Reflective Presence: The Art of Jesse Littlebird & Jonathan Loretto

Reflective Presence: The Art of Jesse Littlebird & Jonathan Loretto (March 9-June 23, 2024) focuses on the artwork of Jesse Littlebird (Laguna/Kewa Pueblos) and Jonathan Loretto (Walatowa/Kotyiti Pueblos) and their processes of traversing home to find new views and understandings of Pueblo places and people. An artist-led project in the IPCC Artists Circle Gallery, the exhibition grounds itself in visual narratives that transport viewers through different layers of consciousness through site-specific bodies of work created by the artists. The exhibition offers a firm footing in the present moment, with the present moment being different for everyone but connected between each person entering the gallery. In exchange, Littlebird and Loretto’s artworks give viewers the opportunity to reflect while in the present. Littlebird uses abstraction and connections to ancestral sites to tell painted, layered stories of the land. Loretto creates bobblehead clay storytellers, charcoal drawing, and black & white photography to shift viewers into reminiscent and reflective spaces of land-based narratives. Through clay, photography, drawing, and painting, these artists channel their work with energy that, in effect, shifts viewers from one state of presence to another. Through these shifts, onlookers pause to consider making the leap from their present state of mind to inventive places of consciousness created by the artists in their two and three-dimensional expressions.