First American Art Magazine No. 31, Summer 2021

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

FırstAmericanArt MAGAZINE

NO. 31, SUMMER 2021

COCHITI MONO FIGURES NATIVE PUBLIC ART IN TULSA JEFF KAHM’S GEOMETRIC VISION IAIA PAINTERS IN THE 1960S

DISPLAY UNTIL OCT. 4, 2021

SALLY BLACK RYAN GASHWESEOMA KENNETH JOHNSON ARIGON STARR

PHOTOGRAPHY BY VANCEFOX.COM

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13-15 2021

Gratilude

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Festival of Woodland Indian Art and Culture • All Native Juried and Judged Woodland Indian Art Show • Art Demonstations & Classes • Free Admission • Open to the Public info@woodlandindianart.com | ph: 920.355.2244 | www.woodlandindianart.com

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Through August 22

Each/Other: Marie Watt and Cannupa Hanska Luger is organized by the Denver Art Museum. It is presented with the generous support of Vicki and Kent Logan, the National Endowment for the Arts, The Robert Lehman Foundation, the donors to the Annual Fund Leadership Campaign, Stelo, Native Arts and Culture Foundation, Osage Nation Foundation, and the residents who support the Scientific and Cultural Facilities District (SCFD). Promotional support is provided by 5280 Magazine and CBS4.

Marie Watt (Seneca, Scottish, and German), Butterfly (detail), 2015. Reclaimed wool blankets, satin binding, thread, cotton twill tape and tin jingles; 94 x 126 in. Denver Art Museum: Funds from Loren G. Lipson, M.D., Vicki & Kent Logan, with additional funds from Brian A. Tschumper, Nancy Benson, Jan & Mike Tansey, and JoAnn & Bob Balzer, 2016.1A-B. © Marie Watt.; Cannupa Hanska Luger (Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara, Lakota, and European), Every One (detail), 2018.

Ceramic, social collaboration; 168 x 168 x 2 in. © Cannupa Hanska Luger. Photo courtesy of UCCS Galleries of Contemporary Art, Colorado Springs, CO.

JOE FEDDERSEN Colville

INHABITED LANDSCAPES

KAY WALKINGSTICK Cherokee

PAINTING AS MEMORY

Solo Exhibitions | September 2021

FROELICK GALLERY Portland, Oregon Joe Feddersen, Inhabited Landscapes 3, 2020, monoprint on paper, 19.5˝x 25.75˝

Kay WalkingStick, Over the Sierra Nevadas II, 2018, oil on panel, 36˝x 72˝

Take Home A Treasure from Indian Country - Buy American -

Buy Authentic Indian Art from 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 Indian art and craftwork, which is available at 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.

Donald F. Montileaux, Oglala Sioux, Ledger Art, Oglala Lakota, ©2020

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:

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: doi.gov/iacb

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issue no. 31, summer 2021

FEATURES Cochiti Mono Figures

By Suzanne Newman Fricke, PhD

DEPARTMENTS 24

Connecting New Pathways: 30 Centering Native Public Art in Tulsa

By Mason Whitehorn Powell (Osage) The Last Great Indian Art Movement of the 20th Century: IAIA Painters of the 1960s

By Alfred Young Man, PhD (Chippewa-Cree)

36

Jeff Kahm’s Geometric Vision

By W. Jackson Rushing III, PhD

42

50

50

Ryan Gashweseoma: Hopi Carver

By Michelle J. Lanteri

56

Kenneth Johnson: Muscogee/Seminole Jeweler

By Michole Eldred (Catawba/ Eastern Cherokee)

62

Arigon Starr: Kickapoo/Mvskoke Artist, Musician, Playwright, and Actor

By Stacy Pratt, PhD (Mvskoke)

68

17

Seven Directions Jackie Sevier (Northern Arapaho)

20

Spotlight: Chris Pappan’s Scout’s Honor

By Iris Colburn

74

Art+Lit 86 Tommy Orange: Cheyenne/Arapaho Novelist

By Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD Artwork by Carlin Bear Don’t Walk (Northern Cheyenne/Crow) Calendar 92 Compiled by James Bland and America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

ARTIST PROFILES Sally Black: Navajo Basket Maker

By Kelly Church (Pottawatomi/ Ottawa/Ojibwe)

Recent Developments

REVIEWS 56

Exhibition Reviews

76

Music Review

85

IN MEMORIAM

62

68

Lee Marmon (Laguna, 1925–2021)

By America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

90

Ethel Vigil (Santa Clara, 1950–2021)

By RoseMary Diaz (Santa Clara Pueblo)

91

cover Lisa Holt (Cochiti) and Harlan Reano (Kewa), Pegasus Unicorn, 2018, ceramic, 18½ × 20½ × 11½ in. Image courtesy of the artists and Chiaroscuro Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico.

NO. 31, SUMMER 2021 | 11

issue no. 31, summer 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) Circulation Manager: James Bland Copy Editors: Jo Ann Reece and Rosa Cays (Chicana) Proofreaders: Staci Golar, Jo Ann Reece, and Angela C. Villa (Chicana) Layout & Design: America Meredith (Cherokee Nation) and Corey Yazzie (Navajo) Social Media: Staci Golar, Michelle J. Lanteri, America Meredith (Cherokee Nation), Jackie Sevier (Northern Arapaho), and Stacy Pratt, PhD (Mvskoke) Interns: Cady de la Cruz (Andean-American) and Frances Montevilla (Bolivian-American)

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) Nadia Jackinsky-Sethi, PhD (Sugpiaq) 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

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.

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

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EDITOR'S GREETING

D

IVERSITY AND INCLUSION have been the hallmarks of successful organizations for years but are greatly needed in the overwhelmingly Eurocentric field of art. Diversity is the hiring of people with demographic differences (including gender, age, and geographical regions, or ethnic, cultural, socioeconomic, and educational backgrounds), while inclusion means welcoming these diverse groups and giving them voice and decision-making power. Diverse peoples need to hold positions of power. For nonprofit organizations this means diverse board members as well as staff.

“Dozens of studies and decades of research have found that diverse teams are more logical, creative, and adept at identifying errors,” says Gabriel Berezin of the NeuroLeadership Institute.1 However, diverse teams are often more challenging, while homogenous teams feel smoother and safer.

These shared assumptions by homogenous groups are also their downfalls. Diverse groups have more cognitive elaboration, in that members must actively interrogate and examine assumptions at a deeper level and often slower pace.

For Native art writing, diversity in editorial advisors, editors, and writers is of utmost importance because we want to reach Native and non-Native audiences, those deeply immersed in the art world, and those new to it. In First American Art Magazine’s pilot issue, we only had Indigenous writers. However, we opened up to non-Native writers in the subsequent issue since we need writers from a broad range of geographic locations but also different perspectives, because we writers are not our audience. We write for you, our audience, who live across several continents, have a wide range of ages, genders, and educational and cultural backgrounds.

We Are Coming Home: Repatriation and the Restoration of Blackfoot Cultural Confidence (2015) is an excellent example of the strengths of diverse writers. Editor Gerald Conaty recruited non-Native museum professionals, Blackfoot cultural leaders, and government officials to contribute chapters. Each writer was able to honestly access shortcomings within his own community, based on experience not prejudice, in a way that outsiders could not.

Fortunately, intergenerational interactions are the norm in Native societies, as they are with FAAM writers—our youngest blog writer started at age nine and our oldest advisor recently celebrated his 93rd birthday. I’m grateful we have emerging scholars and established leaders in the Native art world. Each one contributes a different viewpoint that makes the final publication a more accurate reflection of developments in Indigenous arts of the Americas.

We will keep striving to do better. In the meantime, please enjoy this issue. Even if we may not agree on all points, our understanding is richer from reading each other’s ideas and finding commonalities across demographic barriers.

—America Meredith (Cherokee Nation) 1. “Why Diverse Teams are Smarter, but Don't Feel That Way,” Your Brain at Work, podcast transcription, March 4, 2021, 46:02, S4:E5, web.

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

W E N D Y R E D S TA R DUST detail, three-color lithograph, with archival pigment printed chine collé collaborating Master Printer Judith Baumann, edition of 25 20.25 x 20 inches, hand printed and published at Crow’s Shadow Press, 2021

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 NO. 31, SUMMER 2021 | 15

Visit the Museum of Native American History today!

Weaving 14,000 years of the First People’s diverse past into the future, through art, artifacts, and education.

info@monah.us (479) 273-2456

monah.us 16 | FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

Museum of the Native American History 202 SW 0 Street, Bentonville, Arkansas 72712 Wed–Sat 10 am–4 pm

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS MUSEUMS The ANCHORAGE MUSEUM hired John Hagen (Unangax/Iñupiaq) as its curator of Indigenous arts and initiatives.

Originally from Haines, Alaska, Hagen is a photographer, who earned a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts and studied photojournalism at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks.

The MILLICENT ROGERS MUSEUM of El Prado, outside of Taos, New Mexico, hired Michelle J. Lanteri as its curator of exhibitions and collections. A doctoral candidate in Native American art history at the University of Oklahoma, Lanteri earned her master’s degree in art history from New Mexico State University (NMSU), where she served as the interim director of the University Art Gallery.

