The current exhibition at the Ucross Foundation Gallery, “Marking Time,” is a collection of artwork of the two recent Native American Fellowship recipients, Luzene Hill, and Heidi Brandow. The exhibit is to bring attention, via the art, to missing and abused Native American Women.
Hill, a multimedia artist best known for her socially engaged conceptual installations and performances, and is an enrolled member of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indian.
Brandow, a multi-disciplinary artist with an active painting, printmaking, and social-engagement. She hails from a long line of Native Hawaiian singers, musicians, and traditional dancers on her mother’s side, and Diné storytellers and medicine people on her father’s side.
Photography by Don J. Usner
When Indigenous Peoples’ Day arrived, the sun cast a low, warm light on the obelisk. The Soldiers’ Monument, as it’s officially known, was already looking somewhat besieged as a crowd began to gather around it for a third day of demonstrations. The tip of the 33-foot structure a presence in the Santa Fe Plaza for 152 years had been removed months earlier by contractors in the middle of the night. There was still the vague silhouette of red spray paint marks left by protesters that couldn’t be scrubbed from one of its four sides. And one of the marble tablets at the obelisk’s base was entirely busted. It had once read: “To the heroes who have fallen in the various battles with savage Indians in the territory of New Mexico.” In the 1970s, an Indigenous man chiseled out the word “savage” in broad daylight. In its place, others had written new adjectives like “resilient.” Now, the entire inscription was illegible.