Mateo Romero

Mateo Romero is an internationally recognized artist, writer, and educator. His mixed-media works incorporate photo transfer and sensuous layers of paint. 

Most of the photographs in his paintings, usually images of Pueblo dancers, are in his own, often of people he knows. He combines, he says, “elements of portraiture and the narrative of the dance.”

He occasionally reappropriates the historic photos of Edward Curtis and other “romantic imagery of Indians.” He recently acquired a group of such photos from the Smithsonian and discovered among them a photograph of Cochiti Pueblo in which he recognized his uncle, now in his eighties, a handsome teenager. His work, he says, is “capturing moments of the Rio Grande Pueblo world now, documenting the moment.” 

In the future, he says, his work will “evolve into more highly saturated color and contrast. I was originally an oil easel painter. About five years ago, I moved to mixed-media work; now I am returning to oil.”