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The topic of sketching and planning our pieces comes up on a regular basis as I weave under the watchful eyes of our customers.  The philosophy that Jake Trujillo passed on to us regarding this was pretty clear.  Design at the loom and make each piece a unique work of art. So I don’t often sketch things out before I weave. This comes from a long history of not liking pieces that I have thought through too much in advance. I find that basing my work on something I have drawn out on paper as opposed to basing it on...

When Irvin and Lisa Trujillo got married, they went up to Santa Fe for their honeymoon. Not a great distance from Albuquerque, but nevertheless it was an important choice. They went to see a museum show about Saltillo weavings. Remember that Lisa was about to start her life as a professional weaver, and that Irvin had been weaving since he was a child. But neither of them had seen Saltillo weavings before. The show convinced them both that they were going to have to weave in this style. A classic 19th-century Mexican Saltillo weaving These beautiful textiles originated in Mexico. ...

This is a picture of Jake O. Trujillo finishing up a warp on his warping mill which was kept in the attic of Irvin’s grandmother’s house.  This picture was taken in the early 1980’s, but he had built the mill soon after he built his loom in 1927.  He’s removing the warp from the mill, “chaining” it up to bring it to his loom across the road.     This is a picture taken a few years later of Irvin and Hosana Eilert putting a chained warp on a loom.  The challenge is to have every thread across the warp...

We were honored to be a part of the Gallery of Conscience at the Museum of International Folk Art.  It was a large investment of time spent with a cadre of New Mexican and international artists, over  the space of several months.  It has been difficult to communicate what we were doing during that time, but the Museum’s website explains.  “The Gallery of Conscience is an experimental gallery in the Museum of International Folk Art where the public is invited to help shape the content and form of the exhibition in real time. Visitors notice the Gallery of Conscience looks...

  Always Greener came out of my developing awareness of how the two sides of tapestry weaving, pictorial and geometric, relate to each other.  It always seems like there’s just a shade of jealousy about “the other side” having it easier, either making or selling their work, or just getting respect for it.  And I really am uncomfortable with any kind of “us versus them” mentality. This piece was about taking naturalistic shapes and making them geometric.  It’s about how they relate to each other.  So I revisited this body shape that I’d done in a handful of pieces before. ...

This is from a transcript of an old oral history interview with Irvin Trujillo’s father Jake. It’s a nice thing to have run into today, on Veteran’s Day. When we went to go find a picture of Jake in the Navy we found this picture, which is dated (at the bottom of the picture) November 11, 1944. A lot of Veteran’s Day coincidence. “In 1942, I was called into the army, I was inducted.  Well when I got my induction papers, I went over to Santa Fe.  At that time my oldest brother was working in Santa Fe.  He was...