Is This the Museum World's Favorite Artist?

20:14The Art Angle Host:And what was the reaction to it?

20:16Cara Romero:I think I remember very clearly that one of my mentors and really well-known artist, Tony Aveda, an amazing painter, came by and bought number one. And there was something about that affirmation from Tony that was very meaningful. And then the Smithsonian came by later that weekend and inquired about the series. And they acquired the series. And that was the biggest museum acquisition that I could have ever imagined.

21:06The Art Angle Host:I wanted to ask you about Santa Fe India Market. I know you're preparing for it right now as we speak. And it is kind of extraordinary if you look at your CV. You've won prizes at it year after year as a photographer. It's a very big art event, maybe the biggest art event in the United States. But I think a lot of people outside the Native art community don't know it. They don't understand how big and powerful it is. It really did support you. And it was through that that you've now become, you know, a very important artist in museums all across the United States. But it really started there. It's very interesting.

21:41Cara Romero:It really started here, I think in those small ways, allowing me to make work towards a purpose every year.

21:50The Art Angle Host:And that same year you have another famous work by you is The Last Indian Market, which I guess reflects that community. So maybe tell me about that.

21:57Cara Romero:The Last Indian Market was completed in 2014. And it is...

22:05The Art Angle Host:So a little before, actually.

22:07Cara Romero:Yeah, it was done the year before. It was done during a time where I think I had found my voice. And the image is so interesting. It's a parody of Da Vinci's Last Supper. It is a homage to performance artist Buffalo Man, who's a local icon and placing him in iconic imagery was really the impetus for the photograph. And everybody that's in the photograph is a really well-known artist and cultural contributor to Native America. And it was the largest production that I had done to date. It was done in a local restaurant on a Sunday afternoon. We came together very quickly and made the image, but it was really the impact in the community that it was instantly beloved.

23:04Cara Romero:And sometimes when you make art, you have an experience while you're making it, and then you have this experience after it goes out and lives in the world and both can be equally as impactful. That one, the community response to it was deeply impactful to me to make me feel like I was going in the right direction with voice and with that use of technology and color. And we had never seen ourselves with that kind of lighting. And it was from inside of culture, no doubt about it. It was like, this is not what's interesting about Native people, that edit from the outside, it was, hey, we have this incredible sense of humor.

23:52Cara Romero:We're astute in Western art, in pop culture, and here's an indigenized version of all the things that we experience as Native people. And for that, it was really important. I hung on to that part of my voice for the rest of the years.

24:10The Art Angle Host:So it's interesting that technology keeps coming up or you're bumping up against technology and pushing its limits because another idea or theme in your work that's important is indigenous futurisms. You have a series called that, which when did it debut? 2018?

24:28Cara Romero:That sounds about right. Maybe a little bit after that. It was a genre that is emerging, you know, Latin futurism, Afro futurism, indigenous futurism. I think Grace Dillon first coined the term through a novel and artists began responding. And so much of my life was about that mantra, we are still here. This comes out of the American Indian movement during the civil rights movement. And we didn't ever disappear. We were never erased. We're present-day people, existing, thriving, flourishing, rich in culture, rich in lands. It's like such an overt omission to realize we're never depicting ourselves in the future.

25:22Cara Romero:And that for me was the most exciting to unpack. Why don't we imagine ourselves in the future? If we do imagine ourselves in the future, what does that look like? And so really looking at other artists in my community's response to the movement, and some of it is post-apocalyptic, for sure. For me, I really wanted to insert this take about all of the leadership, all of the indigenous science that's undervalued, all of this traditional ecological knowledge that goes undervalued in Western science. But within our own communities, there's this understanding that it's the highest form of science, of interrelatedness and ecosystem.

26:14Cara Romero:You know, so the importance of basket making, the importance of heirloom corn really signify this tremendous interconnectedness, if you will, of our dependence on localized arts. So in each of my indigenous futurism pieces, there's speculative futurism, maybe an edge of campiness, which I love. Just that's what we do when we imagine the future. But it's not really about technology at all. It's not about AI. It's not about how fast our transportation is going to be or electric vehicles. It's really rooted in this idea of we're in real trouble if we can't grow our corn that we've grown for thousands of years and are in our creation stories.

27:03The Art Angle Host:Maybe the most circulated image from that series is Three Sisters, which maybe describe that because there's some tech. It is like there's wires in it. It's actually a very glamorous photo in its way. But at the same time, yeah, it has these elements of traditional culture and knowledge in it. How did that photo come to be?

