Cahuilla
The Cahuilla , also known as ʔívil̃uqaletem or Ivilyuqaletem, are a Native American people of the various tribes of the Cahuilla Nation, living in the inland areas of southern California.Native American ancestry.
Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive
The Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA, formerly abbreviated as BAM/PFA) are a combined art museum, repertory movie theater, and archive associated with the University of California, Berkeley. Lawrence Rinder was Director from ...
Director
Lawrence Rinder
Lawrence R. Rinder is a contemporary art curator and museum director. He directed the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA) from 2008 to 2020.
Education
Rinder received a B.A. in art from Reed College and an M.A. in art history fro ...
writes: "deSoto has explored a wide variety of media in his efforts to express the nuances of various
social histories
Social history, often called the new social history, is a field of history that looks at the lived experience of the past. In its "golden age" it was a major growth field in the 1960s and 1970s among scholars, and still is well represented in his ...
and worldwide cosmologies."
The majority of deSoto's work has been in the media of
photography
Photography is the art, application, and practice of creating durable images by recording light, either electronically by means of an image sensor, or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as photographic film. It is employed ...
,
sculpture
Sculpture is the branch of the visual arts that operates in three dimensions. Sculpture is the three-dimensional art work which is physically presented in the dimensions of height, width and depth. It is one of the plastic arts. Durable sc ...
, and installation. The San Jose Institute of Contemporary Art writes that "deSoto's multimedia installations combine sound, light, video, space, and sculpture elements and are site-specific or oriented toward making a complete environment. His conceptual artwork utilizes automobiles, inflatables, electronics, photography, wood and metal construction."
DeSoto is based in Napa, California and
New York City
New York, often called New York City or NYC, is the List of United States cities by population, most populous city in the United States. With a 2020 population of 8,804,190 distributed over , New York City is also the L ...
and has been a professor of photography at
San Francisco State University
San Francisco State University (commonly referred to as San Francisco State, SF State and SFSU) is a public research university in San Francisco. As part of the 23-campus California State University system, the university offers 118 different b ...
since 1988.
Background
DeSoto grew up in San Bernardino, California and received a Master of Fine Arts from Claremont Graduate School in 1981 after receiving a BA in Studio Art with a minor in Religious Studies at the
University of California, Riverside
The University of California, Riverside (UCR or UC Riverside) is a public land-grant research university in Riverside, California. It is one of the ten campuses of the University of California system. The main campus sits on in a suburban distr ...
in 1978.
The last name that de Soto shares with famed Spanish conquistador
Hernando de Soto
Hernando de Soto (; ; 1500 – 21 May, 1542) was a Spanish explorer and '' conquistador'' who was involved in expeditions in Nicaragua and the Yucatan Peninsula. He played an important role in Francisco Pizarro's conquest of the Inca Empire ...
has been "a source of much confusion," says the artist: "My heritage is vaguely linked to this ‘explorer.’ Somehow my great grandfather, the Spaniard Terbosio De Soto, married into the Southern California Cahuilla tribe early in the 20th century."
Early work
In the 2016 publication ''EMPIRE'', deSoto writes that he began taking photographs of his model cars when he was ten years old; he later graduated to documenting the world around him using Polaroid and Minolta cameras handed down from his father.
In ''Visions of America: Landscape as Metaphor in the Late Twentieth Century'', Rebecca Solnit writes that "deSoto's oeuvre begins with ''Botanica'' (1980), a series of photographs of flowers that Solnit says "abandon the rules for landscape photography": Solnit posits that the delicate, blurry movements resulting from the slow exposure and flash of deSoto's camera suggest a mechanical analog to the natural beauty of their subject and reflect a process- and time-based emphasis on the "encounter" that would later inform deSoto's installation work.
Subsequent projects such as ''Tahualtapa'' (1983-1988) began to draw more explicitly from deSoto's Cahuilla background. The series documents the gradual leveling of a mountain (called Tahualtapa in the Cahuilla language) in what is now called San Bernardino County through a series of photographs whose frames are filled with materials relating to the mountain's history such as feathers, marble, and cement. DeSoto also began transitioning from photography to installation via works such as the "Site Projects" (1980-1986), which combined large-scale manipulations and "non-destructive" interventions in the actual landscape reminiscent of Robert Smithson with long camera exposures documenting the temporal changes in each work.
