Natalie Gonzalez learned to make tsikuri, or ‘God’s Eyes,’ as a child in a Guadalajara, Mexico school.
As an adult in San Diego, she turned back to the vibrant, concentric squares of yarn two years ago.
She came home from work on a Saturday night, saw two chopsticks and yarn, and her hands returned to the familiar pattern of weaving. It calmed her during a difficult time, and became her therapy.
“And suddenly, when I look on my side, I had like 30 of them. Like a box. It’s like — what am I gonna do with all this?” she said.
What she did was make art — big hanging panels of them — and she taught others how to make them at local workshops.
Thirty turned into the hundreds that now form a towering wave structure that fills a room in the Oceanside Museum of Art (OMA) in a new exhibit called “Ventana Huichola.”
It’s not a place tsikuri would normally hang.
They’re sacred to the indigenous Huichol people, who traditionally make them not for art but as protection and offerings.
They place them around their children’s necks, adding a new color each year, until the age of 5, when they’re considered healthy enough.
They place them “wherever there’s life,” Gonzalez said — water, caves and crops, peyote in the desert and sacred mountains.
“Like, ‘Here is to the land. Thank you, Mother Earth, for doing this,’” Gonzalez explained. “So this is my way to say to Oceanside, thank you so much for everything you have offered me.”
The wave in OMA is made up of tsikuri crafted by people in Gonzalez’s Oceanside workshops.
Each square is unique, together tumbling up into a wave that hangs over the viewer’s head — an ode to the diversity Gonzalez has found in the community here.
The museum will celebrate the exhibit with an event on Saturday, May 3 from 5 to 7 p.m. Tickets are $15 for non-members.
The exhibit will remain open through Sept. 21. 2025.
