Show Preview | Heritage of My Home

This story was featured in the March/April 2019 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art March/April 2019 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

“WE WANTED to do a show in which artists told personal stories,” says InSight Gallery director Elizabeth Harris, explaining the creative impetus behind the new exhibition she has titled Heritage of My Home. The state of Texas has always been a dynamic crossroads of native, western, and Hispanic cultures, and Harris found the ideal artists to tell those cultures’ stories in three outstanding members of her gallery roster: Oreland C. Joe Sr., Mary Ross Buchholz, and Gladys Roldan-de-Moras. All three are present for the show’s opening reception on Friday, April 5, at 6 p.m. Each of the trio of artists, who bring about 25 pieces altogether, was stirred by the theme to select pieces that movingly represent his or her particular take on the concepts of storytelling and home.

Joe, one of the most widely acclaimed American Indian sculptors working today, uses the occasion to debut his most recent forays into painting, a medium he has enjoyed since his teens. His inspiration for these pieces is the ledger art—so named because it was often drawn and painted on pages torn from accounting ledger books—that depicted tribal events among Plains peoples from roughly the 1860s through the 1920s.

For Joe’s approach to the genre, the New Mexico artist first tears a piece of canvas “to emulate old buckskin or muslin,” glues it onto a mounted canvas, and tones the surface with a mixture of warm-hued oil paints. Then, based on in-depth historical research he has conducted with his son on their Navajo and Ute ancestors and their allies and enemies, he composes images at once traditional in style and vibrantly modern, such as the Southern Cheyenne warrior depicted in MEDICINE OF BLACKHORSE. “More and more,” he says of this painting and others, “each person in our history should have his own story.”

As for Buchholz, the show provides a perfect venue for her impeccable charcoal drawings of the life she lives as a sixth-generation rancher in southwest Texas. Works like RANGE COW demonstrate not only her mastery of the medium but also the authenticity that comes from a life lived on the land. “I like the outdoors and the open spaces, the peace and solitude that we have here,” she says. Not that Buchholz will be showing only tranquil images or, for that matter, charcoals. She plans to include an oil painting as well, featuring “quite a bit of movement” in a scene from a bronc rodeo competition.

Competitions of another sort feature prominently in many of the oils of San Antonio artist Roldan-de-Moras. Vividly and faithfully painted, her ESCARAMUZA CHARRA, for example, features Mexican-American women on horseback, getting ready for the gala parade that precedes an escaramuza, a colorful team-riding competition popular in Mexican rodeos. Like her fellow artists, Roldan-de-Moras finds deep meaning in the show’s theme and in being one of its three participants from dramatically different backgrounds. “It represents that we are a multicultural society,” she says. “That’s what makes us who we are here, and we are stronger when we all get along together.” —Norman Kolpas

contact information830.997.9920www.insightgallery.com

This story was featured in the March/April 2019 issue of Southwest Art magazine. Get the Southwest Art March/April 2019 print issue or digital download now–then subscribe to Southwest Art and never miss another story.

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