"There's a revolution happening on the pueblo," Jojola adds. "What we're really starting at Taos is a national Native American glass-art movement."  |
Left: Jason Lee hotshop instructor Greg Piercey works with a Taos elder during the group's visit last November to Tacoma.
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It took twelve months and countless tribal council meetings to take the revolution at Taos Pueblo beyond mere talk. Last summer, the council made an agreement with the Hilltop Artists in Residence of Tacoma, Washington, to build a 15,000- square-foot studio glass center, production shop, exhibition space and plaza on two acres of reservation land. The center will serve the entire pueblo community-children, adults and elders. Artwork made by the tribe will be sold and marketed nationwide. A percentage of sales will go to the artists. The rest will go to a special fund for community programs, from organic agriculture to preserving the Tiwa language. Left: Hilltop student James Kinnard and Taos student Ryan Romero work under the guidance of Tony Jojola (Isleta Pueblo) in the Tacoma hotshop.Right: Tacoma Hilltop student Lucas Lowery cools off after working in the hotshop.  | |  |
But the Hilltop program at Taos is more than a revolution. The program promises to inspire a whole new generation of young Pueblo artists, some of whom are at risk of failing school or, worse, getting involved in crime. The $1.5 million project broke ground last October and is scheduled for completion sometime in late summer. It is the first joint venture in the history of the Taos tribe, according to former Governor Ruben Romero, under whose administration the enterprise took root. "The program is a chance to give our (people) a place to make something and make something of themselves," Romero says. The project's goal of helping at-risk youth is, like the glass-blowing component, modeled on the Hilltop program. Kathy Kaperick, with the materials and counsel of master glass artist Dale Chihuly, started the Hilltop Artists program in 1994 behind Jason Lee Middle School in Tacoma's Hilltop district. The goal was education, a way to get disadvantaged and disenfranchised youth, primarily African-American, back in school. The hook was glass. The project took off like Michael Jordan's vertical leap. The Hilltop's "at-risk" youth turned into risk-takers. Out of 2,500-degree furnaces came glowing art formed and reformed by kids otherwise headed for Tacoma's detention centers. "All kind of kids coexist in the hot shop," says James Kinnard, a student teacher in the Tacoma program who has since been nominated to the national Academy of Achieve-ment for high-school students. "Can't say where I'd be without it, but I'm pretty sure I'd be gettin' there in something stolen." In five years, the Hilltop program has become a national model. In Tacoma, the hot shop serves hundreds of youths through classes thirteen hours a day, five days a week. Exhibitions of student work are organized several times a year and always sell out, bringing significant earned income into the program. Commissions for art from local businesses, another source of revenue, continue to grow. Both the CBS and the Bravo television networks have produced documentaries on the Hilltop program and Home Box Office has a project in the works. "Forty percent of what happens (in the hot shop) is glass, 60 percent is social work," Jojola says. "The kids require attention because they never got it anywhere else-but it works. Every day, they're more engaged." Taos Pueblo, nestled in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains of northern New Mexico, is far removed from Tacoma's inner city. Yet, the same problems exist on the reservation, population 2,000. Drugs, gangs, lack of opportunity and general apathy are acknowledged facts on the reservation. Unemployment is nearly 80 percent. Dale Chihuly visits with John Romero and his wife, Jenny Romero, at Chihuly's hotshop in Seattle. Inset: Chihuly demonstrates color mixing to visitors from the Taos Pueblo.  |
"There is an element of the glass project that Western profiteers may not understand," former tribal Secretary Richard Deertrack adds. "The money isn't our first interest. The preservation and advancement of our culture and its artistic traditions is our first priority." Until last year, glass-blowing was foreign to the Taos tribe, whose artistic tradition is grounded in drum-making and micaceous pottery. Indeed, glass-blowing is little known among Native artists. Jojola, senior instructor of the Hilltop Artists program in Tacoma, has sculpted glass for more than twenty years, initially under Chihuly, honorary co-chairman and spiritual emissary of the Taos project. But the total number of Native artists working in the medium can be counted on one hand. The "studio glass" movement in America took form in 1962, when Harvey Littleton and Dominick Labino devised a small portable furnace and a batch formula for melting glass at a lower temperature. Glass-blowing was freed from the limits of factory production and, suddenly, the seductive properties of glass-transparency, color, liquidity and general luminosity-were exploited to their maximum artistic effect. In 1966, Tacoma-born Chihuly was a Fulbright fellow studying at the Venini glass factory in Italy. He assimilated the Venetians' secrets about glass into programs at the Rhode Island School of Design, where he taught, and the Pilchuck Glass School in Stanwood, Washington, which he founded with Native American art collectors John Hauberg and Anne Gould Hauberg in 1971. Nearly thirty years later, Kiva New calls Chihuly "the reigning maestro of modern glass." The same summer that Chihuly started Pilchuck, his colleague Jamie Carpenter began collecting Northwest Coast baskets. Later, when the two were visiting the Washington State Historical Museum in Tacoma, they chanced upon a collection of Native baskets on the third floor. A seed was planted for Chihuly and in turn a handful of Native artists were captivated by the maestro's imaginative possibilities for glass. Jojola, 40, left Isleta Pueblo to study with Chihuly at the IAIA and to apprentice under him at Pilchuck. Thirty-four-year-old Preston Singletary, whose grandmother was full-blooded Tlingit from southeastern Alaska, also joined Chihuly at Pilchuck and at The Boathouse, Chihuly's glass-blowing studio at Lake Union in Seattle. Singletary draws from the traditional symbols of Northwest Native culture for his sculpture. His favorite form, the Tlingit rain hat, is a delicate but durable balance of traditional design and modern expression. Singletary has answered several times the claim that glass-blowing flies in the face of Native artistic traditions. He sees the medium as "a progression of those traditions." "Any artist," Singletary says, "makes his own individual assessment of the object he's working with, and the idea, I think, is more important than the medium. Glass-blowing will be a tremendous inspiration to Native American artists because the process itself is so dynamic and creative, so full of immediate possibilities. The spontaneity and energy of the moment and the rhythm of working as a team, which glass-blowing requires, is enormously exciting." Similarly, Taos Pueblo leaders see glass-blowing as an expansion of Native cultural traditions. "Fire is a crucial element in glass-blowing, and it's [fire] always been an essential element in our tradition," Deertrack says. "People are taught to fear it, but fire has always been our friend."
