1 week Ago
When I first met artist Cara Romero, her list of awards on Wikipedia was long, but nothing like it is now. I love and live with art, but I don't understand it the way artists and gallerists do. So we became friends talking about family, business and our professional ambitions.
In the award-winning PBS documentary Cara Romero: Following the Light , Romero says: "We make art out of a need to connect, to communicate, to maybe not be lonely and introspective. You're really trying to bare your soul and what's in your deepest places. Those pieces that are the scariest for me are the ones that people connect with, feminine and vulnerable.
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I made a promise to myself in self-care and in healing that I would always pursue my art, it was the one thing that made me whole." That vulnerability and authenticity showed up when Romero was weighing the opportunity to be represented by her dream gallery. We talked about the opportunities representation would provide — shows, placement, prestige — and the opportunities she could create: connection, community, sustainability.
Romero already had a solid history of betting on herself, so I wasn't surprised soon after when she wanted advice on answering the bureaucratically invasive questions on the loan application to purchase 333 Montezuma Ave. No. 5, which now houses the Cara Romero Gallery.
Unsure of the bank's questions about how she could guarantee her decade of consistent annual growth would continue, I suggested mentioning the upcoming show at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York featuring and named for her work, Water Memories . She got the loan (not because of my suggestion), had an amazing Met show (and many others), paid off the loan and is now sharing the gallery space (and the visibility it provides) with other artists. At the same time, she prepares for her first major solo museum survey and monograph with The Hood Museum and Radius Books, respectively.
In the "IDENTITY" episode of Craft in America on PBS, Romero explains, "At the University of Houston I took my first black-and-white film class. I was the only Native American, and everyone around me was completely unaware that we existed. I knew almost instantly that I wanted to be able to communicate visually, through photography, modern Native life.
" In the same episode, we see Romero creating feather bundles for four little boys — Kiyanni, P.J., John and Winka — to wear for a continuation of her series Jackrabbit, Cottontail, and Spirits of the Desert .
The producer asks Kiyanni what the boys are wearing. "We're wearing the Indian stuff," he answers. "And why?" she asks.
Kiyanni sounds puzzled in the way children do when adults ask obvious questions: "Because we are." Then we hear the sounds of their little feet slapping down a road in California's Chemehuevi reservation as they run to pose for Romero in the heart of the Mojave Desert, feather bundles sprouting above their shining faces and aviator glasses as their hair streams behind them. I asked Romero, over tartines at Sage Bakehouse, how it feels to be in business the way she is — not backed by outside gallery representation, but rather by her own courage and her community.
She talked about always wanting to tell her own story, and without a moment's hesitation, and in the most grounded way I have experienced, she responded that her body was her own and that she had complete agency over it. Briefly I wondered if I should clarify, did she mean her actual body or her body of work? Looking at her, I knew without asking that the answer was yes..
