Drawing from his community’s roots in social commentary, Virgil Ortiz crafts a future without limitations, and his epic series Revolt 1680/2180 reaches a climax this fall.
Virgil Ortiz is an educator. A traditional Cochiti potter whose work spans more than a dozen media, Ortiz’s monumental artistic practice carries the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 into the future, asking questions about historical memory and consciousness, Indigenous futurisms and pedagogy, and Indigenous agency in the face of settler colonialism. Drawing from his community’s roots in social commentary, Ortiz crafts a future without limitations. His epic art project Revolt 1680/2180 reaches a climax this fall.
The 1598 Spanish colonization of what is now known as New Mexico forever changed Cochiti life. After decades of socioeconomic imperialism and brutal religious persecution (which included the destruction of Cochiti ceramics, which were seen as idolatrous), Pueblo communities—led by Po’Pay (Ohkay Owingeh)—revolted against the Spanish in 1680. The only successful uprising against a colonial power in North America, the Revolt ensured the ongoing survival of Pueblo ways of life.
Eleven generations and 289 years later, Virgil Ortiz created his first clay figure. His grandmother, Laurencita Herrera (1912-1984), was a matriarch of Cochiti pottery, and his mother, Seferina Ortiz (1931-2007) carried on her family’s tradition. Watching her at the kitchen table making pottery, six-year-old Ortiz wanted to join in. “Traditional clay is the heart and soul of everything I do,” shares Ortiz. “I was born into a family of potters, into a community of potters. Everything I do I learned from my father, mother, grandmothers, and great-grandmothers.” The following year, he saw Star Wars in theaters, forever shaping his aesthetic. Ortiz continued working with clay as a young adult, winning his first SWAIA Indian Market award at fourteen. At sixteen, he remembers seeing historical Pueblo figurative ceramics in collector and dealer Robert Gallegos’s showroom in Albuquerque:
“Without any guidance or having even seen pictures of these earlier figures, mine looked exactly like them! My parents quickly took me outside and said in Keres, ‘We didn’t teach you about or even show you any of these older figures. The clay has chosen you and is working through you to bring them back. Remember this moment. This is when you found out the clay is talking through you.’ At that point, I decided to dedicate my life to revive these pieces, to tell their story and make sure people know about them.”1
Many of the pieces Ortiz saw are called monos. Created between 1880 and 1920, monos are figurative, humorous interpretations of Anglo colonizers arriving on Pueblo lands on the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway. These figures are emblems of Cochiti social commentary, through which potters employed insider humor to poke fun at this inundation of foreigners. With an early focus on reviving mono aesthetics, Ortiz’s work soon matured, expanded, and morphed into explorations of political satire and taboo subjects. Crafting traditional Cochiti ceramic figures that questioned sex, gender, religion, and politics, Ortiz created an entirely new visual language and genre of work—all while staying firmly situated within his community’s heritage.
Today, he reflects: “There are two reasons why I am here on this Earth. The first is to make sure that the use of clay—traditional Cochiti clay—does not die out within my community. It is a dying art form because of the dedicated time it takes to gather, process, and use traditional methods and materials.” The second reason is to “educate people globally about the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. The first American Revolution has been slipped under the carpet—it is not in taught in schools and is not written about in history books.”
In 2008, Ortiz began writing and producing his now-iconic Revolt 1680/2180 storylines. These immense, intersecting narratives take place in three different time dimensions all happening simultaneously—1680, the present, and 2180. “Given that we are also operating in 2180, Cochiti people are climbing through space and time,” he explains. “We are collecting historic artwork with our traditional materials and designs, and documenting our language, ceremonies, and songs, tangibly transporting our way of life into the future so everything stays intact.”
In futuristic renditions of Pueblo people and communities, the 2180 diegesis holds nineteen groups of characters, mirroring the nineteen Pueblo communities in New Mexico today. Anchored by the Venutian Soldiers—a cohort of Indigenous superheroes standing over eight feet tall (perhaps referencing Cochiti’s three-foot-tall monos)—the characters include Tahu, the leader of the Blind Archers; Kootz, one of the Runners; and Mopez, the leader of the Gliders/Runners. Tahu, a descendant of Po’pay, honors and lifts up Pueblo women. Her tagline reads: “You’re no longer blind when you can see through your fear,” reflecting Ortiz’s memories of his matriarchal roots and guiding ethos of women’s empowerment. All the while, Translator, the voice of the story, subtly pushes the viewer to move in and out of wormholes, time dimensions, and alternate versions of reality.
