Well of Moon and Sky - Kotuumot Kehaay

Maker Mercedes Dorame (American, Tongva, born 1980)

Collections

American Art Highlights

ClassificationsPHOTOGRAPHS

Date2013

Mediumarchival pigment print

Dimensions30 × 30 in. (76.2 × 76.2 cm.)

Signedno signature

Credit LineThe Huntington Library, Art Museum, and Botanical Gardens. Purchased with funds from The Philip and Muriel Berman Foundation

Status

Not on view

Label TextMercedes Dorame uses photography and installation works to explore, reimagine, and connect to her Tongva culture and bring visibility to contemporary Indigenous experience. This image centers of an ancient grinding bowl (metate) carved into a boulder at a sacred Tongva site in a canyon in Los Angeles—now private land—once used for grinding food, like acorns, and possibly pigments. She has placed a ceramic metate that belonged to her grandmother and leaves from an oak tree, poetic echoes that suggest presence and absence—the well is filled with water that reflects an image of the sky. Dorame's photographs become a visualization that these places, however developed, are still sacred and deeply meaningful places to First Peoples.

Object number2021.14.2