First American Art Magazine No. 30, Spring 2021

ANCESTRAL, HISTORICAL & LIVING ARTS by INDIGENOUS PEOPLES of the AMERICAS

FırstAmericanArt MAGAZINE

NEO-WOODLAND MOVEMENT CROW’S SHADOW INSTITUTE OF THE ARTS BACONE COLLEGE’S ART PROGRAM THE HOUSER/ HAOZOUS FAMILY LILY HOPE MARIA HUPFIELD MARIO MARTINEZ NATHAN YOUNG

NO. 30, SPRING 2021

DISPLAY UNTIL JULY 7, 2021

MUSEUM OF NEW MEXICO FOUNDATION

LARRY AHVAKANA MARCUS AMERMAN ANGELA BABBY BRIAN BARBER DALE CHIHULY PRISCILLA COWIE JOE DAVID ALANO EDZERZA JOE FEDDERSON DAN FRIDAY RAYA FRIDAY GUNBI GANAMBARR TAMMY GARCIA LEWIS TAMIHANA GARDINER TONY JOJOLA RAMSON LOMATEWAMA CAROL LUJAN IRA LUJAN DJAMBA MARAWILI ROBERT “SPOONER” MARCUS JODY NARANJO ED ARCHIE NOISECAT HAILA OLD PETER MARVIN OLIVER VIRGIL ORTIZ SHAUN PETERSON LILLIAN PITT SUSAN POINT CARL PONCA HARLAN REANO PRESTON SINGLETARY RAVEN SKYRIVER RORY ERLER WAKEMUP ADRIAN WALL

CLEARLY INDIGENOUS Native Visions Reimagined in Glass

GROUNDBREAKING EXHIBITION OF WORKS IN GLASS BY 33 INDIGENOUS ARTISTS MAY 2021 –JUNE 22, 2022 Lead Sponsors: David Kaplan and Glenn Ostergaard, Brautigam/Kaplan Foundation

Preston Singletary (Tlingit) and Tammy Garcia (Santa Clara Pueblo), Untitled, 2018. In the collection of Mark and Lindsay Bibler, Cincinnati, Ohio. Photograph by Wendy McEahern.

Photograph courtesy of Blue Rain Gallery, Santa Fe

ON VIEW APRIL 2021 THROUGH OCTOBER 2021

Shonto Begay

Eyes of the World

This solo exhibition features over forty works of Diné artist Shonto Begay. His paintings narrate his connection to the landscape, personal history, and Diné cosmology.

Wheelwright Museum Shonto Begay, b.1954 (Diné) Rhythms from the Edge of the Rez, 2000 Acrylic on canvas

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issue no. 30, spring 2021

FEATURES

DEPARTMENTS

Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts

By Nanette Kelley (Osage Nation/Cherokee Nation)

20

Evolving States: Michael Elizondo Jr. and the Reemergence of the Bacone College School of Indian Art

By Cedar Marie (Standing Rock Lakota descent)

26

Allan Houser and His Sons: A Story of Kinship and Three Different Artistic Statements

By Jeanine Belgodère

32

The Neo-Woodland Movement

By Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD

38

48

Recent Developments

12

Seven Directions Kelly Church (Pottawatomi/ Ottawa/Ojibwe)

16

Collections: Field Museum

By Andrea L. Ferber, PhD

72

The Paradox of Decolonizing Museums

By Nanette Kelly (Osage Nation/Cherokee Nation)

76

Art+Lit Stephen Graham Jones: Blackfeet Author and Educator

By Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD Artwork by Jonathan Thunder (Red Lake Ojibwe)

90

REVIEWS

ARTIST PROFILES Lily Hope: Tlingit Weaver

By Amy Fletcher

48

Maria Hupfield: Wasauksing Ojibwe Transdisciplinary Artist

By Michelle J. Lanteri

54

Mario Martinez: Pascua Yaqui Painter

By RoseMary Diaz (Santa Clara Pueblo)

60

Nathan Young: Delaware/Pawnee/Kiowa Interdisciplinary Artist and Musician

By Thollem

66

54

Exhibition Reviews

78

Book Reviews

86

Music Review

89

IN MEMORIAM

60

Bill Church (Pottawatomie/ Ottawa/Ojibwe)

By Kelly Church (Pottawatomi/ Ottawa/Ojibwe)

94

Christine Nofchissey McHorse (Navajo)

By Stacy Pratt, PhD (Mvskoke)

95

Marden Paniza (Guna)

By Peter Szok, PhD

96

cover Lily Hope (Tlingit), Chilkat Protector, 2020, thigh-spun merino and cedar bark warp, merino weft yarns, tin cones, ermine fur.

Model: David Eckerson. Photo: Sydney Akagi Photography, Juneau, Alaska.

66

“We have a responsibility to honor and carry on the teachings, to keep creating, to share our version of spirit with others, so when we pass, we’ve left the world more beautiful, through our weavings and through a joyful spirit.”

—Lily Hope (Tlingit)

NO. 30, SPRING 2021 | 7

February 12–August 21, 2021 30 W. Dale St. Colorado Springs, CO 80903 (719) 634-5581 fac.coloradocollege.edu

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CANNUPA HANSKA LUGER MAY 14 – AUGUST 8, 2021 FREE ADMISSION

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LEAD ARTIST CANNUPA HANSKA LUGER.

OPENING RECEPTION:

issue no. 30, spring 2021 ISSN 2333-5548 (Print) • ISSN 2333-5556 (Online) Publishing Editor: America Meredith (Cherokee Nation) Literary Editor: Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD (Euro-Canadian) Marketing Director: Barbara Harjo (Cherokee descent) Copy Editors: Jo Ann Reece and Rosa Cays (Chicana) Proofreaders: Rosa Cays (Chicana), Staci Golar, Jo Ann Reece, and Angela C. Villa (Chicana) Layout & Design: America Meredith (Cherokee Nation) Social Media: Staci Golar, Michelle J. Lanteri, America Meredith (Cherokee Nation), Jackie Sevier (Northern Arapaho), and Neebinnaukzhik Southall (Rama Chippewa)

Regional Representatives

Great Basin: Melissa Melero-Moose (Northern Paiute/Modoc) Great Plains: Jackie Sevier (Northern Arapaho) Northeast: Kelly Church (Pottawatomi/Ottawa/Ojibwe) Northwest: Miranda Belarde-Lewis, PhD (Zuni/Tlingit) Southeast: Michole Eldred (Catawba/Eastern Band Cherokee) Southwest: Holly Coonsis (Zuni) and RoseMary Diaz (Santa Clara Pueblo)

Editorial Advisory Board heather ahtone, PhD (Choctaw/Chickasaw) Roy Boney Jr. (Cherokee Nation) James T. Bialac, JD Cliff Fragua (Jemez Pueblo) Teri Greeves (Kiowa) Emily Haozous, PhD, RN (Chiricahua Fort Sill Apache) Linda Lomahaftewa, Hon. DHum (Hopi/Choctaw) Anya Montiel, PhD (Mestiza/Tohono O'odham descent) Jami Powell, PhD (Osage Nation) Mary Jo Watson, PhD (Seminole) India Rael Young, PhD

ANCIENT MYSTERIES REVEALED

AND THE ART OF THE MISSISSIPPIAN WORLD

FEBRUARY 12 – MAY 9, 2021

Advertising Representative Barbara Harjo (Cherokee descent), barbara@firstamericanartmagazine.com International distribution is by Disticor Magazine Distribution Services.

First American Art Magazine, LLC, is not responsible for the content of any article or for the statements of any advertiser. First American Art Magazine welcomes queries about editorial submissions. The magazine is not responsible for unsolicited manuscripts, photographs, or artwork.

Copyright ©2021 by First American Art Magazine, LLC. Cover and contents are fully protected by copyright and may not be reproduced in whole or part by any method without written permission, except those specific images listed with Creative Commons licenses. Any errors or omissions will be corrected in subsequent editions. First American Art Magazine® is registered with the US Patent and Trademark Office.

See ancient artifacts and explore their connections to works by contemporary artists.

Effigy pipe of seated male figure. Known as Resting Warrior or Big Boy and identified as Morning Star or the hero Red Horn. Le Flore County, Oklahoma, Spiro site, AD 1100–1200. Bauxite (flint clay). Photograph

by John Lamberton. Image courtesy the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art. Fayetteville, University of Arkansas Museum. 47-2-1.

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1700 Northeast 63rd Street Oklahoma City, Oklahoma 73111 (405) 478-2250 • nationalcowboymuseum.org Exhibition support provided by the Henry Luce Foundation, the Kirkpatrick Foundation and National Endowment for the Humanities.

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NO. 30, SPRING 2021 | 9

EDITOR'S GREETING We Have Words for Art Symposium

I

above Neebinnaukzhik Southall (Rama Chippewa), We Have Words for Art logo, 2021, digital illustration, dimensions variable.

N LATE FEBRUARY, First American Art Magazine hosted “We Have Words for Art,” an online symposium to discuss writing about art by Indigenous peoples of the Americas. We were astonished by the enthusiastic response from registered participants who quickly filled all 500 available spots and our generous sponsors from coast to coast: Critical Minded, Noksi Press, University of Virginia’s Mellon Indigenous Arts Initiative, and Shingle Springs Rancheria.

“It rolled so well, I was honestly engaged the entire time,” wrote curator Callie Chunestudy. “It was the best collection of panels and presentations I’ve probably ever ‘attended.’” I have to agree. Thanks so much to facilitators Jami Powell, Taylor Rose Payer, Brendan O’Donnell, and Irem Karaaslan. Thanks to Staci Golar, Neebinnaukzhik Southall, Angela C. Villa, Rosa Cays, Jo Ann Reece,

Michelle Lanteri, Samonia Byford, and everyone else who helped make this symposium possible.

Miranda Belarde-Lewis suggested the name, We Have Words for Art. This FAAM slogan plays off the false stereotype that Indigenous languages lack words for art. ᏗᏟᎶᏍᏙᏗ, eqqumiitsuliorneq, nakvhakv, kapchiy, tōltēcāyōtl, tonkasali imponna, wóuŋspe, and yila'ob are just a few Indigenous words for art, each carrying their own connotations that enhance our collective understanding of the concept of art.

As heather ahtone pointed out in “Shifting the Paradigm: A Love Story,” her powerful keynote address, “The methods for discussing Indigenous art are incomplete.” She used the metaphor of a canyon for the gulf between Indigenous and Eurocentric understandings of Indigenous art. She likened our Native art writing to dropping pebbles in the canyon. While the challenge is larger than any individual, each effort we make contributes to the solution. “One day,” as heather said, “that gap will be filled by the accumulation of pebbles that will become a bridge.”

COMING SOON L O C AT E D I N D U R A N T, O K L A H O M A

A special place to experience the Choctaw journey C H O C TA W C U LT U R A L C E N T E R . C O M 10 | FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

Nancy Marie Mithlo based her twelve-point program, “Native Arts Scholarship: How to, What, and Why?” on the Alcoholics Anonymous twelve-step program, stating, “We didn’t cause the colonialism in our lives, we can’t control it, and we can’t cure it.” As she continued, “Your job is not to ‘fix’ the museum enterprise or academic disciplines” in her liberating call to action for Native writers.

In my talk, “Tribal Affiliations in Art Writing,” I advocated for precise use of language to accurately reflect the complexity of Indigenous identity and to stop enabling ethnic fraud. Adrienne Lalli Hills presented “The Nuts and Bolts of Exhibition Text” and Miranda Belarde-Lewis spoke about “Writing for Depth in the White Cube.” They generously shared practical advice learned from years of personal experience. Teachers have responded saying they look forward to sharing these presentations with their students.

Roundtable discussions showcased diverse perspectives and solutions to nuanced topics. That might be the key to understanding writing about Native art: one size doesn’t fit all.

Publications and art institutions ought to maintain flexibility and listen to Native community voices. Discussions covered authors’ relationships with artists, the challenges of simultaneously writing for art world insiders and the general public, and the nascent field of Indigenous art criticism. My working definition of art criticism is the interpretation, contextualization, and evaluation of art or art events primarily through writing. Art criticism is the engine that drives art history.

We Have Words for Art was not the first symposium sponsored by FAAM, nor will it be the last. In addition to many individual talks and our ongoing, monthly “Collections Spotlight” that we cohost with Ralph T. Coe Center for the Arts, FAAM has also hosted two in-person symposia in the past: the Cherokee Art History symposium in 2018 and Stories from the Land: Indigenous Voices Connecting Within the Great Plains in 2019. A one-day event at the Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, the Cherokee Art History Symposium hosted Cherokee artists, Cherokee scholars, and one non-Native art historian who each presented on a different medium. Stories from the Land, spearheaded by FAAM writer Jean Merz-Edwards, was a three-day symposium and exhibition at Bethany College and the Birgir Sandzén Memorial Gallery in Lindsborg, Kansas, and the Smoky Hills Museum in Salina, Kansas.

Unfortunately those two events weren’t recorded.

Melissa Melero-Moose determined that We Have Words for Art had to be recorded. The videos will be available on First American Art Magazine’s YouTube channel at youtube.com/ user/firstamericanart. Eventually we will publish a book with transcriptions of the symposium and advice on art writing.

Of course, what is the first step to improving one’s writing? Reading. I hope this issue provides you with some illuminative and provocative reading from a myriad of perspectives. I am in awe of the brilliance and generosity of everyone involved with the symposium and all who contribute to this publication to keep improving dialogue around arts by Indigenous peoples of the Americas.

—America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

IDYLLWILD ARTS SUMMER PROGRAM

NATIVE AMERICAN ARTS WORKSHOPS & FESTIVAL JUNE 14 – 26

2021

Offering in-person workshops in a safe environment on our beautiful mountain campus in Idyllwild, CA ONLINE OPPORTUNITIES Exhibition, Kabotie Lecture Series, Performances

Scholarships for Native American adults and teens available for 2021!

MORE INFO:

idyllwildarts.org/nativeamericanarts (951) 468-7265

NO. 30, SPRING 2021 | 11

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS MUSEUMS QAUMAJUQ, the long-anticipated Inuit art center at the Winnipeg Art Gallery in Manitoba, opened with a virtual celebration on March 27, 2021. The 185,000-square-foot center holds the largest public collection of modern and contemporary Inuit art in the world with 14,000 items. The Nunavut territorial government provided an additional 7,400 artworks on a long-term loan. The Inuktitut name Qaumajuq (pronounced HOW-ma-yourq) translates to “it is bright, it is lit” and reflects Inuit leadership of the project.

Philanthropists JoAnn and Bob Balzer donated $500,000 to Santa Fe's MUSEUM OF INDIAN ARTS AND CULTURE (MIAC), a division of the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs. The funds will go toward the construction of a new contemporary art gallery, slated to open in 2022.

MIAC hopes to host two major solo or group exhibitions in the gallery per year.

SCHOOLS The INSTITUTE OF AMERICAN INDIAN ARTS (IAIA) will offer a master of fine arts (MFA) degree program in studio arts. The Santa Fe–based college already offers an MFA page Keshi Ad Spring Like 2021 FAAM .pdf 1 writing 2/13/21MFA, 11:50 degree4 in creative writing. the creative theAM

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studio arts MFA recently approved by the Higher Learning Commission will be low-residency with two intensive nine-day residency periods each summer and winter on the IAIA campus in Santa Fe. Master of fine arts students will be paired with mentors for an independent, one-on-one study for 16-week virtual semesters. IAIA hired Mario A. Caro (Colombian Mestizo) as founding director of the studio arts MFA program.

Caro recently served as interim director and curator of the Longhouse Educational and Cultural Center at Evergreen State College and earned his doctoral degree in cultural studies from the University of Amsterdam.

BACONE COLLEGE in Muskogee, Oklahoma, hired Michael Elizondo Jr. (Southern Cheyenne/Kaw/Chumash) as the new director of its School of Indian Art. He replaces Gerald Cournoyer Sr. (Oglala Lakota), who is now the vice-president of development. Elizondo, who earned his MFA degree from the University of Oklahoma, taught at Bacone in 2012 and 2013. For more information, see “Evolving States: Michael Elizondo Jr. and the Reemergence of the Bacone College School of Indian Art” on page 26 of this magazine.

ART MARKETS Juanita Growing Thunder Fogarty (Fort Peck Assiniboine/ Sioux) won best of show at the 63rd annual HEARD MUSEUM GUILD INDIAN FAIR AND MARKET with Wakitantanka (Strong-Willed) Pandemic Survivalist, her beaded sculpture of a woman in elaborate regalia with a micro-beaded face mask. Prizes at the hybrid virtual and in-person market totaled $75,000. Classification winners were Denise Wallace (Chugach Sugpiaq), jewelry and lapidary work; Erik Fender (San Ildefonso Pueblo), pottery; Eugene Tapahe (Navajo), two-dimensional art; Mark Taho (Hopi), Pueblo carvings; Don Johnston (Qagan Tayagungin), Terresa White (Yup'ik), and Mark Tetpon (Iñupiaq), sculpture; Susan Hudson (Navajo), weavings and textiles; Juanita Growing Thunder Fogarty, diverse art forms; Carol EmarthleDouglas (Northern Arapaho/Seminole), baskets; Orlando Dugi (Navajo), personal attire and accessories; and Dallin Maybee (Northern Arapaho/Seneca), open standards. Pat Pruitt (Laguna) won the Conrad House Innovation Award, Susan Hudson won the Idyllwild Arts Imagination Award, and Birdie Real Bird (Apsáalooke) won the Indian Arts and Crafts Association Commemorative Award.

MEDIA The Nunavut Independent Television Network launched UVAGUT TV, a new channel of Inuit programming, on January 19, 2021. Ugavut, Inuktitut for “Our,” is available to subscribers in the Nunavut and the Northwest Territories and online via uvagut.tv. The shows will be in Inuktitut and Inuinnaqtun, with English subtitles.

TAKE HOME A TREASURE FROM INDIAN COUNTRY

BUY WORKS PRODUCED BY MEMBERS OF FEDERALLY RECOGNIZED TRIBES The Indian Arts and Crafts Board (IACB) offers a Source Directory of American Indian and Alaska Native Owned and Operated Arts and Crafts Businesses that sell authentic Native American art and craftwork, which is available at www.doi.gov/iacb.

Under the Indian Arts and Crafts Act, it is unlawful to offer or display for sale, or sell, any art or craft product in a manner that falsely suggests it is Indian produced, an Indian product, or the product of a particular Indian or Indian tribe or Indian arts and crafts organization.

For a free brochure on the Indian Arts and Crafts Act, including how to file a complaint, please contact the Indian Arts and Crafts Board.

Evans Flammond, Sr., Rosebud Sioux, Dog Soldier Red Moon, Ledger Art, ©2014

AWARDS & HONORS UNITED STATES ARTISTS chose 60 artists as its 2021 USA FELLOWS. Indigenous fellows include Cannupa Hanska Luger (Mandan/Hidatsa/Arikara), Salvador JiménezFlores (Mestizo), Emily Johnson (Yup'ik), Martha Gonzalez (Chicana), Nathan P. Jacobson (Tlingit), Geo Soctomah Neptune (Passamaquoddy), and Delina White (Leech Lake Ojibwe). The Chicago-based nonprofit provides each fellow with $50,000 in unrestricted funds.

The POETRY SOCIETY OF AMERICA awarded its FROST MEDAL for distinguished lifetime achievement in poetry to N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa) author, poet, and visual artist. The society writes, “The Frost Medal is one of the oldest and most prestigious awards in American poetry.” Momaday, a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, was the first Native American writer to win a Pulitzer Prize. He earned his master’s and doctoral degrees in English literature from Stanford University and has received honorary doctorates from more than 20 American and European institutions.

The EITELJORG MUSEUM OF AMERICAN INDIANS AND WESTERN ART, based in Indianapolis, named its 2021 EITELJORG CONTEMPORARY ART FELLOWS: Sonny Assu (Ligwilda'xw Kwakwaka'wakw), Catherine Blackburn (English River Dene), Anita Fields (Osage/Muscogee), Athena

U.S. Department of the Interior Indian Arts and Crafts Board Toll Free: 1-888-ART-FAKE or 1-888-278-3253 Email: iacb@ios.doi.gov Web: www.doi.gov/iacb

LaTocha (Hunkpapa Lakota/Ojibwe), and Steven J. Yazzie (Navajo/Laguna). The fellowship includes a stipend of $25,000, purchases of artwork by the museum, and an exhibition, scheduled to open November 13, 2021, with a catalogue.

The CANADA COUNCIL FOR THE ARTS bestowed its prestigious 2021 GOVERNOR GENERAL’S AWARDS IN VISUAL AND MEDIA ARTS to eight artists, including Indigenous artists Lori Blondeau (Cree/Saulteaux/Métis), Dempsey Bob (Tahltan/Tlingit), Bonnie Devine (Serpent River Ojibwe), Cheryl L’Hirondelle (Métis/Cree), and Germain Arnaktauyok (Inuk). The award includes a medallion and a Can$25,000 stipend.

The AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION recognized We Are Water Protectors (Roaring Brook Press, 2020), a children’s book illustrated by Michaela Goade (Tlingit) and written by Carole Lindstrom (Turtle Mountain Ojibwe), making them the first Native American women to win a CALDECOTT MEDAL, considered the highest award for an American children’s picture book. Lavishly illustrated in ethereal watercolors, the New York Times bestseller follows the adventures of a young girl in a fight to protect water sources inspired by the true events of the resistance to the Dakota Access Pipeline.

The HARPO FOUNDATION named Joe Harjo (Muscogee) and Lena Tseabbe Wright (Pyramid Lake Paiute/Yurok) as its NO. 30, SPRING 2021 | 13

2021 NATIVE AMERICAN RESIDENCY fellows. Fellows will have a one-month residency at the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, Vermont, and a $500 travel stipend.

Artist-in-Residence Program | Fine Print Studio & Gallery | Non-Profit

The UCROSS FOUNDATION announced Eliza Naranjo Morse (Santa Clara Pueblo descent) as its Spring 2021 NATIVE AMERICAN VISUAL ARTIST fellow. The fellowship includes a four-week residency in Ucross, Wyoming, a $2,000 honorarium, and an exhibition at the Ucross Art Gallery in Clearmont, Wyoming.

IN MEMORIAM MARSHALL MCKAY (Yocha Dehe Wintun/Pomo, 1952– 2020), a revered political and cultural leader, passed on due to COVID-19 on December 29, 2020. The son of celebrated basket weaver and healer Mabel McKay (Pomo/Patwin, 1907–1993), Marshall McKay was the first member of his tribe to attend college. He helped the Yocha Dehe Wintun Nation become economically self-sufficient and reclaim lands in Yolo County, northwest of Sacramento, California. He was the first Indigenous chair of the Autry Museum of the American West’s board of trustees. McKay served as tribal chairperson and on tribal council, on California’s Native American Heritage Commission, on the board of the National Museum of American Indian, and on the International Indigenous Peoples Forum on Climate Change. An avid art collector, he cofounded the Native Arts and Culture Foundation.

YAT I K A S TA R R F I E L D S Impressions of Sanguine 7-color hand-printed lithograph, edition of 16 28 x 22.25 inches, published at Crow’s Shadow Press in 2020

RENNARD STRICKLAND (1940–2021), the senior scholar in residence at the University of Oklahoma College of Law and Philip H. Knight Distinguished Professor of Law Emeritus at the University of Oregon School of Law, died peacefully on January 5, 2021, in his home in Norman, Oklahoma.

While primarily a legal scholar, Strickland contributed to Native art history by writing Tonto’s Revenge: Reflections on American Indian Cultures and Policy (University of New Mexico Press, 1997) and several exhibition catalogues and co-writing Building One Fire: Art and World View in Cherokee Life (Cherokee Nation, 2010) with Chad Smith (Cherokee Nation) and Benny Smith (Cherokee Nation). Strickland was the Native American art curator at the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art in the early 1990s. He donated much of his collection of Native American art to the museum in 2007. “He was an astute scholar of American Indian art and history. His superior knowledge and understanding of Indian artists will have a lasting impact through his publications. He was generous with his students,” recalls Mary Jo Watson (Seminole), director emeritus of the University of Oklahoma School of Art and Art History.

ERRATA FROM FAAM 29

C R O W S S H A D O W. O R G 48004 St. Andrew’s Road | Pendleton, Oregon 97801 | 541-276-3954 14 | FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

Bill and Sue Hensler of Colorado reached out to us to correct a mistake in the memorial to Irving Toddy. In FAAM No. 29, America Meredith incorrectly wrote that Irving’s father JIMMIE TODDY SR., also known as BEATIEN YAZZ, had passed away in 2012; however, happily, he is alive and well.

Cherokee Nation

COLLECTIONS SPOTLIGHT a free interactive online experience Native artists bringing us together to discuss and interpret the Coe’s collection.

Artist Unknown (Huron-Wendat attrib.) Handkerchief or Glove Case (detail), c. 1860. Birchbark, silk, porcupine quill, moose hair. NA1050

Third Tuesday, every month 3 pm MST/MDT “Special Bond,” detail, acrylic on canvas 24×48 in.

A partnership with First American Art Magazine

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Coe Center coeartscenter.org 1590B Pacheco Street Santa Fe, NM 87505 • (505) NO. 983-6372 30, SPRING 2021 | 15

SEVEN DIRECTIONS

KELLY CHURCH An Anishinaabe Artist, Environmentalist, and Cultural Advocate Shares Her Top Seven List

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N ENROLLED MEMBER of the Match-e-be-nashshe-wish Band of Pottawatomi Indians of Michigan and descendant of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians, Kelly comes from the largest extended black ash basket making family in southwestern Michigan.

She works with many fibers from the forests to create innovative weavings and sculptures that share her life and experiences in today’s world. She is a basket maker, weaver, birchbark biter, sculptor, quill worker, and Woodland style painter. She has organized conferences about the threat of the emerald ash borer to black ash trees, as well as language and cultural conferences and camps. She and her daughter will have a two-woman exhibition, An Interwoven Legacy: The Black Ash Basketry of Kelly Church and Cherish Parrish, at the Grand Rapids Art Museum later this year.

WOODLANDARTS.COM SOUTH: LINDA LOMAHAFTEWA

above Linda Lomahaftewa (Hopi/Choctaw), Tanchi VIII, 2012, monotype on paper, 11 × 15 in. Image courtesy of the artist. above, top right Kelly Church.

Photo: R i c h a rd C h u rc h (Odawa/Ojibwe).

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opposite, top Adam Avery (Saginaw Ojibwe descent), Mishiikenh (Turtle), 2018, 10° to 12° glass seeds beads, 24K gold beads, hat, brass sequins, collection of the Muskegon Museum of Art. Image courtesy

of the artist. opposite, bottom Hal Homer (Oneida Indian Nation), Untitled, oil on canvas. Image courtesy of the artist.

Linda is Hopi and Choctaw and resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She is a mentor, teacher, friend, and one of the Native art world’s biggest supporters. She is a painter, printmaker, and mixed-media artist who has opened doors and forged new pathways for Native artists worldwide and opened the minds of countless students to see not only their potential, but to show by example that you can accomplish what you dream.

Linda began her art studies at the Institute of American Indian Arts in 1962, and went on to mentor, inspire, and teach thousands of students. She creates work reflecting her Hopi and Choctaw cultures with breathtaking imagery and landscapes using brilliant colors and shapes that tell stories of time and place.

You can all be witness to the magic that she creates and shares with us all at her retrospective The Moving Land: 60+ Years of Art by Art by Linda Lomahaftewa at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe through July 18, 2021. lindalomahaftewa.com

SEVEN DIRECTIONS

NORTH: ADAM AVERY North of my little town in Hopkins, Michigan, lives Adam Avery, a descendant of the historic Saginaw, Swan Creek, Black River Bands of the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe. He is an accomplished dancer and visual artist, who comes from one of the most well-known Saginaw black ash basket making families. While Adam is well-versed in black ash techniques, he is also an apprentice to one of Michigan’s last birchbark canoe–making elders, Ron Paquin (Sault Ste. Marie Chippewa) and has helped create six full-size birchbark canoes to date. As if that isn’t enough, Adam creates beautifully beaded top hats, floral beaded framed pictorials, and some of the finest beaded and appliqué regalia that Michigan has to offer.

Facebook @NiishodeTwoHearts EAST: HAL HOMER Hal is a Turtle clan member of the Oneida Indian Nation and resides in Upstate New York. Born and raised on the Onondaga Reservation, Hal has been creating visual art since childhood, first selftaught and then incorporating his formal training by experimenting with different media throughout his college years.

Hal paints portraits that incorporate the subject’s clan or a special moment as he depicts the beauty and essence of each individual that he details in oil paints. He is willing to work with collectors on commission. His figurative paintings are studies of the human form that draw you in with their emotion, allure, and vibrant colors, as each tells their own story.

“When I was younger my work included acrylics and drawings,” Hal says, and then he moved on to classical “oil paintings as I grew older. My art includes traditional concepts, as well as delving into the surrealist style—usually incorporating the female form to express moments in nature, bringing both as one entity, a celebration of life and nature.”

Instagram @nocturtle NORTHWEST: JIM DENOMIE Jim was born in Hayward, Wisconsin, and at age five moved to Minnesota, where he resides today in Franconia. He is a member of the Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians of Wisconsin. Jim’s work is colorful, bold, and unapologetic in the stories they tell. Stories within stories pull you into each painting, touching on important issues in politics, the environment, and life today. He paints in an intriguing and honest way that catches viewers off guard.

Jim says he is influenced by children’s art and outsider artists because they “are not influenced by anyone in particular. They just make art because they are compelled to make art.” His inspirations come from dreams, imagination, NO. 30, SPRING 2021 | 17

SEVEN DIRECTIONS

above, left Jason Quigno (Anishinaabe), Niikonii Kiinaa (All My Relations), 2018, granite, 198 inches tall, Muskegon C o u n t y V i s i t o r s C e n t e r, Muskegon, Michigan. Image courtesy of the artist. above, right Chris Pappan (Osage/Kaw/Cheyenne Lakota), See Haw Thwarts an Alien Invasion from the West, 2019, mixed media on Evanston municipal ledger, 18 × 23 in.

Image courtesy of the artist. opposite Karen Ann Hoffman (Oneida Nation), Rock Art Caribou, 2016, glass seed beads, watered velvet, tiles.

Photo: James Gill Photography, Madison, Wisconsin. Image courtesy of the artist.

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working with his granddaughter, the natural world, spiritual world, and other artists, both historic and contemporary. Represented by Bockley Gallery in Minneapolis, Jim is the first Native artist to win the McKnight Distinguished Artist award and recently exhibited in Imagined Communities, part of Sesc.

Videobrasil, a biennial festival in São Paulo. Jim Denomie Sketch Work (Rez Rabbit Press, 2020) is reviewed later in this issue of FAAM. Instagram @jimdenomie WEST: CHRIS PAPPAN Raised in Arizona and currently residing in Zhigagoynak (Chicago), Chris is a citizen of the Kaw Nation and an Osage and Cheyenne River Lakota descendant.

One of the most unique and innovative ledger artists I know, he uses imagery from the past and present. His figurative ledger paintings keep me eagerly anticipating what he will create next.

Chris told me, “My practice is based around the Plains tradition of Ledger art, but I want to bring the tradition forward and to help keep it relevant for today. I am influenced mainly by my own personal experiences as a Native person in this country, historical photographs of our ancestors and ‘popular’ culture such as comics, sci-fi, and music. Through the

combination of those seemingly disparate elements, I am reasserting our presence and our humanity for the viewer.” Blue Rain Gallery in Santa Fe represents him. chrispappan.com CENTER: JASON QUIGNO Jason, an Anishinaabe of the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribe of Michigan, is known for his works in stone. He is one of Michigan’s most accomplished sculptors, carving mesmerizing large-scale creations that emanate the true essence of this gifted artist. Carving quartz, granite, marble, limestone, and alabaster, Jason tells the stories of his Anishinaabe heritage. He has received numerous awards and monumental commissions with his work being held in many private and public collections.

