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Della Warrior is retiring as the executive director of the Museum of Indian Arts & Culture. (Caitlin Jenkins/Nm Department Of Cultural Affairs.
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. When Della Warrior took the helm at the Museum of Indian Arts & Culture in 2013, she had a vision to make the state museum better.
After eight years, Warrior (Otoe-Missouria) is set to retire on Aug. 27.
During her tenure, Warrior helped strengthen the museum’s collection of Native art and anthropological artifacts.
MIAC showcased 30 exhibitions, including “Turquoise, Water & Sky,” “Footprints: The Inspiration and Influence of Allan Houser,” “Indian Country: The Art of David Bradley,” and “Clearly Indigenous: Native Visions Reimagined in Glass.”
Currents 826 celebrates the light at the end of the tunnel Steel yourselves for a sea of stories from arts outlets about how shows that were in process have been tragically canceled. In better instances, they’ve just been postponed. Then rejoice, because, as pop-punk band MXPX once mused, some things are better late than never. Case in point: CURRENTS826, that ongoing gallery bastion/satellite arm of the annual CURRENTS festival (which is slated for a smaller but no less powerful appearance at the Center for Contemporary Arts this year) has a doozy. Despite postponement during the great lockdown of 2020, its theme is eerily appropriate for the current era of spring/renewal/mass vaxxing.
No medium captures the dance of color and light more fully than the luminosity of glass.
Archaeological evidence suggests glass-making dates at least back to 3,600 B.C. in Mesopotamia, Egypt or Syria. Stone Age societies used naturally occurring obsidian glass for cutting tools and weapons.
“Raven Steals the Sun,” Preston Singletary (Tlingit), 2017. (Courtesy of the Museum of New Mexico Press))
Venetian glass artists have produced glass from the island of Murano for more than 1,500 years.
Glass gestated in Indian Country in the 1970s. And the legendary glass artist Dale Chihuly played midwife.
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When Santa Fe’s Institute of American Indian Arts rose from high school to a two-year college, its co-founder Lloyd Kiva New turned to the Rhode Island School of Design to help develop an art center. RISD sent Chihuly, who had created the glass program there, to New Mexico to set up a glass-making hot shop and to teach for one semester. Faculty member Carl Pon
When the museum reopens, visitors will be welcomed to “A Place in Clay.”
“This exhibition will showcase the work of artist Kathleen Wall (Jemez Pueblo), the museum’s 2020 Native Treasures Living Treasure,” Tapia says. “With techniques passed on from generation to generation, Wall’s art exemplifies the style and beauty of her family’s heritage through her creations.”
Wall has always considered Pueblo pottery to be an essential ingredient in her life.
“Over the last 30 years, I have begun my creative process with the same actions as my mother, my grandmother, and my great grandmother before her,” Wall says. “I dig clay and volcanic ash in the same places that my mother showed me as a young girl. I have created most of my clay figures using traditionally processed clay from here in Jemez Pueblo … where I began.”