 here. The Center for Visual Art acknowledges the privilege we have to gather in this place once the territories and homelands of so many Indigenous peoples, including the Arapaho and Cheyenne nations, we respect the many diverse Indigenous peoples still connected to this land and value the knowledge systems they have developed in relationship to their lands. We understand that offering a land acknowledgement neither absolves subtler colonial privilege nor diminishes colonial structures of violence at either the individual or institutional level. Land acknowledgments must be accompanied with ongoing commitments to displaced Indigenous and immigrant communities. In order to learn more about the spatial relationships of Indigenous communities to lands, we recommend visiting navyplan.ca and exploring the interactive map. As the off-campus arts center for MSU Denver, the Center for Visual Art acts as a resource for students and the broader community through contemporary exhibitions of local significance and global reach, an immersive education program, and workforce development for students interested in creating fields. And I would add to that also the site of the Bachelor of Fine Arts exhibitions which you are sitting amongst right now. Okay, so a descendant from a matrilineal lineage of Cochiti Pueblo ceramic artists and for over two decades, Virgil Ortiz has told the story of the 1680 Pueblo revolt through his artwork simultaneously joining traditional pottery forms with sci-fi fantasy. In Colorado alone, he's had numerous exhibitions including a solo exhibit at the Denver Art Museum in 2015 titled Revolt 1680, 2180, Virgil Ortiz, a 2018 exhibit at the Colorado Fine Art Center, Revolution, Rise Against the Invasion, and he is currently showing in duality contemporary works by indigenous artists at the Longmont Museum of Art. In 2020, 2022 Ortiz received a Living Treasure Award from the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture and opening this May at History Colorado is Revolt 1680, 2180, Virgil Ortiz Runners and Gliders which Virgil and History Colorado was very warmly welcomed at the professional practice class to visit today so we got to see the installation in progress and thank you so much for that opportunity. So please join me in welcoming Virgil Ortiz to the CVA. Thank you so much for that intro and thanks for the invitation to come hang out with you guys here at CVA. Cicely, thank you so much and also Jeremy Moran from HC. Thanks for having us here. It was so cool because earlier we had like about 10 students or so that came over to the History Colorado so I wanted to show them the behind-the-scenes little tour of like what it takes to put together a whole exhibition and the amount of people it takes to put together is like really cool for them to see it and experience it and like there's like so many people that are involved like doing all the projections doing the through the mapping and documented reality. Sebastian Bustos, my team member from Albuquerque hasn't made it here yet he's on a flight right now but it's really cool to have this experience or to give you guys and show you what we're working on in our team and it's really cool. Everything that I do is based on the 1680 public revolts and do you guys know what that is? Any hand raising like we talked about that earlier but it's about the rise of indigenous people from New Mexico and a long time ago in 1680 there was many battles before the big battle of 1680 when they actually pushed out all the invaders from all the Pueblos that were spread out in New Mexico. Back then there was like 43 Pueblos but now there's 19 Pueblos that are left in New Mexico today so when the invaders first arrived to our area they had destroyed a lot of our artwork saying that it was sorcery and witchcraft replace it with Catholicism idols and saints and started taking over all of the resources and looking for riches and gold basically but the Pueblos people welcomed them and took care of them from the long journey to our area and eventually started getting worse of genocide and bloodshed that happened and enslaving our Pueblo people to build churches on all the Pueblos so there was battles to make that stop but the final big battle was the 1680 and we're one of our Pueblo leaders by the name of Popei he was out of okay Wingate Pueblo which is just north of Santa Fe he devised a plan for the public revolt so to bring together all the Pueblos he sent his runners from the northern northern the most northern Pueblo all the way down to the southern Pueblos and all these runners were instructed to carry knotted cords leather cords with knots on it and they distributed it all through all these Pueblos and they instructed the heads of the Pueblo the Pueblos to untie one knot every morning so when the left last knot was untied then that's they rose up and they pushed all the invaders out of each Pueblo so that's how the America's First Revolution was pulled up and nobody hardly knows about it because it's not written in our history books or taught in classes so my whole life is based on educating globally about the public revolt using artwork so I was born into a family of of potters on my mother's side our mother's side of the family our grandmother great grandmother mothers were all potters so I grew up in a family our mom was a potter and our dad was a drum maker Guadalupe and sufferinortes and here's a picture of our family that are family members that are creating using traditional methods and materials and it's a dying art form right now because a lot of people that they have normal jobs and they work outside of the Pueblo so it's really hard for them to use traditional methods and materials and when I say that I mean that we have to go collect our clay we have to go dig up our own clay collect all the materials and it takes a year to process all these materials so everything that you see with our traditional work it's all from from the Eric mother and it takes a year to do this so if you hadn't grown up doing this as a kid which I did since I was six years