Susan Folwell: Taos Light

Abstract

Santa Clara Tewa artist Susan Folwell’s Taos Light series (2016–present) of social commentary vessels in clay continues the legacy of Native women artists’ leadership in the Southwest in both pottery making and exhibitions of the medium. As a pattern of renewal, or constant set of practices, centered on Pueblo people, Folwell’s vessels portray figurative narratives of cross-cultural dialogue within the region. The intercultural exchanges she depicts express a “kin-space-time constellation,” an Indigenous lens of understanding coined by scholar Laura Harjo (Mvskoke), that “operationalizes multiple dimensions,” including the spirit world, ancestral practices, cosmology, ceremony, and everyday community life.

In her Taos Light series, Folwell comments on the complexity of early twentieth-century intercultural perceptions, specifically the interactions between the Taos Society of Artists (TSA)—a group of Euro-American painters who made portraits of Native Americans between 1915 and 1927—and the Taos Pueblo people who collaborated with them as models. Tethered to the early tourism era, Folwell’s vessel forms and imagery create new associations within both the kin-space-time constellation and cross-cultural relationality of Taos that continue today. In this article, I analyze the multi-play, or strategically layered, visual devices that Folwell employs in this series, examining how their meanings shift in presentations at two venues in Taos, New Mexico—the Couse-Sharp Historic Site and the Harwood Museum of Art. To do so, I employ Tuscarora scholar and artist Jolene Rickard’s four-part methodology of analyzing Native art: inspiration, formal analysis, learning through making, and function in Western and Indigenous cultures. To further contextualize Folwell’s collaborative leadership, I examine her Taos Light vessels and related exhibitions through four foundational lenses: mentorship and education, local and international reach, interdisciplinary forms, and place-specific interactions.