ART MARKETS Avis Charley (Spirit Lake Dakota/Diné) won best of show at the 29th annual EITELJORG INDIAN MARKET

AND FESTIVAL, hosted virtually by the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art in Indianapolis, Indiana. Classification winners were Glenda McKay (Ingalik Athabascan) and Tim Blueflint Ramel (Bad River Chippewa/Comanche), jewelry; Cole Redhorse Jacobson (Mdewakanton Dakota), dolls; Mark Fischer (Oneida Nation), sculpture; Chase Kahwinhut Earles (Caddo), pottery; Michael Dart (Cherokee Nation), basketry; Irveta Aragon (Navajo), weavings and textiles; Monica Raphael (Grand Traverse Odawa/Ojibwe/Lakota), cultural items; and Alex Rae Day (Ho-Chunk/ Anishinaabe), beadwork. Glenda McKay and Tim Blueflint Ramel won the Helen Cox Kersting Award and Aydrian Day (Ho-Chunk/Lakota/Anishinaabe) won the Marot Eccles Youth Award. Chase Kahwinhut Earles and Monica Raphael won Harrison Eiteljorg Purchase Awards.

Gene “Ironman” Smith (Choctaw Nation) was the Grand Award winner

at the RED EARTH FESTIVAL held in Shawnee, Oklahoma. Diane Martinez (Tarahumara) won the President’s Award and Veronica Poblano (Zuni) won the Kathleen Everett Upshaw Award. Division winners were Yonavea Hawkins (Caddo), cultural items; Stuart Sampson (Citizen Potawatomi), diversified art forms; Bill Brien (Turtle Mountain Chippewa), drawing/graphics/ photography; Toney Mitchell (Navajo), contemporary jewelry; Abraham Begay (Navajo), traditional jewelry; Dylan Cavin (Choctaw Nation), painting, oil/ acrylic; Fernando Padilla (San Felipe Pueblo), painter, water-based; Paul Hacker (Choctaw Nation), traditional pottery; Karin Walkingstick (Cherokee Nation), contemporary pottery; and Anita Caldwell Jackson, metal/wood/ stone/ceramic sculpture.

Monica Raphael (Grand Traverse Odawa/Ojibwe/Lakota) won best in show at the ARTESIAN ONLINE ART MARKET, hosted by the Chickasaw Nation. Category winners were Deana Ward (Choctaw Nation), beadwork and quillwork; Sandy Fife Wilson

NO. 31, SUMMER 2021 | 17

(Muscogee), cultural diverse; Chase Kahwinhut Earles (Caddo), pottery; Tony A. Tiger (Muscogee/Sac & Fox/ Seminole), 3-D diverse; Jim Trosper (Chickasaw), photography; Vivian Cottrell (Cherokee Nation), baskets; Brenda Kingery (Chickasaw), painting; Michael Billie (Navajo), mixed media; Amy Gantt (Chickasaw), graphic arts; Abby Gaines (Chickasaw/Choctaw), drawing; Daniel Worcester (Chickasaw), weaponry; and Dalvay (Cherokee Nation), textiles.

AWARDS & HONORS The NATIONAL ENDOWMENT FOR THE ARTS named Anita Fields (Osage/ Muscogee) as one of its nine 2021 NEA NATIONAL HERITAGE FELLOWS. The highest honor for community-based cultural arts in the United States, this award includes a $25,000 stipend and a documentary created for each fellow.

Natalie Diaz (Mojave/Pima) won the PULITZER PRIZE FOR POETRY with her poetry collection, Postcolonial Love Poem (Graywolf Press, 2020). Louise Erdrich (Turtle Mountain Ojibwe) won

the PULITZER PRIZE IN FICTION for her novel, The Night Watchman (Harper, 2020). The only Native American previously to win a Pulitzer Prize was N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa), who won the fiction award in 1969 for his novel, A House Made of Dawn.

Marty Two Bulls Sr. (Oglala Lakota) was a finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Editorial Cartooning.

The Henry Luce Foundation and First Nations Development Institute named this year’s LUCE INDIGENOUS KNOWLED GE FELLOWS: Brooke Mosay Ammann (St. Croix Chippewa), Charlene Stern (Venetie Gwich'in), Charles Kealoha Leslie (Native Hawaiian), Charles E “Aulii” Mitchell (Native Hawaiian), Gimiwan Dustin Burnette (Leech Lake Ojibwe), Hinaleimoana Wong-Kalu (Native Hawaiian), Jennifer Malone (Wukchumni), Reba Jo Teran (Eastern Shoshone), Richard Moves Camp (Oglala Lakota), Steven A. Darden (Diné/ Cheyenne), Theresa Secord (Penobscot), Delores Churchill (Haida), and Evelyn Lance Blanchard, PhD (Laguna/Yaqui).

The fellows receive $75,000 stipends.

PRECONTACT SITES Archaeologists dated pigment-stained turkey bone awls to between 5,520 and 3,620 years ago and identified them as the oldest known tattoo tools in the world. Unearthed at the FERNVALE SITE (40WM51) in Williamson County, Tennessee, these tools were likely part of a tattooing kit that included pigmentstained seashells.

REPATRIATION The Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) will repatriate the ECHENIQUE DISC to the Republic of Peru. The city of Cuzco chose this pre-Inca gold ornament, 5⅓ inches in diameter, as its official symbol in 1986. Machel Monenerkit, NMAI’s acting director, signed a memorandum of understanding with Peru's Foreign Affairs Minister Allan Wagner, Peru's Culture Minister Alejandro Neyra, and Cusco Province Mayor Victor Boluarte, and the museum gave the disc to the Peruvian Ambassador to the United States, Hugo de Zela, to be returned to its homeland.

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Will Wilson, Diné photographer Lightning Boy Foundation Hoop Dancers Coe Center curators and art makers Music by DJ Celeste Worl Mural unveiling with Nani Chacon (Diné/Chicana) ... and more!

Get hands on with the COE! Thursday, August 19 6–8 pm 1590 Pacheco Street Santa Fe

To get hands-on with the Coe — coeartscenter.org An annual celebration hosted by the Coe Center for the Arts and First American Art Magazine

NO. 31, SUMMER 2021 | 19

SEVEN DIRECTIONS

JACKIE SEVIER A Northern Arapaho Pastel and Mixed-Media Artist Shares Her Top Seven List

A

S AN ENROLLED MEMBER of the Arapaho Tribe of the Wind River Reservation, Jackie grew up in Wyoming but now resides in the sand hills of Nebraska. Her husband and two children are competitive rodeo riders. Jackie credits “the greats who have not only taught me technique but also expression, dedication, and determination. Some of these people have been Benjamin Harjo Jr., King Kuka, and Reynold Brown.” Her exquisite works on paper include vivid pastels of Western landscapes and embossed paper reliefs of wildlife and nature that she enhances with gold leaf. She creates unique mixed-media sculptures with Arapaho and other Northern Plains beaded pouches in paper that she embellishes with paint, beads, metal, and cloth.

Jackie has won numerous awards at Santa Fe Indian Market, Heard Fair, Cherokee Art Market, Northern Plains Indian Art Market, Red Earth, the Red Cloud Indian Art Show, and other juried markets and shows. The Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian has commissioned artwork from her. Jackie’s works can be found in private and public collections throughout the United States, Japan, Australia, Germany, South Africa, and Great Britain.

NORTHERNPLAINSSTUDIO.COM

above Jackie Sevier (Northern Arapaho) and her husband Jim Sevier on the North Platte River in Wyoming.

EAST a b ov e Chessney Sevier (Northern Arapaho), Clothed in Dignity, 2020, intaglio etching on paper, 3 × 5 in., edition of 50.

Image courtesy of the artist.

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Over the 35 years of my art career, I have found children of artist friends are highly likely to begin a new career in art alongside their parents. So many fresh, talented young artists step into the art scene at an early age. Just some of the many intergenerational artistic families I have had

the pleasure to know include Bill and Demos Glass (both Cherokee Nation), the late Tillier Wesley (Muscogee, 1955–2006) and Micah Wesley (Kiowa/ Muscogee), Bill and Traci Rabbit (both Cherokee Nation), Veronica and Jovanna Poblano (both Zuni), as well as my own daughter, Chessney Sevier (Northern Arapaho), who has established herself as a printmaker, painter, and pastel artist with a love of the landscapes, wildlife, and people of the West. There are so many more families working together in the world of Native art, and I look forward to meeting more of them and seeing their newest work this fall. The east starts the new day, the new generation.

SOUTH The energy to create, to travel, and to find our path is highest at this time in an artist’s career. The excitement of being accepted into new markets and being invited to participate in competitions

SEVEN DIRECTIONS

and promising galleries runs high. New artists develop their individual styles and focus on their individual paths. The knowledge and experience of their parents and mentors push the artists to a new level.

South is the point in our lives, as established artists, that we create room for the careers of the new generation to expand. South is “when the berries are plentiful and the sun energizes the earth.”

WEST Just as we cross into that threshold where careers have been established, we take a deep look into who we are personally as artists. We begin to enjoy the fruits of hard work, dedication to our art, and feel the benefit of satisfaction in our lives and our careers. We savor this stage of our life as we begin to see finality. Though many have moved into contemporary venues, we begin to realize how inspired we are by historical arts and fully appreciate the movements and pioneers in Native art that have created the pathways. West is a period of satisfaction and reflection.

