Wambade Wiyan
Niula Bedit
Mujer Aguila
Eagle Woman
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G�mez at Alma de Mujer |
Best known locally as a professional artist and executive director of Alma de Mujer, Center for Social Change, Marsha A. G�mez was born in New Orleans. There she learned traditional pottery utilizing hand-building techniques demonstrated by the Southeastern Indian tribes of the U.S. After obtaining her degree in art education she moved to Austin in 1982.
Marsha quickly became involved in the local community and taught traditional pottery for several years at the Dougherty Art Center and in the Artist-in-Education Programs sponsored by the National Endowment for the Arts, the Texas Commission on the Arts, and the city of Austin. She reached over 30,000 students in Austin public schools and senior citizen programs. She focused on the indigenous historical perspective in arts and crafts in her teaching while emphasizing that art is for everyone and anyone can create art.
As a professional artist, Marsha’s work has been shown in many galleries and several museums across the globe — in Africa, Mexico, the Caribbean, the South Seas, and throughout Europe and the United States. Her work has been featured in numerous magazines, newspapers, and publications as well as compact disc and book cover artwork.
For the past 10 years she had been commissioned to do over a dozen life-size permanent sculptures and installations in public art spaces. “Madre del Mundo” (see photo) is probably her most famous. Originally commissioned by Genevieve Vaughan, founder of the Foundation for a Compassionate Society (who had the first “Madre del Mundo” installed in Las Vegas, Nev., in western Shoshone lands across from a missile test site in protest of the desecration of mother earth), the piece was commissioned by other community organizations around Texas as well.
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| Above and below, Marsha G�mez teaches ceramics at the Eastside Community Center |
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Since 1988, Marsha had been the executive director of Alma de Mujer, Center for Social Change, a retreat center and project of the Indigenous Women’s National Network of which she was co-founding mother and board member. It was also to the center that her ashes were taken last Sunday, October 4, for a memorial service. The memorial lasted all afternoon and reflected the several different indigenous traditions and cultures that Marsha had embraced and of which she had become a part. And it was at Alma de Mujer that her ashes were scattered, forever leaving a part of her on the land she so loved and revered.
We will all miss you tremendously.
Hasta la pr�xima, Marsha. Hasta la pr�xima.
Alma de Mujer, 258-3880.
This article appears in October 9 • 1998 and October 9 • 1998 (Cover).