Virgilio Cruz and Ngawang Choedar
SubjectPortrait of
Virgilio Cruz
(Puerto Rican)
SubjectPortrait of
Ngawang Choedar
(Tibetan)
Date1995-1996
Mediumnegatives
ClassificationsGraphics
Credit LineConnecticut Cultural Heritage Arts Program collections
CopyrightIn Copyright
Object number2015.196.244.1-.24
Description2015.196.244.1-.5: Negatives of a musical performance of Virgilio Cruz, Puerto Rican cuatro player, and his group Canto Isleño with vocalist Lydia Gonzalez at the Institute for Community Research on November 10, 1995.
2015.196.244.6-.8: Negatives of a recording of Canto Isleño, a music group led by Virgilio Cruz with vocalists Lydia Gonzalez and Felix Delgado, Puerto Rican cuatro player, at WNPR studios with producer John Dankosky in 1995.
2015.196.244.9-.11: Negatives of a musical performance of Virgilio Cruz, Puerto Rican cuatro player, and his group Canto Isleño with vocalist Lydia Gonzalez at the Institute for Community Research on November 10, 1995.
2015.196.244.12-.13: Negatives of a cat sitting next to a plant.
2015.196.244.14-.17: Negatives of Ngawang Choedar with tools, creating a Tibetan woodcarving in the traditional technique in his apartment in West Haven, Connecticut in 1996.
2015.196.244.18: Negative of a decorative wooden frame of pine, carved with bamboo fret saw and chisels. Later displayed in the "Auspicious Signs: Tibetan Arts in New England" exhibit project.
2015.196.244.19-.23: Negatives of Ngawang Choedar creating a Tibetan woodcarving in the traditional technique in his apartment in West Haven, Connecticut in 1996.
2015.196.244.24: Negative of a musical performance with Virgilio Cruz, Puerto Rican cuatro player, and his group Canto Isleño with vocalist Lydia Gonzalez at the Institute for Community Research on November 10, 1995.
NotesSubject Note for 2015.196.244.1-.5, .9-.11, and .24: "Noche de Música y Libros Puertorriqueña": A Celebration of the Puerto Rican Community, was a performance organized by CCHAP at the Institute for Community Research featuring Canto Isleño, Puerto Rican music group led by cuatro player Virgilio Cruz on November 10, 1995.2015.196.244.6-.8: Negatives of a recording of Canto Isleño, a music group led by Virgilio Cruz with vocalists Lydia Gonzalez and Felix Delgado, Puerto Rican cuatro player, at WNPR studios with producer John Dankosky in 1995.
2015.196.244.9-.11: Negatives of a musical performance of Virgilio Cruz, Puerto Rican cuatro player, and his group Canto Isleño with vocalist Lydia Gonzalez at the Institute for Community Research on November 10, 1995.
2015.196.244.12-.13: Negatives of a cat sitting next to a plant.
2015.196.244.14-.17: Negatives of Ngawang Choedar with tools, creating a Tibetan woodcarving in the traditional technique in his apartment in West Haven, Connecticut in 1996.
2015.196.244.18: Negative of a decorative wooden frame of pine, carved with bamboo fret saw and chisels. Later displayed in the "Auspicious Signs: Tibetan Arts in New England" exhibit project.
2015.196.244.19-.23: Negatives of Ngawang Choedar creating a Tibetan woodcarving in the traditional technique in his apartment in West Haven, Connecticut in 1996.
2015.196.244.24: Negative of a musical performance with Virgilio Cruz, Puerto Rican cuatro player, and his group Canto Isleño with vocalist Lydia Gonzalez at the Institute for Community Research on November 10, 1995.
