1001 Colors commissioned local artist Rebecca Nava Soto to design an installation piece for the newly renovated First Financial Convention Center. Nava Soto is well known for her artwork, which combines Mesoamerican glyphic systems, Indigenous rituals, and everyday objects to form sculptural paintings. Her work honors the traditions of memory, language, and culture while providing healing and empowerment through creation and expression. With the help of five Apprentices led by two teaching artists, they brought Skybundle: A Codex Transmitter installation to life. This team spent hours breaking down painted woodchip shavings that reference alfombra traditions practiced collectively in immigrant Catholic neighborhoods and rooted in precolonial ritual ground works to create this colorful outcome.
Inspired by the cosmology of Indigenous peoples, Skybundle becomes an object, but more than this, a transmission, one which takes its cues from ancient methods of knowledge transfer such as bundles, codices, and sigils; places where image, ritual, and memory merge into something greater than their sum parts, becoming a living transmission of a message meant to protect and honor Mexican and Central American peoples.
Apprentices
Ovis Barkley, Londyn Carter, Claire Erion, Paige Falter, Finn Kennedy
Mural Generously Funded By
3CDC, First Financial Center , City of Cincinnati, Hamilton County
Project Manager
Adrienne Dixon
