'A Walk in my World'

2024-2025 Heller Center Indigenous Fellowship

A Walk in my World: Perspectives from a Native Woman on Culture, Environment, and Art

Roxanne Swentzell is a Santa Clara Tewa Pueblo bronze and ceramic artist. She received her artistic training from the Institute of American Indian Arts and the Portland Museum of Art School. Cultural heritage is a key feature in Swentzell’s art, and includes such themes as respect for family, reverence for the Earth, and social and personal commentary. Many of her sculptures highlight interpretive female portraits that attempt to bring back the balance of power between the male and female. Her work is immersed in her cultural background but conveys a universality that speaks to everyone.

Her sculptures have been exhibited and are in the collections of national and international museums including the White House, the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, the Museum of Wellington (New Zealand), the Denver Museum of Art, the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, the Heard Museum (Phoenix), and the Joslyn Museum of Art (Omaha). Swentzell’s work is currently represented in galleries in Santa Fe, Pittsburgh, Scottsdale, Phoenix, and Sarasota. She co-directs the Tower Gallery located in Pojoaque Pueblo (north Santa Fe, New Mexico).

Swentzell has received several awards and honors such as the New Mexico Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts in 2018, an Honorary Doctorate from the Institute of American Indian Arts, also in 2018, and was named the 2011 Native Treasures Living Treasure by the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture.

In addition to her art, Swentzell co-founded the Flowering Tree Permaculture Institute in 1987, a nonprofit organization that works on the theory of sustainable human living to restore the indigenous diet through the collection of native seeds, and offering classes on animal husbandry, low water-use agriculture in a desert climate, farming methods, and solar energy. Her ongoing initiative, the Pueblo Food Experience, offers Tewa foods that were available pre-European contact. In 2016, she co-edited, The Pueblo Food Experience Cookbook: Whole Food of Our Ancestors, published by the Museum of New Mexico Press.

More information at: https://heller.uccs.edu/indigenous-fellowship

For more information: https://www.roxanneswentzell.net/