NORTH Spirituality and our own immortality speak from the North.

This is the direction our mind and body rest. The work we have done, the miles we have traveled and the people we have met along the way are the legacy we leave behind. North is when we are measured by a body of work and the influence we leave behind. We are measured by the people we became along our journey through life.

above, top Demos Glass and Bill Glass (both Cherokee Nation), A Touch to Above, 2010, stainless steel, 164 inches tall, installed at the First Americans Museum, Oklahoma City. Photo: Ginny Underwood (Comanche/Kiowa), First Americans Museum. above, bottom Traci Rabbit (Cherokee Nation), Stands Alone, acrylic on canvas, 48 × 36 in. Image courtesy of the artist.

NO. 31, SUMMER 2021 | 21

SEVEN DIRECTIONS

BELOW As humans, we are part of the earth. We draw our materials and our resources from below. Clay, pigments, bones, and artifacts provide Native artists with a deep understanding of where we come from and where we will also travel.

ABOVE

above, top Bear Woman, Matilda Spoonhunter (Northern Arapaho, ca. 1846–1928), from the Wind River Reservation, photographed at the Trans-Mississippi and International Exposition, Omaha, Nebraska, 1898.

Photo: Adolf F. Muhr. above, bottom Micah Wesley (Kiowa/ Muscogee), Heir to the Throne, 2011, acrylic on canvas, 10 × 8 in. Image courtesy of the artist. Image courtesy of the artist. above, right Jovanna Poblano (Zuni), Purple Spiny Shell Corn Maiden Necklace, spiny oyster shell, turquoise, pearls, 18 in. long, pendant: 2½ × 1½ in.

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Our ancestors and our elders guide us as artists. They retell the stories and legends that we in turn as artists share through our works. The creator has given us heart, soul, and the ability to create and tell our story. We hear the singing, recall their teachings, and take a place among them as our next generation continues its journey through the circle.

CENTER Center is where my inspiration, my heritage, my soul, and my experiences come together. I have sought to share with the viewer what I see in nature, what I smell in the chokecherry blossoms. Art has been the vehicle to share the stories of my ancestors and my family. I have drawn on the teachings of my Northern Arapaho family of strong women. Capturing a part of our culture on paper is elusive but fulfilling. In this center, it is the people I have met in my career, my heritage, and the promise that the circle will continue again in the east with yet another generation of artists, of grandchildren.

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

NO. 31, SUMMER 2021 | 23

24 | FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

COCHITI MONO FIGURES

By Suzanne Newman Fricke, PhD

W

ITH THEIR humorous, sometimes teasing attitudes, Cochiti effigy figures or monos have a unique place in the history of Southwest ceramics. Measuring between one to three feet high, these hollow vessels in human form mainly represent people who traveled through the area and are often depicted satirically, allowing artists to poke fun at the visitors passing by. With their diminutive size, rounded bodies, and large heads, monos often have a distinctive sense of whimsy and fun, but outsiders’ reactions to them have often been less than encouraging.

Despite—or, perhaps, because of—the opposition from Spanish colonists, who considered the pieces as satanic, and by museum collectors, who described monos as “bad pottery,” Cochiti artists continued to create effigy figures, demonstrating their integral role in the pueblo as an important art form. The production of monos has risen and fallen over the past two millennia, but the form was never lost or abandoned.

As noted Cochiti ceramicist Virgil Ortiz observed, “Cochiti always had figurative ceramics,”1 but their comical attitude distinguishes monos from other ceramic figures. In the Southwest, figurative ceramics date back as early as 400 CE with many humans, birds, bears, and sheep pitchers, jars, and pots that were found in the Chaco Canyon site, and since then other forms of ceramic human figures have emerged. The so-called “rain

above Lisa Holt (Cochiti) and Harlan Reano (Kewa), Untitled, 2014, ceramic, 11½ × 10 × 5 in.

Image courtesy of Chiaroscuro Gallery, Santa Fe, New Mexico. opposite Virgil Ortiz (Cochiti), VO Cirque Performers, from the Contortionista II series, 2018, Cochiti clay, clay slip, red clay slip, wild spinach paint, 17 × 11 × 6 in. Image courtesy of the artist.

gods” from Tesuque Pueblo, built from unpainted micaceous clay, are typically standing figures with open mouths, and are usually about six to eight inches tall. In the 1960s, ceramic artist Helen Cordero (Cochiti, 1915–1994) began making her Storyteller figures: seated women with numerous children on their laps, and mouths wide open as if they are sharing stories from one generation to the next.

Yet monos are distinct from other figurative ceramic forms, as reflected in their name. The term mono, also spelled mano, could be based on the Keresan word for mimic or mocking and the Spanish word for monkey to emphasize the teasing aspect of the figures.2 The materials and techniques involved in making monos use the methods found in historic Cochiti ware. The clay, which has a distinctive bisque color, is dug from local pits. It must be cleaned and mixed into a usable paste, then hand-formed using the coil-and-scrape method into a hollow figure. Once dried, the entire figure is covered in slip, a thin solution of clay and water. The facial features, clothing, and other decorations are painted with black and red pigments made from vegetal and mineral sources found locally around Cochiti Pueblo.

To complete the ceramic, the figures are fired in a pit with manure and wood to reach a high temperature, which converts the crumbly greenware into a hardened piece of pottery.

Jonathan Batkin, former director of the Wheelwright Museum of the

1. Virgil Ortiz in discussion with the author, May 2021.

2. Barbara A. Babcock, Guy Monthan, and Doris Monthan, The Pueblo Storyteller: Development of a Figurative Ceramic Tradition (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1997): 15; Doug Bailey, “Art/Archaeology: What Value Artistic-Archaeological Collaboration?” Journal of Contemporary Archaeology 4, no. 2 (2017): 252.

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above, top Ben Wittick, Pottery Figures, Pueblos of New Mexico, ca. 1880s, collection of the Palace of the Governors Photo Archives (NMHM/DCA), neg. no. 130750. above, bottom Seferina Ortiz (Cochiti, 1931–2007), Bathing Beauties, 1988, collection of the Heard Museum, clay, pigment, collection of the Heard Museum, NA-SW-CO-F-19 a and b. Photo: Craig Smith.

Image courtesy of the Heard Museum, Phoenix, Arizona.

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American Indian, observed that some subjects were not found in historic monos, like images of African-Americans or non-Native women. The figures that were depicted share certain physical characteristics. They are usually rounded, often pot-bellied, with bulbous heads, and with arms held to their bodies or upraised. The mouths are left open, which serves to help in the firing by allowing the heated gases to escape but also gives a lively sense to the figures, as though they are speaking or singing. Most of the facial details are painted on, as added clay can cause problems in the firing.

Given their engaging nature, it is no surprise that Cochiti effigy figures have been the subject of much scholarship and many museum exhibitions. Noted art historians have written about monos, including Barbara Babcock, Jonathon Batkin, Bruce Bernstein, and Patricia Fogelman Lange, and the Albuquerque Art Museum, Denver Art Museum, Wheelwright Museum, and many other museums have exhibited the figures.

While the figures have been popular, it is impossible to compile a complete history of monos due to their mistreatment.

When the Spanish colonizers arrived in New Mexico and Arizona in the mid-16th century, the priests believed the mono figures were idols or false gods at best, satanic at worse, so they destroyed any pieces they found and discouraged potters from creating more.

After New Mexico became a territory in the United States, the figures were created to sell to the tourists and non-Native traders who arrived in the Southwest. When the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad arrived in New Mexico, the area became more available to visitors from the East Coast. Tourists and traveling entertainers—including operas, circuses, and vaudeville productions— came through the area, and Cochiti artists captured the likeness of these performers in clay. The late-19th century photographer Ben Wittick documented examples of monos offered for sale in New Mexico shops, including conjoined twins who performed in the circus. One example in Wittick’s photo measured more than three feet tall, indicating a high level of skill in production. Ortiz observed that this piece demonstrates that Cochiti ceramists had been making monos for many years.

While tourist demand for the monos increased production, the Victorian period in the late-19th century brought new challenges. Anglo-Americans now viewed monos with suspicion and shunned them as false idols. As a result, when many important collections were formed in the late-19th and early 20th century, monos and other figurative pieces were ignored in favor of abstract pottery. During this time, museum professionals traveling through the Southwest purchased crate after crate of ceramics—mainly bowls, pots, and other utilitarian wares that were usually created with abstract designs noted for their symmetry and patterning. For example, the Indian Arts Fund (IAF) became one of the premier collections of Southwestern ceramic, which is now located in a large vault at the School for Advanced Research, but Kenneth Chapman, one of the IAF’s main organizers, did not include monos because they did not fit his ideals for Pueblo ceramics. For Chapman, the pieces were not spherical, not painted with symmetrical designs, and far too reflective of contemporary life.

Chapman illustrated his aesthetic principles in his 1924 article, “Pottery Decorations of Santo Domingo and Cochiti Pueblos.” In the photograph “Good and Bad Indian Pottery,” he contrasts the round bowls with symmetrical, abstract designs placed on the top shelf with the figurative pieces on the bottom shelf, including Tesuque rain gods, small animal figurines, and a gravy boat. As the alignment of the pieces in the photo suggests, for Chapman, a clay figure cannot be a good or authentic example of Southwest ceramics.

