Harry Fonseca: Stone Poems

Harry Fonseca was born in Sacramento, California in 1946, and is of Nisenan Maidu, Hawaiian, and Portuguese ancestry. He studied at Sacramento City College, and with Frank LaPena (Wintu-Nomtipom/Tenai) at Cal State University, Sacramento. He also traveled in New Zealand studying Aboriginal cultures and art. Fonseca as influenced early on by his Maidu heritage, its basket designs and dance regalia, and by his participation as a traditional dancer. His 1977 work, Creation Story, which he would paint in many versions during his career, was a creation story told him by his uncle Henry Azbill. In 1979 the artist began his popular Coyote series, Coyote, which transplanted an Indigenous California trickster into contemporary situations.

Fonseca was particularly taken by petroglyphs in the Coso Range near Owens Lake, California, and petroglyphs from throughout the West and Southwest United States. In 1991 he reinterpreted the Maidu creation story using imagery influenced by petroglyphs. He began a series of paintings he called Stone Poems, that draw heavily from these petroglyphs, which he painted on yards of canvas with house paint brushes and oxide-red colors. A series of these paintings were exhibited in the Southwest Museum (Los Angeles, California) in 1989, and now form the basis for his large archive at the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles. As such, his inspiration and creative output closely mirrors the hybridity of the Nevada Museum of Art focus on the Greater West. Fonseca is well known for his Coyote series of paintings, which he started in 1979, where he portrayed the traditional Native American “trickster” figure to navigate his personal experiences of living as a gay Native American man.

In the late 1980s, Native artist Harry Fonseca began a major series of paintings called the Stone Poems based on basket imagery and Indigenous rock art and petroglyphs of the Coso Range in the Eastern Sierra, as well as rock art sites in Utah and the Southwest. In these works, Fonseca merged abstract and figurative imagery, often composed of one or more large central figures surrounded by repeated motifs: spirals, for instance, or crosses. Using strong red oxide, black, and white paints on very large canvases to reflect the scale and impressiveness of real petroglyphs, Fonseca merges contemporary painting style with his Native heritage. In 1995, Fonseca traveled to New Zealand for a cultural exchange and symposium with Indigenous artists from the Pacific Rim and Pacific Islands. During this trip he befriended Aboriginal painter Judy Watson and collaborated on new works with her.

Fonseca is considered one of the most important Native American painters of his generation, along with artists like Frank LaPena, Frank Day, James Luna, Judith Lowry, and Jean LaMarr. After his untimely passing in 2006, the Harry Fonseca Trust was established and is governed by two trustees responsible for administering his work. One of Fonseca’s most impressive large-scale Stone Poems hangs permanently at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. The Fonseca Trust assembled archive materials related to the Stone Poem.

Materials include a Stone Poem journal/scrapbook that Fonseca made when deliberating whether he should begin the Stone Poem series. Also included are smaller working watercolors, posters, paintings, drawings, and archival photographs of the artist in the field at rock art sites.

• CAE1906: Great Basin Native Artists
• CAE1914: Jack Malotte: Artist Archive