Southwest Indian Art Fair

February 23 & 24 , 2013, on the Museum's Front Lawn

2011 Featured Artist: Laura Fragua-Cota

Laura Fragua-Cota, seen at right with her award-winning portrait "Taos Artist Study" at the 2008 Southwest Indian Art Fair, is the featured artist at the 2011 Art Fair. More information about her is in the article excerpted below.

View the original article

Laura Fragua Cota: A pioneering artist pursues her artistic dreams
By Dottie Indyke, Southwest Art magazine Oct 2002
Excerpted and reprinted with permission

In the early 1980s, Laura Fragua Cota was a student at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe and a pioneer of sorts. Perhaps because she was perceived as an unwelcome intruder in the male domain of stone sculpture, she found some of her instructors skeptical at best and, at worst, downright patronizing. “I don’t know if [it was because] the faculty felt intimidated by women sculptors, but they’d say sarcastic things,” Cota recalls. “The attitude the men had really turned off a lot of women. But it didn’t weaken my spirit.”

Cota grew up at Jemez Pueblo in central New Mexico where both her parents have lived all their lives.

After high school, Cota became interested in art therapy as a way to use her creativity to help people heal. While studying in the social work program of the now-defunct University of Albuquerque, she decided she needed more hands-on experience. “I thought if a client comes to me and he’s a sculptor or a painter, I need to understand the language of the medium,” she says. So she enrolled at IAIA.

Her years at the institute were formative, and they continue to influence her life and work today. Some on the faculty were condescending, but there were others who provided key support and mentoring, including Ottilie Loloma, Charles Dailey, and celebrated Apache sculptor Allan Houser. Cota moved beyond drawing to other two- and three-dimensional media and discovered the allure of sculpting in stone. Most importantly, IAIA offered a home away from home.

“I met people from so many different tribes, tribes I [had] never heard of,” Cota says. “There’s a whole generation of kids who met at the school. It’s like a family. The friendships I made were the ultimate.” Elected president of the student council, Cota led her fellow students in protests demanding that the school build its own campus. She had to wait nearly two decades, but that wish became reality in 2000 with the purchase of 140 acres of land south of Santa Fe.

In the intervening years, Cota has painted and sculpted elegant pieces in limestone and alabaster. Some are traditional depictions of Indian figures, but she particularly enjoys working with abstraction because of its universality and emphasis on emotion and movement.

Once in a while, and sometimes without conscious intention, she will craft a piece of social commentary. Cota’s work is part of the permanent collection of the IAIA Museum, where she has also served as an exhibition curator. In 1998, she received New Mexico’s highest artistic honor, a Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, which was accompanied by an exhibition of her work at the Governor’s Gallery in the state capitol.

[In 2002] Cota came full-circle, going back to school in Santa Fe to earn the degree in art therapy she abandoned more than two decades ago. She is ever mindful of the spiritual foundation and great artistic tradition that underlies her work.

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