Exhibition Catalog: Landing

Landing

String Room Gallery Wells College, Aurora, NY —————————————— September 14– October 26, 2023

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4 Landing: Installation view, String Room Gallery From left: Ash Ferlito, Patrick Costello, Diane Schenandoah

Ben Altman Patrick Costello Ash Ferlito Daniela Naomi Molnar Hannah Bakken Morris Diane Schenandoah Landing presents six artists exploring reparative links between people and place.

The central question is, what is repair? The artists in this exhibition share the perspective that repair is cyclical and ongoing, not as simple as a mend or a fix. Their work suggests that while repair might begin with the acknowledgement of a break or wound, its longer-term outcomes are intuited, hoped for or believed in, rather than known. In asking how to live and work in right relation to land, the artists featured in Landing do not prescribe or formalize any easy answers for us. Repair may always be ambiguous and incomplete; thus, this exhibition represents an incomplete collection of eco-poetic gestures between landscapes, identities, and legacies in a moment of profound climatic and social shift. Landing proposes that such incompleteness is in fact a welcoming in.

Diane Schenandoah’s The Great Tree of Peace is a beautifully practical invitation; Schenandoah [Oneida] shares the culture and history of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, creates a space for contemplation, and offers perching and nesting habitat for grassland birds.

For Ash Ferlito, the gaze is a way in. The act of noticing is in and of itself profound and intimate—a portal into a teeming world of surprising yet familiar entities that, once noticed, call urgently for our consideration. What and how we notice is central to Hannah Bakken Morris’ fence post intervention Words to That Effect, which mimics yet subverts the standard iconography of land ownership, inviting in rather than excluding.

Transformation and alchemy are also explored as forms of repair. Patrick Costello turns to the process of composting as something both grounding and celebratory; he proposes decay and rot as a source

of joyful and queer utopian possibility. Daniela Naomi Molnar collects and grinds stones and plants to use as pigment, wondering whether it is possible to transmute memories that live in the earth itself. Moving at the deliberate speed of a forest, Ben Altman’s long-term collaboration with 38 acres of woods asks: what are our responsibilities? How will we take them up?

The site of Wells College is a Gayogohó:nǫˀ village called Chonodote— “Peach Town”—where the inhabitants tended over a thousand thriving peach trees. On September 24, 1779 the village became the last one to be destroyed by the Clinton-Sullivan Campaign, under the command of William Butler.

The Gayogohó:nǫˀpeople were violently driven away; anything (crops, trees, longhouses) that made living here possible and beautiful was burned or destroyed. The land was

divided up and in many cases, given to soldiers who had participated in the campaign as payment. At Wells College, for the past eight autumns, a peach tree has been planted on the President’s lawn. The planting is done by members of the SHARE (Strengthening Haudenosaunee and American Relations through Education) Farm, the Gayogohó:nǫˀ Nation, and the college.

Can planting a single tree repair such a wound? We don’t know. Regardless, we are graciously invited to be present, to learn, to witness, and to begin to heal. Landing was organized in conversation with and in celebration of this generous spirit of repair, offering gestures that are both symbolic and practical, as well as incomplete, impractical, and hopeful.

— Anna Ialeggio, September, 2023

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8 Landing: Installation view, String Room Gallery Installation view from South. Ben Altman.

The objective for Native people is to heal. The objective for non-Native people is to come out of denial.

—Faith Spotted Eagle [Dakota]

verything in US history E is about the land . . . who invaded and stole it; how it became a commodity . . .

—Roxanne Dunbar Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States.

Ben Altman 9 I Own This Stolen Land HD Video, 29:00 minutes 2022-23

I Own This Stolen Land is a social justice project using photography, video, text-sculptures and social practice. The work aims for improved Indigenous/settler understandings.

When my wife and I bought land next to our house in Tompkins County, NY in 2021, our purpose was to forestall logging and development. However we soon realized that our well-intentioned new ownership perpetuates genocidal injustice.

For over 10,000 years the Gayogohó:nǫˀ (Cayuga), one of the six Nations of the Hodinǫhsǫ́:nih (Iroquois) Confederacy, inhabited

and shaped land in what is now known as upstate New York.

