This program examines the pottery of Grace Medicine Flower and her brother Joseph Lone Wolf, members of the renowned Tafoya family of Santa Clara Pueblo. They revived and expanded the traditional forms and techniques of their pre-Columbian ancestors, the Mimbres, to create exquisite works featuring abstract designs and emphasizing sgraffito and polychrome techniques. Together with their father, Camilio Sunflower Tafoya, Medicine Flower and Lone Wolf are filmed digging and refining their clay and then molding it into pots, which they decorate and fire. (30 minutes)
The first to portray the Native American as "real, not red," Fritz Scholder has been a major influence on an entire generation of Native American artists. This program films Scholder, an artist of Luiseno descent, as he takes his painting Television Indian and his lithograph Film Indian from conception to completion. His unsentimental vision and his technique—a blend of abstract expressionism, West Coast pop, and Bay Area colorism—have enabled Scholder to produce a strong body of work that realistically illustrates contemporary Native American life in the Southwest. (30 minutes)
Sculptor Allan Houser won international recognition for his depiction of the stoic, powerful figures of his Chiricahua Apache and Navajo families in wood, stone, and metal. This program follows Houser—also acclaimed for his murals and paintings—from quarry to studio, where he sculpts a face in marble, and to the Shidoni Foundry, where he casts a bronze head. The art of Houser, whose father was with Geronimo in 1886, blends his people’s heritage with his own personal spirit of adventure to create iconic figures and images that honor the past while looking to the future. (30 minutes)
"Unconventional" and "paradoxical" are two of the more common words people use to describe R. C. Gorman, an award-winning Navajo painter and printmaker who treats Native American subjects ranging from geometrics to nudes with a distinctly Mexican artistic sensibility. This program films the man The New York Times dubbed "The Picasso of American Indian Art" as he works, capturing his fascination with mass and shape as he paints both on paper and on a lithography stone. At once timeless and contemporary, Gorman’s idiom unites the Indian and mainstream art scenes. (30 minutes)
The abstract geometric paintings of Helen Hardin beautifully illustrate the artist’s struggle to depict aspects of her native heritage yet depart from the Santa Fe/Dorothy Dunn model of her predecessors—including her mother, the acclaimed Pablita Velarde. This program takes a close look at the work of a gifted Santa Clara painter and printmaker who acted almost as if she knew that her time to make a mark in the art world would be short. Her multi-layered paintings, created with a combination of brushes and drafting tools, reveal the crisp precision that characterizes her distinctive style. (30 minutes)
Charles Loloma was one of the first Native American jewelers to use gold instead of silver and diamonds and other precious gems in addition to turquoise, coral, and shell. His innovative designs, so sculptural in quality, were internationally acclaimed. And his clients included celebrities, monarchs, and presidents. This program examines the work of Charles Loloma—and how the visionary behind the enchanting jewelry managed to break the barriers that separated Indian traditionalism and mainstream modern art. For him, the art world and the Hopi world were one. (30 minutes)