A stitch in time … tells a life story - Alamosa Citizen

Josie Lobato has become famous for her embroidery and ability to stitch a colorful story around her life in San Luis through the creation of colchas. Now 88 and living in Westminster, she figures she’s created around 44 or more colchas that separately reflect a time in her life and collectively tell their own story of a woman and the pride she takes in her roots.

Lobato’s collection of colchas will be on display Oct. 24 through Dec. 4 as part of a retrospective on her life in a special exhibition at the University of Denver School of Art and Art History.

A reception for the exhibit, Mi Vida en Colcha, is scheduled for Thursday, Oct. 24, from 5-7 p.m. at Davis Gallery at Shwayder Art Building, University of Denver, 2121 East Asbury Avenue, Denver. The exhibit is presented by the San Luis Valley Colcha Embroidery Project in collaboration with The University of Denver School of Art and Art History

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“I am very proud to be from San Luis, and I hope that these colchas, because they’re all focused on my life in San Luis, I hope that this brings a little bit of knowledge about San Luis and our San Luis Valley and our people there. I hope that these colchas are beneficial to our area,” she said during a recent telephone interview with Alamosa Citizen.

While the colchas themselves tell the story, it’s her full journey of growing up in San Luis and leaving in 1954 after marrying her high school sweetheart for a life in Denver, that helps give shape to her work. She and her husband, Buddy, had eight children – four boys and four girls – and she found a career for herself as a bakery manager for King Sooper.

“And then, I don’t know, my husband just wasn’t happy in the city. His father passed away and he got some property in Chama Canyon and he said, ‘I’m not going to stay here. I want to be self-employed.’”

So in 1979 the family moved back to San Luis and Lobato soon found herself on a new path tied to promoting the culture and the artistic value of her hometown. She got the San Luis Cultural Center going and then turned her knack for telling stories to the Fort Garland Museum and Cultural Center, where she spent a decade as curator. Her time at the Fort Garland Museum and hearing and retelling of the “Ghost of Fort Garland” is the focus of her newest colcha creation.

“I always look for stories, whether they were legends or they were real,” she said.

In the days after her return to San Luis there was a popular Catholic priest, Pat Valdez, who inspired the community with projects like the Stations of the Cross and a workshop around developing a cottage industry, which Lobato attended. The instructor of the workshop who inspired Lobato to start her own designs was Carmen Benavente, whose own experimentation with stitching was gaining light.

“What I wanted to do was to make stories because they were all around me, all the stories were around me. I had grown up with all the traditions of Christmas and New Year’s and Las Penitentes, and everything around me was interesting. They were stories. To me they were stories,” she said of the beginning.

“I always thought, well, maybe, ‘I’ll write a book’ but I wasn’t capable of writing a book I thought. So I thought, ‘why not, I’ll make stories on them.’

Her colchas began to take life and gain appreciative audiences.

In the spring of 2019 she received a phone call at her home in Westminster, where she and her husband had retired, and on the other end was U.S. Sen. Michael Bennet. He had news of her selection as a National Endowment for the Arts fellow.

“I got the shock of my life when Michael Bennet, he called me – me and my family were having coffee and cake on the table – I thought he was a scammer when he called, I didn’t believe it. He said ‘Did you know that you were chosen to receive the National Endowment for the Traditional Arts award?’ And I said, ‘No.’ So it was a shock. It was a real shock.”

The colcha she’s now working on, “Ghost of Fort Garland,” will be 22 inches by 26 inches, she figures. She always starts by drawing her idea on paper, then decides how she’s going to make it, and then how big the colcha is going to be.

She credits her art classes and instructors at Adams State University, where she went for classes after the workshop to learn more about colors and design, for giving her the tools and confidence to become the famous embroidery artist that she’s become.

“I love the San Luis Valley and I love San Luis,” she said of her home. “I feel like a fish out of water sometimes.”

The colchas help her remember.

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