Indian Artist Blends Catholic and Zuni Traditions in Murals : Art: Alex Seowtewa’s kachina paintings on a church interior represent the synthesis of old beliefs and Roman Catholicism that many Zunis embrace.

The 6-foot-thick adobe walls of the old church in the center of the village have weathered rain, snow and neglect for more than 360 years, a monument to the determination of long-vanished Spanish missionaries who sought to convert American Indians to their religion.

Now these massive walls are also a tribute to the survival of traditional Zuni religious practices, thanks to the vision of a remarkable artist.

For the last 21 years, Alex Seowtewa has perched high atop metal scaffolding to paint richly symbolic murals depicting nearly 30 masked kachina figures dancing across the distinctive landscape of the Zuni reservation.

With Seowtewa’s work, the church’s interior has come to graphically represent the synthesis of old beliefs and Roman Catholicism that many Zunis embrace.

The chancel is conventional, furnished with an altar, a statue of Our Lady of Guadalupe and a crucifix. But the upper half of the 30-foot-high north and south walls are lined with Seowtewa’s brightly colored life-size kachinas, rendered in oils. Paintings of the Stations of the Cross hang beneath.

Zunis see kachinas as ancestral spirits who bring rain, ripen corn and bestow happiness and prosperity. Each kachina is unique and is impersonated by a masked dancer during sacred religious celebrations marking the cycle of the seasons.

Seowtewa, 58, who attends Mass, sees no contradiction when he takes part in Zuni rites, believing Christian teachings are embodied in the traditional religion. It’s a matter, he says, of keeping his Indian and non-Indian sides “in balance.”

“I know it’s not displeasing to my own people,” he says. As for the church, he recalls how the Pope, during his 1987 visit to the Southwest, urged native peoples to preserve their languages and cultures.

The 50-foot-long murals are also a powerful medium for transmitting tribal lore to future generations. “This project is actually the preservation of my Zuni identity,” Seowtewa says.

Named for Our Lady of Guadalupe, the church was built in 1629 by Zunis under the direction of Franciscan priests. Fifty years later, in 1680, the Zunis joined pueblos in New Mexico and Arizona in an uprising that drove the Spanish from the territory for 12 years. Like most Zunis, Seowtewa knows stories that have been passed generation-to-generation recounting the brutality of the Spanish occupiers.

Missionary activity resumed after the Spanish returned, but halted again in the 1820s following the Mexican Revolution. The Franciscans did not return to Zuni until 1923, when they opened a new mission and school dedicated to St. Anthony.

The old church gradually fell into ruin as its roof collapsed and the walls eroded. Children played inside and Seowtewa himself scaled the walls as a youngster to view village dances.

In 1966, the Zuni tribe reached an agreement with the Catholic church and the National Park Service to restore the building, and after archeological work was done, renovation began in 1968.

Seowtewa, who was carving new confessionals for the church, was intrigued to learn from several village elders that kachina paintings had long ago adorned its walls. “My father said, ‘Son, there’s only one thing missing. It would be nice if you or someone would do paintings of the kachinas,’ ” Seowtewa recalls.

Seowtewa’s relationship with his father, a gifted artist who painted murals at the St. Anthony mission, was complex.

After his mother died when he was 5, Seowtewa was raised by his mother’s family. He did not know his father well until he was older, but he showed an early artistic knack and still remembers learning to sketch on the back of an old cardboard box with charcoal taken from a campfire.

After attending the mission school, he attended a Catholic college in Albuquerque on an art scholarship, where he learned a little about landscape painting. But the Korean War was on, and he was drafted after two semesters.

When he returned to Zuni, Seowtewa fell prey to serious alcohol abuse for about a year. “I was almost in a direction to dig my own grave, but I recovered from it,” he says. He credits his elders with helping him.

‘I reflected on my upbringing,” he says. “My grandfather pointed out that life is a gift.”

He married his wife, Odelle, with whom he has had 10 children, 39 years ago. He worked as a maintenance man and bus driver for the mission school, among other jobs, but he also developed a local reputation for his painting.

When the church renovation was finished in 1970, Seowtewa asked the pastor whether he could paint kachinas. Receiving permission, he set to work. “The hardest part was, ‘How shall I start? How shall I go about it? How shall I end?’ ” he recalls.

On the sun-warmed south wall he portrayed kachinas associated with the spring, fall and summer months, along with the vegetation appropriate for each season. The north wall is devoted to winter kachinas set against a snow-shrouded landscape.

Beneath one of two windows on the south wall there is a vivid lunette celebrating the bounty with which the Zunis are blessed, depicting blue corn, yellow corn, watermelons and squash. Under the other he has painted a stylized Zuni sun symbol.

Seowtewa needed no live models for his painting, relying entirely on his memory, which he says is “photographic.” In the process, he preserved the images of some kachinas that have disappeared from the ceremonies over the years.

With his son Kenneth, 34, serving as an apprentice, Seowtewa painted when he could until 1983, when funding for his maintenance job at the mission ran out. He took a job with the Zuni public schools teaching children about the tribe’s historical legends, which didn’t leave time for the murals.

He and Kenneth returned to painting full time in 1989 when they received a two-year National Endowment for the Arts grant.

Seowtewa has the the support of non-Zunis who are moved by his work, such as Harvard Ayers, an anthropologist at Appalachian State University in Boone, N.C. A self-described “Alex groupie,” Ayers and several others recently formed the Southwest Native American Arts Foundation to funnel donations and grants to the project and to other deserving artists.

“From an anthropologist’s point of view, this is just a bonanza of interesting stuff,” says Ayers, who secured the first NEA grant and has recently applied for a second.

Another academic friend helped set up Seowtewa’s October visit to the then-Soviet Union, where he was a guest of the Soviet Fine Arts Union. He gave slide shows, performed Zuni songs while accompanying himself on a drum and did some sightseeing.

“I went as a good will cultural ambassador to represent my whole country,” he says proudly.

Seowtewa, who estimates it will take four more years to finish the project, does not work quickly. A diabetic for nine years, he has been nursing an arm injury lately that makes it hard to climb the scaffolding.

Often, he and Kenneth stop what they are doing to greet tourists who stop by.

Sometimes Seowtewa waits for inspiration, a process that is helped by visits to the ruins of ancient Zuni villages. Rejuvenated by his ancestors’ example, he says, “It just flows out.”

The final phase of the project is three altar screens painted on canvas. Seowtewa has already sketched in the centerpiece in pencil, a rendering of the church as it looked in the late 19th Century taken from an early photograph.

Above the scene, Seowtewa has deftly merged his Zuni and non-Zuni beliefs in a powerful image: a bearded Jesus in tribal garb standing atop a traditional cloud symbol, one hand raised in blessing.