Trailblazing artists share eye for innovation through different mediums

Apr. 5—Master Glass: The Collaborative Spirit of Tony Jojola opened February 10 — making it a timely tribute to the artist, who died unexpectedly only 14 months earlier at age 64.

Master Glass, the first posthumous exhibition honoring the titan of 20th century glass art, is paired with Pathfinder: 40 Years of Marcus Amerman, which opened the same day at Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian. Amerman is famed for his beadwork portraits.

The museum doesn't often link exhibitions in this way, executive director Henrietta Lidchi says, but Jojola and Amerman had more in common than being contemporaries.

"I think it's quite an interesting thing to do, to look at the way these two artists kind of speak to innovation in Native American art in the '90s and 2000s," Lidchi says. "A lot of contemporary younger artists have always lived in an artistic field where [Jojola and Amerman have] existed, so they don't always know what it must have been like before they existed."

Featured works by Jojola include a pair of untitled glass figurines depicting bears that would be far out of their element in nature: one is purple, the other bright green. Both strike nonthreatening poses, balancing on four paws pulled close together. It creates the appearance the bears are standing on a limited supply of land, or perhaps ice. An untitled vase's nonparallel lines and collision of colors give it an otherworldly look, resembling Jupiter if that gas giant's red hues were replaced with green ones. An untitled bowl appears to glow, resembling lava.

details

Master Glass: The Collaborative Spirit of Tony Jojola

Through June 9

Pathfinder: 40 Years of Marcus Amerman

Through January 11, 2025

$10

505-982-4636; wheelwright.org

Pathfinder, meanwhile, includes pieces of wall art and clothing featuring Amerman's intricate beadwork. Among them is Iron Horse Jacket (1982), a leather jacket emblazoned with a bikini-clad person on the back. In Buffalo Man — the name of an alter ego of Amerman's — the namesake animal's head is perched above intricate carvings. The piece, created by Amerman and Preston Singletary (Tlingit), is created with blown and sand-carved glass.

"We're very lucky because [artist and collector] Doug Hyde, who's Nez Perce, Assiniboine, and Chippewa, has loaned us his dress jacket for the exhibition, which means he's not going to be able to wear his dress jacket for a year," Lidchi says. Several galleries represent Hyde, including Nedra Matteucci Galleries in Santa Fe.

Jojola lived in Taos for many years before moving back to his native Isleta Pueblo in 2020. Amerman [Choctaw], a former Institute of American Indian Arts student, lives in Idaho.

"Both shows are about innovators in their fields — people who have trodden their own path while others have emulated and followed," Lidchi says.

Jojola learned to work with glass in 1975 at IAIA under art instructor Carl Ponca. After receiving an associate's degree from the school in 1978, he attended Pilchuck Glass School in the Seattle area, where he was an apprentice to renowned glass artist Dale Chihuly. Amerman also attended Pilchuck.

Master Glass was easier to assemble quickly because it's a smaller show. It ends June 9, while Pathfinder runs through January 11, 2025. The latter features more than 70 pieces in a larger gallery space: an octagonal room and two outdoor areas.

"Because it's a major retrospective of Amerman's work, we think it's important enough to have it up for a year," Lidchi says. "We would normally have those exhibitions up for a year and run programming in relationship to them. I think it's a very rich exhibition because he's such a magpie of an artist; he draws from so many different sources."

Pathfinder features work finished as recently as November, she says.

"There are things that he's never shown that we've got on display," Lidchi says. "I think the earliest work that we've got from Marcus is from 1981. So it is quite legitimately 40 years."

The first thing viewers will encounter in Pathfinder is a series of works Amerman has been working on for nearly a decade, she says, called Portrait of the Artist.

"It's a sort of rather wry self-representation," Lidchi says. "And if you go around the corner, you'll be confronted by the suit that he wears that has a buffalo head on it, so he has often worn it when he's Buffalo Man. It sort of introduces you immediately to the nature of his artistic brain — his sense of self and his alter ego."