Frederick Hammersley Fund, for the Arts New Mexico PBS Great Southwestern Arts & Education Endowment Fund, and the Nellita E. Walker Fund for KNME-TV at the Albuquerque Community Foundation New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs, and by the National Endowment for the Arts and Viewers Like You.

RECLAIM - REMATRIATE - CREATE.

THREE INDIGENOUS WOMEN UNITE AS THE THREE SISTERS COLLECTIVE, TO CHAMPION ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE AND HONOR ANCESTRAL TRADITIONS.

THE NATIONAL VOTES FOR WOMEN TRAIL BRINGS TO LIFE STORIES OF UNSUNG HEROS IN THE WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE MOVEMENT.

SURVIVING GUN VIOLENCE IN EL SALVADOR, MELVIN GOMEZ FOUND HOPE AND PURPOSE BY TRANSFORMING HIS PASSION FOR ART INTO A MISSION TO BREAK CYCLES OF VIOLENCE.

IT’S ALL AHEAD ON ¡COLORES!

REMATRIATION >> AUTUMN DAWN GOMEZ: So, Three Sisters Collective, the three sisters are a form of crop and of planting that began with Indigenous tribes.

like on the East Coast, and that would be corn beans and squash and all these crops support each other nutritionally, like the beans will climb on the corn, and the squash will protect the ground from weeds and other things so that the beans and corn can grow.

So it’s really like a symbiotic relationship.

And when we were forming our collective, there were three of us from Taos Pueblo who were living in Oga Po’geh or Santa Fe at the time and that idea of a symbiotic relationship is what kept coming up and that there were three of us and it seems.

To be the perfect name and the perfect fit for what started out as an art project but has grown into something new and something that stands on its own.

Our mission is to create community in Oga Po’geh or Santa Fe.

and in Northern New Mexico, where Indigenous women and their families can come to feel safe to reconnect with the land, to reconnect with themselves, to have healing space and above all to create community.

>>FAITH PEREZ: And why murals?

>>AUTUMN DAWN GOMEZ: So, I didn’t start out wanting or knowing that I would like to be a muralist, but being able to communicate messages about the land, about our history and about our current selves that are often overlooked, and also to remind Indigenous and Pueblo people of how beautiful our reality is.

How beautiful our practices are and our world outlook is are my main goals.

>>FAITH PEREZ: Can you tell me about the mural I am Life, Creator of Worlds?

>> AUTUMN DAWN GOMEZ: Yes.

So, that is our latest piece.

It’s our most monumental piece.

It’s on Lena Street and Second.

in Oga Po'geh, Santa Fe.

And that piece is in conversation with another mural on that wall by Chip Thomas, who did an antinuclear message about the plutonium pits and how the creation of the bomb that goes on in Los Alamos is not much more than a spectacle for the people who have created it.

So in conversation with that piece we created I Am Life, Creator of Worlds, in which, we flip the Bhagavad Gita quote that Oppenheimer famously used “Now I am Death, Destroyer of Worlds.” And I wanted to flip that because being a creator of worlds as a feminine person.

As a birth worker, as a daughter, granddaughter, as a human person.

It’s so important.

The main focus image is of a pregnant Pueblo person.

And there’s corn inside them, and it’s radiating out, which is kind of a play on the word and notion of radiation.

So, like life is coming from them.

Life is in them.

Life is radiating from them and the corn, we treat them as our own family members.

And when you meet our farmers for Three Sisters Collective you’ll see how well that they treat the corn.

So that’s the focus image and next to that person are three grandmothers who represent different people in my community whose work has inspired me and is very dear to my heart.

And then next to that, it’s a very long wall, we have a bowl of water and the seeds of hope which lead to the different directions.

And for me, that’s hope that will continue to plant seeds to have clean water and air to really become people who protect water and think about the land and the air and the water before they make decisions.

Every work I do is a little bit of a prayer in my own way.

>>FAITH PEREZ: Can you tell me about the mural, Water Protectors?

>>AUTUMN DAWN GOMEZ: So, Water Protectors is done on a literal water tank.

It’s at Santa Fe Children’s Museum and what it is different animals representing the different seasons and it is directional.

So, in the springtime, the butterflies come out and the plants begin to grow.

The summer, there’s pictures of the garden that they have there at the Children’s Museum, as well as some more summertime animals.

The fall is like the changing aspens and bears and then the north is a cold elk and some buffalo.

And I thought that it would be beautiful to have, like, younger kids be able to go right up to these animals and be able to interact with them, and for them to be part become a part of their imaginative play and, also for them to begin to understand that the yearly cycle holds so much importance not only in, like, Indigenous lives but in everybody’s life.

>>FAITH PEREZ: So, what message do you hope to leave for future generations through the work that you’re doing with the Three Sisters Collective?

>>AUTUMN DAWN GOMEZ: Perseverance.

Definitely.