27:22Cara Romero:It came out of a time where I really needed to play and I was really not concerned about where it was going to be seen or what was going on. I wanted to try something different. And sometimes looking back, those are the best places to start your art making from. And they're painted in blue light. So I'm using gels for them to appear in blue. And the wires coming in speak to that idea of not information coming in and that type of connectedness, but really the need for people and planet. They're going to need the knowledge of Indigenous peoples in order to survive. And so that's what the wires are representing.

28:09Cara Romero:And then I digitally illustrated all of their really, really old designs onto their skin. And so they look tattooed, but they're tattooed with really old vernacular from each of their individual communities. So there's Ojibwe floral and there's ancestral Puebloan and there's Comanche parflesh designs from left to right. And these are designs and visual vocabulary that have also been around for a very long time, protected through really unspeakable and unbelievable times that our ancestors have gone through. Our designs survive.

28:51The Art Angle Host:So as we speak, I believe you're retrospective. You have a mid-career retrospective at the Hood Museum that's just about to close. and you have a two-person show with your husband, who's also an artist, Diego Romero, that's touring the country. How did these things all come together at one time?

29:08Cara Romero:So I was working with Jamie Powell and John Stomberg from The Hood on Panapu Nubugai. It's a chimwebi combination of words that translates as living light or the spirit of light.

29:23The Art Angle Host:Right, this is the name of The Hood Museum show, yeah.

29:25Cara Romero:Yeah, and we had been working on that since 2012. 22. Diego and I were approached to do a two-person show much later. It opened a little bit after the Hood show, and it's much smaller. It's a much smaller kind of one-gallery combination of our pieces, and that's at the Crocker Museum right now, and we'll travel to Albuquerque Museum. The first one is really a survey of about 13 or 14 years of work. So kind of where we started at the restart at Santa Fe Indian Market in 2012. And looking back, somehow I had about 65 pieces that are all centered on Indigenous storytelling and identity and just a thousand narratives.

30:17Cara Romero:And my husband is this incredible artist. I'm just his biggest fan. We have so much in common and speak about art all the time. And the show that we're in together is really got a lot of amazing psychological lines of ideas that show up that really resonate off of each other. So autobiography, love, indigenous futurism, retelling of American history are things that I think just live in us. And we're telling our own kind of renditions of those stories.

30:56The Art Angle Host:He works in the tradition of Pueblo pottery. And in the way that you in photography have this eye for artifice and color, he also puts a very pop art spin on that tradition, correct?

31:09Cara Romero:Yeah, I mean, Diego started out as an illustrator and a comic book artist. I feel like there's this just like collision of this incredible two-dimensional narrative that goes into this traditional narrative medium. It's like Coach T, it's Mimbris, it's his own, and it's figurative.

31:32The Art Angle Host:I'm looking at the image right behind you that he did of you as Wonder Woman. A lithograph.

31:38Cara Romero:Yeah, he's an incredible artist. And I think that was part of the attraction is we had so much in common. We're both born to interracial parents in California, both have an urban experience, a reservation experience. So we're really kind of making art, that intersectional art that is our truth. Yes.

31:58The Art Angle Host:And the specificity of that experience, you know, people can paint with a very broad brush about Native American people. I mean, even you talk about indigenous futurisms, not indigenous futurism. And I'm thinking here also of your first American Girl series, which you have new versions of in the Hood Museum show, which is very specifically about the specificity of different kinds of experience. Correct?

32:26Cara Romero:Yeah, we have thousands of stories and we really try and counter that, you know, one story narrative. Those can be dangerous and they can cause, I think, misunderstanding and misrepresentation. And it's far more fascinating to think of us as hundreds and hundreds of diverse communities because we are so connected to our landscapes. Also, each one of our indigenous communities globally emerge out of our different ecosystems. You know, that's part of being indigenous is being akin to the different bioregions and things like that. that means our art is all different and our language is all different and our diaspora and impacts of American colonialism are all different.

33:16Cara Romero:And so I, like I said, have a lifelong love of learning. And so a lot of it for me is also learning other people's stories here in this intertribal community that is Santa Fe.

33:29The Art Angle Host:And so maybe just describe this series though, the first American Girl series? Because it's funny, right? I mean, but it's also serious.

