As Told To By
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As Told To By
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Andrea Cermanski
My work is inspired by the intricacies of our natural world. Extracting my palette from nature, my work embodies the delicate interplay of light and color, texture and form. While working, I intuitively synthesize memories of the land, sky and water, allowing something new to emerge–a metamorphosis.
My current work explores my relationship with the tumbleweed. An invasive plant with a storied, symbolic history which romanticizes the American West, tumbleweeds overtake everything - the land, the yard, the imagination - during the windy Spring months in New Mexico. Each plant disperses 250,000 seeds as it travels along the landscape, thus making it difficult to eradicate. In response to the giant piles that accumulate around my home, I devised a contraption to burn and attempt to eradicate the rolling offenders from our property.
“Tumbleweed Black” is the novel paint I create following a neighborhood tumbleweed-burning party; it integrates the charred remnants with acrylic medium and water. I then choose rock pigments that I collected from Northern New Mexico to pair with tumbleweed black, and create a pigment pour. The paints are poured onto wood or canvas, and interact with each other with little interference from me. The process of collecting the charcoal, making paint, and creating artworks out of tumbleweed black transforms my relationship with the plant, from frustration to fascination.
With this dramatic jet-black paint, I am redefining the tumbleweed’s narrative from romantic to realistic: they outcompete native plants, are a wildfire risk, put farmer's crops at risk, and will become more prolific as a result of climate change. These paintings are at odds with the traditional representation of the lone tumbleweed blowing down a dusty road, and call for a revision of this romanticized history: tumbleweeds are in fact the fastest growing invasive plant in U.S. history. In contrast, the rocks I collect to make pigments date back as early as the Paleozoic era, and carry within them the precious mark of time. Thus these paintings celebrate the New Mexico landscape: the invasive versus the native, tumbling versus stability, and the ancient versus the new.
Kelly C. Frye
The soul and spirit of my work springs from my curious nature. This curiosity has led me to many adventures throughout my life. Self-discovery through the arts allows me to express a contemporary voice of my Indigenous world. I find limitless possibilities of expression in a combination of historical and personal narratives. These experiences have allowed me to explore different mediums, culminating in a passion for sculpture with casting metals, welded steel, and clay.
Duhon James
Diné printmaker Duhon James, Water’s Edge Clan, born for the Bitter Water Clan, earned his BFA in Studio Arts from the Institute of American Indian Arts in 2014. He works primarily in linocuts, a relief printing method using a linoleum block. His work is rooted in close observation of the natural world and the ways light, land, clouds, and water create moments of color, balance, and pause. Inspired by elements and designs found in textiles, James explores cycles of life through recurring imagery such as stars, corn, mountains, hogans, and water. These elements reflect both the Navajo landscape and a broader cosmology that connects community, land, and the universe. Textile references in his work honor elders and the long tradition of rug weaving, including the Ganado Red rug, which he approaches with simplicity and innovation. James’s work
visualizes Navajo life as a living continuum, grounded in respect for elders whose teachings continue to guide what it means to live, create, and belong.
David A. Naranjo
David A. Naranjo from the Pueblos of Santa Clara, San Juan, and Cochiti reinterprets historic pottery in two dimensions, expressing cultural symbolism through hardline abstraction. Since receiving his BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts, he incorporates elements from Tewa patterns and designs as paintings and scarves, often executed in tactile materials such as silk and micaceous paint. For Naranjo, “Symbols and iconography depicted on pottery and embroidery are not only for ornate decorative purposes, but carry great symbolic significance and serve as visual representations of the landscape, natural world, and, if used properly, for prayer.”