They were resilient throughout the extreme difficulties of the Colonial period, but were driven into exile by the murderous 1779 Sullivan Expedition and subsequent fraudulent treaties.

Few inhabitants of this land today are aware of the continued existence of the people and culture they are displacing. The word “Cayuga” is seen everywhere, but there are few actual Gayogohó:nǫˀ (Guy-o-KHO-no) on their homelands.

The land we bought is part mature forest; the remainder is abandoned settler farmland, now used only for low-grade hay. The text-sculptures I create there are adapted from the

sentence “I OWN THIS STOLEN LAND”. The word LAND is represented not by text but by the entirety of the setting. I photograph the pieces repeatedly as weather and seasons change; the work collaborates with the land. The letters are formed from grass, reclaimed lumber, and fencing from the site, or trodden into snow or carved into rock and dead trees. I vary the text by replacing the word STOLEN with others, such as UNCEDED or SACRED. Many of the photographs are digital collages; I let the joins show faintly, in sympathy with the disrupted history of the site.

I record performance videos of the laborious creation of some of the pieces, which are

Top left: I Own This/220828-2 Digital photograph. Pigment inkjet print. 2022 Top right: CUT HERE (BUGGIN’) Standing dead ash tree killed by invasive Emerald Ash Borer beetles. Location: path from Wood lot to MacMillan.

Instructions for management: in the event that the tree must be cut, leave the trunk in-situ with text visible and intact, either standing or lying down.

On Sept 27, the ash tree bearing this artwork was cut down.

The stump lies in the place where the tree once stood.

This piece was a collaboration between Ben Altman and the students of ART 385: Image & Text.

perhaps attempts to embody the discomfiting work of decolonization.

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Understanding and acknowledgement are empty without action. As I was making the work on the land I joined a local non-profit group, the Gayogohó:nǫˀ Learning Project.

As a result, Gayogohó:nǫˀ people came to the site to produce maple sugar and syrup by their traditional methods. These tastes of their homelands were sent to Gayogohó:nǫˀ living on reservations in Canada and Oklahoma. The response was extremely positive; the operation will expand in coming years.

Hodinǫhsǫ́:nih poets have also given readings on the site.

These events on the land have proved deeply meaningful, so we are working towards a conservation easement to protect the site; this will include perpetual access for Gayogohó:nǫˀ people.

We hope this will become an option for other landowners.

Colonization deliberately suppresses the visibility of the colonized. I hope that this work will be affirmative for Gayogohó:nǫˀ and other Indigenous people, and stimulate new conversations for settler populations on colonized lands, wherever they may be.

I Own This Stolen Land is supported in part by grants from the New York State Council on the Arts and from the Community Arts Partnership of Tompkins County, with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, and a grant from The Center for Photographic Art, Carmel, CA. It is a fiscally sponsored project by the New York Foundation for the Arts. ◊ —Ben Altman, 2023

12 Top: I Own This Unceded Land/230224-1 Digital composite photograph.

Pigment inkjet print.

Frame material is from an ash tree killed by invasive Emerald Ash Borer beetles.

2023 Left: CUT HERE (BUGGIN’) Formerly standing dead ash tree killed by invasive Emerald Ash Borer beetles. Location: path from Wood lot to MacMillan.

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14 Landing: Installation view, String Room Gallery Installation from South.

From left: Ash Ferlito, Patrick Costello, Hannah Bakken Morris.

Patrick Costello 15 Piping Indigo dyed burlap, elephant dung, woodchips, hay.

2023

These tubes are frosting for an earth cake, piped into the gallery.

Coiling around structural columns throughout the space, Piping is a playful gallery iteration of a large-scale planted installation at Stone Quarry Hill Art Park, And Eat It Too. Both pieces are time-based works made with the same materials; soil, hay, woodchips, elephant dung, local ecotype seeds, and indigo-dyed burlap. And both works actively decompose and transform in response to their respective sites.

Piping is one exploration within a body of work that revolves around ecological processes, participatory spectacle, and the transformative possibilities of compost.

As it changes and decays, the sculpture counters notions of object permanence.