33:37Cara Romero:Diego collects vintage G.I. Joes and his mom collected dolls before him. And the first one came out in 2015 and our daughter was then 11 years old and she's really a daddy's girl and wanted to also take on this doll collecting. Some of Diego's G.I. Joes are in the box and such love for historical accuracy and detail. The buttons, the boots, the artillery that they were carrying and whatever war they're representing. And that really fascinated me. But our daughter had one Native American doll. It was an American girl doll that was Ojibwe. And that was it. And sometimes we would make kochiti clothes for her.

34:26Cara Romero:And that was really kind of what sparked it. And so we created a life-size doll box and began this series of different dolls that represented the really beautiful but quite drastic differences between communities. And I thought someday when they're all in the same room, they're going to be this really expansive, powerful learning tool cross-culturally for people to quickly understand and begin to identify people from different communities. It's something that we can do within Native America. We know when things are Oglala or Lakota or Cochiti or Ojibwe or Anishinaabe or Cree. We have a really astute knowledge of that visual vernacular.

35:18Cara Romero:And so each woman is self-representing in their different boxes. They get to choose their cultural accoutrement that surrounds them. And in that way, their diversity comes through.

35:32The Art Angle Host:So you worked with students at Dartmouth, yeah, where Hood Museum is, to create new versions of this for the show?

35:37Cara Romero:I did get to work with the students at Dartmouth. They could make whatever type of photograph that they wanted to make with me. And they chose the first American doll series. And they also chose to do some underwater pieces. And I worked specifically with the Kanaka Maoli students, the Hawaiian students, which was important because it's bringing them into the conversation of being Native American. where they often are not included because they have different political status. And so that gets a little bit complicated. But I think as Indigenous peoples to the Americas, we very much consider Kanaka Mali Native Americans and Indigenous to this greater United States.

36:28Cara Romero:And so it was an incredibly moving experience for me to be able to include them in the breadth of the work that was about representation.

36:39The Art Angle Host:You've already mentioned the importance of self-representation. And I wanted to ask you about Cara Romero Photography, which is your gallery, which is interesting to me because of the themes of your work. That also you have your own institution, gallery that represents yourself. Is that important to you? How did you come to found that?

37:03Cara Romero:That's been an incredible journey. My career does really emerge out of Santa Fe Indian Market, which is self-representation. And I still do work with some galleries nationally. I was working out of a studio and, you know, as part of Santa Fe Indian Market, I would do a studio show, if you will. And that happened for about four or five years in a row. And what I began to feel was this love for collectors. They became like family. Their moms and dads and aunties and grandparents are deeply impactful to us as artists. There's such a caring that happens when you're sharing your artwork and people want to take that home and live with it.

37:58Cara Romero:But people love studio tours, whether it's museum curators or human beings, they want to come in and see how you're making. And so the gallery is both. It's project space. It's where I print all of my own work on the side and in the back and then exhibition space in the front. I have been kind of a self-made learning the entrepreneurial side of artwork since I've been a mom and really for like the last 13 or 14 years and I was able to invest my money locally and buy the space and so once I was able to get the space established on my own I began to share the space and so now I do group shows here at the gallery and either have my own artwork up with staff that runs the gallery, or I have a group show up and really excited about that next evolution of being able to share the space.

39:04Cara Romero:And so New Mythos is our show opening August 14th, 2025. And we have eight artists that will blow your minds when you come to Santa Fe Indian Market.

39:17The Art Angle Host:That's what you've been working on. I know you've been working late nights to put this together. That's your presentation for Indian Market?

39:23Cara Romero:And that is. And I meant to tell you, I shot film for the first time in 18 years. I am shooting black and white film and working in alternative processes. So I'm really excited for the community to see me get back to my origin story.

39:40The Art Angle Host:Oh, well, back to the origins, but also exploring new things. I guess that's the sort of dialectic of your work, isn't it?

39:49Cara Romero:Yeah, yeah.

39:49The Art Angle Host:Well, it's a great pleasure. You have a very unique trajectory and story that I hope is inspiring to people in terms of there are many different ways to do this art thing. And I really appreciate you talking to me.

40:04Cara Romero:Thank you, Ben, for inviting me. I really enjoyed it.

40:07The Art Angle Host:That is it for this week's episode. If you like what you've heard, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever else you get your podcasts. Also, please take a moment to rate and review our show. It helps other listeners discover what we're doing. The Art Angle is produced by Sonia Manalili with contributions from Kate Brown, Ben Davis, Caroline Goldstein, and Naomi Rae. Thanks for listening and see you next week.