old we had samples when as a kid doing these artworks and clay it's really hard to get into it because like it takes a lot of amount of time to dedicate to make a living off of artwork as you guys all know probably because you're here at this cool spot you guys are probably all artists but it was it just it was around me the whole time and I had no idea that it was art that we're creating on a daily basis I'd work out our mom would be creating clay on our kitchen table which was her studio so it was always around me after class after school I would go back home and I just jumped into excited to go work with clay and all my friends would be like well aren't you going to come out and play and I was like no I'd rather go draw and like you don't work with clay but I thought everybody was doing it and when I came to be about 15 I realized that not everybody did art and on a daily basis so one of a collector by the name of Robert Guy goes out of Albuquerque which is like 50 miles from Santa Fe he would make buying shirts from for his his company he was a dealer and he would he knew he knew me since I was like six years old and he watched what he knew it was also dying art so he was really close with all the families that did make the pottery and he kept an eye on who was going to continue this tradition so slowly it started to die out and what was traditional over in Cogiti Puebla was a storyteller figure I don't know if you guys are familiar with that but it's like a seated mother or grandmother grandfather even animals that carry babies and they're telling them stories and this is how we hand down our our language our language is not written and this is how we keep our tradition going so that became popular and became traditional for Cogiti Puebla but I learned how to do that and to make the pots with geometrical designs of earth's elements and I learned all that but I guess I got kind of bored or something I don't know what happened but it was like 15 then I started to create different types of figurative pottery or animals and started designing their clothing on them because they became interested in fashion as well so my designs completely changed from my what I was taught so Robert Guy goes the collector was asking my parents like who's teaching this kid how to do all these different types of sculpture what he's doing and like he's teaching them stuff and my parents had my back and said he was just experimenting so he said can you bring him down to Albuquerque he did the showroom and at that point none of our family had ever gone to a showroom because he wouldn't make mind trips to her to all the different potter stones and my parents decided like okay we're going to go check it out we went to his studio and when we walked into the studio like blew our minds like we almost I almost passed out and my parents did too but it turned out that he had the largest collection of historic like figurative co-giddy figurative pottery from the 1800s so everything that I was I was creating when I was 15 and 16 looked exactly like them without seeing them so that was like an a-hole moment in my life of how like what the hell is happening here and like tripping out on that so at that point I knew I was going to dedicate my life to clay and to revive the style of pottery so going back to what what is just talking about like how we create and collect all the different materials for our traditional pottery we go to a certain spot like who knows how long our family has been collecting pottery from these the the clay vein and I remember like my cousins and I or my family my siblings would always travel with our parents to go collect all these materials so there's certain parts in the pulpo that we have to go to these uh these sacred spots so we don't normally just go and like take as much as we can we have to go there um just realizing that who knows how many of our ancestors they've got the clay from this area so we have to introduce ourselves feed the earth mother ask permission state our purpose and take only as much as we can carry and um ask for guidance to make sure that this our work stays alive so we're overprotective of the all the materials that we get and fill out the buckets that we can carry down because it's like a 30 minute hike and up to the side of the mountain back down to the truck fill it and at that point we have to stick it in the in the barn and let it dry out to bone dry because when we get out out of the earth it's still it's still damp and it's so dense like it's pure clay we don't even have to like put it through a a sieve or screen or anything like that so we dig it out and it comes out in clay lumps like you see there and let it dry out till it's bone dry take it out crush it out and I'm explaining to you right now because you'll see a video that's five minutes that condenses it from a year's work then you'll know what's happening so we crush it all up into like quarter inch size pieces put it in a plastic bin fill some water with it and then slowly when the when you pour the water over it it starts to absorb it and it rehydrates itself because if you're to try to soak the pieces right when you get it out of the ground when it's still damp it's so dense like it's not gonna it's not gonna no matter how long you live in the water it's still gonna be stuck to itself to have pure clay rocks in it right so what we want to do is like dry it out completely rehydrate it so it's all evenly saturated then we go to another part of the bubbler which is the bottom left image is to get kind of a grog but we call it temper and it's like palm and stone volcanic ash that we have to take out and that too also comes out pretty pretty fine take that back home throw on our combat boots to get traction lay down some canvas dance on it basically and then it crushes already to a fine powder and then that the temper we put it through two screens and then it comes out like baby powder so once you have your clay soaking for like over two weeks then it starts to pull away from the plastic bin then it's ready to be mixed so you mix the