META Consulting: Curatorial Essay for Mateo Romero, Native Artist

Mateo Romero:
Snapshots from the Spirit World

...I do think that the award granted my works is significant with reference to the representational interpretation arising from the conventional Indian art fused with the flavoring of formal background. ...the Indian artist must be allowed to absorb influences outside of his own art forms and develop them in his own manner....I also see the promise of a new lane of expression that should keep that Indian's art alive and closer to a more contemporary existence....Indian artists with formal art background will be going more and more in the direction of the European interpretational influences. I have always felt that the term abstraction has been a part of the Indian's artistic thinking longer than most European contemporary influences and perhaps in a [truer] form.

Dr. Walter Richard West, May 1995 taken from Visions and Voices: Native America Painting from the Philbrook Museum of Art.

In his 2006 book Painting the Underworld Sky: Cultural Expression & Subversion in Art, (SAR Press) artist Mateo Romero takes a look at the development of his work over the past twenty years. He begins by examining his social realist paintings of the late 1980s to mid-1990s, where he was driven by a desire to use the canvas as a place to expose the unseen and unspoken social realities of Native life.

But in his latest body of work, Romero is following a path he created for himself in his book, when he said that he and other Pueblo painters of his generation are like "plein-air painters of the metaphysical." This observation certainly holds true for his own works. Beginning with dreamscape backdrops formed by modern painterly techniques such as Abstract Expressionist painting, Romero's foregrounds are dominated by richly brush-painted photo-transfer images of the people, icons and ceremonies of the Rio Grande Pueblo people. Some of these images are appropriated from historical archives, notably the works of Edward S. Curtis; others are taken from images staged and shot by Romero himself. Regardless of the source, through technique and imagery Romero deftly combines two very disparate art historical conversations - Euro-American modernism and traditional ethnographic Indian art, fusing them together to create ethereal snapshots from a journey in the spirit world.

A member of Cochiti Pueblo who lives on Pojoaque Pueblo with his wife and four children, Romero was raised outside the Pueblo world as an urban Indian in Berkeley, CA. Romero's experience as a Native American is grounded in both familial diaspora and personal re-discovery of his tribal heritage through extensive research and direct experience. As the son of a Korean War veteran partially disabled by gunfire, the violent qualities of the nation that conquered his people is never very far away, and for a significant portion of his career, Romero was drawn both to living and expressing this dark side in his work. The body of work immediately preceding his current work, ("The Self-Addiction" series) was marked by a gritty social realism in which his mostly Native subjects stood naked and exposed as gangsters, alcoholics, addicts and abusers.

But beginning in 2002, in the midst of a Dubin Fellowship at the School of American Research in Santa Fe, Romero's emphasis began to shift from the bleak issues of contemporary Native life to the timeless and ethereal qualities of Pueblo spiritual life. In doing so, Romero neither suggests that Native problems have disappeared nor that we can avoid them, but that if we shift our focus just a bit, beyond the alcoholism and the drug problems and the domestic violence, we can clearly see the icons of an ancient religious practice that is still living and breathing today in the Rio Grande Pueblos, kept alive despite conquest and Catholicism and offering much-needed ritual and reinforcement of a social identity that is as uplifting as its social ills are self-defeating.

Along with other members of his generation of Native artists, Romero is a contemporary painter who bears the burden of needing to contend with the social realities of Native contemporary life stripped bare of sentimentality. Simultaneously, with the decline of the self-taught Native artist and the rise of an art school trained professional artist within Native art worlds, both he and his peers are gifted and saddled with the totality of both Native art history (which is short in comparison but rife with issues that include rigid standards and mainstream institutional indiffference) as well as a Euro-American art history to contend with in the execution of their contemporary work. It is a burden that few Native artists carry gracefully. Mateo Romero is certainly among that group who have synthesized what each has had to offer to create a bridge between both historical roads in expressing works of intellectual intergrity and aesthetic beauty.

