What are you doing tonight, Virgil Ortiz?

 I'm a little bit obsessed with a Cochiti Pueblo artist named Virgil Ortiz. There's a Vergil Ortiz out there too, but that's not my guy. He's a boxer. My guy spells his name differently, and he doesn't physically fight for a living.  My guy fights a battle using art.  His objectives are to illustrate and emphasize that his people are still present in modern times, not erased or subsumed in modernity, and also to preserve traditional Puebloan pottery techniques of shaping, ornamenting and processing clay.  Virgil is a sculptor, potter, film maker, photographer, textile designer and composer. He's written screenplays and  narratives for his many museum exhibitions. He has created masks, costumes, and weaponry. He works in clay, glass, plastic, metal, fabric and bytes of light.  He is a prolific creator and collaborator with other artists and artisans.

Virgil, a fervent science fiction fan, has created a world in which Cochiti Pueblo people from 2180 slip through time back to Cochiti Pueblo of 1680. In that year, in 1680, the Puebloan peoples united across many pueblos and with Navajo and Apache forces to expel the Spanish from their territories. It was a decisive and purgative revolt that returned those territories to the cultural, religious, military and political control of the original inhabitants.  

Virgil imagines an alliance through time of the 2180 and 1680 Puebloans both fighting to regain and secure their autonomy.  A character from his world named Tahu, the leader of a unit of blind archers most intrigues me. These women take part in Ortiz' reimagined 1680 Revolt, and ride the slipstream to 2180 to renew the battle in support of their descendants. 

So this early morning, call it tonight, I'm awake, holding my cat on my chest, listening to her purr, wheeze and ultimately fall asleep on my chest, and Ortiz floats up into my thoughts, as he does several times a year. He's like a classmate from long ago that I may wonder about from time to time, and times being what they are now, I go on-line to see what he's up to.  I land on a site for a Florida museum and learn he has had an exhibition there since October. It ends the day I fly into Fort Myers, Florida.  I begin to imagine changing my flight to one day earlier, landing 2.5 hours away from nowhere In a few weeks we will begin our winter vacation.  I want to spend hours immersed in his world, a world where colonialism has been beaten back, where the defeat weakens the colonial powers and they scurry back to their tiny European turfs, where they retract from their expansionist tendencies and humbly beg forgiveness of those in that hemisphere they have invaded and oppressed.  Fantasy.