Diego Romero

Diego Romero firmly positions his work within an Indigenous visuality. He has built a career constructing ceramic vessels that elevate Pueblo life to Olympian stature. A third-generation professional artist, Romero was born to a Cochiti father and a non-Native mother and raised in Berkeley, California. Upon completing high school, he returned to his ancestral Pueblo lands. He attended the Institute of American Indian Arts before attaining degrees from Otis College of Art and Design (BFA) and the University of California, Los Angeles (MFA). Since earning an MFA in 1993, Romero has developed an extensive exhibition record with works housed in significant public collections such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Cartier Foundation, the Peabody Essex Museum, the Denver Art Museum, the Heard Museum, the British Museum, and the Scottish National Museum. Working in a narrative style that evokes pre-contact Mimbres pottery, as well as Greek amphorae (two-handled vases) and Anasazi ceramics, Romero's earthenware bowls and handled-vessels investigate the marginalized status of Indigenous history and society. Using historically situated oral traditions as source material, Romero departs visually from the canonical work of Pueblo pottery and instead relies heavily on a narrative style gleaned from comic books and popular culture, specters of a childhood spent mingling in comic book stores. The resulting composition transcends the object's materiality, engaging the viewer in a humorous interplay in which the author's overt anti-colonial content maintains a non-threatening quality for audiences and collectors.