Duwawisioma (Victor Masayesva Jr.): Màatakuyma Extended

Duwawisioma (Victor Masayesva Jr.):Màatakuyma Extended through March 23, 2024

The exhibition Màatakuyma by legendary Hopi photographer and filmmaker Duwawisioma (Victor Masayesva Jr.) continues through January 27, 2024. Duwawisioma (b. 1951) continues a lifelong quest to understand “existence” and “being” in terms of Hopi ancestral traditions in the modern world. In this exhibition he focuses on the ontological ideas engendered in the Hopi lunar agricultural cycle, combining cosmology, the emergence of the Hopi, animating the personalities of place, and elements of nature, death that leads to regeneration, and cycles of creation and destruction.

Time is not linear in Duwawisioma’s world–ancestral time is a vortex, a whirlwind that underpins and mixes with modernity– cars, casinos, electronic communication, photography, and filmmaking are a constant threat to ancestral time to be embraced and opposed and ultimately to be harmonized with.

The people of Duwawisioma’s home village of Hotevilla, Arizona have a long tradition of rebelling against government, whether opposing the colonizing American government or the traditional Oraibi government, whom they separated from in 1906. They fought against the 19th and 20th century “Indian schools” and have imposed restrictions on visitors to the village to diminish the exploitation from cultural tourism. Duwawisioma has also long advocated against museum practices which highlight sacred artifacts, a practice that has historically led to the looting of these sovereign items.

Hopi sovereignty and identity are central to Duwawisioma’s life and he reminds us that the local is universal, respecting and revering that which sustains us: corn, crops, water, winds, the land. The harmonious path is to be aligned with nature in the ways laid out in ancestral traditions.

Duwawisioma grew up in Hotevilla on Hopi Third Mesa. He attended the Horace Mann School in New York City in his teens and then studied English literature and photography at Princeton University. Outside of his schooling he has always lived in Hotevilla, where he has worked with the community youth and elders to record Hopi cultural history and has worked in many other capacities in the civic life of the Hopi and the religious life of his clan and community. Since 1981 he has been making groundbreaking movies and videos such as Hoplit (1982)and Itam Hakim Hoplit (1984)made in the Hopi language and selected for the National Film Archives in 2023, as well as receiving the Gold Hugo at Chicago International Film Festival in 1984, Ritual Clowns (1988) receiving the American Film Institute’s Maya Deren Award, Imagining Indians (1992), and Paatuwaqatsi – Water, Land and Life (2007). During the last 32 years, the Andrew Smith Gallery has hosted half a dozen exhibitions of Duwawisioma’s work: Recent Works (1991), Victor Masayesva Jr. (1993), Tumuola (1996), Nuclear Reservations (1998) and Drought (2006).

The Hopis’ survival has always depended on prayers for favorable weather conditions. For thousands of years Hisat Sinom and later the Hopi have inhabited a region of high, arid mesas where there is little rainfall. No rivers or streams flow through the territory, though a few permanent springs provide the people with drinking water. Over time, the Hopi developed their own farming systems and crops particularly suited to their specific environment. Integral to this is the respect and reverence for nature and its elements and the ceremonies that encompass these relationships. Duwawisioma’s images describe the animated and difficult relationships man has with the natural world. Relationships with places of emergence and spirits, the personalities of various elements of nature, germination and the destructive freeze, all must be considered; along with the personalities of specific places, such as places where there might be salt, water with the resident snake or the sacred Sipapuni in the Grand Canyon from where the Hopi emerged.

Natwani

The exhibition includes the 12-print narrative Natwani. This series imagines the Hopi lunar agricultural calendar: when there has been moisture, the timing and planting and harvesting of corn and other crops, the skill of the farmer, and the elements of weather mixed in with a cycle of social activities, marriage, and ceremonial activities.
Corn is the dietary and spiritual base of Hopi life, and a skilled farmer understands this through the activities and rituals associated with the Hopi lunar calendar. The lunar cycles begin with moisture, then cleansing and then there are cycles of wind, planting, and harvest. Nature can be generous and beneficial providing germination, new life, and growth but it can also cause drought.

Tuuviki

In the series Tuuviki (mask), Duwawisioma creates images intimating and sketching the personalities and presences that he imagined whether in the Grand Canyon or in a drop of rain. This follows the tradition of katsina representation that emerged from the Hopi migrations. Encountering special places, events, spirits, as well as environmental deprivations (drought, famine, etc.), these circumstances were encapsulated in the katsina and welcomed into the community. Within the exhibition are also a handful of typical older portraits made in Australia, Ecuador, India, and Hopi including a humorous self-portrait surrounded by cowboys and indians. The humor is tempered by hanging diabetes pill containers reflecting another aspect of the self-portrait.©Duwawisioma. Self Portrait, 2023©Duwawisioma. Tuuya, 2023

Duwawisioma creates digital collages from an amalgamation of stories, symbols, natural objects, and actual places. He brings to this body of work insights from the fields of biology, ecology, humanity, history, and planetary energy, along with concepts and traditions from the Hopi people. Rooted in Hopi cosmology, Duwawisioma explores an environmental and ontological reality meaningful to all people.

He has been awarded grants from the Ford Foundation, the Rockefeller Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Arizona Commission on the Arts. He has been a guest artist and artist-in-residence at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, MN; Banff Center for the Arts, Banff; Yamagata International Film Festival, Japan and Imagine Native, Toronto.

His photography, feature films, and short videos have been widely viewed including at the 1991 Whitney Biennial, the Native American Film and Video Festival, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Long Beach Museum of Art, California; World Wide Video Festival, The Hague; Whitney Museum of American Art Biennial, New York; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Pompidou Center, Paris, San Francisco Art Institute; Festival CineVideo de las Primeras Naciones Abya-Yala, Ecuador. Hours: Monday – Friday 10-4 and Saturday 12-5.