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'Colchas,' Folk Art From the San Luis Valley at UCCS
March 1, 2007 2:46 PM
The stories and colors of the San Luis Valley, portrayed in stitches, are on display at UCCS. The show of "colchas," New Mexico-style embroidery, opens tonight and runs until the end of the month. Noel Black talked to the show's curator, and featured aritist Josephine Lobato.
"My name is Josephine Lobato. I'm from Chama, Colroado. I do colcha, traditional colcha, New Mexican-style, traditional colcha, which is embroidered, but not really. It's only one stitch, and it's called the colcha stitch."
New Mexican style colcha is a colorful, textured embroidery that is often hung in the home. Beginning tonight and running through the month of March, Josephine Lobato's colchas will hang in the lower level of the student center at UCCS. The show is a labor of love for organizer Suzanne McCauley. She's an ethnographer and folklorist in the visual and performing arts department. MacCauley has written a book on Colcha called "Stitching Rights." She met Lobato in 1990 while doing research on colcha revitalization projects in the San Luis Valley and has been working with her ever since.
"I consider her a collaborator, a co-worker, certainly not an object of research."
In fact, Lobato wouldn't cooperate with McCauley's research unless she learned the technique herself. Though "colcha" means quilt or bed spread in Spanish, the term has come to be associated with these kinds of embroidered paintings.
"They take the name from the stitch, and the stitch is just basically a straight stitch with an anchoring stitch that runs perpendicular to it. And the reason I stress that is that it creates an interesting visual texture, and also tactile. So it's lovely to touch these things."
Early colchas were primarily representational, depicting mostly floral motifs, but none none told stories. The narrative colchas began appearing during revitalization movements in the San Luis Valley in the 1970s. Lobato began stitching during a second wave of revitalization in 1988 when she was 55 years old. She was working on a story for the Colorado Historical Society about the tradition. Lobato is now considered a master of this visual folk art .
"Josie is a an artist who is literally driven by her visions and her passion to create these pieces. And they grow out of her imagination, her memories of the valley during a very particular time during the transition, between the Hispanic culture and the Anglo influences that came into the valley. "
One of Lobato's uniquely historical colchas titled "La Sierra," tells the story of a land battle in the San Luis Valley involving her husband and a land owner named Jack Taylor.
"This was a major battle. They went to the supreme court. It shows you Jack Taylor with his gun, shooting. And the trucks are carrying the lumber out, because he was selling lumber. And the environmentalists from the colleges were coming down, so there's some environmentalists under one of the trucks, and that's Rocky Madrid who was very active with the land rights council, that was fighting. And that's Rocky Madrid on the gate, he handcuffed himself to the gate."
Visually, the piece is deceptively simple and almost child-like, but even the cheerful colors of the mountains tell a deeper a story about the true fabric of the Chama community and the sophistication of Josephine's artistic talents.
"The purple color is - purple is a color of penance, or a color of conflict, and I took art classes, and I love Van Gogh, so I try to make my sky move like Van Gogh did, because it needed to show movement and conflict. "
Lobato uses only 100% Peruvian wool yarn to stitch her labor-intensive pieces onto muslin. She incorporates the colors of the images she sees around her everyday.
"I go out in the morning and look at the sky, and try to visually kind of put them into the pieces. In fact, I do a first draft and a second draft, sometimes a third and fourth before I decide it's time to put them on the cloth. "
Though the colchas could be considered visual histories or folk narratives of her life in Costilla County , Lobato prefers to think of them more broadly.
"I think most of them are memories and traditions and culture and some of the things that I feel are going to be lost. And I think they are, pretty much some of the traditions are being lost anymore."
This narrative way keeping traditions, she says, is also what distinguishes her work from other more common forms of colcha.
"In the New Mexico area, you find a lot of pieces in the Spanish Market The difference between what that I do and what they do is that I do stories. I like to do stories."
Josephine Lobato's works will be on display through the month of March in celebration of Women's History Month. You can call 262-3865 or go to the events calendar at uccs.edu. To see a slideshow of Josephine's colchas, go to krcc.org.
Posted by Eric Whitney on March 1, 2007 2:46 PM | Permalink
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