Installation works
DeSoto's installation works have typically made extensive use of manipulated recorded sound, with an emphasis on using directional speakers and projected imagery to create an evocative environment. Nearly all of deSoto's installations—e.g. ''Tahquitz'' (1994) and ''Aviary'' (1990) -- incorporate strategically mounted and/or hidden speakers and amplification systems. In works such as ''Tahquitz'', prerecorded sounds are played through the speakers; in other works, such as ''Aviary'', the sound is generated by dynamic elements in the work's environment and then manipulated and reproduced by the amplification system. DeSoto's more sculptural works often also include a sonic element: for example, in 1999's ''Recumbent (Three Works)'', the artist placed speakers and a piezo sound generator inside a replica of a Spanish medieval suit of armor; his 2006 conceptual car ''Cahuilla'' incorporates an audio system that plays back casino sounds and Cahuilla chanting.
In addition to works drawing from
Catholic
The Catholic Church, also known as the Roman Catholic Church, is the largest Christian church, with 1.3 billion baptized Catholics worldwide . It is among the world's oldest and largest international institutions, and has played a ...
,
Muslim
Muslims ( ar, المسلمون, , ) are people who adhere to Islam, a monotheistic religion belonging to the Abrahamic tradition. They consider the Quran, the foundational religious text of Islam, to be the verbatim word of the God of Abrah ...
, and
Buddhist
Buddhism ( , ), also known as Buddha Dharma and Dharmavinaya (), is an Indian religion or philosophical tradition based on teachings attributed to the Buddha. It originated in northern India as a -movement in the 5th century BCE, and ...
traditions, many of deSoto's installation works in the 1990s—such as ''Haypatak, Witness, Kansatsusha'' (1990) and ''Pe Tukmiyat, Pe Tukmiyat (Darkness, Darkness)'' (1991) at the
San Jose Museum of Art
The San José Museum of Art (SJMA) is a modern and contemporary art museum in downtown San Jose, downtown San Jose, California, United States. Founded in 1969, the museum holds a permanent collection with an emphasis on West Coast of the United Sta ...
—drew heavily upon Cahuilla creation mythology. But while the light and sound effects generated could appear otherworldly, Solnit noted in 1994 that "increasingly, his installations rely upon quotidian objects -- most often, furniture and machines, the objects appropriate to rooms for living and making, rather than looking at." She quotes deSoto's assertion that there is no word for sacredness in the Cahuilla language in support of the idea that his work asks questions about the possibility of locating the sacred in the everyday.
This theme is also explored in deSoto's sculpture '' Paranirvana (Self-Portrait)'', which was included in the "Missing Peace: Artists Consider the
Dalai Lama
Dalai Lama (, ; ) is a title given by the Tibetan people to the foremost spiritual leader of the Gelug or "Yellow Hat" school of Tibetan Buddhism, the newest and most dominant of the four major schools of Tibetan Buddhism. The 14th and current Dal ...
," an exhibition of works "inspired by the life and message of the Dalai Lama" that has traveled since 2006 to major venues worldwide including UCLA's
Fowler Museum
The Fowler Museum at UCLA, commonly known as The Fowler, and formerly Museum of Cultural History and Fowler Museum of Cultural History, is a museum on the campus of the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) which explores art and material ...
Nobel Museum
The Nobel Prize Museum (formerly the Nobel Museum _sv.html" ;"title="/nowiki> sv">Nobelmuseet/nowiki>) is located in the former Stock Exchange Building (''Börshuset'') on the north side of the square Stortorget in Gamla Stan, the old town in c ...
in Stockholm, Fundacion Canal in Madrid, and the Frost Art Museum in Miami. The 25-foot-long inflatable cloth sculpture is based on a well known 12th century
Buddha
Siddhartha Gautama, most commonly referred to as the Buddha, was a śramaṇa, wandering ascetic and religious teacher who lived in South Asia during the 6th or 5th century BCE and founded Buddhism.
According to Buddhist tradition, he was ...
at the Gal Vihara in Polonnaruva,
Sri Lanka
Sri Lanka (, ; si, ශ්රී ලංකා, Śrī Laṅkā, translit-std=ISO (); ta, இலங்கை, Ilaṅkai, translit-std=ISO ()), formerly known as Ceylon and officially the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka, is an ...
—but the Buddha's face has been replaced by the artist's own. ''Paranirvana'' was created after deSoto's father died; curator Susan Stoops writes that despite its majestic size, its depiction of the Buddha (and the artist himself) at the moment of death combine with the cyclical deflation and inflation of the sculpture to "underscore a sense of insubstantiality and impermanence."
In 1991 deSoto was one of five artists commissioned to create site-specific artworks at the former site of the
Rose Theatre
The Rose was an Elizabethan theatre. It was the fourth of the public theatres to be built, after The Theatre (1576), the Curtain (1577), and the theatre at Newington Butts (c. 1580?) – and the first of several playhouses to be situated in Ba ...
in
Bankside
Bankside is an area of London, England, within the London Borough of Southwark. Bankside is located on the southern bank of the River Thames, east of Charing Cross, running from a little west of Blackfriars Bridge to just a short distance befor ...