Piping included an edible performance presented as part of the exhibition’s closing reception. Bringing the outdoors inside, artist Benjo Simon contributed an elaborate replica of And Eat It Too; a spiced butternut squash cake iced with brown-butter sage buttercream, and filled with a local pear compote and ginger apple butter. Using locally sourced and seasonally available ingredients, the cake reminded us of our bodily connections to land, and asked us to partake in its bounty. ◊ — Patrick Costello, 2023

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Before cake was served, Patrick recited a poem written for the occasion: Piping: Ornamentation!

Crinkum! Tracery!

Latticework! Mesh! Webbing!

Hot Tea! Hereupon we are Landing, this last eve of the show Loose threads warp and wefting, hither and fro Woven burlap, lumpy tubes, group and ungroup Sprouting and rotting in continuous loop

17 Cake replica of And Eat It Too

by Benjo Simon

Like a charm of goldfinches tumbles and darts Alighting from a field, managed with blunt machines Former dark forests cut to pastoral scenes A pastoral scene like a sculpture, hewed and cared for Shaped by our presence and steeped in our lore If land is a skin bag, with wrinkles and marks, Its pores holding centuries of narrative arcs,

Hither a coil, yon a puppet, a limb curving round

Can it comprise just one body?

Where every plight’s linked?

Queer appendages bulging, wending up from the ground

Bloom and decay until we’re extinct?

Compost tendrils playfully fondling white column order

It’s in this landscape we fumble, sticking hands into holes

Bumfuzzling the gallery with earth odor and ordure

Fingers becoming eyeballs, our parts in new roles

Together a form and also wholly in parts

(That’s a reference to Brancusi, his Sculpture for the Blind

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Where feeling becomes seeing in the eyes of the mind)

How histories repeat, and we’ve inherited rot

In sooth, though, our situation asks for tactile sensing

How breaking down can be fertile: rot moves along plot

Interspecies convos and collabs — expanding, condensing

So join us in chewing, in digesting this heap

Right? Yeah, I think so, and mayhap you too?

CAW! CAW! CAW! CAW! CHEEP! CHEEP! CHEEP!

It does not solve all, but it’s something to do Something to chew on, like a delectable cake A cake of a sculpture, a sculptural home for a snake A sculpture that is habitat, one which re-members grounds Planted and seeded in its concentric rounds With plants that remind us how landscapes transform How the earth consumes all of us, and that’s just the norm

20 And Eat It Too Materials. Stone Quarry Hill Art Park, 2023.

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Patrick Costello & Ash Ferlito

Above: Moth Ball, 2023 Facing left: Installtion view Who Showed Up Risograph print & booklet Facing right: Risograph print detail 2023

Who Showed Up is a Risograph print that serves as visual documentation of the more than 150 species observed at the first Moth Ball, June 25, 2022. Each print includes a booklet containing the entire list of recorded observations from that night.

Created by Patrick Costello and Ash Ferlito, Moth Ball is an annual information-gathering wild science extravaganza celebrating creatures of the night with mothing, art, and

performative spectacle. Rooted in citizen science and participatory creative practice, the event is held around the summer solstice in the Wooshy Woods of Athens, New York.

Moth Ball is an occasion to celebrate summer and track local moth populations (order Lepidoptera). Though small and often unnoticed by the human eye, moths are important pollinators and an essential source of food for birds throughout their lifecycle.

Moths are present throughout the year; however, these longest days of the year are when moth diversity in the

northeastern US is at its peak.

They are critical indicator species, providing clues about the health of the ecosystem we are a part of. Often associated with specific host plants, and dependent upon particular habitat conditions, moths’ sensitivity to changes in their environment provide real insights for us as caretakers of the places where we live.

The gathering is an opportunity to take a closer look, learn more about the other types of life we share this land with, and, at least for the moment, be in a different kind of relationship with those beings. ◊

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Ash Ferlito 23 Above left: To Become Aware Leather, studs, binoculars.

2023 Above right: Moth Light Detail. Muslin, studs, mercury light, burned stump.

2023

Observation, curiosity, and appreciation of the natural world are the foundation of my work. I have several concurrent projects using a variety of media that allow for the direct engagement of insects and animals, favoring things that are often overlooked– birds and moths, in particular. Wonder, which Descartes called the first of the passions, links surprise with a desire to know more, and at the core of work is the hopeful suggestion that what is novel, rare, even shocking is actually familiar, and an essential part of the world around us for which we must have consideration.

