About The Artwork
D.C. ALLEN paints Santiago Romero — Pueblo artist, academic, and cultural activist — against the static of American television. Behind him sits the RCA Indian-head test pattern: circles, grids, converging lines, and a nameless Native man in a Plains headdress, broadcast into homes across the continent from 1939 onward to help technicians adjust focus, contrast, and picture geometry. A face used to calibrate the screen while living Native people stayed largely absent from the programming that followed.
Romero grew up in Los Angeles, far from his ancestral Pueblo communities — he and his mother among only a handful of Indigenous people in a predominantly Latino and African American neighborhood. Without regular access to Pueblo community life, he first met Indigenous history through television and film. He later returned to New Mexico, spending time with his grandfather in Taos and renewing his relationships with Pueblo land, community, and knowledge.
The painting holds both truths at once. The test pattern's language of please stand by names a real interruption: knowledge alive in Romero's family and ancestry, difficult to receive clearly from an urban distance. But a signal delayed is not a signal lost. Like the trickster who moves between systems and exposes their seams, Romero claims authority over how Native life is seen, understood, and transmitted.
Trickster's Broadcast honors Indigenous identity as continuously transmitted, adapted, and renewed — and honors the Urban Native experience of finding the way back.
A work of substance for collectors of contemporary Indigenous art, media critique, and Native portraiture. Ships ready to hang.
Available for acquisition. Original works by D.C. ALLEN (Del Curfman) are produced in limited number and rarely return to market once placed.