Jason recently guest curated The Art of the People: Contemporary Anishinaabe Artists, a joint exhibition at the Muskegon Museum of Art and Grand Valley State University. Partnering with SiTE:LAB, he is selecting a site-specific project to exhibit at the Highlands, a nature preserve in Grand Rapids. He is also working on two monumental commissions for a private collector and the Gerald R. Ford International Airport. He is represented

by LaFontsee Gallery in Grand Rapids. asinaabestudios.com

SEVEN DIRECTIONS

NORTH: KAREN HOFFMAN Karen belongs to the Oneida Nation and lives in Stewarts Point, Wisconsin. She is a Haudenosaunee raised beadwork artist and the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) named her a National Heritage Fellow in 2020. Karen always credits her mentors in her raised beadwork practice: Lorna Thomas-Hill and her son Samuel Thomas (Cayuga).

She recently shared with me what that means to her: “While that honor is deeply appreciated, the responsibility is also deeply felt. I strive to create contemporary raised beadwork that, while being exquisitely culturally connected, simultaneously responds to the issues of the world around us.” She will spend a year or more on her legacy pieces researching, pattern making, and testing the idea before ever taking the first of thousands of stitches.

Currently, Karen is working on a multiyear project resulting in the erection

of a monument to acknowledge and bring rest to the mass graves of Native Ancestors lying under the University of Wisconsin, Stevens Point. Out of this a

creation is growing that will “sing for and honor the lessons of those who can no longer speak with their mouths.”

Instagram @karenann.hoffman

NO. 30, SPRING 2021 | 19

CROW'S SHADOW INSTITUTE OF THE ARTS

By Nanette Kelley (Osage Nation/Cherokee Nation)

“A

RT, C R A F T S , and economic development, that is how Crow’s Shadow got started,” said artist and cofounder James Lavadour (Walla Walla). Located on the Confederated Tribes of Umatilla Indian Reservation in Oregon near Pendleton, Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts (CSIA) is situated in an old Jesuit schoolhouse at Saint Andrew’s Mission.

Until Lavadour rented it out with the idea of starting a studio as a socioeconomic development project, the building was not fit for use beyond an occasional community rummage sale and was going to ruin, rotted from a stream that ran beneath it.

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Before moving out of the area with his parents, Lavadour spent the better part of his childhood with his grandmother on the reservation, then moved back as a young adult.

“In 1974 I had an ambition in this world to do something good and important,” he said. At that time, the Vietnam War was ending, and a few of those who returned created the planning office. Described by Lavadour as “the engine,” the planning office sparked community potential through grants, including housing projects and educational programs. One of his first jobs on the reservation was working in a tribal curriculum development project, creating learning materials by hand.

Lavadour is a self-taught artist and painter, and although he claims he is not an “educated person,” education is relative, and it was his relations who schooled him. Through his work in education, housing, the tribal drug program, the nearby prison, and as a school counselor, he said he witnessed his community inside and out. “It was the wild, wild West in a lot of ways, and my education was the tribe.”

Meanwhile back at the rez, many artists had attended the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, yet once they completed their arts education, jobs and economic opportunities were nonexistent. So, fellow artist Phillip Cash Cash (Cayuse/Nez Perce) and

above Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts (CSIA), gallery. Photo: Walters Photography, Pendleton, Oregon. All images courtesy of Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts. opposite Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts, Pendleton, Oregon. The buildings were formerly the Saint Andrew’s Mission schoolhouse. Photo: Crow’s Shadow.

Lavadour collaborated to establish Crow’s Shadow as a community and economic development project with a unique catalyst, printmaking, and their timing was kismet.1 In addition to other social programs, art had become a standard facet in most tribal development plans, and with help from private and governmental funding sources, the Umatilla tribe received funding for community economic development, including Crow’s Shadow. “As an institute, we have an obligation to the Native community, not just as a nonprofit printmaking studio but as a facilitator of this intersection of Indigenous creativity and contemporary art. It’s not just economics,” said Lavadour.

Now complete with a building, funding, a printing press made by a local engineer, an unlimited supply of talented Native artists, and after a prophetic, “Oh my God, this is going to haunt me for the rest of my life” moment, as stated

by Lavadour, they got down to work.

They created one of the most unique,

Indigenous socioeconomically beneficial collaborative art institutions—the only nonprofit fine art print studio based on a reservation in the country. With a worldwide footprint, in 1992, Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts took flight.

“If you want to live around creative people, it’s the Indigenous people of America that have a good vision of the future,” said Lavadour, who views the organization as a pathway to the mainstream art world. “Part of the conduit is to bring new kinds of resources and opportunities to the heart of the community and bring the most creative people I could find to the reservation.

Many opportunities followed,” he said.

Although printmaking knowledge is valuable as an art trade, many other factors benefit participants, such as developing business skills, portfolios, and professional networks. But most importantly, the institute became a means for Native American artists to generate limited edition print series to disseminate their images further, faster, and with a greater impact than a single art piece.

While on a fellowship at Rutgers University, Lavadour worked with Tamarind Master Printer Eileen Foti.

Lavadour appreciated her collaborative printer-to-artist methods, and Foti soon traveled to the reservation to assist in engineering the studio plan and layout.

“The thing I love most about printmakers and printmaking is that it is knowledge that is passed on by doing, centuries of knowledge in a master printmaker working with an artist, life changing for the artist,” said Lavadour.

The Tamarind Institute, located in Albuquerque, New Mexico, not only offers a professional and a master printer program but also trains printers to work with artists collaboratively, allowing them to translate their artistic vision into an edition of prints. Because CSIA was modeled after Tamarind, the two have always shared a strong connection. For example, both of Crow’s Shadow’s master printers are Tamarind graduates.

“I’ve had many jobs in my life, and this has to be the best,” said Frank Janzen, retired Tamarind master printer and the first full-time resident master printer at

1. JoAnn Lavadour, James Lavadour’s wife at the time, can be considered a third cofounder and she named the organization. Patrice Hall Walters (Umatilla) was also a cofounder. —Ed. Prudence F. Roberts, “Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts at 25: A History,” in Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts at 25, ed. heather ahtone, Rebecca J. Dobkins, and Prudence F. Roberts (Salem, OR: Hallie Ford Museum of Art and Willamette University, 2017), 12.

NO. 30, SPRING 2021 | 21

above, top James Lavadour (Walla Walla), Crows Shadow Series, 2010, monotype, 22 × 30 in. Collaborating master printer: Frank Janzen. Photo: Crow’s Shadow. above, bottom CSIA studio.

Photo: Crow’s Shadow. opposite, top Marwin Begaye (Navajo), Evening Song, 2018, eight-color lithograph, 28 ¼ × 22 ¼ in., edition of 18. Collaborating master printer: Judith Baumann.

Photo: Crow’s Shadow. opposite, bottom Marwin Begaye in CSIA studio, 2018.

Photo: Crow’s Shadow.

22 | FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

Crow’s Shadow. In his 25 years at CSIA, Janzen has worn many hats to help enable the organization to thrive and has worked with a plethora of Native and non-Native artists from all over the world. “Even bringing in the non-Indigenous artists is beneficial because it creates a cross-cultural exchange,” he said.

Although separate from the tribal government, CSIA is intrinsically involved with the Umatilla tribe. For example, CSIA provides an arts component for Nixyáawii Community School, the public charter high school on the reservation, which focuses on Indigenous culture and

infuses Native languages into school life.

Janzen witnessed the value in hosting reservation high school students in the studio and saw printmaking nurture the students’ self-worth in creating, marketing, and profiting from their work.

He hopes that one day a young Native American will apprentice under a CSIA master printer, attend Tamarind, and then return to work as a future CSIA master printer. “Past my lifetime I want to see it keep going,” said Janzen.

Janzen’s first resident artist collaboration was with Edgar Heap of Birds (Southern Cheyenne). As he took a deep breath and chuckled, Janzen said, “Edgar came up with a 19-color print. Anyone with printmaking experience knows what that means.” However, Janzen soon found out a 19-color print was the least of anyone’s worries, because Heap of Birds’s stay coincided with September 11, 2001.

Because of the national state of emergency and subsequent economic downturn, after CSIA’s very first residency, they could not afford to bring in outside participants.

Therefore, they relied heavily on artists within driving distance, such as Marie Watt (Seneca Nation), and Rick Bartow (Mad River Wiyot/Yurok).

“Everybody’s got a Bartow story,” said James Lavadour as he reminisced about his friend’s contributions as a multidisciplinary artist. Lavadour described Bartow as having the ability to make a distinct mark like nobody he knew, a single mark like a dash, a little wavy line, or an X, easily identifiable as only his work. Lavadour said, “It was like music. He was a musician, and he knew how to [strum], and he did it effortlessly to every single mark.”

Bartow donated the work he produced at Crow’s Shadow in order to create an endowment for Native artist scholarships, so they could work at CSIA. Only now, since his passing in 2016, is the institute close to selling out of Rick Bartow’s gifted editions of prints.

Judith Baumann, a Tamarind professional printer, is Crow’s Shadow’s current master printer. “There are some artists I get excited about, what their work might look like and how I can get them

to think about lithography,” she said and clarified that painters, photographers, and multimedia artists don’t present much of a problem; however, sculpture is a little more challenging. Most CSIA resident artists are not printmakers, but those who are have an opportunity to spend more time concentrating on their design and immersion in the community instead of worrying about the color process and technical aspects.

University of Oklahoma printmaking and painting professor, Marwin Begaye (Navajo), was Baumann’s first artist collaboration at CSIA. Initially Begaye found it difficult to trust someone else with the printing process, but eventually he enjoyed leaving the printmaking to someone other than himself.

“Usually when I’m in the studio, it’s just me, and the main part of the struggle is me knowing the process, layering, and wanting to do everything.” However, Begaye emphasized he would do it again if asked, and next time he would challenge the process with more experimentation.

Begaye utilized his newfound free time to speak with and explore the Umatilla Indian Reservation community and research Plateau arts in local archives to connect attributes shared by his Navajo culture. “In Native cultures there are a lot of commonalities, and in using design elements and patterns, I wanted to see how to acknowledge the landscape and the stewards of the land in that area.”

Ke e pi ng m i n d f u l of ot h e r cultures and their relationships to the environment, these similarities included cultural relationships to the birds.

Begaye described the three pieces he and Baumann collaborated on as representative—abstracted interpretations of other Indigenous cultures without copying their work. “There was a lot of sensitivity, there was a lot of understanding of working with her and being woven into that community,” he said.

Begaye especially wanted to incorporate condors, since they are returning from the brink of extinction and significant to the local Indigenous peoples.

They also play a part in Navajo stories.

“We are learning how to take care of our NO. 30, SPRING 2021 | 23

opposite, top Wendy Red Star (Apsáalooke), Apsáalooke Roses, 2015, four-color lithograph with archival ink-jet chine-collé, 18 × 26 in., edition of 12. Collaborating master printer: Frank Janzen. Photo: Crow’s Shadow. opposite, bottom Wendy Red Star and Frank Janzen in CSIA studio, 2015. Photo: Crow’s Shadow. above Melanie Yazzie (Navajo), Yazzie Girl in Pendleton, 2012, wo o d c u t a n d l i t h o g ra p h , 29 ¼ × 30 in., edition of 16.

Collaborating master printer: Frank Janzen. Photo: Crow’s Shadow.

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stories and our cultural knowledge, as we are learning how to take care of our relatives like the condors,” he said. “As we come back, they are calling us back.”

Melanie Yazzie (Navajo) earned a BFA in printmaking from Arizona State University and an MFA in printmaking from the University of Colorado, where she currently heads the printmaking program. Like Begaye, she struggled with her free time away from the printing process, when she was an artist-in-residence, but found a unique and productive way to utilize it.

With her pre-carved wood block in the hands of Frank Janzen, Yazzie set about printmaking elsewhere by collaborating with Whitman College art professor Nicole Pietrantoni in Walla Walla,

Washington. There she spent time with students who would not ordinarily have an opportunity to work with an Indigenous artist, and together, they printed eight or nine of her woodblocks.

Yazzie appreciates Lavadour’s work and perspective and enjoyed listening to his stories and his dream of creating Crow’s Shadow. “It was a huge honor to be with him and be in his studio and be in his people’s landscape and community,” she said. The symbolism in her resulting three-color print was inspired, not only by her own background but by the colors of the landscape, including the river and the grasses from the Umatilla Reservation.

Wendy Red Star (Apsáalooke) said collaboration with Janzen during her first two residencies was successful. However, because her background is in sculpture, she admits she had a “fear of 2-D.” Baumann, who also collaborated with Red Star might beg to differ with the artist’s concern. As Baumann said, “Her work can translate into any media, and her pieces are meant to be an immersive exhibition that tells a story, so bringing that into print is exciting as there are so many possibilities.”

The work from each of Red Star’s three residencies has been driven by photos that she or her family members have taken. What she enjoyed the most each visit was the opportunity to look through the archive of lithographs from past resident artists and see the brilliance of how every artist had applied their mind and problem-solving skills.

Red Star recently completed her third CSIA residency. She described the awkwardness of not being able to use or see facial expressions through the masks, yet was still positive about the collaborative experience saying, “We really made some magic happen.”

Being a single parent, Red Star explained she was thankful CSIA allowed her to bring her daughter and two dogs and to have the comfort of working on a reservation where she did not need to explain herself. CSIA enabled her to create work she would not have been able to do otherwise.

Residencies are by invitation and artists can be chosen through a variety of ways, including those whose art the printers think may translate well into a printed edition. Baumann said, “I’m really proud of the work that I’ve been able to do here and I feel really privileged to work with amazing artists and would encourage any emerging Native artists to contact us and see if there’s a potential for working together in the future.”

Today, multiple institutions are building a Crow’s Shadow collection.

Both Crow’s Shadow and Hallie Ford Museum of Art at Willamette University archive one print from every edition.

While Crow’s Shadow retains ownership to all archived prints in both collections, every two years the Hallie Ford Museum hosts an exhibition of the archive. CSIA attends the Portland Fine Print Fair every year and the Editions/Artists’ Book Fair in New York City, which includes small press and nonprofit work. When the Umatilla tribe built a new governance center, they filled it with Crow’s Shadow prints.

Crow’s Shadow has plans for a traditional arts program coordinator to focus solely on the customary Plateau programming. Workshop leaders have the ability to designate any workshops as strictly for the Native community. Last fall, Charles Wood III (Cree/Umatilla), a singer, composer, performer of Cree-style round dance, and hand drum champion, led a socially distanced drum-making workshop. Wood said, “They opened the door for something new that hadn’t been there before and are really giving back to the community.”

Although Lavadour says it has always proven difficult to find funding for Native artists, long term goals on the table include hosting a national beadwork conference and a new building for Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts. “Sometimes people don’t know how to do things, but they show up and there’s usually some staff member that leads them through and comes up with something forward. It’s a slow go and it’s agonizing, and you look back and say, ‘Look what we did, some good stuff,’” he said.

Lavadour credits 40 years of community effort with the success of the organization. “The education, economic development, housing—all those committees that had to be restocked with tribal members over and over. It was all those people off those horrible meetings, here’s the outcome,” he said. In addition, Lavadour mentioned current CSIA

president Patrice Hall Walters (Umatilla), cofounder, tribal member, and past board chair, who contributes blood, sweat and tears. “Bedrock of the organization,” he acknowledged. “I think it’s really important to encourage Indigenous creativity. We call it art, but it’s not, but it shines in art. It shines in everything. It shines in what’s going on today."

Nanette Kelley (Osage Nation/Cherokee Nation) is the 2021 California Arts Council Administrators of Color Fellow for the Greater Northern Region (Upstate California). A professional writer and artist based in California and Oklahoma, she is obtaining her master’s degree in Indigenous education and policy with an art and Traditional Ecological Knowledge (TEK) curriculum design emphasis from Arizona State University.

NO. 30, SPRING 2021 | 25

EVOLVING STATES Michael Elizondo Jr. and the Reemergence of the Bacone College School of Indian Art

By Cedar Marie (Standing Rock Lakota descent)

B

ACONE COLLEGE’S I N F LU E NC E on Michael Elizondo Jr. has evolved over time. The oldest continuing American Indian college in what is now Oklahoma, Bacone College was chartered in 1880 and its campus was later established in Muskogee within the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. Unlike many schools for Native students of its time, Bacone College supported expressions of Native identity, cultures, and visual arts. Its storied School of Art was directed by Native artists and gave birth to the Bacone school, a form of Flatstyle painting that flourished in the 20th century and continues today. Michael Elizondo Jr. (Cheyenne/Kaw/Chumash) now serves as the new art director of the Bacone College School of Indian Art. Elizondo’s family lived down the road from artist Dick West (Southern Cheyenne, 1912–1996), who served as the art director of Bacone’s School of Indian Art from 1947 to 1970 and returned to teach from 1979 to 1986. West, an alumnus of Bacone, studied under another influential artist, Acee Blue Eagle (Muscogee, 1907–1959), who painted aspects of Cheyenne ceremonial life and gatherings that Elizondo had witnessed during his own life and that remain a part of Cheyenne culture today. Painter, printmaker, and former Bacone art director Ruthe Blalock Jones (Shawnee/Delaware/ 26 | WWW.FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

above Michael Elizondo Jr. (Cheyenne/Kaw/Chumash) in front of his mural. Photo: Dayrah Elizondo (Alabama-Coushatta). opposite Ataloa Lodge on the Bacone College campus.

Photo: Matt Jarvis (Osage).

Peoria) depicted images and stories of the Native American Church, a regular and important influence for Elizondo’s family.

As a young man and art student, Elizondo looked to these artists for inspiration.

He wanted to express himself in his own way while also keeping his culture as the central subject matter in his artwork.

Even though he did not attend Bacone’s art school, when Elizondo researched artists and artworks that he could relate to and learn from, his research nearly always led him back to Bacone College and the art department’s history of prominent directors.

Elizondo received his BFA from Oklahoma Baptist University (OBU) in 2008 and his MFA from the University of Oklahoma (OU) in 2011. At OBU he met artist Tony Tiger (Muscogee/ Sac & Fox/Seminole), who visited there when Elizondo was planning his senior art show. Tiger, Bacone’s art director from 2010 to 2015, showed the younger artist how to lay out a gallery space and hang his artwork, and later, how to navigate the mainstream art world. In graduate school, Elizondo continued to create artwork specifically related to his Cheyenne culture and heritage. His early paintings, such as Subsisting, Esevóona, and No-Wa-Wu, were relatively formal and abstracted studies where both artist and materials seemed to enter into a heavily textured and deeply charred

landscape. Once through that desolate space, something new began to grow.

During this time he began to focus on “constructed paintings,” and merge ancient Cheyenne influences with current cultural themes in his artwork. I was on his thesis committee and became his thesis mentor during his final year at OU. I remember Elizondo sharing that he was close to his grandmother and took inspiration from her stories and artwork as a beadworker and cradleboard artist.

“My grandmother would tell me that every design has a story,” says Elizondo. “Some of the artworks in my MFA thesis show were influenced from the designs she used to bead. I began to think about what new elements I could bring to my story and my history and create my own designs and stories.

Nothing stays the same; someone creates something new at some point; beads were once new.”

The artist continues: “I began to experiment with forms, shapes, and patterns, and create what I call constructed paintings. I would move a pattern in a new way, take it apart or separate it by creating a small diamond in the middle or expand the outer edges of the frame [such as in the painting, Transcendent II]. I was focused on personal identity themes as a Native American, [and] as an individual continuing on this creative path, [I was]

trying to also hone my craft. Form and color became a way to merge together my life and Indigenous influences to explore our evolving state and larger cultural experiences.”1 During his second year of study, OU art faculty encouraged Elizondo to take a teaching assistantship. He was a little hesitant about it at first because he wanted to focus as much time as he could on just being an artist. Yet he began to shadow his painting mentor, Tommy White, and often worked with students on one side of the classroom while his mentor worked with students on the other side. He also became a woodshop monitor in the sculpture area, so he could help undergraduate students make their own panels for painting. At the time, he did not know that much about power tools but soon learned how to use them. What he discovered from this experience reinforced the notion that art-making doesn’t just happen in the studio; it happens with the conversations and experiences an artist has with others, in the different ideas that are shared, in listening to personal stories, and in helping others learn. When his mentor left OU after Elizondo’s second year of graduate school, School of Art Director Dr. Mary Jo Watson (Seminole) asked him to teach two painting classes during his final year of study. That

teaching experience prepared him for what happened next: teaching Art Appreciation and Native American Arts and Crafts courses at Bacone College in the fall of 2012. Elizondo and his wife and new daughter were living in Oklahoma City at the time and had to figure out how teaching 140 miles from home was going to work.

“Oklahoma City is about two hours from Muskogee where Bacone College is located,” recalls Elizondo. “The commute was pretty hard, but I did it for an entire year. My wife took care of the baby during the day while I was out here teaching, and I took care of the baby at night when she was in class. I was still doing my best to keep the momentum of showing my artwork, because that was also helping us keep afloat. As the academic year came to an end, I was grateful to have the experience teaching at Bacone and fortunate enough to be mentored by Tony Tiger.”

“I wanted to continue teaching but needed to work closer to home again so I could be with my family. Spring of 2013, I got an adjunct position at the University of Central Oklahoma, which is closer to Oklahoma City. The art history director asked me to teach a Native American art history class. There was also a Comanche Nation college down in Lawton, and they asked me if I would teach American

1. All quotes from Michael Elizondo Jr. from discussion with the author, January 12, 2021.

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DIRECTORS OF BACONE COLLEGE SCHOOL OF INDIAN ART Compiled by Frances Donelson (Cherokee Nation) and America Meredith (Cherokee Nation) Several people served as interim directors of the art school during the 1940s and mid1980s.

• 1932–1935: Mary Stone McLendon (Chickasaw, 1896–1967) founded the art lodge and taught art courses • 1935: Bacone School of Indian Art officially opened • 1935–1938: Acee Blue Eagle (Muscogee, 1907–1959) • 1938–1941: Woody Crumbo (Citizen Potawatomi, 1912–1989) • 1947–1970: Dick West (Southern Cheyenne, 1912–1996) • 1970–1975: Terry Saul (Choctaw/ Chickasaw, 1921–1976) • 1975–1979: Gary Colbert (Muscogee) • 1979–1985, 1987–2010: Ruthe Blalock Jones (Shawnee/Delaware/Peoria) • 2010–2015: Tony Tiger (Muscogee/Sac & Fox/Seminole) • 2018–2020: Gerald Cournoyer Sr. (Oglala Lakota) • 2020–Present: Michael Elizondo Jr. (Cheyenne/Kaw/Chumash)

Indian Art as Film and another art history class.”

In 2016, the Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes invited Elizondo to work with the language department on a three-year master apprenticeship grant, to develop a Cheyenne language immersion program. His grandmother loved to talk in Cheyenne, and she frequently told him how important it was to know the language. It was a challenging decision for him because he had an established routine with his art practice— showing his artwork and teaching, and he was already regularly attending language classes offered by the community. But the Cheyenne language is critically endangered with only about

400 Cheyenne speakers total in Oklahoma,2 and only 15 to 20 fluent first-language speakers, mostly elders. Elizondo knew how crucial learning Cheyenne was for his community and his family. He finished up his teaching assignments that fall and began the language immersion program in January 2017.

Everything art-related stopped: the exhibitions, teaching, and workshops. After he got more comfortable speaking the language, he could better balance his art practice with his language immersion experience.

Elizondo spoke with his grandmother in Cheyenne; she told him stories about what it was like for her growing up, how Cheyenne was frequently spoken in the house, and how the customs, dances, and songs sung in Cheyenne have evolved during her lifetime and that some of them are now gone. She told him a story about going into town with her grandmother, an all-day event because she did not have a car and did not speak English. They rode to town using a horse and a wagon.

He thought about his youngest daughter after hearing that story, and all the changes that have happened in his lifetime, and all of the changes that have happened just in 2020. He told me that he could never have imagined the circumstances our society is currently enduring: the COVID-19 pandemic and the loss of thousands of lives, the racial and political traumas, especially

2. Christopher Moseley, “Cheyenne,” Encyclopedia of the World’s Endangered Languages (London: Routledge, 2008), e-book.

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on black, brown, and Indigenous communities, and the economic impact of so much unrest.

But it wasn’t just learning the Cheyenne language that was important to Elizondo. Other second-language learners who had gone through the apprenticeship program told him that he had to think in Cheyenne as much as possible, not just speak it, if he truly wanted to embody the language. He played Cheyenne language CDs while he slept. Four to five days of the week he visited with and listened to fluent elders, who often laughed as they spoke Cheyenne. Slowly, he began to have small conversations with them that would then get longer and longer. As he began to learn, speak, and finally teach the Cheyenne language, he began to see their worldview and humor. He wanted to take the experience of learning Cheyenne and directly connect it to what was occurring right now in this time, in his life, his community, and in his artwork.

“I would ask, ‘How do you say the word tire in Cheyenne?,’” Elizondo recounts. “One of the elders would laugh and say, ‘mȧhtse'ko,’ and another would laugh and say, ‘That just means leg!’ I would ask, ‘How do you say get in the car?’

And they would say the [term] which actually means climb on the car. I realized that the terms they were using were for riding a horse. Today, many Natives actually refer to their car as their pony.

As I began to understand the language more, I also began to understand that the way they were talking was because they were still thinking in Cheyenne. Our language still works in the older terms though society has evolved and is more modern. I decided to pull all of what I was learning together into the artwork Store Run, which is a direct influence of the Cheyenne language.

“In the drawing, they are driving a car into town but instead of tires it has horse legs. The driver is holding a depiction of my unemployment card, a direct result of the pandemic. So, this, again, speaks to our evolving state.”

Elizondo began to draw more during the pandemic. He created a series of coyote drawings that evolved

from humorous conversations between himself and his brothers. The timing was perfect, because he was invited to participate in Speak, Speak While You Can at Living Arts of Tulsa, curated by Tiger that summer.

Elizondo continues to help his community with Cheyenne language revitalization efforts, and he is back to having a strong studio practice. As we continued to talk about the changes in his artistic career, he was humble in reflecting on the shifts that have occurred in his life and his creative practice since

above, top Michael Elizondo Jr. (Cheyenne/Kaw/Chumash), Transcendence II, 2017, acrylic on wooden panel, 32 × 67 in. Image courtesy of the artist. above, bottom Michael Elizondo Jr. (Cheyenne/Kaw/Chumash), Store Run, 2020, Prismacolor pencil on Bristol board, 17 × 14 in.

Image courtesy of the artist. opposite Mary Stone McLendon (Chickasaw, 1896–1967), whose stage name was Ataloa (Little Song), collection of the Oklahoma H i sto r i c a l S o c i e t y, C z a r i n a Conlan Collection 1990.056.

Image courtesy of the Oklahoma Historical Society.

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above, top Gerald Cournoyer Sr. (Oglala Lakota), Ravens with Texture, 2009, acrylic on canvas, 36 × 48 in., Image courtesy of the artist. “The work is about weaving stories together with the help of the spirit animal, the Raven,” writes Cournoyer. above, bot tom Gerald Cournoyer Sr. (Oglala Lakota), Vice-President of Development at Bacone College, former art program director from 2018 to 2020. Image courtesy of Gerald Cournoyer Sr.

graduate school. Each shift, he said, was an important building block for whatever the next phase of his life would be for him and for his family. That next building block arrived in December 2020, when he got a call from the president of Bacone College, Dr. Ferland Clark (Navajo), and Bacone’s art director, Gerald Cournoyer Sr. (Oglala Lakota). Cournoyer had just been promoted to vice president of development to lead fundraising efforts in revitalizing the college. They needed a new director of the Bacone College School of Indian Art who shared their vision for moving the art program forward.

Bacone, too, has been evolving, and Elizondo joins the program at a challenging time. (In addition to the challenge of operating an institution of higher learning during a global pandemic.) The art school shut down in 2015 due to financial difficulties.

President Clark was hired in 2018 when the college was on the verge of completely closing, and he successfully kept it open. He worked with five Oklahoma tribes—the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians of Oklahoma, Osage Nation, Otoe-Missouria Tribe of Indians, Cheyenne and Arapaho Tribes, and

Kiowa Tribe—to charter the college to help to stabilize the college’s finances.

President Clark soon hired Cournoyer to lead the art department.

Cournoyer worked to repair and upgrade the facilities at McCombs Hall, where the art school is located.

The building, constructed in 1935, has not been upgraded since about 1976, and Cournoyer’s priority is to ensure the facilities are up to code and safe for students and for the school to be able to regain its accreditation. These renovations are currently underway at Bacone with upgrades to their HVAC system, plumbing, and ADA compliance.

I spoke with Cournoyer about the direction of Bacone’s art school and his responsibilities as vice president of development. “My new role in development is finding funding for the entire college, not just the art school. We are working on our charitable giving and being more transparent and starting the process of getting donor-advised funding,” Cournoyer says.

“Additionally, we are looking into getting tribal college status. Bacone has always been a private education institution and cannot receive a lot of federal or state funding until it gets established as a tribal college. As a tribal college, we can become a member of the American Indian Higher Education Consortium and then receive funding. It just takes time, but Bacone has a bright future.”3 Bacone College was founded as the Indian University in 1880 by Almon C. Bacone. When Mary “Ataloa” Stone McLendon became an English teacher there in 1928, she immediately set out to raise funds for an art building and developed an impressive collection of Native artworks that was housed in an “art lodge,” later renamed the Ataloa Lodge Museum in her honor.4 This humble institution became the earliest Native American art museum in the country.

McLendon served as Bacone’s first art department director from 1932 until 1935, a fact that is sometimes left out of research texts about the school. She then

3. Tamara M. Elder, “Ataloa (Mary Stone McLendon) (1896–1967),” The Encyclopedia of Oklahoma History and Culture, web.

4. Gerald Cournoyer Sr. in discussion with the author, January 13, 2021.

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handed the reins to artist Acee Blue Eagle, who worked in the Flatstyle of painting and developed what became known as the Bacone style. Many Native American students who came to Bacone back then were influenced by Blue Eagle, Elizondo says, because he showed a common way of painting for not only his people but for surrounding tribes as well, and he depicted different aspects of his culture.

The Bacone style paralleled painting styles developed at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, Oklahoma, where Blue Eagle earned his BFA. The Kiowa Six5 had established Flatstyle painting at OU in the late 1920s, and a related style emerged from the Studio at the Santa Fe Indian School, following the developments of the San Ildefonso school painters.

Bacone’s art department and history of influential directors helped shape a whole movement of Indian art for its time, as it shaped Elizondo.

His goal is to continue the work others started and adapt the program to better reflect current times. His immediate goals are to upgrade the curriculum and increase course offerings and enrollment. The school is investing in computer equipment and printers to instruct students in digital art practices.

Photojournalist and artist Matt Jarvis (Osage) is teaching the art school’s graphic design courses.

A donor recently left $75,000 to the program just to buy art equipment, and they are looking to secure funding for the Ataloa Lodge Museum so that the collection can be preserved and utilized as part of the curriculum. Right now, there is no proper place to store the collection, which has around 3,000 items. The program currently offers a two-year associate degree in art, yet as development plans move forward, the college hopes to establish an accredited four-year BFA degree.

The collective inspiration of Bacone’s art directors, past and still living, has prepared Elizondo to help

the next generation of Bacone art students to develop their artwork, tell their own stories, and find their own influences and styles. Like everything, Bacone is always changing and evolving.

