“Through my sculpture, I tell about my experiences as a Native American, as a woman, as a mother, wife, girlfriend, as an artist, as a human being in today’s society. I tell about life through the human figure expressing emotion. It is my story, but it’s also everyone’s story.”

As a 4-year-old child, Roxanne Swentzell, Santa Clara Pueblo, b. 1962, found that expressing herself through clay was the easiest way for her to communicate. Her mother, Rina Swentzell, who is Rose Naranjo’s daughter and sister to Jody Folwell and Nora Naranjo Morse, made pottery when Roxanne was a child. Roxanne’s childhood creations were often figurative works. She studied art at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe and the Portland Museum Art School in Oregon, where she excelled as a figurative ceramist, but she also took other art classes including painting and printmaking.

Many of Swentzell’s clay works exhibit social commentary, while others astutely examine human emotions. Swentzell’s pottery was included in the exhibit Pottery by American Indian Women: The Legacy of Generations at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in Washington, D.C., in 1997 at the same time her work was in the exhibit Honoring Native America: Twentieth Century American Sculpture at the White House. Her many awards include the 1999 Best of Classification in Sculpture at the Indian Market in Santa Fe, and she was the featured artist at the 1997 Heard Museum Guild Indian Fair & Market. The book, Roxanne Swentzell: Extra-Ordinary People by Gussie Fauntleroy, chronicles her career.