VISUAL TALES OF THE FRAGILITY AND TENACITY OF LIFE

Natural Languages: The Art of Judy Tuwaletstiwa

 “…When I experience, rather than observe the land,

I become part of it as it becomes part of me.”

(Flagstaff, AZ)—The Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff announces its new exhibit, Natural Languages: The Art of Judy Tuwaletstiwa, opening on June 7 and running through November 1, 2009. Tuwaletstiwa’s installation combines photographs, mixed media paintings, sculpture, and text to create a poetic visual language.

Tuwaletstiwa believes there are many ways to think of language. “Language is not limited to words,” she writes. “Our first language is the rhythmic beating of our mother’s heart. Our next language is the touch of our mother’s skin. Nature has a language. In this series, I seek to create a vocabulary of textures and images that speak to the primordial and the intellectual within us.”

Tuwaletstiwa’s home and studio lie along the bosque of the Galisteo Creek in the village of Galisteo, New Mexico. In the arid Southwest, a bosque (Spanish for “woodland”) is a ribbon-like oasis of verdant vegetation existing along the margins of a stream. On September 5, 2008, Tuwaletstiwa began a one-year exploration of the bosque beside her studio. Through photographing it daily, writing about it, gathering its materials to use in sculpture and paintings, she reveals the gentle power of beauty and the universal relationship between plants and animals, germination and decay, the passing of time and seasons, and the cycles of life.

In The Bat: A Residue of Wings, a mixed media on paper, Tuwaletstiwa finds beauty in the insect wings, antennae, and legs lying under a bat’s roost. Viewers experience a scientific curiosity about the creature’s eating habits while recognizing the fragility of life.

In Taking Apart a Bird’s Nest, a diptych measuring six feet by six feet, she uses the material from one bird’s nest—twigs, monofilament, aluminum foil, hair, and a nail—to create a painting that reveals the complexity of the nest.

Language can create boundaries or dissolve them. Tuwaletstiwa seeks to dissolve boundaries between man-made and natural materials, between image and word, between photograph and painting. In the same way that words form phrases, the exhibit’s works relate to each other, forming visual poems. Throughout the exhibit we see Tuwaletstiwa’s devotion, celebration, and documentation of the web of life and our place within it. “My work is to integrate the dark and the light into a harmonious whole that speaks directly to the soul,” she states.

She writes, “In this vast high desert, a thin membrane separates the daily world and the world of the spirit. The elemental landscape of the bosque continually reminds me of the fragility and tenacity of life. It holds a deep reservoir of the unconscious.”

She continues, “The earth wraps around the bones of our ancestors, as it will wrap around our bones. Ancient rocks tell stories and winds carry tales in a language of eternal change. When I experience, rather than observe the land, I become part of it as it becomes part of me.”

MNA Fine Arts Curator, Alan Petersen, states, “Tuwaletstiwa’s work is rich and multifaceted, like the natural world she depicts. It is also more conceptual than the artwork the Museum has exhibited in the past. The importance of Tuwaletstiwa’s work lies in her ability to convey the innermost essence of her subjects, all of which are microcosms of the larger Colorado Plateau.”

“Tuwaletstiwa’s artwork reveals an exciting new perspective in the visual arts for the Museum. Her conceptual approach allows viewers a great deal of latitude in their interpretation of the work,” Museum Director Robert Breunig adds.

Judy Tuwaletstiwa was born in Los Angeles in 1941. She earned a B.A. in English Literature from the University of California at Berkeley in 1962, concentrating on the English Medieval period. She earned an M.A.T. in English Literature from Harvard University in 1963. She has produced two limited edition books, The Canyon Poem, 1997 and Mapping Water, 2007. She is married to Phillip Tuwaletstiwa of Kykotsmovi, a village on the Hopi Reservation where they lived for 12 years before moving to the village of Galisteo in northern New Mexico. 

Natural Languages: The Art of Judy Tuwaletstiwa is open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. daily at the Museum of Northern Arizona. The Museum sits at the base of the San Francisco Peaks, three miles north of historic downtown Flagstaff. More information is available at musnaz.org or 928/774-5213.