Subject Note for 2015.196.244.6-.8: The recording session depicted took place at the studios of Connecticut Public Radio, as part of a five-part series of interviews conducted by CCHAP and John Dankosky, Producer at WNPR, and later broadcast widely on the station. In 1998, these recordings along with others were made into a CD called "Sounds Like Home," produced by the Institute for Community Research and Connecticut Public Radio under grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Connecticut Humanities Council, with additional support from the Connecticut Commission on the Arts. It was produced by John Dankosky and Lynne Williamson in 1998.
Subject Note for 2015.196.244.14-.23: "Auspicious Signs: Tibetan Arts in New England" was an exhibit project developed by the Connecticut Cultural Heritage Arts Program (CCHAP) at the Institute for Community Research in Hartford in 1996. The exhibit opening and a festival of Tibetan arts and music served as the major public events of an eighteen-month research and programming project conducted by CCHAP in partnership with the Tibetans. The project celebrated the Tibetan community's preservation and practice of their traditions in America.
Since the Tibetan Resettlement Project brought twenty-one Tibetans to live in Connecticut, the state has become home to one of the fastest growing Tibetan communities in the United States. Several Connecticut Tibetans are traditional artists of great skill who are deeply committed to expressing and passing on Tibetan culture. Members of the Tibetan community are also dedicated to educating others about the difficult history and circumstances of the Chinese occupation of Tibet.
The collaborative project team consisted of three Tibetan project assistants, exhibit designer Sarah Buie, the Tibetan Cultural Center of Connecticut, artist Sonam Lama who was at the time Vice President of the Massachusetts Tibetan Association, and curator/folklorist Lynne Williamson, then director of CCHAP. The interdisciplinary nature of the team served to broaden the project's outreach to regional Tibetan communities as well as to incorporate a rich variety of expertise and perspectives.
The project team produced an exhibit displaying Tibetan religious art as well as everyday traditional arts, a day-long festival featuring artists, performers, demonstrations, and discussions, and an illustrated catalogue. Artists Jampa Tsondue, Ngawang Choedar, and Tsering Yangzom were featured in a video documenting their artistic process.
Funders included the Lila Wallace Readers Digest Community Folklife Program administered by the Fund for Folk Culture and underwritten by the Lila Wallace-Reader's Digest Fund; the National Endowment for the Arts Folk and Traditional Arts Program, the Connecticut Commission on the Arts, the Connecticut Humanities Council and the Institute for Community Research.
To mark the exhibit opening, the Tibetan community held a festival attended by over three hundred people, including Tibetans from all over the region. Four music and dance groups performed outside, while in the exhibit gallery three Tibetan artists demonstrated weaving, woodcarving, and thangka painting. The event also featured a bazaar, a common Tibetan cultural activity. Many Tibetans are keen traders, maintaining links to Dharamsala, India, and Nepal through import of goods to the U.S. and sale through small shops here. Six Tibetan vendors from all over the region set up tables during the festival with a great variety of Tibetan books and crafts. Lakedhen and five other community members had risen at dawn to prepare food, which they sold during the day. Several speakers described the background of the project, the story of the Connecticut community, the current political situation in Tibet, and the history and character of Tibetan culture. Cholsum dance group from New York City and musicians Lakedhen and Thupten performed and accompanied the dancers. Singer DaDon and her group played for over an hour.
Biographical Note: Virgilio Cruz, master cuatro player and composer of décimas (an old poetic form with ten lines of eight syllables each) first learned traditional music from trovadores (folk poetry improvisors) and from his father who played and built cuatros, the 10-stringed guitar-like instrument. After moving to Hartford Virgilio established a community traditional music school and orchestra, La Primera Orquesta de Cuatros. Through the school many local Puerto Ricans became good singers, cuatro, guiro, and guitar players as well as trovadores. Like the school, Canto Isleño was formed by senior members of the Orquesta to fill a void in the cultural life of Hartford's largest ethnic group and to expand appreciation for traditional music and poetry. Canto Isleño performed Puerto Rican música jíbara, the songs and poetry of the island's mountain farmers. Their repertoire included folk forms such as Puerto Rican seises and aguinaldos, along with joropas, marumbas, and semi-classical mazurcas, valses criollas, and danzas. In 1998, Virgilio moved back to Puerto Rico, a long-time dream of his.
