This Heard Museum curator saw queer Indigenous history in Harry Fonseca’s Coyote

SAM DINGMAN: A few years ago, Roshii Montano graduated from Stanford University, and she got a fellowship at the Heard Museum.

During her orientation, they took her on a tour of the museum’s archives. One painting in particular caught her eye: “Rose and Coyote Dressed Up for the Heard Show,” by Harry Fonseca, an Indigenous artist of Nisenan Maidu, Hawaiian and Portuguese descent.

It’s a striking image: two coyotes dressed in human clothes against a purple backdrop. One of them wears a black leather biker jacket and black leather boots. The other wears high heels and a bright dress with a floral pattern. Roshii couldn’t stop staring at it.

ROSHII MONTANO: I immediately resonated with it on multiple levels. I thought it was just incredible to gaze at. But also, I felt like there was an inherently queer undertone to it.

DINGMAN: “Rose and Coyote” reminded Roshii of the time she’d spent back in college exploring San Francisco’s queer community.

MONTANO: When you look at Coyote specifically, he’s clad in leather, and he’s wearing these heeled boots, chains, all of these kind of silver adornments all over his dress, and I — that was one aspect of it, because I’ve visited Folsom Street Fair, and there’s a leather culture there that I was familiar with. And then Rose — she’s just, like, hyper glamorous.

DINGMAN: And Rose is the other figure in the painting.

MONTANO: She’s Coyote’s counterpart. And so I, I thought that was fantastic. And I was wondering, just, all these questions — is this Coyote in drag? What’s the connection?

DINGMAN: For Roshii, the idea of an Indigenous artist painting queer characters was a revelation.

Roshii Montano

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MONTANO: Especially when I was growing up and in my own culture and my Diné community, it’s not something that was really talked about. And I think expressions of gender has always just been interesting to me, and how you identify that to another person, and how much someone can read from you based on that performance.

DINGMAN: The more Roshii dug into Fonseca’s work, the more she began to wonder about Fonseca’s relationship to performance — and to Coyote.

MONTANO: I felt that perhaps Fonseca identified with Coyote …

DINGMAN: One afternoon a few months ago, I visited Roshii at the Heard Museum, and she showed me a series of Fonseca’s paintings on the wall in one of the galleries. We spent a while looking at one that shows Coyote on a stage with velvet curtains, wearing his leather jacket and ballet shoes, leaping and twirling with another coyote, who’s wearing a tutu. Roshii sees the painting as a comment on the flexibility of Indigenous identity — Fonseca declaring himself as someone who refused categorization.

MONTANO: I think Coyote is so liberatory in that way because Fonseca places Coyote in all of these kind of fantastic spaces, and occupies different identities.

DINGMAN: Hearing you say that, it makes me love this image even more, because not only is Coyote at the ballet, Coyote is at the ballet in a motorcycle jacket.

MONTANO: Yes.

DNGMAN: Like doing it the Coyote way.

MONTANO: Mm-hmm. I always wondered if, in terms of all these different embodiments of Coyote, how much of that did — was that Fonseca himself? And if he kind of just felt liberated in portraying Coyote in that way?

DINGMAN: In that first painting that caught Roshii’s eye — the one with Coyote in biker gear, and his counterpart, Rose, in a floral dress — Roshii wonders if Fonseca saw himself in both figures.

MONTANO: Rose really was kind of this extravagant, glamorous native auntie symbol, I would say. Because he would watch his Auntie going out for a night out, and she would just be … her heels would be high, her dress would be short, and her makeup would be done. And I love these two different — this mixture of gender identity, and also going against the pre-conceived notions of male gender and female gender.

DINGMAN: Elsewhere in the gallery, Roshii showed me another of her favorites. This one was a black and white line drawing. Two coyotes sitting at a bar — one wearing fedora, and the other with a bow in its hair. They’re staring into each other’s eyes.

MONTANO: What really drew me to this is sort of this really softness in … the intimacy between the two Coyotes. And I think there’s a longing there.

DINGMAN: Yeah, they both have their hands on each other’s backsides. But it could be friendly, or it could be romantic.

MONTANO: Exactly! And I love that ambiguity. … I wondered about that exploration that Fonseca was taking in his work.

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DINGMAN: This exhibition that we were walking through was called “Harry Fonseca: Transformations.” Roshii was the curator for the exhibition. To prepare for it, she pored through correspondence between Fonseca and his friends, and interviewed many of the people who knew him before his death in 2006.

She discovered that Fonseca was inspired by the Coyote trickster archetype from Indigenous lore. And that Fonseca had spent a lot of time in San Francisco’s queer neighborhoods — just like she had. And as she was analyzing one of his paintings, “Coyote in the Mission,” she spotted the word Folsom written on a brick wall beyond Coyote, which made her think about her own experience at the Folsom Street Fair.

As Roshii began to narrow down the works she wanted to feature, she realized was also creating a kind of meta-work. Choosing a group of paintings and drawings that added up to a kind of portrait of Fonseca himself.

MONTANO: I was finding, like, little hints or crumbs that I thought were interesting that kind of built this story that I was interested in, and so I was like I wonder if there’s something there, something deeper. And so it just kept building and building.

DINGMAN: That story Roshii is interested in — the story of gender and how it’s performed in Indigenous art and culture — it’s really important to her. She sees it as part of a larger narrative about how colonial forces have suppressed the diversity of Indigenous life.

MONTANO: It’s just profoundly interesting to me. … I remember reading this book, and the first line read that, you know, just to paraphrase, Native people at one point were just like the queerest people in the world. And I thought that was so funny, but also incredibly true.

DINGMAN: Roshii also told me that all the while she was studying Fonseca, she knew that this version of him was filtered through her own experience. She wanted to explore his identity, without trying to define it — though she says she talked to one of Fonseca’s friends who described Fonseca’s sexuality as “kaleidoscopic.”

And she also found a comment Fonseca made at one point, when someone asked him what his Coyotes represented. She says he gave a somewhat winking reply: “They’re just coyotes.”

But in another interview he gave once, speaking to a fellow artist named Lorenzo Baca, Fonseca said something that suggests he would’ve been open to Roshii’s interpretations of his work.

HARRY FONSECA: You mentioned am I going to do coyotes making statements, or do I want to do statements. It seems that all art makes some kind of statement, even if it just sits there and doesn’t do much of anything. // So as far as my coyotes making statements — yeah, they do make statements. I’m not sure what those statements certainly are.

DINGMAN: Talking to Roshii, I got the sense that looking at Fonseca’s coyotes and trying to figure out exactly what he was saying isn’t really the point. The point is to keep looking.

MONTANO: The motorcycle jacket, the glitter, the extravagance, everything … how can you not look at it and have questions?

DINGMAN: Roshii Montano is an assistant registrar at the Heard Museum.