As models and artists mingled at the Hole gallery in the East Village of Manhattan on Thursday night, a young Navajo ceramist named Jared Tso stayed focused on the clay pot he was sculpting with his hands.
“I’m the fourth generation to make pots in my family,” Mr. Tso said, glancing up from his wheel. “My process and materials are still all based in traditional Navajo pottery. My grandmother, she was an influential Navajo potter, and she made our family name.”
Gallery guests around him sipped cans of Pacifico as they studied ethereal oil paintings of Monument Valley and Shiprock. Others thumbed through a rack of T-shirts printed with artwork of bald eagles and mesa sunsets. A tattooed server wended through the crowd offering cups of Navajo tea.
Mr. Tso grew reflective.
“I think Native American people get looked at through a lens of nostalgia, and the contemporary versions of ourselves aren’t seen,” he said. “That’s also been true for Native American art. I think Native pottery could have a huge opportunity to participate in the New York art world if it got the chance, and that’s why I’m glad to be here tonight.”
Mr. Tso, who lives in Navajo Nation, a reservation in the southwest, had flown to New York for the downtown gallery event, which celebrated the launch of Hosh, a Native American lifestyle brand that seeks to support contemporary Native artists by adapting their weaving, metal work, pottery and painting into fashion and art.
Hosh, which is named after a Diné word for cactus, was co-founded by the noted Navajo weaver DY Begay, whose tapestry work is currently being exhibited at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C. Her co-founder, Tom Tarica, is an art collector who developed a lifelong passion for Native American art while studying at the University of Arizona in the late 1980s.
Ms. Begay, a fifth-generation Diné weaver, warmly greeted her fellow artists. One of her tapestries, “Enduring Red,” hung on a gallery wall beside tapestries woven by her sisters.
“This red tapestry is made from Navajo tea, sandalwood and cochineal, which is an insect,” Ms. Begay explained. “As my inspirations, I looked at the formation of the soils, canyon walls and red colors embedded in natural resources.”
A rapt crowd — which included a model carrying a toy poodle — had formed to watch Perry Shorty, a silversmith who lives in Navajo Nation, give a demonstration of his craft. He lit up a torch to heat a crucible filled with Barber coins, which are what he uses to forge much of his turquoise jewelry.
On a small stage, a Cherokee singer-songwriter, Ken Pomeroy, performed an acoustic set with Dakota McDaniel. Ms. Pomeroy — whose arms were lined in red tattoos of a hare, a coyote, a minnow and John Denver’s signature — strummed original tunes like “Wrango,” “Flannel Cowboy” and “Grey Skies,” which she sang in Cherokee. Her soft singing soothed the gallery crowd, luring one boy to sit on the floor and listen.
“It’s a song about self-discovery and nature,” Ms. Pomeroy said afterward. “I contributed it to a Cherokee language revitalization project. Languages are so lost, so we got together with our Cherokee elders, to make sure it was all correct.”
“I didn’t seek out to be a story teller,” she added. “But it’s literally in my blood.”
As the night wound down, the crowd spilled out onto the gallery’s sidewalk on the Bowery. Hanging out was Phillip Bread, a tall young man with long braided hair who wore rings imprinted with horses. He is Comanche and moved to New York from Oklahoma a few years ago before signing as a model with DNA.
“It’s difficult finding community as a Native American living in New York,” Mr. Bread said. “I might be walking around Brooklyn and be the only Native American in a several-mile radius. It’s not like I’m constantly running into other Comanche.”
“So it’s important when we all get together in the same space,” he added. “Because people still have an idea in their mind about what being Native American is, and it’s time to stop those stereotypes. We are not mythological. We are living, modern people.”
Alex Vadukul is a features writer for the Styles section of The Times, specializing in stories about New York City.
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