Retha Walden Gambaro
Retha Walden Gambaro was an American sculptor and gallery owner.
She is known for her own artworks that explore Indigenous American themes and for her curatorial practice that brought attention to contemporary Native American artists of the 20th and 21st centuries. Gambaro advocated for and helped raise funds to establish the National Museum of the American Indian.
Early and personal life
Gambaro was born in Lenna, Oklahoma, to parents she identified as being of Native American descent. She identified her mother as having Muscogee descent and her father was having European and Cherokee descent. She grew up primarily in downtown Phoenix, Arizona, where she and her family moved when she was young. She attended public school through the 8th grade before leaving to support her family. Gambaro worked a variety of jobs including maid, seamstress, and engineering draftsman. She married Stephen A. Gambaro and worked to support him while he completed high school and college. In 1969, after the youngest of her three children left home, Gambaro, with newfound time and an empty nest, began experimenting with art, first, and only briefly, painting and then discovered a passion for sculpting. She enrolled, at the age of 52, in sculpture class at the Corcoran Gallery where she studied with Berthold Schmutzhart until 1971.Career and legacy
Gambaro's career as an artist spanned late mid-life through old age. She first exhibited her sculpture in 1971 in her mid-fifties and continued sculpting until her mid-eighties. Works by Gambaro in stone, clay, copper, wood and bronze often feature female figures and themes of spirituality and reverence for nature.Her work has been exhibited at the U.S. National Arboretum, Folger Shakespeare Library, Discovery Park Museum in Seattle, the Suffolk Museum, the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, the Gilcrease Museum, the [John F. John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts|Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts|Kennedy Center] and the Heard Museum. In 2012, the Heard Museum exhibited a retrospective of Gambaro's work titled "Attitudes of Prayer" including Gambaro's self-portrait, "Acceptance" of a woman holding and looking at a fallen leaf.