“I didn’t want to be an artist,” Rose B. Simpson told me over the phone from her studio in Santa Clara Pueblo, an indigenous community outside Española, New Mexico. “I wanted to fly airplanes and helicopters. I only made art as a kind of priority.’ Working in large-scale ceramic sculpture, custom cars, fashion and performance, as well as music, the artist has appeared at the nation’s most prestigious institutions, including the Denver Art Museum, Minneapolis Institute of Art and SITE. Santa Fe She recently had a solo exhibition at San Francisco’s Jessica Silverman Gallery, and is one of the Indigenous artists exhibiting at this year’s Whitney Biennial alongside Demian DinéYazhi’, Cannupa Hanska Luger, and Kite. For an artist who was reluctant to start, Simpson’s career is on a strong path.
After high school, Simpson moved from Española, a small town north of Santa Fe known for its cheap cars and high crime rate, to Albuquerque, where she attended the University of New Mexico and studied studio art, creative writing and dance. She later earned an MFA from the Rhode Island School of Ceramic Design, and an MFA in Creative Non-Fiction from the Institute of American Indian Arts. Yet outside the context of academia, Simpson found profound ways to channel her voice through artistic expression, creating works that spoke to her culture while living with what she describes as “postcolonial stress disorder.”
The artist began painting graffiti and train carriages, and joined the city’s underground Hip Hop scene. “School was like a byproduct,” Simpson said. “My real life was the social scene and culture I was a part of in Albuquerque. That was what really influenced me and helped make me who I am. It was an education rather than a formal education”. Several Albuquerque street artists took Simpson under their wing, most notably Mike 360. “He was an incredible figure in Albuquerque for a long time,” she told me. “They showed us a tremendous impact on the ways of empowering young people and different ways of seeing the world and also engaging in political activism. It was beautiful.” This environment of support and care was fundamental to Simpson and in part shaped who he is as an individual and artist today. “We were creating this little belief system together – I felt empowered, I felt strong, I felt beautiful, I felt all the things I didn’t feel in our patriarchal capitalist world.”
Co-creation and collaboration are cornerstones of Simpson’s practice. As they work from an idea to the realization of a piece, many contribute their work and energy, visible or not. “I don’t do anything alone,” he says. “When I’m doing something, I have a whole history behind me, I have all the unseen creatures in the world moving around me.” The artist absorbs physical, mental, emotional and spiritual influences from ancestral knowledge systems, contemporary lived realities and the environment, and incorporates these into his sculpture and performance. In Simpson’s work, references to Pueblo culture, underground music, the North American landscape and lowriders converge.
Simpson’s 2023 sculptural installation, “Counterculture,“ Originally exhibited at Field Farm in Williamstown, Massachusetts, settler colonialism foregrounds the displacement and dispossession of indigenous peoples. 12 female humanoid forms rise above the viewer, looking out over the landscape. In the iteration of the Whitney Museum, they were installed on the terrace, overlooking the city, the territory stolen from the Lenape people by Dutch settlers in the 17th century. These 10-foot-tall concrete statues nod to the artist’s Santa Clara identity and cultural heritage, but also to her family: her mother, Roxanne Swentzell, is a renowned ceramist known for her feminine figures in bronze and clay.
Simpson’s 2014 work “Maria”. she is another example of building on her environment, personal passions, and the legacy of the female artists who came before her. The sculpture, a 1985 Chevrolet El Camino restored and redesigned by Simpson, is black-on-black, honoring the black-on-black ceramics of renowned San Ildefonso Pueblo artist Maria Martinez and Española’s lowrider culture. El Camino’s matte body is decorated with bright geometric patterns, playing with Tewa ceramic motifs.
But the work is also an act of empowerment that is very personal for the artist. “I felt really powerless and insecure and lonely and scared as a kid,” Simpson said. “I felt vulnerable, and I looked at cars as protection, as beauty, as a relationship you can build, to express how you see yourself. It’s another form of collaboration.” A car is literally and metaphorically an entity that includes people, objects and ideas and transports them to another place. The work functions as a container: like the specific pottery of the Santa Clara Pueblo, this El Camino holds within itself this visual and cultural vocabulary of beauty and utility.
Simpson sees her work not only as a form of agency for herself and her community—an antidote to the postcolonial stress disorder, perhaps—but also as bodies themselves with agency. “I feel like the pieces have used us all,” he told me, “and we’re just tools.”