Over the first half of the 20th century, Chapman had wide-reaching influence since he also helped organize the earliest Santa Fe Indian Markets, which were created to stimulate interest and the new production of “finer” works.

The new market was organized into many separate categories and each piece was judged within its group, but there was not a category for figurative ceramics, so monos were not allowed into a show that became a major venue for selling and earning prize money. Beyond the Southwestern Association for Indian Art’s annual market in New Mexico, the

structure for Indian Market has had a wide-ranging influence. Not only does it serve as a major venue for artists to show and sell their pieces, but its classification system and standards have been copied by other annual markets, such as the Eiteljorg Museum Indian Market and Festival and the Cherokee Nation’s Cherokee Art Market.

Mono production came to the forefront again in the 1970s and 1980s, mainly due to the efforts of Virgil Ortiz.

His mother Seferina Ortiz (Cochiti, 1931–2007) taught him how to make

above Virgil Ortiz (Cochiti), Four Arm Siren, from the Siren series, 2011, Cochiti clay, clay slip, red clay slip, wild spinach paint, 18 in. high. Image courtesy of the artist.

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above, bottom Juanita Inez Ortiz, Mapuwana (Cochiti, 1960–2008), Mermaid Figurine, ca. 1995, clay, pigment, collection of the Ralph T. Coe Center for the Arts, NA 1526. above, top Lisa Holt (Cochiti) and Harlan Reano (Kewa), Griffin, natural clay, natural pigments.

Image courtesy of the artists. opposite Lisa Holt (Cochiti) and Harlan Reano (Kewa), Dragon, natural clay, natural pigments.

Image courtesy of the artists.

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pottery with historic techniques and designs. As he describes it, she taught him to listen to the “clay speaking through you, teaching the style, connecting to the history.” When Ortiz was still a teenager, he experimented with human forms, and the collector and art dealer Robert Gallegos, who had amassed a

large collection of mono figures, saw his work. Around 1984 Gallegos invited him to visit his collection—the largest extant collection of Cochiti figurative pottery—and the 15-year-old Virgil realized his work resembled the older work. He studied the pieces to learn the techniques. At the time, none of the potters were making figures larger than twelve inches, but by studying the older pieces, he learned how to work larger while maintaining structural integrity.

He redeveloped the tricky techniques required to form larger pieces and to fire them safely. To better control the firing process, he ground-fired each mono separately; the different shapes made the firing process tricky and increased the chance of popping or cracking.

Virgil’s figures are often described as urban, edgy, and provocative since the figures have tattoos, piercings, and wear bondage gear, yet he follows the historic model in terms of reflecting the world around him. He created a series of circus performers, with clowns, tightrope walkers, and acrobats. Other monos include figures wearing S&M bondageinspired outfits, often with bare-breasted women. He created monos to represent the figures from his Revolt 1680/2180 series, including the Trackers and the Watchers. Virgil states that he does not name his figures because “people can get into dissecting a figure too much. A figure or the painting on it is supposed to have a meaning. A lot of the subjects are just daily life. … Without naming them, viewers can change their minds about what they mean in two weeks, or three years, or so on.”3 Virgil emphasizes his obligation to passing along his knowledge, sharing his techniques with his family and with the youth in the community.

Other members of the Ortiz family joined in the creation of effigy figures. His mother Seferina and his three siblings, Joyce, Juanita Inez, and Janice, have all made monos. Joyce’s figure of Tina Turner captures the spirit of the singer onstage in a minidress, microphone in hand, mouth open in song.

3. Jonathan Batkin, Clay People: Pueblo Indian Figurative Traditions (Santa Fe: Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, 1999), 14.

Seferina did a series of Bathing Beauties in the late 1980s depicting seated figures in bathing suits, sometimes with mermaid tails, enjoying a sunny vacation on the beach or, perhaps, by Cochiti Lake. Mermaids and sunbathers became popular figures after the US Army Corps of Engineers built a dam in the 1970s that created Cochiti Lake. The dam changed the landscape around the pueblo, turning usable farmland into a lake and adding a risk of flooding and water contamination.

While they might have serious implications, these smiling figures also capture a sense of joy and fun as the bathers relax and enjoy the sun.

Juanita Inez’s daughter and Virgil’s niece Lisa Holt (Cochiti) and her husband Harlan Reano (Kewa) have been producing dramatic, dynamic monos for more than 22 years. Taught

by Lisa’s family, the couple learned how to create monos inspired by the world around them. In the 21st century, Reano observed, “We can get on our phone and see the world, not sit on the plaza.”4 After decades of experience, their technique has become instinctual. They still fire outside though it can be risky; Harlan notes, “You need to get the materials right, measure out how much wood and manure. But once you know how to do it, you know how to do it.” The artists form many human figures though Harlan expressed a preference for making animal figures, which he views as more playful and fun. As a child, Harlan loved science fiction and Japanese anime, and aspects of fantasy continue to inspire him as seen in the imaginary beasts the two create. Their horned, winged creature Pegasus Unicorn (2018), on this issue's cover, combines the aspects of the creatures, shown in motion with one leg flexed.

Despite the constant challenges, the figures continued to be created.

The quality that most distinguishes the figures is their playful, often fanciful attitude, conveying the artists’ amusement and humor towards the ever-changing world. Compared to other 4. Harlan Reano in discussion with the author, May 2021.

ceramic figures like the gentle nostalgia and maternal devotion of the Storyteller figures or the more abstract Tesuque rain gods, monos demonstrate a direct connection to the wider world, offering the artists a chance to reflect on who they are in a depiction of who others are, providing contrast and context.

In looking at the body of figures that remain, it is hard to see them as mocking. I see curiosity, a gentle teasing quality, and an expression of joy in the monos, not the satirical caricatures that drove the Spanish colonists to destroy them. No matter how urban or fantastical the image, the happiness they contain is clear.

Suzanne Newman Fricke, PhD, earned her doctoral degree in art history from the University of New Mexico. She has taught art history at the Santa Fe University of Art and Design, University of New Mexico, and Institute of American Indian Arts and has curated several international traveling exhibitions. Currently, she is the director of Gallery Hozho at Hotel Chaco in Albuquerque.

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CONNECTING NEW PATHWAYS Centering Native Public Art in Tulsa

By Mason Whitehorn Powell (Osage)

“I

’VE NEVER SEEN anything like this here in Tulsa,” muralist and studio painter Yatika Starr Fields (Osage/Muscogee/Cherokee) said. “That’s what I wanted … to create a space where we can all come together. We have Native catering over here; we have the Native vote for our rights [Rock The Native Vote Tulsa], for our democracy; you have Native artists, a Native DJ— these are things we are all working on in our community to create better equity that we want to share and build here.”

Fields was standing among a socially distanced crowd below Diné/ Chicana muralist Nanibah “Nani” Chacon’s half-completed Connected Pathways, a 16-by-111-foot mural on the northern face of a brick commercial building at 533 South Peoria Avenue in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The painting was coming to life against a cobalt blue background: three close-ups of beaded hide moccasins posed in dance, framed by elegant, geometric yellow patterns and, at that stage, blades of Indiangrass in outline. As Fields spoke, Chacon was 30 | FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

painting, all by brush, with her apprentice Lynnette Haozous (San Carlos Chiricahua Apache/Diné/Taos).

Conceptually based on three photographs of Tulsa-area women’s moccasins, the work feels familiar and recognizable to anyone who has spent time at tribal dances. Scale and detail are amplified together, and abstraction is tamed by the representative emotion suggested by legacies of Indigenous womanhood, customary clothing, and tribal singing and dancing. Chacon says the title and subject of Connected Pathways is not rooted in history or trauma but driven by beauty and meant to carry us into the future. The “pathways” may be physical or cognitive, but she acknowledges the intersection and influence of various Native spheres upon one another.

Fields helped bring Chacon to Tulsa in 2020 by way of an Arts Integration Award funded by the Tulsa Artist Fellowship. After three years of support from the fellowship as a studio painter, Fields launched the Indigenous Mural Series during the COVID-19 pandemic,

originally hoping to bring four diverse Native public artists to paint murals in Tulsa. Chacon and Haozous were the only artists able to travel and contribute to the intertribal series and worked for ten days in September 2020. Chacon gave a virtual talk about her process and experience.

This organic gathering proved fruitful and revealed the imminent potential for an outward Native art scene in a city with both historic and contemporary Indigenous relevance. Yet not enough Native public art programs or centers dedicate resources and space to this community.

Mainly through the work of Native Tulsa Artist Fellows such as Fields and his mother Anita Fields (Osage/Muscogee), multidisciplinary artists and composers Elisa Harkins (Muscogee/Cherokee) and Nathan Young (Delaware/Kiowa/ Pawnee/Cherokee), and filmmakers Blackhorse Lowe (Navajo) and Sterlin Harjo (Seminole/Muscogee), progress has been made in recent years to not only create significant work but to ensure that visibility takes place in public forums beyond museums and galleries.

HOMELANDS & HUNTING GROUNDS BEFORE TULSA there was Tallasi.

