GOLD STANDARD
Artist taking ceramic pieces to Traditional Spanish Market in Santa Fe
Traditional Spanish Market artist reinvigorates art form
Jacobo De La Serna’s artistic roots plow deep into the New Mexico earth.
Potter, painter, santero and scholar, the Albuquerque artist has cycled through woodcarving, gesso relief, egg tempera, oils, clay and — most recently — jewelry, across a lifetime of cultural expression.
The Española-born artist is taking four ceramic pieces to the 65th Annual Traditional Spanish Market on the Santa Fe Plaza on Saturday, July 30, and July 31. The Contemporary Hispanic Market runs the same weekend along Lincoln Avenue.
About 250 Spanish colonial artists will converge around the Plaza selling woodcarving, tin, colcha embroidery, hide painting, retablos, straw appliqué, furniture, weaving, jewelry, filigree, pottery and ironwork beneath the arching trees and floral baskets of summer. The annual event is a celebration of traditions begun about 400 years ago. The market lures about 70,000 visitors to Santa Fe.
De La Serna traces his bloodlines back to eight out of 14 New Mexican founding families during the 1500s and 1600s. He says one of his ancestors built a hacienda off what is now Albuquerque’s Central Avenue; part of it still survives. His greatgrandmother Luna was a “genizaro,” the term for a Native woman who left her tribe to live in another culture. Luna was a Navajo who created micaceous pottery, a tradition her great-grandson continues through his own vessels. A micaceous pot coiled by his grandmother sits atop a wooden kitchen cupboard.
“When I was a little kid, when it rained, I would wait until it evaporated and gather up the clay and make pinch pots,” he said. He juried into Spanish Market 15 years ago. “They call it pottery,” he said. “I call it sculptural vessels.
“Pottery gets categorized as craft,” he added, bristling. “I’ve always tried to stay away from that ‘craft’ connotation because I think it cheapens the work.”
A plastic bag of brown clay dug from the Manzano Mountains sits on the table of his living room studio. Mozart’s overture to “The Marriage of Figaro” wafts gently from a player.
Bookshelves stuffed with titles on Picasso, Van Gogh, Fritz Scholder and Dalí loom over his work table. He scoops out a wad of clay and starts working it, first rolling it into ropes of coils, then grabbing a rolling pin to flatten a circular base. He places it all into a mold, pinching and smoothing it into place.
“When I come into the studio, I don’t know what I’m going to make,” he said. “It evolves.”
Some of his pieces ascend 3 feet. He fires them in what resembles a large nighttime bonfire of wood. He dons fireproof gloves and a helmet to reach in and grab each piece when it turns red. He then places it in a container with newspapers, holding down the lid until the contents explode after consuming the oxygen.
“It will literally lift the lid and me, picking up until it vacuums down,” he said.
The vessel emerges as black as a San Ildefonso pot.
De La Serna is creating a piece to benefit the Museum of Spanish Colonial Art with a removable bolo shape and pendant, “like a pictograph or a petroglyph.” He says admirers have already bid it up to $7,000.
“He’s very driven,” Albuquerque Museum curator Andrew Connors said. “He’s always open to experimentation in new directions. But he’s so deeply rooted. His understanding of deep culture is at the academic level, but he chooses to reinvigorate a traditional art form and keep pushing it. Every one of his works looks modern and new and fresh because he never replicates historic vessels. That, to me, is the perfect example of keeping tradition alive.”
De La Serna is sending more elaborate pieces to a Shanghai gallery. Their colors swirl to a nearly psychedelic fluorescence. He over paints them mixing his own version of egg tempera, adding lacquer for longevity. Nature inspired the stylized
trails, leaves and petals.
“It’s not supposed to be literal,” he said.
The interiors glitter like jewels with layers of 23-karat Italian gold leaf.
His intimacy with the clay is marrowdeep.
“The clay is a medium unlike any other in that it moves, it breathes, it responds to barometric pressure,” the artist said. “I can tell if there’s a cloud hanging over my house because it feels more supple, wetter.”
Micaceous clay breaks easily, making it even harder to mold into the larger pieces he favors.
He achieves that height “by looking to the clay and establishing a relationship with it. I can feel the little grains as they mesh together. I can sense and feel where the clay has compacted. I must have learned that at a very early age.”
In October, De La Serna will be taking his new jewelry line to a one-man show in Paris at the Premier Arrondissement adjacent to the Louvre Museum. The work melds Spanish colonial designs with a 5,000-year-old Japanese technique in sand-cast wearable art made from a blend of alloys.
The diamonds and triangles of Spanish colonial furniture will embellish a half-circle bracelet like appliqué.
“I’m deeply New Mexican,” De La Serna said. “If you were to cut my veins open, I think I would bleed the earth here.”