Cedar Marie (Standing Rock Lakota descent) is an independent artist and writer.

5. The Kiowa Six were Spencer Asah, James Auchiah, Jack Hokeah, Lois Smoky Kaulaity, Stephen Mopope, and Monroe Tsatoke.

a b ov e , t o p To n y T i g e r ( M u s co g e e /S a c & Fox / Seminole), Linking the Past to the Present: Influenced

by Ancestry, 2019, etching, serigraph, ink, water-based paint on paper, 22 × 30 in.

Image courtesy of the artist. above, bottom Tony Tiger ( M u s c o g e e / S a c & F ox / Seminole) and Ruthe Blalock Jones (Shawnee/Delaware/ Peoria). Photo: A. Meredith.

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ALLAN HOUSER & HIS SONS A Story of Kinship & Three Different Artistic Statements

By Jeanine Belgodère

O

UR JOURNEY into the artwork of the Houser family begins with the patriarch Allan Houser (1914–1994), and then follows with the works of his two sons Phillip Haozous and Bob Haozous, all Chiricahua Apache. What cultural perspectives did Allan hand down to them? How did Phillip and Bob depart from their father? What makes their respective sculptures unique?

The first legacy Allan Houser bequeathed to his sons is pride in their origins. Such a feeling has played an important part in making them creators in their own right. Phillip shares common sources of inspiration with his father, as well as a predilection for simplicity and flowing lines. Fully committed to celebrating his Apache culture, Phillip has also explored a unique poetic world.

Similar themes and a preference for monumental sculpture bring Bob Haozous close to his father as well.

Nevertheless, Bob has created his own approach to the same thematic material.

Moreover, his art is politically oriented.

With an emphasis on topical societal issues, notably ecological ones, Bob’s subversive art branches out in a different direction from his father’s.1 ALLAN HOUSER was the first child in his tribe to be born out of the confinement of Fort Sill, a few months after

the Chiricahua were released from 27 years of captivity by the US government.

Widely regarded as the pioneer of Native American modern art, Allan sculpted in wood, alabaster, bronze, and steel.

His modes of representation range from narrative realism to abstract sculptures.

Allan believed in portraying fundamental dignity in Native people. “Look at the beauty. There’s a lot of strength in what you can see in these women’s faces.… You’ve to overlook things and be one of them—be part of them,” Allan would advise Native children aspiring to be artists.2 That desire to hold that ennobling mirror up to Native people guided his creative urge.

Although Allan was keenly aware of the ordeals the Apaches endured under the US federal government’s 19th-century policies, he chose not to focus on that aspect of their history. Rather, Allan

illuminated the positive energy he perceived in his people. Allan’s parents nurtured pride in his roots, which can be seen as the driving force behind his aesthetics.

Allan’s work is primarily infused with his cultural legacy. His father, Sam Haozous (Chiricahua Apache, 1868–1957), who was Geronimo’s close relative, passed the Apaches’ oral history and ancestral lifeways on to Allan. Sam, an outstanding singer and healer, also told Allan countless stories about the Apaches’ relentless combat, in which he fought alongside Geronimo, against the Mexican and American armies.

Treasured memories of his mother, Blossom Haozous (Chiricahua Apache, 1893–1981), singing songs fed Allan’s creativity as well.

Allan once claimed, “I could never turn away from my history.”3 His portrait of Geronimo (1986), the monumental sculpture of Taza (1991), and Unconquered II (1994), all rendered in bronze, forcefully speak of Apache nobility and resistance. Unconquered II is a veiled hint at Geronimo’s tactics of having the Apaches fight in pairs or in small groups. The bronze sculpture features two warriors, powerful icons of the Chiricahua people’s indomitable will. Like Geronimo and Taza, this work remains a compelling, though nonviolent, statement on the Apaches’ dogged determination.

1. The monumental bronze sculpture As Long as the Waters Flow (1989) can be considered a subtle political statement. The title alludes to President Andrew Jackson’s proclamation from the 1830s, in which the land that would become Oklahoma was now “Indian Territory” and would belong to Native American tribes “as long as the grass grows and the waters flow.” Jackson’s pledge was broken when the US legislature passed the Dawes Act (General Allotment Act) in 1887.

2. Allan Houser, interview by Sandro D’Emilio and James Rutherford, 1990, in Allan Houser: Life in Art (Ha-o-zous) (Santa Fe: Museum of New Mexico, 1991), 16.

3. Allan Houser in Unconquered: Allan Houser and the Legacy of One Apache Family, directed by Bryan Beasley (Oklahoma City: Oklahoma History Center, 2008), DVD.

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above Allan Houser, Abstract Crown Dancer II, 1991, fabricated bronze, 99 × 40 × 38 in., edition of 8. Image courtesy of Allan Houser, Inc.

Allan Houser in his studio, Santa Fe, 1991. ©Allan Houser, Inc. Photo: Lee Marmon (Laguna Pueblo).

Image courtesy of the author. opposite

Allan immersed himself in the social and ceremonial dances of his tribe, notably the sacred dance of the Gaan, the benevolent Mountain Spirits whose main function is to heal and stave off malevolent forces. His lifelong fascination with the Gaan gave rise to scores of paintings and more than 50 sculptures. In Abstract Crown Dancer II (1991), Allan discards many elements of the Gaan’s attire, paring it down to its essentials. Influenced by the British sculptors Henry Moore and Barbara Hepworth, who pioneered the use of pierced voids, he introduced two openings that contrast with solid masses and help to energize the piece.

Allan’s interactions with other tribes led him to make works that solemnized their cultural practices. In the sculptures showing powwow scenes, Pueblo singers, and Buffalo and Eagle dancers, he highlights the integral role of dance as both a vital expression of Native American identity and an instrument of resistance.

The time-honored lifeways of the Navajo and Pueblo moved Allan to create abstract and realistic works including Homeward Bound (1989), more than twelve feet long, staging a shepherdess and her flock, a tribute to the Navajo’s ancestral means of subsistence. The ancient practice of Zuni women carrying jars of water on their heads, captured in iconic photographs, is given an abstract treatment in Zuni Olla Maidens (1986). Allan deviated from the Flatstyle painting promoted by Dorothy Dunn at the Santa Fe Indian School in the 1930s.4 Instead, he used organic and sleek shapes to honor this Pueblo practice and the eponymous dance still held today by Zuni women. His abstracted forms go beyond Pueblo context to conjure up an age-old task of carrying water present in other world cultures. Moreover, his ovoid forms, which resonate with those of Constantin Brâncuși, hearken back to primordial Neolithic goddesses suggesting the source of all life, hence the universal feeling of this piece.

Allan’s works further vibrate with a symbiotic connection to the land, binding him to his Indigenous background. In Mountain Echoes (1986), three male, grounded and hieratic figures huddle together while singing in unison. Often, Allan blends realism and abstraction by contrasting polished faces with uneven bodies. The figures’ swathed bodies, a grooved mass from which their faces emerge, resemble a mountainous terrain. The striated lines also suggest wavelets. As in Affection (1990), the figures partake of the mineral and water elements, thereby reflecting the concepts of kinship and interdependence with nature that characterize the Indigenous worldview.

Mother Earth is a leitmotif in many of Allan’s sculptures that captures a protective mother in a close or fusional relationship with her infant. The portrayal is either intimate as in the exquisite Reverie (1981), or grand as in Earth Mother (1986) where the woman, earthbound and solid as a rock, seems invincible. In these large stirring pieces inspired by pre-Columbian art, the woman epitomizes the Primordial Mother, an archetype of the cosmic mother, a concept central to Native philosophy but not exclusive 4. From 1934 to 1939, Allan Houser studied painting at the Santa Fe Indian School program known as the Studio, founded by Dorothy Dunn in 1932. Dunn sought what she believed to be authentic American Indian painting and advocated for the autoethnographic role of American Indian painting. The Studio style was primarily two-dimensional and illustrative. In 1938, Houser left the Studio as he felt that it restricted his creativity.

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above, top Phillip Haozous (Chiricahua Apache), Great Spirit Buffalo, bronze, 4 × 6 × 3 in. Image ©Phillip Haozous. above, bottom Allan Houser, Earth Mother, 1986, bronze, 39 × 24 in., edition of 6. Image courtesy of Allan Houser, Inc. opposite Phillip Haozous (Chiricahua Apache), Apache Clowns, bronze, 16½ × 6 × 11¼ in, edition of 18. Image ©Phillip Haozous.

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to it. It reaches back to numerous ancient cultures including archaic Greece, where the earth is conceived as a female divinity, Gaia, and, as such, is revered. If Allan’s main themes stem from his Native heritage, they go beyond these roots.

The oneness between mother and child, dance as a profound expression of life’s resilience, and man in tune with nature retain an ageless aura. What makes these themes even more universal is Allan’s use of the organic and schematized forms that he so admired in the modernist sculptors and employed to attain the core of reality.

Most of Allan’s sculptures mirror an integrated living world consonant with Indigenous philosophies. His archetypal portrayals of women are caught in a variety of states and activities. Some are rapt in meditation, others engaged in daily tasks or ceremonies. They include interlacing mothers and children and intimate depictions of friendship. The curvilinear and sensual shapes of such abstract pieces as Dawn (1989), where a solemn witness merges with maternal land formations, all present full forms that evoke a holistic creation.

INTERACTION IS A TRADEMARK of Phillip Haozous’s work that involves different modes of kinship, including humorous exchanges and affective bonds

between animals, siblings, mothers, and children. Phillip follows in his father’s footsteps by evincing a reverence for the Gaan. Apache Clowns II (2005) is a kinetic rendering of the sacred clowns who are about to enter a state of dynamic interconnectedness. The clowns wear head masks, long skirts, and moccasins that are reminiscent of the Gaan’s attire. They also carry sacred yucca wands, which the Gaan wield in the dance to bless the four directions, the sky, and the earth and to avert evil forces. However, their garb is plainer.

Phillip’s essentialized forms exhibit similarities with Allan’s abstracted shapes.

He also plays on contrasted juxtaposed textures: the smooth patina of the clowns’ bare torso versus the striated surface of their kilts, masks, and moccasins. The striated lines echo grooved rocks where the masks are placed in order to return them to the home of the Mountain Spirits, once they have served their purpose in the dance.

The buffalo, an emblem of Native power, appealed to both father and son.

Bison once provided many tribes with food and clothing, before they were slaughtered and nearly eradicated by white settlers whose aim was to deprive Natives of their vital food resource in an attempt to subdue them. Phillip’s monumental Great Spirit Buffalo II (2006) conveys the might of the revered animal. In this work, where abstract and realistic forms are combined, concavities enhance the sculpture’s dynamism while perhaps symbolizing the wounds of white aggression against the buffalo. This device recalls Allan’s formal language of employing the pierced void in the center of When Spring Comes (1990), a steatite piece representing a mother buffalo and her offspring. The voids are not decorative holes but metaphors of the buffalo’s demise.

Phillip’s works echo the continuous flow between humans and nature. In Celestial Maiden (2004), a young woman identifies with a meteorite fallen to the earth and now sitting on her lap. The inside of the meteorite is polished whereas the outer surface is striated. The maiden shares simultaneously in the mineral and water elements, since her back is a

rugged and uneven surface while her face is smooth. Her long wavy hair resembles a waterfall. The interplay of textures lends Celestial Maiden variety and vitality, while voicing the Native and ecological idea that there is no divide between humankind and nature but rather a communal continuity of a living cosmos.

By visiting the theme of motherhood, Phillip further embraces his father’s legacy, reaffirming the pivotal position held by women in Indigenous cultures. Similarly, he highlights the closeness between mother and child or their symbiosis as in Contemporary Mother and Child (2005), where one concave volume indicates both the mother’s and the infant’s face. Phillip’s maternal figures have none of the archetypal presence characterizing most of Allan’s. Far more realistic, they are linked to a cosmopolitan world.

Despite Phillip’s deep-seated connection with Allan, his art speaks with a lyricism of its own. The artist steers away from his elder’s commitment to Native heroism and the epic breadth of his pieces. His female portraits lack the lofty sublimity that most feminine figures by Allan exude. Phillip’s come down from their pedestal to assume a more familiar look. Their small size further helps to bring them closer to the viewer.

Navajo Maiden (2006) portrays a young girl with her cat wrapped up in a shawl at shoulder level. Her hair is tied in tsiiyéeł, or bun at the nape of her neck. This distinctive hairstyle is derived from that of White Painted Woman, also known as Changing Woman, the First Woman of the Navajo and Apache— with whom the pubescent Navajo girl identifies in the Kinaaldá, the Coming of Age Ceremony. If Phillip’s piece is a hymn to the delicate beauty of a Navajo maiden, it retains the quintessence of gracefulness.

Phillip’s female portraits do not necessarily feature Native women. The clean lines and sweeping curves of Ana in Transition (1989) that play upon light and shadow, the uneven curves of his meditative Elegance (2000) and of his baroque The Dancer (2001), rendered in gold-plated bronze, bespeak any woman’s sensuality, thus reaching beyond time and ethnicity.

Another dimension of Phillip’s artistry is his cultivation of genre art.5 Tinged with sentimentality, He’s My Grandpa (2004) and Tender Love (2002) tell familiar stories. The former had its origins in a moving, affectionate scene between a grandfather and his granddaughter in Peru, while the latter, a vivacious piece, depicts his mother and her niece playing together. Both works, together with some intimate pieces rooted in Apache narratives such as Apache Love Song (2005) enact commonplace scenes grounded in daily life. Anybody can relate to such intimate tableaux, in which slices of life that cut across cultural lines are exquisitely rendered.

What further typifies Phillip’s artwork is his preference for a polished patina that creates a warmth in his sculptures.

His bronzes, including his monumental piece Spirit of Machu Picchu III (2002), standing almost eight feet high, acquire lives of their own. Shimmering like silk, they take on a flowing

quality evocative of streaming water, coming alive in an intangible fusion between man and nature. Their lustrous aspect and pristine contours that appeal as much to the eye as to the touch may be attributed to Phillip being a fine jewelry-maker.

His works invite us to enter an enchanting and serene world pulsating with light.

IN THE WAKE OF ALLAN HOUSER, Bob also draws upon Apache history. However, his approach differs greatly from that of his father. Allan’s warriors remain steeped in heroism, a faithful representation of the Apaches’ response to their aggressors. Indeed, the Apaches proved to be tenacious in defending their territories against white settlers and miners who were encroaching upon their hunting grounds. In Allan’s works, the Apaches are not pictured as oppressed people. In contrast, Bob Haozous revisits the history of his tribe, pointing out the story of a genocide. His blunt commentary is expressed through his emphasis on death imagery.

Unlike Allan’s warriors, Bob’s are not invincible but defeated: Mangas Coloradas (1990), a skull made of nickel-plated steel, alludes to the sordid killing and decapitation of the Chiricahua

5. The term genre originated in France in the 18th century and was applied to “painters specializing in one kind (genre) of picture, such as flowers or animals or middle-class life, and was originally used derogatorily by advocates of the ideal or grand manner in art.” “Genre painting,” Encyclopædia Britannica Ultimate Reference Suite (Chicago: Encyclopædia Britannica, 2015), DVD.

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above Bob Haozous (Chiricahua Apache), Mother (Earth), 1988, steel, 480 × 92 × 93 in., on loan to the Institute of American Indian Arts, Santa Fe. All three images courtesy of the artist. opposite, top Bob Haozous (Chiricahua Apache), Cultural Crossroads of the Americas, 1996, steel with razor wire still intact, 360 × 312 in., Yale Park, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. opposite, bottom Bob Haozous (Chiricahua Apache), Mangas Coloradas, 1990, nickel-plated steel, 32 × 18 × 19 in.

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chief by order of General Joseph Rodman West.6 Apache Skull (1990), steel, refers simultaneously to the death of thousands of Apaches and the loss of Apache cultural values, while his Love and Death Series (1988) is another variation on the skull motif with one of them bearing dollar signs in the eyes’ cavities.

Apache Holocaust (1993) is a monumental structure in steel, aluminum, and wood, denouncing the decimation of Haozous’s tribe and “a memorial to a culture that’s been exterminated.”7 The painted figure of a Chiricahua Apache youth is featured at the top of the column.

He sits on a chair with irons binding his feet. His execution is imminent.

The themes of the feminine figure and of Mother Earth run through Allan’s and Bob’s respective creations. Early pieces by Bob reveal a classical kind of beauty that ties him to his father.

However, his later, more postmodern art presents disquieting portraits of women and mothers.

Mother (Earth) (1988) is personified as a naked female figure who is static and amputated.8 Her erogenous zones are emphasized; therefore, she is reduced to a sexual object. Faceless, she no longer sees, nor thinks. Limbless, she has lost her power to move. Thus handicapped, she can neither give or take, nurture or embrace. Interestingly, Mother was originally made up of parts that could be moved by using pulleys and cables. Bob created them on the premise that visitors would lift and lower the “arms” of the figure, a gesture which signifies, for the artist, man’s manipulation of the Earth.

The female figure, made vulnerable and sexualized, has become a passive object of lust. Similarly, the Earth has been turned into a commodity, ready for exploitation.

Ozone Madonna (1989) is another disturbing, though humorous, painted steel work about the defacement of the earth. The disconcerting title contains

a paradox: a virgin, an immaculate woman, is coupled with ozone. It further points to an analogy between the female figure and a land covered in ozone. The lascivious Madonna is white and buxom. Compared with her plump body, her face is very small so that her sexuality is underscored. She is wearing a bathing suit peppered with planted trees, a token of a domesticated forest that has replaced a wild nature. Her legs are overwhelmed with clouds of smoke coming out of an exhaust pipe and cars, emblems of our modern society, which is dominated by technology, materialism, and individualism.

Severed from nature, these female figures mirror a harmful industrial society that has damaged and mastered nature. Bob subverts the representation of Mother Earth that Allan Houser powerfully expressed in his works as a sacred and all-embracing Mother. By laying bare a desecrated Earth, he decries the exploitation of nature and perhaps of woman, viewed as inferior to man within patriarchal societies. His intent is to demonstrate that Indigenous values no longer prevail or are jeopardized. In this assertion, Bob does not spare those among his own people who, influenced by Western behaviors, have abandoned their former reverence for and responsibility towards the earth.

Bob thus criticizes an anthropocentric stance: man harms nature to submit it to his mercantile appetites.

His dominion over the earth, which is no longer regarded as being alive but an object to be manhandled and used for profit, partakes of a similar attitude towards woman. In his critique, Bob prompts Indigenous people to reclaim nature-based values, once the foundation of their philosophy. This worldview he affirms finds its potent poetic expression in his father’s artistic vision: Man does not stand above nature, rather he is completely integrated into it.

6. In January 1863, US General James Carlton and General Joseph Rodman West tried to capture Mangas so as to overcome the Apaches. Mangas and fellow Apaches set out for Pinos Altos, in southwest New Mexico, at the invitation of Jack Swilling, a gold prospector and former lieutenant, to begin peace talks. Jack Swilling and his troops raised the white flag of truce, but Mangas was the victim of a vile betrayal. Swilling forced Mangas to surrender unconditionally if he wanted the lives of his comrades in arms to be spared. Mangas was tortured before being murdered. He was decapitated, and his skull was sent to a New York phrenologist.

7. Bob Haozous and Lucy R. Lippard, Bob Haozous: Indigenous Dialogue (Santa Fe: Institute of American Indian Arts, 2005), 17.

8. When Mother (Earth) was first exhibited at the Wheelwright Museum in 1995 in Santa Fe, the sculpture had movable parts. They are no longer components of it.

In Bob’s view, man’s severance from and sway over nature extends to his fellow human beings. Indeed, man has also alienated himself from those who are homeless and stateless, and therefore vulnerable, by erecting walls. Border Crossing (1991), painted steel, stands as a bold illustration of Bob’s indictment.

It reveals two sides: one face shows a pristine sky where white clouds travel above a sandy and brown hill studded with sage, a typically New Mexico landscape. On a metaphorical level, this beckoning land holds the promise of bright horizons.

The other face, by contrast, conjures up a hellish world as opposed to a heavenly harbor: a disenchanted land versus the land of enchantment.

Images of a military world, a bomber, bullet holes, and an armed guard refer to a warring country. Three steps leading up to a padlocked door are encircled with barbed wire, a persistent motif in Bob’s sculptures. It makes any entrance in its proper and figurative sense impossible.

The heart-shaped padlock is symbolic of a heartless society. The title itself, Border Crossing, hints at the humanitarian drama facing refugees. Created in 1991, this piece transcends a specific period in history. It symbolizes the US government’s policy towards the Other at the border, whether undocumented Mexican refugees or, more recently, undocumented asylum seekers from Central America’s Northern Triangle—Guatemala, Honduras, and El Salvador—who have been confronted with the US government’s construction of a larger wall along the US-Mexico border.

The whole sculpture carries a major contradiction: The United States as the land of opportunity, known for being open to immigrants, versus the United States as implementing a deportation policy and denying access to newcomers.

The permeating presence of barbed wire is an aggressive symbol meaning, as Bob has stated, “Separation. It’s a humanitarian insult that we are living so high while so many other people are starving and nature is suffering.” It is plain that Haozous unsparingly critiques the American Dream.

Bob levels criticism at capitalist society, best embodied by the United States and its values, as being opposed to Indigenous philosophy predicated on

interdependent relations, a holistic view that he staunchly asserts.

THE MULTIPLE EXPRESSIONS of Native American tribes that Allan Houser’s creations wove into a tapestry reflect a world deeply connected to nature.

The sculptor’s modern art empowers Natives who throughout centuries of colonization saw their ancestral lands stolen, their rights flouted, and their cultures disparaged, labeled barbaric, and banned. Allan’s iconic sculptures restore to nobility this mosaic of cultures by giving them back their voice and visibility, thereby acting as a catalyst for a far-reaching change in Western appreciation of Indigenous art. Allan Houser was and remains a profound inspiration to his sons who have created their own artistic visions.

Phillip has found his path close to and away from his father. He embraces Allan’s passion for his cultural heritage and a leaning towards harmonious curvilinear forms. However, he clearly deviates from Allan’s narratives of heroic Apaches and archetypal mothers, indulging instead in charming genre scenes and depicting female characters that transcend cultural differences.

Although Bob has inherited from his father a keen interest in the warrior and Mother Earth themes, he holds a

divergent view of them. His political and postmodern art raises questions about the future of the earth and the role of Indigenous man within it, while emphasizing the urgent need to revive Indigenous values in order to guide and enlighten our relationship with the earth and our fellow men. Bob’s call for Indigenous environmentalism has a precursor in Allan’s politically subtle but earth-centered art.

Jeanine Belgodère is an associate professor of English at the University of Le Havre in France. She has traveled often to New Mexico since 2001, spent time with Native American artists, and developed a special interest in the Houser family’s unique artistic legacy.

NO. 30, SPRING 2021 | 37

THE NEO-WOODLAND MOVEMENT

By Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD

That style of painting has been taken and worked and adopted by a number of very talented image makers or other artists. They have always been very true to the ethos of their community and that has been very difficult because it has been an art that has not been primarily created for that community.

—Tom Hill (Konadaha Seneca), curator1

A

NDRÉ BRETON founded Surrealism, Chuck Berry shaped rock ’n’ roll, Allen Ginsberg made Beat Poetry, and Norval Morrisseau formed Woodland Art. Though it was not conceived in a vacuum, it remains one of few original artistic movements to emerge from Canada during the 20th century.

Morrisseau is recognized as the first

Indigenous artist to exhibit his work in a contemporary Canadian art gallery and, in doing so, he destabilized the historical relationship whereby the mainstream art world perceived Indigenous art as ethnographic craft. His was not a singular vision but emerged as the result of Anishinaabe cultural teachings, collaboration with other image makers, and radical experimentation with totemic iconography.

1. “Transcript: Dreams, Myths, and Memories,” People Patterns, March 9, 1988, TVO video transcript, 28:54, web.

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The Woodland style that Morrisseau developed beginning in the 1950s has since mushroomed into an expanded field of Woodland-related art occasionally referred to as Neo-Woodland or New Woodland style. However, little has been written regarding its etymology or its complicated relationship to secular themes, digital technology, or 21st-century life. In some ways, the Neo-Woodland art typifies a continuum of the original Woodland movement elucidated by Morrisseau while, in other ways, it breaks off into new directions and unforeseen lines of flight.

EMERGENCE OJIBWE IS BELIEVED to derive from the word Ozhibii’iweg, which translates to English as “people who keep records of a vision.” Their visual material and other iconography, including totemic symbols, ochre petroglyphs, dreamscapes, personal signatures, and writing,2 were inscribed on birchbark scrolls by members of the Midewiwin, the Grand Medicine Society.

Research indicates that this pictographic visual system was one of the largest and most widely used in the Eastern Woodlands. Certain scrolls are imbued with spiritual meaning and engaged during ceremony by the initiated, hence their imagery and subject matter are protected by strict cultural protocols.

Morrisseau was born in 1932 on Bingwi Neyaashi Anishinaabek First Nation, a small Anishinaabe reserve community in northwest Ontario. As a young man, he was introduced to birchbark scrolls and oral teachings by his maternal grandfather, the spiritual leader Moses Potan Nanakonagos, and Morrisseau sought to imitate its iconography and worldview in paintings and drawings. Anishinaabe cultural protocols led community members to dissuade him from sharing their ceremonial knowledge with others. 3 Morrisseau continued unabated, notwithstanding the social taboo, and he experimented with a visual language that later became known as Woodland Art, Legend Painting, or X-Ray Art. With the support of friends and sycophants, an exhibition of Morrisseau’s work opened at Pollock Gallery in Toronto in 1962. Not only did this critical event establish Morrisseau’s commercial success, but it also introduced Anishinaabe visual culture to mainstream Canadian audiences. Several years later, in 1973, the Professional Native Indian Artists Inc. (PNIAI), of which Morrisseau was a founding member, reinforced the idea that art produced by Indigenous artists was utterly of its time and existed outside the discursive restrictions placed on it by ethnological museums, the gallery system, and the souvenir economy. At this

time, Odawa/Potawatomi painter Daphne Odjig (1919–2016) said, “We wanted just to be artists.”4 During the early 1960s, Morrisseau started to tighten his compositions and apply paint more liberally to delineate large blocks of color enveloped by thick black lines. Flat planes of luminescent white paint and undulating thin black contours vibrate and tremble his tableaux to life. Inside the transparent bodies of sacred beings such as thunderbirds, water serpents, and snakes are repeated patterns and designs that generate X-ray-like vision, which unsettle the observer’s sense of perception, making it difficult to

a b ov e Stephen Snake (Rama Chippewa), Copper Thunderbird, 2008, oil on canvas, 40 × 30 in. Image courtesy of the artist. opposite Norval Morrisseau (Bingwi Neyaashi Ojibwe, 1 93 1 – 2 0 07 ) , S h a m a n a n d Apprentice, ca. 1980–85, acrylic on canvas, 53¼ × 74½ in., collection of the Art Gallery of Hamilton, gift of Nicholas John Pustina, Robert Edward Zelinski, and Kenny Alwyn Whent, 1985.

Image courtesy of the Art Gallery of Hamilton, Ontario.

2. Christopher Barry-Arredondo, “The ‘talking paper’: Interpreting the birch-bark scrolls of the Ojibwa Midewiwin” (master’s thesis, SUNY Buffalo, 2006).

3. Carmen Robertson, “Norval Morrisseau: Life and Work: Biography,” Art Institute Canada, web.

4. Catherine Mattes, “Goyce & Joshim Kakegamic,” Gallery One One One, web.

NO. 30, SPRING 2021 | 39

above Thomas Jay Bruyere (Cree/Ojibwe), Deer, 2020, digitally-colored ink drawing.

Image courtesy of the artist. opposite Thomas Jay Bruyere (Cree/Ojibwe), Amy's Pedagogy, 2020, digitallycolored ink drawing. Image courtesy of the artist.

distinguish a strong relationship between figures and the ground.

The appearance of orbs featuring a diametric line through their center, a divided circle, may represent moral binaries, in addition to reverse states of life and death, day and night, function and dysfunction. The spheres link to other figures and forms using thin black lines to propose a metaphorical relationship and express the worldview that all things are interconnected, both here and in the cosmos. “All life is connected,” said artist Roy Thomas (Long Lake Ojibwe, 1949–2004), “the artist to the brush,

the brush to the creatures and the trees, the paint to the earth, the canvas to the plants.”5 Their strange resemblance to cells or microorganisms insinuates that Indigenous medicine identified the strange networks between matter we cannot see with our eyes long before the microscope existed.

Morrisseau was drawn to the spiritual beliefs of the Anishinaabeg and Christendom early in his career, the latter’s dogma imprinted on him while surviving residential school from the age of six. During the mid-1970s, he was introduced to the American religious movement Eckankar and, in particular, its theorization of astral projection. An astral plane is a state of existence or different form of reality that an individual’s consciousness or spirit can travel to in life or death. Greg A. Hill (Kanyen'kehà:ka Mohawk), National Gallery of Canada curator, maintains that Eckankar was a deep influence for Morrisseau because it helped him develop the visual language for his spiritual beliefs6 and inspired such paintings as Artist and Shaman Between Two Worlds (1980) and Observations of the Astral World (ca. 1994).

Morrisseau’s imagery portrays astral planes to which he, as a spiritual practitioner, transcended. Morrisseau’s interest in traversing other realities reflects Eckankar’s core beliefs in the existence of divine light and the healing power of color. “Many times people tell me that I’ve cured them of something, whatever’s ailing them,” Morrisseau remarked. “It was the colour of the painting that did that.”7 Still, Morrisseau’s impassioned application of complementary colors intensified by tertiary colors is precisely why paintings like The Masterpiece (1982) are diffused with energy. His testing of light and color combinations to imbue sacred legends and pictographic imagery with great élan impacted those who came after.

The diffusion of Woodland art in the South coincides with a zenith of Indigenous political activism in the late 1960s and ’70s. At this time, the federal government penned sweeping policy changes to repeal the special status given Indigenous peoples by the state

5. “Campus Art Guide: Roy Thomas,” University of Regina, 2016, web.

6. Robertson, “Norval Morrisseau,” web.

7. Norval Morrisseau and Donald Robinson, Travels to the House of Invention (Toronto: Key Porter Books, 1997), 16–17.

40 | FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

and fully assimilate them into broader Canadian society, only a few years after they received the right to vote in federal elections. Morrisseau was almost certainly perceived as an intermediary between the Northern communities and its Southern counterparts. So, was he used by authorities to stabilize decaying relations? Since then, Woodland art has become an indelible facet of Canadian identity, though presumably many Woodland artists would not consider themselves “Canadian” at all.

BRIDGE MANY ARTISTS OF THE SECOND GENERATION of Woodland artists, sometimes described as the New Woodland School, were directly mentored by Morrisseau or were students of his work and teachings. Though his influence is often overlooked today, likely due to his death at the early age of 35, the extraordinary body of work left behind by Morrisseau’s apprentice and friend Carl Ray (Sandy Lake Cree, 1943–1979) was viewed as a seminal “bridge between Morrisseau and the new generation of Native painters” as early as 1984.8 Other artists such as Brian Marion (Saulteaux, 1960–2011), Richard Bedwash (Long Lake Ojibwe), Stephen Snake (Rama Chippewa), and Abe Kakepetum (Sandy Lake Oji-Cree, 1944–2019) similarly adopted the lexical system of the Woodland style and its symbology to map new trajectories.