Meaning “old town,” this is what the Locvpoka tribal town of the Muscogee Nation called their settlement near the Arkansas River following their forced removal from Alabama.1 The Muscogee people brought with them coal and ash from their sacred ceremonial fire and rekindled them near a flowering tree, and established town grounds in the four-square layout. For 60 years, the fire and Council Oak Tree were the center of tribal life and business. Here they survived the American Civil War, white settlement, and other hardships. The City of Tulsa was officially incorporated in 1898, signaling the end of Muscogee autonomy at Tallasi with the discovery of oil reserves and sales of allotted land.

Their self-governance was further disenfranchised when Indian Territory became Oklahoma in 1907. However, despite allotment and the colonization of both public and private land use, the entirety of Tulsa still lies within Muscogee territory, with portions of the city crossing into the Osage and Cherokee reservations.

Before Indian Removal, Tulsa was comprised of the homelands and hunting grounds of various tribes such as the Cherokee, Quapaw, Osage, Wichita, Caddo, and earlier Mississippian Caddoan peoples. Landmarks along the warpath and hunting trails near modern-day Tulsa exhibit early

recognized manipulations of landscape remotely comparable to public art.

Washington Irving notes overheard dialogue in 1832: “If you keep along yonder, by the edge of the prairie, you will come to a bald hill, with a pile of

1. “Where it All Began: Muscogee (Creek) Nation Reflects Arrival to Indian Territory, History of Council Oak Tree,” Muscogee Nation, October 24, 2018, web.

above, top Nani Chacon (Diné/ Chicana) and Lynnette Haozous (San Carlos Chiricahua Apache/Diné/Taos), Connected Pathways, 2020, mural, 16 × 116 feet. Photo: Mason Whitehorn Powell (Osage). above, bottom Gaylord Oscar Herron, detail of Council Oak Tree, 1971, photograph.

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Native American presence in Tulsa falter, which is strange and sad considering that this land extends directly from the founding and stewardship of various tribal citizens. Council Oak was nearly destroyed to build a parking lot in the 1960s, but white allies, Tulsa citizens, and the Muscogee (Creek) Nation purchased the property and donated it to the City of Tulsa. Creek Nation Council Oak Park was constructed to enshrine the tree at 1750 South Cheyenne Avenue in 2009 and features a $250,000 memorial plaza and sculpture representing the ceremonial fires by sculptor Dan Brook (Muscogee descent).

While the McGirt v. Oklahoma Supreme Court decision has recognized that more than half of Oklahoma is rightfully Native American land under law, it is easy for the general population to overlook this truth.3 Yatika Fields, among others, hopes to change this with public art that goes beyond memorialization to open conversations, acknowledge the city’s contemporary Indigenous presence, and beautify Tulsa.

above Allan Houser (Chiricahua Apache, 1994–1994), Sacred Rain Arrow, 1988, bronze, 98 × 39 × 31 in., collection of the Gilcrease Museum, 0827.185, gift of Florence Lloyd-Jones Barnett and Howard G. Barnett and their Family. Both photos: Mason Whitehorn Powell. opp osite Bob Haozous, Artificial Cloud, 1991, steel, 72 feet 6 inches.

stones upon it.… Well! those stones were set up by the Osages as a landmark: from that spot you may have a sight of the Red Fork.”2 Red Fork remains a community in southwest Tulsa; in Irving’s time it referred to a crossing at the Arkansas River.

In a similar manner, the Locvpoka Muscogee people and others who made independent journeys along the trail to Indian Territory would tie saplings to the ground that marked directions for those who followed. As signal trees grew, they remained bent into maturity.

The last known signal tree survived in the yard of a suburban Tulsa home into the mid-20th century. In this use, all signal trees pointed toward Tallasi, specifically to the Council Oak Tree.

This historical background is important because apart from a small number of memorial plaques and markers added after the fact, Council Oak is the last remaining public evidence of Tulsa’s birth as an Indigenous city. Without its preservation and story, passed down and honored, the external signs of today’s

MURALS, SCULPTURE, NOISE ART IN A CITY burgeoning with new murals, Connected Pathways is a significant example of permanent wall art in Tulsa by an Indigenous artist that overtly depicts tribal imagery. Indigenous public sculpture in Tulsa is outnumbered by the works of non-Native artists. The 1985 full-size bronze cast of Appeal to the Great Spirit (1908) by American, non-Native sculptor Cyrus Dallin appears to be the first serious display of tribal imagery at Woodward Park in midtown. Although technically masterful and evocative in the equestrian genre, the bare-chested man in a headdress with braids on horseback, arms outstretched as he exalts the sky, is generic, stereotypical, and a romanticization of the past.

A bow and arrow aimed at the sky mirror the arched doors of the Gilcrease Museum. Allen Houser’s (Chiricahua Apache) Sacred Rain Arrow was gifted to the museum grounds in 1988 and has

2. Washington Irving, Crayon Papers and a Tour of the Prairies (New York: R. F. Fenno and Company, 1900), 34.

3. McGirt v. Oklahoma, U.S. No. 18-9526 (2020), 3–42. “Held: For MCA purposes, land reserved for the Creek Nation since the 19th century remains ‘Indian country.’”

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been prominently featured ever since.

Based on an Apache ceremony, the warrior takes a knee and looks skyward as he prepares to release an arrow blessed with his people’s prayers for rain. Cast in bronze with a textured surface, Sacred Rain Arrow hints at Houser’s groundbreaking, modernist style but is more literal and detailed by comparison. But in contrast to the static nature of Dallin’s sculpture, Houser’s is technically fluid and full of motion. Installed just three years apart, the gap between these two widens when one considers that the former is from a series titled The Epic of the Indian, and the latter is based on Apache oral history and family storytelling. Houser, a relative of Geronimo, was the first Chiricahua Apache born free and not a prisoner of war in Oklahoma after their forced relocation to Fort Sill.

Sacred Rain Arrow was iconic enough to adorn the official Oklahoma license plate for several years.

Mayfest Tulsa commissioned Houser’s son Bob Haozous (Chiricahua Apache) to create a public sculpture in 1991. Installed downtown in 1992, Artificial Cloud rises from a smooth, rectangular pedestal with rings like doorknockers on the north and south sides, below a first story patterned with cutout figures of people and airplanes, and above this, a tower that tapers all the way up to an imposing, symmetrical cloud symbol. Constructed of untreated steel, from a distance Artificial Cloud looks like a black beacon against the Tulsa skyline, centered in front of BOK Tower by architect Minoru Yamasaki, who designed the World Trade Center Twin Towers, of which BOK Tower is an approximately 1:2 scale replica. Upon closer viewing, one sees the rusted surface and crowds of small people and planes that decorate the sides of the sculpture in negative space.

In a YouTube video by This Land Television, Haozous describes his sculpture as a simple statement, a harrowing “indication of the future of the earth.”4 The artist explains further: “My idea at the time is we’re destroying nature and we’re going to have to make

monuments to those things that are natural,” that humankind will one day have to live underground and be removed from the sunlight because the water and air will be polluted. A temporal element reshapes this monument to nature.

As it rusts away, Haozous recognizes its impermanence against a similarly indeterminate future with multiple climate crises impending, a result of our dependence on technology.

The 72½-foot-tall sculpture sits at the apex of a footbridge that connects the offices of downtown with the Tulsa Arts District and Historic Greenwood District, also known as Black Wall Street. Haozous selected this site and recognized it as “the demarcation line between the white Tulsa and the Black Tulsa.”

In reference to the destruction of Greenwood during the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre, where a white mob destroyed 35 blocks of Black-owned businesses and homes, displaced approximately 10,000 people, and killed an estimated 300 individuals, Haozous continues in the video: “This is going to mark where the races clashed, a reminder not only of the destruction of the environment but the spiritual destruction of mankind with people. We can’t let it happen again. They [the city and members who commissioned the sculpture] didn’t want to honor the Blacks at all.”5

Artificial Cloud is mysterious in appearance, political in intention, and postmodern in context, decidedly different than the imagery of his father’s sculpture installed just three years prior at the Gilcrease. Haozous respects and honors his father and his art; simply put, a stylistic gap separates their public art in Tulsa and ultimate intentions as diverging sculptors. Houser takes pride in the past, centering the Apache in his own time, and Haozous makes art that reflects “who I am today,” separated from either an idealized or traumatic past and looking toward a dark future. Haozous sees much of the mainstream people’s reception to his father’s artwork this way: “As an Indigenous artist, he’s classified as a craftsperson rather than a more meaningful artist in the Western world.”6 This idea of Native artwork being solely a tribute to the past or pigeonholed as cultural crafts is something a new generation of Native artists is attempting to break away from. The song- and language-based performance and installation art of Elisa Harkins exemplifies this. Harkins’s The AIM Song (2020) is currently displayed in (and on) the window at the Tulsa Artist Fellowship building at Archer Street and Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. Featuring a transparent decal of the "American Indian Movement Song" musical notation

4. Bob Haozous, “Artificial Cloud,” This Land, YouTube video, produced by Sterlin Harjo, June 27, 2012, 5:54, web.

5. Oklahoma Commission to Study the Tulsa Race Riot of 1921, “Tulsa Race Riot,” Oklahoma Historical Society, February 28, 2001, PDF; Bob Haozous, “Artificial Cloud,” video.