* * * * * * * * *

In order to appreciate the differences between today's contemporary Native American artist and the traditional Native painters who comprise the bulk of the Philbrook Native American art collection, an examination of traditional work, including its history and its rules, is necessary.

Beginning in the early 1920s, first at the Bacone School in Tulsa, Oklahoma and then at the Santa Fe Indian School under the direction of Dorothy Dunn. in the 1930s, Native American art studios were developed that taught and rigidly adhered to a style that has become known as flat-painting. This style was marked by perspective-less figures placed against a plain white or neutral-colored background, often without horizon. The result were somewhat illustrational-looking images of Native life.

The historical precedents for flat-painting included buffalo and deer hide paintings throughout the Plains and southwest, as well as kiva paintings among the Pueblo people and the Hopi. Flat perspective works also appeared following the conquest in the ledger drawings and paintings found primarily in the Plains.

Its illustrational aspects notwithstanding, there was a certain academic rigor applied to the making of flat paintings, and much of that rigor revolved around research, primary and secondary, to ensure that the pictures were captured properly. In addition to historical precedent in determining style guidelines for flat-painting, the motivation to proceed with a rigid guideline also came from an earnest desire to capture Native people and their ways of life before it was too late. Towards that end, it was a cultural preservation imperative to have a flat illustrational style with which to train 100s of students to capture those freeze-frame moments of a past that existed before conquest and assimiliation.

But while flat painting became an acceptable modality for Indian painters, including such figures as Allan Houser, Harrison Begay, Pablita Velarde & Pop Chalee in the American Southwest, as well as among the Kiowa Five of Oklahoma, the thrust of modernism in mid-century art circles found many native artists chaffing beneath flat painting's decidedly "flat" and cartoony style. As artists of their time, many Indian painters wanted to join the conversation of modernism, and a few, including Houser and George Morrison, did so with considerable success.

The collection at the Philbrook Museum is marked by a great historical treasure trove of traditional flat painting. Yet even amidst this grand celebration of the form, there are a number of key pieces which illustrate the reality of artists testing the boundaries of flat-painting's rules, artists who sought to combine modernist influences with the traditional (and acceptable) style. Notably, we can cite the work of Blackbear Bosin, whose Philbrook collection painting "Prairie Fire" adheres to the style in terms of foreground figures but drenches the backdrop in rich expressionist color, as well as to the work of Oscar Howe, whose Philbrook collection works such as "Victory Dance," and "Dance of the Heyoka" evoke comparisons to such modernist figures as Picasso and Braque. Also within the collection, one can see a truly remarkable painting in Yeffe Kimball's "Zuni Maiden." Made in 1939, the piece is eerily reminiscent of the paintings being made by Mateo Romero today.

* * * * * * * * * * *

Word about Mateo Romero's work first reached me in the spring of 2005. As an arts writer for a number of Santa Fe publications, the word was out that there was a Native artist re-appropriating Edward Curtis photographs into his canvasses, and so I had to go take a look. I heard he was showing at the Blue Rain Gallery and went over to ask, and they had a few in storage pending an upcoming show that they were only too happy to show me.

Even beneath a stuttering flourescent light in the storeroom, I knew I was looking at something extraordinary, an integrated and complete work of art unprecedented in my experience with Native contemporary painting. The background showed exquisite use of color, brushwork, and overall technique, while the forground image of a Butterfly Maiden was so ghostly, hovering above the surface of the canvas, yet inundated with that sense of the real that can only come from a photograph, though without the cold mechanical sense that often comes wtih both silkscreen and photo transfer alike.

Romero's Butterfly Maiden was an icon I might've seen elsewhere in a flat painting, but there only as a illustration. Here, she seemed like a goddess rife with significance, popping out from a background built on a layer of a symbolic language that as a student of Euro-American art history, I could relate to and then begin to relate to her as well, though as a non-Native person her symbolic language was lost on me. The fusion was more than aesthestically beautiful - in bringing together these two disparate moments in the history of the art symbolism of two peoples, dominant and oppressed, I saw both cultures changed on that canvas, one cradling the other, one arriving at its rightful place within a mainstream cultural discourse. I was instantly captivated by what I was seeing and I sought Romero out for a profile for the Santa Fean magazine's 2006 Indian Market issue.

