Our Vow & Acknowledgment

OUR VOW

20 years bring us full circle and fill us with gratitude: for you, for our collective legacy, and for our acceleration forward. The AROHO story is not about any one woman; it’s a story about all of us – our origins, our works of art, and how we make room for each other.

Committed to grounding principles of inclusion, nonpartisanship, and sustainability, we recognize the self-agency of each woman and our responsibility to each other – to listen with love and create or change, with fluidity; and to acknowledge our shared humanity. AROHO is a room of her own where creative women are seen and heard and where together we make room within the world of arts and letters for our unique narrative and vision.

OUR ACKNOWLEDGMENT

We recognize that Virginia Woolf has been an artistic sister-elder to AROHO. As we are also in individual relationships with our artistic and cultural ancestors, AROHO holds space for Virginia and each woman’s artistic and cultural ancestors as the predecessors who paved our path. We acknowledge that their struggles, failures, and liberations shape our reality today. We seek to courageously and compassionately hold their realities at the intersection of ours to inform us how we can do better, how we can make more room, and how we can carry wisdom further.

We’ve always worked to elevate women’s voices from around the world to help us find each other and make waves. This is why AROHO aligns in principle with anti-racism and justice movements. We are committed to our moral and mutual responsibility to each other and to the principle of inclusion that honors, engages, and celebrates our diverse, global community.

We honor our unique relationship to New Mexico, our birth home, and the ancestral land of the Tewa Pueblo and of cultural exchange between the Navajo, Apache, and Comanche peoples. We have gathered in the hundreds at Ghost Ranch, Abiquiu, ancestral homeland of the historic people of Santa Clara and San Juan (now Ohkay Ohwingeh) Pueblos on the Rio Grande.

We stand and dream upon the land where our artistic sister elders stood and dreamed: Matriarch Maria Montoya Martinez of San Ildefonso Pueblo made pottery precious across the world; matriarch Maria Margarita “Margaret” Tafoya, Corn Blossom, potter of Santa Clara Pueblo and recipient of the National Heritage Fellowship; and matriarch, renowned pueblo artist, teacher and the only woman painter of the San Ildefonso Self-Taught Group, Tonita Pena, Quah Ah. We are grateful for their legacy.