Coyote Leaves The Res: The Art Of Harry Fonseca

at Autry Museum of the American West, Los Angeles (through January 5, 2020)
Reviewed by Genie Davis

I looked a coyote right in the face
On the road to Baljennie near my old hometown
He went running thru the whisker wheat
Chasing some prize down
And a hawk was playing with him
Coyote was jumping straight up and making passes
He had those same eyes just like yours
Under your dark glasses
– Joni Mitchell, “Coyote”

Joni Mitchell’s song, “Coyote,” about a lover she describes as a shape-shifting trickster, seems a fitting soundtrack to the Autry Museum of the American West’s Coyote Leaves the Res: The Art of Harry Fonseca. The beautiful exhibition is the inaugural presentation of Fonseca’s work taken from the museum’s acquisition of the artist’s vast estate. In it, viewers meet an evolving humanization of the artist’s character of Coyote, an elusive figure who could very well have slipped into Mitchell’s heart and music.

The vibrant, uniquely-Fonseca exhibition includes paintings, sketches, and lithographs primarily depicting Coyote, a trickster and storyteller who can move between different worlds. Coyote in part represents Fonseca himself and the different roles he inhabits culturally, from his mixed heritage of Nisenan Maidu, Hawaiian, and Portuguese, to…