As a boy, he attended the Pueblo’s day school, where teacher Esther Hoyt gave her students paper and paints and encouraged them to draw and paint what they knew, including ceremonial dances and daily life. Born in 1898, he was the son of Juan Estabal Roybal and Alfonsita Martinez, a San Ildefonso potter on whose pots her son is thought to have painted traditional Pueblo imagery as a young man. It was perfect timing for Awa Tsireh, also known as Alfonso Roybal, whose name in San Ildefonso’s Tewa language means Cattail Bird. Significantly, this attention came at a time when American artists, collectors, poets, writers and anthropologists - some of whom became patrons - were beginning to appreciate Native art for its aesthetic and artistic qualities, rather than simply in an ethnographic sense. Sandfield, authors of Awa Tsireh: Pueblo Painter and Metalsmith. The reporter may have been disappointed, but in the 1930s and ’40s Americans in New York City, Chicago, San Francisco and other major cities were clearly impressed with the paintings of Awa Tsireh (pronounced A-Wa See-day), one of the first Pueblo artists to receive national and international recognition, according to Diana F. When he mentioned that he and the other Pueblo artists had been taken to the top of the Empire State Building, the reporter excitedly asked, “What did you think of it?” Awa Tsireh replied, “I thought it was high.” The quiet, intelligent artist expressed genuine wonder at seeing the ocean, but he wasn’t taking the bait when repeatedly asked what impressed him about the city and its tall buildings. When San Ildefonso Pueblo artist Awa Tsireh traveled to New York City in 1931 for the Exposition of Indian Tribal Arts, which included several of his paintings, a reporter seemed intent on eliciting a “golly gee” in response to his first experience in the big city, according to a newspaper article at the time.
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