Maiduan Language/Philosophy Expressed In Local Native Artist’s Works

by April Farnham

Nisenan artist Alan Wallace incorporates Native dialect and great-grandmother’s teachings in paintings

From November 3 through January 11, 2008, the Maidu Interpretive Center (located in Roseville) will be featuring eleven works of Alan Wallace, of Nisenan-Maidu descent, who grew up in the Auburn region.  Wallace works through a diversity of art mediums, including jewelry, paintings, and mixed media (wood, glass, metal, etc.), to communicate ideals and thoughts on the natural world, resolving his own questions and problems in the process.  His most recent works include a series of acrylic paintings of oak trees and woodlands, using Nisenan words and their English translations to describe the pieces.

Family history and childhood experiences have been a major influence in Wallace’s art. At age 3 or 4, Wallace distinctly remembers being in his garden at his parents’ home. “I was just sitting on a rock and watching the tomatoes grow,” he recalls, “and I had all these questions about how plants grew, how they began - the world seemed so big.”  This wonder and need to understand the fundamental laws of nature was fueled by his great-grandmother, Lizzie Enos, who had a vast traditional knowledge of Nisenan names and uses of plants and grasses native to the Sierras.  As children, Wallace and his sister April Moore spent countless hours outdoors with Enos learning about the natural world and working “hands-on” with plants.  This experience enabled Wallace to visualize the dynamics of creation from start to finish and seeing the proverbial ‘big picture’.  It also fueled his ongoing fascination with how ideas, thoughts, and language originate.

Following his graduation from U.C. Davis in 1975 with a B.S. in Applied Behavioral Sciences, Wallace worked as an educator and practitioner for a number of California tribal organizations including the Intertribal Council in Sacramento, the El Dorado Indian Council, and the Mendocino Indian Education Center in Ukiah.  In the 1980s, he moved back to the Auburn area and began creating jewelry (gold and sterling silver with mosaic stone inlays).  “Working with my hands has always stimulated my creative thought [processes], I was working in clay before I entered kindergarten,” he says with a smile.  Thus he returned to U.C. Davis for a year’s instruction about art studio technique and theory. 

The most important concept Wallace took away from his studio instruction, he emphasizes was that “it’s not the piece [artwork] that’s important, it’s your ability to make it, what you thought of it at the time you made it.”  In 1991, he moved to Taos, New Mexico and began showing his works throughout Santa Fe including the famous Santa Fe Indian Market.   He fondly recalls the satisfaction in seeing the wonder and fascination on the faces of children who stopped to study a bronze sculpture of his at a Santa Fe art gallery.  “Something was [intellectually] real in their response,” he says.

When asked about the importance of connecting the Nisenan language to his works, Wallace explains that the words forced him to ascribe a certain meaning and verbal context to the works.  “The whole idea of language,” he says, “is the concept of expressing ideas, thoughts, and messages in a certain perspective or viewpoint.” 

Aside from the Nisenan language, Wallace hopes the viewer will take away another important message from his show.  “Don’t try to pigeonhole or categorize art,” he cautions, “. . . just because it has no feathers or beads doesn’t make [the art] non-Indian. What makes a piece successful is that it made you think . . . just the idea that someone was working out a problem or answering a question.”  For Wallace, art represents a means of critically analyzing our world and utilizing reasoning skills in interpreting a worldview, much like his great-grandmother taught him in childhood.