Elsewhere on social media, it’s Throwback Thursday, so it seems like a good day to highlight something vintage.
In this instance, it’s something more than merely vintage: It’s the oldest continuously-inhabited community in North America, otherwise known as Taos Pueblo.
On this continent, Wings’s people pioneered the creation and sustained use of specific architectural forms, including adobe masonry, multi-level and multi-family (i.e., apartment-style) dwellings, and the use of perimeter retaining walls. Ironically, it was his ancestors’ talent and skill at using readily available natural materials to create beautiful living spaces that helped to attract colonial invaders to the area. Seeing the area’s ethereal late-afternoon sunlight reflecting off the mica in the local clay that made up the adobe led the invaders to believe they were looking upon one of the famed Lost Cities of Gold. The rest, as they say, is history, but our task is always to remember the difference between “history,” written by the “victors,” and history, as the true lives and stories of those who actually lived it.
The latter informs Wings’s art (and life) at the most fundamental levels, and it likewise played a large part in the choices he made for his recent one-man show, Taos Pueblo: Ancestral Places, Sacred Spaces. Of the ten photos he chose to include, this was the first, which he used to set the stage for the entire story he wanted to tell. The interpretive text that accompanied it read as follows:
STORIES
Our lives are lived in stories — and in stories.
Perhaps the first thing visitors to Taos Pueblo notice about our historic multi-level architecture is that it is multi-level — our ancestors, a thousand years ago, divided homes into stories in larger communal buildings.
In a way, each story is symbolic of the other kind of story: the little piece of our collective history written by each family, each inhabitant, of each of these stories made of earth and straw. If you look closely, you can see each individual piece of straw embedded in the adobe wall, each essential to the wall’s strength and cohesiveness and ability to stand, whole.
So, too, is each of our people: Individuals, with their own lives and histories and roles to play in our culture and in the historical narrative of our people. Each unique, each with his or her own story — and each essential to our strength and cohesiveness and ability to stand, whole.
Signed on white matting; brown wooden frame.
Size including frame: 17.75″ by 20.25″.
$625 + $100 shipping, handling, and insurance.
This photo remains available for purchase here.
You can read much more about Taos Pueblo and its history here.
~ Aji
All content, including photos and text, are copyright Wings and Aji, 2015; all rights reserved. Nothing herein may used or reproduced in any form without the express written permission of the owners.
