Artwork Description
Virgil Ortiz – Watchman/Tseka
Dimensions: 32.5 x 18 x 12.5″
Year: 2020
Medium: high fire clay and acrylic detail
One of the most innovative potters of his time, Virgil Ortiz’s exquisite works have been exhibited in museum collections around the world including the Stedelijk Museum- Hertogenbosch, The Netherlands; Paris’s Foundation Cartier pour L’art Contemporain; the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian; the Virginia Museum of Fine Art; and the Denver Art Museum.
Ortiz, the youngest of six children, grew up in a creative environment in which storytelling, collecting clay, gathering wild plants, and producing figurative pottery was part of everyday life.His grandmother Laurencita Herrera and his mother, Seferina Ortiz, were both renowned Pueblo potters and part of an ongoing matrilineal heritage. “I didn’t even know it was art that was being produced while I was growing up,” he remembers. Ortiz keeps Cochiti pottery traditions alive but transforms them into a contemporary vision that embraces his Pueblo history and culture and merges it with apocalyptic themes, science fiction, and his own storytelling.