Rose B. Simpson: Leaving Fingerprints Behind

I remember when I first met Rose at her booth in Santa Fe’s August Indian Market. She had hung an astonishing large color photograph on the front of her booth, presenting an abrupt, dramatic image of an Indian woman, squatting, her head bowed between her knees. Although nothing “showed,” Rose told me passersby were complaining that her photograph was pornographic; I bought it on the spot.

Now, some ten years later, Rose has an array of images in clay—she works in all media—at New York’s Shainman Gallery, an interview in Vogue and a section on her work in the upcoming season of Art of The Twenty-First Century on PBS but she never leaves her lineage at Santa Clara Pueblo here behind. She was born here of an extraordinary lineage of women artists, including her mother, the sculptor Roxanne Swentzell and her grandmother and women ancestors even further back—70 generations of clay artists.

Describing her thoughts on the finger- and handprints we often see here on ancestral pueblo walls, she explains that rather than seeing history she sees “vibrance, I see life… I think in a time when we’re about fast products everywhere, we’ve built a world where we don’t want that human touch—we want this sterile, artificial disconnected thing… It feels like we do need some of that really raw and rough humanity to have a little bit of compassion and empathetic responses to being human” which her works provide.

Rose’s young daughter will surely carry on the tradition as her mother reflects, “Mostly I think about that matrilineal line in that the mother actually makes the daughter’s eggs as she makes the daughter. I’ll make my grandchildren through my daughter.”

In addition to clay works and photography, Rose also works on cars, including her beloved El Camino, Maria, breaking down and reassembling engines as works of art. On the way back from an art show in Tucson, Maria blew the engine, Rose couldn’t get a tow, and there were only pebbles nearby to block the tires so she “crawled underneath and disconnected the drive shaft and used it behind the wheel.” Later “We took the engine apart and that engine has been in all kinds of art pieces.”

In our culture where there is often so much disconnection between mothers and daughters, it seems almost impossible to establish a matrilineal line of women artists—although I continue to see the possibility, especially now that one of my granddaughters is blossoming into a painter.

And we white women artists sometimes lack the sheer effrontery needed to create ourselves—the effrontery I encountered with so much appreciation when I saw Rose’s photograph on her booth.

It’s a special pleasure and an honor to get to know a woman artist at the start of her career, and those of us who can afford to buy art should look for the opportunity.

In Art, Women, New Mexico Rose B. Simpson Santa Fe Santa Clara Pueblo Roxanne Swentzell