Comparable to Ray, painter Roy Thomas also helped bridge the Woodland style to later generations of artists. Thomas was born on the trapline outside Caramat, Ontario, and grew up on the Long Lake #58 Reserve community. His grandmother shared stories of Anishinaabe heroes, immortals, and animals with him as he traced their likeness on her back with his finger,9 and he was fascinated by the pictographic imagery he encountered throughout northwestern Ontario. Like Morrisseau, Thomas periodically painted on birchbark as a reference to Anishinaabe ceremony and depicted totem animals in luminous

colors united by undulating black lines. His 1984 painting We’re All in the Same Boat (1984), included in the Art Gallery of Ontario’s exhibition Norval Morrisseau and the Emergence of the Image Makers, references the genesis of the Woodland style and its principal authors. The painting depicts a canoe holding seven artists participating in the exhibition—Morrisseau, Odjig, Ray, Joshim Kakegamic (Sandy Lake Oji-Cree, 1952–1993), Saul Williams (North Caribou Lake Oji-Cree), Blake Debassige (M'Chigeeng Ojibwe), and Thomas himself—as they gesture toward pictographs with their paint brushes. The work stands in praise of Anishinaabe visual culture and pays homage to the Woodland artists while also pointing to the challenges each experienced in legitimizing their new art form to the contemporary art market.

The critical success of Woodland art is due, in part, to the self-determination of Sandy Lake First Nation artists Goyce and Joshim Kakegamic during the 1970s and early ’80s. Morrisseau married their sister, Harriet Kakegamic (Oji-Cree), in the late 1950s and encouraged the then-teenage boys to paint and draw in the Woodland style he advocated. It was around this time that Goyce remembers,

“I started to establish myself … as an Indian artist. Pardon me, establish myself as an artist who happens to be Indian.”10 The 1970s saw the Kakegamic brothers travel to Toronto where they sold original paintings to a buyer who cheated them out of artist and copyright fees. Nonetheless, they absorbed the newest printmaking techniques at Toronto’s Open Studio, an artist-run center, before returning home.

The brothers settled in Red Lake, Ontario, and opened Triple K Cooperative Inc. with their brother Henry and became the first Indigenous silkscreen printing company in Canada. In short, Triple K reproduced and promoted limited-edition works on paper by the brothers themselves, as well as that of friends and colleagues like Barry Peters (Pikangikum Ojibwe), Paddy Peters (Pikangikum Ojibwe), Williams, and Morrisseau. The efforts of the Kakegamic brothers to retain their agency over how their work was represented to collectors, dealers, and galleries, often through copyright and royalty agreements, became a model for other Indigenous-led art organizations.

The access and affordability of Triple K prints to patrons throughout northern North America and Europe helped proliferate the Woodland style among younger artists and collectors.

8. Alan J. Ryan, review of Norval Morrisseau and the Emergence of the Image Makers, by Elizabeth McLuhan and Tom Hill, The Canadian Journal of Native Studies 4, no. 1 (1984), 162.

9. Stephanie MacLellan, “Influential Native artist Roy Thomas dies,” The Chronicle-Journal, November 15, 2004, web.

10. Cathy Mattes, “Indigenous Artists Defying Expectations,” Canadian Dimension, January 12, 2007, web.

NO. 30, SPRING 2021 | 41

M'Chigeeng First Nation on Manitoulin Island three years later helped to differentiate the aesthetic interests and conceptual approaches between the Woodland artists and what became known as the Manitoulin School. Artists Shirley Cheechoo (Cree), Blake Debassige, Leland Bell (Wikwemikong Ojibwe/ Odawa), Joseph Linklater (Anishinaabe), Randy Trudeau (Curve Lake Ojibwe/ Odawa), and Martin Panamick (M'Chigeeng Ojibwe, 1956–1997) were soon associated with the Manitoulin group and further distinguished themselves from the original movement through their transdisciplinary approach towards art making.

Cheechoo, in particular, produced a number of paintings and drawings informed by poetry, narrative fiction, music, film, and theater. If creativity necessitates experimentation, then those of the Manitoulin School splintered from the Woodland style by embracing new directions. Alan Ojiig Corbiere (M'Chigeeng Ojibwe), former OCF director, and Leland Bell maintain that the work produced by the Manitoulin School remains heterogeneous in its approach and application. 11 The Anishinaabeg “come from a long line of creativity; our civilization goes way back,” says Bell, “What we practice is creativity.”12

NEO-WOODLAND THE NEO-WOODLAND STYLE acknowledges the historical influences of Morrisseau and Woodland art while evolving its themes and subject matter into secular and digital expressions. No longer are astral projection, petroglyphic engravings, or pictographic imagery central facets of image-making, but a line of continuity to work that aestheticizes current political obstacles and vernacular life. For curator Bruce Bernstein, “Tradition is not a stagnant set of rules and practices but rather a set of principles and values that provide a foundation for change—a wonderful and vital part of

above, bottom Patrick Hunter, Howling for the Northstar, 2014, acrylic on canvas, 16 × 20 in.

Image courtesy of the artist.

Elsewhere, in 1971 the Manitoulin Arts Foundation on Manitoulin Island, Ontario, received funding to organize studio classes for emerging artists taught by instructors such as Morrisseau, Odjig, and Ray. The establishment of the Ojibwe Cultural Foundation (O CF) in

opposite Chief Lady Bird (Rama Chippewa/Potawatomi), Bneshii Devours Windigo, Creates New World, 2021, oil on panel, 30 × 23 in. Image courtesy of the artist.

11. Lynn Barwin, Marjory Shawande, Eric Crighton, and Luisa Veronis, “Methods-in-Place: ‘Art Voice’ as a Locally and Culturally Relevant Method to Study Traditional Medicine Programs in Manitoulin Island, Ontario, Canada,” International Journal of Qualitative Methods 14, no. 5 (December 27, 2015), web.

12. Margo Little, Portraits of Spirit Island: The Manitoulin School of Art Comes of Age (Gore Bay, ON: Lady Luck Enterprises, 2009), 28.

above, top Chief Lady Bird (Rama Chippewa/Potawatomi), Dibaajimowinan, Mushkiikii, and Land Back, 2020, digital illustration and collage. Image courtesy of the artist.

42 | FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

art-making.”13 Many Anishinaabe artists still champion the elemental tableaux of 1970s and ’80s Woodland art in their use of exoskeletal designs, repeated patterns, lustrous color palettes, heavy black line, and all-over composition. Other artists feel attached to Woodland art, because it maps a connection to ancestral knowledge, grounds them in a specific place, and therefore provides a strong sense of belonging.

The earliest memories of Cree/ Ojibwe artist Thomas Jay Bruyere were replicating prints by Odjig and Jackson Beardy (Garden Hill Oji-Cree, 1944–1984) that hung on the walls of his family home.

Beardy, especially, made a lasting impact on Bruyere, because the younger artist attended school, where they were the only Indigenous children, with Beardy’s son Jason. Later, Bruyere attended the School of Art at the University of Manitoba, the same school that Beardy graduated from decades earlier in 1966. In Bruyere’s painting Deer (2020), flora and fauna converge in a fantastical vista animated by complementary colors. Unlike the original Woodland movement, black line is used sparingly and blocks of color are not flat but feature gradients of red to orange and purple to blue. Wavy black lines of the Woodland style are inverted to delicate white lines that extend through the deer’s neck and swell into its head.

Bruyere’s approach to painting is rooted in “Indigenous Storytelling” and autobiography,14 whereby cultural narratives and lived history synthesize to generate fantastical visions.

Conversely, for some Anishinaabeg, the archetypal shift in themes and subject matter in the Woodland style represents cultural loss; more specifically, the erasure of Indigenous peoples through Canada’s assimilationist policies. Odjig, for example, was a fluent speaker of her original language until she left the Wikwemikong First Nation on Manitoulin Island after the death of her mother and grandfather.15

Marten Falls Ojibway knowledge-keeper Eli Baxter writes that the Anishinaabe Kih-kayn-daa-soh-win (knowledge) and Pah-git-tin-nih-gay-win-nun (laws) are encoded in the original language itself. This includes information on the education system, sciences, philosophy, spiritual teachings, and so forth. As a consequence, he considers that the loss of Anishinaabemowin (the Ojibwe language) from settler-colonialism and its aftermaths might have shifted Woodland art from its foundations in spirituality and ceremony to secular and autobiographical experiences.16

Rama Chippewa and Moose Deer Point Potawatomi artist Chief Lady Bird makes clear that the concepts articulated through the Woodland style are indeed related to language in that they circumvent the “English language and colonial worldview,” functioning as “a portal into known and unknown worlds, bursting with ideologies that place us on the land and express the interconnectedness embedded in Anishinaabe cosmologies.” 17 Paintings such as Bneshii Devours Windigo, Creates New World (2021) are deeply indebted to the Woodland style for it makes use of

13. Bruce Bernstein, “Expected Evolution: The Changing Continuum,” in Shapeshifting: Transformations in Native American Art, ed. Karen Kramer Russell (Salem: Peabody Essex Museum, 2012), 30–43.

14. Bernstein, “Expected Evolution,” 30–43.

15. Judy Stoffman, “Aboriginal modernist painter Daphne Odjig led Indian Group of Seven,” Globe and Mail, October 21, 2016, web.

16. Eli Baxter, email message to author, January 25, 2021. See also: Eli Baxter, Aki-Wayn-Zih: A Person as Worthy as the Earth, ed. Matthew Ryan Smith (Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, forthcoming).

17. Chief Lady Bird, email message to author, January 31, 2021.

NO. 30, SPRING 2021 | 43

above Gordon Coons (Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe/Ottawa), Caring for Our Relations, 2014, acrylic on canvas, 30 × 24 in.

Image courtesy of the artist. opposite Gordon Coons (Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe/Ottawa), Ancient Trials of the Sturgeons, 2015, acrylic on canvas, 24 × 30 in. Image courtesy of the artist.

totemic iconography, blocks of pure color, and rhythmic black line against a brilliant firetruck-red background utilized by the likes of Thomas, Alex Janvier (Denesuline/Saulteaux), and Jim Oskineegish (Eabametoong Ojibwe). Her other works such as Dibaajimowinan, Mushkiikii, and Land Back (2020) introduce collage elements, photography, and digital design into established Woodland motifs. The background image is Lady Bird’s self-portrait adorned with red ochre pictographs on her face. The words Land Back hang from her earrings and combine with sacred birds, soft flora, and syllabics to communicate Indigenous stewardship of the land and the process of reclamation. Hers is a memorable

statement that conceptualizes “the experience of living as an Anishinaabe kwe in this complex time/timeline.”18 It is both of its time and of another time, impelled by the Woodland style while renewing it in the ether of digital software.

Patrick Hunter is a two-Spirit Red Lake Ojibwe artist and designer who, like Chief Lady Bird, is also interested in the aesthetic potential of digitalizing the Woodland style. Hunter grew up with Woodland art and prints on the walls of his home and remembers hearing anecdotes about some of the men who originated the Woodland movement.

“I think it's important to see the works of those early originators,” says Hunter, “and put it through your own filter and experiences and turn it into something that looks true to you, and that's what I hope I've done.”19 Though his paintings reside in public and private art collections, his design work has garnered significant commercial interest in recent years. Hunter draws inspiration from bandolier bags and historical clothing, which splinters the Woodland style into new domains of contemporary fashion and graphic illustration.

Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwa/Ottawa artist Gordon Coons looks to his Anishinaabe heritage to interpret the wildlife and natural scenery that he absorbs in the Great Lakes region. There is a jouissance, a playfulness, that exists in paintings that bring together Western and Indigenous cultural elements. For example, in Caring for Our Relations (2020), he envelops common animals from the Great Lakes—a cardinal, turtle, swan, and rabbit—inside the connective tissue of bright green line. It is not a coincidence that the back of a badger is rendered in white stars on a blue background to hint that American colonialism and Indigenous history is interwoven into a shared condition. To this end, Coons warns that the Woodland style has been corrupted by unscrupulous actors in recent years.

“With the new Woodland Art Style creations,” he affirms, “traditional stories can be seen […] but has some of the spirituality been lost? Or has it been lost because of the need to chase the dollar?”20

18. Chief Lady Bird, email. Kwe is an Ojibwe term that translates as "woman."

19. Patrick Hunter, email message to author, January 25, 2021.

20. Gordon Coons, email message to author, January 25, 2021.

44 | FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

Woodland art, much like Inuit carving, has been produced for the souvenir economy en masse for publics with little knowledge or regard for its cultural origins or spiritual cosmology.

Airports, corner stores, trinket shops, and even some art galleries sell kitschy Woodland coffee mugs, T-shirts, neckties, and mousepads, some with or without the artists’ permission. Likewise, a Toronto exhibition of non-Indigenous artist Amanda PL was canceled due to public outcry over her paintings that unabashedly replicate the Woodland style. Chippewa of the Thames artist Jay Soule contends that “she’s taking [Morrisseau’s] stories and retelling them, which bastardizes it down the road.” Amanda PL responds to the controversy by saying, “I think it’s a shame to say that an artist can’t create something because they’re not from that race.”21 Non-Native people profiteering off Indigenous art is nothing new, though the deliberation surrounding cultural appropriation is still unfolding.

Nevertheless, it remains an important part of Woodland art’s story.

In a similar vein, the documentary There Are No Fakes (2019) reveals an alleged forgery network in Thunder Bay, Ontario, of approximately 3,000 Morrisseau paintings at an estimated worth of Can$30,000,000. It maps how protagonist and musician Kevin Hearn purchased a (supposed) Morrisseau painting (with suspicious provenance) for $20,000 and included it in a private collector’s exhibition at the Art Gallery of Ontario where it was swiftly removed by then-curator Gerald McMaster (Plains Cree). After the film’s release, an Ontario Court of Appeals decision overturned an original decision against Hearn to award him $60,000. If the purported emulation of Morrisseau’s paintings is true, then it would have generated millions of dollars in sales for some while jeopardizing the value and provenance for others.

Back in 1935, Walter Benjamin argued that mechanical processes such as lithography or photography deplete art of its special quality, what he called its “aura.”22 If the alleged forgery network is

factory-like in its production, then what is the cost to Morrisseau and his legacy?

Is this what Coons insinuates when he asserts that the dollar of greed has supplanted the spirit of Woodland art?

In the end, perhaps the greater shame is that discourse surrounding forgeries and plagiarism have surpassed critical debate on Morrisseau’s invaluable body of work and his conceptualization of Woodland art itself.

CONCLUSION THE WOOD LAND SCHOOL originated in 2011 when Omaskêko Cree artist Duane Linklater curated a small exhibition of works from five friends and collaborators in his second-floor studio in Nipissing First Nation, Ontario. “By creating a small space between wood and land,” Linklater “sought to break apart the ethnographic categorization of Eastern Indigenous people in North America.”

Since then, the Wood Land School has evolved into an elastic arts-based project

with no fixed address that scrutinizes the spectrum of Indigenous inclusivity in institutional spaces. At issue are the limits of visual art when the presence of Indigenous voices and their conceptualizations are inserted into their directives.23 Here, in the hands of its membership, the etymology of Woodland to “Wood Land” offers a productive and meaningful schema to critique unbalanced systems of display. For this reason, it is firmly bonded to the oppositional politics adopted by the PNIAI and the first generation of Woodland artists.

The image-making of Morrisseau and the transfigurations of Woodland art diffuse in unpredictable ways whereby attempting to classify the movement risks essentializing it. What is clear is that Woodland art was an archetypal event in art’s befuddled history and a crucial point of departure for a breadth of aesthetic, economic, and political exploration (or exploitation). Neo-Woodland art, in all its various manifestations and guises, can be many things to many people—beautiful, regenerative, or utterly corrupt.

Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD, is the curator and head of collections at Glenhyrst Art Gallery in Brantford, Ontario.

21. Shanifa Nasser, “Toronto gallery cancels show after concerns artist ‘bastardizes’ Indigenous art,” CBC News, April 28, 2017, web.

22. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn from the 1935 essay (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 217–51.

23. Aïcha Diallo, “Centering Indigenous Bodies, Art and Practice,” ArtsEverywhere, September 25, 2017, web.

NO. 30, SPRING 2021 | 45

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PROFILE

Tlingit Weaver

LILY HOPE

By Amy Fletcher

L

ILY HOPE’S APPROACH TO HER WORK is centered in a deep understanding of the interplay between art and community. Whether she’s engaged in the intense, focused task of weaving Chilkat ceremonial robes in her studio, co-curating a museum exhibit to raise awareness of her art forms, or sharing techniques she learned from her mother with students and colleagues, Hope’s role as an artist strengthens the connections that bring and hold people together, creating a fertile environment for her work to continue.

Her physical practice is well suited to building connections. Chilkat weaving is slow, meditative work through which Hope brings the collective knowledge and vision of her predecessors into astonishingly beautiful, physical form.

The work roots her in place, requiring in-depth knowledge of gathering and processing her materials, namely mountain goat wool and cedar bark. And it is collective, tying her closely to other Ravenstail and Chilkat weavers who in the past three decades have built up a powerful network of knowledge sharing, camaraderie, and friendship.

The weavings themselves can be approached from many perspectives: as examples of the ongoing vitality of Northwest Coast art; as crucial links in perpetuating the legacy of a revered Tlingit master weaver; and as “documents” made of wool recording events and relationships. But perhaps the most illuminating place to begin is at eye level, with an appreciation of them as beautiful, intricate works of art, and products of Hope’s highly imaginative mind. If, as renowned Haida artist Bill Reid (1920– 1998) wrote, “Joy is a well-made object

equaled only by the joy of making it,”1 then Hope’s work is a joint celebration.

HOPE, A TLINGIT RAVEN of the T’akdeintaan clan, weaves in both the Chilkat and Ravenstail styles, techniques unique to the Northwest Coast.

She is one of only a handful of weavers (less than ten in the world by most counts) currently creating full-size Chilkat ceremonial robes, using weaving techniques considered to be among the most complex in the world. She learned Chilkat from her mother, Tlingit artist Clarissa Rizal (1956–2016), who learned from celebrated Tlingit master weaver Jennie Thlunaut (ca. 1891–1986), who was instrumental in bringing Chilkat into the hands of present-day weavers.

When Thlunaut passed away at age 96, just a few months after Rizal’s apprenticeship, Rizal did everything she could to ensure that Thlunaut’s teachings were carried forward by leading classes, taking

her own apprentices, and organizing collaborative weaving projects. When Rizal herself passed at age 60 after a brief and unexpected illness, Hope stepped into her mother’s role, balancing the weight of that legacy with gratitude and the support of her colleagues.

“My mother didn’t leave all of her knowledge with one person,” Hope says.

“And when we come together collectively, we all benefit. We feed each other information but also that spirit memory.

There’s a recognition that we are weaving from the strands of the same weft.”

Hope is currently working on her third full-sized Chilkat robe, her most ambitious to date, and one that will require 1,500 to 2,000 hours at her loom. Just the first 14 inches were visible during a visit to her studio in January—a horizontal border in black and bright yellow that is a distinguishing feature of the Chilkat style. Below that, the warps hung down in a curtain of parallel rows,

1. Bill Reid, Solitary Raven: Selected Writings of Bill Reid, ed. Robert Bringhurst (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2000), 222.

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LILY HOPE

above Aantlenx’ Xh’aak: Between Worlds, 2021, Chilkat blanket in process, mountain goat wool, cedar, natural dyes, commercial dyes. Image courtesy of the artist. opposite Lily Hope weaves the Lineage Chilkat robe in the Delores Churchill Artist-in-Residence Studio at Sealaska Heritage in Juneau in June 2016. Photo: Nobu Koch. Images courtesy of Sealaska Heritage, Juneau, Alaska.

70 inches across, hinting at the hundreds of hours yet to come.

Below the border, the upper curve of an eyebrow was just beginning to emerge, the first part of a spirit face that will eventually occupy the center of the robe. The face will be partially obscured by a second design field layered over the first that is based on a customary Chilkat pattern called Diving Whale. The two layers will merge in the final textile in an innovative effect inspired by Hope’s work in collage. The design highlights the importance of a weaver’s spiritual training and her role in continuing the transference of knowledge “through the veils” of space and time.

“It’s an image of this being essentially peering through from the other side of the veil, as if this being is pushing their face against the glass, if you will,” Hope said. Though inspired in part by experiencing her mother move from the material world into the spirit realm, Hope said the being in the robe is representative

of any spirit teacher or ancestor that is looking to be closer to us. The robe is called Aantlenx’ Xh’aak: Between Worlds.

To highlight the juxtaposition of old and new design elements, Hope chose commercially dyed wool in rich black to weave the Diving Whale pattern and hand-spun wool that was hand-dyed with locally sourced materials for the spirit being: hemlock bark (brown), copper-ammonia (blue-green), and wolf moss (yellow). One of the stumbling blocks for present-day weavers interested in Chilkat is the labor-intensive process of harvesting and preparing their materials. For this project, Hope spent months spinning wool and yellow cedar strips together into warp by hand on her thigh, then dyeing the wool in batches in her studio. She recently created a six-part video series, “Chilkat Weaving Prep,” on Sealaska Heritage Institute’s YouTube channel to encourage others to get involved in the processes, freeing the weaver to spend more time at the loom. At this point the

work rests with the weavers, who assist each other whenever possible.

The cooperative aspect of Chilkat can extend to the weaving itself, as Chilkat robes are big enough to allow two weavers to sit at the loom side by side. Hope’s second robe, Double Raven, created for a private collector, was a collaboration between Hope and fellow Tlingit weaver Ricky Tagaban.

Hope’s first robe, Lineage, was begun with virtual support from her mother in 2016 as part of an exhibition highlighting the traceable lineage of four weavers: Hope, Rizal, Thlunaut, and Clara Benson (Tlingit), Thlunaut’s aunt. Hope’s robe features a spirit figure of a master teacher holding a robe-shaped space for a student below. Rizal passed away when Hope was halfway done with the weaving, leaving her temporarily unable to continue, but with the help of fellow weavers, she came to recognize her mother’s continuing assistance and now says Rizal is “ever-present” when she weaves.

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Hope plans for Between Worlds to be unveiled during a major public gathering of weavers and robes, if pandemic precautions allow, before it goes to its eventual home at a national museum. Through her work with museums, she seeks to establish Chilkat in the public awareness as an ongoing, world-class art form. “I want people across the world, wherever they are, to be able to look at a Chilkat robe and say, ‘I know what that is, I know where they’re made, and I know that this is not a past-tense piece of work.’” Hope’s Lineage robe is held in the permanent collection of the Portland Art Museum, with smaller weavings at Sealaska Heritage Institute in Juneau, the Burke Museum in Seattle, and the Museum Mensch und Natur in Munich, Germany.

“Lily is a phenomenally talented weaver,” says Kathryn Bunn-Marcuse, PhD, curator of Northwest Native art at the Burke. “She understands the long history of this art form and many of the Tlingit protocols that were handed down to her by her mother. Moreover … she is a generous teacher and a fighter for

women’s equity in the art world, which has for too long discounted the time, materials, and knowledge it takes to weave these complex and monumental creations.”

CHILKAT ROBES, NAAXEIN, play a vital role in ceremonies in Southeast Alaska and beyond. In some ceremonies, older robes are formally displayed as precious, clanowned possessions, or at.óow, accompanied by oratory and storytelling. In the book In the Spirit of the Ancestors, Haida weaver Evelyn Vanderhoop describes the design of older robes: “Ancestral privileges gained by interaction with natural phenomena and supernatural beings were recounted in stories and symbolized in crest designs….

The visual language of the arts was intended to extend beyond the comprehension of humans. Its messages were composed also for the natural and supernatural worlds of sky, forest, and sea.”2 Tlingit weaver Suzi L. Williams describes Chilkat robes as being “the culmination of thousands of years of interaction between weavers, their

thoughts, and changes in their culture.”3 In the same essay, she writes, “Many rhythms of the past have been disrupted, and traditions now share time with contemporary life. It is no longer possible to dwell in the heart of harmony, but it is still possible to visit there…. The Dancing Robes, old ones and new ones just being made, bridge these changes. They continue to dance through time, holding the door open for the future.”

Today, old and new robes are commonly worn and danced to songs and drumming at formal and informal cultural events in Southeast Alaska and beyond. One measure of the weaving community’s success in keeping Chilkat and Ravenstail alive is the number of new robes that can be seen at Celebration, a biennial dance-and-culture festival of Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian peoples organized by the Alaska Native nonprofit Sealaska Heritage in Juneau.

In addition to weaving these highly valued ceremonial robes, Hope makes small-scale works in the Chilkat style— most recently a pandemic-inspired line of Chilkat Protector masks. The masks, which feature the distinctive Chilkat-style nose and mouth and long-fringed border, highlight the documentation aspect of Chilkat in recording clan histories and reinforce the idea of the art form as flexible within certain parameters and evolving to fit current circumstances.

Widely shared on social media, Hope’s masks have garnered interest from museums, media outlets, and engaged observers all over the world. Hope’s mask design also earned her three judge’s choice awards in this publication’s virtual exhibition, Masked Heroes, and was featured in a full spread in the January/ February issue of Smithsonian Magazine as part of an article called “Inspiring Awe in Alaska,” in which Hope was photographed with all five of her children.

Hope also created a variation of the Chilkat Protector mask design that speaks to LGBTQIA+ awareness, a series of three masks called Ancestral Indigenous

2. Evelyn Vanderhoop, “The Naaxiin: Robe of Sacred Honor,” in In the Spirit of the Ancestors: Contemporary Northwest Coast Art at the Burke Museum, ed. Robin Kathleen Wright and Kathryn Bunn-Marcuse (Seattle: University of Washington Press and the Bill Holm Center for the Study of Northwest Coast Art, Burke Museum, 2015), 33–34.

3. Suzi L. Williams, “Chilkat Weaving: Summers and Histories,” in Celebration 2000: Restoring Balance Through Culture, ed. Susan W. Fair and Rosita Worl (Juneau: Sealaska Heritage Institute, 2000), 131.

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LILY HOPE

Protectors that is now part of the permanent collection of the Juneau-Douglas City Museum. In an artist statement, Hope said the masks “lean on the strength of our ancestors, reinstating historical Indigenous protection for all members of our community, inclusive of all genders, sexual expressions, and self-identity.”

Not intended to be functional, the masks highlight the cultural significance of “two-spirit” people in Tlingit, Haida, and Tsimshian history, including the tradition of allowing only two-spirit men to weave, still widely followed.

In another project sparked by current events, Hope wove a Black Lives Matter Allies Armband in Chilkat style, designed with the intent that allies could wear one in support of Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) community members, making themselves more visible in public. The piece, which features a raised fist design in black against a bright yellow background, was part of the Anchorage Museum’s Alaska Biennial 2020.

These projects have been completed as Hope works on her full-size robe, teaches online classes, operates a nonprofit called Spirit Uprising with her aunt and sister, and tends to her family with her husband, poet and storyteller Ishmael Hope (Tlingit/Iñupiaq). But as she sits in her crowded studio discussing her work, surrounded by boxes of supplies and multiple works in progress, Hope doesn’t appear fatigued. On the contrary: the demands on her time seem to galvanize rather than deplete her. For Hope, pushing the boundaries of Chilkat forward and working toward the collective prosperity of the weaving community are important ways of honoring Thlunaut and Rizal’s teachings.

“A huge part of the art process is the relationships you build and the people you work with,” she says. “It’s really foundational to my heart work, who I am at the core, of wanting to see other people get excited about this work.”

HOPE WAS RAISED in a highly creative environment where participation in art practices was a matter of course.

In addition to weaving, her mother studied carving under Ellis “Pete” Bibb (1922–2016), basketry under Selina

Peratrovich (Haida, ca. 1890–1984), glassblowing under Preston Singletary (Tlingit), and painting and collage under Cecil Touchon. In 2016 Rizal was named an NEA National Heritage Fellow, the nation’s highest honor for a customary artist;Thlunaut was honored in 1986.

Hope assisted her mother in various weaving tasks starting at age five and began weaving on her own at fourteen when her mother encouraged her to weave every day before socializing with her friends. When she took up weaving again in her early twenties with Juneau weaver Kay Parker, her hands and heart remembered “like riding a bike.” Six years later, in 2010, Hope won first place in Sealaska Heritage’s Juried Art Show in the “traditional category” for her weaving ensemble, Copper Child. Later that year

above Black Lives Matter Allies Armband, 2020, mountain goat wool, cedar bark, dye. opposite Ancestral Indigenous Protectors, 2020, three Chilkat facial masks, mountain goat wool, cedar bark, dye. Both images courtesy of the artist.

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above Double Raven, 2020, Chilkat blanket, modeled by Lily Hope. Photo: Ricky Tagaban (Tlingit). opposite Lily Hope dances her Lineage Chilkat robe in the clan house at Sealaska Heritage in Juneau, Alaska, in May 2017.

At right, her husband, Ishmael Hope, dances a Chilkat tunic woven by Clara Benson, Jennie Thlunaut's teacher. Hope's mother, Clarissa Rizal, learned from Thlunaut. Photo: Nobu Koch. Images courtesy of Sealaska Heritage.

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she assisted her mother in teaching a beginning Chilkat class. “From that class I was hooked,” Hope recalls. “I just wanted to weave all the time.”

Chilkat and Ravenstail are visually different. Ravenstail, an older form also unique to the Northwest Coast, is woven in black and white with sparing use of yellow. Designs are predominantly geometric. Chilkat is more colorful, woven in yellow, blue-green, black, and white, with sparing use of red.

Chilkat designs are adapted formline, the complex design system on which two-dimensional Northwest Coast art

is based, and incorporate difficult-torender forms such as ovoids, trigons, and circles—or anything else the designer might come up with—that combine to become highly stylized figures, often animals or spirits. Both styles are hand twined and constructed on an upright loom. Ravenstail is woven straight across, while Chilkat is woven in smaller sections that are eventually joined with hidden draw strings.

“Some weavers have a natural affinity toward Ravenstail, toward the mathematics and counting and the predictability, if you will, of that,” Hope says. “And Chilkat weaving is creative problem solving. It takes a bit of psyching up to come into it and go, Okay, I’m going to make this shape that I haven’t woven, ever.” She laughs. “We say that weavings are going to be what they want to be, and that’s true with Chilkat especially. They have a mind and life of their own.”

Ravenstail, an ancient art form that passed out of practice in the late 18th or early 19th century, fell dormant for nearly 200 years until it was reintroduced through the work of weaver Cheryl Samuel in the 1980s. Ravenstail’s decline may be tied to the rise of Chilkat around the same time. Though Chilkat’s origins are unclear, according to most accounts it originated with Tsimshian or Nisga'a weavers. Tlingit weavers acquired an example and unraveled it to see how it was made. It then became associated with weavers in Chilkat Territory at the north end of Southeast Alaska, where Thlunaut and her family lived.

Though many weavers have learned Chilkat techniques in the past three decades, and hundreds are now weaving Ravenstail, Hope feels the pressure to make sure Thlunaut’s knowledge of weaving Chilkat robes is passed on.

“Ideally when I’m gone, there will be more than five people to take my place.

Hopefully one or two of them will be my own daughters, but we’ll see.”

Her daughter Eleanor, six, has received a little extra encouragement.

“We named her Eleanor Weaver Hope in the same way that way up north in my husband’s Iñupiaq culture you would name someone Brilliant Hunter—so we’re building the destiny into her name.” Hope plans to keep things casual with all four of

LILY HOPE

her daughters and one son, encouraging their interest though time spent in the studio, an approach used by her mother.

Hope’s mother spoke and wrote extensively about the profound spiritual impact of Chilkat weaving on women, individually and collectively. For Hope, the experience can be compared to meditation. Open expressions of gratitude are part of the spiritual agreements the practice requires of weavers; others include not weaving when you’re in a negative mood, covering your weavings at night, and taking good care of your family.

The positivity inherent in those agreements and the excitement of new weavers learning the techniques practiced by their ancestors is reflected in the tone of the gatherings Hope leads on alternate Sundays. Since the pandemic, meetings have moved to Zoom, expanding the group’s reach. “That’s been the biggest pick-me-up since the pandemic and since not being able to teach in person.