clay with the temper and then like like I said we're overprotective of this I know I have an order or like an intention of making like a medium sized pot I know exactly the amount of clay that I need to to mix we don't have any exacting like the amounts of the ingredients that we put into it we kind of test it with uh once you mix it the first time you run your finger through it then it's um you could see the strokes that it leaves like if it's too if it's super sleek then you add more of the volcanic ash or then it starts to get gritty then it's the perfect mixture so roll into a ball and create your piece and all of our pieces are um coil in straight method so all of the walls are about a quarter inch thick um they um they have to be all the same thickness because we pit fire pit fire is the last process in what we do so there's only one firing so we have to have it all the same thickness because it expands and contracts um once because it's a quick fire maybe like three hours from the beginning to the end so heats up really quick um cools down really quick so it has to have the thin walls like that um if there's any air bubbles in it it'll blow up so um once we like go through um sculpting at them the dries hopefully with no cracks then we sand it take a light coating of water to remove all of the um the dust from it and now that it's all dust free and smooth then we stick it in the oven if you can sit in your normal oven 350 like you're making some cookies or something but you heat it up and then you apply another white clay so the red clay is is all red a red clay body but the white clay so this is put on like a 10 layer so like it's heated up you put it on really thin evaporates and it sticks to it and then starts to go on the porousness of everything um just repeat that process till it completely turns completely white once it's all white um and cooled down then we take our con rag and rag polish it so it goes from a very matte surface to a super glossy surface and you cannot touch it no matter how many times you wash your hands at that point because if you're too levo space that it's going to be white and you actually don't even touch it after you're eating like the needles or something then you won't have it now until after the firing you'll have a big old smudge so it's it's kind of funny because like my younger nieces and nephews know that they're not supposed to touch the pieces when we're working on them at that point but when you fire them you see a little tiny fingerprints you're like I told you not to do that but it's kind of cool to have them there at the same time because they're learning the process and they're with us so it's really cool to see that it's like a signature so I'm like oh you're going to be a potter when you grow up but once it's ready polished and it's ready to be decorated so our traditional colors are black white and red at cogedy and the black paint is the only vegetable part of the whole process and that's made out of wild spinach so on the right side of the image when the purple flowers bloom then that's like an alarm clock for to gather the family and go pick it and this is like a crazy hard thing to do because if you miss the blooming of that then you like we prepared all these materials once a year so you have to hit out the right spot and when we harvest them we pick like eight thirty three gallon size bags of just the leaves like no stems we just have to get the leaves and I always ask my mom like why why do we can't we just cut up the whole thing like totally uh put it in the food processor or something and just like use the stems and everything she's like no just only the leaves yeah and of course I didn't listen and I tried it so I like it takes us about two weeks to make a big batch and I lost the whole batch it's like oh mom knows right so so we once we get the the bag school then we have like the sample in here was like a really small batch so it's probably like about a week's worth to make the black paint but we take it outside and we put it into big um water uh I mean pots full of water boiling and then we just cut the leaves and once about it once about maybe about a third or four day then it starts to disintegrate then we just scoop it out with cotton rags twisted strain it and get the all the all the leaves out and then what we're after is just the juice so once we have the juice like starting off from like six to go pots of boiling water now we have like about maybe just one pot and then that's just continuous boiling so like I always tell people that I've worked with like thank god I have 44 pieces of nephews now great pieces of nephews so the younger ones can stay up all night to watch the fire and help me do that but the last part it's finally condenses and it boils down to like about a gallon and then I take over then I take it inside it's getting really thick like molasses right so you have to watch it really closely because if you burn this at that point it will not stick to the polished white clay slip of the clay body so you've wasted another two weeks then you burn it so you have to watch it really closely at that point and then it's almost like if you guys like make like the red candy apples like it's kind of molten and very that texture then you have to pull it off the fire and then we distribute it onto corn husks and that's how we dry it so on the like around the six month mark it's still like soft like tacky you could kind of bend it within the corn husk but around the year mark it turns like to a jelly rancher so it's like really hard sometimes it comes out green sometimes it comes out brown but uh when we're going to paint up our pots then we crack little pieces off crush it up rehydrated and that's what we used to decorate it for so now we take it outside to pit fire and we use aspen cedar and cow manure and pit fires use like underground but like we just call it pit fire but it's above ground like eight inches and the ground has to be completely bone dry as well so it's really hard to fire in the monsoon season or during the winter that's