We’ve come from such a, like, such a, long line of people who have been put down repeatedly by different government.

There has been so much harm done to Indigenous people for the past five centuries and counting and I love to show them that we survive and we support each other to thrive.

Even throughout all that, we have to go through, even in the day to day.

We preserve seeds in hopes that our children or our children’s children will be able to plant the grandchildren of the seeds that we planted.

PASSING THE TORCH Suffragists were instrumental in laying the groundwork for the human rights we have today, many of which go beyond a woman’s right to vote.

>>Women of the past can be models for us today.

Their words speak to so many of the events that are happening in the political arena in the United States right now.

When we think about art and the suffrage movement, we need to think about two different eras.

The era before we have the technologies that enable us to mass produce and mass distribute pictures, and photograph, and even to record and share music.

One of the more important artists for the women’s suffrage movement in Ohio was Cornelia Cassady Davis.

Davis was a Cincinnati artist.

She was a member of the Cincinnati Women’s Suffrage Party.

She participated in a competition in 1912 for that year’s campaign when Ohio women were widely expected to succeed in getting the vote.

Davis created a work that was later reproduced in postcards and posters, Let Ohio Women Vote.

It became iconic for the Ohio campaign.

It‘s modeled after the state seal and uses elements of that.

One of Davis’ competitors in this campaign was Nina Allender.

Allender becomes perhaps one of the most influential suffrage cartoonists of the era through her work for the National Women‘s Party publication, The Suffragist.

If I think of art in the women’s suffrage movement, there are three stories about the impact of art that come to mind.

The first is from the early 1850s, and it actually has to do with a sculpture by Hiram Powers called the Greek Slave.

This sculpture of the Greek Slave, toured the country and Lucy Stone, who became a national leader in women’s suffrage, saw the sculpture and was moved to spend more of her time focused on women’s rights.

A second story has to do with theatrical professional, Hazel MacKaye, and she’s the mastermind behind many of the pageants that the National Women’s Party produced.

In connection with the famous 1913 Suffrage Parade, MacKaye created a pageant at the front of the treasury building called the Allegory.

A third story has to do with the Portrait Monument, which suffragists commissioned and gave to the country in February of 1921.

It’s a bust of Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton.

The thing about the portrait monument is it spent exactly one day in the rotunda and then was relegated to the basement for the next 75 years, and it took an act of Congress to get it restored to the rotunda.

Women in history in general are overlooked.

Women’s stories might at most be a footnote in standard history that you might study in school, so it’s important that these stories are told.

In 2016, we started a volunteer grassroots effort and we populated a database with sites of importance to the women’s suffrage story.

>>KATHERINE DURACK: There are more than 2,020 sites on the online map for the National Votes for Woman Trail.

>> Along the way, the William G.Pomeroy Foundation in Syracuse, New York recognized the importance of this project and offered to fund over 200 historical roadside markers, so that made our virtual trail into a physical trail.

Sewah Studios has been really terrific to work with, and we’re so grateful for their expertise.

>> Sewah Studios is America’s premier cast aluminum historical marker manufacturer located here in Marietta, Ohio.

Sewah Studios was founded in 1927.

It was really a man’s dream to mark the byways and the highways of America with cast aluminum historical markers.

Sewah is really the only known large manufacturer of historical markers in the nation.

This is a niche business.

We make nothing but historical markers.

Sewah’s process is really kind of locked in time.

There‘s really four really core processes.

First, we typeset the patterns where we individually lay out every letter and then we glue them in place just long enough to make an impression in the sand, which is our next process, which is the sand foundry.

And this process states back all the way to the Egyptians.

The sand comes from the Ohio River.

The Ohio River has a perfect silt and clay mixture for the casting process.

We make two molds, put them together, and then in the void we transfer the mold aluminum.

After the casting is made, we bring it into our finishing department where we work down any of the imperfections or the pouring gates, and we try to clean it up from a metal standpoint to get it ready for the painting process.

After that, we take it into our electrostatic powder coating process, puts a very hard, durable finish on it.

Next, we then roll on a liquid enamel on all of the letters to get the contrasting view to where you can actually read them and then we do the beautiful hand painted seals.

The Votes for Women trail markers’ design comes from the William G. Pomeroy Foundation and they‘re really kind of a neat combination of a white and the pink and then some of the more delicate, more feminine looking colors, and we really think it’s a nice grouping of colors to go on our marker, and they’ve been well received nationwide.

>>Another mission of the National Votes for Women Trail was that we wanted to shine a light on underrepresented women.

We’re telling the stories that we don’t know about of women of color.

>> One of those women was Jewelia Galloway Higgins, a highly influential woman in the Dayton community.

>>Julia began going to the meetings of the Dayton Women’s Suffrage Association.

It was a segregated organization.

She would be referred to within the minutes as “the colored woman was here today”, “the colored woman was back again.” Well, the colored woman built a booth and she took it to the Dayton Courthouse on Mondays, and she began to give speeches on women’s suffrage and the women’s right to vote.

