Mixed-media installation artist Rose B. Simpson is grounded by the Santa Clara Pueblo matrilineal traditions that afford female artists freedom to express their singular, creative individuality through the gift of mother earth: clay. Simpson is of the hip-hop kuul, low-rider cruz’n, Native pop art culture and demonstrates a brashness that suggests she is easily the most progressive proponent of younger Native artists. Her work demonstrates the same complexity of regional subjectivity and cosmopolitan sophistication that can be found in New York galleries and on international museum walls. Simpson’s style delineates her critical eco-political stances as well as the perspective of Native empowerment that informs work by her generation. The artist’s family is a creative dynasty with enormous influence in art leadership; her mother is the ceramic political artist, Roxanne Swentzell, and her extended family includes published poets, academic scholars, and internationally recognized sculptors. Simpson’s great-grandmother, Rose Naranjo, is the matriarch of clay traditions of the Santa Clara Pueblo. Her great-aunt is internationally acclaimed sculptor, Nora Naranjo-Morse. Like her relations, Simpson’s art is a contemporary expression reflective of the generational schisms between Boomers and Gens X, Y, Z, and A. Simpson’s use of clay figures is an expression of her tribal roots, but with additions of metal, hide, and pigment, they become culturally ambiguous in their combined state. Her works are neither humorous nor burnished with other media to express the multi-layered existence, mixed-blood sensibility, and heritage shared with with others from the nearby communities surrounding Santa Clara Pueblo and Española, New Mexico. Simpson is adamant that her topics address with serious consideration the reality of ecological damage to the planet and survivance of Native subjectivity. While clay is her preferred medium, Simpson’s talents include auto restoration, poetry, music, and performance.

      Turn demonstrates Simpson’s ability to use sculpture to manipulate space through a seated androgynous figure surrounded by and holding broken shards. The presence of the seated figure on a chair is unique to spatial forms found in Auguste Rodin’s The Thinker (1888, 1904). It reformulates the space around it through intrusion, directing people’s flow, and disrupting continuity in gallery installations. Simpson’s work, like that of many of her contemporaries, is informed by trauma. In this instance, she revealed the piece evolved as she watched the burning of the Amazon rainforest​. She explained, “I know that [this work] isn’t directly about the destruction of our planet, but it is about how it is all connected to our own identities and the destruction of ourselves in order to evolve.”¹ Like many Native artists, recognition of stereotypes about Indigenous culture is both pan-Indian and specific to a place, tribe, or community, most of which are unknown to non-Indians. As such, the need to formulate a means of communication to bridge and expand knowledge of Native reality is “the challenge of innovation.” While her audience may not be informed of her reality, Simpson sees that her challenge is to make art that is inclusive, often with a sense of obscurity. Turn incorporates questions of destruction and renewal as well as challenges the viewer to engage with conscious intention.

      The incised patterns over the seated form draw attention to individual parts of the body and face; the body that emerging from the shards that surround it is neither attractive nor repellent. Behind the figure, a chair-like backboard includes heads in profile, some situated up, others down. Features that look upward seek to evolve and provide hope through ideas that will formulate in future generations, according to Simpson. Her ornamentation through earrings and the leather wrapped around the figure’s neck signal the unfinished and unrefined nature of developmental change as “objects of intentionality.”² The responsibility to the future, to knowledge, and to Indigenous self-awareness become physical manifestations in Simpson’s hands and motivate her in her work and life. In keeping with the traditions of the Pueblo people, Simpson pushes back against complacency and motions to the next generation that their obligation to tomorrow is now.

¹ Private correspondence to Beryl Bevilacque, Director, Jessica Silverman Gallery, San Francisco, CA, June 23, 2020. Simpson notes that the red leather used in this work was a gift from the widow of renowned jeweler Charles Loloma (Hopi).

² Ibid.

Image courtesy the artist and Jessica Silverman Gallery.