The Legacy of Generations Suffuses Rose B. Simpson's Art

The romanticized dystopia that we have accepted as truth beckons us around every corner. Manhattan’s looming skyline and modern concrete facades, the constant speckle of fluorescent lights illuminating the city that never sleeps, do most of the heavy lifting. Even in the absence of 24/7 commerce and air pollution, the persistent illumination whose glow we habitually embrace obscures the visual presence of the cosmos. Spending most days floating from insulated corporate offices and overcrowded hotel rooftops, most New Yorkers can identify the twinkle of airplane lights moving through the night sky before star constellations. It’s a reality many have accepted as the price for the pursuit of career success, social possibility, and twenty-dollar cocktails. What is gained can’t be completely written off as hollow, even as it increasingly separates us from what is universally true—the natural world, its rhythms and cycles, our relationship to stewarding the land, the self, and others.

In this sense, Rose B. Simpson’s monumental sculptural manifestations are political. The spirited figures she crafts by hand are akin to what Audre Lorde described as “personal visions,” each with the power to mobilize viewers to political action. To occupy this space is to live not only in the present, the physical matter of a tangible reality, but to exist in the realm of possibility: a space where all people and things are bound together—one thread within the web of life and the acknowledgment of time everlasting. Simpson’s current sculptural installation, commissioned by the Madison Square Park Conservancy, inhabits multiple realms of being and knowing. Sited both in Madison Square Park and in Upper Manhattan at Inwood Hill Park, Seed speaks to all New Yorkers, though those willing to excavate the inner world and transform truth into action stand to benefit most from sitting with Simpson’s offerings. “One of the most resolute figurative sculptors working today,” the Madison Square Park Conservancy’s chief curator and artistic director Brooke Kamin Rapaport proclaims, “Rose probes at the conditions of contemporary life, offering strength, vision, and hope for the future.” Seed, as Rapaport explains, is not simply an optimism looking toward the future, however. The seven bronze sentinels, set in circular configuration, each face a different direction, seemingly calling to something outside of themselves. Yet, they stand collectively and firmly rooted in the ground on which they stand, while their two faces—marked by turquoise sheaths of color around the eyes—face in both directions. They stand watch over the surrounding landscape and look behind themselves in reverence toward the bare torso of a female figure, half-submerged in the ground. Simpson identifies the eternally sumptuous feminine form as Mother Earth, and the surrounding two-faced statues, “ancestor protectors.”

Together they look to history, to the future, and to a realm independent of time and place altogether. A realm inhabited by ancestors and governed by divine beings like the Earth Mother and in direct communication with human beings through the cosmos. Such divinity is rarely understood wholly through the language of a singular religion or New Age spirituality. In consonance with her personal belief system, which she communicates through sculpture and performance, Simpson understands divine consciousness to live in everyone and everything, especially the materials we rely on to live and make art. To separate humans from the spiritual and ancestral realms, to impose hierarchies and systems—as European settlers have done in North America—that devalue human beings and non-human elements, disastrously limits our capacity to live in harmony with the land and with those who are different from ourselves.

One of the most diverse cities in the United States, New York is both a ‘concrete jungle’ and a multi-ethnic, multicultural ‘melting pot.’ And yet, the fantasy of a peaceful, futuristic metropolis is most often eclipsed by the overwhelming pursuit of capital, abundance of commerce, and the violent mundanity of class segregation. Moreover, the early colonial history of Manhattan Island is nearly invisible to New Yorkers who on the day-to-day encounter few acknowledgments that the ground on which they live is the ancestral homeland of Lenape natives. In erecting Seed, Simpson draws on the Indigenous history of New York, embracing the creative act as an “opportunity to guide through reminders.” In doing so, the artist transmutes the collective experience of sharing public space into a conscious veneration of the land and its Indigenous stewards. Where the installation in Madison Square Park is grounded in Manhattan’s history as the center of Lenapehoking, the uptown installation at Inwood Hill Park reflects on an equally significant historical event. The latter, featuring two eight-foot-tall bronze sentinels in a similar style, serves as a reflection on the politically contested space—the site where Dutch settlers claimed to have “purchased” Manhattan from the Lenape people in 1626.