How much I missed that for the first few months. Now we weave together online.

They bring their weaving to the Zoom meetings and flip their camera around and show me where they are and ask questions or laugh with us about the silliness of life and the hard things.”

Hope’s husband, Ishmael, who is also a working artist and is currently writing an epic saga entirely in Tlingit, is inspired by what’s happening in the Chilkat and Ravenstail weaving community and believes it offers a powerful model for other artists to follow. “It’s not necessarily very common, that kind of thing,” he says of the weavers’ support for each other. “They’re learning things, they’re teaching each other, they’re telling stories, they’re visiting as they’re working together, they need to be around each other as they do the work…. It’s going to be an art movement—and it already is. The foundation is in place and it’s rooted in kindness and the gifts and the nurturing of the Elders.”

The weavers’ work also supports larger efforts to build international recognition of Northwest Coast art forms. In Hope’s hometown of Juneau, a community-wide effort is underway to establish the capital city as the Northwest Coast arts capital of the world, as covered in a December article in Smithsonian Magazine. The story, “How Juneau, Alaska is Becoming an Epicenter for Indigenous

Art,” was the first of two Smithsonian features on Southeast Alaska artists within the same month. Hope and her Chilkat weavings were featured in both.

Ishmael Hope sees similarities between the momentum that’s building with Northwest Coast arts and cultural movements of the past, such as the Italian Renaissance, with its structured master-apprentice relationships. “Where I think it starts to get super interesting is when all those things cross over and connect, between the oral literature and the arts, between the ancient and the present, when those relationships start to really resonate.” Providing more structure and space for this kind of dialogue is a goal the Hopes share, and one they practice in their own home with their children.

As these conversations continue, Hope and the weaving community are well placed—and well prepared—to play an important role in weaving it all back together.

LILYHOPE.COM

Amy Fletcher is a writer and editor based in Juneau, Alaska. A former reporter, she first interviewed Lily Hope and the late master weaver Clarissa Rizal in 2013. She now serves as the media and publications director for Sealaska Heritage Institute.

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Wasauksing Ojibwe Transdisciplinary Artist

MARIA HUPFIELD

By Michelle J. Lanteri

M

ARIA HUPFIELD MAKES PERFORMANCE ART to navigate the world in past, present, and future tenses.

Intertwining wearable media with display strategies, her practice hinges on acts of finding, seeing, connecting, and reciprocating. Born in 1975 in Parry Sound, Ontario, she belongs to Wasauksing First Nation located on Georgian Bay. Hupfield earned an MFA in sculpture at York University in Toronto. She has served as the Canadian Research Chair in Transdisciplinary Indigenous Arts at the University of Toronto, Mississauga, since 2019. Prior to this position, she lived in Brooklyn for nine years. Hupfield currently holds a Borderlands Fellowship with the Vera List Center for Art and Politics at The New School in New York City and the Center for Imagination in the Borderlands at Arizona State University.

Currently curating a project in New Jersey, Hupfield has curated projects in New York and has written for Movement Research Performance Journal and Crossroads: New Views on Art and Environment.

Growing up Anishinaabe in the Great Lakes shapes all aspects of Hupfield’s art practice. She combines industrial grey felt and site-specific performances to reflect an organic ethos of responding to the present while feeling her way through each thought and interaction as they happen, much like waves cresting the lake. For Hupfield, each iteration bears immense promise to speak, portray, defend, locate joy, and experiment through personal connections made in performative art. By weaving together narratives of home and travel, she’s created interventions at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, SITE Santa Fe, The Power Plant in Toronto, the Heard Museum in Phoenix, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, and alongside the Venice Biennale in Italy in a collateral 54 | FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

exhibition. She gives equal energy to collaborators and audiences in return for exchanges that bring new thoughts and conversations.

ML: First, can you tell us about yourself and your art practice?

MH: I’m back in my home territory, which feels a little bit different. I’m no longer an outsider. I’m a maker. I make things. My primary material is industrial felt.

Before I worked with the felt, I made my paper jingle dress, which is made from standard lined paper. That piece I made to fit my body at the time so I could wear it. I knew I wanted it to be a sculpture, but it didn’t make sound, it only rustled. In the end, I wanted to hear the sound, not a silencing or quietness.

Now I’m coming back to this idea of sound.

Before that I would take apart books, like my Anthropology 100 book—I shredded it and wove those pieces into a basket. Rather than read a book of words that talks about the object, why don’t we just go to the objects and the people? The basket to me was the knowledge; it has the knowledge more than this book. That’s an idea I’m constantly going back to—the function, the sound, the object—when you trace that trajectory from the books, to the jingle dress, to the jingle boots. There’s a path that is so clear now. My interests are broad, but there is this thread of continuity. When I moved to Brooklyn, there were a lot of artisanal projects happening. That allowed me to really free myself and not really feel a lot of burden, like the history and hierarchy of craft and art or the impact of anthropology on Native forms of making. In my

MARIA HUPFIELD

art I feel wholly seen [and] that I’m fully able to express myself.

ML: Can you talk about your experience with industrial felt as an ongoing collaborator?

MH: I hand sew all of my industrial felt creations. When I landed on the felt, it stuck. I’ve come to realize that a lot of my work is about being at home with myself and having ultimate freedom through materials. Industrial felt is one of those materials that allowed me to do that. It’s so versatile in its different functions. I like the practicality of it. It’s not about beauty, although when I started using it, it did come into fashion, and I saw it everywhere, at IKEA and in handbags.

It has this durability and function and it allows you to work with it in a way that is forgiving. I don’t have to worry about a seam allowance; it’s not going to unravel. At the same time, felt has ancient roots. I’m constantly learning about it; it’s constantly giving back to me. I still feel connected to it. There are infinite possibilities with it, and it allows me to work in a way that is familiar. It can have an everyday household or functional or industrial purpose, and it can be high art, because of that history of Conceptual art, Minimalism, and Joseph Beuys. It’s fully loaded but in an exciting, new way. It gave me a lot of freedom to have different conversations and move in and out of things. The original reasons I was drawn to it have changed a lot, so I have this whole other relationship with it.

It’s just growing. It is both specific to me and it connects me to broader and more global conversations. It’s a material that I feel less precious about. It allowed me to work with it in a way that was forgiving, versatile, and familiar, by sewing. There’s a lot of tension in it; it’s very immediate.

ML: How does industrial felt, as a living agent, give form to your process?

MH: Because I come to my work through a combination of embodied knowledge, drawing, language, and handwriting, I felt that I was thinking with my hands. Before you’ve comprehended what you’re doing, you’ve already made a mark that expresses

it. For me, the piecing together and working with felt gives me an imagining and a way of working. I come up with a pattern. I’m freestyling a lot of the time.

Through experience with and knowledge of the material, a kind of intuitiveness happens. I can work quickly and efficiently. The color I’ve been drawn to is not a dark grey or light grey, it’s a mid-tone grey. It can be a screen you’re projecting on, a mat on the wall to lean on, or boots to wear. I’ve rolled myself up in it and cut myself out of it—very carefully—with an X-Acto blade. So felt becomes a form of resistance. It also points to how there’s always been innovation.

above Maria Hupfield: The One Who Keeps on Giving, 2017, installation, The Power Plant, Toronto. foreground: Contain That Force, 2013, industrial felt, dimensions variable, with conceptual contributions from Ann Beam, Zachary Fabri, Andrea Geyer, Sterlin Harjo (Seminole/Muscogee), Laura O r t m a n ( Wh i te M o u n t a i n Apache), Waubgeshig Rice (Wasauksing Ojibwe), and Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Salish/Cree/Shoshone). Image courtesy of Maria Hupfield and Galerie Hugues Charbonneau. opposite Maria Hupfield at the Heard Museum, Phoenix, Arizona, 2019. Image courtesy of the artist.

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above Maria Hupfield: The One Who Keeps on Giving, 2017, installation, The Power Plant, Toronto. left: Jingle Spiral, 2015, industrial felt, tin jingles, collection of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. right: The One Who Keeps on Giving, 2017, two single-channel video projections, 15:00, with Deanne Hupfield (Temagami First Nation), John Hupfield (Wasauksing Ojibwe), and Johna Hupfield (Wasauksing Ojibwe).

Video by Waukomaun Pawis (Wasauksing Ojibwe). opposite Maria Hupfield, Jiimaan (Canoe), 2015, performance in Venice, Italy, single-channel video projection, 5:00. Video

by Dylan McLaughlin (Diné).

Both images courtesy of Maria Hupfield and Galerie Hugues Charbonneau.

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A lot of it also has to do with sound, and the way it absorbs sound. I wanted to carry sound through movement, action, and being mobile. The felt is rigid and supports itself. It allowed me to sew in a style that’s similar to a moccasin or a fabric boot. Right away, it was like I was seven years old wearing the liners in my winter boots and running back and forth, sliding. It gives me an extra bit of cushion.

I did a residency at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York during Changing Hands: Art Without Reservation 3, and it just kind of grew. I started making replicas of things I owned, like my large-format camera, which created a conversation about obsolete technologies, or sunglasses that became sleeping glasses. It’s fun to create a different language with it and use it in this way.

Most of the people who have used it are men, like Robert Morris. So felt is a material I could put my mark on. It’s still growing and keeping me connected, but because I don’t feel like I want to work with it during the pandemic, I have been spending time researching my process and material [and] talking to Kathryn Walter, an artist in Toronto known for working with felt, and looking at color more lately.

ML: In Maria Hupfield: The One Who Keeps on Giving, your recent retrospective that toured Canada and traveled to France, one of your performances featured your siblings and a landscape painting by your mother. Can you talk about the relationships that fueled this project?

MH: I did a video that was centered around my mother’s painting. It’s a painting of water, and I’ve carried it around from home to home. It’s a painting that’s connected to my mother, to my family, to a place, my community.

It looks like the Georgian Bay, where I’m from. My mother had a lot happening in her life, so when I look at the water, I’m seeing her. I’m reading the water like I’m visiting with her. It binds my family together to this place. On top of that, I remember it as a child, so when I see it, all of these memories come forward.

Suddenly I’m in a canoe with my parents, going camping, or I’m swimming with my sister—all of these ideas around canvas with pigment in oil on it. My grandfather even made the frame. All these kinds of things, it’s not a passive thing. We know this about art, that potential to function

MARIA HUPFIELD

as a mnemonic device and trigger our subconscious and memories. A painting can take us places, become a portal or be a window to another location or time.

With all the things I create, everything is equally imbued with all of these connections, especially when I further activate the objects that I make.

Some objects appear multiple times in so many different ways, [like] the jingle spiral, which is a circle with jingles spiraling to the middle. Through this circular piece of felt with jingle spirals, I’m connecting to water and cosmology.

I made this item and I did a few photos where I was trying it out, to see how it looked. Right away I couldn’t think what I would do in it and didn’t want to wear it. So I sold it through my dealer [Galerie Hugues Charbonneau] in Montreal with the condition and understanding that it would remain accessible to me for future performance. Then [when] I was doing The One Who Keeps On Giving, I was talking to my family and asked, “I want to do this video with Mom’s painting, how do you feel, are you okay with that?” I asked them if they wanted to perform with me, and right away they supported the idea. When I asked my sister-in-law

Deanne what she wanted to do, she said she didn’t want to wear her regalia. I asked her, “How do you feel about wearing the jingle spiral?” She said, “Yes.” We have this footage of her wearing it while she’s nine months pregnant.

Because she’s a fancy shawl dancer, she held her arms up, and her whole movement vocabulary animated the spiral. She brought so much life to that object.... She’s embodying life and water.

ML: How have your parents influenced your pathway to becoming the kind of artist you are today?

MH: I’ve come to realize that this is a very personal reflection of me, because I’m literally the embodiment and product of my biracial parents. My dad is this non-Native, boat-building, anti-establishment type who moved his life to be with my mom and live close to her community.

And my mom, who has passed away, she was this radiant Native woman. There’s a lot to her life story and their relationship.

So how does a biracial couple from two different backgrounds end up connected?

Well, at art school. They were very young.

Everything I do has absolutely been influenced by them.

My mom had four children with my dad. When I did my master’s, she was very much at the forefront of my mind at that time. For the first time, I realized, I’m at the age I remember my mom being. I was thinking of her as an artist who also went to art school and the differences in our lives. When I go places, like when I had a show in Paris and when I went to Venice, I carried my mom in my heart with me. I would have loved to have taken my mom there. She would have thrived; she would have just glowed. I definitely come back to her, but, for that matter, anyone in my family, like her sisters, my aunties, and my cousins. I feel really connected to my community through her, because I was able to grow up with her, and them, us.

She made a lot of tough choices for us, as did my dad. I have a lot of respect for them. My mom was a maker, hilarious, so sharp, so clever, and I feel indebted to her. I’m also aware that my smile comes from her, so when I see myself, I see her. I feel that connection. My mom was glamorous, gorgeous, and amazing.

ML: Can you talk more about your relationships with water and its related dialogues in your work? How did these NO. 30, SPRING 2021 | 57

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I’m constantly reminding myself that I’m never meant to be fixed in one place; movement is medicine.

above Native Art Department International (Maria Hupfield and Jason Lujan), Bureau of Aesthetics, 2021, installation, Crisp-Ellert Art Museum, Flagler College, St. Augustine, Florida. opposite Double Punch, 2011, found gloves with jingle bells.

Both images courtesy of the artist.

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experiences inform your contribution to Ga ni tha (2015), a collateral exhibition to the Venice Biennale?

MH: For Ga ni tha, Nancy Mithlo [Chiricahua Apache] brought three Native women together in Venice as an intervention. It was great to be there with Marcella Ernest [Bad River Ojibwe] and Keli Mashburn [Osage]. Taking place outside of the Americas, it afforded an opportunity to talk about and make these connections across our different communities.

I created a new work for the occasion [Jiimaan, or “canoe” in Anishinaabemowin]. It reflected being from a boat culture, Anishinaabe; going to a place that is also a boat culture; and having a dad who’s a boat builder. The only way to experience Venice is through boats. That place is about water. And they have a whole other history there, and artists there must feel the weight of that history. But I knew I wanted to build a boat, and my dad makes a lightweight double paddle canoe, which has laminated marine plywood. So it’s light; it doesn’t have ribs. Its hull is like a kayak.

So that’s where the [industrial felt] boat came from.

I hired a video-based artist, Dylan McLaughlin (Diné), to document the performances. We did three nights of public performances with the canoe, each a different iteration. The next morning I would re-perform by myself at sunrise, and I would try to remember, to reenact the performance I did the night before.

I would have thought through it, and I would do another iteration based on the night before without an audience and for myself, with Dylan documenting it again.

The performances were a learning process and investigation into audience, place, and object. I had brought the felt over and assembled the canoe in my bedroom in Venice. It was a physically demanding performance in hindsight—carrying the felt, sitting, working, and then doing the performances. It was a lot of work, and I performed barefoot on hard ground.

I’ve always wanted to go back and have an Italian interpreter with me, with social moments where we’re cooking together and sleeping together in the same shared living space to really immerse ourselves in the culture. When I go somewhere, I want to reciprocate the values that I’m bringing as a cultural exchange.

MARIA HUPFIELD

ML: What is Native Art Department International, and how does it shape your work?

MH: Right now I have a show with my husband, Jason Lujan [at the CrispEllert Art]. We collaborate on Native Art Department International. The project started while we were in New York. We’re both artists, we have our own practices, and those have their ebbs and flows.

This was a way for us to put our minds together around shared ideas and art. I have so much adoration for his work. He’s the reason I moved to New York. When I learned about his work, I was like, What is this, who is this, why are they doing this—I have to know more.

That’s basically how it’s been since; I really met my match: someone who keeps me interested every step of the way and always keeps me thinking. We hold each other accountable. The work we do is beyond what we do individually, and it’s something totally in and of itself. It’s a tough go sometimes, because we’re very different and we don’t always agree. We have to remind each other why we’re doing that work. I feel like that really came out of our time in New York. You have to find a lot of ways to do the things you want to do. And now we find ourselves in a different position, a different city, and we’re continuing to think about these ideas in our new environment. This work comes out of living in the city and our relationship as artists and a married couple.

ML: You recently moved closer to home for your position at the University of Toronto. How does this role intersect with your art practice?

MH: There’s been a lot of cluster hires at institutions across Canada to integrate and Indigenize institutions. They’re being held accountable. In Canada we have the TRC, the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. I just knew I wouldn’t get that kind of backing and support in the United States at this time. What makes this position a good fit is they acknowledge that my research is my artwork.

It’s a very simple and straightforward thing for me to come to a school

where they’re going to give me lots of money, and a space, students who I can work with, and surround me with other amazing Indigenous academics.

Right now I’m calling my space on campus the Indigenous Creation Studio.

It’s not a lab; it’s a studio. It’s where things get made and where we make artwork and think about Indigenous content, knowledge, accountability, and ethical practices. I am thinking through movement indoors, outdoors, and online. I’m really looking at how I build solidarity and how I apply Indigenous methodology. It’s an ongoing conversation. I’m designing classes on Indigenous performance and advising graduate students.

So it’s really what I’m doing already, but with the University of Toronto backing me. There are now five Indigenous faculty members at the University of Toronto at Mississauga who have all started in the past three years. Plus we have an Indigenous director and we’re looking at a big building. This does not include the

many other Indigenous faculty working at the other campuses…. This is stuff I did not see happening in New York. So it’s exciting to be in Toronto, having conversations with other Native people around me or being able to go to an Anishinaabe language class.

There are exciting things in New York that I love and miss, like the Indigenous Kinship Collective and discovering and meeting these amazing Native people who are at the top of their field in acting, science, curating, poetry— you name it. Having conversations with pure-on performance artists, as well as all the cultural events, live music, plays, and good food. There’s a lot of amazing stuff.

I’m looking forward to when it’s possible to travel again and continue that work, and I’m constantly reminding myself that I’m never meant to be fixed in one place; movement is medicine, and I'd rather have mobility, migrate, and have access to people’s ideas. Artists are always traveling and making work and meeting people and doing stuff. And I love people.

MARIAHUPFIELD.WORDPRESS.COM Michelle J. Lanteri is a curator, writer, and Mellon predoctoral fellow in Native American art history at the University of Oklahoma, where she teaches courses in global arts. Lanteri earned an MA in art history at New Mexico State University in Las Cruces.

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Pascua Yaqui Painter

MARIO MARTINEZ

By RoseMary Diaz (Santa Clara Pueblo)

W

HEN MARIO MARTINEZ was just six years old, he had a “lightning-bolt moment” while working on a finger painting at school. “I knew right then I would become a painter,” he recalls.

“I knew it was what I wanted to do for the rest of my life.”

From then on, art was the word, and as Martinez’s childhood pushed into his teenage years, his interest in its possibilities grew. By early adulthood he had mastered its array of definitions.

His grade-school premonition was coming to full vision.

Martinez grew up in New Penjamo, or Vista del Camino, Arizona, the smallest of six Yaqui settlements in the Scottsdale area. He was one of three high school graduates from his village in 1970. At age 18 he moved to San Francisco and had a strong start there, first as an art student then as a working and exhibiting professional artist. In 2002 Martinez reestablished himself in New York City, where he has lived ever since.

“It’s been a solo journey,” the artist says. “Some can’t live without the group or outside of the tribal society. But for me the move was necessary. I wanted something different.”

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There’s “a sense of anonymity that comes with living in a big city,” continues Martinez. “I’ve never been much of a small-town type. In that kind of environment there’s a lack of understanding and acceptance, and too many fear-based attempts to control the narrative.”

The themes Martinez explores in his monumental works— the largest of which can measure 22 feet across—are mostly nature based, as suggested by such titles as Green Forest, Flower Forest, Talking Tree, and Yellow Flower Landscape. “That only makes sense,” he says, “given that nature is the basis for the original Yaqui religion, before the introduction of Catholicism in the first decades of the 17th century.”

“We are all conscious of the power of nature,” he continues.

More recent works also reveal Martinez’s reverence for nature as well as the cosmos. His “metascapes,” as he has called them, connect the microcosm to the macrocosm. His canvases speak a surreal and otherworldly language that seems at once familiar and of another place and time.

Whether rendered in acrylic, charcoal, oil, oil pastel, Prismacolor, or a combination thereof, Martinez’s artwork draws much of its aesthetic character from the rich and complex cultural web of Yaqui cosmology. And though the art is imbued with this sacred tribal knowledge, the artist is careful in observing the strict protocols that disallow the use of trueto-form representations of Yaqui religion or spiritual teachings outside of their sacred and protected ceremonial contexts. “It’s all codified,” says Martinez of his creative toeing of the line. He is careful to never reveal too much.

Yaqui people, also known as Yoeme, hail from Sonora, Mexico, and are closely related to the Mayo people. Yaqui and Mayo both speak the related Uto-Aztecan language. The allied tribes resisted government control throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, only to be brutally suppressed by the Mexican government. They fought to maintain their autonomy and several Yaqui communities fled violence in Mexico to find refuge in the United States. The Pascua Yaqui secured a reservation and federal recognition in the 1960s.

While drawing from his own culture and history, Martinez’s work is also informed by the long history of Western modernism, from its beginnings in the late 19th century to the late 20th century. He counts as his art heroes the Russian-born artists Wassily Kandinsky and Kazimir Malevich, the Austrian symbolist Gustav Klimt, Swedish abstract painter and mystic Hilma af Klint, Canadian-born Philip Guston, and American Abstract Expressionists Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. But, Martinez observes, “not even they could perceive the level of

MARIO MARTINEZ

abstraction that the Native basket and pottery makers did long before 1900. And, as far as I know, nobody in European or American painting history was visually ahead of the Diné weavers of the early 19th century. Native artists were way ahead of the game.”

Selecting just a few of an artist’s successes can sometimes pose a challenge.

Each contributes to the collective archive of their work. Often there are simply too many to list in their entirety. Thus, I offer these highlights of Martinez’s long

and well-lit career: Personal Journeys: American Indian Landscapes (2016) at the Heard Museum, Phoenix; In/Sight 2010 (2010), Chelsea Art Museum, New York; Contemporary Artists Federation Group Show at the Museum of Modern Art, Saitama, Japan (2002); Native Abstraction: Modern Forms, Ancient Ideas (1997) at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe; and Mario Martinez: Visual Interpretations of Yaqui Myths & Legends at the American Indian Contemporary Arts (1995) in San Francisco. The

above Green Forest, 2007– 08, acrylic on paper, 60 × 44 in. Image courtesy of Garth Greenan Gallery, New York. opposite Mario Martinez (Pascua Yaqui). Photo: Steve Hawthorne. Image courtesy of the artist.

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National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) George Gustav Heye Center in New York has featured Martinez’s work in several major exhibitions including Vantage Point: The Contemporary Native Art Collection (2010), New Tribe: New York (2005), Who Stole the Teepee? (2000– 01), and, most recently, in the ambitious survey of Indigenous American painting, Stretching the Canvas: Eight Decades of Native Painting (2019–2021).

Making waves in the arts and mainstream press, Stretching the Canvas inspired headlines such as “An Exhibition of Native Painting Fills a Stubborn Gap in the History of Modernism”; “New exhibit celebrates long-overlooked Native American paintings”; and “Native American Art Breaks Free in Stretching the Canvas.”

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Martinez, who earned his master of fine arts degree from San Francisco Art Institute in 1985 and BFA from Arizona State University in 1979, taught as a visiting professor at the University of Arizona in 2000. He has garnered innumerable awards and residencies, including the New York Foundation for the Arts 2017 Murray Reich Distinguished Artist Award; a 2015 Robert Rauschenberg Foundation residency on Captiva Island, Florida; a 2015 Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship; and a 2013 Joan Mitchell Foundation Creating a Living Legacy award. His work is in museum collections across the country.

In 1999 Martinez mobilized fellow Yaquis to paint three massive, public murals tracing Yaqui history from Rio Yaqui, Sonora, to Arizona at the Vista del Camino Community Center in

Scottsdale. Later, the Heard Museum commissioned Martinez to design and paint Sonoran Desert: Yaqui Home (2003–05), a 22-foot mural that is part of its permanent exhibition, Home: Desert Peoples in the Southwest.

Garth Greenan Gallery in New York represents Martinez. When I ask Garth Greenan to share his thoughts about the artist’s work, he responds, “As a student of art history and a longtime resident of New York City, Mario Martinez is a great admirer of the New York School and Abstract Expressionists. His monumental works reverberate with the turbulent energy of [Maxim] Gorky or [Willem] de Kooning.”

Greenan continues, “Audience expectations present many Native American artists with a dilemma. On one hand, there’s the temptation to play into or flatter the romanticized ideas of Native Americans in the popular imagination.

On the other hand, there’s the temptation to shun the topic altogether, to avoid being pigeonholed. Artists like Mario Martinez have found elegant and natural ways of navigating around that double bind.”

The resulting artworks beautifully come together in “showing the two existential aspects of his work: Brooklyn and Yaquiness,” as exemplified in Imaginary Brooklyn Flowerscape (2014). “Martinez’s Yaqui heritage plays an important role in his work, with indirect traditional references detectable in certain patterns or materials, or in cryptic allusions that inform the universe of his paintings.

“For Martinez, pre- and postcolonial American painting traditions mix easily,” observes Greenan. “His sense of self within a 40,000-year tradition allows him to commingle elements that are often characterized as conflicting. For example, the traditional Yaqui reverence for nature seeps into his abstracted depictions of urban architecture: the hectic city is framed within the broader context of the cosmos and nature, to which it belongs in the final analysis.”

Over several weeks, Martinez and I speak by telephone and correspond by text and email. Some of our conversations are wreathed by history in the making: the biggest snowstorm New York City witnessed in years, the second

MARIO MARTINEZ

above Brooklynscape III, 2009–16, acrylic on canvas, 28 × 22 in. opposite Imaginary Brooklyn Flowerscape, 2014, Prismacolor, charcoal, oil pastel on paper, 24 × 18 in. Both images courtesy of Garth Greenan Gallery, New York.

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source energy. And it’s about being in an open state, advocating for yourself, being nice to yourself.

Answering your cause or intent, creating through your process, can bring a state of upliftment that can be described as being “in the zone” or just as feeling good.

RMD: What or who were among your early influences?

MM: I was born into a small Yaqui village, but I was impacted by various other cultures: Anglo, Black, Mexican, and those of the other Native tribes in the area. Other big influences came from public school art classes, the technology of the time, and icons of mainstream culture: Jimi Hendrix, James Brown, the Jefferson Airplane. Television also morphed me, like it did many others.

RMD: How do you prepare to be creative?

above Yaqui Abstraction I, 2011, acrylic on canvas, 36 × 36 in. Image courtesy of Garth Greenan Gallery, New York. opposite Yaqui Abstraction III, 2011–18, acrylic on canvas, 36 × 36 in. Image courtesy of Garth Greenan Gallery, New York.

impeachment trial, the introduction of a COVID-19 vaccine. “We are living in interesting times,” reflects Martinez on these historic if strange days.

As per my usual approach with artist profiles, I pose several questions to Martinez, an ennead of inquiries that helped me bring a little more of his story to the page. Here is how some of our conversations went.

RMD: How do you to describe your approach to art?

MM: Rather than descriptives, I think it’s about emotions and aligning with who you really are: your inner being, or consciousness, your spirit, your soul, your

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MM: I just start and continue with no ideas about where it’s going. Abstraction is a perfect ground, or atmosphere, for that. Having done this since I was a kid, I think it’s in my DNA. I haven’t been able to let it go.

I believe one can be born an artist, so I guess I came in ready for it.

I think artists are blessed. Through the creative process, we easily get into a receptive mode and tune into the eternal creative energy that runs through everything. Making art is a way of tapping into the larger picture, tapping into the energy that created the world, the universe.

RMD: What have you learned from failure, such as when a particular piece hasn’t quite worked out?

MM: There is no such thing as failure, or mistakes for that matter, just opportunity for growth and expansion. That can lead to creating a great life, which at times can seem like a rare accomplishment.

RMD: How have your individual experiments changed your broader art form?

MM: I feel that I sort of expanded contemporary Native painting history in a small way by reintroducing some of

MARIO MARTINEZ

the Native abstract design elements from ancient basketry, pottery, and weaving.

Because of all the layers of cultural and social influences I’ve experienced, I feel that my art is different from that of mainstream painters. Or even other Native painters of the last 50 to 60 years.

Over time, process has led me to more exploration and helped me branch out into other mediums. So process can change an art form.

RMD: What would you say has been the most fulfilling accomplishment of your career so far?

MM: I would say continuing to produce work throughout the years, focusing on what I intended when I came into this physical time and space is my most fulfilling accomplishment. Native artists of North America are just starting to be recognized by mainstream American art institutions. The original inhabitants, the first Americans of this hemisphere, have been the last to be recognized! Perhaps being recognized takes more effort for a Native artist.

RMD: If you could collaborate with any artist from any time or place in history, who would you choose and why?

MM: I would choose Michelangelo and Ludwig van Beethoven. Though I’m not inspired to collaborate with other artists in general, it would be grand to be a fly on the wall, observing their creative process, which I imagine were private endeavors most of the time. Like me, they closed the door enough to focus in their most inspired moments.

All artists, from any time, are supported, in varying degrees, by our different times and places, or by particular art contexts. Both Michelangelo and Beethoven received much support in their time.

Pietà [1498–1499] and the Sistine Chapel are examples that remind us that Michelangelo was the greatest artist in the history of Western art. His creativity went beyond most humans’ ability, in any historical era, and resided simultaneously in this physicality and in an energetic, divine realm.

B e e t h ov e n , i n t h e e a r t h’s

historical musical realm, was the greatest of composers. His development as an artist seems to be almost beyond the capabilities of human creation. To my ears, Symphony No. 9 is the greatest musical composition ever written. And for it to have survived for 200 years is almost incomprehensible.

I like the idea that, in my own way, I have an energetic, psychic, nonphysical but conscious, collaborative connection with both artists—a kind of kindredspirit-artist collaboration.

Support for my Native American version of abstract art has been minimal up until now, compared to the support both of these artists received in their time.

I feel that, like them, I’ve created works of powerful, emotional range; we are all nonphysical consciousnesses beyond this

physical realm, and we’re all part of the eternal realm. Also, like those before me, I have strived for constant expansion, growth, and new artistic manifestations.

RMD: What do you hope will be your creative legacy?

MM: I think one’s art embodies one’s vision-energy, and there is nothing more powerful to humanity than one’s vision-energy having a positive impact on others. [Legacy] can be about approaching your art through the art histories of others.

RMD: What is next on the horizon?

MM: I stand for having fun all the way.

So for me it’s really just about the joy of doing what I love to do. Everything else will take care of itself.

MMARTINEZPAINTING.COM RoseMary Diaz (Santa Clara Pueblo) is an anthologized poet and award-winning writer based in Santa Fe. She studied literature and its respective arts at the Institute of American Indian Arts, Naropa University, and the University of California, Santa Cruz.

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Delaware/Pawnee/Kiowa Interdisciplinary Artist and Musician

NATHAN YOUNG

By Thollem

A

N ARTIST WORKING in video, installation, animation, and documentaries and as a musician in composition, noise, and large sonic installations, Nathan Young IV is also a community activist. His projects combine his myriad interests in ways that complement and enhance all the included elements. He is both a student and a teacher in all facets of his life. An improviser, he is willing to follow the process to an unknown end to accompany his clear vision of intention.

Nathan’s curiosity and humility allows him to abandon his ego toward the final result, and he is deeply engaged in providing opportunities for other artists.

