Cara and Diego Romero forge their own paths through contemporary Indigeneity and Western pop culture

“Cara and Diego Romero: Tales of Futures Past,” on view through Feb. 8 at the Albuquerque Museum, encourages viewers to compare and contrast the work of two Santa Fe-based artists, photographer Cara Romero (Chemehuevi) and her husband, Diego Romero (Cochiti), a ceramic artist and lithographer. We can see the cross-pollination of ideas, as well as points of divergence.

Diego Romero looks at Indigenous life primarily through the lens of Western pop culture, it seems, whereas Cara Romero looks at Western pop culture through an Indigenous lens. This is a subtle but important distinction. One approach is not better than the other, but they are distinct paths of inquiry.

Diego Romero’s lithograph “Pueb Fiction” (2020) humorously reimagines the poster for Quentin Tarantino’s “Pulp Fiction,” replacing the Uma Thurman character with a Pueblo woman wearing a tablita headdress and other traditional accessories. Like the characters in Tarantino’s film, Romero’s figure is a caricatured fiction who calls attention to pop culture’s role in producing and perpetuating myths.

In his pottery, Diego Romero tells heightened, mythic stories of Pueblo life — past, present and future — in a visual language that mixes the dancing geometries of ancient Mimbres pottery with the aesthetics of Marvel superhero art and ancient Greek pottery known as amphorae. Why Greek amphorae? That might seem out of left field until you realize that those painted trophy-jugs from the Panathenaic Games were the superhero art of their era — a form of popular art that extolled the virtues of physical excellence and valor. So, Western pop art, both ancient and contemporary, acts as the container for Diego Romero’s Indigenous narratives.

Cara Romero’s black-and-white photograph “Life in the West” (2022) re-creates the image of a damsel in distress tied to the railroad tracks by a dastardly villain — an old silent film cliche first seen in “Barney Oldfield’s Race for a Life” (1913) and “Teddy at the Throttle” (1917) and parodied countless times since. “Life in the West” subverts this trope by making the damsel Indigenous, since the ones in the silent films were always white. By centering white victimhood, such films elided the real violence railroads brought to Indigenous communities in the form of increased settler expansion and resource extraction.

On the surface, it may seem that Cara Romero is doing the same thing her husband is doing — using Western pop-cultural tropes as frames for Indigenous stories — but she takes it one step further.

Early silent film directors built tension by showing oncoming trains barreling directly toward the camera — a shot first employed by the Lumière brothers’ in their 1895 film “The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station” and redeployed in many damsel-in-distress flicks. But the use of one-point perspective for dramatic effect has a much earlier pedigree in Western art. In the early 1400s, it was associated with Italian Renaissance masters Leonardo da Vinci and Masaccio. By enlivening one-point perspective with actual motion, early 20th century train films accomplished what the Old Masters could not: they fully conquered pictorial space — and just a few decades after real trains conquered real space in the American West.

In “Life in the West,” Cara Romero’s one-point perspective links the viewer to the distant horizon. She does this not only to evoke silent movie cliches but as a visual shorthand for the entire history of Western representational art and the colonialist gaze, which sees space and time as things to be conquered. This is the x-axis within the world of her image.

There is also a y-axis. The model in the picture, Kaa Folwell (Santa Clara), is a respected contemporary potter who comes from a long line of Pueblo potters. In Cara Romero’s theatrical photograph, Folwell plays the damsel role, yes, but she also portrays herself. In her bound hands, she holds a pottery piece made by her grandmother, Jody Folwell. An invisible line passes vertically from the earth through the artist’s body through her grandmother’s clay pot and upward to the heavens.

If the x-axis of the train tracks represents the colonization of space and time from a Western perspective, the y-axis represents the Indigenous perspective, where land is not a thing to be conquered or passed through quickly but the very source of one’s being, and where time does not rush forward on a single, inexorable track but flows in cycles, linking past and future generations within the present moment. Viewed along the x-axis, we see an anonymous Indigenous damsel threatened by colonization. But the y-axis reveals a self-aware artist and culture-bearer — a real, living person with a history — who is committed to preserving ancestral knowledge and carrying it into the future.

There are moments in the show where Cara and Diego Romero’s influence on each other is clear. In 2018, Diego Romero made a painted ceramic portrait of his wife as the superhero Wonder Woman, and in 2020, she made a photographic portrait of the jeweler and bodybuilder Arla Marquez (Seneca-Cayuga, Shoshone-Bannock and Blackfoot) as Wonder Woman. In both cases, the titles inform us that what we are seeing is not a generic “Indigenous Wonder Woman” but a mythologized portrait of an actual person whose life and deeds deserve to be immortalized in superhuman form.

It’s wonderful seeing these two pieces together. Diego’s portrait feels like something a proud husband would make. Cara’s photograph affects me more, though, because small details like the tattoo on Marquez’s forearm point to a reality beyond the mythologized image. The philosopher Roland Barthes, who wrote the classic photographic theory book “Camera Lucida” (1980), would have called Marquez’s tattoo the “punctum,” the thing that punches through the surface of the image and makes me feel something — a tiny pin-prick to the heart. Whereas Diego Romero’s art remains within the realm of myth, Cara Romero’s pulls us back to the real world, giving a glimpse of the real Indigenous heroes and heroines behind the capes and costumes.

“Tales of Futures Past” was originally presented at the Figge Art Museum in Davenport, Iowa, and traveled to the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, California, before having its homecoming, so to speak, at the Albuquerque Museum. For its final iteration, curator William Gassaway chose to add two of Cara Romero’s monumental “Four Horsewomen” photographs, which are being presented here for the first time in public. One of them is 26 feet wide — larger than some billboards — and breathtaking. You might think the difference in scale between these works and Diego Romero’s fruit bowl-sized objects would cause the exhibition to feel unbalanced, but the pottery holds its own, thanks in no small part to Gassaway’s thoughtful layout.

“Tales of Futures Past” serves as an excellent introduction to both artists’ work, their mutual influence, and what makes their practices distinctive. These two leading voices in Indigenous art are both great storytellers. And while they’re not telling the same stories in the same way, their voices harmonize beautifully.

Logan Royce Beitmen is an arts writer for the Albuquerque Journal. He covers visual art, music, fashion, theater and more. Reach him at lbeitmen@abqjournal.com or on Instagram at @loganroycebeitmen.