The works in Landing, while related, harmonize in different registers. Sculptural mothing stations with special lights to attract insects for observation are set up outside at night; this framework allows the witness of these creatures congregating. Sharing this experience of locality and species specificity, within, around, and through sculpture, is important to me. Here in Moth Light, an indoor version is presented emphasizing the concept by inverting the function– a sculpture for moths set up for people.

In the paintings, Artemis Io and Tiger Moth, moths are a conduit to explore light, color, and texture. Flowing acrylic creeps and soaks suggesting a surface in motion or a kind of aliveness. A meditation on the form in such a way as to be past what is materially exact, something less knowable- but akin to the fact of beauty we find in organic life.

Seeing is to notice or become aware of something or someone visually or by using the eyes. Noticing is a profound act. It is the language of meditation and is also a core aspect of bird watching aka ‘birding’ or the activity of observing birds in their natural habitat.

In To Become Aware, a studded leather strap lends an erotic buzz to binoculars.

The presentation of this equipment as a voyeuristic tool points to the inherent eroticism in ‘watching’ and ‘discovery’ and invites an engagement of the complexity of those concepts. ◊ — Ash Ferlito, 2023

24 Artemis Io Acrylic on muslin.

2023 Confused Haploa Acrylic on muslin.

2023

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26 Tiger Moth Acrylic on muslin.

2023 Facing left: Moth Light Detail. Muslin, studs, mercury light, burned stump.

2023

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28 Landing: Installation view, String Room Gallery Installation view from North.

From left, Daniela Naomi Molnar, Diane Schenandoah

Daniela Naomi Molnar 29 echo)zero(stone 2 Natural and synthetic pigments, rainwater, and river water on paper.

2022

echo)zero(stone 2 This painting is made of stones, plants, and wild waters. These materials contain the earth’s memory. Each round shape in this work is an ecosystem in flux, in crisis, in homeostasis.

The painting is their ecosystems linked.

The circles can also be seen as stone-shapes. Stones are the material embodiment of Jewish mourning (one puts a stone on a Jewish grave, not flowers). The shape’s repetition is the trace

of my process of transmuting intergenerational and planetary grief to wonder.

The circles are also zeros. The zero is infinity, a site where our capacity for logic fails and something else takes hold. These zeros teem with nothingness and multitudes, grief and love.

This painting is part of a series of paintings that led me deeper into memories and considerations of memory – and to my work in Płaszów.

Memory of a Larger Mind 2 What pigments might one find in a former concentration camp? How might it feel to encounter, transform, and share these colors? What spiritual, emotional, or social transformation might occur in these processes?

I visited Płaszów, a former concentration camp outside of Krakow, Poland in June of 2023 in order to engage with these questions. I have a very direct connection to this place — my grandparents were enslaved

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31 Memory of a Larger Mind 2 Wildflowers, weeds, and stones from Płaszów concentration camp (Krakow, Poland).

2023 Facing: Wild Pigment Workshop

here during the Holocaust. I wanted to visit this difficult and contentious spot not to reenact or glorify its trauma but to find ways towards transformation, community exchange, healing, and learning. To do this, I am working in collaboration with the staggeringly resilient earth.

Płaszów is a complicated and difficult place. It is also a place of intense aliveness that yielded vivid colors–including many vibrant yellows, golds, and

greens–colors of rebirth and resilience.

This painting is the beginning of a series that will consider intergenerational memory, postmemory, and the “memory” of other-thanhuman entities such as rocks, plants, and water.

My sense for now is that healing involves both forgetting and remembering. This painting engages both. ◊ — Daniela Naomi Molnar, 2023

On Saturday, Sept 23, Daniela led a Wild Pigment Workshop to introduce students and community members to the vibrant world of natural pigments in our bioregion. We ethically foraged pigments and transformed them into paint and ink in order to creatively engage with socioecological issues. Pigments allow us to directly interact with forms of time our daily lives usually obscure — geologic time, photosynthetic time, and what is often called “deep

time.” In opening up different timescales, pigments offer a balm for the confusion and challen­​ging emotions ecological crises can provoke.