Self-described as “American Indian Gothic,” Nathan weaves the spiritual and the political, “re-imagining Indigenous sacred imagery in order to complicate and subvert notions of the sublime.” He was a founding member of Postcommodity and was this Native artists’ collective collaborator from 2007 to 2015. He holds an MFA in music/sound from Milton Avery School of the Arts at Bard College and is a current Tulsa Artist Fellow with an Arts Integration award sponsored by the George Kaiser Family Foundation. He is the curator of Tulsa Noise and co-presenter of the Tulsa NoiseFest.

Over the years, I’ve been able to get to know Nathan Young professionally and as friends through his work and my work as an art/music journalist for First American Art Magazine. I’ve always enjoyed and benefited from our discussions. His unique perspectives are a result of his upbringing. He was born in 1975 in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, to a family that regularly engaged in erudite conversation. An enrolled member of the Delaware Tribe of Indians, he has served 66 | FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

on his tribal council since 2015. Nathan is grounded in historical context, the health of his community, and his role in the larger context of his work, which are always at the top of his concerns.

The Pew Center for Arts and Heritage is sponsoring Nathan to create a site-specific, large-scale, and longterm sonic installation on the grounds of Pennsbury Manor in Morrisville, Pennsylvania, along the banks of the Delaware River on Lenapehoking, the mid-Atlantic ancestral homelands of the Lenape or Delaware people. The project, nkwiluntàmën: I long for it; I am lonesome for it (such as the sound of a drum), “will foster a deeper understanding of the [Delaware] tribe’s heritage … through sounds of wind, water, and wildlife.” As the Pew Center’s website states, “The work will connect listeners to the environment while reexamining histories of colonialism.”

NY: They had a visiting curator from Philadelphia named Ryan Strand Greenberg. He was expressing [his ideas] to other artists, wondering if there were any Delawares around. I attended his curator’s talk and found out that he was curating, particularly in public art, and was inserting the Lenape point of view in the public sphere. People were searching for Lenape artists who had the skill set to engage in a public art intervention. He had worked with Pew before on another project. During his curatorial talk he showed a work that was primarily a sound piece. We arranged a studio visit after his talk and began what became a two-year process. Dianne Loftis came on as a co-curator.

T: How did the work at Pennsbury Manor come about? How is the experience as a Lenape person to be creating such a work in your ancestral lands?

NY: Primarily my overall concern is exploring sonic agency and the ability of music and sound to chart new futures.

Sonic agency is a way of engaging with the sociopolitical dynamics of a time or

T: You and I have talked about sonic agency quite a bit in the past. This seems like an ideal situation to realize these concepts.

NATHAN YOUNG

above Nathan Young (Delaware Tribe/Pawnee/Kiowa) and Warren Realrider (Pawnee/Crow), The Plains Indian Sign Language 2, video still. opposite Nathan Young in Lullaby for Peyote Tapes, video still of performance art, 2017. All images courtesy of the artist.

space. It’s a reconsideration of the environment and a way to be able to reach out to people who aren’t your regular audience members who will come and have an experience unlike any other they’ve probably ever had. I feel like the real work is in the sound.

I’m grateful that I’ve really been able to apply sonic agency as a Tulsa Artist Fellow, which then naturally led to the opportunity for this piece at the Pennsbury Manor. We’ve been gone from that place, constantly pushed away. The story of the Delaware is of nine different removals. There’s this collective memory loss, and we’re at a point in time where curiosity has been piqued, and people see value in that time and era and in our knowledge systems when we were living there. We are also inundated with sound pollution, so I expect this work will guide listeners into a different relationship with their sonic environment, both natural and man-made.

This project is a culmination of my studies throughout my life. The reason I went to Bard College was to work with

Bob Bielecki on these concepts of large landscape installation and soundscape. As an artist, it was a wonderful opportunity to be able to assert that much-needed Delaware/Lenape point of view in this place where we’ve been gone from for hundreds of years now. It’s so rich to engage and such an amazing opportunity. I’m trying to use this opportunity to expand my own thinking concerning composition, ecology, composing on a large scale in time, using the contours of the landscape, thinking about extended technique, and understanding that this is an intervention.

It’s just starting, and through my interests in sound studies and this new Native American art history program, I’ve discovered examples of other interventions and musicalizations of spaces.

It’s a joyful experience. There’s a lot to be revealed and things will change, but no matter what, it’s really important to me as a Delaware, as a Lenape person, that I have this opportunity.

T: How and what will people experience when they visit your piece once it’s

finished? What kind of materials are you using?

NY: We’ve been talking a lot about native plants and ways to utilize the contours of the landscape itself. There have been plans for habitat restoration in the works before my project came along, so I have some guides already. There’s already been a lot of research in the flora and fauna.

I’m not trying to make a time machine to take us back, but I’d like this work to aid in the restoration of this environment.

It’s a mixture of remediation and using these plants to create a soundscape and a different sound environment alongside electro-acoustic techniques with infrastructure already present in the environment. Finding inventive ways to engage wind, water, and the contours of the land with the intention that everything will enhance each other.

I’m bringing in a number of engineers and sound artists. It will be along a path so that people can casually experience it as they walk through, and sit here and there to take it all in. There will NO. 30, SPRING 2021 | 67

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also be a public programming aspect to it including educational programs and concerts.

T: How has your education, both previously as well as currently, prepared you for this work now? You speak about Bard often and your studies with Bob Bielecki and others. Currently, you are in the Native American art history PhD program at the University of Oklahoma.

I’m also curious about your education when you were a child.

NY: Everything is complementary to each other. I’m finding that research in my preparations for this academic work at the university is deeply informing my direction in creating this piece. I live my research, which is unconventional and a little bit privileged. My parents regularly exposed me to singers, and I sing in my own way. I was always kind of struck by this idea of the inspiration of song in our communities. I grew up in this square in Oklahoma between the Pawnee, the Delaware, the Cherokee, and the Kiowa.

This idea of where our songs come from, one thing that people would express to me is that our songs come from the wind, our songs come from the rustling 68 | FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

of the leaves, our songs come from the dropping of the water. I see these parallels in all music, especially in early electronic music, avant-garde composition, art music. And it’s just wonderful to be able to materialize it, to engage it.

I’m not saying that it’s the only way that our songs are composed. Dreams are very important as they are to rock and roll.

Where these songs come from is a great and beautiful mystery. Ultimately in the larger sense of things, I’m just trying to impart to others the beauty that has been presented to me. Everything is subjective, but I see beauty even in the darker things.

What is life without feeling the full gambit of everything?

When I went to Bard I was seeking a mentorship and education from the artists who were teaching there. After spending so much time with brilliant thinkers through Postcommodity, it was really fortuitous for me to go up there.

I’m very fortunate that I chose that path.

I found that sound was a way of engaging ideas. It was teaching me when I was young. I grew up in a rural area, skateboarding, playing punk [music]. That was the container for me at that time to engage my ideas. I grew up around what

became gaming and the rise of tribes as major economic drivers of the state and region. So I feel really fortunate to be around people who were theorizing and doing that work. It was the dinner table conversation.

I’ve always had this wonder of the East—always asking what tribe the name of this lake was, for instance. I realize these were our words from my heritage.

A lot of times it feels like things choose you, and the way it became present to me I had to follow through.

Then I had these 24-hour drives to school, which gave me a lot of time to think. I was fascinated with the idea that a sacred space might have a strip mall or a post office on it. Or might be part of a highway. It’s not something exceptional to our tribe; this is the history of the earth.

I started to think about the ideas of the sacred, learning the politics of presentation in art at the same time. Generally I’ve found that whenever I embark on anything artistically, like animation, Postcommodity, democracy, sonic agency, and now writing, it’s because I feel it needs to be done.

While at Bard, someone showed me the painting We Are Making The New

NATHAN YOUNG

World by Paul Nash. He painted this in 1918 as a response to the First World War. I was working on a piece about sound waves when someone showed me this painting. And then I thought about my family and these federal infrastructure projects during the War on Poverty in the ’60s, right after Kennedy was assassinated. I feel like I’ve seen something exceptional and therefore I feel compelled to engage with it and express it. Then it’s making meaning so that others might contemplate these same ideas, and we can build that future.

The other important thing connected to this piece is the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act. Pennsbury Manor is providing a space for reinterment burial.

The work is a large re-creation of Penn’s home. It’s near the space where the famous Walking Purchase treaty between the William Penn family was done, where the first treaties were signed. The Delawares signed some of the first treaties and even the first treaty with the United States.

I was always aware of this growing up.

Part of this place is a landfill, with these surreal landscapes that have developed.

The Delaware River is a different river now than when my ancestors lived there.

A large part of my envisioning of this project is using natural elements to activate and to musicalize that space.

I want to compose on a larger scale.

Thinking of it as composition in an amount of time that can’t fit into notation.

I want to use the landscape to compose and reconsider what hearing and listening is. There will be a distance learning element to the piece. We’re talking about it being streamed 24 hours a day due to the pandemic. It reminds me of Maryanne Amacher’s City-Links. She would sit there and listen on the telephone to a sonic painting, listening to a soundscape and considering it in this completely different way. You have to be patient to hear the change in this composition. Ideally a sound wave at the beginning of the work will look very different later—hopefully [reflecting] a healthier landscape.

Where these songs come from is a great and beautiful mystery. … I’m just trying to impart to others the beauty that has been presented to me.

above Spirit Plate (Nathan Young and Mateo Galindo) at the Oklahoma Intertribal Noise Symposium, organized by Nathan Young, at the Tulsa Artist Fellowship Cameron Studios, Tulsa, 2019. Photo: Blackhorse Lowe (Navajo). All images courtesy of the artist. opposite Karhausen, 2017, photograph of performance art.

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PROFILE

T: Can you tell me more about the program you are currently enrolled in? Is this the only doctoral program in the country for Native American art history?

above My Pins, 2019, digital photograph, dimensions variable. opposite Mom and Dad’s Peyote Bracelet, 2019, digital photograph, dimensions variable.

This work is not a focus on the past problems but to encourage people to understand that we are here and capable of very sophisticated contributions to art forms and community. We are containers for ideas. Art is a vessel to carry these ideas. You want to create a piece that everybody can see themselves in. You are also there as the artist ideally without overwhelming the reflection of the viewer. Here we are down the road, and we’re thinking about you and you’re thinking about us.

NY: As far as I know, Columbia has a similar program or at least offers classes in Native American art history.1 Otherwise the vast majority of education has been to teach Native American art as artifacts within the purview of natural history and anthropology. The majority of curators and the people writing about and collecting Native American material, culture, have been anthropologists and ethnologists.

I was at the University of Oklahoma in the late ’90s and had the great fortune of having the mentorship of Dr. Mary Jo Watson, who was the first individual, a Seminole American Indian, to get a PhD in Native American art history. She became a very important figure in my life, articulating a lot of these ideas to me. I graduated with an art history degree from there but I focused on her classes. There was South American art history up to the art history of the Plains, as well as Native language classes. While I was there, she had the idea of establishing a PhD program so that more Native Americans could be trained in the field of Native American art history rather than through anthropology. So it was a very conscious and politically important issue for her and became one for me.

I am currently working with Dr. [Alicia] Harris [Assiniboine] and Dr. [Alison] Fields and recently participated in a post-grad seminar with them, focusing on sound art. There seem to be a significant amount of Native American musicians practicing sound art. This field is still developing in so many ways. The first proper large institutional sound art show was the Soundings [A Contemporary Score (2013)] at MoMA, which was sound art’s great arrival. It’s just now that institutions have recognized it.

[Sound] was always a natural part of my experience in the world. My father would often tell me, “You wouldn’t be a very good hunter, because you’re so loud.

You need to learn to walk quietly.”

1. The University of New Mexico and University of Colorado, Boulder, offer arts of the Americas art history doctoral degrees.—Ed.

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NATHAN YOUNG

T: How important are Native languages to your work?

NY: Native American language was the gateway to me for understanding contemporary art—the way symbols are used. This is something that I still think about today. It’s a daily practice for me.

Humor is really important in our world.

My mother told me this story that when they were trying to figure out how to make a word for car, they said, “It has these bright glowing eyes and it farts!”

That type of practice of imagining and expressing this thing through symbols makes this connection with me about contemporary work.

I also owe a great deal to Edgar Heap of Birds’ contemporary arts class and my mentorship with him was really valuable to me. A cohort of mine in Postcommodity once said: “Decolonization is something that is so multifaceted, it’s hard to grasp. And there’s nothing more decolonized than thinking in your language. If you can think in Cherokee or Pawnee then you’ve

escaped this zone and you’re thinking differently.” A lot of that is about sound and how language works.

I grew up in the capitol of the Cherokee Nation [and the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians], so that is the language that I know the most of. My niece had the opportunity to grow up in the Cherokee language immersion program, so I was able to spend a lot of time talking to my niece about the words and what they mean. It’s not something that I live and move in, this world of Native languages, but it’s very much an influence on myself and I know that it’s similar for other artists who are working in the same field as me. I was writing a paper on Tick Suck [also known as Warren Realrider], and I asked him what’s

up with that name, and he said because it sounded Pawnee. It has those phonetic elements to it. This is not unique.

It’s so important who you are around as an artist. One thing I learned in Postcommodity is that we mentored each other. We were truly interdisciplinary. I learned so much about sound from Raven [Chacon]. And that sharing of ideas created a special bond between us.

We all have agency and those who choose to use it, then that’s your choice. I just want to impart what I know, or think I know, with the hope that it’s going to help us make a better future. It seems that music, art, and philosophy lead the way to better understand ourselves and situations.

NATHANYOUNGPROJECTS.COM Thollem is a peripatetic pianist, keyboardist, vocalist, composer, improviser, collaborator, activist, teacher, and author who performs throughout North America and Europe.

Thollem has contributed articles to Anthology of Essays on Deep Listening and Full Moon Magazine.

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COLLECTIONS

Collections

FIELD MUSEUM

By Andrea L. Ferber, PhD

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HICAGO’S FIELD MUSEUM emerged from the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition, a massive spectacle of 65,000 displays covering more than 600 acres on the city’s south side. Planned to commemorate the anniversary of a lost Italian sadist stumbling upon a foreign shore, the fair celebrated colonialism with presentations of global cultural heritage.

The exhibitions of ethnographic objects were amassed and organized largely by archaeologist Frederic Putnam and anthropologist Franz Boas, who spent most of the two years leading up to the fair overseeing expeditions across North America.1 Director of American Indian programs at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, JoAllyn Archambault (Standing Rock Dakota/ Muscogee) credits Franz Boas’s orchestration of Kwakwaka’wakw dancers at the fair as one of the earliest examples of collaboration between Native artists and

white cultural gatekeepers.2 One display featured the collection of Norwegian sailor and collector Johan Adrian Jacobsen, who had previously been tasked to collect objects for the Ethnologisches Museum in Berlin. These, combined with businessman Edward Ayer’s substantial collection of Native American objects, became the basis of the Field Museum’s anthropology collection, about 50,000 items. Today this department has grown to about two million objects, surprisingly only 5 percent of the museum’s holdings (the departments of botany, geology, and zoology total nearly 38 million).

Founded as the Columbian Museum of Chicago, Boas was (briefly) its first curator of anthropology. In its first 50 years, museum staff conducted over 440 expeditions. Associate history professor Amy Lonetree (Ho-Chunk) explains the inherent contradictions driving these pursuits: “At the same time that these collectors were in search of the ‘most

authentic’ or oldest type of tribal artifacts for their collections, Native communities were experiencing extreme pressures to assimilate into American society—to give up the very ways of life that produced these objects.”3 These incongruities manifested in opposing factions of specialists and also within the work of individual researchers.

The museum changed its name in 1905 to honor its primary financial backer, Marshall Field. Its current classical revival building opened in 1921.

Decades later Field curator Donald Collier described how the museum recruited academically pedigreed experts to oversee the exhibition and interpretation of its massive collections.

Archaeologist J. Eric S. Thompson curated Mexican and South American displays, and a few years later anthropologist Ralph Linton installed the “Northwest Coast and Eskimo” exhibits.

Reflecting on the 1960s, Collier wrote, “Suddenly the Indians were at the doorsteps of the big museums, with different attitudes toward museums— more critical and more assertive. Museums and anthropologists gradually responded to the changed cultural and political situation … including the new policy of museums to interact with them as urban neighbors, not as relics of the past.”4 The museum organized annual cultural festivals to present Indigenous cultures as living and dynamic. Of course progress does not occur equally on all fronts, and institutions change at a glacial pace. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, museums were timidly approaching (or denying) issues of rightful ownership and repatriation, and exhibitions remained highly problematic.

Archaeologist Paul S. Martin was the Field Museum curator of anthropology from 1935 to 1964. During his tenure he focused primarily on excavations of precontact cultures in the Southwest. He initiated a reinstallation of the American Indian galleries, though they were not completed until 1982, after his death in 1974. These displays

1. Notably, Putnam and Boas argued against then-popular beliefs in eugenics and the concept that all cultures evolve from “primitive” to “civilized.”

2. JoAllyn Archambault, “Native Communities, Museums and Collaboration,” Practicing Anthropology 33 no. 2 (Spring 2011): 16.

3. Amy Lonetree, Decolonizing Museums: Representing Native America in National and Tribal Museums (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012): 10.

4. Donald Collier, “My Life with Exhibits at the Field Museum, 1941–1976,” Fieldiana: Anthropology no. 36 (September 30, 2003): 212.

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COLLECTIONS

remained in place until very recently. The decision to keep the outdated galleries open made this particular section of the museum a relic unto itself. Professors brought students to undertake critical analyses of anachronistic and racist presentations of Native cultures.

Some of the problems with this installation stemmed from Eurocentric bias and ignorance on behalf of the curators: describing Indigenous peoples as monolithic, use of objectionable terms like Papago, and persistent use of the past tense. But the most glaring issues were the result of decades of neglect by the museum: missing items with removal forms standing in their place, many objects in dire need of conservation, haphazard arrangements, overcrowded cases, didactics discolored from age, missing letters in signs, and burnt-out fluorescent light bulbs.

A disclaimer posted in the gallery stated, “the exhibits were created decades ago, and don’t reflect our current perspective.... In the future, we will renovate this gallery ... and communicate our current understanding of Native American peoples, past and present.”

Between 2013 and 2016, three artists were invited to underscore the problems in these galleries. Field curator of anthropology Alaka Wali organized Bunky Echo-Hawk: Modern Warrior with the artist. Two concurrent exhibitions were on view from 2016 to 2019: Full Circle/Omani Wakan: Lakota Artist Rhonda Holy Bear and Drawing on Tradition: Kansa Artist Chris Pappan.

Artists selected historical objects from the collection to juxtapose those with their contemporary artwork.

Pappan worked in collaboration with Adam Sings in the Timber (Crow), Debra Yepa-Pappan (Jemez/Korean), and Santiago X (Koasati/CHamoru) to produce a video. Using film footage of a staged Buffalo Dance from 1894, Pappan overlaid images of contemporary Indigenous people. Santiago X mixed the soundtrack from a wax cylinder recording of an Indigenous man speaking over an original electronic composition.

Printed transparencies of Pappan’s ledger drawings on glass display cases recontextualized and sometimes obscured

historical objects. The museum acquired some works from each of these shows, including Pappan’s painting Pow Wow Chair, ca. 1980 (2016), which depicts a colorful folding chair as an archived cultural object.

The museum renovated its Arctic and Northwest Coast galleries in the 1980s. The Field commissioned artists to create work for this, including a stone inuksuk by Inuk sculptor Piita Taqtu Irniq and a carved wooden pole by Tlingit carvers Nathan and Stephen Jackson.

above, top Men with [Indian] North American artifacts in cases, outside in preparation for move to new museum series. Possibly taken in Jackson Park, Illinois, the first “Field Museum,” 1920. Photo: Charles Carpenter. All images, unless otherwise noted, courtesy of the Field Museum. above, bottom Children wearing paper headbands with feathers, with museum staff member looking at exhibit case of Equipment for Children Native American artifacts, for Raymond Foundation, 1965. opposite Field Museum. Photo: Robert Barat, volt4ire (CC BY 2.0).

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COLLECTIONS

above, top Rhonda Holy Bear (Cheyenne River Lakota), Maternal Journey, 2010, mixedmedia sculpture with wood, hide, cloth, paint, glass beads, hair, shell, metal, 31 × 42 × 15 in. © 2010 Rhonda Holy Bear. above, bottom Installation view of Bunky Echo-Hawk: Modern Warrior, 2013. Photo: Karen Bean.

Screen prints by Northwest Coast artists fill one case. These galleries are problematic in different ways than the North American Hall. In fall 2019 performance artist Emily Johnson (Yup'ik) staged an intervention in the Arctic galleries by placing black tape over every mention of “the E-word” (Eskimo). Surprisingly her

action not only remained in place for some time but was acknowledged with a statement of support from the museum.

One curious element in the Northwest Coast gallery is a large boarded-up case. Covered with a panorama photograph, a text panel explains that the display was concealed pending a Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) investigation.

Resolving issues of rightful ownership is complex and painful for living descendants. While many cases are still under debate, the Field did voluntarily engage in repatriation efforts well before the federal mandate in 1990. Like many museums, it maintains some official agreements with tribes to safeguard sensitive items. For example, the museum was prepared to repatriate two Oneida wampum belts, but the different Oneida tribes could not decide who would keep them, so they resolved the belts would remain at the museum. Beyond repatriating material culture that falls under NAGPRA stipulations, the Field is also deaccessioning to strengthen its collection, including 32 paintings by American artist George Catlin.

The Field also aims to increase the number of Native staff. Artist Debra Yepa-Pappan became the community engagement coordinator in 2018. The role is a liaison to bridge the institution with Indigenous people. She hosts Native individuals and groups at the museum, often guiding them to view parts of the collection off limits to the general public.

She also meets with local university students studying museology, Indigenous histories, and repatriation. Yepa-Pappan stresses that community engagement goes beyond outreach, with the goal to establish long-term and mutually beneficial relationships.

Yepa-Pappan contributes to exhibition development and advocates for this to become a regular part of museum protocol. Bureaucratic hierarchies and siloed departments within larger institutions present challenging obstacles to decolonial approaches of inclusion and collaboration. 5 A few years ago

5. Debra Yepa-Pappan in discussion with the author, February 1, 2021.

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Yepa-Pappan helped to unveil the museum’s land acknowledgment. Signs on the grounds and inside welcome visitors to Shikakw’a, a Miami-Illinois name and the historical homelands of the Ho-Chunk, Otoe-Missouria, Iowa, Menominee, Meskwaki, Sauk, Miami, Wea, Piankashaw, Kickapoo, Inoka or Illini Confederacy, and the Three Fires Confederacy: Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi nations.6 Tom Skwerski, exhibitions operations director oversees reinstallations.

He speaks enthusiastically about the plans for the Native North American galleries, projected to open in 2022.7 Rather than a chronological or geographic arrangement, the new presentation will be organized around 24 narrative vignettes.

Of the anthropology department’s two million objects, approximately 70,000 are from Native North American cultures, representing Indigenous tribes across the continent.

Unlike attempts in past decades, today’s curators recognize no display can be comprehensive. As Skwerski explained to me, “While the previous installation included about 1,500 objects, the new one will have 250 with much more contextualization.” There will be no linear narrative, and smaller sections will be rotated regularly. The Field has commissioned more than 20 Indigenous artists to create new work for these galleries.

A Native advisory board weighs in on every decision and regularly consults with other tribal contacts to get feedback on the presentation of their cultural heritage. Initially the advisory panel thought a Pawnee earth lodge constructed in 1976 should be removed because it does not reflect contemporary life. However, Pawnee representatives felt it should remain because it is a rare example of this architectural form. Rather than being dismantled, its interpretive framework will be updated.

From a paradoxical history, the Field is acting on constructive criticism

to redress past mistakes and present living cultures more accurately. Contemporary art interventions, increasing the number of Native staff members, repatriating and deaccessioning problematic holdings, and revising exhibitions in consultation with Native people are all part of this process.

While exiting the Field campus on Columbus Drive, one is reminded of how much work there is to be done.

6. “Land Acknowledgment,” Field Museum, web. The Piankashaw are now enrolled in the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma. The Illinois Confederacy, including the Kaskaskia and Wea, are now enrolled in the Peoria Tribe of Indians. —Ed. 7. The renovation is funded in part by an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation grant, but primarily the funds come from one anonymous donor.

above, top Installation view of Drawing on Tradition: Kanza Artist Chris Pappan, 2016.

Photo: John Weinstein above, bottom Hall 8 Deinstallation removal from case 8A31 Silver Horn Tipi liner.

Silver Horn (Kiowa, 1860–1940), Biography of a Warrior, paint on animal hide, collection of the Field Museum, 96796. Field conservation staff at work, 2020. Photo: John Weinstein.

NO. 30, SPRING 2021 | 75

OPINION

THE PARADOX OF DECOLONIZING MUSEUMS

By Nanette Kelley (Osage/Cherokee Nations) “Indians under glass on display, we have no soul, we have no purpose, it’s a living, breathing thing, and people don’t understand that.” —Cheryl Seidner (Wiyot), former Wiyot Tribal chairperson1

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ECAUSE TRIBES EMBRACE self-determination, Vine Deloria Jr. (Standing Rock Dakota, 1933–2005) questions the concept of governmental paternalism in his book, Custer Died for Your Sins. However, regarding the private sector and universities, he speculated paternalism might be disguised as an American Indian advisory board selected from local tribal representatives and “put to use to make it appear as if all is well.” Decades after the publication of Deloria’s book, as many museums make a go at “decolonizing,” a paternalistic paradox appears to have raised its feathered head.

Cultural items that Eurocentric institutions take upon themselves to collect and exhibit to “honor” tribes do not promote the self-determination of Indigenous peoples. The word “decolonize” has been co-opted by many art institutions. In fact, the process of decolonization could be an act of dominance, the manifestation of authority that strategically removes responsibility from the hands of Indigenous peoples to manage, care for, and interpret their own culture; in a word, paternalism.

From Oxford University Press’ Lexico dictionary: “De·col·o·ni·za·tion noun. 1. the action or process of a state withdrawing from a former colony, leaving it independent. They thought they could assist the process of decolonization and local self-determination.” Exactly, that is what “they” thought, yet 30 years after the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA), information presented at the 2020 NAGPRA conference indicated that many institutions are in year 0 to 5 in repatriation of Native human remains and funerary items.

A recent California legislative hearing examined the University of

California system’s failures to return seeing Native Americans as living. “We human remains and funerary items. Is all are teachers, educators, scientists, we the problem rooted in the fact that the had a Native American astronaut go universities refused to form mandated into space, ditch diggers, we are all these advisory committees with an equal repre- things, but people stop us and think we sentation of university officials to tribal should be in museums,” said Seidner. members? More likely it is the absence of Native Americans in institutional policy “TRIBAL COMMUNITIES often have little say in how museum collections are making positions. housed or exhibited, but in this case, as DEMOGRAPHIC AND EMPLOY- with other tribally run museums,” said MENT data gathered for a diversity Steven Karr, PhD, the executive director study by the Association of Art Museum of the Agua Caliente Cultural Museum, Directors (AAMD), non-AAMD “museum staff act on the tribe’s behalf, museums, and the American Alliance carrying out what we are asked to do.” of Museums member museums indi- Unlike most museums with Native cated intellectual leadership positions American collections, Karr explained for people of color were not growing the museum and its collection are with the overall rate in US population owned solely by the Agua Caliente Band diversity. Between 2015 and 2018, the of Cahuilla Indians and administered by new American Indian or Alaska Native its tribal council. hires for decision-making positions were “Our primary audience for the found not only to be the least represented museum is the tribe itself—a teaching group, but within the survey of 30,000 tool for youth, a resource for adults, and positions, Native hires had dropped from a legacy for elders. Our secondary audi5 to 3 people.2 ence is the broader public. Everyone is welcome, but our tribal members are the INDIGENOUS ART should be inter- priority,” said Karr. preted through an Indigenous lens, but Although the pandemic has paused is it possible for a Eurocentric institution, the project, when open, the Agua oblivious to Indigenous epistemology, Caliente Cultural Museum will be among to interpret a just, intrinsic value of the largest tribal cultural centers in the living relations? “When I make things, United States and, because tribal council I ask God, Creator, to bless each stitch, and tribal membership make all the deciand it would bring comfort and joy to sions, Karr described the museum as, “a the person who receives it, and it has a very good example of decolonization.” life,” explained Cheryl Seidner (Wiyot), educator and former Wiyot tribal chair- A DECOLONIZED MUSEUM may person, who says their cultural items have come with a price. The Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki a life of their own, because whoever made Museum of the Seminole Tribe of Florida is the only tribal museum accredited by it breathed life into it.

Seidner told a story of private the American Alliance of Museums. With collectors who sold her great grand- just one AAM-accredited tribal museum mother’s baskets to a museum in Klamath in the United States, could approval Falls without giving the tribe first right of procedures be ethnocentric? For example, refusal. She had no recourse, because that during the 2020 NAGPRA conference, museum does not accept federal money. one tribal museum director stated “I looked at it as they were putting Native their facility may never be accredited Americans on display, not like we’re here, because, due to the smoke generated in but like we were here once,” she said, the collection room from holding regular stressing the importance of institutions ceremonies, the fire suppression system

1. Cheryl Seidner in discussion with the author, January 23, 2021 2. Mariët Westermann, Liam Sweeney, and Roger C. Schonfeld, “Art Museum Staff Demographic Survey 2018,” Ithaka S+R, January 28, 2019, PDF, web.

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OPINION

Intellectual Leadership Positions, by Race/Ethnicity Repeat American Association of Museum Directors Participants Only

350 305 278

300 250 Total Hires

is periodically turned off.

According to the American Alliance of Museums, accreditation benefits might include an increase in credibility from funding agencies and donors, a leveraging tool to attract support for capital improvements, and being viewed as a lower risk by the fine arts insurance industry with possibly an insurance discount. Clearly the absence of accreditation proves an inequity of resources for tribal museums.

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74 WHAT IF WE JUST LISTENED to 50 each other? One of the most captivating photography exhibitions I ever expe7 10 5 3 rienced was at the Oakland Museum 0 of California. Instead of lauding the Transcontinental Railroad’s western expansion with tones of manifest destiny, Pushing West: The Photography of Andrew J. Russell presented an honest portrayal of the subsequent US colonization, including the photographer’s own notes 2015 2018 about the imagery and an Indigenous lens context to the invasion of Native lands.

Data from Mariët Westerman, Roger Schonfeld, and Liam Sweeney, “Art Museum Staff Demographic Survey 2018,” Andrew Mellon Foundation, Ithaka S+R, Association of Art Taken from an article Russell wrote for Museum Directors, and American Alliance of Museums, January 28, 2019, PDF. his hometown paper in Upstate New York, his words about the tribes he photographed are what the Oakland Museum’s developer, described as “rich, meaningful the evolution of peoples reclaiming their curator of photography and visual culture, conversations” with Indigenous advisors sovereignty and everything they need Drew Johnson, referred to as a “cringe- recruited by Manriquez. Quotes were it to be. Indigenous peoples should be worthy piece.” However, Eurocentrism recorded from actual conversations and included in decision making, from collecdid not stand a chance in this exhibition utilized as narrative on exhibition labels. tion acquisition to first right of refusal in Johnson described two threads in liquidation, and from project inception because the permanent Native Council’s narrative was presented alongside the exhibition: one about the achievement throughout planning.

