A travelling exhibition coming to The PASEO!

Lavadie’s latest project features four woolen shirts that she crafted herself. “ Lavadie’s shirts are modeled after 18th and 19th century tradesmen or Comancheros and Spanish colonial buffalo hunters known as Ciboleros. Accompanying the shirts are four imaginary Comanchero and Cibolero personas in four books that she bound herself. Each Comanchero or Cibolero is described extensively through family lineages, stories, poems and songs. Though imagined, Lavadie compiled these creations from years of research and exploring oral histories. Lavadie asserts that she is not a “scholar” but a fiber and graphic artist and an educator.”

“I’m just a fiber artist with a lot of imagination,” Lavadie said during the conversation.

She said that “each shirt represents a dream.” Through the interweavings of all these different elements, Lavadie works on exploring complex and nuanced identities that almost seem to transcend temporal space and time. 

“Working with dreams was fun, because they come out of the subconscious and they can take many forms,” Lavadie said.

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About the Project:

The project came into realization in 2021 with a collaboration between Art Lab: Art Meets History in New Mexico & 516 ARTS 2022 public exhibition.

The tent and digital photo-capture of shirts onto laminated canvas scrolls were funded by NORTHERN RIO GRANDE, NATIONAL HERITAGE AREA, 2023 for traveling displays in communities of Santa Fe, Rio Arriba and Taos Counties.

About the Artist:

Juanita Jaramillo Lavadie is a contemporary weaver, textile scholar and muralist based in New Mexico. Her art is centered on the acequia system in Taos County, Northern, New Mexico and is influenced by traditional Hispano and Indigenous cultures. Her work primarily focuses on water rights in Taos County. Lavadie grew up in Northern New Mexico in a family of weavers, and four generations of family members involved in education. She is the eldest child of Eliseo and Amelia Jaramillo, who were educators. She studied music in high school and was a member of the youth choir at Our Lady of Guadalupe Church.

Lavadie attended New Mexico Highlands University, where she completed her Bachelors of Arts in Visual Arts and Elementary Education and went on to earn her Master’s in Graphic and Fiber Arts. After graduating, Jaramillo Lavadie went to Chicago where she worked with the post-humanist muralist Marcos Raya and the A.L.B.A the Association of Latino Brotherhood of Artists. She traveled to Mexico to study mural making in Mexico City. In 1980 she studied with Master Weaver Norma Maestas. In 2018, she was attending Middlebury College to complete another Master’s degree in English and multicultural literature.