Daniela shared that pigment work is a way to interact with the memory of a place and to respond with transformative forms of care that bring intergenerational and ecological healing. This workshop was sponsored by the Center for Sustainability at Wells College.

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But perhaps the words the Western[er] hates stand as well for inner confusion.

A welter of thoughts and feelings, a condition of mental turmoil that is just as hateful as the more obvious external constraints of economics, politics, and class distinctions.

Women, like language, remind men of their own interiority; women’s talk evokes a whole network of familial and social relationships and their corollaries in the emotional circuitry.

—West of Everything, Jane Tompkins

Hannah Bakken Morris 33 Above left: Masculine Reserve (Setting a Good Thought) Video, 56:59 minute loop 2023 Words to that Effect Letterpress prints, metal mesh, found wood panels, staples, metal mounting hardware 2020-2023

The iteration of Words to that Effect at Wells College was produced in collaboration with the students of ART/SUS 100: Art & Sustainability in the Field, and WTQS/SUS 100: Identity & Belonging in the Outdoors. Seventeen signs were installed in various locations throughout campus. ◊ — Hannah Bakken Morris, 2023

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Previous spread: Diane Schenandoah The Great Tree of Peace

Diane Schenandoah

39 Above: The Doctrine of Flora and Fauna.

Australian Pine driftwood, raku fired clay, feathers.

This piece represents the European views of Indigenous peoples when they landed upon our shores of Turtle Island carrying their “The Doctrines of Discovery” lies.

The Great Tree of Peace is an ongoing series of site-specific installations that share the culture and history of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, creates a space for contemplation, and restores perching and nesting habitat for grassland birds.

It began in March 2022 at Stone Quarry Hill Art Park and continues at Wells College with the planting of a 4-year-old white pine, donated by tree specialist Dave Travers. The white pine symbolizes the Haudenosaunee Confederacy, formed over 1000 years ago for Peace, Harmony and Unity among the people of the

Oneida, Mohawk, Onondaga, Seneca and Cayuga Nations.

The Haudenosaunee Confederacy is the oldest living democracy known to humankind. When the nations came together for peace, they buried their weapons of war underneath the Great White Pine, so there would be no more war.

Diane buries a sheet listing “The Weapons of Words” and sacred tobacco at the tree’s base.

She believes that a continued message of Peace, Harmony, and Unity is still relevant and very much needed today. The tree is encircled by strawberry plants. In the Haudenosaunee teachings, it is the Strawberries which line the Milky Way to Creator’s land. This is also a heart medicine.

At Wells College, The Great Tree of Peace is located next to Cleveland Hall. It was planted on September 16, 2023 by a large group of students, faculty, staff, and community members in a ceremony led by Diane and Adah Shenandoah. ◊

40 Sky Woman. . . Sky World . . .

Wall hanging Butternut base with Ohio base clays and Duck feathers.

41 Above and facing: Haudenosaunee Call For Peace Bronze.

We are descendants of Sky Women, star beings from the center of gravity, to the pull of creation . . . our Great Creator, breathes into the glow of the universe as we journey into Life lessons surrounded our beings as we ascend back to our ancestors, our original reality . . . and we say Yaw^ko we are grateful. . .

Our history tells us, it was the acceptance of peace by then evil Onondaga chief named Tadahao, who was feared by all… he tied snakes in his hair to scare the people. He killed and destroyed all of Iawatha’s

family. Hiawatha grieved and wandered upon a mountain for many many days. The Peacemaker came to him and gave him the messages of peace, songs of love, and the ways to forgive through Ceremony. It is said when Tadahao accepted this Great Message he was given the title of “Head Chief” for all the Five Nations. The hand represents the “Combing away of the dark thoughts” . . . the snakes that plagued Tadahao. This chieftain title is still held today. On the back is Jakonsahseh, of the Seneca Nation, she was our first clan

mother who worked along with Hiawatha and the Peacemaker carrying this “Great Message of Peace” to all Nations in the four directions. She is buried in the present day Ganondagan in Victor, NY. In the front of the hand is the symbol of the original five Nations: Cayuga, Seneca, Onondaga, Oneida and the Mohawk who had accepted this great message. The Tuscarora were adopted in the early 1770’s making us Six Nations. Onondaga is our capital with the central fire uniting the Confederacy.

