The clay called to Virgil Ortiz when he was 15 years old.
The Cochiti Pueblo artist’s world opened when he saw the ancestors of today’s storyteller figures in the gallery of an Albuquerque art dealer. He had already been sculpting similar characters on his own.
Robert Gallegos asked Ortiz’s parents why his figures looked the way they did. They didn’t resemble traditional storytellers. When Gallegos invited Ortiz and his parents into his showroom, their mouths dropped.
“He had the largest collection of Cochiti pottery in the country,” Ortiz said. (My work) “looked like the historic pieces. That was an ‘Aha’ moment. My parents said, ‘The clay has chosen you.’ ”
With a career spanning 40 years, the Cochiti Pueblo artist learned traditional methods from his mother and grandmother. He pushed boundaries from the beginning, imbuing a passion for fashion and sci-fi into early clay figures. These mushroomed into life-sized futuristic characters from a script he penned about the Pueblo Revolt of 1680.
“Virgil Ortiz: reVOlution” by Charles S. King (Museum of New Mexico Press) examines that creative trajectory across pottery, design, fashion, film, jewelry and décor. He has continued making social commentary through his art dating from his first clay figure: a buxom woman wearing a man’s suit and bow tie, at the age of 6.
Generations of Ortiz’s family developed the distinctive Cochiti style: geometric black patterns set against ivory backgrounds on clay bodies. Although instantly identified with the storyteller figures developed by Helen Cordero in the 1960s, Ortiz dates his approach to a much earlier and edgier ancestry.
When the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad Company roared through Albuquerque in 1880, it carried circus acts, opera singers and tourists, characters the native people had never seen before. The artists at Cochiti began creating figurative pieces called “monos,” serving as social commentary on these “invaders.”
Ortiz had begun making “Star Wars” figures at 8 after he ditched the 1977 Santa Fe Indian Market to see the movie. Later he would sculpt figures reflecting controversial issues such as the Dakota Access Pipeline, the Women’s March and Donald Trump.
Today he weaves these influences into his own script, “Revolt 1680/2180,” his sci-fi-meets-pueblo version of the Pueblo Revolt, which takes place in both 1680 and 2180. Throughout his travels, he learned Europeans knew about the event, but most Americans had never heard of it.
The Pueblo Revolt was a revolution against Spanish religious, economic and political institutions imposed upon the pueblos. Historians consider it critical to the survival of pueblo cultural traditions, lands, languages, religions and sovereignty.
“It’s considered the first American Revolution,” Ortiz said.
The artist devised 19 groups of characters, one group from each New Mexico pueblo. In a melding of art and history, he introduces a new character with each exhibition.
After a successful collaboration with fashion mogul Donna Karan, he developed boldly patterned textiles based on his graphic decorative painting.
Sexuality sizzles throughout his creations. His figures stand sleek and sinuous, some with piercings and exposed breasts. Ortiz drew from his experiences in underground S&M clubs in the U.S. and Europe.
“It’s part of fashion,” he explained, “leather and latex and vinyl. It’s like costuming as well. It goes back to creating caricatures in clay. They think they’re risqué, but I was like, ‘Check out the stuff our grandparents did.’ My stuff is pretty tame compared to that. Some of them showed the sale of prostitutes. It’s all documented in the clay.”
Ortiz decided to produce the book to help people understand how all the pieces of his work fit into an innovative jigsaw. Author Charles King has shown Ortiz’s work in his Scottsdale, Arizona, and Santa Fe galleries for 20 years. “I worked on it as sort of a mid-career retrospective,” he said. “I’ve watched this amazing progress and growth in him, this energy. Everything he touches is gold.
“He’s always one step ahead of what is on trend, what is fashionable,” he continued. “That’s what makes it exciting.”
Before each exhibition, King interviewed Ortiz and wrote down his answers.
“It was, how do I tell (my customers) what he was thinking and have it make sense?” King said. “I think it made him stop and think about it, too.”
Ortiz’s work has made the Pueblo Revolt accessible to a younger generation, he added.
“Years ago, you could say Pueblo Revolt and they’d stare at you like they didn’t know what you were talking about.”
Ortiz recently returned from an invited residency at the Archie Bray Foundation for the Ceramic Arts in Helena, Montana, where he created life-sized figures in its oversized kilns. Santa Fe’s Museum of Indian Arts and Culture will display the work next Memorial Day Weekend. Ortiz also will co-curate an exhibit at the New Mexico History Museum marking the 100th anniversary of the Santa Fe Indian Market in August of 2022.
Recently named a Native Treasure by the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, Ortiz has won multiple awards at Santa Fe Indian Market, the Heard Museum Indian Market and other events. His pottery can be found in museums worldwide.
When he’s home at Cochiti, Ortiz still digs for clay with his family and picks wild spinach for his black paint to work in the traditional coil method.
For him, it all goes back to the Pueblo Revolt. He embroiders the story in a futuristic theme.
“This is my way to do something for a younger generation,” he said. “It just has to be cool and updated. They’re getting a history lesson.”
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Artist Virgil Ortiz uses traditional pottery methods and merges them with sci-fi, fashion and history - Albuquerque Journal
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