What was more problematic for the artists, however, was their public presentation to white society as the oddity to be gaped at and seen as "the other."
Visions & Voices, p24

As I would quickly discover, Mateo Romero is an articulate artist who has not stumbled upon his artistic polemic by accident. Instead, Romero is an intelligent artist who graduated from Dartmouth College and received an MFA in printmaking from the University of New Mexico. He is both a contemporary painter and a tribal member, as deeply enmeshed in the conversation of contemporary art as he is in the conversation of his local tribe(s) and Native America as a whole. Where the Kiowa Five school of the 1920s may have faced issues of "otherness", Romero, along with a select number of artists from his generation, have begun to address these issues of "the other" in ways wholly unique to what came before. Their works illustrate a fusion mentality between both the rich dialectical language of their local heritage, combined with an appreciation for and a cunning appropriation of the polemics, techniques, and symbolism of Western art history.

In creating this work, Romero takes two seemingly disparate art historical threads and weaves them together into a seamless and integrated whole. In the background of his works lie deeply layered and richly complex planes of color and movement that are clearly reminiscent of the Abstract Expressionist movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Here, Abstract Expressionism is not the forefront but the subtext of his work, an obvious nod to the contemporaraneous nature of the foreground figure and the artist who paints it.

At its zenith, Abstract Expressionism was dominated by such figures as Jackson Pollack, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, who called the painting, "an arena to come to terms with the act of creation." In the same period, noted art critic Clement Greenburg wrote that "the physicality of the paintings' clotted and oil-caked surfaces was the key to understanding them as documents of the artists' existential struggle." In both viewpoints, the potential for viewing the execution of Abstract Expressionist works as forming a kind of ritual metaphysical act for their creators is quite clear.

Today, Abstract Expressionism exists as something of a kind of historical homage within the contemporary art world, a useful technique that most experienced viewers implicitly recognize as being a statement within a painterly text that illustrates the notion that the act of painting is as important as the product of the painting itself.

In a Mateo Romero work, Abstract Expressionist strokes define the backdrop of his subject, generally a Puebloan dancer or religious icon. Many of these icons – Corn Maiden, Deer Dancer, Buffalo Dancer – echo traditional Native flat-paintings in their subject matter. These enter his paintings through a photo-transfer process that bring a realistic aesthetic to the dreamscape of his backgrounds. Many of these photographs are Romero's own - others, such as the foreground figures in "War Party" arise from archival Edward S. Curtis photographs, taking both referential and literal cue from Curtis' works. The process permits Romero to both appropriate and reclaim his foreground images within a Native context, while simultaneously referencing the subject matter of traditional native flat-painting.

The fact that many of Mateo Romero's foreground subjects are taken from Romero's own contemporary photographs does not render the subject matter any less historical. Indeed, these subjects form the basis of a historical continuity which Romero plays on in enacting a most post-modernist composition, simultaneously playing on the historical continuity of his subject matter as as well as engaging his work in a Western art history dialectic and post-modernist discourses on the making of art.

Though Romero's work sits squarely in the center of the modernist tradition through his skilled appropriation of Abstract Expressionist backdrops within his canvasses, his use of photo-transfer appropriation of both "found" and staged imagery of Pueblo people, ceremonies and rites allow him to perform profound post-modern excercises of both appropriation and reclaimation of the presentation of the more sublime elements of Pueblo culture, with startling results indeed.

