MORE THAN BEAUTIFUL
The artwork that hangs in the home of Allan Lokos and Susanna Weiss reflects the meaningful, emotional experiences they’ve had in their lives.
The artwork that hangs in the home of Allan Lokos and Susanna Weiss reflects the meaningful, emotional experiences they’ve had in their lives.
As many New Yorkers do, Allan Lokos and Susanna Weiss said one winter, “Let’s get out of New York and go to someplace warm.” They chose Santa Fe, New Mexico, not aware at the time that at 7,000 feet it isn’t Sun City. “It was snowing,” Susanna recalls. “But it was beautiful!” They were seduced by the Land of Enchantment. They were also captivated by Native culture, its closeness to the earth and the art it produced. She says, “Friends invited us to use their house in Santa Fe when they weren’t here. We did, and soon we were hooked.”
Their New York apartment now houses a fine collection of Native art and other pieces they have purchased in Santa Fe.
Allan was a director, actor and a singer and Susanna was a dancer. Later Allan became the founder of the Community Meditation Center in New York City and is its guiding teacher, having studied with Thich Nhat Hanh and Sharon Salzberg among others. Susanna became a painter and became the center’s first executive director. She is a somatic experiencing practitioner.
“Wherever we have traveled,” Susanna explains, “what rises up to us is the roots of the people, their being on the earth and the way it intersects with them. Our African pieces are tribal rather than contemporary. It connects us more to the place.”
Allan adds, “I’m aware that the people who live here, who are native to this land, were treated in a way they shouldn’t have been treated. I’d rather buy from the artist than a gallery in New York. We want to know the artists and to hear their stories. The art changes when you do that.”
Susanna says, “It’s not just a story. They’re living it. Even if you don’t know or get to meet the artist, there is a piece of them in their art. Each of us leaves a piece of ourselves in what we make. I honor that.”
Allan relates, “At the top of the small staircase at the back of the Allan Houser Gallery was his sculpture Desert Flower. We both stopped and looked at it but didn’t discuss buying it. We knew. Susanna said , ‘I’ll go to the car and get the camera.’ I sat down and was looking at it for a while when I realized I was wiping tears from my eyes. We knew we had no place for it. But I said, ‘Here’s our card. When we go back to New York we’ll see what we can move around.’ What we moved left us the perfect place. She’s the first thing you see when you come into the apartment. From the other end of the hall I can see her when I wake up. I think she was meant to live with us.”
They saw a bronze by Michael Naranjo at a friend’s house and heard his story. “I was writing a book called Patience at the time,” Allan explains. “I interviewed people whose life situations required an enormous amount of patience. I called his gallery to ask them to connect me to Michael. Five minutes later he called and said, ‘Come on up to the house.’ We spent a long day with Michael and his wife, Laurie. I wrote the piece and went back to read it to them.”
Naranjo had lost his sight, and his right hand was severely injured in a grenade explosion in Vietnam. He had wanted to be a sculptor and in his hospital room he asked for a block of clay, which he began modeling
with his left hand. Today, his work is included in the collections of the Heard Museum, the White House and the Vatican. A large bronze eagle has pride of place in the couple’s apartment.
In his book, Allan recalled, “As Susanna and I drove back to town we were silent, which is unusual for us since we like to discuss our experiences.” He recalls being in the audience leaving a concert in Carnegie Hall in awe and in silence. “Or of when we were gorilla trekking in Rwanda and a female gorilla sat down next to me and held my arm. There are those rare experiences that reach so far down into our being that no words can find their way out of the chasm. All we can do is breathe and wipe away the tears.”
Allan and Susanna survived their own horrific trauma in 2012 when the plane they were traveling in in Burma crashed and burst into flames. Allan was severely burned over 30 percent of his body and Susanna broke four vertebrae. In his most recent book, Through the Flames, Allan writes, “I, for one, am comfortable simply standing humbly in awe before what is so astonishing. The instant my body was so badly injured, it began to heal. If that is not miraculous, I do not know what is. It brings me to my knees.”
The couple finds joy in the art they collect, from the myriad twists and turns of the wood in the last table George Nakashima worked on before his death, to the way a turquoise necklace hangs on Susanna’s neck. They revel in the bit of the artist in every piece. When they purchased a large painting by Dan Namingha, the artist explained all its symbolism. Allan remarks, “This is more than something beautiful.”