At that time, she invited women from the WCA, the Women’s Christian Association II.

She invited women from the Dayton Women’s Suffrage Association to come and give speeches as well.

So what began as a segregated effort, it was through her efforts that it became an integrated effort, and likely, because of the amount of racism that was endured and faced during that time, she left that organization and it was very evident that her work for suffrage never stopped.

She was able to do that work through the WCA, and it was later that we found, within our family handwritten archives, that she organized the Montgomery County Equal Women‘s Suffrage Association.

Would the Dayton community be different had there been no Jewelia Higgins?

Absolutely, it would be.

Voters’ rights, the support of women‘s rights, the support of women’s right to choose, all of these were things that Jewelia worked with and towards within her lifetime and here we are again.

So we pass torches.

They are not extinguished.

What was done generations ago is relevant today learn from it, augment it for today’s world and society and keep up the fight.

MOVING FORWARD Since my childhood, I was supposed to be creative by making my own toys with the material that I found in nature, including wood, clay, rock.

And since then, I have been really interested in art, and one of my neighbors, he’s a painter and I always looked at him, he’s work.

At some point I asked him if he was willing to teach me because he don’t teach, and he said, “Yes.” so I start having classes with him, with my neighbor, and that’s how I start getting truly into painting and drawing.

In 2014, I got the opportunity to study visual art in an international school in Norway, and I met Kimberly White, Associate Director, International Mission from Ringling.

I knew about the fine art program and I say, “I want to go there.” >>As department head, I look at all the applications, and when Melvin arrived, he came from the school in Norway, so I thought he would be Norwegian.

And then he showed up on campus, and obviously he was not Norwegian.

He’s a really gifted painter.

He’s expressive, he’s got great content that’s there.

He’s trying to deal with the human condition and bigger issues, but just in the general way of applying paint, I just love his surfaces and a sense of color and composition and form and the brush marks.

>>He knows that his hand can make certain marks that no one else’s can.

This kind of mark is more appropriate for the horse.

This kind of mark is more appropriate for the figure.

This kind of mark is more appropriate for the landscape or the light source and the clouds.

That ability to grasp that and to organize it and then to adjust it continuously like, I think everyone who has worked around Melvin knows that his trajectory is superstar level, and we’re all glad just to be part of it.

I would say it’s incredibly rare, and the level of sophistication that goes into not just great technical skills as far as rendering, but seeing some of the compositions, you start to see right away, oh, there’s dynamics of interaction, social, political and historic as well.

>>There is really a strong composition to see children shooting a horse, but I grew up in El Salvador around that social context with guns.

I don’t want to glorify violence.

At the same time, I want also the viewers to have their own interpretation when they confront my painting.

Because for instance, the painting in the back is a concert of life and death.

>>You can talk about philosophy with Melvin.

You can talk about political things.

You can talk about really deep, intellectual associations of subject matter that oftentimes you never get to that point in a conversation with students.

>> My art has some classical approach in my artistic process, but at the same time I’m trying to pursue and find my own voice.

>>He knows what he’s doing, and we’re just here to help along with technical advice, conceptual advice, maybe some references or historic context, but the subject matter, the themes, what he’s creating, inventing and transferring to the surface, that’s entirely his, and it’s beautiful.

>>That is my main inspiration, to express human condition, emotion, feelings, and desire, and I use my personal experience as an inspiration.

In 2009, my life changed forever.

I was a victim of gun violence in my country.

I saw art, in a way it was, it gave me hope and motivation to move forward in life.

I wake up happy to pursue my passion, and I’m so happy to come to my studio because there is a painting waiting for me.

>>There’s been times where I’ve come in here, like there’s been a Thursday class and I come back in on Monday and I’m like, how did you even do all this work?

Did you sleep?

>>I am going to graduate in May next year.

My goal at the moment is to teach.

Also, I want to go back to my country and share what Ringling taught me.

I went back to my country after I finished my studies in Norway and I opened an art school for children with the mission of breaking the cycle of gun violence and providing the tool to create art three years ago with my neighbor who taught me painting classes.

I told him while I’m not here, you are in charge from the art school, and when I come back, I’ll take full responsibility.

My main focus is to keep them busy and spend their time, positive.

>>It’d be great for Melvin to stay here.

I think he’d be an incredible asset to the community and a great leader, and maybe he’ll come back, but I think he could bring all those traits back to his home country and really build something special over there.

>>It’s truly important.

Painting to me, in some way, I will say, saved my life because it truly gave me a new perspective in life and I don’t see myself doing something else.

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Funding for COLORES was provided in part by: Frederick Hammersley Fund, for the Arts New Mexico PBS Great Southwestern Arts & Education Endowment Fund, and the Nellita E. Walker Fund for KNME-TV at the Albuquerque Community Foundation New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs, and by the National Endowment for the Arts and Viewers Like You.