WELCOME TO THE REVOLUTION
VIRGIL ORTIZ ISN’T AFRAID to confront or shock. The Cochiti Pueblo artist regularly tackles difficult, even taboo, subjects with his pottery. Blending graphic-comic imagery with time-traveling history and futuristic fantasy, he seems to have hit just the right nerve to make art a popular vehicle for overlooked education. Imagine millennials flocking to see an exhibition about a 17th-century Native American revolt against the Spanish and you’ll have a sense of the sometimes subversive genius at work here.
Raised “with clay in [his] hands” at Cochiti Pueblo between Santa Fe and Albuquerque, New Mexico, Ortiz has made it his artistic focus to tell the story of the 1680 Pueblo Revolt. It is his most ambitious project to date — and one of the least-known events in American history.
The Pueblo