,
London
London is the capital and largest city of England and the United Kingdom, with a population of just under 9 million. It stands on the River Thames in south-east England at the head of a estuary down to the North Sea, and has been a majo ...
; in the accompanying catalog, deSoto states that he aims for his installations to take the form of an "experience, rather than a representation of ideas," and intends the work to take on its own "independent life...in time."
Works on paper, prints, and photography
DeSoto "has created photographs, prints and tapestries in series and individually," with emphasis in the field of photography, particularly
landscape photography
Landscape photography shows the spaces within the world, sometimes vast and unending, but other times microscopic. Landscape photographs typically capture the presence of nature but can also focus on man-made features or disturbances of landscapes ...
. His ongoing ''Appellation Series'', for example, depicts wine-growing regions in California by digitally merging between 50 and 200 photographs into panoramic landscapes, some over eight feet in length.
Like his installations, many of deSoto's works on paper consider the relation between cosmological or sacred themes and otherwise mundane objects, locations, or imagery. For example, the 2003 pigment print ''Pakhan-gyi'' presents a field of thousands of collaged pornographic images from the internet - a reference to the mythical temptation of Buddha by visions of beautiful women—from which likenesses of the Buddha's footprints (some of the earliest depictions of the Buddha in Pakhan-gyi,
Myanmar
Myanmar, ; UK pronunciations: US pronunciations incl. . Note: Wikipedia's IPA conventions require indicating /r/ even in British English although only some British English speakers pronounce r at the end of syllables. As John C. Wells, Joh ...
) emerge or disappear depending on the viewer's distance from the work. In 2005's ''The Restoration,'' the artist staged a tableau vivant in the style of Johannes Vermeer's dramatic paintings but set in a contemporary garage, complete with a mechanic working on a vintage
Pontiac Grand Prix
The Grand Prix is a line of automobiles produced by the Pontiac Division of General Motors from 1962 until 2002 for coupes and 1989–2008 for sedans.
First introduced as a full-size performance coupe for the 1962 model year, the model varied ...
.
Conceptual cars
Following ''La Cena Pasada'' (2002), where deSoto painted and arranged thirteen 1/24-scale miniature replica cars in a 're-enactment' of
Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci (15 April 14522 May 1519) was an Italian polymath of the High Renaissance who was active as a painter, Drawing, draughtsman, engineer, scientist, theorist, sculptor, and architect. While his fame initially res ...
's fresco of the Last Supper, and ''Sound of the Trumpet'' (1996), in which a V8 engine was outfitted to generate an environment of shifting light and sound, deSoto's sculpture began turning toward the modification of full-scale automobiles.
To date deSoto has created three conceptual car projects: ''Conquest'' (2004), ''Cahuilla'' (2006), and ''Imperial America'' (2008). These projects consist of vintage automobiles outfitted with what Nick Czap calls "meticulously deadpan" details and design elements. In a 2010 profile in the
New York Times
''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid d ...
Auto section, Czap writes that the extensive and often symbolic modifications made to these cars transform them into "vehicles for exploring subjects from the acts of Spanish conquistadors to the empowerment of Native Americans to the military-industrial complex."
Czap writes that deSoto views his conceptual cars "as an extension of his work as an installation artist, describing the creation of installation art as a process of enhancing the 'performance' of an exhibition space."
In a 2011 interview deSoto says, "I think each car has a built-in opportunity for meaning, with some meanings needing to be more upfront than others. I view all the work as humorous in some way."
DeSoto's first conceptual car ''Conquest'' was re-made in such a subtle fashion that the artist presented it as a replica of a rare prototype at a Northern California Chrysler car show, where it won second prize. It was later shown at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Connecticut, the de Young Museum's "High 5" exhibit, and the International Center for the Arts of the Americas as well as the diRosa Preserve in Napa, CA. Historian Eric Foner writes of ''Conquest'': "This 'public sculpture' by the Native American artist Lewis DeSoto links his own surname with more than four centuries of American history." In a 2006 essay about the ''No Reservations'' exhibition at the Aldrich Museum, Smithsonian National Museum curator Paul Chaat Smith writes of ''Conquest'': "Lewis deSoto embraces the transgressive nature of ''No Reservations'' by building a car from a parallel universe."
In a 2005 documentary, ''The DeSoto Conquest'', deSoto describes the genesis of the concept cars: "Well I'm hot-rodding spaces, I'm hot-rodding the notion of sculpture in various situations. Why not just go back to the hot-rod and start from there?’"
Publications
In 2016, a collection of photographs and essays by DeSoto titled ''EMPIRE'' was published by Heyday Books and the Robert and Frances Fullerton Museum of Art in San Bernardino. This book serves as a comprehensive collection of images from his ''Inland Empire'' project, a portion of which was exhibited at the Fullerton Museum from November 2015 to February 2016.
