As the guest curator of Continuity: Cahuilla Basket Weavers and their Legacies, I want to clarify that my opinions are my own and do not represent those of the Benton Museum of Art. —Meranda Roberts (Northern Paiute and Chicana)
One of the key objectives of this exhibition has always been to hold up a mirror to 鶹ý administration and show them the harm the institution has caused Native American communities. Through timelines, institutional research, archival photographs, and essays, the exhibition and its accompanying publication underscores this history. My hope was that 鶹ý would understand the need to improve its relationship with Native American communities, including the Native and Indigenous students of the 5Cs.
Following the recent student arrests on April 5, 2024, including that of a NISU student, the focus of my planned talk with fine art photographer Cara Romero (Chemehuevi) has shifted.
While we will still touch on how her work, including “Indian Canyon, 2019,” and “First Light at Joshua Tree, 2023,” speaks to the deep relationship Native People have with land, our conversation will now serve as a reminder as to how this relationship changed in California due to its colonial foundations. We will also discuss society’s responsibility in learning how to respect Native women’s lives, bodies, and autonomy.
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Cara Romero (b. 1977, Inglewood, CA) is a contemporary fine art photographer. An enrolled citizen of the Chemehuevi Indian Tribe, Romero was raised between contrasting settings: the rural Chemehuevi reservation in Mojave Desert, CA and the urban sprawl of Houston, TX. Romero’s identity informs her photography, a blend of fine art and editorial photography, shaped by years of study and a visceral approach to representing Indigenous and non-Indigenous cultural memory, collective history, and lived experiences from a Native American female perspective.
As an undergraduate at the University of Houston, Romero pursued a degree in cultural anthropology. Disillusioned, however, by academic and media portrayals of Native Americans as bygone, Romero realized that making photographs could do more than anthropology did in words, a realization that led to a shift in medium. Since 1998, Romero’s expansive oeuvre has been informed by formal training in film, digital, fine art and commercial photography. By staging theatrical compositions infused with dramatic color, Romero takes on the role of storyteller, using contemporary photography techniques to depict the modernity of Native peoples, illuminating Indigenous worldviews and aspects supernaturalism in everyday life.
Maintaining a studio in Santa Fe, NM, Romero regularly participates in Native American art fairs and panel discussions, and was featured in PBS’ Craft in America (2019). Her award-winning work is included in many public and private collections internationally. Married with three children, she travels between Santa Fe and the Chemehuevi Valley Indian Reservation, where she maintains close ties to her tribal community and ancestral homelands.
