Virgil - "I AM"
Photo by Randy Bacon
Something happened when we were visiting the Hickory Museum of Art and thinking about a title of what to name the exhibition and bringing in the local Catawba people and other artists in the area. I always feel that it’s not about me as an artist and I wanna bring in and incorporate as many people into any exhibitions and to do collaborations and all. And I said, “Okay, how are we gonna name it,” and it just popped up into my mind and one of our team members' minds, like what about just call it I AM? So that way, anyone that is participating in this show or who even just visits the museum, you can tell your story; you can individualize it; you can tell what you got from it, but to think of it as just called I AM. Also, the sub header would be, “Indigenous Ancestral Memory.” And I feel like, all these messages I do get from the spirits and beyond, of guiding me what to do and I’m just a conduit of what is supposed to be transmitted and put out into this timeline.
I’m Virgil Ortiz. I’m from Cochiti Pueblo, New Mexico. I’m an artist that mainly works with clay. I was born into a family of potters on our mother’s side. Our grandmother, aunts and great-grandmother so I learned how to work with clay at a very young age. We have pieces from when I was like 6 years old. We grew up on the Cochiti Pueblo reservation and our parents were very traditional and they brought us up and showed us all the different ceremonies, all the dances, the way of life; all the different songs and how all our people lived together as a big family. That was one of the first lessons I learned is I’m so lucky to be born into the Pueblo of Cochiti. It’s a big family. Growing up in Cochiti was really incredible because we grew up without cellphones, first of all, and our toys were clay. And thinking of my cousins and my family and everybody gathering together to go pick the wild spinach to make the black paint for our pottery and just learning on a constant daily basis from our parents, by them sharing the older stories, going into the mountains to collect the clay. That’s what I try to pass on to all of my nieces and nephews and anyone else from Cochiti that wants to learn how to work with the traditional methods and materials. That includes going to the clay mountain and hiking up like 30 minutes to the top with all the tools; the buckets and the picks and everything we need to do to be able to harvest the clay. But once we get to the top, before we start digging, we have to introduce ourselves to the clay mother, state our purpose and really connect with her. Ask for guidance to make sure this way of making traditional pottery stays alive. We feed her, we ask permission and then we start to dig into the clay vein. It’s incredible because who knows how long our people have been getting it from this clay vein. It’s like, as far back as I can remember, it’s like, to be able to follow in those footsteps and know how important it is. It’s as important as our language, our way of life, and I’m lucky to be a part of it.
Photo by Randy Bacon
A fun story is of when I was a kid, I was probably 6 years old when I started making pottery and our family friend, Robert Gallegos, was a dealer out of Albuquerque, so he would make buying trips to Cochiti. So, he would maybe come four times out of the year and come to buy pottery for his shop. And he got to know our whole family and he knew me since I was a little kid and he would always say, “Okay, who’s making this pottery? Who’s gonna keep the tradition going?” By the time I was maybe 16 years old, I had learned how to make the original storytellers that Cochiti is known for and the pots with the old school designs, but me having ADHD, bouncing all over the place and thinking of everything at one time; I started to experiment with the clay making figures and painting them completely different than I was taught. And Robert Gallegos was asking my parents, “Who is teaching this kid how to do this, or who’s teaching him how to paint this way?” And my parents just said, “Oh, he’s just experimenting.” And they always supported us so he said, “Can you bring him down to our showroom?”
We went to his studio and my parents and I just about passed out, or our mouths hit the ground because we walked into his studio for the first time and it turned out that he had the largest collection of historic Cochiti figurative pottery and everything that I was experimenting on looked exactly like them. So, it was a huge AHA moment for me and my parents pulled me outside of the showroom and they just said like, “We didn’t teach you any of this, grandma and grandpa didn’t teach you any of this, and to see what has happened, it’s the clay mother talking to you and through you so remember this day for as long as you live.” And when I was 16, I understood it and I knew what I was gonna dedicate my life to, was to clay.
There are two reasons that I feel that I’m in Earth’s realm this time. It’s to make sure that our traditional way of making Cochiti Pueblo pottery does not die out, because it is a dying art form. It takes a lot of time, and most people don’t have that time right now because of kids and jobs and everything so I feel that I’m here to make sure that that practice does not die out. And also, the second is to educate globally about the 1680 Pueblo revolt that happened to our people. It’s not taught in our schools. It’s not in our history books because of the genocide, the bloodshed, the murders and rapes that happened to our people. I’ve been working on this whole story and turning it into a feature film and I’ve been working on it for the past 23 years and to be able to write a movie script about the 1680 Pueblo revolt happening simultaneously in 1680 and 2180, allows me to fulfill my dreams of sci-fi, the love for sci-fi and creating 19 groups of characters that represent the 19 Pueblos that are left in New Mexico today. So, I’ve been developing all these characters for that long and now it’s coming to fruition through all my gallery shows and museum shows, to tell our history, all using art.
I think the prayer that I want or really want to see people take away when they come to one of my exhibitions is just the acknowledgement of Pueblo people first of all, cause that’s who I am and acknowledge our history that we survived and we’re still here resilient. We’re still creating, thriving. Our ceremonies and dances are still going on and for this exhibition I hope for all you that do visit it…really look at who we are and all the different people that are part of it. Really understand who we are as a people, cause we are actually more alike than we are different. So, when you open your heart and your eyes to reality, we can all help each other.
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