* * * * * * * * * *

Today, Native American painters have the opportunity to paint anyway they like - but they have both contemporary and historical trends within both Western and Native American art history to deal with, as well as institutional trends in collecting that determine the authenticity and validity of what they create. The importance of any collection to the public at large (which includes artists as well) can help to tip the balance towards a rush of new ideas. In using his skills to bring together disparate moments in art history within a single canvas, Mateo Romero's work offers a rush of new ideas that are far far away from the *rules* of the past, and yet they are still moving towards the goal of unveiling and preserving Native life, but in a way which combines a multiplicity of styles and ideas to acheive that goal.

If we are to take Visions & Voices as representational of the overall Native American arts collection at the Philbrook Museum, then a logical conclusion that it is a rich collection of Native American flat-painting, and thus represents an historic aspect of Native American art. The inclusion of works like Mateo Romero's within the context of a collection like the Philbrook's, however, marks the beginning of a new chapter in what we - both Native and non-Native American peoples - can begin to formally recognize as "authentic Native American work."

In the wake of the kind of assimilation that today's Native American faces, one must ask the question: What rises to the surface in works that combine traditional and non-traditional ideas about Native art-making? What ideas or notions remain uniquely Native American yet have the power to touch on the universality of human experience? If such universality is possible, it may be within the articulations of spiritual insight garnered by an ancient religion who despite conquest and assimilation have stood the test of time and remain a testament to the spirit of a people.

Regardless of the series or even the medium, there is very little about Mateo Romero's work that could be dismissed as trivial. Indeed, with each piece there exudes an immense desire to provoke both message and meaning from the viewer. Observing the development of his career means watching someone engaged in a serious battle of what it means to be Indian today, taking into account the spectrum of Native reality, from its historical genocides and its myriad social problems, to the beauty, reverence and grace inherent within its spiritual world-views and practices.

Works by Romero and others of his generation offers answers that aren't entirely obvious and are fully open to interpretation, for while those of us outside the recognized tribal reality that Native Americans enjoy may secretly see - or wish to project - the possibilities of our own indigenous pasts within the folds of a Corn Maiden's dress.


