Linda Lomahaftewa
My name is Linda Lomahaftewa. I'm originally from Arizona. I'm Hopi Choctaw. My father is Hopi from Second Mesa, Shungopavi Village, and my mother is Choctaw from Oklahoma. That's where I was born, and we lived there until I was like about six years old or something, then we moved to California.
My dad got a job out there, so we moved out there. We lived there for seven years and then moved back to Arizona.
My parents put my brother, my sister, and I to boarding school, Holbrook Mission Boarding School in Arizona, because my brother and my sister wanted to go to a school that had Native people. So, since I was the youngest of the three, my mom and dad just sent me along with them.
So, we hated it, and in all the interviews that I've always done, I always say that, you know, we didn't like that experience of that. It was such a cultural shock, too, you know, coming from the urban city environment and then to a mission boarding school run by the Seventh-day Adventists.
You know, it was just a lot of restrictions that we weren't used to. Coming to Santa Fe IAIA, everything was all focused on the arts and cultural, using our cultural background. The abstract movement at that time, the teachers would show us examples, like slides, and talk about them in classes, and that's that was our exposure to Abstract Expressionism.
I don't remember. I can't remember whether it was taught that the artists that were in the mainstream that were creating Abstract Expressionism, if they, where their ideas came from, you know, like Jackson Pollock doing the drip paintings on the ground on the floor and saying his inspiration came from Navajo sand painting, you know, that I don't remember being taught that, but you learn that later on in art history.
So, yeah, we were just exposed by the teachers talking about those movements, and of course, at that time, we didn't really know because we hadn't seen it physically, so we kind of had to, I guess, just explore ourselves.
Well, our cultural background was always emphasized to us in how we should create our work, so one course that we did have was cultural aesthetics. I think that was the course.
So it was a team-taught class, and the different Native instructors like Otellie Loloma, Charles Loloma, Allan Houser, Neil Parsons, they would all be in a room, and they would talk about their cultural background and how they used it in their work. So, it was, you know – and Lloyd Kiva also – you kind of got that idea that you should use your own background in creating your work.
So, this piece, The Quiet Land, The Warm Land, during the time that we were in the painting class, we all painted in oils. At this time, I was doing a lot of landscape painting in the abstract form.
It was about trying to remember, you know, what it was like out in Arizona, and it's not that much different from New Mexico, but the desert is a little bit different, and so it was just like trying to remember, I guess, thoughts and feelings that I had of the landscape.
So, that's what this piece was about, again just experimenting, you know, with a lot of the drip method techniques. We used a lot of turpentine, which is highly toxic that you're not supposed to use, so, but, you know, we all did it.
So, again, you know, thinking about land, landscape, and what it's like to be, you know, out in this kind of landscape, that it is a quiet time and a peaceful time that you can just, you know, be with yourself.
I would have to say that that connection of how the landscape looks, again, because these are dark colors in this painting, it looks to me kind of like a nighttime nightscape painting.
Looking back and going to IAIA again, I came the first year the IAIA opened in 1962. It was a whole new experience of people again, people coming from all over that it was just an exciting time because we were coming from all over that and learning other cultural ways and how to get along, and it was just exciting to me, and I think that's what everyone else thought, you know.
