Submitted by Rebecca S Cohen
Earlier this year, the Placitas Community Art Committee asked Joe and Althea Cajero and Lyle Yazzie, residents of Placitas, to assemble an exhibition of work by Native American artists and craftspeople to mark Native American Heritage Month in November. More than a dozen artists including the three organizers are exhibiting paintings, sculpture, jewelry, basketry and pottery in the library’s Gracie Lee Community Room through Jan. 2. The public is invited to a reception for the artists on Friday, Dec. 6 from 5–7 p.m., and a presentation by several participants in the exhibition, Nov. 30 at 2 p.m. The Cajeros and Yazzie will discuss their work on Dec. 14 at 3 p.m.
To share time with Joe and Althea Cajero and Lyle Yazzie is to learn about the tug of family heritage, the spirit world and the traditions and taboos associated with Pueblo culture that shape their artwork and give it purpose.
Joe Cajero’s father was a painter and his mom was a self-taught ceramic artist. Joe followed their lead. At 15, he fashioned diminutive clay bears and sold them at art shows. Later he studied painting and pottery-making at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe and then, with additional study, learned how to advance the lively painted figures he sculpted in clay by casting them in bronze.
Now he produces both “table top” clay and bronze sculptures and plaques as well as monumental sculptures like his bronze figures at the Hotel Chaco and at Mesa Verde National Park. Both large and small, many resemble his father’s father with whom he spent time growing up in Jemez. His koshare and kachina figures look knowingly both inward and outward.
Koshares, a Keres or pueblo peoples’ creation word, means public clown, while kachinas represent a spiritual being. Koshares can be shared with the public on feast days but for New Mexico pueblos, “it is considered taboo to recreate kachinas realistically,” says Cajero, “so my figures that are like kachinas take a contemporary form and represent aspects of the spiritual beings that are part of our ceremonies. They represent the non-physical realm in a physical manifestation and are meant to convey the concepts of what these ceremonies are about.”
“It’s a universal language, creativity,” adds Cajero. During COVID when I thought art would suffer, art was the most necessary thing. Almost as important as breathing and eating in some cases.”
Joe and Althea Cajero share a studio in their home as well as a penchant for collaborating on jewelry pieces such as pendants and bolos. “My mother was a jeweler,” Althea says, “and my father was a lapidary artist so when I was growing up I saw them at work.” Her father did lapidary work in the Santo Domingo style, grinding stones to make necklaces out of them, and her mother mostly worked with silver. Althea’s grandmother taught her how to drill stones and clamshells. Her 97-year old father now lives with the couple, but her mother passed away 26 years ago.
“She never got to see me be a jeweler,” says Althea of her late mother, “[but] I call on her energy all the time. Having first had a career as an Administrative Assistant with the USPHS Indian Health Services, Althea didn’t make jewelry until she met Joe. “It was me feeling that I wasn’t patient enough to be creative,” she explains. “He found the patience in me I didn’t even know I had.” She was in her mid-thirties before she began producing art.
Althea’s work, both the collaborations with her husband and her individual jewelry pieces appear independent of place and time and yet with the undeniable aura of pueblo culture.
“I call it contemporary Native American art,” she says of her elegant earrings, necklaces, bracelets, and rings. She employs cuttlefish bone casting like that done in the 1500s in Athens Greece which is not something native to her culture, but similar to the basic techniques of tufa casting that’s been around for a very long time with the Hopi and Navajo artists.
“I thought it was a good idea because not a lot of artists were doing it, so I would be recognized for that style of work,” she says. “I love the texture. With cuttlefish, the striations reflect the actual shell of the mollusk.”
Recently The twosome’s collaborative work caught the attention of the producers of the PBS show Made With Love and the Cajeros were interviewed for an upcoming episode. The couple recreated how they lay out unique agates, jaspers, and crystals. “We choose out some of the stones and play around to see what’s going to work with what and talk about design. Is it a masculine or feminine energy we feel? If masculine, the stones dictate creation of a bolo. If feminine, a pendant.” Althea assembles the piece. Their process as well as Lyle Yazzie’s work will be among the topics discussed on Dec. 14 at a presentation at the Placitas Library.
“Everybody needs someone who tells them they’re doing great, says Lyle Yazzie who credits a former teacher as well as his husband with encouraging him to keep sketching and making jewelry as he traveled a meandering path in the arts. In his work—and in his life—he combines an appreciation of prehistoric rock art and traditional Navajo iconography. “It’s my love of culture and pre-history that inspires,” he says, when making his silver jewelry, drawings, paintings and collages. “I don’t know if the prehistoric people were actually creating art like we do or if they were simply storytelling. For me, no ritual meaning. I’m Navajo. I simply love those designs.”
Yazzie’s roots in Northwestern New Mexico and time spent as a seasonal National Park Service worker at the Chaco Culture National Historical Park and Natural Bridges National Monument served as inspiration. He employed his skilled eye designing bulletin boards and brochures for the Park Service, while continuing to sketch his surroundings.
Yazzie’s stepfather, a jeweler, introduced him to silversmithing and encouraged him to buy tools. Even as he worked as a park ranger and helped his grandfather herd sheep on their ranch, he made side money making jewelry. “Silversmithing was more lucrative than drawing and painting. I could sell a ring more easily than I could sell a painting.” Today the multi-faceted artist is still meandering, sketching, painting, making jewelry, and marketing his art while also officiating as a volunteer disc jockey at a local community radio station.