Destined to Carve: The Life of Sculptor Cliff Fragua
By Brian D’Ambrosio
Cliff Fragua considers himself lucky as far as sculptors go. After 50 years carving stone, the Jemez Pueblo artist still has strong hands that are in one piece.
“When I studied in Italy, a lot of the stone artisans had missing tips on their fingers,” Fragua said. “It’s not unheard of to lose a part.”
Fragua’s hands have been exposed to decades of demanding work across the globe – leaving a visual and emotional record of an artist who believes that he has long since found his proper place and true home.
His unique journey began early.
Fifty-Year Mission Continues
Fragua’s parents are from Jemez Pueblo, where the couple met. His father, Manuel, was the oldest of 13 children. His mother, Juanita, was one of 10.
Manuel Fragua was a carpenter, and he moved the family to St. Louis, Mo., when his son was quite young. Federal relocation programs at the time were offering jobs and opportunities to Native Americans who were willing to migrate to urban centers. The elder Fragua joined the carpenters’ union and eventually earned the distinction of journeyman. He worked on the iconic Gateway Arch constructed between 1961 and 1965.
The Fraguas returned to New Mexico briefly before the family moved once again, this time to the West Coast. When Cliff Fragua was in the fourth grade, he had his first interaction with sculpture. In the housing projects in San Francisco where they lived, there were several public installations sculpted by Beniamino “Benny” Bufano (1890-1970) in the courtyards, and they weren’t off limits to the young boy climbing, riding, or sitting on them.
“They were marble and granite sculptures and simple, suggestive carvings,” Fragua said. “The highly polished stone. The different crystals in the granite. I never forgot them.”
Though he spent summers at Jemez Pueblo learning agriculture and working with livestock, Fragua graduated from high school in San Francisco.
“We had a community of Jemez people who lived out there and we had Feast Day in the Bay Area,” he said. “There was such a contrast to life in the city and life here on the reservation, and it was hard assimilating back into the culture.”
In the mid-1970s, Cliff Fragua returned permanently to Jemez Pueblo and enrolled in classes at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. Sculpture was a suggestion from his college friend Gerald McMaster, a Plains Cree from Saskatchewan who had an almost surreal sense of dexterity. McMaster would carve an eagle’s head out of gray alabaster in the dorm room and look like an expert in five minutes.
The first time that Fragua tried to do something similar, it didn’t work out as well as he had planned. He took a chunk of soft soapstone and imagined the form of a bear. Yet, after chipping too hard at the stone, it broke. He held the shattered fragments in his hand, disappointed, even though he discovered he loved the process.
Soon, Fragua acquired a few modest tools – hand chisels, a mallet, a rasp – and in the three-room house that the Fraguas rented, there was precious little space for all seven family members. So, he set up in a corner of the kitchen.
While at the Institute of American Indian Arts, he was fortunate to be taught by renowned Native Modernist sculptor and painter Allan Houser (1914-1994). Fragua recalled him as a quiet and intelligent man of rich insights, who taught him that sculptors construct the world with their eyes as well as their hands.
Fragua said he formed an immediate sense of attachment to sculpture, comparable to a spiritual pathway discovered by a monk and deserving complete attention.
“I said to myself, ‘This is it’, and I could feel the love.”
Fragua also attended the Marble Carving Workshop in Pietrasanta, Italy, to hone his craft.
However, when Fragua started his artistic journey, he said, very few Native people carved stone, except for those traditional masons who made small animal fetishes on a grinding wheel.
“I was outside of the house carving and an elder man asked me what I was doing,” Fragua said. “I told him that I was making sculptures. For him, he could see carving stone for ceremonial use, but carving stone as an art form, he couldn’t grasp that idea.”
The more that Fragua carved, the more people began to understand it and to respect and admire his ability.
Today, Fragua has pieces at various galleries and homes across the United States. Perhaps his most grand piece is the marble Po’pay statue, which was permanently installed in the Statuary Hall of the U.S. Capitol in 2005.
Teachings, Secrets of Stone
On this afternoon, Fragua shapes and chisels a small marble statue representing the distinct features of the “Corn Mothers and the Corn Clan” of the Zia Pueblo. Watching his hands whittle the sides of the Corn Mother, it’s clear that stone enables him to experience every moment with new appreciation and delight.
“Stone takes up space,” he said. “It has a presence. You are not creating an illusion.”
Stone carving, he added, is an adventurous act of discovery, and, therefore, ideas must be flexible and fluid, susceptible to change.
“Continuing means the stone is accepting my approach to bringing the image out from within,” he said. “If it doesn’t accept it, it’ll tell you. It will break on you. You will see a flaw or these little mishaps will occur. The material is the greatest teacher. When I am pulverizing stone until I get a shape, I can hear the ringing, the song singing to me.”
A certain slab of stone might sit in the corner of Fragua’s workshop for 20 years before it is ready to engage.
“One day the stone will say, ‘I came to bring a smile to your face and some warmth to your heart,” he said.
Fragua incorporates a number of techniques and influences into his stone work, including Italian methods of pictorial cutting and Korean modes of stacking and laminating blocks together. Still, he is always experimenting with possible patterns, textures, forms and adornments.
“Sculpture’s a journey that was given to me,” Fragua said. “I’ll always do it.”
Awesome story. Awesome art.
Gorgeous work