META Consulting: Curatorial Essay for Mateo Romero, Native Artist Mateo Romero: Snapshots from the Spirit World ...I do think that the award granted my works is significant with reference to the representational interpretation arising from the conventional Indian art fused with the flavoring of formal background. ...the Indian artist must be allowed to absorb influences outside of his own art forms and develop them in his own manner....I also see the promise of a new lane of expression that should keep that Indian's art alive and closer to a more contemporary existence....Indian artists with formal art background will be going more and more in the direction of the European interpretational influences. I have always felt that the term abstraction has been a part of the Indian's artistic thinking longer than most European contemporary influences and perhaps in a [truer] form. Dr. Walter Richard West, May 1995 taken from Visions and Voices: Native America Painting from the Philbrook Museum of Art. In his 2006 book Painting the Underworld Sky: Cultural Expression & Subversion in Art, (SAR Press) artist Mateo Romero takes a look at the development of his work over the past twenty years. He begins by examining his social realist paintings of the late 1980s to mid-1990s, where he was driven by a desire to use the canvas as a place to expose the unseen and unspoken social realities of Native life. But in his latest body of work, Romero is following a path he created for himself in his book, when he said that he and other Pueblo painters of his generation are like "plein-air painters of the metaphysical." This observation certainly holds true for his own works. Beginning with dreamscape backdrops formed by modern painterly techniques such as Abstract Expressionist painting, Romero's foregrounds are dominated by richly brush-painted photo-transfer images of the people, icons and ceremonies of the Rio Grande Pueblo people. Some of these images are appropriated from historical archives, notably the works of Edward S. Curtis; others are taken from images staged and shot by Romero himself. Regardless of the source, through technique and imagery Romero deftly combines two very disparate art historical conversations - Euro-American modernism and traditional ethnographic Indian art, fusing them together to create ethereal snapshots from a journey in the spirit world. A member of Cochiti Pueblo who lives on Pojoaque Pueblo with his wife and four children, Romero was raised outside the Pueblo world as an urban Indian in Berkeley, CA. Romero's experience as a Native American is grounded in both familial diaspora and personal re-discovery of his tribal heritage through extensive research and direct experience. As the son of a Korean War veteran partially disabled by gunfire, the violent qualities of the nation that conquered his people is never very far away, and for a significant portion of his career, Romero was drawn both to living and expressing this dark side in his work. The body of work immediately preceding his current work, ("The Self-Addiction" series) was marked by a gritty social realism in which his mostly Native subjects stood naked and exposed as gangsters, alcoholics, addicts and abusers. But beginning in 2002, in the midst of a Dubin Fellowship at the School of American Research in Santa Fe, Romero's emphasis began to shift from the bleak issues of contemporary Native life to the timeless and ethereal qualities of Pueblo spiritual life. In doing so, Romero neither suggests that Native problems have disappeared nor that we can avoid them, but that if we shift our focus just a bit, beyond the alcoholism and the drug problems and the domestic violence, we can clearly see the icons of an ancient religious practice that is still living and breathing today in the Rio Grande Pueblos, kept alive despite conquest and Catholicism and offering much-needed ritual and reinforcement of a social identity that is as uplifting as its social ills are self-defeating. Along with other members of his generation of Native artists, Romero is a contemporary painter who bears the burden of needing to contend with the social realities of Native contemporary life stripped bare of sentimentality. Simultaneously, with the decline of the self-taught Native artist and the rise of an art school trained professional artist within Native art worlds, both he and his peers are gifted and saddled with the totality of both Native art history (which is short in comparison but rife with issues that include rigid standards and mainstream institutional indiffference) as well as a Euro-American art history to contend with in the execution of their contemporary work. It is a burden that few Native artists carry gracefully. Mateo Romero is certainly among that group who have synthesized what each has had to offer to create a bridge between both historical roads in expressing works of intellectual intergrity and aesthetic beauty. * * * * * * * * * In order to appreciate the differences between today's contemporary Native American artist and the traditional Native painters who comprise the bulk of the Philbrook Native American art collection, an examination of traditional work, including its history and its rules, is necessary. Beginning in the early 1920s, first at the Bacone School in Tulsa, Oklahoma and then at the Santa Fe Indian School under the direction of Dorothy Dunn. in the 1930s, Native American art studios were developed that taught and rigidly adhered to a style that has become known as flat-painting. This style was marked by perspective-less figures placed against a plain white or neutral-colored background, often without horizon. The result were somewhat illustrational-looking images of Native life. The historical precedents for flat-painting included buffalo and deer hide paintings