Best-known for his depiction of Coyote, the colorful trickster who “leaves the res” only to re-appear in a variety of non-traditional settings, [Harry] Fonseca also created work that speaks to historical events such as the California Gold Rush. (Autry Museum)
Fonseca, born in 1946, was of Nisenan Maidu, Hawaiian, and Portuguese heritage. He studied with Frank LaPena (Wintu-Nomtipom/Tenai) at California State University Sacramento. Fonseca is widely known for his Coyote series – which he started in 1979 – where he portrayed a traditional figure in contemporary dress and settings – thus mirroring the experience of the modern Native American. Beyond the Native art world, Fonseca’s work is seen as especially significant and important in contemporary art.
“He connected the elements of what it means to be a contemporary Native American. What it means to be Native in the past, but what it means to be Native now. (This acquisition) is highly appropriate in my standpoint for a museum like The Autry – in Los Angeles, which is the most highly diverse cities in the country – with a mission that says that we aim at telling all the stories of the American West.” (source)
Harry Fonseca’s coyote (Getty)
The Autry represents yet another space in which Coyote can play, enlighten, advocate, and critique, bringing with his endless transformations an aesthetic that celebrates the vitality of Native culture along with its capacity for metamorphosis and appropriation—without shedding its own significant, and often difficult, histories. Take Fonseca’s breakout works of 1971 and ‘72, in which Coyote “leaves the res” for San Francisco’s Mission district. Shown first on four legs, furry and snarling against a brick wall, Coyote quickly transforms: soon he is upright, in a black leather jacket with silver chains and platform boots.
Although Coyote embraces Western culture broadly—reappearing as Prince Siegfried in Swan Lake, as Don José in Carmen, dancing the tango, as Buffalo Bill, an Indian chief, a cowboy—there is something distinctly subversive about his ability to take on one icon, or one art form, after another. Coyote’s move from the “res” to the mission-turned-barrio-turned-counterculture destination is powerful in that it represents freedom, and his ability to act upon the shifting social, sexual, and urban geographies of 1970s America.
Untitled (Discovery of Gold series), circa 1997, Harry Fonseca. Mixed media on paper. Museum Purchase. Autry Museum of the American West.