The artist's ''Inland Empire'' project, a photographic survey of various California sites begun in 1979, includes both single-frame and panoramic images; while the exhibition included only panoramas, the book includes both. DeSoto writes that "the panoramas constitute a broad public exposure," while the "single-frame images count as a kind of private view."
Exhibitions, collections and awards
DeSoto has exhibited widely across the United States as well as in
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...
,
Italy
Italy ( it, Italia ), officially the Italian Republic, ) or the Republic of Italy, is a country in Southern Europe. It is located in the middle of the Mediterranean Sea, and its territory largely coincides with the homonymous geographical re ...
,
Mexico
Mexico (Spanish: México), officially the United Mexican States, is a country in the southern portion of North America. It is bordered to the north by the United States; to the south and west by the Pacific Ocean; to the southeast by Guatema ...
,
Portugal
Portugal, officially the Portuguese Republic ( pt, República Portuguesa, links=yes ), is a country whose mainland is located on the Iberian Peninsula of Southwestern Europe, and whose territory also includes the Atlantic archipelagos of ...
, and
Sweden
Sweden, formally the Kingdom of Sweden,The United Nations Group of Experts on Geographical Names states that the country's formal name is the Kingdom of SwedenUNGEGN World Geographical Names, Sweden./ref> is a Nordic country located on ...
; in 1997 he was commissioned to create an installation, ''Dervish'', at Metronom in
Barcelona
Barcelona ( , , ) is a city on the coast of northeastern Spain. It is the capital and largest city of the autonomous community of Catalonia, as well as the second most populous municipality of Spain. With a population of 1.6 million within ci ...
. His work ''Paranirvana'' has been exhibited in numerous major museums worldwide since 2006 as part of the Missing Peace exhibition.
His work is included in major museum, corporate, and private collections including the
Atlantic Richfield Corporation
ARCO ( ) is a brand of gasoline stations currently owned by Marathon Petroleum after BP sold its rights. BP commercializes the brand in Northern California, Oregon and Washington, while Marathon has rights for the rest of the United States an ...
;
Bank of America
The Bank of America Corporation (often abbreviated BofA or BoA) is an American multinational investment bank and financial services holding company headquartered at the Bank of America Corporate Center in Charlotte, North Carolina. The bank w ...
; the
California Museum of Photography
The UCR/California Museum of Photography (CMP) is an off-campus institution and department of the UCR College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences, College of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences at University of California, Riverside, the Uni ...
; the
Center for Creative Photography
The Center for Creative Photography (CCP), established in 1975 and located on the University of Arizona's Tucson campus, is a research facility and archival repository containing the full archives of over sixty of the most famous American pho ...
Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies The Los Angeles Center for Photographic Studies (LACPS) was an artist-run nonprofit arts organization that presented photography exhibitions, lectures, and workshops in and around Los Angeles, California between 1974 and 2001.
History
The Los Ange ...
;
Los Angeles County Museum of Art
The Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) is an art museum located on Wilshire Boulevard in the Miracle Mile, Los Angeles, California, Miracle Mile vicinity of Los Angeles. LACMA is on Museum Row, adjacent to the La Brea Tar Pits (George C. Pa ...
; the
Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art
The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (MOCA) is a contemporary art museum with two locations in greater Los Angeles, California. The main branch is located on Grand Avenue in Downtown Los Angeles, near the Walt Disney Concert Hall. MOCA's or ...
Museum of Modern Art
The Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) is an art museum located in Midtown Manhattan, New York City, on 53rd Street between Fifth and Sixth Avenues.
It plays a major role in developing and collecting modern art, and is often identified as one of ...
Nelson-Atkins Museum
The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art is an art museum in Kansas City, Missouri, known for its encyclopedic collection of art from nearly every continent and culture, and especially for its extensive collection of Asian art.
In 2007, ''Time'' magaz ...
Safeco Corporation
Safeco Insurance, a member of Liberty Mutual Group, is an American insurance company. It held the naming rights to the Seattle Mariners' baseball stadium Safeco Field from its opening in 1999 through the end of the 2018 season.
History
Safe ...
National Endowment for the Arts
The National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) is an independent agency of the United States federal government that offers support and funding for projects exhibiting artistic excellence. It was created in 1965 as an independent agency of the federal ...
. He has received the Flintridge Foundation Award for Visual Artists (2003); a Eureka Fellowship in Visual Arts from the Fleishhacker Foundation (1999); and a California Arts Council Fellowship (1992). He has been Artist in Residence at List Visual Arts Center at MIT in 1997; Artpace in San Antonio, Texas in 1996; and at the Headlands Center for the arts in 1990 and again in 2000.