Indigenous artist Meyo Marrufo intertwines art, culture for Sonoma Valley exhibit

Meyo Marrufo wears an infectious smile as she enters the classroom at the Lake County Campus of Woodland Community College in Clearlake. She's awhirl with the business of setting up the equipment needed to connect with attendees in person and online, who are here for her art talk. The one-time public event was a request by the community college for Marrufo to speak and connect with students.

The Lake County resident’s art and lectures offer a compelling introduction to her culture and those of the Pomo people.

"Meyo is a brilliant artist and cultural educator. Her commitment to sharing knowledge is deep and tireless,“ said Lisa Kaplan, lead curator at Middletown Art Center. ”It not only bears many fruits for regional Native artists and people, but for all people including students K-12 through curriculum development she has contributed to."

Marrufo adds to the dialogue of the 100-plus tribes of Indigenous people living in California. She says that although she has tremendous knowledge of Pomo culture, her work represents her truth, and does not presume to speak for others. By taking a step through art, education and nature's powers, communities will be nurtured and supported, allowing for more cohesion and community to take place.

"My art is about what I am feeling or what I want to express. When I share my art, there is usually some writing with it. I like to tell people that it either talks about the picture or the mindset,“ she said. ”If it starts a conversation, that is great. Inclusion and healing are perspective. Is my art going to heal my people? No, but if a person sees it and learns from it, finds beauty in it or even relates to it … it is doing what it is supposed to do."

Nestled in the Clear Lake Basin, her tribe is the Robinson Rancheria Band of Pomo Indians. Marrufo said she moved “home,” to Pomo land, in her 20s after growing up in Humboldt County around friends of the Hupa, Yurok and Karuk tribes. She has also lived in Sacramento, among the communities of Miwok and Maidu.

Marrufo has always had ties to the Indigenous communities around Northern California and learned about Pomo history and culture from the tribal elders of the different tribes in the area. Through her own research into her culture and by asking lots of questions, Marrufo found basket weaving. She found the art form was a creative way to connect and picked up weaving methods from other weavers along the way.

Marrufo’s creative process

Marrufo’s art ranges from basketry, jewelry, digital drawings to prints. All of her distinctive work merges her interpretation of traditional culture with contemporary art applications and installations.

Her day often starts with beading in the morning while planning her day, and again at night to decompress.

She said plants are important and are significant both in her art and culture, too. For example, the Bittern bird that hides in the leaves of tule rush, tells the story of the importance of tule plant as habitat, food, clothing, shelter and toy-making for the tribe. The Bittern is camouflaged within the reeds awaiting the hitch — an important fish in Pomo culture found only in Clear Lake and its tributaries.

"I gather, tend, harvest my materials in my traditional cultural landscape. From the area my tribe is from,“ she said. "Pomo peoples wove some of the finest baskets in the world using at least 10 different techniques. Variations of techniques include lattice twining, open work twine and coiling methods which incorporate sedge roots, willows, dogwood, redbud and bulrush. Pomo made baskets for everything from hauling firewood to storing acorns, catching fish to cooking, gifting during weddings to carrying their young children."

When harvesting plants for baskets, she stewards the land as did her ancestors, never taking more than she needs. When she works as she has to perpetuate the making of traditional basketry, what makes it difficult is that so much of the ancestral lands where gathering took place for millennia is now privatized.

She added the baskets she makes are usually given away.

”Depending on what I am making, they (the pieces) will either be used by me or given as gifts or sold,“ she said. ”Really it depends on what it is. Workbaskets or another term: open twined baskets is what I make normally.“

During her campus art talk, she shared tidbits of her digital process to create art prints.

Her digital prints are created from sketches or as she likes to call them, “finger doodles,” using an app on her phone. The drawing typically includes basketry and a theme or a focus like an animal or season. The focus can also be words that bring forth powerful imagery like “renewal.”

Then she’ll add more to the digital drawing by incorporating weaving lines, flowers, animals or insects.

“Sometimes it (the process) will take a day, sometimes it may take a week or two. Typically my pieces will take about a week to draw," Marrufo said.

Once the drawing is set, it’s ready to be printed. She outsources to a printer who uses cold press paper and high saturated pigment ink to ensure the colors are exactly what Marrufo envisioned. To print her digital art, Marrufo uses PSPrint in Oakland and sends her Giclee pieces to Mindzai Printing in Texas.

Uplifting Pomo artists at exhibits

When she isn’t creating art, she works full-time as the environmental director for the Environmental Protection Agency at Guidiville Rancheria in Mendocino County.

Among the many hats Marrufo wears, there’s the important one of curating or co-curating art shows. Sometimes she helps select artists for the exhibit, picks the theme or helps select items to display, and other times she is asked to create signage.

"The museum had been thinking for some time about doing an exhibition focused exclusively on contemporary Pomo artists,“ said David Burton, director of the Grace Hudson Museum and Sun House in Ukiah. ”We asked Meyo to guest curate because she has extensive connections with Pomo communities and artists throughout the local region.“

When it comes to curating an exhibit representing a culture or heritage, having someone from that particular community can ensure the right people, items and events are being represented.

“It is incredibly important when presenting any sort of programming about Native peoples that museums seek the guidance, perspective and voice of content experts and interpreters from those communities, and Meyo certainly provided that,” Burton said. “Native histories and lived experience need to be told by Native peoples not by those from other cultures."

Kaplan, lead curator at Middletown Art Center, echoed Burton’s thoughts.

”She generously shares her cultural knowledge and ideas in how we can effectively collaborate as allies to better educate and engage the general public through arts, culture and environmental practices,“ she said.

Marrufo has hosted gallery shows at Middletown Art Center, Mendocino Art Center, Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento, Grace Hudson Museum in Ukiah, and California Indian Museum and Cultural Center in Larkfield-Wikiup, among others. She’s helped curate exhibits at Mendocino Art Center, Grace Hudson Museum and the Museum of Northern California in Chico.

She’s also worked with the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the de Young Museum in San Francisco for the Jules Tavernier and the Elem Pomo exhibits.

Sonoma Valley Museum of Art

Currently, she is showing and helped co-curate the current exhibit “We are Still Here: Pomo Artists on Our Cultural Landscape” at the Sonoma Valley Museum of Art. The other exhibit is “New Californians: Photographs by Judy Dater.” Both exhibits run until April 30. The exhibits include work from Silver Galleto, Bonnie Lockhart, Clint McKay, Robin Meely, Kathleen Smith and Eric Wilder.

"We are honored to be working with Meyo Marrufo on SVMA's current exhibition, ‘We Are Still Here: Pomo Artists and Our Cultural Landscape,’“ said Linda Keaton, executive director and chief curator at Sonoma Valley Museum of Art. ”Meyo has curated a stunning exhibition with the art of seven Pomo artists, and we are grateful that they are willing to share their art and stories with us."

Marrufo said her art conveys to others who she is.

“My art is who I am,” she said. “My art reflects the connections within family, heritage and cultural landscape. I look forward to future opportunities to show not only my artistic growth, but to highlight other Native artists."

Looking ahead at future exhibits related to Pomo tribes, she said, "I would like to do a show about breaking the Native archetypes. Moving past the imagery of Pocahontas and the drunken Indian. As a people, we are so much more. A show on our historical items and the makers of today."