A master cuatrista and teacher, Virgilio is also a poet, accomplished in composing the words of decimas, seises, and aguinaldos (specialized poetic forms in Spanish) which he sets to music. These become both folk songs and popular songs which he sings himself or arranges for Canto Isleño. He was First Prize Winner as Composer, at the Segundo Festival de la Voz y la Cancion, San Lorenzo, Puerto Rico and Semi-Finalist Composer at the XI Festival de la Cancion de la Nueva York in the late 1980s. Virgilio is an experienced performer who can explain as well as perform music in both English and Spanish. The concept of a roving singer/songwriter skilled at extemporaneous song composition is so much a part of Puerto Rican folk music. Virgilio and others developed and presented several Concurso de Trovadores de Nueva Inglaterra" events, traditional competitions in jibaro poetry creation, in Hartford, with support from the national Endowment for the Arts.
Virgilio served on the advisory committee for the Connecticut Heritage Arts Program, and CCHAP served as mentor to La Primera Orquesta de Cuatros, advising on grantwriting, organizational development, and marketing/promotion, through a Connecticut Commission on the Arts program. Canto Isleño performed at Charter Oak Cultural Center during the first traditional arts performers series organized by CCHAP in 1995-1996, and was selected for the Connecticut Commission on the Arts Touring Roster. In 1992, the Orquesta was a participant in the New England Foundation for the Arts (NEFA) Newcomers Project, a technical assistance program for artists from recently arrived communities. In 1995, Virgilio was selected as a mentor/teacher as part of the New England Foundation for the Arts Apprenticeship Program. He and the group Canto Isleño are featured on the 1998 CCHAP/WNPR-produced CD "Sounds Like Home."
BIographical Note: 27 years old at the time of the Auspicious Signs project, Ngawang Choedar shows a remarkable skill in woodcarving. His father was a well-known Tibetan woodcarver and traditional architect from near Lhasa, who fled Tibet for Dharmasala, India. Ngawang inherited his father's love for wood, further developing his carving knowledge at the Tibetan Library in Dharmsala where he apprenticed for four years. Ngawang's teacher there was a monk from Kham in Tibet who both taught students and supervised them in making elaborate carved tables commissioned by monasteries in India and Japan. They also carved a wooden altar for the Dalai Lama. It could take as long as a year to finish a large table with several decorated panels carved with traditional Tibetan designs such as Buddhist symbols, mythological animals, and landscape scenes.
Ngawang brought his woodworking tools with him to Connecticut in 1992. He found a job in West Haven making specialized countertops, learning new techniques of industrial woodworking. The more delicate art of traditional Tibetan carving, as he learned it, is difficult to do in a small apartment even though Ngawang uses only his saw, whetstone, chisels, and the flat arm of a chair to create intricate, almost molded three-dimensional carved forms. Usually he carves pieces out of a soft pine called chil, easier to work than the hardwoods for furniture which require hammer and chisel.
After tracing designs (he uses many from his father) onto a flat piece of wood, Ngawang holds the wood with one hand while cutting shapes with his bamboo fret saw. This seemingly simple tool is ingenious and flexible, as it allows him to cut curved lines into tightly spaced shapes. By unstringing the serrated wire, threading it through a pierced hole in the center of the wood, then rewiring the saw, Ngawang can shape the middle of the wood block without cutting into it from the edge. Once the shapes are cut, depth and detail are added with a variety of gouges and chisels. To make a piece such as a large frame or table, individual panels or sections are carved, then assembled.
Additional audio, video, and/or photographic materials exist in the archive relating to these artists.
Cataloging Note: This project was made possible in part by the Institute of Museum and Library Services MA-245929-OMS-20.
Status
Not on view
