Ahead of CODAsummit in Santa Fe, a closer look at the artist whose work fuses Pueblo history, clay, fashion, and speculative futures.
Most artists working across ceramics, couture, augmented reality, and futurist world-building would reach for the word innovator. Virgil Ortiz reaches for something older, and far more precise. "I was inspired to create images of what I saw. It gave me a freedom knowing that I was not an innovator or even going outside of tradition. I was in fact a Revivalist." That single word is the key to understanding one of the most original artistic practices in the world today.
Ortiz grew up at Cochiti Pueblo, a sovereign Native community between Santa Fe and Albuquerque — the same land where the story his art tells began more than three centuries ago. His grandmother Laurencita Herrera and his mother Seferina Ortiz were both revered potters who placed the tradition directly into his hands. He won his first Santa Fe Indian Market award at 14. By 16, he was a working artist, traveling to New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles — selling pottery to fund each trip. What he found in those cities surprised him. The tattoos, the piercings, the boldly adorned bodies in nightclubs didn't feel foreign. They reminded him of the Cochiti figurative pottery of the 1800s. Social commentary, captured in clay.
That recognition unlocked everything.
In 1680, the Pueblo people of what is now New Mexico staged the most successful Indigenous revolt in North American history. Under the leadership of Po'pay, they drove Spanish colonizers out of Santa Fe and preserved their religion, language, and art for twelve years before the Spanish returned.
Most people have never heard of it.
"It's America's first revolution," Ortiz has said, "but people don't call it that because it wasn't taught in schools. It's been almost swept under the carpet because of the genocide that happened."
He has spent decades changing that — using clay as the instrument.
Revolt 1680/2180 is Ortiz's life's work. An ever-expanding visual saga that places the Pueblo Revolt in two time dimensions simultaneously — the past and five centuries into the future. Original Runners who carried coded messages between pueblos become futuristic gliders. Watchmen sound alarms across time. The leader Po'pay reappears as a warrior-prophet navigating two eras at once.
What looks like science fiction is, at its core, an act of cultural survival.
"Everybody's capable of time travel right now," he told The Art Newspaper in 2024. "We're just vibrating at different levels."
Works from the series are now in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and exhibitions have traveled from Denver to Miami, Paris to Los Angeles. Yet through all of it, Ortiz still gathers his own clay from Cochiti lands, still paints with wild spinach, still pit fires using cedar, aspen wood, and cow manure — the exact same methods his mother and grandmother used.
"I won't ever feel successful," he has said, "until I leave this realm and the pottery tradition stays alive and the world knows about the Pueblo Revolt."
For anyone thinking seriously about what public art can carry — Virgil Ortiz is essential. His work proves that cultural memory and speculative imagination are not opposites. That the most technologically adventurous practice can be grounded entirely in the earth beneath your feet. And that the communities historically excluded from the official art canon are capable of producing some of the most formally rigorous, narratively complex, and globally resonant work being made anywhere in the world today.
He also reminds us that place is not decoration. The revolt he depicts happened on the same soil where CODAsummit will gather this September. The land beneath Santa Fe carries that history. Ortiz has spent thirty years making it visible.
This September, Virgil Ortiz will deliver the Barbara Tober Opening Keynote Address at CODAsummit 2026 in Santa Fe, New Mexico, September 29 through October 1.
Register for CODAsummit 2026 →
Early bird pricing ends June 30. After that, tickets increase by $100.
Do you have news, stories, or projects to share? Reach out to editor@codaworx.com