Queen Calafia
“Queen Calafia”, a unique pyrogravure art piece, is one of Steffi’s newest creations as part of our Circus Fables c. 1838 show in Joshua Tree, CA.
We’ve pyrographically burned all lines into wood and then hand-painted the different layers using acrylics. The border is meticulously burned and painted and used a recycled antique wood frame.
California has long been associated with fantasy, but few people know that centuries before Hollywood, it drew its very name from an imaginary kingdom—one ruled by a Black queen. Around 1530, when Hernán Cortés’s conquistadors, amid shipwrecks, mutinies, and the destruction of the Aztec Empire, arrived at the peninsula on Mexico’s western side, they christened it “California,” after a fictional island in a Spanish book published decades earlier. The name, later extended from the peninsula (now Baja California) to the mainland coast to the north, endured, surviving the region’s incorporation into the United States in 1850. Meanwhile, the novel of chivalry that spawned it, Garci Rodríguez de Ms one of the books that turned poor Don Quixote’s brains to mush). Yet its portrait of California’s queen, the dark-skinned warrior Calafia, is worth revisiting—not just for its marvelous details, but for the light it sheds on medieval European attitudes about race.
"Queen Calafia" - 2023
pyrographic wood panel and acrylics on recycled antique wood frame
16" wide x 19" high