Bruce Hucko
Photographic Installation: TUK (Tukuhnikivatiz); Utah, Spirit Place, Spirit Planet, Tukuhnikivatz (1996); Ancient Lands/ Ancient Peoples (1992/1994); Spirit Path/ Migration/ Remains (1990)
Bruce Hucko freelance photographer, author, art educator and radio producer whose primary work focuses on art, indigeneity and the environment. The landscape of the American West and the relationship people have with it figures largely in all of his work. He was recognized in 1984 by the Rockefeller Bros. Fund as one of 30 leading art educators in the United States and received a Rockefeller Bros. Fund Award for Excellence in Arts Education. Fifteen books feature his photographic work exclusively and he has contributed to more than a dozen other. His media credits include National Park Service slide shows for Arches National Park and Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. His book, Where There Is No Name For Art: The Art of Tewa Pueblo Children (120 pages, School of American Research Press, 1997) received a 1998 Southwest Book Award and the 1997 Carey McWilliams Award given by Multicultural Review Magazine as “the best book of the year on the U.S. experience of cultural diversity. Bruce’s photographs are featured in TUK.
Longer Resume:
Hucko (photographer) is an independent photographer living in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He is known for his earth photographs and photographic documentation of archeological expeditions in the Southwest, and for his educational work with Native American peoples, and children, in visual art and photography in the Southwest (as Director of Educational Programs and Serendipity, Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, in Santa Fe, New Mexico). His work is consistently shown nationally in landscape related calendars and books, including National Park Service slide shows for Arches National Park and Organ Pipe Cactus, New Mexico. Hucko produced the nationally acclaimed, 40-minute, 8‑projector The Canyon’s Edge, a multimedia slide presentation about the Colorado Plateau seen through the eyes of Native Americans. A recent book on the Santa Fe trail and numerous postcards, posters and book publications round out his landscape work. Hucko’s most current work combines producing an educational exhibit about the Southwest’s cultural resources with the Grand Canyon Trust and writing contemporary poems and essays to educate people about the issues facing the Southwest.
From 1978 until 1989, Hucko lived on the Utah Strip of the Navajo Reservation, where he served as classroom teacher and artist‑in‑education. That began an involvement with the Navajo people that continues today. Hucko directed the Navajo children’s art project, Have You Ever Seen a Rainbow at Night?, presented at Festival 2000, and Children of Light. Hucko guides trips designed around the theme of cultural sharing, to the Navajo Mountain and Bluff‑Montezuma Creek, in the Utah area for the Four Corners School of Outdoor Education and Canyonlands Field Institute. Hucko currently divides his time between working as a photographer and as an art educator for the School of American Research Press working with the Native American communities of San Juan, Santa Clara and San Idefonso Pueblos, producing a book of children’s art combined with text that shares the Native American children’s perceptions, Where There Is No Name for Art, 1996.
Hucko was cited for Excellence in Arts Education by the Rockefeller Brothers Fund Awards in Arts Education Program in 1984. He is photographer for the Wetherill‑Grand Gulch Research Project, a documentary and aesthetic interpretation of Anasazi culture in southeastern Utah. Hucko’s photographs have been exhibited at Desert Images, Bountiful Art Center, Navajo Tribal Museum, Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, and Utah Museum of Natural History. Photographs and writing have been published regionally and nationally in Utah Holiday Magazine, New Age Magazine, Rocky Mountain Magazine, Backpacker, NEO, Journal of the Heard Museum, “Native Peoples,” High Country News, Utah Arts Council Publication and others. He has been instrumental in documenting Native American artists on video for public presentation.
Primary themes in my work are those of indigeneity and the environment. I am deeply concerned and interested in the relationship that people develop with the land around them ‑ the land that sustains and shapes who they are. My areas of interest begin with the ancestral Puebloan (Anasazi) people who once lived upon this land and includes its current inhabitants. A necessary aspect of my work lies in the field of environmental activism to preserve both the land and lifestyles that characterize the West. I see all of my work as being engaged in the continuum of human expression on the Colorado Plateau. I practice reciprocity, giving back to the land and the people some of what I have gained by knowing and caring for both. Bruce Hucko