New Mexico artist Jeroma Nakagawa jokes that his life has bounded forward in 11-year jumps. First, there was a career in photojournalism, which took him all around the country documenting crime, weather, sports and breaking news. That was about 11 years. Then there was work at a legal aid organization that served people who had been denied disability rights or faced gender discrimination. Again, 11 years. “My life has been a series of chapters,” he says. “All the same size”

The most recent chapter of his life started in 2020, when he enrolled in the jewelry program at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His first classes were during the fateful spring 2020 semester that was zapped into oblivion by the Covid pandemic. Education around the country essentially stopped, especially IAIA’s jewelry classes that normally involve students learning from workshops in hands-on settings. Instead, the classes went online. With the universe seemingly warning him, and with other careers to fall back on, another artist may have given up. But not Nakagawa. He saw this new chapter of his journey as a way of reclaiming his lineage. “There I was at age 40, and I really started to kind of have this deep-seated feeling that I wanted to reconnect with my cultural heritage,” he says. 

This desire to rediscover his heritage came from his parents. His Navajo mother came from Shiprock, New Mexico. His Japanese American father was a jockey, one of the first Japanese jockeys in horseracing. They met in Castro Valley, California, and raised their family in the Bay Area city of Hayward, California. Although elements of both Japanese and Navajo cultures were present in the home, they were also mixing with other subcultures, creating a fusion of styles and influences. “My childhood was mixed with not only the Navajo experience and the Japanese experience, but also hip-hop. As a young child, I was a breakdancer. I had this kind of mishmash of all these different cultural experiences in the Bay Area,” Nakagawa says, adding that he characterizes his childhood as that of an “urban Native.” “I didn’t grow up on the reservation, so it wouldn’t really be authentic for me to really be completely immersed in that story. I had a different story.”