possible but you have to burn the ground first to make sure that everything's all nice and dry um you we take out the the metal grate and then we put a kiln shelf on it and we fire only one piece at a time all of our pots are fired upside down and our figures are standing up so we have one piece on there then we cover that piece leaving about five inches around it for breathing room with chicken wire and then you cover the whole thing with bone dry cow manure and now it looks like a big igloo and you have to ignite it from each side evenly so i need help every time i fire that and again this is something to do that you have to ignite it evenly so that the fire and the flame goes straight up and it pulls the smoke up with us to kind of avoid the smoke making smoke marks on the pot so it starts to ignite and it's just like just wood just the wood is burning as a fuel but at a certain point maybe about an hour in then the cow manure catches fire so it turns into a big huge bonfire and we stop eating at the wood so then it burns from the outside inward and that creates our kiln so after maybe just at that point you just pray you don't hear any like thuds or snaps or cracks because you can't see the piece of course right and all of you guys that work with clay you guys know like the same sound like you're like oh my god my piece blew up but once you fire it you let it cool down you take it out take the cage off and the cow manure's still intact it's all ashes now take it off it all falls to pieces and you realize that you have your piece as survived or not so now the piece has now transformed from like a green or brown translucent paint to completely black so it hasashed over so you have to wipe it off again and it's good to go at that point because if you handle it your natural oils will give up the Tina to it but to speed up that process we use animal fat or ape white so it gives it like just putting lotion on our skin is the same effect um so here's the the video of a year's work all smashed into five minutes hopefully i can do this he said double click right the sample of where um what a song about the firing process he says nephews are sisters to help us do that another way we learn how to fire is like one of our nephews is a metal smith so he made his uh metal containers that we could use during the um winter time but you have to use like twice the amount of um a field because it is metal so but it still works here's a sample of the storyteller that i was talking about earlier and also with the the bear storyteller sample my mom's piece holding a drum and our dad was a drum maker so you often make little accessories for my mom's pieces my grandmother's on the right hand side and mine in the middle um with i don't know like with a short haircut with breasts and a bow tie and like i was six years old when i made that which is kind of funny but um it's pretty cool and so like my style started to change so i started using the the pots to really design like i love black wine tattoos so like design many tattoos so it's kind of like really practicing on the clay and then like i told you is it was a dying art form and it's like how the hell am i gonna like make the help the next generation latch onto it and learn from it so it's like a revival of social commentary and giving voice back to the clay because all the pieces were broken like i said earlier so this piece of this photograph was from Ben Whittock a photographer which he took in the late 1800s and the first time i seen this one was about 16 after i just said i've been just lived to create clay i said i really want to remake this picture and it just was burning my brain so i asked my family member and they said okay like look at this picture and pick a piece that you want to recreate and these pieces were like up to three feet tall which was unheard of in Cochinie like right now it's still hard to get that big just because of the firing process so i said we're gonna bring back these pieces that we had access to to look at and hold and look at the paint uh how they painted it through our friend bob there he goes in the showroom and so i said we have like a like a month and a half to do this let's all do it so my all my whole family did it and then this is what the result was so the backdrop painting on the first picture on the left hand side was on a canvas and that was like a old Santa Fe trail down in Santa Fe and when i was making uh or when i was actually i was doing i don't remember what it was but in Prague on the right hand side this bridge the st. Charles bridge reminded me of the backdrop painting so i started snapping pictures with the intention that i was going to use that as a background so when i got home and we had all the pieces done there was like 22 pieces and we had them and they were big pieces so like we're it was super scary to take a picture of them because we set up boxes and like fake bear skin had my nephews go get some sand from the fields where we collect the wild spinach plants and we had them all tied up so they won't fall over with um with fishing water it was it was like it was very scary to do that but got the picture cut it out to get into Photoshop cut it out and then place the background in so that was pretty cool and now this piece resides at Cartier Paris and in Paris for an independent collection so that was an awesome project to do with my family here's a sample of some of the larger pots that i did with the geometrical design so it incorporates a lot of earth's elements with not only the clouds the thunder the rain um wild spinach plants this is what coach eddie pottery looks like but then i started it was all based on social commentary the pieces from coach eddie so they were people created a timeline when more people came into our area they started creating caricatures in clay and capturing say like opera singers or the traveling circus type shows that came through the area so you see these cool pieces from the 1800s that have tattoos all over the place or conjoined twins and just all these things that you would imagine in the