WE:SIC ‘EM KI: (EVERYBODY’S HOME)

ABOUT THE INSTALLATION
TERROL DEW JOHNSON
1971–2024, SELLS, ARIZONA (TOHONO O’ODHAM NATION)
ARANDA\LASCH
ESTABLISHED 2003, NEW YORK, NEW YORK; ACTIVE TUCSON, ARIZONA, AND BROOKLYN, NEW YORK
We:sic ’em ki: (Everybody’s Home) is a forward-looking home design for the Tohono O’odham Nation that draws on Indigenous knowledge of building and living in the desert. Following 20 years of collaboration between master basket weaver and activist Terrol Dew Johnson and designers Aranda\Lasch, We:sic ’em ki: is inspired by traditional O’odham homes that pair a wa:ato (whole-tree shade structure) with a ki: (earthen enclosure). Designed with the Johnson family, the home will be situated on ancestral O’odham land adjacent to the family’s Alexander Pancho Memorial Farm in Sells, Arizona, a 40-acre traditional dry land farm and open classroom for native food cultivation. Constructed of traditional local materials including fragrant mesquite trees, saguaro cactus ribs, and clay-rich soil, We:sic ’em ki: embraces an essential tenet of the O’odham Himdag—to live and build regeneratively into the future—and will serve as a model for art, activism, and sustainable desert living.
ACCESSIBILITY RESOURCES
We:sic ’em ki: (Everybody’s Home) is an installation featuring a large shade structure called a wa:ato that’s located directly across from the installation Casa Desenterrada/Exhuming Home in the open gallery space with a light wood floor and white walls. The roof of the structure is made from saguaro ribs, the woody internal skeleton of a saguaro cactus, which look like light-colored thin logs with textured veins running throughout. We can walk underneath the shade structure which is held up by long curving vertical mesquite tree branches and two light gray roughly textured adobe walls nearly 7 feet tall, 3 feet wide and just under a foot deep. One side of the structure is held up by two branches at each corner and an adobe wall in the middle faces parallel to the back of the gallery. The other side of the structure is held up by two branches by the back corner and middle, and the front corner is held up by the second wall facing the other direction, parallel to the side walls of the gallery. Underneath the wa:ato structure towards the back wall hangs a sculptural basket made of beargrass, the color of dry hay with its ends hanging down like locks of flowing hair. The coiled basket twists and loops just above two adobe pedestals topped with plexiglass vitrines. Behind glass, one pedestal holds a basket formed from the shape of a gourd with beargrass woven around the top and bottom letting us see the warm brown color of the gourd across the middle. The woven beargrass creates a small round opening at the top, like that of a vase or bottle. The other pedestal under the structure holds two sculptural vessels made of desert paper, one light gray with bits of sparkle from mica, and the other a vibrant light blue. The works appear like pieces of textured coral folded upwards with the edges folding inwards and outwards like the petals of a flower about to bloom.
Along the gallery walls, material samples, photographs, architectural models and text encircle the shade structure. Beginning with the first wall to our right when we walk into the gallery from the long 3rd floor hallway, the first object we see is a “Star Split Stitch Basket” with a shape similar to a large open bowl or curved plate, woven with brown beargrass and yucca with a 5 point design reminiscent of both a star and flower petals. The following sections on the wall have a photograph paired with a quote or paragraph of text and a natural material sample below. Walking down the wall and around the structure we see photographs with scenes such as Terrol Dew Johnson’s grandmother in a cornfield, three sisters at the Pancho Farm up to their ankles in flood waters, family members at a grave, elders passing down farming knowledge and singing to a plant, farm land being irrigated by monsoon rain, Terrol Dew Johnson presenting his weaving with a teacher and teaching weaving to a child, people gathering yucca for basketry, and Sonoran Desert vegetation. The material samples are sources of Indigenous foods, weaving materials, and construction materials. These include cholla cactus flower buds, a bundle of white mesquite bean pods, white lentils glued together in a small mound, a bundle of dry wrinkled squash, an ear of corn, a small mound of black and white cow beans, a pointy agave leaf, a bundle of long dry beargrass, a bundle of devil’s claw herbs curved like the letter C, a small glass bottle of dark colored saguaro fruit syrup, and a tall saguaro cactus rib mounted vertically.
In the center of the back wall at the end of the structure is a hanging textured handmade paper panel that displays a projected video showing scenes of tall green saguaro cactuses, flashes of lightning, and people working to harvest the saguaro fruit at the top of the cactuses. Other objects along the walls and hung between windows include photographs and white plastic and paper architectural models behind glass of plans for a Wa:ato home near Pancho Farm. An aerial view of one of the models shows a small square grid representing the roof and walls concentrated by the top right and bottom left corners delineate open and closed space within the home.
Acknowledgements
Designed by Terrol Dew Johnson, Benjamin Aranda, and Chris Lasch with Alice Wilsey, Joaquin Bonifaz, Andrew Gonzales, Jesse Bassett, and Leslie-Fairuz Abad-Neagu. Assistance in gathering, interpreting, and assembling exhibition materials by Alexander Pancho Memorial Farm staff, family, and friends including Betty Lou Pancho; Noland Johnson, Farm Manager, Alexander Pancho Memorial Farm; Vivian Donahue; Avery Johnson Jr.; Seth Johnson; Novalee Antone; and Jesse Pablo.
Additional support from The School of Architecture, founded by Frank Lloyd Wright (TSOA), Scottsdale, Arizona: Stephanie Lin, Daniel Ayat, Eliot Bassett-Cann, Alex Martinec, Mariah Hoffman, and Nick Gulick; The Cooper Union–The Irwin S. Chanin School of Architecture; Cattle Track Arts, Scottsdale, Arizona; and Mike Lopach, Earthen Building Consultant.
This installation is made possible with additional support from the New York State Council on the Arts and the Agriculture Institute of Scottsdale, Arizona.