The gallery sits upstairs, above the Plaza Cafe, which means that during Indian Market week you climb a flight of stairs out of the loudest ten days of the Santa Fe year and into somewhere quiet. That contrast is the entire idea of this show. Everything downstairs is happening now. Everything upstairs has been happening for a very long time.
The exhibition
Ceremony and Ritual was our 45th Annual Indian Market Show and Sale, open through September 30th during normal business hours or by appointment at any time.
It brought together work by Fritz Scholder, David Michael Kennedy, Zoë Urness, Douglas Johnson, Charles Loloma, Elliott McDowell, Paul Pletka, Ned Jacobs, Jack Silverman, Doug Hyde, Presley LaFountain, Darren Vigil Gray, Edward S. Curtis, Alfred P. Maudslay, A.D.M. Cooper, Dick Mason, and Robert Stivers, alongside Native American textiles, pottery, beadwork, katsinas, and turquoise and silver jewellery. Also on the walls were historic photographs of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. Running throughout was Marion Wasserman’s short film Medicine Wheel, decrying oil extraction and fracking activity in the Four Corners area and Chaco Canyon.
In the collection’s words
Forty-five years of doing this teaches you that a good Indian Market show is not a survey. It is an argument about continuity, and the way you make that argument is by hanging a nineteenth-century photograph near a film made last year and letting a visitor work out for themselves that the distance between them is shorter than it looks. The Wasserman film is why we called it Ceremony and Ritual rather than something safer. Ritual is not only what is inherited. It is also what is defended.
Continue exploring
- Elliott McDowell, Robert Stivers, Marion Claire Wasserman, and Alfred P. Maudslay
- Zoë Urness, a Tlingit Alaskan Native artist, and Charles Loloma of Hotevilla, Hopi Pueblo
- Navajo (Diné) weavings and the antiquities collection
- Santa Fe Indian Market and the Whitehawk Antique Indian and Ethnographic Art Show
- Carrier Wave, the same argument made forty years later
- All exhibitions at Webster Collection
