Kelly Frye, Cliff Dwellings Revisited

InCliff Dwellings Revisited, Kelly Frye (Tesuque Pueblo) engages the architectural memory of ancestral sites such as Chaco Canyon and the cliff dwellings in the Southwest. Rather than rendering these places literally, Frye distills them into a visual language of curved planes, rectilinear forms, and the geometry of the masonry walls, kivas, windows, and portals. The sweeping arc that anchors the composition suggests both the sheer canyon wall and the vault floating above, while stacked, block-like shapes recall the multi-storied structures of Chacoan great houses. Created with luminous blues and earthen ochres, Frye references sky and sandstone, placing human construction in dialogue with cosmology and landscape. As a Pueblo artist, Frye approaches these forms not as ruins, but as living presences—sites of continuity, migration, and cultural endurance. The circular motifs allude to how the architecture is aligned to the planets and the stars, a central aspect to Chacoan architecture and Pueblo worldviews. The work becomes less a depiction of the past than a meditation on ancestral design principles still resonant in contemporary Indigenous life.