Janet Shapero's art has taken her from craftsmen's yards in the hills north of Florence to the rock deserts of Utah. But the journey isn't best told on a map. It's in her work.
Leaving Old World marble, Shapero discovered the more fragile desert landscape of the American Southwest and the profound symbolism of its native inhabitants."It's a different kind of thinking than with most sculpture," Shap-ero said. "Now I use materials that are susceptible, that hang in the balance."
The more vulnerable pieces are far different from the monumental marble, or even the bronze and wood she worked with during eight years in Italy.
With a graduate degree from Wisconsin, Shapero, 39, came to Logan two years ago to teach sculpture at Utah State University. The new surroundings worked a metamorphosis in her art.
Shapero found that the desert and Native American petroglyphs, or rock writing, suggested an art that would not presume to triumph over natural forces but accommodate them.
That idea is embodied in Shapero's most recent piece, a large outdoor sculpture made for the Utah Arts Festival that pays tribute to the Uintah and Ouray Ute Tribe of eastern Utah.
The sculpture, which stands nearly 12 feet tall, was unveiled last month.
Three cast-glass columns, weighing 400 pounds apiece, sit atop a massive block of rust-colored sandstone. The prisms ripple like water and are etched with rock writing symbols. Each column evokes a facet of Ute history, and most of the figures are copies of Ute petroglyphs.
Tribal official Larry Cesspooch collaborated with Shapero to select the figures and the story they tell.
"An image of a hobbled horse seemed to be the most profound to both of us," Shapero said. "It seemed to be definitive of the constraint of a people."
At first, some questioned the right of a white Boston native to undertake such a work.
"It could be quite presumptuous," said Ken Louder, chairman of the Utah Arts Festival committee that commissioned the piece.
Shapero agrees but has tried to solve her outsider's dilemma.
"I really felt like the more I stepped back and let it be theirs, the better it would be," she said.
The festival committee picked three proposals and asked the public to choose one. More than 14,000 people stood in line for up to 20 minutes to vote at last summer's festival. Shapero's proposal received nearly 6,000.
However, that support was not mirrored at tribal headquarters in Fort Duchesne. Shapero received no response to her letter in the tribal newspaper seeking help with the project.
So she contacted Cesspooch, the tribe's community relations spokesman. He directed her to a book, "The Rocks Begin To Speak," by LaVan Martineau, which shows the petroglyphs were not mere hunting magic or graffiti but accounts of actual events.
Martineau and Cesspooch had videotaped many of the reservation's rock writing sites after the book was published in 1973, and Cesspooch invited Shapero to view them.
Both agreed the hobbled horse image "seemed to speak the very elements of the Native American situation in one single image," Shapero said, and that agreement dispelled some mistrust.
The sculpture's first deep-green glass column tells of the Utes as a nomadic people who, like the neighboring Sioux, hunted buffalo before the coming of white race.
"At the top of the panel are animals that look happy and gleeful," Cesspooch said. "But behind those deer was a coyote. That coyote could symbolize almost any invader.
"Then you see where the animals start to climb into the mountains. It's like at first they were free; then the invaders start to show up," he said.
The next clear prism tells of conflict with the whites and of broken treaties. The figures include the hobbled horse, a warrior with a broken lance and a reservation symbol.
Most of the images duplicate a panel of petroglyphs on the Duchesne River depicting how much of the original reservation was divided among white settlers. That led to the Utes' temporary flight to South Dakota in 1906.
The last column, a lighter green, has images of the bear dance and represents the maintaining of traditions and hopes for the future. Cesspooch asked that it include a water symbol because water rights continue to be an important tribal issue, she said.
"Water is gold here," Cesspooch said. "Not only does it mean sustenance, it also means financial survival."
Eventually, the sculpture's future will tell still another tale.
"If it's vandalized, that's a statement about our culture," Shapero said. "If it's respected, it will survive.
"But it will weather. It wasn't designed to be this solid monument. It won't last forever."