Eliza Naranjo Morse

Eliza Naranjo Morse, an artist from Santa Clara Pueblo, has been named the 2007 Rollin and Mary Ella King Fellow at the School for Advanced Research.

Eliza has been immersed in artistic expression from the start: Her mother, grandmother, and much of her extended family are renowned ceramic artists, and she grew up surrounded by a tradition of creating pottery. Always comfortable with the art-making process, Eliza became interested at a young age in developing her ability to recreate on paper the world around her. She studied figure drawing at Parsons School of Design, figure drawing and painting at the Institute for American Indian Arts, and ultimately graduated from Skidmore College with a B.S. in art. Eliza has recently merged the work done based on her “western education” with the artistic traditions that she grew up with. “As a pueblo person who comes from a family of clay,” she says, “allowing these aspects of myself to interact resulted in drawings that better describe my perspective.”

While at SAR, Eliza plans to create several large drawings inspired by concepts of space, form and line, and to experiment with the organic materials (such as beets, tea, and clay) that she has recently begun painting with. She also looks forward to having access to “a collection of work by people who have highly crafted methods of processing organic materials to build, color and form,” to learn more about the tradition of collecting earth material to make art.

Eliza’s work has been shown at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College, the Center for Contemporary Arts and the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe.

The Indian Arts Research Center at the School for Advanced Research is pleased to welcome Eliza Naranjo Morse as the 2007 Rollin and Mary Ella King Native American Fellow.