Young Artists at Work

YOUNG ARTISTS AT WORK THE HEARD MUSEUM BRINGS NATIVE AMERICAN STUDENTS TO STUDY WITH ACCOMPLISHED MENTORS

A handful of lizards appeared at the Heard Museum in Phoenix one day last summer, and each morning for a week they were there again, looking different than they had the day before.

They were odd reptiles, flat and motionless, creatures without tongues or eyes. They had been made from cardboard by a boy from Sells, Arizona, who had drawn them with care different sizes, but all with the same splay-legged silhouette-and he held each one close to his eyes for a moment before he cut it out, silently assessing his work. He arranged them on a sheet of paper and blew bright paint over them through a tube he held to his lips, and instantly, through the magic of stencils, more lizards appeared.

As the week progressed, the lizards became stiff and distorted with paint and the room around them fell into disarray. On Monday it had the sterility of an empty classroom. By Wednesday it was full of color and confusion, with mangled paint tubes littering the floor and wilted stencils draped over chairs. Seven Native American high school students were visiting the museum for a week-long workshop, and they had turned the classroom into a lively collective artists' studio.

They were invited to the workshop after winning achievement awards in the Heard Museum Guild Native American Student Arts and Crafts Show. They were chosen from among a thousand students who entered from across the country.

"The show has always had lots of prizes," says Peter Welsh, the Heard's chief curator and director of research. "But we hope to give an added incentive to older kids who clearly have artistic talent. They're at an age when they're making decisions about their lives, and we want to give them an experience that might help them take their talent further. The workshop is really a week-long master class with an accomplished, recognized artist."

That artist was Jack Malotte, a Western Shoshone who came for the week from his home in Lee, Nevada. Malotte is a big, amiable man whose paintings and drawings are surprisingly small and elegant. He showed the students some of his art: his "pretty pictures," scenes that are predictably easy to sell; his "political stuff," dealing with Nevada social issues; and the paintings he loves most, the ones full of moons and eagles and lightning that dances in the sky.

Along with his artistic expertise, Malotte offered lessons in pragmatism. He has supported himself as an artist for nearly 10 years, but he tells also about the earlier years, "when I was starvin' around." He has learned to economize his time and his materials.

"I can teach them to do things quickly, to keep from wasting time," he said. "But they pick things up so fast that I don't need to spend a lot of time on anything. I didn't know much about these kids before I arrived, except that they were the cream of the crop. They're very enthusiastic and spontaneous. Easy to work with."

In the classroom, 17-year-old Stuart Quandelacy of Zuni, New Mexico, bent over one of his paintings, positioning stencils and shifting the pop cans and baby food jars that anchored them in place. Quandelacy's enthusiasm was boundless. He stayed up late into the night cutting stencils. He pulled leaves from trees and

sprayed their silhouettes onto his paper. Painting was new to him. He had been invited to the workshop because of his outstanding pottery. He hopes to study sculpture in college.

Nearby was Ella LaMarr, who learned printmaking from her aunt, master printer Jean LaMarr, in Susanville, California. LaMarr, who is 17, wants to attend art school in Santa Fe, New Mexico, when she graduates from high school. Across the worktable were 16-year-old Mike Arthur Jones, who traveled to the workshop from Versailles, New York, and Dianne Lomahaftewa, a Phoenix high school student who comes from a family of artists. "Their work is as good as a lot of what you'll see in the galleries in Scottsdale and Santa Fe," says Jack Malotte. "My advice to them is to be individuals, to keep their work from becoming clones of the 'Indian art' you see in so many galleries. These kids are already very good. I think some of them will do well."

In the classroom, Stuart Quandelacy was sprawled on the floor, cutting out new stencils. A minute earlier, he had dropped a jar of orange paint on his shoe, and now

ARTISTS AT WORK

he was working in his socks. Nearby, someone had sprayed paint past the edge of the table and onto the floor, covering a discarded stencil in a speckled arc of bright blue. It was the last of the lizards, captured there on the linoleum, waiting in silence for the next canvas.

The Heard Museum at 60

(LEFT) The Heard Museum was built during the 1920s to house its owners' large collection of Native American artifacts and craftwork. (BELOW) Two-year-old Jennifer Ben inspects Allan Houser's bronze sculpture, "Heading Home."

A few years ago, I visited the Heard Museum with a friend from the East. It was a scorching day, the first hint of the summer to come, and my companion was suffering in the heat. As we passed through a gate into the Heard's inner courtyard, she stopped suddenly and sighed with relief. It was so much cooler in here, she said gratefully, and then she looked down at the desert sunlight pouring in around her, and she laughed.

She was right. It was cooler inside. But it was more than the shade along the edges of the courtyard that made the day seem suddenly bearable. It was the atmosphere. There is, in the open space that greets visitors to the Heard, an air of tranquility, a quiet sense of the history that is preserved within the surrounding walls.

Last year the graceful white museum celebrated its 60th birthday. It was built during the late 1920s by Dwight and Maie Heard to house their enormous collection of Native American crafts and artifacts.

The Heards, who had moved to the Southwest from Chicago more than 30 years before, had become immersed in the political and cultural life of their adopted home. They made many contributions to the young city of Phoenix, but None has had a greater impact than their beloved museum. Today it is one of the city's most popular institutions. The Heard Museum has built on its founders' fascination with native crafts and artifacts to take on the additional task of providing a link between cultures not only present-day cultures, but those of the past and the future as well. It has simultaneously undertaken to preserve evidence of dying traditions and to support and nurture Native American artists and innovators of today by giving them a public forum, a place to communicate their talents and ideas as representatives of their culture.

The museum has extensive collections of Native American textiles, ceramics, jewelry, basketry, beadwork, and kachina dolls. It presents exhibits of contemporary Native American artists and sponsors educational programs for all ages. Its Artist-in-Residence and Artist-on-the-Road programs have provided museum visitors and schoolchildren throughout Arizona with a very personal look at native cultures.

But members of the museum staff hope that this is only the beginning, the first step in an educational process that continues long after visitors leave the museum. Their goal is to give people a new way of seeing and understanding those whose traditions are different from their own. -Anne Stephenson