Harry Eugene Fonseca was an American

United States

The United States of America is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district...

 artist. He was born in Sacramento

Sacramento, California

Sacramento is the capital city of the U.S. state of California and the county seat of Sacramento County. It is located at the confluence of the Sacramento River and the American River in the northern portion of California's expansive Central Valley. With a population of 466,488 at the 2010 census,...

, California

California

California is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third-largest by land area...

.

Harry Fonseca was of Nisenan

Nisenan

The Nisenan, also known as the Southern Maidu and Valley Maidu, are one of many native groups of the Central Valley. The name Nisenan, derives from the ablative plural pronoun nisena·n, "from among us"...

 Maidu

Maidu

The Maidu are a group of Native Americans who live in Northern California. They reside in the central Sierra Nevada, in the drainage area of the Feather and American Rivers...

, Hawaiian

Native Hawaiians

Native Hawaiians refers to the indigenous Polynesian people of the Hawaiian Islands or their descendants. Native Hawaiians trace their ancestry back to the original Polynesian settlers of Hawaii.According to the U.S...

, and Portuguese

Portugal

Portugal , officially the Portuguese Republic is a country situated in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula. Portugal is the westernmost country of Europe, and is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the West and South and by Spain to the North and East. The Atlantic archipelagos of the...

 heritage. He studied art at California State University Sacramento with Native-American artist Frank LaPena but quit the program to pursue his own vision of art. His earliest pieces drew from his Maidu heritage. He was influenced by basketry designs, dance regalia, and by his participation as a traditional dancer. Further, the creation myth of his people, as recounted by his uncle, Henry Azbill, became the source of a major 1977 work, Creation Story, which he would paint in many versions during his career.

Fonseca began his popular Coyote series in 1979. In it he places Coyote, the trickster, in non-traditional settings. As an example, his Coyote in the Mission depicts Coyote dressed in a leather jacket with many zippers and green hightop sneakers standing against a graffiti covered brick wall in San Francisco's Mission district. Another image has Rousseauesque Coyote sitting in a Paris cafe.

In 1981 he illustrated a book, Legends of the Yosemite Miwok, compiled by Frank LaPena and Craig Bates.

Fonseca was particularly taken by petroglyphs in the Cosco Range near Owens Lake, California, and petroglyphs from throughout the Southwest United States. In 1991 he reinterprets the Maidu Creation myth all over again using imagery influenced by petroglyphs. He began a series of paintings he called Stone Poems, that draw heavily from these petroglyphs. A series of these paintings were exhibited in the Southwest Museum (Los Angeles, California) in 1989.

Harry found another profound influence in the California Gold Rush, where his work takes a political tone. These are small abstract paintings in which gold is the predominant color, along with traces of red which represent the blood of native Americans shed by the gold seekers. Each painting also incorporates minerals from California's gold country. Fonseca wrote that they are "a direct reference to the physical, emotional and spiritual genocide of the native people of California". Many of these were exhibited in the Crocker Art Museum in Sacramento (1992) and the Oakland Museum as part of a larger Gold Rush exhibit in 1998.

He did many drawings and prints of Coyote and Rose, a female counterpart to Coyote, often depicted in a rose print dress. These became a mainstay of Santa Fe event posters.

Harry did several other series of paintings. One series painted in the 1990s was of images of Saint Francis, who appears as negative space in each painting. About the same time he did a series of paintings of the Icarus story. Another series from 2002 was inspired by the striped patterns on early Navajo blankets.

From the early 1990s on he lived in and maintained a studio in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

In 2003 he started to paint a series of abstract paintings of flowering tree branches, which he called collectively the Four Seasons, a small group of which were exhibited at the Smithsonian's National Museum of the American Indian in New York City. He was diagnosed with brain cancer and hospitalized in the Veterans Administration hospital in Albuquerque

Albuquerque, New Mexico

Albuquerque is the largest city in the state of New Mexico, United States. It is the county seat of Bernalillo County and is situated in the central part of the state, straddling the Rio Grande. The city population was 545,852 as of the 2010 Census and ranks as the 32nd-largest city in the U.S. As...

, New Mexico

New Mexico

New Mexico is a state located in the southwest and western regions of the United States. New Mexico is also usually considered one of the Mountain States. With a population density of 16 per square mile, New Mexico is the sixth-most sparsely inhabited U.S...

 in August, 2006 where he died on December 28, 2006.

The Albuquerque Museum

Albuquerque Museum

The Albuquerque Museum is located in Albuquerque, New Mexico in Old Town Albuquerque dedicated to preserving the art of the American Southwest and the history of Albuquerque and the Middle Rio Grande Valley of New Mexico. The museum also contributes significantly to the cultural and educational...

 (Albuquerque, New Mexico), the California State Parks Central Valley Regional Indian Museum (Sacramento, California), Crocker Art Museum

Crocker Art Museum

The Crocker Art Museum is one of the leading arts institutions in California, and the longest continuously operating art museum in the West. Located in Sacramento, California, the Crocker has been an art innovator since 1885...

 (Sacramento, California), the Denver Art Museum

Denver Art Museum

The Denver Art Museum is an art museum in Denver, Colorado located in Denver's Civic Center.It is known for its collection of American Indian art,and has a comprehensive collection numbering more than 68,000 works from across the world....

, the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians & Western Art

Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians & Western Art

The Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art is located in downtown Indianapolis, Indiana, and houses an extensive collection of Native American art, as well as Western American paintings and sculptures collected by buinessman and philanthropist Harrison Eiteljorg...

 (Indianapolis, Indiana), Ethnological Museum of Berlin

Ethnological Museum of Berlin

The Ethnological Museum in Berlin is one of the largest ethnological museums in the world. It houses half a million pre-industrial objects, acquired primarily from the German voyages of exploration and colonialization of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries...

 (Berlin), the Heard Museum

Heard Museum

The Heard Museum of Native Cultures and Art is a museum located in Phoenix, Arizona, USA. There is also the Heard Museum North Scottsdale branch in Scottsdale and the Heard Museum West branch in Surprise....

 (Phoenix, Arizona), the Honolulu Academy of Arts

Honolulu Academy of Arts

The Honolulu Academy of Arts is an art museum in Honolulu in the state of Hawaii. Since its founding in 1922 by Anna Rice Cooke and opening April 8, 1927, its collections have grown to over 40,000 works of art.-Description:...

, the Hood Museum of Art

Hood Museum of Art

The Hood Museum of Art is a museum in Hanover, New Hampshire, USA. Dating back to 1772, the museum is owned and operated by Dartmouth College and is connected to the Hopkins Center for the Arts. The current building, designed by Charles Willard Moore and Chad Flloyd, opened in the fall of 1985. It...

 (Dartmouth College, New Hampshire), the Linden Museum (Stuttgart, Germany), the Monterey Fine Arts Museum (Monterey, California), the New Mexico Museum of Fine Art (Santa Fe, New Mexico), the Oakland Museum of California

Oakland Museum of California

Oakland Museum of California or Oakland Museum is a museum dedicated to the art, history, and natural science of California located in Oakland, California....

 (Oakland, California), Oguni Museum (Oguni, Japan), the Pequot Museum (Mashantucket, Connecticut), the University Art Museum (Berkeley, California), the Washington State Arts Museum (Olympia, Washington), and the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian

Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian

The Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian is a museum devoted to Native American arts. It is located in Santa Fe, New Mexico and was founded in 1937 by Mary Cabot Wheelwright, who came from Boston, and Hastiin Klah, a Navajo singer and medicine man....

(Santa Fe, New Mexico) are among the public collections holding work by Harry Fonseca.