As he has been working on Revolt 1680/2180 for more than two decades, Ortiz is constantly adding new media, processes, and collaborators to his ever-evolving arsenal. Rooted in Cochiti aesthetics, his work has moved between and across fashion design, photography, videography, glass, graphic design, jewelry, painting, and specialized ceramic firing techniques, such as raku, for many years. This year, he is moving even further, collaborating with artificial intelligence, sound effects, virtual and augmented reality, three-dimensional mapping, and sound compositions.
This fall, Ortiz’s Revolt 1680/2180 reaches a crescendo. Daybreak of the Resistance, which opened at Container in Santa Fe on August 10, 2024—the 344th anniversary of the Revolt—brings these worlds together for the first time. The scene is the night before the Revolt: the Recon Watchmen, Runners, Gliders, and Blind Archers converge, making plans to defeat the Castilian forces. To those of us in 2024, we will see an almost-comprehensive gathering of Ortiz’s work: monumental high-fired ceramics, never-before-released photographs, mapping projections, paintings, and musical compositions. These diverse works are in conversation, sharing whispered news from the impending frontline: “The Resistance is coming, and it arrives at Daybreak!”2 The exhibition is the storyboard of what is to come: a feature film.
In 2003, Anishinaabe scholar Grace Dillon first coined the term “Indigenous futurisms,” and it has since expanded and morphed to encompass an interdisciplinary analytical framework bringing together media, arts, and literature to think through how science fiction can be a productive genre for expressing Indigenous perspectives and experiences.3 Breaking ontological boundaries and concepts of linear time, Indigenous futurisms critically engage with the ongoing effects of settler colonialism (including but not limited to environmental collapse, capitalism, and patriarchy) to generate new ideological and spatial possibilities, asking how Indigenous artistic and cultural production—as mediated through the aesthetics of science fiction—can aid in the development of a decolonial “elsewhere.”4
Though these theoretical frameworks developed independently of Ortiz’s own thinking, it is now hard to view his work—especially his engagement with augmented reality and artificial intelligence—outside of this lens. Ortiz thinks about and uses “augmented reality in two ways,” he says. “As an artist, AR helps me create a sketch of a sculpture, allowing me to visualize an exhibition installation space. As an educator, AR helps me reach new audiences, such as those who may not have the opportunity to see my work in person in museums and galleries. It also helps me attract the next generation, who are already acquainted with using augmented reality.” Similarly, when asked about his perspective on AI, he tells me that he sees it as a tool, “just like a paintbrush:”
“AI has to be prompted. If you are collaborating with the computer, with artificial intelligence, it has to be prompted to do something creative, to do what you—as the artist—want it to do. It won’t come up with your creative ideas on its own. […] It is a tool, just like a paintbrush. A paintbrush can just be sitting there, but it takes an artist’s hand to pick it up and dip it in the paint and put it on there, on the canvas. It needs a prompt to be able to work and collaborate with a human.”
Ortiz is exploring the possibilities for collaboration with artificial intelligence, cautioning us not to hide from it. This begs the question of taking collaboration a step further: what would it mean to imagine AI otherwise, placing it within Indigenous knowledge systems, kinship networks, and tools for artistic production? What if Indigenous knowledge was woven into AI, expanding the “operational definition of intelligence”?5 Digital media theorist Jason Edward Lewis suggests that by centering Indigenous knowledge systems:
“We can use such future imaginaries to better build technologies that support the fullness of human life and thought. Imagining Indigenous AI is one way to dream beyond the impoverished knowledge frameworks in which we are currently trapped, and to draw upon the abundant multiplicity of ways of being intelligent in the world to envision AI systems that co-create the futures we want.”6
Using artistic expression as a way to communicate historical and ancestral knowledge, Ortiz is wielding the power of AI to build a decolonial narrative. If, as Ortiz suggests, we see artificial intelligence as a tool, could we now think more fully about the productive, hopeful possibilities AI may present? What new knowledge bases would be generated if Indigenous epistemologies and creative practices were foregrounded in global conversations around AI? Here, Ortiz’s Revolt 1680/2180 becomes not only a project of critical historical consciousness, but also of deconstruction and reconstruction, through which Indigenous imaginaries highlight assumptions within the current status quos of Western technology and American settler colonial structures.
