When the Getty Museum invited Tongva artist Mercedes Dorame to create the inaugural installation for its new Rotunda Commission series, she felt honored yet faced a unique challenge. That’s because the rotunda is not only an iconic space but a very large one, as Dorame quickly discovered.
Richard Rand, the Getty’s associate director for collections, originally approached Dorame during the opening of a photography exhibit that included her work. Around that time, Dorame had been spending time working on Santa Catalina Island (Pimugna in Tongva), where she marveled at the recovery of the abalone population, an endangered mollusk of great cultural significance for many California tribes.
Despite growing up on the Southern California coast, Dorame had never seen abalone living in the wild. So when Dorame visited the Getty to look at the rotunda with Rand, she proposed what might seem an unlikely concept for her installation: giant abalone.
“At first, I was thinking of something on a human scale, between four and six feet tall,” she recalls. “Because I wanted to diminish the hierarchy in which we think of ourselves as so big. Or only think of the Getty as looking out on Catalina—but what’s the view from the island looking back at the Getty? And how important are the messages that these little abalones give us? How can we be more equal in our thought and the way we relate to animals, ecologies, and other beings?”
After Dorame shared her ideas with Rand, he pointed to someone standing on the stairs in the rotunda. Dorame realized that the person, probably six feet tall, looked tiny in the soaring space and that she would need to double the scale of the installation.
The spectacular result is Mercedes Dorame: Woshaa’axre Yaang’aro (Looking Back), which consists of five abalone-shaped sculptures ranging from 4 to 12 feet tall and suspended from the ceiling. The installation includes Dorame’s curving, painted panorama of the view of the Southern California mainland as seen from Catalina, which runs along the wall near the top of the rotunda. Colored film on the windows filters sunlight, giving the space an almost underwater light and enhancing the iridescent purples, greens, and pinks of the shells that Dorame and her team fabricated from high-density foam.
As Dorame wrote in her artist’s statement about the mixed-media work, “I hope to immerse the viewer in the realm of the abalone, creating a sense of kinship, reciprocity, and balance with the natural world.”
An Ancient Culture in the Modern World
Dorame was raised in the Los Angeles area, a region known as Tovaangar in Tongva (the tribe has also historically been called the Gabrieleno). Her father Robert is Tongva, while her mother’s side of the family is a mix of French, English, Scottish, and German. Dorame grew up in Santa Monica and she says her father’s family has ancestral ties to what is now Marina del Rey and the Venice canals area.
Decades ago, Dorame’s maternal grandparents bought property on the eastern end of Malibu that was originally Tongva land. The family still owns the property, which Dorame calls her “outdoor studio.” It was on this land where she played and explored the local coastline and hills, developing her deep connection to the natural world of Southern California.
Dorame says, “I spent so many hours of my life in those hills, learning the plant names and learning how to read the ocean and the waves. When it’s safe, when it’s not safe, and how to anticipate sets. I definitely grew up outdoors, very hands-on. Did I necessarily code that as Indigenous learning? Maybe not at the time because I didn’t have the full context.”
Dorame says her Tongva paternal grandparents were discreet about their culture. Because of the attitudes of her grandparents’ time, she says it was “shameful and actually detrimental to livelihood and survival to claim Indigeneity.” Dorame says her father later encouraged her grandfather to gradually open up about his heritage and it was only later that she better comprehended the family’s Tongva ancestry.
“It was a lot of looking back at the memories I had with them and re-understanding: Oh, this is why they did this thing, or this was actually a traditional practice that was happening,” she says.
Her father was more publicly engaged in his Tongva culture, and, along with Dorame’s aunt, played a major role in preserving Kuruvungna, a Tongva village site with natural springs on the campus of University High School, which he had attended. Her father also works as a cultural resource monitor to identify and preserve Indigenous artifacts and remains at construction sites. While attending UCLA, Dorame also started monitoring sites and continues to work in that capacity today.
The experience has had a profound effect on her, both personally and artistically. “I held these things my ancestors made that I probably never would have come in contact with. These beautiful, beautiful things that show the sophistication and aesthetic production of my people,” she says. “But at UCLA I had read all kinds of things that said the Tongva weren’t artistic. No—check this stone bowl that has carvings on it. It’s gorgeous.”
In one interview she also likened her role as a monitor to being “a professional mourner” and says it ultimately helped define her Tongva identity. “Working around burials or working with cultural artifacts was an experience that I had with my culture, very personally and very explicitly. I had to learn how to talk about the experience and how to process it and to be OK. It’s kind of why I began to make art. To work through some of the difficulty and traumatic experiences.
“You feel so much responsibility, right? This is such important work. These are my ancestors. You want to give the work the most care and concern that you possibly can. However, legally the power you are given is that you’re only allowed to give a recommendation. There’s no actual legal obligation for anyone to listen to you…When it’s a good site, one where people are respectful and thoughtful, things can actually be moving and beautiful and touching. Good healing things can happen. But I’ve experienced sites where that’s absolutely not the case. Things happen that are really horrific. I’ve seen gut-wrenching things. And you can’t do anything. But you’re also still responsible to the community.”
Looking Ahead with Hope
Dorame’s art—photography, sculpture, sound art, and site installations—reflects her experiences as a member of the Tongva tribe and is a way to convey that her people are not remnants of the distant past but instead remain a presence in contemporary Southern California. She speaks about trying to mend the gaps in the tribe’s cultural heritage, writing in an artist’s statement, “My work is a product of weaving back together the loose ends that have been passed down to me, filling in the cracks with mud, yarn, concrete, and cinnamon, and making a new whole.”
The Tongva faces additional challenges because the tribe lacks federal recognition. “Recognition gives a different voice to the people. It becomes a government-to-government conversation,” Dorame says. “There’s definitely an authority that recognition brings.”
Unlike tribes with reservation lands, the Tongva don’t have their own land base. The tribe recently established the Tongva Taraxat Paxaavxa Conservancy, a land trust that can receive property donations. Dorame says the only parcel that the tribe currently holds, as a people, is “land a private person has given back to us. I think that’s something to pause on. Land is about where we can do ceremonies, where can we bury the people who are disturbed on sites when they’ve been dug out of the ground. Instead of having them sit in collections.
Her art is now in leading museums and the works help to give the Tongva increased visibility in Los Angeles and beyond. While Dorame says some members of Native communities prefer to work from the outside, she sees benefits in gaining access to such major institutions as the Getty.
“I always think of that image of the little Black girl looking at the Barack Obama portrait,” she says. “I want my daughter to walk into a museum and feel represented. I want other Native kids to walk in a museum and feel reflected. That’s important to me. That’s why I do it.”