Whether it be by repatriation or Russell’s false, whitewashed descriptions. of Russell’s artistry and the achievement “Even if they disagree with what of building the railroad, the other about collaborative curation and custodianship, we are saying, they could still hear it the United States building railroads across for a museum to truly decolonize, they and it shows in their exhibitions,” said L. Native homelands without regard for need to shake off paternalism and put Frank Manriquez (Tongva/Ajachmem/ Indigenous rights. He said, “Every photo- the fate of the living culture and stories Rarámuri) regarding the collabora- graph title in the exhibit was preceded of each Being under glass back into the tive work she and Native Americans with the names of the people whose lands hands of their relations. Indigenous from across the country do at the were depicted by the photograph,” an idea peoples need to be in policy and deciOakland Museum. Since formation of recommended by the Native Council. “I sion-making positions in numbers greater the permanent Native Council in 2006, don’t know what they were expecting, than would result in being thrown into a curators have collaborated with council but it really opened their eyes,” said mixed demographic group labeled “somemembers from inception to exhibition Manriquez, “It was an interesting experi- thing else.” Institutionalized Indigenous of any project pertaining to the cultures ence to see the whole attitude of the show narratives can never truly be decolonized of Indigenous peoples. If the council’s change with Native input; it was like it was but should instead evolve collaboratively with both Native and non-Native predominantly Indigenous Californian being seen for the first time.”

Both Indigenous art and voices are museums in perpetuity. members need assistance beyond their As Cheryl Seidner said, “We as knowledge, council members them- living and breathing and should only selves recruit the most appropriate tribal be interned at an artist’s and respective Native Americans, we’re not stagnated. culture’s pleasure. For an institution to be We don’t sit in still water, we are still in members from across the nation.

To create the Indigenous content for fully inclusive, it must be understood that motion like the river, like the air, like the the Pushing West exhibition, the museum “decolonization” cannot manifest from an flames of a fire. We are still in motion and had what Christine Lashaw, experience exhibition but is an ongoing process, or people need to see this.”

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REVIEWS

ANCHORAGE

Extra Tough: Women of the North Anchorage Museum

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OMEN ARE OFTEN considered the sinew that keeps communities together and keeps us strong. They clothe us, surround us with beauty, and nurture us with love and care. Extra Tough: Women of the North,1 an exhibition curated by Francesca DuBrock at the Anchorage Museum, highlights circumpolar women’s artistic practices and perspectives on life in the North through diverse media including photography, film, paintings, sculptures, tools, and clothing. The exhibition counters narratives about the North that have tended to highlight this region as masculine and rugged, a place to be conquered and exploited. In this exhibition we see the North’s feminine side through the celebration of women and all their labors: women as mothers, women as caretakers of the land, women as workers, women as makers and creative visionaries.

The exhibition is divided into three broad themes. Women & Society features works of art that examine gender roles and gender constructs including changing ideals around beauty. Women & Place explores landscapes and women’s artistic practices made from the land and her resources, such as grasses, roots, and hides. Women & Work draws attention to gendered labor and women’s work in male-dominated professions such as the oil industry and commercial fishing.

I found myself drawn towards the films included in the exhibition.

The first film visitors encounter is Sámi artist/filmmaker Marja Helander’s Birds in the Earth (2019), a stunning short film that depicts twin Sámi ballerinas dancing through the Sámi homelands and in front of the Finnish parliament.

The film offers a poignant examination of

Indigenous land use and ownership but also shares the beauty of Arctic lands and the sound of joik (a Sámi singing style).

Another film by Inuvialuk artist Maureen Gruben, Stitching My Landscape (2017), transports viewers to the Canadian Arctic to observe Gruben’s installation of 300 meters of bright red broadcloth rolled in a zigzag across the ice in a pattern that is reminiscent of parka trim. These films share a sense of the human connection with the lands of the Arctic as an intimate, known, and embodied place.

1. The title for this exhibition relates to a brand of boots that are very common in Alaska. XTRATUF boots are often worn when commercial fishing, but Alaskans also wear them for everyday wear and sometimes even when we are dressing up. They have become a symbol for being prepared.

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a b ov e Alison Bremner (Tlingit), Wat'sa with a Pearl Earring, 2014, digital print, 18 × 25 in. Image courtesy of the Anchorage Museum.

“Wat’sa is Sm’algyax for land otter. Land otters would take the form of a beautiful woman and appear to unsuspecting men to steal them away.”

—Alison Bremner

Another section of the exhibition that drew my attention focuses on arts that express women’s experience with birth, child rearing, and coming of age. An etching by Chukchi artist Galina Ivanova Irgutegina illustrates the intimate relationship of mother and child through the act of breastfeeding. An intricately beaded moose-hide baby strap and a birchbark baby carrier provide examples of functional art forms that express love for children. Other artworks bring focus to sexuality and menstruation, such as Métis artist Audie Murray’s beaded menstrual cup and condom. An installation of a reconstruction of a Tlingit seclusion hut, constructed under the direction of Tlingit healer Meda DeWitt, offers a space for workshops about women’s health and ceremony.2 I love the representations of women showcased in this exhibition that seek to “decolonize beauty” standards. Several images in the exhibition include representations of women’s facial tattoos, a practice being revitalized in communities across the Arctic. Images such as Tlingit artist Alison Bremner’s giclée print, Wat’sa with a Pearl Earring (2014), and Iñupiaq/ Athabascan artist Erica Lord’s photograph, Native-Looking (2005), speak to the objectification of women and how Indigenous artists push back against stereotypes. Yup'ik artist Amber Webb’s drawing, Meq (2020), depicts a woman’s body as a landscape. Webb shared with me that much of her work is about moving away from Eurocentric beauty standards and taking back the power of representation of Alaska Native women: “I think about my work as making an effort to come back into balance. I have to make art to heal from the way that women are treated in the world. This is who I am. Others don’t get to tell me who I am. A lot of the artwork is taking that power back.”3 Extra Tough: Women of the North will be on display at the Anchorage Museum through September 6, 2021. If you are unable to visit the museum in person, plenty of online opportunities to explore the exhibition are available through the Anchorage Museum’s website, anchoragemuseum.org.

An accompanying digital curation project provides access to profiles of Northern women such as basket weaver and teacher Anfesia Shapsnikoff (Unangax, 1901–1973); St. Lawrence Island’s Florence Napaaq Malewotkuk (Yupik, 1906–1971), whose drawings offer intimate scenes of everyday life in the early 20th century; and Ada Blackjack (Iñupiaq, 1898–1983), a master seamstress who was the sole survivor of an Arctic expedition to Wrangel Island. Community–based programming is being offered virtually and includes a robust artist speaker series and film series. Visitors to the museum’s website can also listen to recordings of more than 50 women who share stories and wisdom about their experiences as Northern women. I congratulate the Anchorage Museum for opening space for dialogue and visibility of Northern women’s stories and art.

—Nadia Jackinsky-Sethi, PhD (Alutiiq)

JOE FEDDERSEN (COLVILLE)

FROELICK GALLERY

PORTLAND, OREGON

Gathering, 2019-20, blown glass w/ mirror/copper enamel, 17.5 x 11.25 x 11.25˝ photo: M. Gallucci

2. Historically, seclusion practices were observed in many communities in Alaska during a woman’s menstruation period and following childbirth. Some communities are working to reclaim these observances and honor women’s role as life givers.

3. Amber Webb in discussion with the author, October 14, 2020.

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REVIEWS

OKLAHOMA CITY

Spiro and the Art of the Mississippian World National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum

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PIRO MOUNDS, located in far eastern Oklahoma near the Arkansas River, on what is now the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma’s reservation, is a major precontact spiritual center with a wealth of ceremonial artworks, including more shell engravings than all other known Mississippian sites combined. The items from Spiro are not just grave goods but include sacred items from the Spirit Lodge and Great Mortuary Chamber, where hundreds of people were once buried. Members of many tribes would not visit Spiro and the Art of the Mississippian World based on that fact alone; however, tribal cultures are not uniform in how they deal with funerary items. The Wichita and Affiliated Tribes and the Caddo Nation are associated with Spiro and both have anguished over issues of repatriation of the items from Spiro and the human beings who were disinterred from there.

The Caddo Nation became the first tribe in Oklahoma to obtain a Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) grant, and they have been able to rebury the deceased people from the Mississippian era.

In 1996 Gary McAdams (Wichita) served as President of the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes and said, in a discussion about Spiro Mounds funerary items, “It was his opinion that the artefacts were not meant to be in a museum display but were meant to be buried away from the sight of individuals who had no right to view them.”1 And yet, Adams and the current political leaders of the Caddo Nation and the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes ostensibly gave their permission and support to this exhibition. What changed? How did this exhibition address complex issues surrounding the desecration of digging up the dead and sacred items and repatriation, in such a way that it won approval from Wichita and Caddo leaders?

Almost a decade in the planning, this exhibition changed dramatically from what co-curators Eric D. Singleton, PhD, curator of ethnology at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum (NCWHM), and F. Kent Reilly III, PhD, anthropology professor at the University of Texas, Austin, first envisioned. The show’s realized scheme was first: a gallery of non-Spiro artworks to provide a broader picture (from late 16th-century Theodor de Bry copperplate engravings of Indigenous peoples of Florida to artworks from throughout the Mississippian Ideological Interaction Sphere); second: a gallery of Spiro artifacts with contemporary Native artworks interspersed; third: the looting and WPA archaeological digs of the 1930s and 1940s with more Spiro items; fourth and fifth: galleries of modern and contemporary Native art; and finally: a reading lounge with children’s activities.

I asked friends more culturally informed than me how to prepare to be around culturally sensitive objects of this magnitude, and I followed their advice. The museum did not have places to leave tobacco offerings, but I found a way to leave tobacco. Any natural history museum is going to have grave goods on display, and I have been in close proximity to many Spiro and other Mississippian grave goods, including several of the works in this show. Nonetheless, I gave a wide berth to the communal ceremonial pipes thought to have been manufactured in Cahokia,2 the largest Mississippian city and home to ancestral Dhegiha Siouan– speaking peoples, the Omaha, Ponca, Kaw, Osage, and Quapaw—tribes not named as consultants in this exhibition. I do not feel I have the knowledge, or right, to be in the presence of these pipes.

The wall text failed to mention the hundreds of human beings buried in the Great Mortuary Chamber at Spiro Mounds. Exhibition labels contained

extensive conjecture about the meanings behind the artworks and how they connect to “Native American folklore.”

The catalogue is not as objectionable as the labels, which present hypotheses by non-Native archaeologists about Mississippian religious views and iconography as settled facts.

One reason why researchers find Spiro so compelling is because the Spirit Lodge of Craig Mound held the largest surviving collection of perishable items such as precontact cloth, wood, and baskets in the Southeast Woodlands.

The National Museum of Natural History houses much of the intricate lace and multicolored fabrics from Spiro, but one vivid tricolored textile is included in the Spiro exhibition. Two woven outfits by Margaret Roach Wheeler (Chickasaw/ Choctaw) conjure viewers’ imaginations of how the people might have dressed; of course, these are artistic visions not intended to be historical reconstructions.

Elizabeth Horton, an archaeologist at the University of Arkansas and Toltec Mounds, created illustrations showing the complexity of the basket designs. These, along with more recent Southeastern rivercane and commercial reed baskets, bring the basketry fragments to life.

The modern and contemporary art includes works by Caddo artists Jeri Redcorn, Chase Earles, and Wayne Earles; and Wichita photographer Brenna Nance. Deé-Tumbah Kah’-Wis (Horse Tripod Vessel) by Chase Earles is a massive and structurally complex, incised ceramic jar made from mussel shell–tempered clay that the artist harvested, processed, and pit-fired by hand. Wayne Earles, a stone sculptor, carves monolithic axes. Other exquisite examples on display—of basketry, beaded bandolier bags, ribbonwork, and more— speak to the continuance and revivals of Eastern Woodlands arts. Yet other works borrowed from the museum’s permanent collection don’t quite fit any perceivable theme. Nance’s Cradle of Love (2020) is the only photograph of a living Native person in the entire exhibition.

Several stations show contemporary artworks and encourage people to touch

1. Joe Watkins, “Spiro Mounds, Grave Goods and Politics,” in The Dead and their Possessions: The repatriation in principle, policy, and practice, ed. Cressida Fforde, Jane Hubert, and Paul Turnbull (London: Routledge, 2002), 155.

2. Thomas E. Emerson and Randall E. Hughes, “Figurines, Flint Clay Sourcing, the Ozark Highlands, and Cahokian Acquisition,” American Antiquity 65, no. 1 (January 2000), 82.

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REVIEWS

them, which no one did when I was there.

While people want a tactile experience, museums typically encourage the public to touch raw materials as opposed to finished artworks. One station showed stages of shells processed into gorgets with a beautiful finished gorget by Matthew Anderson (Cherokee Nation). But I have never seen so many children’s activities in an exhibition at the NCWHM, and I had to wonder, why in this exhibition?

This show is not designed for a Native audience; it is tailored for a non-Native public unfamiliar with Spiro or Mississippian peoples. Singleton makes that clear in his catalogue essay: “Today, when we think of art, our minds typically wander to the European underpinnings of the word.”3 Hopefully by reaching this demographic, the exhibition can raise public awareness about the Spiro Mounds Archaeological Center, which has been perennially underfunded and undersupported.

Spiro and the Art of the Mississippian World was funded in part by a $400,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH), a $40,000 NEH planning grant, a $200,000 grant from the Henry Luce Foundation, and support from the Kirkpatrick Foundation. The exhibition will travel to the Birmingham Museum of Art in Alabama and the Dallas Museum of Art. It is telling that no museums on either the West or East Coasts took the exhibition.

This exhibition grew out of the annual Mississippian Iconographic Conference sponsored by Texas State University, which is not known for privileging Native voices. The conference is far removed from the raging debates throughout the Native art world about Indigenous consultations in museums.

While key leaders in the Caddo and Wichita tribes gave their permission for the show to take place, others are notably not involved, and those who signed off on the show did not have visible contributions to the exhibition or the catalogue.

Native artists from tribes both related to and unrelated to Spiro were recruited for the exhibition. The exhibition and catalogue had a clear division: non-Native

above Chase Earles (Caddo) and Starr Hardridge (Muscogee), 2019, Everlasting Fire Plate, hand-fired ceramics, paint, collection of the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum, Oklahoma City. Image courtesy of the NCWHM.

anthropologists and archaeologists interpreted Spiro while Native contributions were limited to artist’s statements, two observations about precontact Caddo ceramics, and a wall panel about Caddo people by Phil Cross (Caddo/ Potawatomi). No Native archaeologists were involved, even though several serve as tribal historic preservation officers in Oklahoma. Nowhere in the exhibition was NAGPRA or repatriation discussed; these terms aren't even indexed in the 308-page catalogue.

This curatorial model of white experts interpreting Native culture and religion on behalf of Native peoples— widely and publicly criticized back in 2014 with The Plains Indians: Artists of Earth and Sky and continuously since— is obsolete. Curating sensitive, sacred funerary items requires more Native guidance not less, and if Native American spiritual and cultural leaders aren’t willing to make major, visible contributions to

such an exhibition, that is surely a sign.

Back in 2004, Stacey Halfmoon (Caddo/Choctaw/Delaware) wrote: “When honored with the opportunity to hold and see my ancestors’ work, I feel reverence for the piece and am humbled by the vast cultural and environmental knowledge of my ancestors to understand how to make such artwork; I feel the sacredness of the pieces and am frightened at holding something I don’t fully understand.”4 Pretending that we understand the complexities of Indigenous religions from centuries ago is a dangerous mistake. Regarding the exhibition proposal, a colleague stated, “My main disappointment is that after generations of amazing scholars and artists who have sought and gained credentials to have a seat at the table, we are still marginalized by the colonial structures that reward white fantasies.”

—America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

3. Eric D. Singleton, “A Changing Canvas: Narrative Symbology in Native American Art,” in Recovering Ancient Spiro: Native American Art, Ritual, and Cosmic Renewal, ed.

Eric D. Singleton and F. Kent Reilly III (Oklahoma City: National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum, 2020), 255.

4. Stacey Halfmoon, “Caddo Art: A Personal Perspective,” in Hero, Hawk, and Open Hand: American Indian Art of the Ancient Midwest and South, ed. Richard F. Townsend and Robert V. Sharp (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 249.

NO. 30, SPRING 2021 | 81

REVIEWS

PAWHUSKA, OKLAHOMA

Creativity 2020 : Art from Our Community Osage Nation Museum

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N CONSIDERATION OF OUR ALTERED LIVES and limited mobility, the Osage Nation Museum presents Creativity 2020: Art From Our Community to everyone with internet access. For those daring to venture out, the exhibition was open from December 18, 2020, through February 12, 2021, with a timed ticket. The exhibition offers “an exciting glimpse at the creative work that community members have been engaged in since the onset of the pandemic,” and encourages us to “share, exchange, and celebrate the enduring strength of [Osage] culture and community.”

The virtual exhibition, online at osagenationcreativity.com, allows us to view images of artworks by 34 Osage artists, see those artists’ faces (some masked), and read about their work in their own words. Most of the artwork is accompanied by text written by the artists that touches on their processes and materials, as well as their feelings and experiences during the pandemic. We see a diverse range of media, from installations, body paint, and stoneware to a spray-painted, antlered animal skull. In all of these 34 artworks, we see the recurrent themes of resilience, adaptability, and hope. Many of us are likely to relate to these themes as we endure the threat of COVID-19, but many of them have been prevalent throughout Osage history.

Of her mixed-media collage Move Forward #1, Anita Fields (Osage/ Muscogee) says: “We are familiar with what it means to persevere. Osages are resilient and know how to survive.” This theme is explored by many of the artists and is of great significance to Jessica Rosemary Harjo (Otoe/Osage/Pawnee/ Sac & Fox). About her piece, Skyprints of the Future, Harjo states, “It is meant to represent the resiliency of our people through the many hardships we face and continue to face, recognizing the connection to our seeds and earth as part of our cultural continuance.” Harjo 82 | FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

focuses on the importance of passing on knowledge that ensures the survival of the Osage people and culture in this giclée print that carefully maps out the earth and sky. The resilience of the Osage is also evident in the photograph, hapahshutse,

by Ryan Red Corn. His photograph is a striking image of ears of corn that Redcorn and his family planted and harvested during the pandemic, a vital practice to his family.

The creative process itself plays a pivotal role in the lives of these artists, especially as many have faced lockdowns and quarantines. Wendy Ponca, through her painting and sewing, and R. A. Red Corn, through her intricate beading,

above Jen Tiger (Osage), By Order of the Governor of the State of New Mexico, 2020, installation with jewelry made by the artist and mixed media, including sterling silver, copper, enamel, bison horn, hair.

REVIEWS

june 6 - august 15, 2021

Entries Due by May 14, 2021 More at www.redcloudart.show

The Heritage Center at Red Cloud Indian School 100 Mission Drive Pine Ridge, SD 57770 605.867.8257

Carmen Selam (Yakama Nation) Lazy at the Longhouse, 2020 digital illustration

emphasize the therapeutic quality of creating art. Writing colorful layers of graffiti-style script helped Ross Mashunkashey to manage the loneliness he was feeling while in isolation. Addie Roanhorse, who stressed the importance of keeping busy to maintain sanity, mentions that she has made 600 masks during the pandemic, in addition to her epoxied mixed-media piece, Topo Bison.

Just as the Osage Nation Museum has adapted the means of displaying this exhibition, making it social distancing– friendly in more ways than one, we see the ongoing adaptability of the Osage in these artists and their work. Some artists have had to adapt how they create, and many capture the adjustments we are currently making during these COVID times. Norman Akers (Osage/Pawnee) explains how he discontinued work on a series of monoprints because he could no longer go to the print shop. He then shifted his focus to photopolymer relief prints, relying on phone calls, email, and mail to complete his work. To adjust to

the presence of a four-year-old at home during lockdown, Joe Don Brave (Osage/ Cherokee) began periodically allowing his son, Preston, into his studio space.

They’ve both contributed paintings to this exhibition.

Osages have been forced to adapt over the centuries, through removal, reservations, the discovery of oil, allotment, headrights, the “reign of terror,” and pandemics. The WahZhaZhe Health Center in Pawhuska has recently adapted to provide COVID vaccinations to Native Americans in an organized, safe manner in the Osage Civic Center. The photographs of Shannon Shaw Duty and Susan Shannon address other changes Osages are making to ceremony, and to keep loved ones safe. Duty’s portrait of her grandfather at the Hominy I-loⁿ-shka (playground of the eldest son) ceremonial dances shows his strength and persistence through his participation in the postponed dances. Hominy was one of three Osage districts to hold the dances in 2020. In Girlfriends, Shannon shows a family friend masked and seated in

her powwow chair outside the window of Shannon’s home in order to visit with her granddaughter.

In many of these artworks and in the words of many of these artists, we find hope. We find fear as well, fear of not knowing when the pandemic will end and if our loved ones will make it through, but the hope is apparent throughout the exhibition. The vibrant paintings of Dena Cosby, John Parker, and Jonathan Lunsford express this hope in the face of worrying and challenging times. Ruth Shaw’s brilliant ribbonwork blanket entitled Oldest Daughter was completed while her daughter was sick with COVID-19. It was important to Shaw to finish the blanket and give it to her daughter with a wish for her healing.

The Osage Nation Museum has made accessible an inspiring exhibition that connects us to the featured artists and allows us a peek into the creative and constructive ways that they are withstanding the pandemic. We persevere.

—June Carpenter (Osage) NO. 30, SPRING 2021 | 83

REVIEWS

SANTA FE

The Moving Land: 60+ Years of Art by Linda Lomahaftewa IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts

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odest and unprepossessing in her person, the Hopi/ Choctaw artist Linda Lomahaftewa has not received the attention for her artwork that she deserves. A cursory look at her career, as seen in the exhibition The Moving Land: 60+ Years of Art by Linda Lomahaftewa, underscores the artist’s many years of active creativity and her role as an artist at the center of the Native American art world. As the wall text at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts notes, “From the deep and mysterious spaces of her early paintings to the vibrating intensity of her drawings during her years in San Francisco, to the prints and collages of the last two decades, when the artist moves, the land moves with her and moves us in turn.”

Born in Phoenix, Arizona, in 1947, Linda belonged to a family active in the arts who encouraged her to pursue her art studies. Lomahaftewa joined the inaugural class at the Institute of American Indian Arts when it opened in 1962. She studied with Lloyd Kiva New (Cherokee Nation, 1916–2002), Allan Houser (Chiricahua Apache, 1914–1994), and Fritz Scholder (Luiseño, 1937–2005), along with fellow students Earl Biss (Crow, 1947–1998), T. C. Cannon (Kiowa/Caddo, 1946–1978), Karita Coffey (Comanche), Doug Hyde (Nez Perce), Kevin Red Star (Crow), and Dr. Alfred Young Man (Cree). After graduating from IAIA, several alumnae including Linda attended San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI), where she received her BFA in 1970 and her MFA in 1971.

After graduating from SFAI, Lomahaftewa taught art at the University of California at Berkeley and Sonoma State University. The artist’s time in the Bay Area overlapped with the 84 | FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

19-month occupation of Alcatraz Island.

Lomahaftewa visited the protest site and sat in with protesters to show her support.

In 1976, Lomahaftewa returned to the IAIA as an instructor, where she spent more than 40 years teaching printmaking and two-dimensional arts. Her education at IAIA and SFAI provided a deep base of knowledge about art techniques and history from Native American, European, and other diverse cultures, which have informed her work as an artist and as a teacher.

This retrospective curated by Dr. Lara Evans (Cherokee Nation), the interim director of the IAIA Research Center, highlights the artist’s range of media from drawings, paintings, collage, pastels, monotypes, etchings, and engravings to lithography. Two of Lomahaftewa’s murals are featured, including one she created with her brother, Dan Viets Lomahaftewa (1951–2005).

above Linda Lomahaftewa (Hopi/Choctaw), Untitled, ca.

1965–1973, oil on canvas. opposite Viets Lomahaftewa (Hopi), Linda’s grandfather, visiting Linda, on right, in San Francisco, 1970. Both images courtesy of Linda Lomahaftewa.

Many of the images in Linda Lomahaftewa’s work reference her Choctaw and Hopi ancestry. These motifs include mesas, corn, dragonflies, spirals, and especially parrots. With permission from Hopi elders, she studied the form of parrots from the kiva mural paintings at Awat'ovi, an archaeological site on the Hopi Reservation that had been the site of a Spanish church, which was razed during the Pueblo Revolt. Lomahaftewa had painted parrots from the time she was a child and has integrated the Awat'ovi parrot in many works, including prints, paintings, and ceramics.

The Moving Land includes works that span Lomahaftewa’s entire storied career, from her time as a student through today. The show opens with works the artist has created since 2020, emphasizing her continued dedication to creating art. Some of these images address contemporary life, including a figure wearing a plague mask in reference to the COVID-19 pandemic, while other works show her explorations of abstract patterns with a series of colorful collages made from different drawn patterns. While a student at IAIA, Lomahaftewa designed a silkscreen textile in a class with Lloyd Kiva New. Some of the cloth was used as part of the set design for the 1971 movie Billy Jack, part of which was filmed at the IAIA campus. Displayed dramatically for the exhibition, the cloth, which had been archived at the school, hangs from the ceiling and down the wall.

This exhibition underscores her role as a seminal figure in the Native American art world. Through and video and archival materials, such as exhibition advertisements and letters, , the retrospective considers the wide circle of Native American artists surrounding Lomahaftewa. She has shown her works in exhibitions with Karita Coffey, Jody Folwell (Santa Clara Pueblo), Helen Hardin (Santa Clara Pueblo), Jolene Rickard (Tuscarora), Ramona Sakiestewa (Hopi), Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Salish/ Cree/Shoshone), and Kay WalkingStick (Cherokee Nation).

Lomahaftewa’s work has been included in notable shows including Our Land/Ourselves: America Indian Contemporary Arts (1990), Shared Visions: Native American Painters and Sculptors in the Twentieth Century (1993), and Indian Humor (1995). Her work has gained attention in the United States and abroad and she has won numerous accolades, including many awards at SWAIA’s Santa Fe Indian Market and the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation’s Power of Art Award in 2001. An adventurous traveler, Linda has visited several continents and reached destinations including China, Russia, and New Zealand.

The museum reflects Lomahaftewa’s work in the beautiful design of the show, using different wall colors suggesting earth, sky, and water to display her paintings and prints to their best advantage. On view through July 18, 2021, The Moving Land: 60+ Years of Art by Linda Lomahaftewa offers a wider perspective on a talented artist whose life touches on so many historically notable happenings.

—Suzanne Newman Fricke, PhD

Contemporary Native American Art and Jewelry Market homeandaway.gallery 207 423-8473

Jacob D. Morgan

Jewelry | Baskets | Sculpture | Beadwork

NO. 30, SPRING 2021 | 85

BOOK REVIEWS

Jim Denomie Sketch Work Jim Denomie Rez Rabbit Press, 2020

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IM DENOMIE IS KNOWN for his vibrant, prismatic paintings, some measuring as large as eight feet tall and ten feet wide. His narrative artworks often recount injustices of the past and present but in a satirical and humorous manner. Other works depict surrealistic dreamscapes, portraits, and erotic scenes. His paintings require a careful look in order to catch a detail on a sign or Jimi Hendrix placed on Mount Rushmore. His latest publication, Jim Denomie Sketch Work, is a massive, hardbound book containing 174 black-and-white ink sketches along with essays by Denomie, artist Andrea Carlson (Grand Portage Ojibwe), and Minneapolis Institute of Arts curator Robert Cozzolino.

Denomie, a member of the Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Lake Superior Chippewa Indians of Wisconsin, was born in Hayward, Wisconsin, and grew up in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

He holds a bachelor of fine arts degree in visual arts from the University of Minnesota and has received numerous awards and fellowships, including from the Bush Foundation, Joan Mitchell Foundation, McKnight Foundation, and the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation. His work is in the collections of the Denver Art Museum, the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the Walker Art Center. While known for his paintings, Denomie also works in printmaking, photography, and mixed-media sculpture.

Drained of any color, the ink drawings in Sketch Work are powerful glimpses into Denomie’s creative process. Some sketches are studies for his recent large-scale paintings, such as Eminent Domain: A Brief History of America (2011); Off the Reservation (or Minnesota Nice) (2012); Oz, The Emergence 86 | FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

(2017); and Standing Rock 2016 (2018). In the introduction, Denomie explains that sketching functions as note-taking and recording thoughts and dreams. Moreover, as he offers on page seven, “sketching is instrumental for evolving ideas and for understanding the incomplete.” Through these intense drawings, Denomie provides a peek into the construction of his paintings and their evolution. The book includes 16 sketches for the Oz, The Emergence painting, with vignettes being reworked and others being omitted completely.

Some sketches recount dreams and are labeled as such.

One dream occurred while staying at a former Catholic mission school on a reservation in Oregon where, in his dream, he enacted revenge on a priest who had been sexually abusing children. Other dream sketches include the figure of a rabbit—a being who often appears in his paintings and who arrives during profound moments in Denomie’s life. A few sketches are extremely private and personal—quick outlines that memorialize the passing of family members and other loved ones. There are playful and lighthearted sketches, such as a 2012 drawing of Denomie seated in his recliner chair joining artist Ernie Pepion (Blackfeet, 1943–2005) in his wheelchair “horse,” chasing buffalo across the sky.

In 2013, after completing his first McKnight Visual Artists Fellowship, Location Books published a limited-edition sketch book of Denomie’s work. Denomie hoped to release a larger book of sketches and started organizing this project in 2019.

When the COVID-19 pandemic began taking the lives of hundreds (and now hundreds of thousands) of people in the United States, Denomie worked vigorously on this book. He also continued sketching. The Covid Tales sketch from April 2020 depicts people in front of a state capitol building protesting face mask mandates with one person holding a sign saying, “Give Me Liberty or Give Me COVID 19.” In the sketch Rabbits Confronting Disease from March 2020, three ghastly figures arrive upon a colony of rabbits, but the rabbits hold weapons to defend themselves from the strangers. These sketches, whether true to life or allegorical, document our present moment.

above Jim Denomie (Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe), Study for Standing Rock 2016, 2018 pen and ink on paper, 11 × 14 in.

Cozzolino’s essay discusses Denomie’s artistic process and recurring themes. Concerning the artworks that speak to historical events, Cozzolino explains, “They are powerful history paintings of our time, made with the knowledge that past and present speak to one another, talk back, argue, and ultimately strive for a future.” The past is not removed from the actions of the present. For example, the treatment of Native people during the Wisconsin Walleye Wars of the late 1980s correlates to the treatment of the Water Protectors in 2016 and 2017 during the Dakota Access Pipeline protests—two events Denomie recounts. Sketch Work brings together numerous drawings about police brutality, white privilege, and violence against black and brown bodies—the shooting at the Sutherland Springs church, the killing of Atatiana Jefferson in her home while babysitting, the murder of George Floyd, etc. Denomie does not shy away from his portrayals of the perpetrators: they are depicted as devils, Nazis, and members of the Ku Klux Klan.

His work offers a platform where he can portray, memorialize, amplify, or even shame those he draws.

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Carlson, also an Anishinaabe painter, is the perfect essayist to discuss Denomie’s work. She provides insight that only another artist can provide. Carlson opens with a memory from a Minneapolis café when Denomie discussed the life of Woodrow “Woody” Keeble (Dakota, 1917–1982), a veteran of both World War II and the Korean War who did not receive proper recognition for his deeds until after his passing. She describes Denomie’s elation at sharing information about Keeble’s life with her. He then paid tribute to the veteran in A Beautiful Hero, Woody Keeble with Keeble on horseback carrying a staff riding through enemy lines. Carlson’s essay brilliantly brings attention to both the “joy and trauma” of Denomie’s art, stating that “his work offers a platform where he can portray, memorialize, amplify, or even shame those he draws.” She demonstrates how Denomie is a storyteller, historian, and social commentator who brings urgency and honesty to what he depicts, exposing the beauty and the horror.

