FROM STUDIO TO GALLERY
Randy Chitto opens his Santa Fe studio for an exhibition of works alongside Baje Whitethorne.
SANTA FE, NM
Twice a year Randy Chitto’s Red Clay Studio in Santa Fe, New Mexico, becomes a gallery for his work and for another artist he invites to join him. On May 9 and 10 his guest will be Baje Whitethorne, the well-known Navajo painter and book illustrator.
Chitto (Mississippi Choctaw) had been participating in the Young Artist Studios at the Art Institute of Chicago when he learned about the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe through his tribe. He went there hoping to study painting. Unable to sign up for painting he took a course in clay with Otellie Loloma. He fell in love with the medium and the rest, they say, is history.
Chitto’s playful figures include turtles, storytellers or story keepers to the Choctaw. When the Choctaw were forced from their land, they told their stories to the turtles who they knew would close up and keep them safe. When some of the tribe returned the turtles began to tell them their stories.
His son Hollis “began collecting Baje’s books as a little guy,” he recalls. “We always loved his work as a family.”
Whitethorne has written and illustrated eight books, writing the text for two of them. Whitethorne recalls how his grandfather would draw horses. “He taught me how to draw,” he says. His grandfather also told how, as a boy, he used to hide in a hole dug near the corral when they saw government workers coming to take them away.
He grew up in a canyon observing “what a day is, cloud movement, the reflection of light on the walls, shadows moving across the canyon. As a kid I saw all of that through the eyes of my grandfather. When it was hot, I would lie under a tree and look up at the colors. If a tree was on a hill I could sit under it and let my eyes wander around the mountains.”
The tree is prominent in his painting The Blue, rising up gnarled but strong in the canyon next to the hogan where he was born. When the prehistoric Navajo people emerged from the dark, the light reflected on things and gave them color—a wide range of color like white light breaking into the spectrum when it passes through a prism. Intense color and thick impasto are characteristic of his vibrant paintings.