Roxanne Swentzell

Roxanne Swentzell (born December 9, 1962) is a Santa Clara Tewa Native American sculptor, ceramic artist, Indigenous food activist, and gallerist. Her artworks are in major public collections and she has won numerous awards. She has been commissioned to create permanent installations at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, the Museum of Wellington, New Zealand, and other venues, including the University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Philadelphia.

Swentzel is descended from a long line of Santa Clara Pueblo potters from whom she learned customary methods of pottery making. She grew up watching her mother harvest clay from the earth to create hand-coiled and pit-fired pots. Swentzell grew homesick after one year of study as she became dissatisfied and disillusioned with Portland's art scene.

Personal life Swentzell homeschooled both her children and her grandchildren. Her son, Dr. Porter Swentzell, is a professor and associate dean at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA).

In 1987, Swentzell co-founded the Santa Clara Pueblo-based nonprofit organization Flowering Tree Permaculture Institute, where she serves as president. Flowering Tree is based on the theories of ecological design, sustainable human living, and agriculture. The institute offers lessons on techniques for living a healthy life. Classes taught at the institute include: methods of farming, low water-use farming in a high desert climate, animal husbandry, adobe construction, and solar energy. Her work at the institute is based on her own personal philosophy informed by Native American ancestors who serve as role models for protectors of Earth who preserve Indigenous knowledge of conservation. Swentzell's initiative, the Pueblo Food Experience, offers participants foods that were available to precontact Tewa people.

Swentzell runs the Tower Gallery located on Pojoaque Pueblo in north Santa Fe. She exhibits her ceramics and bronze work there as well as curated group art exhibitions.

Artwork Swentzell's sculptures depict emotional portrayals of her own personal experiences. They predominantly take the form of female figures and focus on issues such as gender roles, identity, politics, family, and the past. As in classic Pueblo pottery, Swentzell crafts her clay figures from coils of clay. She differs from other Pueblo potters who dig, sift, clean, and process their own clay by choosing to use commercially produced clay. Swentzell has stated that she is not overly concerned that her clay is store-bought, as clay, no matter where it comes from, comes from the earth. She forms the clay into thick coils to build the walls of the hollow figures. During the two- to four-day process of coiling, Swentzell keeps the clay moist. and uses a knife or stone to smooth over the ridges of the coils.

Pinup Swentzell's work, Pinup, addressed what Swentzell believes to be the unrealistic physical expectations placed by popular culture on young women and the resulting struggle by women with self-image and identity. In Pinup, the Native American woman's unemotional face is painted white. The figure covers her nude form behind a headless poster of a thin, bikini-wearing model (similar to the graphic posters of Playboy pin-ups from the late 1970s by Patrick Nagel).

Nestled Lives The University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology purchased the sculpture, Nestled Lives, from Swentzell in 2000 for display in the Native American Voices Gallery, curated by Dr. Lucy Fowler Williams. The sculpture is made from clay and depicts a seated woman with outstretched arms holding three nested vessels in her stomach. Made at the time of the Los Alamos fires, Swentzell was thinking about humans, and especially women, as vessels. According to the artist "I could see the land near my home burning... For Pueblo people, earth is our mother—earth itself is seen like a bowl. Nesting bowls are seen as a sign sort of like generations—the earth holds all of us, nestled within."

Awards and honors In 1984, Swentzell first participated in the annual Santa Fe Indian Market. Two years later she received eight awards for her sculpture and pottery displayed at the market. Swentzell was awarded the Market's Creative Excellence in Sculpture honor.

Exhibitions White House, Washington, DC

Collections Her work is included in collections of the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian, Cartier in Paris, the Museum of New Zealand, Te Papa Tongarewa, the Santa Fe Convention Center, and the Museum of Wellington in New Zealand. the Heard Museum, Denver Art Museum, Joslyn Art Museum, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, among others.