Art in public spaces, including murals, can serve as a vehicle for dialogue about history, describe relationships, and depict the resilience of the community in the hope to create equity, agency, and healing. Created in 2020, artist Naranjo Morse says, “This mural was created to tell the story of seeking to become our most compassionate selves, our most conscious selves, and recognize our ability and responsibility to bring good medicine into the world. It is an acknowledgment of the incredible fact that we are the current articulations of all the people we come from and that today we are all here together.”

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Eliza Naranjo Morse spends some of her time as a two-dimensional artist. Her work explores aspects of the human experience through articulating anthropomorphic characters, collected objects, and landscapes. These subjects become vehicles for processing current events, personal experiences, and spiritual seeking. Eliza is informed by the land-based, creative and cultural information of her elders, and the current world she explores and learns about. Her cartoon aesthetic is refined by technical skills developed through formal training and

a continuing relationship to the material. Eliza was born in 1980 in New Mexico and is the articulation of two different cultural backgrounds; a Tewa mother and an Anglo father from Connecticut. Coming from the families of Sicneros, Sartori, Naranjo, and Morse, she is connected through cellular memory to parts of the world she is unfamiliar with and those places and understanding become woven into her experience of being centered in the place of Northern New Mexico. Eliza has shown her work internationally and nationally including Cumbre de el Tajin (Veracruz, Mexico), Ekaterinburg Museum of Fine Arts (Ekaterinburg, Russia), Chelsea Art Museum (New York, New York), SITE Santa Fe (Santa Fe, New Mexico), Axle Contemporary (Santa Fe, New Mexico), Heard Museum (Phoenix, Arizona), Berlin Gallery (Phoenix, Arizona), School for Advanced Research (Santa Fe, New Mexico), and the Institute of American Indian Arts, Museum of Contemporary Native Art (Santa Fe, NM.) She is the proud art teacher to many brilliant young Artists at the Kha’p’o Community School in Santa Clara Pueblo.

Image:

Eliza Naranjo Morse, b. 1980 (Santa Clara Pueblo)
All Together. Making our Way. Every day. Medicine., 2020
Acrylic paint
(Detail)