old school circus so that was like my intention and so um but at a certain time it was put to a stop because victorian attitudes didn't like that what they found out it was caricatures of themselves so like you guys can't make this anymore so that's not all right out but when i was 15 and what i told you about like to see did i tell you about this i don't know why i'm repeating myself it's too about like going to bob gaegos's place and seeing the whole looked exactly like it right so i was like okay i'm going to use this exact storyline of what our people did is to um social commentary so that left the door wide open so now i'm taking my pieces to within the political scene and really commenting on what was happening and i made this piece was um in 2016 and it was a politician at that time was us commenting on the um the dakota axis pipeline so the black snake represents the pipeline with the politician holding bundles of cash but the snake coming to bite him in the back you turn the pot a little bit then you see fracking and slowly the snake infiltrating the body and eating him from the inside out and the last image is a picture of a woman's hand taken this politician out so that was kind of my prediction of what's happening and also this is called cyberbully and it's a the cyberbully sitting on the can tweeting at 5 a.m so that was another prediction piece of what would happen and what was me going down with the classic you know the air there he is and then also commenting on the lgbt community and this piece is called hate is a drag so like a bunch of friends that i do that are drag queens i commented and you made them in clay slowly it started to get into actually manufacturing um leather handbags and clothing and also using like the clay to make sketches of what i wanted to create and in fashion but also making fashion pieces and then then taking the clay and recreating it that way so just always influence itself back and forth i got to work with donna karen like i told the students earlier that came over to the district colorado but here's a sample of the donna karen collaboration that did with her on the left side but it helped me to develop and develop my line and with tisha goya my manager like figured out how to do like all the different um silk scarves someone was wearing one earlier thank you for worrying that um but it's just really cool to go work with a designer at that magnitude and see how her team works together and really figure out your way if you want to do a fashion line and once we released that fashion line almost passed out because your main model was milich over bitch so it's like li lu from the development right and it was really cool and um she gave me a huge props and she used to do a magazine um through the donna karen company so um gave my whole backstory and she um once we put all my designs onto her her fabrics we're able to tell the story of where it came from so that helped me reach a bunch of fashion used to people that had no idea where pojini was or where these designs were about and that was my podium to be able to talk to all these fashion people and say like this is where coming from and direct people back to all this fashion these two people back to our people on pojini i'm saying like you know there's other other artists that she could support so that was a major break for me to work with her and slowly i started picking up all different types of medium uh to work with and utilizing different mediums i was able to do photography body painting fashion combined it all with photoshop so now it's really helping me develop a screenplay doing lithographs as well always concentrating and developing the next character then it goes into hospitality design doing carpet and for all the different hotels and stuff that are in vegas so i was able to work with a company called um um project dynamics so they rebuilt a bunch of different hotels in vegas so that was amazing to do and they just challenged me they said what would your suite look like i said here you go and they had access to all the manufacturers so i was able to do like mirrors desks the chairs the love seats the duvet covers the headboards the blockade everything that you'll see in a hotel room and that's what it looked like um so now like we said earlier like how do you educate the world about what happened to our people what we'll capture the next generation's attention i was like oh shit the film script sorry so i said okay so now um i'm like okay let's go really push all these characters and i designed 19 groups of characters to represent the 19 bubbles that are left in new mexico today so that's where i first started so i started because i love like star wars and uh star trek and battle star galactica all these sci-fi so when i was a kid six years old when i seen the first star wars and it was amazing to me that i remember when i reminisced because like i think me and my family seen the star wars movie when it first came out like all we stayed in the in the theater like all day long we did pay by the way but it was just so cool to just like learn from there and like all of a sudden i came out of the theater saying like oh my god i know this character i know where they're from what ship they drove like how they talk how they dress so i was like okay i want to put that same kind of idea into developing a story about the public revolt happening in two titan dimensions in 1680 and 2180 so that helps me because i'm not an academic person and that helps me really be able to tell the story of the public revolt using film or any kind of medium that artwork that i work in so what these characters are doing a lot of them are coming back from 2180 to the present time and historic times and they're collecting a bunch of our our songs our traditions our way of life our our language and taking those shards and all that information to 2180 storing them or protecting them so that when we get to that timeline all of our traditions and our ceremonies and everything that we do are still alive so that's incorporating that into indigenous