World travelers always bring something home from the journey: books, art, clothing, photographs. For internationally acclaimed sandpainter Joe Ben Jr., it has always been sand: fine to grainy, in colors ranging from bone and ocher to rust or rose.
Ben is no stranger to sand. He was born and raised in Shiprock, New Mexico, where the landscape of sandstone mesas, buttes, arroyos, and canyons has been shaped slowly through the years by water and wind. As a child, he spent days alone in the Four Corners area tending sheep and filling his pockets with sand. When he helped his family plow behind a horse to farm corn, watermelon, and alfalfa, he'd often stop to gather sand and pigments. Now an adult, he still collects sand from his journeys to Europe, Africa, and throughout the United States: From Anasazi, Navajo, and Hopi lands of the American southwest to Moroccan villages and the Lascaux caves of Dordogne, France.
Ben teaches sandpainting at the School of Fine Arts in Paris and the School of Fine Arts in Grenoble, and his work is exhibited worldwide at museums, universities, and galleries. In 1995, Ben was one of 60 contemporary artists and one of only five Americans and invited to create a work in celebration of the 50th anniversary of the United Nations at their European headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. He spent two weeks creating a large-scale sandpainting installation as diplomats and political officials walked about the main hall of the conference building. At the end of the designated time, the composition was scattered, just as sandpaintings are scattered at the conclusion of Navajo ceremonies.
"Sand is the perfect medium," Ben explains, "especially in a situation like the united Nations because sand, like peace, is fragile. Honesty is inherent. It has always spoken the truth to me. It responds to heat or cold, wetness or dryness. It shifts even in a light breeze. The challenge in working with sand is to let the material speak."
Ben must be a good listener because each of his precise yet passionate creations tells of the rituals and traditions of the Navajo, many of which are based on tales passed down by tribal elders. His paintings offer colorful and exuberant narratives of fire dancers, whirling rainbows, blessings for the harvest, and approaching storms. In Ben's paintings, rainbows protect the Pollen Boy, eagle’s protect the moon. Coyote steals fire, and gentle rains nourish corn, beans, squash, and tobacco. There are Talking Gods, Humpback harvesters, medicine bags, thunderbirds, sweat lodges, and a rich light that emerges in the morning sky as Dawn.
"Sand is my medium, and symbolism provides that alphabet for my language," Ben professes. "I remember one man said of the United Nations image, "What a pity you have to destroy it." But I see it differently. I am grateful to have experienced it, to help raise questions that initiate dialogue and understanding. It’s no different from the other artists who played water drums or double bass with such intensity, or read a poem from the heart, or offered video work.
"Artists are inspired by what moves us, which for me is community and family. Native American artists today still labor with their hands to create images in the same way that our people produced objects for ceremonies a long time ago. There was always a reason for what they made, and a rule behind it. For example, there are many images and rituals I won’t reproduce. Yes, it's artistic, but it also has purpose."
Ben’s sandpaintings range from 7" X 7" and 48" X 14" to larger-than-life ceremonial installations. Some of his larger pieces, like" Journey" even allow viewers physically to enter the composition, stand at the center and contemplate each element from within. His paintings evolve as he opens a vein of sand on a cliff, and collects small buckets of pigment from which he makes paint. He says he deliberately takes small amounts, returning to the spot when he needs more, working in a repetitive way that recalls repeated images, phases, or chants in a song.
"It's important to me that I go to the source for my paint, not an art supply store. Finding natural materials and processing them myself, breaking stones and sand, pulverizing it by hand in a metate, processing it through air filtration allows me to reconnect again and again. Repetition establishes a form. The resulting pigments have a life of their own. Some bleed and create fine washes like watercolors, while others offer properties more like stains and temperas. And I like the quality of texture and color I can achieve."
Additionally, to attain many of his vibrant hues and shades, Ben crushes lapis, azurite, coal, galena, gypsum, and malachite to incorporate into his surfaces. His canvas is horizontal masonite prepared with layers of sand, gesso, and glue. The fixative is determined by the number of layers of pressed sand. Everything is done by hand. And while sand is fragile, these paintings should last at least three to four hundred years.
When Ben is reminded that it's a long way from Shiprock to Paris, he laughs. "It's a long way from Shiprock to Phoenix, where I lived for many years." But he recently returned to the family home in Shiprock. And during a recent telephone interview, he described his favorite views of Pinnacle Rock, the Carolina popular his father planted years ago and the yellow sunset crossing the open land.
"I missed living here with my family, my community. One of my first memories as a child is of sitting under the sewing machine while my mother sewed. Sometimes I fell asleep as yards of soft velvet draped over me like a tent. I think this image is my first real memory of texture and color sweeping over me, and I carry that memory along as I travel on different continents.
"I love learning new phases and languages, new trade systems, new landscapes. But such exposure also points back to us, to the richness we can too easily overlook in our own lives: the Hopi dances, and poetry along the Rio Grande. When I'm away, I don't focus on the differences but on our connectedness. I pray to belong, not just to two worlds, but to all worlds. And through it all, I think about the depletion of human resources, of exporting our talent. We need to keep our talent here, too, with our people. It's time for me to be home."