Virgil Ortiz works from the belief that a tradition stays alive by traveling. The clay he begins with comes from a vein near Cochiti Pueblo that his family returns to, and from that ground his work has moved into figures, couture, image, video, and story. For Webster Collection, what stands out is how little of it feels like a departure. It is a single practice, and the clay is where it starts.
Biography
Ortiz is a Cochiti Pueblo artist and designer, the youngest of six children. He comes from a line of Pueblo potters: his grandmother, Laurencita Herrera, and his mother, Seferina Ortiz. He grew up among storytelling, clay gathering, and figurative pottery. “I didn’t even know it was art that was being produced while I was growing up,” he remembers. Clay, he says, is “the core of all my creations,” and his work now reaches into couture, photography, video, performance, and design. His own site names museum collections that have exhibited his work, among them the Stedelijk Museum ‘s-Hertogenbosch, the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, and the Denver Art Museum.
His ongoing Revolt 1680/2180 narrative reimagines the 1680 Pueblo Revolt through a futurist lens, with a feature film and graphic novels in development. Its characters include Tahu, leader of the Blind Archers, who stands at the heart of QUIVER: Vision Beyond Fear, on view at Webster Collection and W Department from November 20, 2026, to February 2, 2027. Ortiz is a Webster Collection artist, and QUIVER holds his full range together as a single environment: ceramics, couture, photography, video, and design, alongside Max Baptiste, Carlos Condit, STORM by Montecristi, and Ilene Joy’s REVERIE.
In August he spoke at the New Mexico School for the Arts, in conjunction with Continuum: Blindfall, First Strike, his exhibition with Eric F. Garcia at Vladem Contemporary, which ran from June 20 to October 18, 2026. We went to listen, and wrote about the evening in The Dispatch. He described clay gathered by the family that then waits nearly a year before it is ready, and a black pigment made from wild spinach, gathered by hand and reduced over weeks. He described making figures as a teenager that his family did not remember making, until historic Cochiti figures in a museum showed them those forms were generations old. His family spoke of Clay Mother as a guiding presence. Tradition, in that telling, can be remembered rather than taught.
In the collection’s words
What draws us to Ortiz is that he will not choose between the old and the new. Clay is the discipline, and everything else is clay carried forward: a garment, an image, a figure with a bow. In his own words, “Clay remembers what the future forgets.”
“Virgil’s work makes those connections visible,” said Christopher Webster. “You can feel the same hand and imagination moving from an object to a garment, to an image, to an environment. We wanted to give Virgil’s entire world room to exist together rather than present only one part of it.”
Continue exploring
- QUIVER: Vision Beyond Fear at Webster Collection and W Department
- Time in the Clay: Virgil Ortiz at the New Mexico School for the Arts, in The Dispatch
- Cloudface and Randy L. Barton in Carrier Wave, the gallery’s other dialogue between tradition and the present, and the night it opened in The Dispatch
- Charles Loloma of Hotevilla, Hopi Pueblo, for craft carried into a contemporary language
- North American Indian art at Webster Collection, the field the gallery has worked in since 1972, within ethnographic art
- Fine art at Webster Collection
- The New Mexico Museum of Art and Vladem Contemporary
- The Museum of Indian Arts and Culture and the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian
- Santa Fe Indian Market
- The Railyard, where Vladem Contemporary stands
- W Department, for the design side of the house
- All exhibitions at Webster Collection
