Diego Romero
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Top: A True Tale; 2005; Clay and pigment h x diam: 6 1/2 x 13 1/8 inches; Collection of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art; bottom: Drawing for A True Tale |
“Negative views toward Indian art made me stronger and firmer in the belief that my art was Indian art and that’s what it was about and it was going to stay that way.”[1] —Diego Romero
Firmly positioning his work within an Indigenous visuality, Diego Romero has built a career constructing ceramic vessels that elevate Pueblo life to Olympian stature. A third generation professional artist, Romero was born and raised in Berkeley, California to a Cochiti father and a non-Native mother. Upon completing high school, he returned to ancestral Pueblo lands and attended the Institute of American Indian Arts, before subsequently attaining degrees from Otis College of Art and Design (B.F.A.) and University of California, Los Angeles (M.F.A.).
Since earning an M.F.A. in 1993, Romero has developed an extensive exhibition record with works housed in significant public collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Cartier Foundation, the Peabody Essex Museum, the Denver Art Museum, the Heard Museum, the British Museum, and the Scottish National Museum.
Working in a narrative style that evokes pre-contact Mimbres pottery, as well as Greek amphorae (two-handled vases) and Anasazi ceramics, Romero’s earthenware bowls and handled-vessels investigate the marginalized status of Indigenous history and society. Evoking the anti-colonial writing of Frantz Fanon, who believes that “the native intellectual who wishes to create an authentic work of art realize[s] that the truths of a nation are in the first place its realities,”[2] Romero states that instead of using Indigenous “tradition” as insulated from historical change, he consciously evokes “the historic as a point of departure to reinterpret the contemporary.”[3] By using historically situated oral traditions as source material, Romero departs visually from the canonical work of Pueblo pottery and instead relies heavily on a narrative style gleaned from comic books and popular culture, specters of a childhood spent mingling in comic book stores. The resulting composition transcends the materiality of the object and engages the viewer in humorous interplay in which the author’s overt anti-colonial content is seen as non-threatening to audiences and collectors. The confrontational and subversive nature of the work is commonly overlooked in lieu of Romero’s excellent craftsmanship and artistry.
Merging autobiography with narratives of contemporary Indian life and stories of Pueblo resistance to colonial violence, Romero elevates Pueblo and contemporary Indian narratives to the level of the superhero, devices he draws from Greek pottery and comics. When placed into an autobiographical context, his ceramic practice develops further layers of nuance and complexity. For instance, his ceramic bowl A True Tale visually depicts a Spanish conquistador holding the recently dismembered hand of a figure whose hair is tied back in a chongo, the traditional Pueblo style. This apparently harsh critique of the ongoing colonial violence inflicted on Indigenous peoples in New Spain is a palimpsest-like method of fusing autobiography with historiography that becomes apparent when one understands that Romero’s father lost his hand during wartime service in the U.S. military. This investigatory nature of simultaneously inserting biographical material while interrogating the cross-sections of Indian life enables Romero to transcend the commonly provincial status of contemporary Indian art.
[1] Larry Abbot, “Interview with Diego Romero (Cochiti).” A Time of Visions: Interviews by Larry Abbot, http://www.britesites.com/native_artist_interviews/dromero.htm.
[2] Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove, 1963), 225.
[3] Gussie Fauntleroy, “Looking Forward: Mateo and Diego Romero Discuss Current Trends in Native Arts,” Southwest Art (August 2000): 234.