“Living life in a post-colonial world, I have been acutely aware of how the self-centered nature of human beings is the very thing that causes us to commit atrocities and violence toward others,” Simpson writes. Within this framework, she includes all sentient beings, ranging from plants, animals, and the natural elements to entire cultures. Seed is, in fact, a multidimensional reminder: Not only does it recognize the erasure of New York’s Indigenous history but Simpson speaks through the work to communicate that such histories of disempowerment can be transformed into pride for contemporary Indigenous cultures and beyond. The artist, however, refuses the idea that one’s cultural identity exempts them from the ability to cause harm. “I think the political bend of my work is deep self-awareness,” she says. “I see this in myself as much as anyone else; I simply have the privilege of perspective. I work to change this in myself, and hope that I can inspire others to build self-awareness of the blind spots that we all carry.”

The recent popularity of land acknowledgments in the art world, alongside calls for land reclamation which echo through protest phrases like ‘Land Back,’ has elevated centuries-old demands for the restoration of Indigenous stewardship of U.S. territories. But Simpson’s understanding of ‘Land Back’ also includes ‘giving consciousness back to the land itself.’ She is constantly intrigued by investigations into our human relationship with existence. Reflecting on our present relationship to non-human and spiritual consciousness as an actively spiritual and traditionally religious person, she constantly feels “caught by all the varied translations of the spiritual experience.” Ultimately, she believes, “We must stop pretending we know what is best for the natural world, as we have forgotten to live as guests in a natural community that is so much bigger than ourselves.”

New York’s man-made parks—many with significance to the city’s Indigenous, formerly enslaved, and working-class history— are places where diverse New Yorkers and visitors go for a moment to feel connected to something greater than the daily grind, what Simpson refers to as part of its “intense anthropocenity.” In a world where we “have forgotten how to approach life with respect and reverence,” Seed’s ominous figures are designed to capture our attention so that we may engage in an act of self-reflection. The ancestor-protectors are striking, but inviting. “They reflect a critical eye at the mannerisms modern humans take for granted, or even choose,” she continues. “The circle of protection provides an example of where values can adjust, and a critical seriousness of the weight of what we have taken for granted.” For Simpson, Seed’s seven sentinels “represent the direction and relationship to the stars,” drawing on her ancestral relationship to the stars as cosmic keepers of time and the sources of power for healers and warriors in Pueblo cosmology.

The sentinels’ circular formation and the jagged edges of the sculptures directly reference the Pleiades star system. Often referred to as the Seven Sisters, the Pleiades sits near the Orion constellation and is visible from almost every part of the globe, even though urban congestion renders them invisible to many. Significantly, the Seven Sisters has been an important cosmic guide for humans and was among the first astronomical recordings, appearing in texts as early as Chinese annals dated around 2350 BC, as well as being mentioned in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. For Simpson, Seed’s representation of the Pleiades, which navigates sailors to port, marks when farmers should sow, and connects humans to spiritual realms, is both honorific and symbolic: “[The sentinels] stand tall, adult faces looking out, younger faces looking in—seven generations back and seven into the future.” Her language serves as a hint perhaps that we should take seriously the old saying that the children are our future. That future, however, is one that, Simpson wants to remind us, begins in the present moment. The sentinels that protect what we hold dear can be interpreted as iterations of ourselves: “We are the ancestors, we are the innocent children, we are the central being, learning vulnerability and context.”

Though Simpson makes conscious optimism look easy, she is just as aware of the obstacles many people have to overcome to access this level of awareness. She is intimately familiar with the long-term effects of colonial displacement, cultural erasure, and violence that are passed down through generations and live on in the present. The experience of “post-colonial-stress-disorder” is applicable to many Americans, though Simpson’s perspective is infused with the intimacy of an Indigenous person who was raised in her ancestral homeland. Today, Simpson still resides in Santa Clara, New Mexico, where her Tawa ancestors lived in the valley between mountain ranges for thousands of years before European contact. Due to colonization and the imposition of arbitrary borders, Santa Clara Valley is a multicultural place where, like Simpson, many residents are descendants of the amalgamation of several Indigenous, Spanish, and English-speaking European peoples. The context of these encounters has brought a great deal of inherited trauma that requires strength and resilience to overcome. In a 2023 interview for Art21, Simpson spoke about how her multi-ethnic heritage has influenced her practice: “Being ‘mixed-blood’ I always had a ‘hyper-awareness’ of how I wasn't fitting in.” She similarly struggled to be understood in her identity as a two-spirit person: “I have struggled with my own gendering (mostly based on the trauma of colonized enforced belief systems, as I believe ancestrally, there was not a ‘weaker’ sex, there was balance and self worth in both.”