futurism but of course being like a sci-fi freak now it lets me really design all of these really cool characters and like through the movies that are in film right now like the Avengers or Black Panther last time about earlier it's like really paying attention to people of color and i really want to thank everybody for having me here in Denver and giving me the chance to invite you guys in to learn about who we are as public people samples of body painting and all my friends i use to do this and we have a blast in my studio trying to get the right shot shooting them and then bringing a photo shot to really make it look like they will develop the characters as much as i could i'm thinking of movie posters that would it look like uh the venusian soldiers where some of the characters that um in the film script their public gets bombed first in the future so that's why they're wearing all the gas masks and the breathing tubes but their journey is to relocate your public and find trying to find some breathable air again taking these characters and then having them interact with the pottery and putting their images on it some samples of how i make my graphics and really thinking about all my sisters and all like even tish like strong level women that helped me pull this storyline off and making the head character of women women empowerment and being kicked out as warriors that you guys all are so you can see the real strength in their women empowerment movement here but it's just fun to really push all the different types of materials you can work with like the center figure was made from billboards and i did a show at fine arts college how many fine arts center in Colorado Springs after that show came down this was a recycled fashion show so i was able to get all the billboards and recreate them into fashion june conneco i don't know if you guys know him he's like a really well-known in ceramicist but he does like huge ceramic pieces that are 15 feet tall and over and he was one of the inspirations that i got invited to go work at the archie bray foundation up in alana montana and that's really hard to get into but i was so lucky and i accepted and i said okay my main goal was to create really huge pieces because i was limited using traditional clay well once i figured out how to when i first introduced into high fire clay i had no idea like there was like red clay i mean different colors of clay textures and everything that all the different glazes compared to just using black white and red right i was so excited like a kid in a candy store just buying all kinds of stuff and looking at all the tools that they had and i said okay i'm going to push myself and really go for it so here's me working the archie bray and like really going as big as i could um some examples of what came out of the archie bray and some of the pieces that are going to be released at the history color out of them so those pieces will be like 45 feet tall and that's super hard to do and well i think it is in clay one of my best friends just in reese he's like six five so he was able to help me build all these pieces and where those long arms could get on the inside and coil ins great because i couldn't like almost probably fell in a couple of them but to use the resources up at the archie bray like with a huge kiln and all the heavy equipment that would look heavy like 600 pound pieces right it's so cool to work there samples of when we're standing on stools trying to get in there but it was just amazing to be able to think and create and just push yourself every student that i work with i always tell them like there's no more imaginary hurdles quit putting that up and i spoke to all of you guys earlier that we're a the behind the scenes tour is like that's a human nature to do it's like self doubt so i like oh my god the first thing is like i can't do it i'm like the first thing is like okay you already do great in yourself like don't put up imaginary hurdles because they're never there to begin with so don't be afraid of failing because all those are the perfect lessons there are best teachers so fail as much as you can you're going to learn that much quicker so just go for it and don't hold yourself back some of them went after they're fired really experimenting with the color and the type of glaze application but yeah you'll see some of these pieces that hc wants to come out for in on may 18th a sample of the size one of my friends sujean choi that was also a resident of that archie bray so i was like please stand next to them and get a picture like to show you know the size of them so i mean this whole thing is basically a revolution and clay guided by my ancestors our family really taking it to the next level of developing the recon watchmen which are going to be a focus at runners and gliders as well but taking plaster molds of my friends faces putting them sculpting using monster clay over it and then really carving them to look like the actual pottery and then make using silicone and resins to make their masks so after we got all that then but then layer of mass like now you could just go by them at like party city or something but of course they never had these characters there so i had to make it myself and that's what they look like once they're done combining the fashion and the all the the foam fabrication their armor and everything to make up so some samples of what they look like and we shot outdoors at the bisti bad lines in northern mexico this place is so crazy if you guys have a chance to go check it out and do it it's like insane they're like you're on another planet um so meow well if you guys have one here but the original one was in Santa Fe it started so i got invited a bunch of their original members are my friends so they invited me like to do a little exhibition in it so i was like okay i don't have no time but we'll do it now last year was perfect so we filmed all of these models wearing the costumes of the recon watchmen made the pieces in clay filmed them and everything and just like another behind the scenes of what