Pablita Velarde (Tse Tsan), Awataba Kiva Mural

0:00:05.4 Dr. Beth Harris: We’re in the galleries at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and we’re looking at a fairly large painting by an artist named Pablita Velarde. And this particular painting dates to 1981, but Velarde had a very long career.

0:00:20.7 Dr. Ashley Holland: Velarde was born in 1918. She studied at the Santa Fe Indian School in the 1930s. And she becomes knowledgeable in, what is known as, Dorothy Dunn’s Flat Style.

0:00:36.6 Dr. Beth Harris: And this idea of a Flat Style, which we see here, was promoted by Dunn, to help the Native American artists remember and connect to a past. There’s this idea that Native American culture is disappearing and needs to be preserved.

0:00:53.1 Dr. Ashley Holland: Native people are not disappearing, they are losing access to cultural continuation because of United States’ policies, because of expectations of assimilation. And what is tragic about Pablita Velarde is that her mother passes away when she is 5, and her father sends her to Saint Catherine’s Indian School, which is a boarding school in Santa Fe. And that means that from a very young age, she is disconnected from her community.

0:01:23.5 Dr. Beth Harris: And Velarde is from Santa Clara Pueblo. And in that tradition, pottery is most important, not painting.

0:01:30.3 Dr. Ashley Holland: There’s a chance that if her mother hadn’t passed away, if she had stayed in the community, she may have become a potter. She would have learned it from her mother. She would have passed it down to her children. But instead, she learns art from Dorothy Dunn, who is focused on this creation of modern painting tied to memory of the past, tied to recreations of dances, of culturally significant moments.

0:02:00.3 Dr. Beth Harris: And that’s what we have here.

0:02:00.9 Dr. Ashley Holland: This is a recreation of a mural in an ancient Hopi settlement called Awatovi, that existed from around the 1200 to 1700 time period. And then in the 1930s, the Peabody Museum undertakes an excavation that reveals this kiva mural that is fairly intact.

0:02:23.5 Dr. Beth Harris: That mural gets recreated by another Native American artist.

0:02:28.5 Dr. Ashley Holland: It gets recreated by Hopi artist Fred Kabotie.

0:02:31.9 Dr. Beth Harris: So we’re not sure exactly what the source is for Velarde; whether it was the original mural, a photograph of that, or the recreation by Kabotie.

0:02:41.6 Dr. Ashley Holland: So Dorothy Dunn is given credit for the Flat Style. But once you start to realize that this imagery comes from a mural that would have been created at some point from 1200 to 1700 by Hopi people, there are also Indigenous origins of that style. And I think this is such a great example of that combination between Dorothy Dunn’s influence, as well as Indigenous influence.

0:03:10.4 Dr. Beth Harris: And then Velarde building on that.

0:03:15.7 Dr. Ashley Holland: Dunn teaches her to mix her own mineral pigments. So from the very beginning, Pablita Velarde is known as being an incredible paint maker. She creates these natural pigments, and they are just the perfect source to create the work that we see here.

0:03:31.9 Dr. Beth Harris: One figure doesn’t seem quite human. The figure has no feet.

0:03:35.9 Dr. Ashley Holland: No feet, no facial features, outside of the symbols that are on the rounded face with these very exaggerated ear-like structures. They hold a water jug, they have a staff. They are seemingly emerging from the ground. There are these stylized, corn-like images coming out of that ground as well. So this is probably an abundance spirit figure that is there to help with a good harvest.

0:04:04.1 Dr. Beth Harris: And then the figure on the right, who we see in profile, who holds a parrot, and whose bent knees give the suggestion of movement.

0:04:14.6 Dr. Ashley Holland: This is probably a human figure that would be part of a larger ceremony within the kiva.

0:04:18.2 Dr. Beth Harris: And behind that figure, we see a set of steps.

0:04:21.1 Dr. Ashley Holland: These are called kiva steps. These denote the kiva as a sacred space. It’s really important to note that if you look at the original kiva imagery, this is almost copied exactly in many ways. And there are stylized components that speak to an ancient aesthetic, but also a very 20th-century aesthetic. Velarde, even though she wasn’t trained as a potter and wasn’t able to have that matrilineal passing down of pottery, she was a painter. And her daughter, Helen Hardin, was a painter. And Helen’s daughter, Margarete Bagshaw, was a painter. So that becomes a part of their family legacy, this passing on of the use of painting as a culturally significant art form.

This work at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art

Pablita Velarde’s Paintings of Traditional Pueblo Culture on Google Arts & Culture

Sally Hyer and Pablita Velarde, “Pablita Velarde,” Art Journal, volume 53, number 1 (1994), pp. 61–63.

Lydia L. Wyckoff, editor, Visions and Voices: Native American painting from the Philbrook Museum of Art (Tulsa: Philbrook Museum of Art, 1996).

Contemporary art, an introduction

1980–now in the United States, an introduction

Terms and Issues in Native American Art