Deertrack and his fellow tribal council members didn't buy into the Hilltop program without assurances. They needed to be convinced that the Hilltop model in Tacoma had value as an artistic venture and as a social healer. Taos is arguably the most traditional of nineteen Pueblo tribes in the Southwest. Electricity and running water have come to the reservation, but not into the original North Pueblo and South Pueblo structures. Many of the tribe's most important decisions are made in kivas up to 800 years old. Members of the governor's and war chief's offices are appointed by caciques, or religious leaders. The same rules of order apply for the fiscales, who attend to the affairs of the Roman Catholic Church on the reservation. Convincing the tribal council of the social and artistic potential of the glass-blowing project was difficult. Tribal councils at Taos Pueblo had heard many proposals-joint-venture schemes for organic fertilizers and a motorcycle maintenance program, to name just a couple. To make matters more fragile, there is no word in Tiwa for what the Hilltop group was proposing. The closest to "glass-blowing" that tribal council members could come to in their own language was "blowing bottles." Undaunted, Kaperick, a 41-year-old Anglo woman, went before the full council with a proposal in April 1998. It was June before she was invited back. But on June 10, the council passed a resolution establishing "a glass (art) venture to train and direct tribal youth and adults in the production and marketing of blown glass and related glass products." Instructors and senior students in the Tacoma program will travel to Taos to help Jojola teach glass-blowing to the tribe. In turn, Taos Pueblo youth, parents and elders will be selected for residencies in Tacoma to learn the exacting art of glass-blowing.  |
Left: Kathy Kaperick helps celebrate Marie Martinez' first glass piece in the Jason Lee hotshop in Tacoma. Martinez is the wife of a Taos elder.
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Construction of the project's glass-blowing studio at the pueblo is slated for late spring, but the cultural exchange between Tacoma and Taos already has begun. Last November, at the invitation of the Hilltop group, twenty members of the Taos tribe, ages 8 to 82, went to Tacoma and Seattle for a five-day crash course. They visited Chihuly's studio in Seattle, where they tried glass-blowing for the first time. Then they toured the Hilltop hot shop in Tacoma, where they saw the program in full production and blew more glass.Shortly after the group tour, Jojola took 18-year-old Ryan Romero to Tacoma. He is the first of the Taos tribe to train at the Hilltop. "Now the project is real in the eyes of the Pueblo people," Kaperick says. "They can trust it." "I can tell the project will soar because the beginnings are so positive," says Kiva New, who went on the Tacoma trip. "There's a spirituality on both sides. That means everything to the Taos people." Chihuly especially recognizes the cultural bond between Tacoma and Taos and the larger implications for the Pueblo community. "Glass-blowing is an art form that works as a team," he says. "At Taos Pueblo, you have a community whose whole tradition is teamwork." Kaperick and the Hilltop team in Taos didn't wait for the permanent glass studio to be built in order to get the project up and running at the pueblo. This March, Kaperick and the Hilltop team in Taos plan to install on the reservation a "portable" hot shop-including a molten-glass furnace, two glory holes (reheating chambers), and one annealing oven-so that the glass-blowing wouldn't have to wait for the permanent facility to be built. Discussions between the Hilltop group and administrators at the Native American Preparatory School in Santa Fe also have begun to establish an exchange program that would bring NAPS students to the Taos studio for residencies to supplement their studies. "I think the glass-blowing project in Taos is going to be an incredible opportunity to introduce Native Americans to an art form that will spark their imagination and provide a medium of expression to strengthen, not weaken, their traditions," says Singletary "As a Native American, I can't wait to see what new ideas come out of the program and turn heads in the art world." Singletary and Jojola, who met at Pilchuck in 1984, used to work together at Benjamin Moore Glass Art Inc. studio in Seattle. They also collaborated on a Chihuly team that assisted Italian glass master Lino Tagliapietra. Now that the Hilltop project has come to the mountaintop at Taos, Singletary is champing at the bit to visit the pueblo to share his work with other Native American artists. Says Singletary, "I welcome the opportunity to share what I've learned, especially knowing what may come of it." 
Right: Taos elder Tony Reyna works with Hilltop students on a glass creation.
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