6. Bob Haozous, “Artificial Cloud,” video.

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above Elisa Harkins (Muscogee/ Cherokee), The AIM Song, 2020, American flag, AIM patch, dowel, fringe, stool, table leg, vinyl. Image courtesy of the artist. opposite Nani Chacon (Diné/ Chicana) and Lynnette Haozous (San Carlos Chiricahua Apache/ Diné/Taos), detail of Connected Pathways, 2020, mural, 16 × 116 feet. Photo: Mason Whitehorn Powell (Osage).

and transcription by Harkins, as sung by Louis Gray (Osage), behind the window is a fringed American flag blanket with an AIM patch sewn on one corner. Harkins has also enacted site-specific and Indigenous language work that grapples with history, collective experience, and Native futures. One such video performance, For Hellen Woodward (2018), pays tribute to the original landowner of Woodward Park, where Dallin’s Appeal to the Great Spirit is installed.7 Nathan Young, another Tulsa Artist Fellow, primarily creates sound, video, and installation art, but his body of work and discography is extensive and collaborative. His website says this “engages the spiritual and the political and reimagines Indigenous sacred imagery in order to complicate and subvert notions of the

sublime.” Young shares TAF Cameron Studios with Fields in the Tulsa Arts District, a space where Young has hosted Tulsa NoiseFest since 2018. A preeminent festival in the genre, Young brings sound artists and noise musicians to Tulsa, including performances by Tick Suck (Warren Realrider, Pawnee/Crow) as well as the trailblazing, experimental musician and composer Raven Chacon (Diné), among others.

These relationships have led to collaborative public art and film projects, such as Tick Suck being featured in director Sterlin Harjo’s documentary Love and Fury (2021), which follows the current realities of various Indigenous artists, with scenes filmed in Tulsa.

Another project was Chacon’s temporary billboard installation, American Ledger No. 2 (2019), which presented largescale musical notation that overlooked Greenwood and a community performance of the piece. Atomic Culture, a multidisciplinary curatorial team formed by Tulsa Artist Fellows Mathew and Malinda Galindo, commissioned this work. Atomic Culture also launched and cocurated a free Indigenous film program at the Admiral Twin Drive-In theater with director Blackhorse Lowe. Young’s music label, Peyote Tapes, released the soundtrack to Lowe’s feature film, Fukry (2020). The list of connections and collaborations goes on as artistic relationships circle back around to support one another. The Connected Pathways mural represents an idea that is embodied by the spirit of artists centering Indigenous concepts and realities in their Tulsa-based work.

That three generations of Haozous relatives (Allan, Bob, and Lynnette)8 have public art on display in Tulsa, and that the Chacon siblings Nani and Raven have been invited into this space to educate and create for beauty’s sake, signifies a strong and bold future for Native creators in Tulsa. From a legacy of fine art depicted in the Five Moons (2007), a sculpture at the Tulsa Historical Society and Museum gardens completed by Gary Henson (Shawnee Tribe), to contemporary dance pieces by Harkins, more conventional work has paved the way for

7. Elisa Harkins, For Hellen Woodward (2018), video performance, web.

8. All three descend from Sam Haozous (Chiricahua Apache, 1868–1957). Lynnette Haozous is Bob Haozous’s second cousin once removed. —Ed.

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subversion and public engagement that reframes the Indigenous narratives of Oklahoma and tells the truth of the city’s founding. Storied public art projects are the new signal trees pointing to Tulsa.

INDIGENOUS CULTURAL TOURISM RECENT URBAN DEVELOPMENT projects threaten the future of Haozous’s sculpture and possibly Houser’s. A Tulsa World article describes a $2-milliondollar Downtown Coordinating Council proposal to the Tulsa Development Authority (TDA) that would make “improvements” to the bridge Artificial Cloud rests on, citing its heavy daily foot traffic and disrepair. While the sculpture is pictured in the article, its future is not mentioned, nor are project plans solidified. The TDA chair is quoted as saying, “The vision that is in place for this is contemplating how to link the north and south together in a way that gives honor to the history there,” a history misunderstood by many.9 Renovation plans are in place for the Gilcrease Museum to begin July 2021 with an estimated $125-million in city and private funds. The museum will be closed for two years during construction, with the goal of boosting tourism in Tulsa and expanding it, creating a “ripple effect for other cultural attractions” in the local economy all the way to “Route 66.”10 A new grand entry and façade call into question the future of Sacred Rain Arrow, whether it is in the plans or if other public art is being considered.

Susan Neal, Gilcrease executive director, spoke with Tony Moore, Gathering Place park director, about functionality, “value engineering,” “the Tulsa market,” and end users, but not material benefits to or substantial inputs from local Indigenous communities.11 Gilcrease sits on city-owned land in Osage Reservation land that was donated to the city in a 1954 transaction by the museum’s founder, oilman Thomas Gilcrease (Muscogee, 1890–1962), in order to pay off his debts. Gilcrease had amassed an impressive collection of Native American

art, artifacts, and early American rare books and manuscripts, so much so that he nearly went bankrupt following the museum’s private founding in 1942.

Material culture and artifacts in institutions, now revered for symbolic and stylistic decoration, once served practical purposes. Addressing the utilitarian dimensions of earlier works, Fields has painted several murals of precontact effigy pots in other states, meant to confront viewers with ancient items taken from the earth below them, that they might have not been aware of otherwise. Keeping to his studio practice here, at the present Fields does not want to use his own work to reshape the city of Tulsa; he would rather assist and guide others, bringing them into this community and foster an environment of inclusion—cultural sharing, teaching diverse values, and creating space for the Native community at large in a way that existing institutions cannot.

Speaking about Tulsa, he said, “We need to get rid of the Route 66 idea, that’s what got us into this mess in the first place: the expansion of the West, tourists, and laying down the railroads. Millions of dollars are being spent on kitsch things to bring tourists into Tulsa.”

“Now I’m working on a new project with my mom [Anita Fields],” Fields said. “[It’s about] Indigenous activism in Oklahoma from the 1970s to now and [we’re] trying to get that as a public facing panel.” This is a four-part series with guest speakers and other programs scheduled for summer 2021.

The Indigenous arts renaissance in Tulsa, backed by Native arts fellows, is a paradigm shift that takes histories of forced relocation and stolen lands and actively grounds us in the present. Fields is culturally Osage but considers himself a “world artist” and acknowledges the need for solidarity between all artists of color, hoping that creators are not put into boxes. This radical democratization of art is necessary to foster positive change in the community. With the painting of Nani’s mural, not only was the narrative being reclaimed, but the place itself was also reclaimed. In that moment, one could glimpse the future, and it was red.

“The story develops while we’re making it, that’s where the magic happens,” Fields said as we stood below Nani’s mural. “It’s the celebration of us and this community right here coming together today under the umbrella of Indigenous public art.”

Mason Whitehorn Powell (Osage) is a freelance journalist whose work engages with art, community, and local history. He is based in Osage County, Oklahoma, and Rome, Italy, but is relocating to Brooklyn, New York, to study law.

9. Rhett Morgan, “Center of the Universe landmark, pedestrian bridge eyed for $2M facelift,” Tulsa World, October 2, 2020, web.

10. “Transforming Gilcrease Museum: Plans for Improvement,” Gilcrease Museum, web.

11. “Gathering Insight: A Candid Chat About The Future of Gilcrease,” Gilcrease Museum, YouTube video, February 26, 2019, 5:34, web

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THE LAST GREAT INDIAN ART MOVEMENT OF THE 20TH CENTURY IAIA Painters of the 1960s One of the early students of the Institute of American Indian Arts, Alfred Young Man shares his perspectives on a group of painters who irrevocably changed the course of Native art.

By Alfred Young Man, PhD (Chippewa-Cree) Dedicated to Jeff Kahm (Plains Cree, 1968–2021)

S

E T T L E R- C O L O N I S T S i n America and Canada wrought genocide and devastation of Native Americans and First Nations. For five centuries, intruders brought about the total collapse of ancient cultures and ways of life. For centuries, settlers tried to extinguish Indigenous languages and art forms, the principal means by which First Nations and Native Americans organize society and culture. Enacting laws to sever the People from their poetry, history, mythology, philosophy, spirituality, laws, education, architecture, dance, and theater would accomplish what no amount of reeducation could.

Settler-colonists would censor the original voices in various ways. A distinct feature of settler ideology dwelled upon “killing the Indian to save the man.”1 Speaking Indigenous languages and holding Sun Dances, Ghost Dances, vision

quests, potlatches, ceremonial dances by Pueblo, Navajo, Northwest Coast, Plains, and all other tribes were criminalized for more than seven decades. Longhouses and Sun Dance lodges became targets under the directions of Christian pastors, priests, evangelists, and preachers. The theft and sale of sacred objects of art and digging up the remains of Indigenous people to ship to museums in New York, Washington, or Europe defined the era.

