17 Facts About Clarissa Rizal

Clarissa Rizal was a Tlingit artist, visionary, and organizer of Filipino descent.

Clarissa Rizal was best known as a Chilkat and Ravenstail weaver, but she worked in painting, printmaking, carving, and sculpting.

Clarissa Rizal produced works for a time using the married name of Clarissa Hudson.

Clarissa Rizal raised a son and two daughters; both daughters are weavers.

Clarissa Rizal died on December 7,2016, in Pagosa Springs, Colorado.

Clarissa Rizal's appliqued blanket, Spirit of the Music, depicts a kneeling guitarist encircled by seven squatting figures that are linked to one another.

Clarissa Rizal produced large scale paintings, illustrated books, and the painted designs on one of the fiberglass horses in The Trail of Painted Ponies, Santa Fe, New Mexico's 2001 public art project.

The work was completed by inviting Northwest Coast Chilkat and Raven's Tail weavers to submit 5x5 inch squares, assembled from kits that Clarissa Rizal created, to be incorporated into the work.

When in her twenties, Clarissa Rizal apprenticed under Jennie Thlunaut to learn Chilkat weaving.

In 2005, Clarissa Rizal published a book titled Jennie Weaves an Apprentice: A Chilkat Weaver's Handbook.

Clarissa Rizal contributed illustrations to the children's book Mary's Wild Winter Feast.

Clarissa Rizal won a 2013 Artist Fellowship from the Rasmuson Foundation.

In 2015, Clarissa Rizal received a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation National Artist Fellowship.

Clarissa Rizal was a 2011 and 2016 First Peoples Fund Cultural Capital Fellow.

Clarissa Rizal was a recipient of a 2016 National Heritage Fellowship awarded by the National Endowment for the Arts, which is the United States government's highest honor in the folk and traditional arts.

One of the last robes on which Clarissa Rizal worked was a collaborative effort, Weavers Across the Water.

Clarissa Rizal then took the robe to Washington, DC, for the NEA award event.