we're building at meow well so we use like wallpaper we use like the huge head was like from the floor to the ceiling we used um foam and uh what was that word again germy fiberglass i don't know why i can't remember that but uh fiberglass and it was like another way of thinking because like through meow well if you guys like touch everything and climb on it or selfies and stuff so it was a different way for me to think rather than having everything behind glass or a vitrine right like in galleries or museums but i said okay i'll just challenge myself to do that so we built these big um heads and then turn all the the video um that we filmed with all the costuming on and it was a turn out to be a really cool exhibition at silent phase so if you guys are down there go check it out if you can um so the next so going through this whole process of having interact with the public um selfies and all that stuff right and it comes to the show that i want to do at the history colorado center it's called runners and gliders um and this is just like a quick behind the scenes of what how i bring the show together like the design concepts like it's amazing like to be able to work with the hc center because like usually i mean i'm trying to teach all the different students that are getting to show in galleries or museums like to really have the um lines of communication completely open you have to communicate with their designers with the curators and directors and speak your mind and because like a lot of people that do shows they give them the artwork and have no say so and all of a sudden they display it but um and sometimes that's a little bit disappointing but other times they hit it on the spot so you never know what you're going to get but every time i do work with people i ask them like is there any way i could help design can i do this or are my ideas before you know agree to it uh which was cool that um Jeremy wasn't afraid and it goes i said can i have the the layout of the room he sent it to me and i completely they're they're going to get it to begin with so i like built walls and like said okay here you go i'm going to have a rejection room i'm going to have 3d mapping i want to have videos going like really huge artwork and another thing that we're working on is using augmented reality and one of my team members Sebastian Bustos he is out of albuquerque and he knows how to work with all those AI and all the augmented reality virtual reality stuff so this is going to be the first show that really brings that to life so you'll start seeing all these different advertisements around town even projections on buildings that's a possibility of what might happen crossing fingers but it's really cool so like when you go into a museum like i want a piece that's 20 foot tall but that takes up a lot of retail space so you can do it through AR augmented reality like using your smartphone you scan the piece and all of a sudden like all these 10 foot tall or the photographs come alive so you'll see like a double kind of installment at this museum when it opens so we're excited about that but just also utilizing their third collections of historic Cochiti public pottery pieces have that energy show that people like were at progress from that time to what we're doing right now it's it's it's so it's so fun to work with people that believe with you believe in you and like our trusting of what you're doing and what your vision is but this was the layout of what it was going to look like what it is going to look like this was like when we first started so they gave no they I mean they agreed with everything that I designed so I was very happy about because usually they're like oh you can't do that you can't do this but for them to trust me that much is a big it's a big thanks to them here's the title wall so the images of the costuming the models and it's a I don't remember the dimensions of this of this piece but when you go into the title wall read what the museum is about I mean the exhibitions about then you take out your smartphone scan it over this piece will come alive you go around the corner then you'll see four big pedestals that have that are blank here but they'll have like my 45 foot tall ceramic busts on there the middle pedestal will have a wood obelisk got another friend another student in a collaborative with over at Anderson Ranch in Aspen he's making a black obelisk with a silver cap tip let you shine your phone at that then it all of a sudden like a 10 foot tall levitating rotating bust over here so it's just really thinking and taking a line of what's available now to AR and all the stuff that you see on Instagram that's pretty insane to get it to it so that's pretty cool but these are just the mock-ups of what I wanted the museum to look like and it was so cool that now it looks like the whole piece is all cements um but it's um it's just a post-cement it's an artist that they hired to come in and really texturize is texturizing look like the cement walls but when you aim it at that piece like there's nothing there on the runway called this little thing the little pedestal but when you do your AR and all of a sudden like one of the characters will pop up also the behind the scenes of all the mannequins what that's gonna look like so all of the all of these costume mean that you seen throughout this presentation you'll see a lot of the costume in there and that is my presentation and you guys I mean I do a lot of the I do a lot of the behind the scenes and everything on Instagram so you guys have any questions reach out to me that way if you have any questions cool I hope you enjoyed it questions yes it's a different clay source yeah like and it's just pretty crazy about that because only that white clay it's a white clay slip that works with our red clay body like I've tried um so because that's it's really scarce to find that plate white slip and I've been testing all kinds of different types of white clay slip but none of it it'll like peel off the red clay body it'll wipe off or it won't come out white so this is