International treaties were created centuries earlier and signed with other European nations, where settlers would conclusively see that all civilized nations agreed upon the concept of “first discovery,” resulting in the Doctrine of Discovery (1493) and Manifest Destiny (ca. 1845). These doctrines declared that whichever European nation got to the lands that belonged to Indigenous peoples first would own that land in perpetuity against all other foreign invaders. Initially

settlers denied the existence of Indigenous peoples. They considered the land to be empty. As they traveled, settlers left their names chiseled into a stone, carved on a tree, or written as graffiti on the side of a cliff. They confirmed in this way that they, and only they, had a God-given right to own all those cultures and all those artworks instead of against any other nation. Moreover, the Bible gave this authority to the settler in complete confidence, evidently without a moral conscience. Associate Justice Joseph Story (1779–1845), a Unitarian, wrote, “As infidels, heathens, and savages, they [the Indians] were not allowed to possess the prerogatives belonging to the absolute, sovereign, and independent nations.”2 After seas of willing settler accomplices had faithfully followed that diktat for more than five hundred years, what does the reader think settlers would have produced? Plundered and fundamentally

1. Richard Henry Pratt, Battlefield and Classroom: Four Decades with the American Indian, 1867–1904, ed. Robert M. Utley (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2004), xi. Brigadier General Richard Henry Pratt coined the term, “Kill the Indian, save the man,” when he launched Carlisle Indian Industrial School, designed to assimilate Native children into Anglo-American society.

2. Steven Newcomb, “Domination and Indigenous Peoples,” in Indigenous Peoples as Subjects of International Law, ed. Irene Watson (London: Routledge, 2018), 32.

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disrupted from once solid, stable societal systems, Indigenous peoples fell into dysfunctional political economies.

Adaptations to survive introduced crises ensued. Visit any reserve in Canada or reservation in the United States; the winning of the West in this fast, ever-changing world has not yet finished its terrible legacy.

This then is the world from which the artists at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) emerged in the 1960s—a singular and unique era, the last great Indian art movement of the 20th century. Founded in 1962 as an alternative model of BIA boarding school, IAIA was first a high school, then a junior college devoted to the arts and humanities. More than 300 Native American students attended the school back then and worked in a variety of media: music,

ceramics, silverwork, fashion design, drama, creative writing, and printmaking.

Here I focus on the visual arts, specifically the painters.

TWO ARTISTS STAND OUT from that generation: Tommy Cannon (Kiowa/ Caddo, 1946–1978) and Earl Biss (Crow, 1947–1998), with several others who indicate the depth of the ’60s. The research in this area has barely begun, except for writings about Cannon, who has loads of information published and reported on his work and life.

One of those rare artists who boldly painted his convictions, Earl Biss from Montana applied paint in grand, gestural accents and explored and defied the limits of Indian art like few of the time. Such abstractions lend themselves easily to Western art criticism but not easily to ideas of what Indian art should

above Alfred Young Man (Chippewa-Cree) painting in a studio on the IAIA campus, 1968, collection of the IAIA Archives, Box 04f66i01. Image courtesy of the IAIA Archives, Santa Fe, New Mexico.

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be. Coming so soon in the early years of the Indian Fine Art movement, his art seemed positively irrational: Since what reservation Indian artist had ever heard about Abstract Expressionism?

Biss, some thought, was clearly out of his league and depth of knowledge. He was embarking on defining the ineffable, born of what was written and known about his people’s history and customs. As Biss’s studio classmate, I found him irreverent, egotistical, humorous, and politically astute, yet somehow caught up in dealing in a world of conservative, racist history with the rest of us. If, after one glance at his large, dripped, rebellious canvases you were led to believe otherwise, you would be mistaken.

Biss and his creative writer buddy, Ronald Rogers (Cherokee Nation), were of the intellectual elite on campus. They spoke and wrote of high-minded aspirations and goals and were permanently fixed as artists and writers in the world of Native art at every possible level of conversation. Rogers wrote his radical prose and poetry while Biss pushed his art beyond the acceptable, clearly ahead of the game. He was not worried about being controversial, nor was he doubtful. One might say that Biss’s work was derivative, perhaps of American Abstract Expressionist Jackson Pollock and to a lesser degree Franz Kline. The political edge of life on the reservation was no longer a

significant factor; therefore his strongest sentiments came from his disposition to paint freely.

All artists and writers worth their salt created their work with equal enthusiasm, with such utter abandon.

IAIA gave all the artists on campus the freedom to paint and develop in their chosen medium; some of us used that freedom to have a clearer impact on others. Historically, the ’60s redefined Native art from the Bambi School style of painting that had dominated Indian art of the Southwest for more than 30 years— but ’60s art is still influential today. Biss was a decisive factor in that redefinition.

Although Biss would move on to redefine and refine his painterly style, he ended his life painting more iconic, figurative work, which seemed to be guided by the preferences of his art-buying public.

Nevertheless, these early works clearly defined his best ideas. Viewed as complete expressions divorced from the political, cultural, historical, and monetary, they are original creations in their completeness. Conversations Biss had about art with campus contemporaries can be felt in Fire Dream #3 (1967) and Cracks the Black (1967). Biss engaged in sexual innuendo in his art too; however, conservative-minded IAIA politics and curriculum could never allow such works to see the light of day. I often wonder what he did with those works.

Tommy Wayne Cannon (Paidoung-u-day or One Who Stands in the Sun), commonly known as T.C., attended IAIA from 1964 to 1966. He was among a handful of young Native artists who had a seminal, cutting-edge influence on an entire generation of subsequent IAIA students and an ever-growing, aspiring, Native and non-Indian art community in other regions of the United States, particularly in the Southwest.

Cannon once said, “I believe that there is such a thing as Indian sensibility.

But I don’t believe it necessarily has to show in a person’s painting. This has to do with the idea of a collective history.

It’s reflected in your upbringing and the remarks that you hear every day from birth and the kind of behavior and emotion you see around you.”3

3. Jamake Highwater, Song from the Earth: American Indian Painting (Boston: Little, Brown & Co. for the New York Graphic Society, 1976), 177.

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During Cannon’s student days, the institute was located at the old Santa Fe Indian School campus on Cerrillos Road.

It was there, during a general mood of vigorous, creative activity and political change on campus amid an emotionally tumultuous climate of Native angst, that he painted Mama and Papa Have the Going Home Shiprock Blues (1966).

This period from 1962 to 1968 was also marked by a tide of keen political consciousness and social awareness.

Deafening world revolution was the order of the day, and IAIA students felt those vibes to the depths of their Native American souls.

Undergirding and inflaming these widespread political passions and emotions were the ludicrous conditions these young artists found themselves living under, where chain-linked fences—not unlike those of federal prisons—guarded the campus perimeter, as much to keep students in as to keep unwanted guests out. Many conversations of what constituted Native art framed themselves within these political contradictions, to which Cannon was no stranger.

Mama and Papa Have the Going Home Shiprock Blues is a painting humorously soaked in the philosophical and political ambiguities and ironies of the day, discussing as it does what life is like as an Indian living in a white man’s world and all that entails.

Although the painting is an early one, and perhaps Cannon’s best-known work of that period, he unabashedly unlocked, located, and unloaded his Native sensibilities and symbolisms into this piece.

He used vernacular of the folk/pop, social consciousness, protest-song idiom of the day. Bob Dylan and his freewheelin’ harmonica were immortalized in It’s Alright Ma, I’m Only Sighing (ca. 1967), as was Woody Guthrie, as Cannon interwove a rich tapestry of poetry and satire onto his canvases. He once wrote that his paintings were nothing but “songs that I have lived through.”4 The style of Mama and Papa Have the Going Home Shiprock Blues illustrates Cannon’s fondness for creating

variations on a theme throughout a whole breadth of work. Writers pontificate about how Cannon’s Indians seem to be caught between two worlds, as if that somehow were a Cannon issue or worry. The Navajo man in this painting appears to be incongruously smoking the white man’s cigarettes. Both figures in the painting end up coolly sporting sunglasses invented by the mainstream culture. The man, caught in a typical cigarette advertising gesture, might have been modeled after an idea created by corporate America. The crossed legs and

above T.C. Cannon (Kiowa/Caddo, 1946–1978), Mama and Papa Have the Going Home Shiprock Blues, 1966, oil, acrylic on canvas, 84 × 59½ in., collection of the National Collection of Contemporary Native American Art, Honors Collection CD-10, Institute of American Indian Arts, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Reprinted with permission of the Estate of T.C. Cannon. © Estate of T.C. Cannon. opposite E a r l B i ss (C row, 1947–1998) at IAIA, ca. 1965, collection of the IAIA Archives.

Both images courtesy of the IAIA Archives, Santa Fe, New Mexico.

4. Joan Frederick and Walter Cannon, T.C. Cannon: He Stood in the Sun (Flagstaff: Northland Publishing, 1995), vii.

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above T.C. Cannon (Kiowa/ Caddo, 1946–1978) at IAIA, ca. 1965, collection of the IAIA Archives, Santa Fe, New Mexico. opposite The E-Yah-Pah-Hah Indian Chanters, collection of the IAIA Archives, box 08f02i05. Image courtesy of the IAIA Archives Santa Fe, New Mexico.

daintily hoisted ciggy insinuate, perhaps unexpectedly, that assimilation has taken place at a very refined if antithetic level, hence the “living in two worlds” analogy, but a careful reading of the entire work and other later works say precisely the opposite. If anything, the idea of cultural sovereignty rules supreme in Cannon’s mind when viewed against the backdrop of his short life span.

