A national program supports Southern Arizona artists to bring their art practices into community
by Kimi Eisele
Porfirio “Pilo” Mora holds a small clay pot he’s formed by hand and burnishes its sides with a polished stone, adding shavings from a bar of soap to make the surface shine. He’s painted an intricate geometric pattern on the clay, a crisp maze of green circling the pot. Eventually, he’ll build a small pyramid of wood, light a match, and set the pot in the middle to fire.
Mora calls this pottery practice a “prehistoric heritage,” one he started learning more than fifty years ago in his hometown, the small rural pueblo of Mata Ortiz in Chihuahua, Mexico. He continues the tradition in Tucson, where he’s lived for the past fifteen years. And this spring he’ll share it with a group of neighbors on Tucson’s south side, engaging them in their own creativity, and planting seeds for new local economies.
Mora is one of four Tucson artists funded by the New York-based Artists At Work (AAW) program, which provides artists in six US cities with an eighteen-month salary, health care, and other benefits, as they work with community organizations to address local issues through their artistic practice. Joining Mora are Harrison Preston, a Tohono O’odham potter; Katrina Kerstetter, a mixed-media artist working with Tucson’s refugee community; and Shane Beeshligaii, an Apache and Navajo metalsmith.
To help identify artists and make sure they are locally supported, AAW partners with host organizations in each city. In Tucson the Southwest Folklife Alliance (SFA), which supports traditional and heritage-based artists (and publishes BorderLore), serves as local partner.
Artists in the program address issues pertinent to where they live, says Gabriela Yadegari, AAW program coordinator and former Tucson resident. In Los Angeles, for example, artists are connecting their art practices to fire recovery after last year’s Eaton and Palisades fires. In Dearborn, Michigan, four Arab American artists are working to highlight Arab culture, connect communities to their home countries, and reestablishing connections lost in the diaspora, Yadegari says.
Denise Uyehara, program manager for artists services at SFA, says the selected Tucson artists were already working in the communities where their projects will happen, helping them develop meaningful and cultural significant programs.
All the artists in the Tucson program are focusing on cultural preservation, she says.
Playing with Mother Earth on Tucson’s South Side
The way Mora tells it, Mata Ortiz pottery is inspired by Paquimé or Casas Grandes traditions revived in the 1970s by a potter named Juan Quezada Celado, who studied those early forms. The practice became a “blessing,” Mora says, helping residents support themselves economically more consistently than they could with ranching or agriculture.
Today’s Mata Ortiz potters use the same process as potters of those early cultures. “Using the materials of the region, the pigments of the region, making everything by hand. And even copying the same designs as those early pots,” Mora says.
Mora will share the practice with residents from barrios along Tucson’s South 12th Avenue and elsewhere on the south side who are affiliated with Regeneración, a grassroots collective of multigenerational neighbors involved in local organizing and cultural work.
Since 2022, Regeneración has been working to establish a Community Land Trust in the neighborhood and is working with SFA to launch La Doce Center for Cultural Organizing at Louis’ Market, once a Chinese grocery store. Mora’s residency will bring together participants together across age, language, and life experience to build confidence, a sense of what’s possible, and “a moment of grounding and joy,” says Regeneración Co-director Nelda Ruíz.
Mora has seen the way working with clay invites a playful connection to the earth. “Small children in their mothers’ arms are often wanting to reach for the dirt. I always say that when we have clay in our hands playing, it’s as if we are playing with our mother, with the earth,” he says.
Ruíz believes this approach will resonate strongly with participants, many of whom already “already hold a strong relationship to land, place and ancestral ways of knowing, especially through food, gardening, and everyday practices of care,” she says.
Participants will create clay ollas, small pots used in backyard self-watering systems, to take home and to gift to others. “It’s going to be a full circle moment,” Ruiz says. “From learning with Pilo, to expanding on existing systems of care and expanding that knowledge with others.
For the workshops, Mora’s goal is to introduce some techniques and see what “sticks.” “There are people who can’t even imagine making something. If there are two or three that want to learn more, I’m ready to show them,” he says.
Ruiz says the residency will inform future artistic and economic activities for the neighborhood and at Louis’ Market. “It’s something that could grow into a consistent offering,” she says, which fits the larger vision for Louis’ Market as a place where cultural practice is central. “This collaboration could help prototype what it looks like to build creative infrastructure that’s accessible, intergenerational and grounded in neighborhood leadership while also honoring local artists as key partners.”
Re-energizing Traditional O’odham Pottery Practices
While Mora will introduce a heritage practice from Mexican ancestral lands, Preston is working with a collective of O’odham potters to re-energize and re-introduce pottery techniques indigenous to southern Arizona.
Traditional Tohono O’odham pottery is made using clays harvested locally, hand-built, hand-dyed, and hand fired, Preston says. Pots were used on a daily basis prior to metal pots and pans or plastic. “This is a tradition that helped us survive in the desert,” Preston says. “It’s how we stored our water and made our food. So that’s why we really want to keep it going.”
Preston took his first pottery class in 2017 with Kathleen Vance and Teresa Choyguha, who taught a community class in the San Xavier District of the Tohono O’odham Nation on the traditional technique known as paddle and anvil (or rock), which differs Southwest Pueblo traditions and Mata Ortiz pottery.
He was caregiving for his aunt who was ill at the time. He’d spend the day tending to his aunt, then “I’d come home and pot and make stuff until I went to sleep. That helped take all that stress away. It’s how I honed my process.”
Nothing Preston created survived in that class the firing process. But that just encouraged him to keep going, he says. “I just needed the basics to get started. By the time we were done with the class I was firing pots at home.”
For his AAW project, Preston is working with the O’odham Haha’adam Collective, which was started by potter Reuben Naranjo, Jr., to expand and advocate for the tradition.
