such protocols are perhaps necessary when one is handling a toy with a value of $10,000 and over a pound of pure silver in its architecture. It can also be taken apart, just like a regular Rubik’s Cube, revealing a number of individuals pieces as well as the spoke-like central axis that allows the faces of the cube to spin in any direction.
The astonishing thing about the win is that it probably wouldn’t have been possible at The Other Big Indian Market, namely, the Indian Market in Santa Fe, whose winners tend to be more from a traditional bent than Sanderson’s pieces. Though Sanderson said he finished the piece just in time for this show, it may have been a strategic move on his part to enter this piece into the Heard Show first rather than Indian Market.
“My experience has been that the Heard is a lot more open to artistic innovation than Indian Market,” said Sanderson. “They care less about the political correctness of materials and more about the artistry that goes into the work.”
A notable artist who may benefit from that attitude was displaying work alongside Sanderson’s. Laguna/Chiricahua Apache artist Pat Pruitt is a metalsmith who works exclusively in stainless steel, producing jeweled objects that have become the hot ticket for young Native artists and collectors alike. Sanderson sported a Pruitt on one of his wrists, and Pojoaque potter Melissa Talachy also was seen wearing one. In addition to his killer jewelry, Pruitt also makes stainless steel sculptures, one of which won a Best in Category award at the Heard show.
In general, the Heard show had a more intimate feel than Indian Market, which certainly owes itself to the fact that it all takes place on the grounds of the Museums and all it’s closed to all but a paying public. Regardless of those differences, one thing that remained the same was just the incredibly diversity available to those of us who are fans of Native Art. It’s a community that re-unites itself at shows like these and presents a “family” of sorts of different people, personalities, tribes and mediums, with everything from traditional weaving to the latest cutting-edge offerings of folks like Sanderson and Pruitt.
Such diversity makes Native Art a joy to cover, because there’s always something new to uncover and learn about. Perhaps one of the biggest highlights of the show for me came from listening to a relative of artist Merced Maldonado recount the history of the Yaqui Indian tribe and their struggled with both the Mexican and U.S. government.
Shows like these are more than just markets – they’re opportunities for artists and fans alike to meet each other and talk about the work and the ideas and communities that inform that work. The Heard show brought that all back home for me this past weekend – and now we wait until Indian Market in Santa Fe does it all again.
ps: “Outside the Cube” sold for its asking price to a private collector on the final day of the show.
Addendum: Cody Sanderson was quick to point out that Indian Market has always treated him well personally, but that he has seen other jewelry artists who have been stifled by the process of getting into Market. We’ll be discussing this issue in upcoming articles.
I have issued an open call for information regarding the stifling of artists at Indian Market. It’s posted over here.
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