For some, inspiration comes in the form of Olympic athletes or an especially poignant film or biography. For Ingrid Albrecht, an Elgin grade school teacher turned artist, it came in the form of rocks. Lots of them.
“I can’t put the feeling into words,” said Albrecht, recalling a 10-day Navajo guide-led trip in the late 1980s through northeastern Arizona’s Canyon de Chelly, home to one of the greatest concentrations of prehistoric and historic Native American rock art in the United States.
“At night you had this overwhelming feeling of awe. Just seeing the stars overhead, hearing the crackle of the campfire, and being aware of the thousands of sacred rock carvings and paintings surrounding you in the dark. You really felt the presence of the people who’d lived there thousands of years ago.”
The moment was a turning point for Albrecht, who was living in a suburb of Albuquerque at the time and just beginning to grasp the rapid rate of destruction currently faced by petroglyphs (rock engravings) and pictographs (rock paintings), the world’s most ancient art.
“In places like Three Rivers in New Mexico, people use chalk or paint to outline carvings before taking photos. Kids go out there and shoot at them for target practice. In some cases, images have been literally chiseled out of the sandstone walls and carted right past the guards, who too often are bribed to look the other way.”
Particularly egregious, she noted, is the case of Petroglyph National Monument, a 7,160-acre Pueblo Indian rock art site just west of Albuquerque, where a 17-mile stretch of petroglyph-covered cliffs known as the West Mesa escarpment may soon be bisected by a six-lane highway designed to carry on Albuquerque’s rapid westward growth.
Pueblo Indians consider the area–home to more than 15,000 Anasazi and Pueblo drawings of animals, anthropomorphs (human figures with animal attributes), shield figures, handprints, supernatural beings, clan symbols and recordings of ceremonial events that date back nearly 3,000 years–a sacred worshiping site for which encroaching development is tantamount to sacrilege.
Since then, Albrecht, 49, has devoted her life to recording, and rendering in abstract watercolors, vestiges of rock art in the Southwest and around the world. Part artist, part preservationist, part itinerant explorer, she said she hopes to raise awareness of their plight through her works, about two dozen of which are on display through Nov. 26 at Chicago’s Tavern Club.
The decision seemed a natural one, said Albrecht, whose North Side apartment-cum-atelier is a natural wonder all its own, filled with exotic plants and birds, including an African ringneck dove named Cooper who is fond of alighting on the heads of unsuspecting visitors. As a child growing up along the Rock River in Dixon, Ill., she was first drawn to Native American culture through the area’s historic association with the Pottawatomi and the Blackhawk Wars. In 1970, Albrecht eschewed nurse’s training to become an English teacher for six years in Argentina, Costa Rica and Guatemala, ultimately returning to teach in the Elgin public school system for nine years. But something was amiss.
“Education at that level is 99 percent discipline and 1 percent teaching,” said Albrecht. “After nine years, I felt unfulfilled and decided to take a leave of absence to study art. What I do now combines the best of both worlds: the opportunity to create art and to educate a much wider range of people about something most Americans are totally unaware of.”
Petroglyphs are Albrecht’s main muse. Though lesser known than the rock paintings made famous through cave discoveries in southern France and northern Spain, they are far more copious, often older and in various and occasionally eerily similar designs worldwide–a phenomenon probably owing at least in part to early man’s continental migration patterns.
Lacking a written language, primitive man pecked, abraded and incised the sandstone, volcanic basalt and granite surfaces of canyon walls and other rock formations with pictures that served, among other purposes, as memory aids, documents of fertility rituals, tribal totems and entreaties to the spirit world for success in hunting.
The Southwest may have been her catalyst, but it opened up a world of possibilities, said Albrecht, who has since traveled to Hawaii, the Pacific Northwest, the Tsodilo Hills of Botswana in South Africa, Arnhemland in Australia’s Northwest Territory and northwest China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region.
To simulate the darkened, mineral-streaked patinas, or “desert varnish,” that accumulate on many of the rock surfaces, she uses watercolors in earthy reds, browns, blues and greens, tilting the paper to create unusual washes and mimicking texture by painting over a rough, acrylic-based material on boards. Figures and symbols are executed with a thin drawing gum; homemade paper adds another dimension evocative of the subjects’ rock surfaces and shapes.
Of Albrecht’s Southwest petroglyph paintings, the most intriguing may be those depicting anthropomorphic carvings made by the Fremont Indians who lived in Utah from about 500 to 1300 A.D. Highly ornamental, they are typically of broad-shouldered human figures, in ceremonial regalia and headdresses, with trapezoidal torsos. Presumably, shamanistic ritual and a belief in the preternatural power of such animals as bighorn sheep, bears and elk play a role in the images’ meaning, but interpretations are usually just guesses, cautions Albrecht. “That’s what is so fascinating about these carvings. They’re ultimately a mystery.”
The Albuquerque petroglyphs aren’t the only rock art engravings under siege. In Pakininui and Puako, Hawaii, where fairly recent carvings of human and spiritual figures are found in flat lava beds, Albrecht surveyed an entire site destroyed by people who had poured latex into the petroglyphs to make molds. In the Southwest and elsewhere–notably the Bushman culture of South Africa and the Aboriginals of Australia–the Westernization of younger generations and an ensuing lack of regard for their cultural heritage is also to blame for widespread negligence.
“A lot of researchers won’t even reveal particular sites for fear of vandalism and theft,” said Albrecht. Sometimes, she added, it’s the locals who get in the way.
In Xinjiang, China, where she had hoped to record ancient petroglyphs of human figures and fertility symbols engraved at a site near the capital city of Urumqi in the Tian Shan Mountains, the son-in-law of a local history professor and petroglyph expert demanded an unexpected special permit and $1,000 to guide her to the site in a Land Rover.
Albrecht declined, choosing instead to record the animal images carved on a rock formation in a more publicly accessible grassland area. “Later I learned from a friend that the mountain site was too high to be accessed even by a four-wheel-drive vehicle,” she said.
Still, much remains that is beautiful, mysterious and exhilarating, said Albrecht. In Arnhemland, Australia, where rock art is sometimes 25,000 to 50,000 years old, Aboriginals own and control their land, carrying on the tradition of rock paintings through the grinding of red and yellow ochres and the chewing of twigs for brushes. Many of the images are of supernatural entities with cannibalistic, skeletal forms filled with body parts and wavy lines emanating from heads that may have been created by hallucinating shamans in the Aboriginal trance-like state known as “dreaming.”
“These places are filled with such a spiritual aura,” said Albrecht. “In Arnhemland, our guides, Moses and Gideon, took us to an area that’s blocked off to tourists. We were climbing through boulders when they started mumbling some kind of chant to themselves. It turns out they were asking permission of the Mimi spirits to allow us to pass through.”
Such reverence sadly seems to be lacking in the United States, said Albrecht, who next hopes to visit Northern European rock art sites.
“It seems like we left so much behind when we immigrated to this country, that everyone wanted to forget the past and get busy building the New World. We’ve become very homogenized. These carvings are priceless, irreplaceable documentation of early people’s lifestyles and beliefs. I just hope that through my work people will make a connection to the past and help to preserve what is left.”
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THE FACTS
Ingrid Albrecht
What: Watercolor renderings of rock art
When: Through Nov. 26
Where: Tavern Club, 333 N. Michigan Ave., 25th floor
Admission: Free
Call: 312-263-7584