throughout the Plains and southwest, as well as kiva paintings among the Pueblo people and the Hopi. Flat perspective works also appeared following the conquest in the ledger drawings and paintings found primarily in the Plains. Its illustrational aspects notwithstanding, there was a certain academic rigor applied to the making of flat paintings, and much of that rigor revolved around research, primary and secondary, to ensure that the pictures were captured properly. In addition to historical precedent in determining style guidelines for flat-painting, the motivation to proceed with a rigid guideline also came from an earnest desire to capture Native people and their ways of life before it was too late. Towards that end, it was a cultural preservation imperative to have a flat illustrational style with which to train 100s of students to capture those freeze-frame moments of a past that existed before conquest and assimiliation. But while flat painting became an acceptable modality for Indian painters, including such figures as Allan Houser, Harrison Begay, Pablita Velarde & Pop Chalee in the American Southwest, as well as among the Kiowa Five of Oklahoma, the thrust of modernism in mid-century art circles found many native artists chaffing beneath flat painting's decidedly "flat" and cartoony style. As artists of their time, many Indian painters wanted to join the conversation of modernism, and a few, including Houser and George Morrison, did so with considerable success. The collection at the Philbrook Museum is marked by a great historical treasure trove of traditional flat painting. Yet even amidst this grand celebration of the form, there are a number of key pieces which illustrate the reality of artists testing the boundaries of flat-painting's rules, artists who sought to combine modernist influences with the traditional (and acceptable) style. Notably, we can cite the work of Blackbear Bosin, whose Philbrook collection painting "Prairie Fire" adheres to the style in terms of foreground figures but drenches the backdrop in rich expressionist color, as well as to the work of Oscar Howe, whose Philbrook collection works such as "Victory Dance," and "Dance of the Heyoka" evoke comparisons to such modernist figures as Picasso and Braque. Also within the collection, one can see a truly remarkable painting in Yeffe Kimball's "Zuni Maiden." Made in 1939, the piece is eerily reminiscent of the paintings being made by Mateo Romero today. * * * * * * * * * * * Word about Mateo Romero's work first reached me in the spring of 2005. As an arts writer for a number of Santa Fe publications, the word was out that there was a Native artist re-appropriating Edward Curtis photographs into his canvasses, and so I had to go take a look. I heard he was showing at the Blue Rain Gallery and went over to ask, and they had a few in storage pending an upcoming show that they were only too happy to show me. Even beneath a stuttering flourescent light in the storeroom, I knew I was looking at something extraordinary, an integrated and complete work of art unprecedented in my experience with Native contemporary painting. The background showed exquisite use of color, brushwork, and overall technique, while the forground image of a Butterfly Maiden was so ghostly, hovering above the surface of the canvas, yet inundated with that sense of the real that can only come from a photograph, though without the cold mechanical sense that often comes wtih both silkscreen and photo transfer alike. Romero's Butterfly Maiden was an icon I might've seen elsewhere in a flat painting, but there only as a illustration. Here, she seemed like a goddess rife with significance, popping out from a background built on a layer of a symbolic language that as a student of Euro-American art history, I could relate to and then begin to relate to her as well, though as a non-Native person her symbolic language was lost on me. The fusion was more than aesthestically beautiful - in bringing together these two disparate moments in the history of the art symbolism of two peoples, dominant and oppressed, I saw both cultures changed on that canvas, one cradling the other, one arriving at its rightful place within a mainstream cultural discourse. I was instantly captivated by what I was seeing and I sought Romero out for a profile for the Santa Fean magazine's 2006 Indian Market issue. What was more problematic for the artists, however, was their public presentation to white society as the oddity to be gaped at and seen as "the other." Visions & Voices, p24 As I would quickly discover, Mateo Romero is an articulate artist who has not stumbled upon his artistic polemic by accident. Instead, Romero is an intelligent artist who graduated from Dartmouth College and received an MFA in printmaking from the University of New Mexico. He is both a contemporary painter and a tribal member, as deeply enmeshed in the conversation of contemporary art as he is in the conversation of his local tribe(s) and Native America as a whole. Where the Kiowa Five school of the 1920s may have faced issues of "otherness", Romero, along with a select number of artists from his generation, have begun to address these issues of "the other" in ways wholly unique to what came before. Their works illustrate a fusion mentality between both the rich dialectical language of their local heritage, combined with an appreciation for and a cunning appropriation of the polemics, techniques, and symbolism of Western art history. In creating this work, Romero takes two seemingly disparate art historical threads and weaves them together into a seamless and integrated whole. In the background of his works lie deeply layered and richly complex planes of color and movement that are clearly reminiscent of the Abstract Expressionist movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Here, Abstract Expressionism is not the forefront but the subtext of his work, an obvious nod to the contemporaraneous nature of the foreground figure and the artist who paints it. At its zenith, Abstract Expressionism was dominated by such figures as Jackson Pollack, Mark Rothko, Willem de Kooning, who called the painting, "an arena to come to terms with the act of creation." In the same period, noted art critic Clement Greenburg wrote that "the physicality of the paintings' clotted and oil-caked surfaces was the key to understanding them as documents of the artists' existential struggle." In both viewpoints, the potential for viewing the execution of Abstract Expressionist works as forming a kind of ritual metaphysical act for their creators is quite clear. Today, Abstract Expressionism exists as something of a kind of historical homage within the contemporary art world, a useful technique that most experienced viewers implicitly recognize as being a statement within a painterly text that illustrates the notion that the act of painting is as important as the product of the painting itself. In a Mateo Romero work, Abstract Expressionist strokes define the backdrop of his subject, generally a Puebloan dancer or religious icon. Many of these icons – Corn Maiden, Deer Dancer, Buffalo Dancer – echo traditional Native flat-paintings in their subject matter. These enter his paintings through a photo-transfer process that bring a realistic aesthetic to the dreamscape of his backgrounds. Many of these photographs are Romero's own - others, such as the foreground figures in "War Party" arise from archival Edward S. Curtis photographs, taking both referential and literal cue from Curtis' works. The process permits Romero to both appropriate and reclaim his foreground images within a Native context, while simultaneously referencing the subject matter of traditional native flat-painting. The fact that many of Mateo Romero's foreground subjects are taken from Romero's own contemporary photographs does not render the subject matter any less historical. Indeed, these subjects form the basis of a historical continuity which Romero plays on in enacting a most post-modernist composition, simultaneously playing on the historical continuity of his subject matter as as well as engaging his work in a Western art history dialectic and post-modernist discourses on the making of art. Though Romero's work sits squarely in the center of the modernist tradition through his skilled appropriation of Abstract Expressionist backdrops within his canvasses, his use of photo-transfer appropriation of both "found" and staged imagery of Pueblo people, ceremonies and rites allow him to perform profound post-modern excercises of both appropriation and reclaimation of the presentation of the more sublime elements of Pueblo culture, with startling results indeed. * * * * * * * * * * Today, Native American painters have the opportunity to paint anyway they like - but they have both contemporary and historical trends within both Western and Native American art history to deal with, as well as institutional trends in collecting that determine the authenticity and validity of what they create. The importance of any collection to the public at large (which includes artists as well) can help to tip the balance towards a rush of new ideas. In using his skills to bring together disparate moments in art history within a single canvas, Mateo Romero's work offers a rush of new ideas that are far far away from the rules of the past, and yet they are still moving towards the goal of unveiling and preserving Native life, but in a way which combines a multiplicity of styles and ideas to acheive that goal. If we are to take Visions & Voices as representational of the overall Native American arts collection at the Philbrook Museum, then a logical conclusion that it is a rich collection of Native American flat-painting, and thus represents an historic aspect of Native American art. The inclusion of works like Mateo Romero's within the context of a collection like the Philbrook's, however, marks the beginning of a new chapter in what we - both Native and non-Native American peoples - can begin to formally recognize as "authentic Native American work." In the wake of the kind of assimilation that today's Native American faces, one must ask the question: What rises to the surface in works that combine traditional and non-traditional ideas about Native art-making? What ideas or notions remain uniquely Native American yet have the power to touch on the universality of human experience? If such universality is possible, it may be within the articulations of spiritual insight garnered by an ancient religion who despite conquest and assimilation have stood the test of time and remain a testament to the spirit of a people. Regardless of the series or even the medium, there is very little about Mateo Romero's work that could be dismissed as trivial. Indeed, with each piece there exudes an immense desire to provoke both message and meaning from the viewer. Observing the development of his career means watching someone engaged in a serious battle of what it means to be Indian today, taking into account the spectrum of Native reality, from its historical genocides and its myriad social problems, to the beauty, reverence and grace inherent within its spiritual world-views and practices. Works by Romero and others of his generation offers answers that aren't entirely obvious and are fully open to interpretation, for while those of us outside the recognized tribal reality that Native Americans enjoy may secretly see - or wish to project - the possibilities of our own indigenous pasts within the folds of a Corn Maiden's dress.
© 2006 META Consulting / Gregory Pleshaw • Site by Ontology.com.