Navajo Folk Art Koshare Kachina by Virgil Wood — Cactus & Phoenix Book

In Hopi ceremony, the Koshare is the sacred clown — the conscience of the village disguised as its most outrageous fool. Painted in bold horizontal stripes of terracotta, black, and white, with black circles ringing his eyes and grinning mouth and yarn-tasseled horn braids erupting from his skull cap, he appears during Katsina dances to do everything a Hopi person should not: gorge, boast, grab, and carry on. Here, Navajo folk artist Virgil Wood catches him in a moment of magnificent idleness: seated cross-legged against a towering saguaro, one hand raised with a watermelon wedge already bitten into — red flesh, black seeds, clean white rind — the other holding open a carved Phoenix tourism guide, the word PHOENIX painted across the cover above a desert scene of sun and cacti. At his feet sits three-quarters of a watermelon, the missing wedge accounted for: it is in his hand. He is going nowhere. He is bothered by nothing. The joke lands on the tourist, on the clown, and on Arizona itself simultaneously — which is exactly where Wood always aimed. The saguaro behind him is rendered in bold green with white spines, arms curving outward in a shrug that matches the clown's mood perfectly. Black leather lashing at the wrists and ankles — a signature contribution of his wife and collaborator Bertha Wood — completes the figure.
Wood (d. 2021) was a named gallery artist at Sun Country Traders in downtown Santa Fe throughout his career; his death has only sharpened collector interest in his work. The base is signed "V Wood" in the artist's hand.

CONDITION Good — no remarkable damage, displays well as shown. The natural cottonwood slab base shows typical drying cracks consistent with age and material.

DIMENSIONS / SPECIFICATIONS

• Height: 7.75"
• Width: 4.75"
• Depth: 5"
• Materials: Wood, Leather
• Artist: Virgil Wood (Navajo, d. 2021), signed "V Wood" on base
• Campbell's Soup Can (4" H) Shown for Scale