The roots of the Great White Pine Tree reach out in the four

directions, so any people seeking peace and protection need only trace the roots back to the source. The Eagle carries our prayers and good thoughts to our Great Creator and it is their duty to watch over and warn of any peril. Our Great Law tells us we are to love and care for one another, using the “Good Mind.”

We are to share this message and our prophecies tell us all people will hear this message . . .

The Haudenosaunee is the heart of democracy, which the United States fashioned their Constitution and government after. ◊ — Diane Schenandoah, 2023

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Ben Altman (b. 1953) trained as an artist by studying Physics, towing icebergs, and working in commercial photography. A naturalized U.S. citizen of British origin, his work responds to histories of mass violence.

Altman’s work has been selected for a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Fellowship, two New York State Council on the Arts Artist Support Grants, a NYSCA/NYFA Fellowship, a Foundation for Contemporary Art Emergency Grant, a Project Support Grant from the Center for Photographic Art, Artist in Community grants from the Community Arts Partnership of Tompkins County, the Houston Center for Photography Fellowship, the Critical Mass Top 50, and many others. He has exhibited nationally and internationally. benaltman.net

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Patrick Costello is an artist and performer who works across creative disciplines and genres, contending with themes of history, ecology, horticulture, collaboration, and queer joy. Informed by the process of composting, Patrick’s work experiments with temporary world-building as a way of accessing the potential for collective transformation and utopian possibility.

Patrick completed an MFA in Combined Media at Hunter College in

2018 and earned a BA in Printmaking from the University of Virginia in 2008.

Patrick’s work has been exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit, 601 Artspace (NYC), Second Street Gallery (Charlottesville), and Socrates Sculpture Park (Queens), as well as independent and alternative spaces nationally and abroad including Cinema Balash (NYC), Space 1026 (Philadelphia), and Trance Pop (Tokyo), with performances in venues including Ars Nova (NYC), the Eugene O’Neill Theater Center (Waterford), the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Philadelphia), Space Gallery (Portland), Ohranimo Tovarno Rog (Ljubljana), and a sheep farm in Waikawa, New Zealand. Patrick has held residencies with Shandaken Projects (NYC), The Soil Factory (Ithaca), ACRE (Chicago), New City Arts (Charlottesville), and HewnOaks Artist Colony (Lovell). Patrick lives and works between New York City and Gayfeather Gardens, an off-grid land project located in the Hudson Valley.

Ash Ferlito is an artist whose work is rooted in observation of the natural world. Direct engagement with moths and birds, in particular, generates information for a practice that spans

painting, sculpture, printmaking, and experimental rewilding gardening.

The work aims to inspire wonder and consideration and offers new ways of seeing and gathering. Ash has exhibited her work widely in the United States and internationally, most recently at The South Utah Art Museum, The Concord Center for Visual Arts, and Wells College. She has several ongoing collaborative projects: MOTH BALL, an annual mothing-art event; The Marshy Garden, a pollinator-supporting garden project; and the Skowhegan Bird and Nature Club, an international bird club for artists. She completed an MFA from the Tyler School of Art and a BA from Yale University. Ferlito lives and works in Ithaca, NY, and North Bennington, VT. Daniela Naomi Molnar is an artist, poet, and writer collaborating with the mediums of language, image, paint, pigment, and place. She is also a wilderness guide, educator, and eternal student. An entry in the Oregon Encyclopedia states, “Molnar pioneered the notion that art can speak to climate change.” Her art is about transmuting grief to wonder in order to help shape generative new questions, feelings, and ethics about what it means to be human at a time of socioecological crisis. Her

work is the subject of a front-page feature in the Los Angeles Times, an Oregon Art Beat profile, and a feature in Poetry Daily. Her book CHORUS is a finalist for the 2024 Oregon Book Award and was selected by Kazim Ali as the winner of Omnidawn Press’ 1st /2nd Book Award. Forthcoming books include: The Ecopoetry Anthology, Breaking the Glass: A Contemporary Jewish Poetry Anthology, PROTOCOLS (Ayin Press, 2025), and Light / Remains (Bored Wolves, 2024). Her visual work has been shown nationally, is in public and private collections internationally, and has been recognized by numerous grants, fellowships, and residencies.