like it's crazy but that's only that material works with this material so yeah it's separate from the from the palm of stone I hope you guys can all make it to the opening on it's Thursday May 18th so we're gonna we're gonna have a good time and I think we're doing a uh panel discussion at MSU right I think what time what time is that do you know about that oh no I don't know but there's gonna be a panel discussion with one of my other friends Greg deal so we'll be talking about it's it's gonna be a pretty cool discussion because they're hosting they're hosting a seminar that is from the American Alliance wait American Museum Alliance so like all the directors all the curators will be coming to Denver for this seminar so they're going to party over at HC so we get all those people get to see the show and it's like it's a little bit nerve wracking but oh well this is how it goes yeah so it's a feature film I'm working on so I've been doing it for over two decades now so it's like five or 20 years of but it is like all the different shows that we've done and it's the reason why we did those upticking baby steps is because again I didn't go to school for anything so I don't know anything about film but the more people and more talks that you do you attract those people and you know you send your your rocket a desire out there like I want to meet people I want to pull the movie industry and then all of a sudden people knocking your door email you then you get to meet more people from the movie industry but it's all about developing and protecting your intellectual property so all of you guys that are artists make sure you pay attention to that is like another big lesson that I try to enforce and instill in students that I work with is to protect your intellectual property be going to your life I'm being an artist really make sure that you take that time it costs money to do that a little bit of money but then in the end like you're protected under copyrights tree marks and registered marks and it's it's it's an investment in yourself so make sure to pay attention to that because like now the social networks yeah it's like free to advertise it's a good thing but also a lot of people like it yourself and they'll snag it from you so you're at least you are prepared to in a lawyer sense of way to protect your intellectual property but yeah we're working on the film yeah like all the different a lot of the music stuff music parts of everything that I do and like the scores and stuff like I make the music with helps in collaborations through some of my friends so I wish I don't know if I should learn those but I don't remember like the it's mostly electro music that goes with it but a bunch of my friends are musicians and we record little snippets from them they send me clips and then I rearrange everything and remaster it and make the soundtrack for all of these different projects that we do so there'll be like a six minute music version that comes out at history Colorado in the projection room going along with again like it's I think about the artwork as a like a whole storyboard so all the different shows like I'm developing the characters more and more and more so each show that I do each season or whatever you call it then I make sure that I we have to enter all that stuff into our trademark attorneys and have the backing of say a museum say like we released it in 2023 or whatever 24 that we're doing like our basil but it's all categorized and it's all done the legal way so that you're protecting yourself but yeah music is included or not I love bumping out and rocking out in the studio I'm just curious about working with all of the activism that relies on the future and also working with places like history museum and creating this semi-infectional story that's based on the future and I just wanted to know the process of just how you can go to the past and present and future yeah I get what you're saying I started like doing when I first wrote the movie script like happening in two different kinds of events right that's my prayer of like saying like hopefully we learn from the past our history like not to relive a public revolt and all the genocide and bloodshed that happened but I'm trying to tell it in a because if I were to tell it in an old school way I bet you like your demographic the people that are here will pay attention to it but if you see characters like this and like polished and presented in a futuristic kind of way then that gives me a bigger advantage or opportunity to talk to more people but I really come out and take History Colorado to take a chance and having this type of show because that's normally not what they do but to really work with an artist and to give the artist not free reign but just like a bigger opportunity to present our work and then again to really attract a different type of different age group to a history museum but yeah it all works together and the prayer in the end is to not repeat our history and tell exactly what happened like everybody came together and lived in peace again but it's all positivity behind it but including our truth and having people acknowledge what happened the atrocities of bloodshed raised you know all the murders and stuff that happened in the name of looking for riches and gold and converting into a religion you know when we already we don't have a religion there's people it's a way of life but to be forced into that there's a lot of people that not only indigenous people that went through that but a lot of people don't know our stories and you know when I rent cars in other cities they're like oh we need your passport like I'm not from Mexico I'm from New Mexico so I mean it's just funny like that they don't think we're still here but slowly it's catching on and that's the prayer in the end is to acknowledge the people that are here the lands and know the real story which are not taught in schools or in textbooks so I think this way it has been working for over 20 years now to present it in a hard presentation thanks thank you guys have a good evening