Sketch Work is an artist’s book that one will revisit many times. Each glance brings another detail into focus or leads into another recurring theme. Since there are copious sketches, two essays about his art were not enough. There could have been at least two more essays, particularly discussions of Denomie’s use of erotic images and his dreamscapes. Nevertheless, it is such a timely, compelling publication that it could not have waited any longer.

—Anya Montiel, PhD (Mestiza/Tohono O’odham descent) NO. 30, SPRING 2021 | 87

BOOK REVIEWS

Making History: IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts Edited by Nancy Marie Mithlo University of New Mexico Press, 2020

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ERSISTING IN ITS JOURNEY to expand Native arts production and dialogue, the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) offers this publication as a guide to critically engage with the Indigenous arts of Turtle Island produced between the late 20th and early 21st centuries. The book dovetails with IAIA’s new master of fine arts program in studio arts, and, taken together, this strengthens the institution’s commitment to furthering Indigenous leadership in arts discourses.

Carefully edited by Nancy Marie Mithlo (Chiricahua Apache), Making History teaches arts professionals how to navigate Native arts analysis through Indigenous methodologies as demonstrated in featured essays. The chapters serve as a toolbox for creating narrative accompaniments to visual forms in the practices of writing, teaching, exhibiting, and conversing about Native arts. In doing so, Making History fills a need in the field to point scholarly, studio, and museum practitioners toward informed 88 | FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

considerations that lead to collaborative processes of Indigenized placemaking through visual arts. The book provides a resource that could find its way to educational institutions globally.

In her essay, Mithlo directs readers to observe visual patterns in Native artworks through noting formal references to duality, refusal, and renewal in figurative works, especially nudes. She discusses the subjectivity of multiple, intertwined perceptions as well as Native artists’ self-empowerment, resiliency, and disarming techniques that bridge time, place, and power in materiality.

In a subsequent essay, John Paul Rangel (Mestizo) articulates the firm connections between Indigenous aesthetics and Indigenous mapping through a lived experience framework. He moves through the contours that shape these relations, with a particular emphasis on ways of knowing, physical place, and conceptual space. In naming these embodied sites of Indigeneity, Mithlo and Rangel hold the door open for arts professionals to engage these concepts in their interactions with Native arts.

Suzanne Newman Fricke’s contribution focuses on images of Native dances and regalia in art. By applying Rangel’s framework, she finds productive entry points in intersections that link place-based ideologies, lines of respect, and cross-cultural influence. Following this essay, Lara M. Evans (Cherokee Nation), as both an art historian and an artist, presents readers with creative pedagogical strategies for university classrooms that offer ideas to liven up undergraduate curricula. Applicable to in-person or remote learning formats, her Native art history courses include assignments where students write a letter to an author or artist, perform a library scavenger hunt, and draft an exhibition proposal. Fricke and Evans offer readers techniques that trace pathways to incorporate critical analyses of and interactions with Native arts into regular frequency.

In her essay, Patsy Phillips (Cherokee Nation) devotes an in-depth discussion to the art practice of C. Maxx Stevens (Seminole/Muscogee), who bases her installations on her dreams

and everyday life. Phillips’s essay draws from her interview with Stevens, and this strategy serves to teach readers how to engage a biographical approach to Native arts writing. As Phillips conveys, Stevens’s mixed-media installations invoke affective remembrance from audiences who empathize with her tracings of memories. In large-scale sculptures with complex textures, her works fuse her own experiences of survival and trauma with those of loved ones. As Phillips notes, and I concur, Stevens deserves a monograph that takes a long view of her evolving practice and “no rules” approach to experimental installation.

The book also includes contributions focused on Charles Dailey and David Warren (Santa Clara Pueblo). Of the former, Jessie Ryker-Crawford (White Earth Chippewa) and Stephen C. Fadden (Mohawk) pay tribute to Dailey, who established IAIA’s first museum studies program in 1971 and positioned his career in allyship to Native artists and arts professionals. Following this homage, one of Dailey’s writings provides a succinct history of Native arts education in the 20th century—an overview valuable to readers seeking historical context for IAIA’s emergence in 1962. After this discussion, Mithlo offers an interview with Warren that shares with readers his perspective that the significant changes shaping the field of Native arts in the 21st century remain to be fully understood.

This dialogue with Warren returns attention to the sovereignty of Indigenous mapping and forges a connection to Rangel’s analytic framework that hinges on Indigenized, aesthetic processes.

The publication concludes with a set of classroom standards put forth by David Wade Chambers. These concepts formed the basis of the Native Eyes Project (NEP)—an online curriculum designed

by Indigenous scholars in North America and Australia in 1999 that IAIA used for virtual course instruction beginning in 2007. In this discussion, Chambers stresses the importance of pedagogies that shift and overlap between Indigenous, Western or cross-cultural spaces of knowledge production. He includes the themes that fueled the NEP and still drive IAIA’s standards today. These indigenizing facets encompass continuity and culture;

MUSIC REVIEW

local and global dynamics; individual and community identities; and processes of perception, representation, and power.

Making History lives up to its promise as a textbook for teaching Native arts. It’s a resource that I envision on reference shelves in many universities and museums, with applications in high school curricula. Its centering of lived experience through an ethics of Indigenized collaboration adds complexity and nuance to Native arts discourses, from the generous inclusion of IAIA collection images to conversational essays. Making History reminds readers of a constant amid tumultuous change: that interdependent, coauthoring practices give form to art, dialogue, and critical processes of looking.

—Michelle J. Lanteri

Khu.éex' WOOch 2021

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ASED IN SEATTLE, Khu.éex' is a multicultural Northwest Coast jazz/funk/experimental band that began after Tlingit artist Preston Singletary met the late Bernie Worrell of Parliament-Funkadelic in 2013. After the passing of Worrell and singer Clarissa Rizal (Tlingit), the band evolved but sustained its original vision. In March 2016 Khu.éex' recorded a panoply of new music that resulted in two triple LP albums: first Héen (2019) and now their fourth album, WOOch, released in April.

WOOch, a Tlingit word that translates as “together,” encapsulates the

philosophy of WOO that Worrell lived by: bringing people together through music. The liner notes explain their new work as “Focusing on the concept of the Alaska Native communities’ shared experiences, the album explores the connection between historical and contemporary issues and intergenerational strength in the face of trauma.

Khu.éex'’s most expansive work yet, ranging stylistically from Funk to spiritual jazz to Americana to drone metal.” I would also include psychedelia and electroacoustic. Ultimately most of its aesthetic influences come from music born and evolved in the 1970s.

WOOch features Bernie Worrell on keyboards, Preston Singletary on bass, Captain Raab on guitar, Gene Tagaban on flute, Skerik on saxophone, Hans Teuber on wind instruments, Stephen Nistor on drums and other percussion, Denny Stern on percussion, and Tim Kennedy on keyboards, with vocals provided by Tagaban, Nahaan, Indrayani Ananda, and Carly Kienow.

Meant as an odyssey to be experienced intimately from beginning to end, this album is a meditation, a revolutionary call, and a deep joyful celebration of togetherness—WOOch! This band, its concept, and music harkens back in time, as well as moving forward. Anyone familiar with Parliament-Funkadelic or Electric Miles will feel at home with this album. The particular combination of individuals, languages, and concepts is unique, but what is most clear is the spirit in which the music was made and intended to be listened to.

The first track, “10,000 Generations,” is a sonic stream with a deep voice that rises, speaking in Tlingit—a centering, a foundation for gathering and a beginning from which the rest of the album will spring forth. The next track runs seamlessly from the first, invoking ’70s-era funk and fusion, a hypnotic groove lasting over eight minutes, or five decades, or generations. The instrumental introduction creates a pocket that holds voices, looping a repetitive pattern and supporting more spoken words in Tlingit. Eventually the horns arrive in a sonic response. The bass percolates, while holding it down as

the keyboard solo is revealed. There are a lot of nuanced touches I love on this album that one may only hear when fully engaged—little nuggets that reward the committed listener, like the long fade-out in “Courtroom of Thieves” that ends side A. “Residential Thieves” begins side B as a psychedelic drone.

The drums enter languidly, joined by glistening bass and keyboards, dripping in reverb and delay. Well-placed in the album, this track provides a moment of deep reflection and prepares listeners for the rest of the journey.

An instant transportation device, the album’s high-quality, 21st-century recording mix caresses the aesthetic from decades ago. These electronic sounds from the beginning of the rock world, so pleasing and inclusive, call out to us to stay focused. Unnecessary resistance dissolves in the listener’s reflection.

Brilliant colors interchange among instruments and timbres, revealing a large ensemble together in a wonderful spirit.

This album was Bernie Worrell's last studio project before he passed on three months later in June 2016. His playing is remarkable, especially knowing that he was suffering from cancer at the time.

Best known for founding ParliamentFunkadelic, Worrell also played keyboards with the Talking Heads and performed in many other projects. Singletary says he was the spiritual mentor of Khu.éex'.

“I lucked out big time connecting with Bernie Worrell, which in turn attracted many other great people,” Singletary reflects. “I was friends with Skerik since the late ’80s and so that was also the magnet. Bernie was drawn to the group in part because he was intrigued with the fact that he had Native roots but had not connected with them fully. In some ways this is how he bonded with the group.”

Preston Singletary is extremely enthusiastic about WOOch: “My feeling about this album is it’s the most diverse batch of music we did on any LP. There is spiritual jazz (‘Concept of Time Itself ’), Afrobeat (‘10,000 Generations’), funk (‘G Ya Self ’), spoken word, etc. Bernie helped us define our sound and inspired us to continue on in new directions.”

—Thollem NO. 30, SPRING 2021 | 89

ART+LIT

Blackfeet Author and Educator

STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES

By Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD

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ORN IN WEST TEXAS in 1972, Stephen Graham Jones is an enrolled member of the Blackfeet Tribe of the Blackfeet Indian Reservation of Montana, who has already published more than 25 books.

His novels and story collections range from horror and sci-fi to crime and pop culture. Jones earned his doctoral degree from Florida State University.

The National Endowment for the Arts named him a fellow, and the Texas Book Festival presented him with the 2020 Texas Writer Award. He has received a Bram Stoker Award, a Texas Institute of Letters Award for Fiction, and four This Is Horror awards.

His first novel, The Fast Red Road: A Plainsong (2000), a fantastical account of outlaw life and recovery of Indigenous identity, spurred writer and scholar Gerald Vizenor (White Earth Ojibwe) to remark, “Jones is an original, visionary storier.” Other works, such as Mapping the Interior (2017) and The Only Good Indians (2020), combine Jones’s fascination with horror fiction and the impact of colonialism on everyday life in the United States.

In November, Jones contributed an X-Men story to the Marvel Comics’ anthology, Marvel’s Voices: Indigenous Voices #1, with artist David Cutler (Qualipu Mi'kmaq).

Currently Jones teaches at the University of Colorado, Boulder, as the Ivena Baldwin Professor of English and Professor of Distinction.

MRS: Thank you for speaking with me, Stephen. It’s been 20 years since you published your debut novel, The Fast Red Road. How do you perceive that work now, with historical distance?

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SGJ: It’s a debut novel, which is to say, it’s the book where I thought this was going to be my only chance to get to the shelf ever, so I better say everything in my head and in my heart all at once. Which of course can result in ten pounds of words in a five-pound bag. Most debut novels are like this, I think.

But, too, The Fast Red Road—I had no idea how to write a novel, but I had to go fast, so each time I hit that ten- or twelve-page wall of “what next?” I’d just reach in my head, pluck a piece of my own life out, and smear it on the page, maybe change some names. The Fast Red

Road is a weirdly autobiographical book for me, I mean. But aren’t they all?

MRS: Though you write in several genres, including crime fiction, horror, comic books, and even articles for truck-enthusiast magazines, I’m curious to know if you can discuss the underlying idea or logic that binds everything you create?

SGJ: Sincerity is what I always look for first in any art I engage, and so, I think, that’s kind of the bar I always hold myself to as well. Whether I’m doing a piece for money or whether it’s because I’ve got

ART+LIT

a fire inside and typing’s the only thing that’ll keep it at bay, I try to find what matters in it to me and then hit that head-on.

Indians tend to be spooky. I’ve heard a lot of scary stories, sitting around tables in hotel lobbies, after everyone’s gone home.

MRS: Tales of horror are prevalent in most, if not all, cultures. My friend and colleague, the Anishinaabay writer Eli Baxter, told me that when he was a boy living on the trapline in Northern Ontario, he was frightened of Wendigo, the cannibal monster who lived in the woods, and also of Paagak, a skeleton with long black hair who shrieks during the night. What do you see as the connections between these historical stories and the Indigenous horror fiction of today?

SGJ: Indians tend to be spooky. I’ve heard a lot of scary stories, sitting around tables in hotel lobbies, after everyone’s gone home. I don’t know why so many of us are spooky, really. But, if there’s some Indian out there who’s not, then, don’t worry—I’m spooky enough for both of us.

MRS: These must be petrifying, especially for a child, but such stories educate or provide moral lessons. For

above Jonathan Thunder (Red Lake Ojibwe), Mamaawi (Together), 2020, animation still.

Image courtesy of the artist.

example, don’t stray too far from home or you will become lost in the woods (and consequently be eaten alive by Wendigo). Is writing horror stories a methodology for exploring morality?

And if so, what lessons can be taken from reading horror?

left Cover of Stephen Graham Jones's The Only Good Indians: A Novel (Gallery Publishing Group, 2020). opposite Stephen Graham Jones. Photo: Gary Isaacs.

Image courtesy of the author.

SGJ: Yeah, most horror stories tend to be built on the scaffolding of a cautionary NO. 30, SPRING 2021 | 91

ART+LIT

tale. But … zombie stories, say. If you read one and then are worried about something shuffling up behind you, doing you harm, and you prepare yourself for that, you watch your surroundings closer because who knows, then … you’re safer in all the parking garages of your life, aren’t you?

MRS: Does your Blackfeet identity make its way into your protagonists, characters, plots, and themes?

SGJ: A lot of my characters tend to be Blackfeet, yeah. Just because that’s kind of the default setting for me. I don’t know what it’s like to be Osage, I can’t imagine being Diné, but I’ve got a pretty good handle on being Blackfeet, I think. Or being the kind of Blackfeet I am. I don’t want to suggest there’s just one way to be Blackfeet.

But my characters have always been Native, just that doesn’t always get said out loud in the story. I far prefer a story to have Indianness be incidental rather than instrumental.

MRS: Mapping the Interior and The Only Good Indians tackle themes of colonialism, often through a thriller or horror lens. What can thrillers or horrors that engage Indigenous history in the Americas teach us about colonialism?

SGJ: Man, I’m not even trying to do any teaching. I just want to have real people on the page, so that the story can matter more, can feel more real, and thus, maybe, be more scary. That’s how scares work. Something with teeth “over there” doesn’t matter, but something with teeth right beside you in your own actual world, that’s terrifying. But angling for that felt reality of course involves capturing real people on the page as best I can, and that often involves taking the knees out of dominant and reductive conceptions of who we are and how we live. But my job’s actually to entertain, not to teach. At least the way I see it.

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MRS: I’m curious to know your thoughts on how teaching has transformed your writing and what you continue to learn from your students in Boulder?

SGJ: I hear myself articulating this or that about fiction or principles of fiction or reading or techniques or best practices, all of that and more, and then, when I’m working on my own stuff, I kind of flash back to me saying that, and don’t want to be a hypocrite, so . . . I feel compelled to be better than I am, to not cheat, to hold myself to, if not higher principles, then at least principles that I’ve presented as decent enough to follow.

MRS: What is writing missing today? What stories need to be told?

SGJ: Inclusivity is needed, of course, but that’s more at the industry level than the writing level. I think what fiction needs is, maybe, more chances with form? That’s what I always respect the most. It’s like watching someone walk a tightrope with no net below. When they fall, they splat. But when they don’t? Then it’s amazing. It takes our breath away.

MRS: Who are you reading?

SGJ: Just finished Carmen Maria Machado’s The Low, Low Woods and was so impressed. Silvia MorenoGarcia’s Mexican Gothic, too. And Rebecca Roanhorse’s Black Sun. MRS: Can you talk about the X-Men comic you recently wrote for Marvel? How did that come about?

SGJ: They just called me up, and said, first, do you want to write for us, and, second, what Native character would you like? I went with Silver Fox since she’s Blackfoot, and that’s pretty close to Blackfeet. Close enough for me.

After that it was just scripting and sketches, pencils and ink, colors and letters. All the editorial assistance was wonderful, too. Great experience all around, really.

ART+LIT

MRS: Finally, what are you working on right now?

SGJ: Revising another slasher novel, out at the end of next summer. Writing two feature films right now, and one television pilot. And always stories. But, with all these other projects weighing in, probably less stories than usual.

DEMONTHEORY.NET

JONATHAN THUNDER RED LAKE OJIBWE ARTIST Jonathan Thunder creates haunting and complex videos and visual art inspired by his culture, daily life, and lucid imagination.

His brooding, dreamlike works, reminiscent of Symbolism and Surrealism, dovetail Ojibwe animal stories and oral history with pop culture. Thunder addresses the “loss and recovery of Indigenous sovereignty, environmental welfare, and humorous social commentary,” as he writes in his bio, and then adds in his artist statement: “My work often reflects the ridiculous nature of current events.”

An alumnus of the Institute of American Indian Arts, Thunder also studied visual effects and motion graphics and earned a bachelor’s degree from the Art Institutes International Minnesota, where he gained the technical skills for 3D design and computer animation, a burgeoning field among Indigenous artist-storytellers and language advocates.

Beginning in 2018, Tweed Museum of Art in Duluth, Minneapolis, commissioned Thunder to study their Nelson Collection and create an artistic response.

He rendered three Ojibwe stories “that related to the land, sky, water, and language,” as a 3D computer animation, Manifest’o (2018–19), with accompanying sculptures and a mask, as he noted in his statement.

SWAIA awarded him several Best of Class awards when Class X Moving Images was still part of Santa Fe Indian Market from 2014 to 2017. Giving back

to his community and inspiring the next generations of artists, Thunder has led several youth painting workshops and group mural projects in the Great Lakes region and has provided visuals for educational Ojibwe language videos for schools, museums, and tribal programs.

Fellow Native animator and Indigenous language activist Joseph Erb (Cherokee Nation) says, “Jonathan is one of the most sought out Indigenous animators in North America.”

The Pollock-Krasner Foundation recognized Thunder’s risk-taking in painting by awarding him a major artist grant. Joseph Nease Gallery in Duluth and Wakaja Gallery in Santa Fe carry Thunder’s artwork.

—America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

above Jonathan Thunder (Red Lake Ojibwe), Defend the Sacred, 2017, acrylic on canvas, private collection. Image courtesy of the artist. opposite Jonathan Thunder (Red Lake Ojibwe), detail of Deer Woman Gets a Manicure, 2016, acrylic on canvas, 54 × 48 in. Image courtesy of the artist.

THUNDERFINEART.COM NO. 30, SPRING 2021 | 93

MEMORIAL

BILL CHURCH January 16, 1945–December 3, 2020

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Y FATHER, WILLIAM LOREN CHURCH, also known as “Swamp Buck” and “Woodland Willie” to those who knew him best, was a sculptor who created detailed wood carvings.

He transformed old fallen trees and left-behind stumps into cranes, bears, eagles, figures, and his unique Cigar Store Custer series. My dad saw the life form in any log and knew just what it was going to be before he started. He sold his carvings to collectors, businesses, and tribal communities around the nation.

Bill was also a master tailor, who made ribbon shirts and taught ribbon shirt–making. He could make a tailored fit shirt for anyone given cloth, ribbon, a sewing machine, and a few hours.

He made unique ribbon and appliqué Hudson Bay blanket vests still worn by those lucky enough to have one today.

He embellished these with clan and floral patterns. They had pockets on the inside and out for pens, cell phones, wallet, bullets—whatever the occasion, he had a pocket ready for it.

Well-versed in many areas, Bill was an avid supporter of Native arts in Michigan. He was an avid hunter and would turn the uneaten parts of the deer into leg lampstands, antler buttons and earrings, tools, knives, and anything else his mind imagined. He was a true believer in practicing and sharing the Anishinaabe cultural teachings of his people.

My dad took me to harvest my first black ash tree. He was driving to his deer camp and there we gathered our first black ash tree together, with many more to come. He demonstrated how to remove the bark, pound off the growth rings, and split the growth rings into basket-weaving splints. Bill was a mentor and teacher of harvesting and processing techniques for black ash and natural fibers, as well as other forest materials. He shared the best locations and times of year to harvest natural materials and taught the proper processing practices. He also had an encyclopedic store of cultural knowledge, history, and stories that he would share 94 | FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

above Bill Church among his woodcarvings in Hopkins, Michigan. Photo: A. Meredith

on demand when asked any question. My dad shared the oral history of Michigan tribes with the Gun Lake Band youth each year, teaching lessons through animated and captivating storytelling.

Bill was descended from centuries of chiefs, warriors, and knowledge keepers. After earning a history degree from Western Michigan, he served the community as a public school teacher, coach, and community development activist. In the 1970s and early 1980s, Bill led a campaign to reinvigorate Native culture and practices in the Straits region of Michigan, which bridged the Lower and Upper Peninsulas. While living in Sault Ste. Marie, he developed the Mackinac Island Traditional Values seminar. He also launched a Native newspaper and directed and hosted the first Indian television programming in Michigan called The Woodland Way and Spirit in the Sky. Bill cared deeply for all his Anishinaabe relatives and his community, and he led a campaign to ensure

funding for a tuition waiver for Michigan colleges and universities for members of all Michigan tribes. Bill used his extensive knowledge of Michigan Indian history to implement policies that helped advance Michigan tribal communities to the sovereign nations they are today.

In 1985 Governor James Blanchard appointed Bill to serve as executive director of the Michigan Commission on Indian Affairs. Under his stewardship, six Michigan tribes received their federal recognition, which has radically enhanced the lives of present-day Michigan Indians.

He personally guided three tribes through the Bureau of Indian Affairs’ recognition process—the last being the tribe he was a member of at passing, the Match-ebe-nash-she-wish Band of Pottawatomi Indians of Michigan. He was a direct descendant of Chief Mashipinashiwish (Potawatomi, fl. 1780s–1820s).

Just last summer the Michigan Traditional Arts Program awarded him the Michigan Heritage Award for his extensive knowledge of Michigan Native history and his tribal advocacy and storytelling. He shared the tribe’s history and stories with the youth and anyone who would listen. Sharing history was his passion. Bill could start your family tree at 1800 and work his way up the present.

Bill lived his life for his family and community always thinking of future generations. My dad said he never got upset with anyone but wanted to understand them. Bill lived simply and began his journey in Hopkins, Michigan, where his life began, in the land of the Three Fires Confederacy—his ancestors. “Natives who entrust their history, culture, and language preservation to others, including the white man, prove they have learned little about tradition,” he once said. Bill Church’s historical and cultural knowledge will continue to be passed on to future generations through his children and grandchildren. His stories, histories, and life experiences will live on through all who knew him.

—Kelly Church (Pottawatomie/ Ottawa/Ojibwe)

MEMORIAL

CHRISTINE NOFCHISSEY McHORSE December 21, 1948–February 17, 2021

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HROUGH MY 45 YEARS OF EXPERIENCE working with micaceous clay, I’d say I’ve gained confidence and sweet fusion. I’ve used other types of clay, but none compares to the natural clay.

What is there not to like about it? It is my life.”

Christine Nofchissey McHorse (Navajo) shared those words with First American Art Magazine in 2015, during the five-year run of her influential solo exhibition Dark Light: The Ceramics of Christine Nofchissey McHorse. The exhibition was organized by the CFile Foundation, New York, and curated by Garth Clark and Mark Del Vecchio, who represented her work for many years. When news of her passing circulated through the art world, tributes and memories came from every direction, recalling her generous spirit, gracious friendship, and prodigious creative vision.

Asked about the legacy of her work, Clark emphasized its worldwide impact. “The later black micaceous pots ... took her across borders, from her many years at Indian markets to worldwide acclaim in the contemporary fine arts,” Clark wrote.

“Her forms were unprecedented; complex, architectonic volumes that interlocked to create totemic vessels. Her art had as much to do with Constantin Brâncuși, Jean Arp, and Antoni Gaudí as they had to do with Native American pottery.”

McHorse was born in Morenci, Arizona. Along with two of her sisters, she attended the Institute of American Indian Arts from 1963 to 1968, studying ceramics with Ralph Pardington, jewelry with Charles Loloma (Hopi), sculpture with Allan Houser (Chiricahua Apache), and design with Fritz Scholder (Luiseño). At IAIA she settled on clay as a primary medium.

She also met silversmith Joel McHorse (Taos Pueblo), who she married in 1969. She credited Joel’s grandmother, Lena Archuleta (Taos), with teaching her to work with the micaceous clay that led to the distinct, thin-walled sculpture for which she became known. The intricate inner structure of the sculptures required careful planning and sketches so precise that they were shown along with the sculptures in the Dark Light exhibition.

Christine participated in the Santa Fe Indian Market from 1983 to 2005, winning best of show in both pottery and sculpture. She also influenced the event as the first president of the Council of Artists, which led to greater self-advocacy for artists with the Southwestern Association for Indian Arts that hosts Indian Market.

Artist Sallyann Milam Paschall (Cherokee Nation) moved into the studio next door to McHorse’s studio in 2008. She said of McHorse, “She and her family just kind of gathered me up.”

“I had occasion to see Chris’s new work for about a ten-year stretch,” recalls Paschall. “She had everything planned out, and she never wasted anything. It always went back into a jar and was reworked and reconstituted and worked again.

Usually when you go into a clay artist’s studio, there is dust everywhere. The first time I stepped into her studio, I was blown away, because I expected an inch of dust, and there was none.”

above Christine McHorse in her studio. Image courtesy of Garth Clark.

Paschall said McHorse’s relationship with clay was special.

“She just had this way with clay,” said Paschall. “She never fought it. She would touch it and manipulate it, and she just knew exactly what it was capable of. I got to see the inside of some of the sculptures, where you wouldn’t be able to look after they were finished, and they were just as immaculate and pristine on the inside as they were on the outside.” The same was often said about their maker.

Potter Jane Osti (Cherokee Nation) was among several artists invited to lunch with McHorse when Dark Light showed at the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art in Norman, Oklahoma, in 2014. “Her art was so wonderful, just exquisite, and she spoke about it so eloquently and with such ease,” recalled Osti. “She was so real and down-to-earth. Her beauty and the beauty of her work will live on in my heart and mind. She was truly a creative genius.”

Osti’s sentiment was echoed by many artists, friends, institutions, and collectors, including Karl Duncan (Arikara/ Hidatsa/Mandan/San Carlos Apache), the executive director of Poeh Cultural Center, who wrote: “She has touched so many people in this community, and we honor her grace that we felt even through her work.”

McHorse’s work is in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Denver Art Museum, New Mexico Museum of Art, National Museum of American Art, Denver Museum of Natural History, Navajo Nation Museum, and Rockwell Museum of Western Art. Her friend Paschall summed up what many continue to say about McHorse, “Not only was she a marvelous artist, she was just a marvelous human being.”

—Stacy Pratt, PhD (Mvskoke) NO. 30, SPRING 2021 | 95

MEMORIAL

MARDEN PANIZA December 15, 1956–January 6, 2021

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OVID-19 HAS EXACTED A TERRIBLE TOLL on Indigenous peoples across the Americas. On January 6, Abya Yala, the Americas, suffered another loss with the death of Panama’s Marden Paniza (Guna).

Paniza was a bandleader, composer, and pianist who in recent decades led efforts to blend Indigenous rhythms with jazz and other genres seen as distant from Native Americans. “De Yandup a Aspinwall” is Paniza’s most recognized piece and reflects his emergence as an urban Indigenous artist.

The son of a teacher, Paniza grew up in Guna Yala, the Guna homeland and autonomous region that stretches for 140 miles along Panama’s northeastern coast.1 Most of the narrow territory’s inhabitants live on several dozen littoral islands, while over half of the Guna now reside elsewhere, principally in or around Panama City. Paniza’s community, YandubNarganá, had long been an entry point for missionaries and officials determined to control Guna Yala. By his own admission, Paniza’s youth provided a weak foundation in Guna culture. Yandub-Narganá was a base of colonization; nevertheless, its jukeboxes, cantinas, schools, and churches likely offered an important reflective counterpoint and a springboard into Paniza’s future. Interestingly, most Guna artists of Paniza’s generation lived for a period in Yandup-Narganá.

In 1972 Paniza ventured to the capital to pursue a musical apprenticeship that would link him to the legacies of Aspinwall. Aspinwall is the original name of Colón, the Atlantic terminus of the Panama Canal, and a port city whose Afro-Antillean residents secured the country’s ties to the African diaspora, to its rhythms and aesthetic practices.

In the mid-20th century, Cuban and other Caribbean musicians regularly toured Colón and Panama City and contributed to a lively scene of cabarets

above Marden Paniza speaking to an audience.

Image courtesy of the author.

and orchestras, fueled by the US military presence during World War II. Paniza immersed himself in this inheritance, which continues to direct Panama’s cultural antennas squarely toward rumba, jazz, and the Caribbean.

Paniza first studied at the National Conservatory, whose teachers initially informed him that at age 20, he was too old to take up the piano. Paniza focused instead on the saxophone and pursued the piano and other instruments through his own determination. A tiny apartment bathroom served as his studio. Like many Guna migrants to the capital, Paniza faced its racism and classist structures, which were likely more obstructionist in his case, given his pale hair and complexion, a product of the Guna proclivity for albinism. After a year at the conservatory, Paniza transferred to the national university, whose arts program he would slowly complete as he became more involved in outside opportunities.

Paniza’s first professional gig was a $15-a-night arrangement to play his sax at a brothel. Gradually he switched to the

piano and became an adept salsa-jazz musician through his long participation in the group Tropical Sweet Caribe.

Simultaneously he worked for the capital’s studios and produced recordings for radio and television programs. In the 1980s Paniza showed little interest in Guna music, but events shortly drew him back to Yandup and beyond.

Critical to his return seems to have been the 500th anniversary of the conquest of America. The 1992 commemorations produced a series of opportunities in which Paniza’s clients asked him to create arrangements with Native American influences. “De Yandub a Aspinwall” arose from these circumstances, serving as the audio backdrop to a show on Indigenous migration.

Paniza fused his jazz-rumba sensibilities with Guna panpipes, rattles, and flutes to create the evocative music.

In 2003 Paniza founded the Bannaba Project, an ensemble of Indigenous and non-Indigenous musicians whose suggestive name (beyond in Dulegaya) points to its fluid, transnational nature. The Bannaba Project produced jazz with Indigenous themes and intonations from across the Americas. Paniza described the outcome as a kind of “fusion.” In 2014, Paniza organized the Orquesta Dule de Panamá. The “People’s Orchestra” focused on popular music and staged its shows amid dangling hammocks, simulating the sounds and sights of Guna Yala. As a composer, Paniza was known for his collaborations with fellow Guna musicians Marino Roldán and Eulogio Benítez Miró (Olaidegiña) in the recording of Kuna Yala Canta (Kuna Yala Sings), a creative album of children’s songs, now widely used in Guna Yala.

Paniza was a pioneering figure in Panama’s Indigenous community. He leaves behind a plethora of disciples who continue to forge their culture in “unexpected places.”2 —Peter Szok, PhD

1. Until recently, the Guna referred to themselves as the Kuna. According to Panama’s 2010 census, the Guna number, just over 80,000 people, constituting the second largest Indigenous group in the country.

2. Philip J. Deloria, Indians in Unexpected Places (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2002).

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