Of the nearly 30,000 members of the Tohono O’odham Nation, only twenty people know the process of creating traditional pots, Preston says. Of that twenty, only ten or fewer are doing it routinely. He is the only member of the San Xavier District making traditional pots.
Preston is also the youngest member of the Collective. Motivated to get other young people involved, he also recognizes the dedication required. “It’s a lot of work to having to dig the clay, prepare it, make the pots, and in the end, you don’t know if it will survive the fire or not. So that dissuades a lot of people,” he says.
It’s also requires time and labor to give public demonstrations and workshops, he says. After focusing on these activities during their initial years, the Collective’s members soon realized they also needed time and support for themselves, to gather, teach one another, and bring in potters from sister O’odham communities to share different techniques. So AAW funds are supporting Preston to do his artwork, organize gatherings, and support other members of the collective with travel and honoraria.
Vance says the support comes at an important time. “People here remember the big ollas that sat under the ramadas. They were a welcome sign–when people came to visit others, they were always welcome to get water. People also still remember the taste of foods cooked in those vessels, with a more earthen and sweeter taste,” she says.
But while people remember the uses of the pots, they don’t know how to make them. “That’s what we’re really trying to promote for the next generation—to help others learn to harvest and process clay.”
As one of Preston’s teachers, Vance says she’s very happy he’s been given this opportunity. “That’s what a teacher wants: for their students to be better and to keep going and to move forward.”
Connecting to Many Cultures
Uyehara says the AAW support for heritage-based artists helps carry on techniques passed down through generations to their broader community. “They are able to connect with practices that have been around for thousands of years, and this has meaning on familial and spiritual levels.”
But Yadegari says supporting artists working within cultural communities doesn’t just benefit members of those communities. “The loss of culture is a risk that we are all facing. This is our shared history as Americans. This work deepens the connection that we can all share and helps us identify with one another’s cultures.”
Indeed, cross-cultural connection is what Kerstetter, a mixed media artist, is bringing to a network of refugees in Tucson.
After teaching English in South Korea for twenty years, Kerstetter returned to Tucson, her hometown, and founded the Koru Multicultural and Diverse Library, a collection of mindfulness and cultural books that help people connect and create community. After seeking out volunteer opportunities with refugee populations, she landed at the Iskashitaa Refugee Network, an organization that works to integrate UN refugees into the community through gleaning, gardening, and other educational food programs, essentially running its weekly Refugee Garden Art Program (RGAP).
“People think refugees come and take from the community,” Kerstetter says. “But this program will focus on what they are bringing.”
Her project brings artmaking and belonging to the garden, where people of different cultures and languages gather every week to weed and glean in the garden.
From her time teaching English in Korea, Kerstetter learned that people can connect through visual imagery. Of the more than one thousand books she’s gathered for Koru Library, some eighty five percent are picture books. “These are a really quick way to help people share experiences,” she says. She brings books to the garden as a catalyst for creativity.
“Not everyone run and picks up the books,” she says. “Some of them, if they’ve been in refugee camps, they may never have been to a library.” Using picture books, however, is an easy way for people to engage in learning others’ stories and telling their own.
“We go around and discuss the book and what experiences we’ve had, then we move to creating art, using what we’ve shared as inspiration to create. It’s the starting point of a conversation.”
One thing she’s learned so far is that community happens without shared language. Refugees in the program represent up to twelve different countries and speak various languages. “They can sit together and there’s a sense of community even though we are all from different places. Language isn’t that important.”
Funds from AAW will be used to improve the garden space and provide supplies for the art program. She’s also giving opportunities to the refugee volunteers to share knowledge and crafts with others. One man wants to share what he knows about medicinal plants, another woman has plans to teach barrette making.
Through conversation and creativity, she tries to encourage the continuation of heritage. “It’s really important that people don’t lose that pride even though they are here, that they continue to teach their children about their heritage and culture.”
A longer-term vision is setting up a market for the refugee participants to sell their work, she says. “The most important thing is to give them a space, because of how crazy the world is right now, where there’s well-being and community. Even the staff at Iskashitaa. Everyone needs that mindful well-being space.”
Supporting Artists as Whole People
A critical component of AAW is the extent of support it offers artists, Uyehara says. “The program really sees the artist as a whole person. It’s not just supporting a project but supporting the artists who are carrying out the project.”
Which also means supporting an artist’s diverse interests.
Shane Beeshligaii, an Apache and Navajo silversmith makes traditional Navajo jewelry as well as a specific form of micro-inlay he learned from his father. At Tucson’s Mission Garden, a living agricultural museum and demonstration garden of Sonoran Desert-adapted heritage fruit trees, traditional local heirloom crops and edible native plants, Beeshligaii will share traditional metalsmithing and copper casting techniques from a variety of Indigenous traditions in the region.
“He’s interested in what you can learn both from being on those grounds and from icons that from your Indigenous culture,” Uyehara says.
All the artists say they are grateful to be part of the AAW program.
Mora says the support has “opened more doors for me, introduced me to others, and helped me develop in my work. Without it I might not still be here in the United States.”
Preston says both the health care support and the salary has made a big different for him. In the past, he says he’s had to do as many markets as possible throughout the year to sell work. The AAW support has allowed him to rest a little and focus on more experimental work. Also, last fall he was able to take advantage of a cultural exchange with artists in Kazakhstan. “If it wasn’t for the salary I wouldn’t have been able to go, I wouldn’t have had the funds,” he says.
Kerstetter says in addition to the boost financially and emotionally AAW provides, she’s also been grateful to connect with artists across the country. A convening in November brought the artists from all six cities together to meet in person. “The larger network is very supportive and encouraging,” she said. “All the artists are very humble, soft people doing good things.”