She founded the Art + Ecology program at the Pacific Northwest College of Art and helped found the backcountry artist residency Signal Fire. A 3G Jew and the daughter of immigrants, she is a diasporic student of the earth.

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Hannah Bakken Morris hails from Malheur County, OR and works interdisciplinarily by combining printed media with performance, sculpture, and installation to explore identity, the body, landscape, and place. Her works comment on land use in the United States and how the historical and contemporary narratives of

the American West intersect with constructions of identity, economies, nationhood, and the environment. She received her BFA in Studio Art from Southern Oregon University in 2017 and her MFA in Print Media and MA in Critical Studies from the Pacific Northwest College of Art in 2020. Hannah currently is the Assistant Director for the Center for Contemporary Art & Culture at PNCA and when not working she enjoys riding her bike, gardening, fly fishing, printing shirts and sewing bags in her small business with her husband and spending time with her pets Ed, Al, and Wallace.

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Diane Schenandoah is Faithkeeper for Oneida Nation Wolf Clan of the Six Nations Haudenosaunee Confederacy.

She was born on the Onondaga traditional territory in Syracuse, NY. She is an Alumni of Syracuse University College of VPA, She graduated from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, NM. She is a sculptor for over 30 years, professional, singer and energy worker. Her Father was a Chief of the Beaver clan from the Onondaga Nation and her mother a Clan mother of the Wolf Clan of the Oneida Nation. Diane’s duty and traditional responsibility is to share and promote

the use of a “Good Mind” which are ancestral principles of peace and the methods of conduct and responsibilities to the natural world. Diane’s Art work, Intuitive Energy Work and writings are grounded in her culture and teachings which reveal the power of unconditional love. Her parents encouraged all of her siblings to pursue their talents and gifts in the arts. Clifford was a Jazz musician and singer for Duke Ellington and their mother Maisie was an artist, painter, and pianist. Diane is also a back up singer and percussionist for her sister, the internationally renowned Grammy winning- singer/songwriter Joanne Shenandoah. In the early 80’s Diane moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico to attend the Southwestern Indian Polytechnic Institute where she earned a “Certificate of Completion in the Arts”, and then moved to Santa Fe to attend the Institute of American Indian Arts where she earned two degrees in “3-Dimensional Arts” and “Creative Writing.” Diane fell in love with sculpture while working with clay and stone, creating images of her culture. She was further encouraged when her works won numerous awards and were featured in exhibits and galleries throughout the United States. Diane stayed in Santa Fe for a number of years raising her daughter and first of her four sons.

As her career progressed, she began to realize how blessed, in that she could share her culture through her work while further supporting her family.

Diane has been honored with two grants from the First Peoples Fund in South Dakota. She then created a series of Lady stick pin/necklaces in honor of woman, called the “Life Giver” series, and a line of Jewelry with babies called “Angel Babies” which were originally carved from Buffalo bone, then cast in Sterling Silver and 18k gold. Sam’s Club Online carries some of her designs. Her designs are traditionally inspired through her rich culture which is blended with a contemporary flair. This work includes Cradle boards, Rattles, furniture and custom work, utilizing local Black Walnut, Oak, shell and various other materials, including Deer and Buffalo bone. Diane was invited to participate in the Robert Rauschenberg foundation artist-inresidency in Captiva Florida, and is now working with Australian Pine driftwood from Captiva Island. ◊

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Many, many thanks to the following folks: Gallery Attendants: Emily Smith, Nate Phillips, India Buff, & Ethan Yanacheak Students of SUS/ART 100 Students of SUS/WTQS 102 Students of ART 385

Facing: Hannah Bakken Morris A Masculine Reserve (Setting a Good Thought) Video, 56:59 minute loop 2023

James Button Nick Borsellino Kelly Presutti Ernie Olsen Relatives & friends of Diane Schenandoah Dave Travers Stone Quarry Hill Art Park Dan Rosenberg & Michelle Landers & for extraordinary friendship and support Ash Ferlito

Landing was made possible by the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature.

Catalog design by Isa Knafo / Mosa Studio

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Ben

Altman

Patrick Ash

Costello

Ferlito

Daniela Naomi Hannah Diane

Molnar

Bakken Morris

Schenandoah