Biography of:
Roxanne Swentzell
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Roxanne Swentzell was born in 1962 to Ralph and Rina Swentzell in Taos, New Mexico. Her mother is Santa Clara Pueblo and father is of German descent. She grew up in Santa Fe, New Mexico traveling up and down the Rio Grande River from Taos, Santa Clara and Santa Fe. She currently lives at the Santa Clara Pueblo. Swentzell has had many of her initial experiences with making art in the atmosphere and guidance of her family. Especially important were the influences of her mother, Rina Swentzell, a potter, and her uncle, Michael Naranjo, an acclaimed blind sculptor.
Swentzell says of her work, "As a young child, I found it hard to communicate through language and turned easily to expressing myself through art instead. This way of communicating became my life. I took to sculpting the human figure because it showed the most direct way of expressing my human emotions. These emotions became my language and I soon found out that it was a language that was universal. It has been a very uplifting feeling that people from anywhere in the world can look at my work and understand it. Through my sculpture, I tell about my experiences as a Native American, as a woman, as a mother, wife, girlfriend, as an artist, as a human being in today's society. I tell about life through the human figure expressing emotion. It is my story, but its also everyone's story. I believe that when we reach each other with our emotions, we feel less alone and more understood...thus loved."
Swentzell attended the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the Portland Museum Art School in Portland, Oregon. Her work has been exhibited at American Craft Museum, New York, NY, Heard Museum, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, New York, NY, Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, PA, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, D.C., The White House, Washington, D.C. She has been collected in many private and public collections.
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HEARD MUSEUM
