American Indian Culture and Research Journal

This article explores ways of creating public art, ways of looking, and ways of remembering. It focuses on how one work in Albuquerque, New Mexico, twines around these three notions and produces new ways of thinking about each. My perspective is that the best public art shapes the ways in which people examine themselves, their lives, and their worlds. It opens up critical, rational spaces that ask viewers to critique themselves and their thinking. It is also capable of social and personal intervention, inspiration, and transformation. For these reasons, I focus on one component within a larger work of public art. The piece actively presents an opportunity to rethink the world around it. By extension, it also presents the opportunity to rethink one’s self. It offers little prescription for looking and instead encourages the imaginative by engaging the senses. I offer here neither a detailed chronology nor a complete art historical record. Rather, I examine the speculative and theoretical contours and possibilities within the piece. I engage with establishing memory as a kind of artistic language that may activate crucial new understandings of potentially painful narratives. The work of art under consideration here is Numbe Whageh by Nora Naranjo-Morse (Tewa of Santa Clara Pueblo). It is the first monumental piece of public art by a female Native artist and is part of the city of Albuquerque’s Cuartocentenario Memorial, installed at the Albuquerque Museum in 2005. However, the memorial had generated controversy for years before its installation, with the planning process reflecting the polarized standoff over history and space implicit today in issues of representation and public memorials. The Cuartocentenario Memorial marks the four hundredth anniversary of the arrival of Spanish conquistador don Juan de Oñate in what is now New Mexico. The memorial comprises two linked segments, La Jornada (The Journey) and Numbe Whageh (Our Center Place). La Jornada focuses on Oñate and on the settlers and livestock accompanying him; it is a group of figures rendered in bronze created by Reynaldo “Sonny” Rivera, a Hispanic artist, and Betty Sabo, a Euro-American artist. Numbe Whageh is a landscape treatment designed to represent the American Indian perspective on Oñate’s arrival.