Further expanding the conversation around collaboration and kinship, partnering with friends and colleagues is central to the expanding nature of Ortiz’s artistic practice. In a team led by his agent of twenty-plus years, Tish Agoyo (Ohkay Owingeh/Cochiti Pueblo), Ortiz is now working with a cohort of five additional artists for the Daybreak storyline alone. These collaborators include Morgan Barnard, William T. Carson (two of Southwest Contemporary’s 12 New Mexico Artists to Know of 2022 and 2020, respectively), Jonathan Sanchez, Patrick Lachman, and Alex Sokol. For Ortiz, it is all about “the vibrations of who you are, who you surround yourself with, and what you are attracting.” Living and working alongside his family and community in Cochiti, operating communally was a value instilled in Ortiz at a young age. This collaborative approach remains inspiring: “I am really excited to see everybody’s reaction to the work, with [these] many brains working together. We all have one goal in mind: to educate globally about the Pueblo Revolt.”
Despite Container’s climactic moment, Ortiz is not stopping there. He has two other major exhibitions coming up this year—the first at the Autry Museum of the American West and the second at the Lowe Art Museum at the University of Miami. For the Autry, Ortiz is working on Revolt 1680/2180: Sirens and Sikas, which is part of their larger group exhibition, Future Imaginaries: Indigenous Art, Fashion, Technology. Here, Ortiz is releasing two new character types: the Sirens and the Sikas. The Sirens are cyborgs—half-human, half-machine. They are assigned to the children of the world, protecting them against harm, but they also work to arm other members of the Revolt, firing clay shields at temperatures over 2,400°F—just as Ortiz himself has been doing in his most recent ceramic projects. Working alongside the Sirens, the Sikas are half-simian, half-canine guardians of children. The release of the Sikas is a segue into releasing all of Ortiz’s animal characters, further deepening and widening the futuristic Pueblo World. For Ortiz, the addition of these animal figures references the “work and practices of my ancestors. The dances that we have at home celebrate these animals, and we hold them in high regard. In developing my own characters, I go back to my childhood, re-remembering and reimagining the stories of hunting.” In December, Ortiz’s final exhibition of 2024 will open at the Lowe, coinciding with Art Basel Miami Beach. Taking the Floridian audience into account—as well as the massive 6,000-square-foot exhibition space—the Lowe will exhibit an adapted version of Daybreak.
Reflecting on his artistic practice as a pedagogical tool, Ortiz comes back to one fundamental, unalienable fact: Pueblo people survived. “We are still here, we are living, we are thriving, and we are creating,” shares Ortiz. “That’s my prayer for the future as well. In many ways, Revolt 1680/2180 is a prayer.”
Remaining rooted in Cochiti Pueblo’s tradition of social commentary and critique through clay, Ortiz ruminates on the idea of a “radical future” at the end of our conversation:
“Most people are afraid of the future. In reality, we are moving forward so quickly, so we have to ask, ‘Are you going to be a part of it and live in the right way, or are you going to be heavy and stuck to the past?’ You can make it what you want. We are the creators of our own realities on a daily basis. You choose to be who you are: you could be happy, you could be sad; you could help people, you could not help people. You could try to destroy people, or you could stand up against tyranny and all types of ugliness out there. So the radical future is what you make it—what are we going to do? What are you going to do?”
Ortiz has perfected the art of storytelling, but remains humble: “I would describe myself as just a bead in a necklace. Because I know what I do is way bigger than me and it’s not about me.”7 Much like how he hand-digs clay from the mountains to make his traditional ceramic art, Ortiz hopes to use Revolt 1680/2180 to unearth the hidden truths of Pueblo history, reshaping and reimagining the future.