As is true of the androgynous sentinels on view in New York, Simpson’s sculptures tend to be genderless as she rarely wants to isolate viewers who could benefit from the self-awareness her figures elicit. “If there is a referenced gender in the figure, there is a reason,” she explains. Maybe the most uniquely touching inheritance of Simpson’s, what has made her the artist she was born to be, is the sculptural tradition that was passed down to her through generations of women in her family. Simpson’s mother Roxanne Swentzell, who is still a practicing sculptor, taught her to work with clay, as did Swentzell’s mother, who carried on a matrilineal sculptural tradition extending several decades into her lineage. The tradition includes Simpson’s great-grandmother Rose Naranjo, for whom the artist is named, who also created figurative ceramic sculptures using the traditional coil method. “I am not the first, I am carrying on a tradition that was started as my family began exploring different methods of creative expression in clay,” she says. Be it by fate, destiny, or tradition, Rose B. Simpson was born to create, as were many of the women who came before her. Her matrilineal heritage is all that she has ever known. But although it never felt special, she is learning that her very existence formed in opposition to a largely hetero-patriarchal Western paradigm. “I honestly don’t think we would be struggling with gender identification if we had that healthy relationship to self and context,” she says. “Maybe it makes me more frustrated at colonized versions of expressed sex, because I feel how limiting and suffocating it has made all genders to feel.”

In her Pueblo studio, working primarily with New Mexico clay, she has embraced tools and techniques that allow her to not only mirror her amorphous qualities but communicate them through sculpture. “I suppose that because I come from a place, and live of a place, I have a visual language that I inherited just by default,” she says. “I didn’t realize this until I moved away and realized that other people don’t necessarily ‘read’ the symbols in the way that I do.” One example is a modeling technique she calls ‘slap-slab,’ in which she forms her sculptures by hand, leaving fingerprints behind that are not only a mark of creation but have become her signature æsthetic of textured ceramic figurations. With this method, Simpson can alchemize difference into a holistic work of art by bringing together different colors and consistencies of clay, molding, glazing, and firing them into unified figures. And she is constantly experimenting with various techniques she’s inherited, innovated, and channeled through a higher source. Still in clay, bronze, performance, and in life, Simpson’s work maintains a discerning optimism and a reverence that coexists with both past and present: “All the decisions I make as I work have meaning.”

Simpson is proud of her heritage, but like many artists from marginalized communities, she has no desire to speak for the whole of Indigenous North Americans, nor does she want to be pigeonholed into Indian Art. “I have discovered incredible things that I never thought I would, by exploring ideas outside of my comfort zones,” she says. By engaging narratives that she assumes she might disagree with, she has discovered new things about herself, including her own limited viewpoints and fear-based triggers. These are the words of a contemporary artist whose seemingly endless self-compassion, capacity for witnessing, and teaching are very much alive. She “just so happens to be Indigenous.” Seed is a timely representation of the idea that who we are born to be, “being a part of a people, and a place,” is only as important as what one chooses to acknowledge and make good of that inheritance—whether the concepts we inherit feel like proverbial gifts from one’s ancestors or curses of the post-colonial variety. “There is no beginning or end,” she says. “If it is ‘art,’ it will be ‘art.’” Becoming a mother appears to have strengthened Simpson’s intuitive knowledge and strength, bringing “a new awareness of the seriousness of my actions. What might have once been just an opinion, now has dire consequences for the one I love most in the world.” Many parents will relate to the immense pressure Simpson has come to know along the journey of guiding her daughter to find her way in the world. Regardless of what she chooses, Simpson maintains the hope that the spiritual practices and faith she has taught her will strengthen her to “value herself in all the places that push us to devalue ourselves.” While nothing in life is certain, especially whilst raising a child in the midst of ecological and political crisis, Simpson has already started to endow her child with the extraordinary skill bestowed upon her by generations of mothers in her family—art, heritage, collective consciousness. Perhaps now, more than ever before, through works like Seed, Simpson wants to share the gift that she has been given through investigating, becoming, and creating. “Her entire life is a piece of art,” Simpson says of her only child. I imagine that she foresees her daughter growing up to resemble the central figure encircled by sentinel protectors in Seed, peacefully grounded in a bountiful Earth and morphing with time into the realm of ancestors. I believe that she wishes for viewers to remain open to this possibility, and will strive to make it a reality for everyone inhabiting this land.