East Gallery Closing Reception- Material World

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Artists’ Biographies:

Michael Billie is a Diné (Navajo) mixed media artist who was born on the Navajo reservation but now lives and works in Santa Fe, NM. His main media are encaustic (pigmented beeswax and oil), venetian plaster and resin with which he incorporates many materials from nature. He is also a master of eco-printing, which entails wrapping plant materials and other objects (such as rusty metal pieces) in silk to create silk scarfs.  The tightly wrapped bundles are then steamed.  Steaming transfers the plant pigment to the silk, creating a colored design. Michael once observed: “When the bundles were cooling, I noticed how striking they looked as a composition…They were like a newborn bundled up in a blanket, a gift waiting to be unwrapped; a medicine bag; a protected secret, never to be revealed.” He always remembers this powerful moment of inspiration and continues to incorporate bundles in his current work.  Michael shows his work at the Encaustic Art Institute, Cerrillos; Calliope Fine Art Gallery, Madrid, and Diné & Company, Santa Fe.  He also participates in the annual Santa Fe Open Studio Tour.

Carl “Cat” Tsosie is Native American artist whose ancestry includes Navajo (father’s side) and Pueblo (mother’s side). He is the eldest of their seven children.  His large artistic family includes both his parents (now deceased) and several of his six siblings.  His younger sister and her children are accomplished jewelers (Tsosie-Gaussoin family) and his youngest brother is the well-known sculptor, Robert Dale Tsosie.  Cat says: “ I think of myself as a draftsman—like my father—and sculptor (like my younger brother) . My sculptures are buildings, built traditionally of adobe. They include restoration of the San Lorenzo Spanish mission church at Picuris Pueblo (where I lived and worked for more than 30 years), kiva restorations, horno ovens and kiva fireplaces (my specialty).” After moving from Picuris to Albuquerque, Cat began drawing and established a gourd garden.  He dries and cleans the gourds, making them into ceremonial rattles, percussion instruments, or art objects. The rattle images depict animals and insects, landscapes, and forces of nature.  He and his wife both design the rattles, and she paints them.  Cat is an initiated member of the Southern Cheyenne Warrior Shield Society and a gourd dancer.  Gourd dancers start pow wow festivities, leading the pow wow’s grand entry processions.  Cat and Harriette recently published “Gourd Rattles,” which won first place in the crafts category of the 2023 New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards.

Harriette Tsosie is a painter, living and working in Albuquerque’s South Valley. For the past twenty-five years, she has worked primarily in acrylic but also studied encaustic (pigmented beeswax).  She founded New Mexico Wax, an organization for encaustic artists, and later merged it with the Encaustic Art Institute, becoming the Institute’s first president.  During the Covid pandemic lockdown, she enrolled in a six-week online course and learned to work with cold wax medium and oil. Harriette says: “The subject of my work—regardless of the medium— is identity, which I see as shaped by genetics, language, and place.”  After moving from Iowa to New Mexico in 1995, she met and married her husband and moved to his pueblo.  “At Picuris, I became aware of the tremendous influence place has on a culture.  My birth family’s frequent moves from place to place as I was growing up left me feeling uprooted and disconnected from my own heritage.”  But when she and her sisters discovered their grandparents’ love letters and diaries tossed in a box in their parents’ Florida home, “it inspired me to learn more about my own heritage through online ancestry programs.” She started transcribing the letters and diaries—written in cursive—to computer text: “This reconnected me to my academic studies of language and art.”  Harriette turned this inspiration into a focus on the languages of many cultures, referencing their words and writing in her work.  “Art is about mark making. I am fascinated by the Native American petroglyphs and consider them the first written native language.  The text in my paintings is generally from archaic or extinct languages, which I see as more visually interesting than English. I like the sensuous shapes of the characters and symbols and don’t care much about their literal meaning.” Harriette’s work is included in the Bernalillo County public art collection.  Two of her paintings were recently selected for the Southwest Artist Purchase Initiative. She exhibits internationally and has received many awards. Her work can be seen at the Museum of Encaustic Art and at her studio by appointment.

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