Roberta Heyer

From Where I Stood • Gallery

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Huichol Magic

145-4514_c.png Three • signed on backThumbnailsTlaloc’s Heaven

1984 acrylic 16x16

From the back of the painting:

Precolumbian Art

Peter Furst: Myth in Art: a Huichol depicts his Reality

Huichols - only major Indian group in Meso. with its aboriginal religion and world wiews still intact. Present homeland rugged and inaccessible in the Sierra Madre Occidental. About 10,000 pop. Ramon Medina Silva - Huichol Indian artist and shaman; medium Indian yarn painting. Originally ritual objects: nearika; now folk art objects. Beeswax base for colored yarn. Wax covers a wood board (softened in sun), design sketched into wax. Entire picture framed first with wool, then figures outlined with wool. then filled in two strands at a time. Hard on fingertips.

Huichel

In ancient times there was a dangerous sorcerer, Kiéri Tewíyari, Datura Person, who tried to mislead the people with his hallucinogenic powers. Kiéri was finally defeated by the sacred Deer, Elder Brother Káuyúmarie, who used peyote to fortify and immunize himself against the dangerous poisons of the sorcerer Kiéri. Here Kiéri is shown falling over backwards (lover right), after Káuyúmarie, with the horns of the deer on his head, “killed” him with five arrows. As he dies, the fox, animal of sorcerers and death, barks at upper left, and sparks and brilliant flashes of color representing diseases spew forth from the dying Kiéri’s mouth. Above him appears his other manifestation, the Datura (Jimson Weed) plant, into which he changes, for he does not truly die but only transforms himself to bewitch the people with his juices.