Former Valley resident to be honored by NEA for her cultural embroidery

WASHINGTON, D.C.— National Endowment for the Arts has announced the 2019 NEA National Heritage Fellows, recipients of the nation’s highest honor in the folk and traditional arts. The 2019 recipients are masters of a wide range of folk and traditional art forms, including a former San Luis Valley resident. Each fellowship includes an award of $25,000 and the recipients will be honored at two public events on Sept. 18 and 20, 2019 in Washington, D.C.

For more than 30 years, Josephine Lobato has created embroidered renditions of cultural memories, enactments, and folk histories. Her tenacity and passion have sustained her as the sole Colorado practitioner of Spanish colonial style needlework known as colcha embroidery. Lobato inventively uses only one stitch, the colcha stitch, a couching stitch (one of the oldest stitches in the world) associated with the settler culture of the Southwest to create pictorial narratives about Hispanic life in the San Luis Valley in southcentral Colorado.

Women of Lobato’s pre-World War II generation learned domestic crafts as part of growing up in the Valley. Lobato knew how to embroider as a young girl but had never encountered colcha embroidery in the revitalized form of a pictorial narrative until she attended a stitching workshop offered by the San Luis Sangre de Cristo Parish in 1988 when she was in her early 50s. That encounter literally changed her life. The significance of Lobato’s epiphany during the workshop, and her subsequent devotion to creating colcha embroideries, recall folklorist Henry Glassie’s observation that “medium is a biographical accident.” Lobato’s discovery was the perfect confluence of craft with an innate desire to express herself artistically. At that time her artistic awakening marked a critical entry point into an imaginative world colored by her life experience and her hunger for cultural history.

Lobato’s embroidered visual narratives with their range of historical and ethnic imagery validate her as both a chronicler of Hispano life and a cultural commentator or “tour guide” to her own culture. Her pictorial themes, such as the charter legend of El Milagro de San Acacio or the land rights protest in La Sierra, reveal the ethical and moral underpinnings of Hispano society as well as reinforce essential aspects of cultural identity shared by a rural Hispanic population living in the San Luis Valley.

In the current resurgence of interest in colcha embroidery, stitching groups from San Luis and Taos, New Mexico, credit Lobato, her artistic innovations and prolific creative output, as inspiration for these women to pick up needles and stitch. Lobato has received two master-apprentice awards from Colorado Creative Industries to work with novice embroiderers, including her daughter, Rita Crespin, who continues the tradition. In addition to all the women Lobato has influenced, she also taught her granddaughter, Jacinta Lobato, and her great-granddaughter, also Jacinta Lobato. She taught them not only techniques but inspired them to search for culturally embedded content and imagery. In 1998 Lobato earned the Colorado Heritage Award for her work.


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