One cannot truly appreciate the true genius of Cannon without looking at his entire body of ’60s work alongside the work of his IAIA contemporaries: Kevin Red Star, Earl Eder, Billy Soza 5. Highwater, Song from the Earth, 178.

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WarSoldier, Alfred Clah, Richard Kee Yazzie, Austin Rave, Cliff Suathojame, Linda Lomahaftewa, Douglas Coffin, Douglas Hyde, Ted Palmanteer, Bill Prokopiof, King Kuka, Earl Biss, Parker Boyiddle, Bennie Buffalo, Don Chunestudy, Peter Jones, Phyllis Fife, and Dominick F. Laducer. Only by looking at context can you see who was influenced by whom to get an accurate reading of the painting movement.

In Instructor in Green, Cannon ironically tags German-American artist Fritz Scholder as no other painting can. Cannon created this parody when Scholder was making that challenging transition from painting Abstract Expressionist stripes to that of imaging Indians. Here, Scholder is inserted into one of Cannon’s paintings of a striped canvas, giving the viewer a historical look into that enigmatic artist’s life change.

Scholder’s striped canvases (ironically served as the background here and were his hallmark up until he came to teach at IAIA) reflect the world from which Scholder emerged to finally paint his idea of what the Indian was. Scholder “found his voice” at IAIA, but he did it at the expense of the artists who brought his style of thinking and art to fruition.

In the end, Cannon was able to create Native art using the white man’s tools and idioms and by employing his Native sensibilities. Unquestionably, Cannon remained the Indian artist to tell it like it is, to use a popular expression of the ’60s. The Warrior Renaissance Man’s growing reputation and legend were fast overtaking his realities. On the way to casting off the jargon of the ’60s as he strove to create what he said were his mythologies, T.C. said, “I wasted a lot of time dealing with momentary political problems. I agree with a great many militant ideas, but I’ve got to do it from my own studio. If I were a politician, I’d be one all the way, but I am not a politician. I’m an artist. And I’ve got to do that all the way.”5 By the time of the decorative frame motif idea on Grandmother Gestating Father and the Washita River Runs

Ribbon-Like (1975), Cannon had already evolved his personal mythology to break from the artistic legacy he learned and earned at IAIA. Cannon’s paintings matured, probably because of his Vietnam war experience, higher education, and art residencies in such places as Colorado State University and Dartmouth College in New Hampshire. They became more reflective and more involved with his Kiowa/Caddo cultural heritage and the Santa Fe/Southwestern Native art scene.

Gone are the pop patois and protest art imagery that defined many of his early studies, drawings, and paintings.

He drew and painted his way through a range of subjects in his short career: Vietnam, ceremonies, politics, personal expressions. By the time of his automobile accident, he had created an entirely new personal mythology for himself. Faithful to his sense of satire, Cannon often used puns, parody, and political subversiveness in his work, combined with his ornate sense of color, shape, and design to make his statements work.

ALTHOUGH ART STUDENTS of the 1960s may not have perfectly articulated important political and historical issues in our everyday conversations, they nonetheless intuited the sociopolitical changes at play, and these realities were a part of our political conscience. Certainly no author, white or Indian, could lucidly articulate our extreme political and historical consciousness, until Standing Rock Dakota author Vine Deloria, Jr. came on the scene in 1969 with Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto.

Not until then was there anything like a truthful analysis of the extent to which the American and Canadian Indians found themselves oppressed and what the character of that tyranny was. As an art student at the Slade School of Fine Art in London, I accidentally discovered his book in a Shaftsbury Avenue bookstore.

For years after, Deloria’s books have proven to be essential reading for all my art students.

Such bitterly personal and racial experiences informed the art of the ’60s.

We had a “cause” and we had the Vietnam War, Jim Crow laws, racism, and badly run reservations and reserves to ensure that we had plenty of incentive and desire to paint, to write, do our jewelry, pottery, sing our songs, and to dance— experiences few of our non-Native faculty or students in the colleges across town could claim to have had. Undoubtedly, comparing us to white students was unfair to begin with, since those students had no idea whatsoever how absolutely advantaged they were. Today such racial expanse is called “white privilege,” an expression that would not gain traction for almost 40 years. No doubt recording all that hard-won, lived experience and creativity—as many writers, historians, and artists have done—of students who were not very successful at painting Indian art was too challenging for many writers, therefore the credit for developing the art style of that period should go to someone else. That perspective must be the height of obliviousness, bad research, shortsightedness, and egoism.

Many IAIA students were gifted musicians. They formed rock bands

such as the Fauves (named after the European art movement), the Playboys, and the Jaggers, who appeared in the December 1967 special issue, “Return of the Red Man,” of Life magazine. IAIA music instructor Louis Ballard (Quapaw/ Cherokee, 1931–2007) had his E-YahPah-Ha Indian Chanters singing original songs and touring places like Washington, DC, to perform for government dignitaries. IAIA alumni performed in theater companies in New York City. Rolland Meinholz produced original, dramatic stage performances with IAIA students in our school theater. These were later performed in the outdoor Paolo Soleri Amphitheater, which would in its lifetime host the likes of such celebrated artists as Leonard Cohen and Lyle Lovett.

IAIA had talent. So much so that when the 1970s emerged, the artists of the 1960s provided enough momentum to get us into the new millennium. That history was largely overlooked by writers such as J. J. Brody, Jamake Highwater, Joy L. Gritton, Charleen Touchette, and others.

Styles of painting, subject matter, quality of art, color, philosophy, politics of the age—all of these figured into the creative wave found at IAIA in the ’60s.

Alfred Young Man, PhD, Eagle Chief (Chippewa-Cree) is a professor emeritus at the University of Lethbridge and University of Regina. Born in Browning, Montana, he has written several essays and books including The Buckskin Ceiling: A Native Perspective on Native Art Politics (2012).

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JEFF KAHM’S GEOMETRIC VISION

By W. Jackson Rushing III, PhD

J

EFF KAHM (PLAINS CREE, 1968–2021) was a much beloved artist and art educator who had taught at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe since 2005.

Sadly, he died tragically young in an automobile accident on March 26, 2021. Like the passing of T.C. Cannon (Kiowa/Caddo) in 1978, Kahm’s death at age 52 robbed the world of one of its most gifted, accomplished, and visionary painters. Ambitious and prolific, he was remarkably talented and admired by many. Kahm was plain-spoken, likable, and easy to be with. Humble to a fault, he was a pathbreaker who made hard-edge abstract paintings and prints that synthesized Indigenous and modernist traditions in works both large and small that evolved from dozens of thoughtful studies on paper.

He welcomed students, curators, critics, and collectors to his studio and was always glad to discuss his work, which managed to be both surface-oriented and deep and complex.1 Born in Edmonton, Alberta, Kahm grew up on the Little Pine First Nation Reserve in Saskatchewan. When I asked him

how old he was when he first knew that he would be an artist, he replied, “I was quite young actually.… Allen Sapp was the first artist I ever knew. I must’ve been six or seven years old, and I remember my grandmother and my auntie talking about him.

And that’s when I realized, or found out about, that concept that you could actually be an artist … and make a living out of it.” He was already drawing in elementary school, where his teachers recognized and encouraged him.

To make money as a teenager, he sold representational images he had made of powwow culture, because, as he reported, that’s what he knew. And so, I asked, when you were growing up on the reserve did you see traditional, historic art forms? “Maybe somewhat at powwows,” he noted, “but … by then everyone was making scenes with bears and eagles, not the traditional geometric things. I did see though a lot of [contemporary] ribbonwork … but not so much the old stuff.” His youthful artwork drew the attention of his cousin, the artist and educator Alfred Young Man (Chippewa-Cree), who introduced him to the Institute of American Indian Arts, where Kahm earned his AFA degree in 19922 and where he was first introduced to modernism, which he described as tradition supplanted by experimentation.

In 1992 Kahm attended the Kansas City Art Institute on a scholarship, where he was mentored by the painter Ron Slowinski. Initially Kahm projected black-and-white images from a book of photos of elders in Saskatchewan and then invented colors to produce paintings. He soon tired of the repetitive nature of this process and grew more interested in abstraction. In this moment of Kahm’s journey, Slowinski played an important role by conveying his interest in both American abstraction after World War II and Native American art and reaffirming Kahm’s interest in both as well. Slowinski collects Native arts, and Kahm was impressed by his teacher’s knowledge of Native American art. Both of them recalled that Slowinski introduced Kahm to Gaylord Torrence’s important 1994 publication, The American Indian Parfleche: A Tradition of Abstract Painting. According to Slowinski, “Although Jeff came from a traditional background on the reserve, … he wasn’t working with historic imagery. He was increasingly drawn instead to American abstraction. To see it, it was clear his work belonged anywhere.”

1. The memorial essay I offer here is based on a previously unpublished paper I delivered in Santa Fe on October 10, 2015, at the biannual meeting of the Native American Art Studies Association. Although Kahm was unable to attend, he vetted the essay and approved the content, which grew out of studio interviews I conducted with him in the summers of 2013 to 2015. Except as indicated, all of his statements here either emerged from those conversations or from his website.

2. Merle Martin, “Color of Spirit,” Folio 35 (January 9, 1998), 9.

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As a result of Slowinski’s introduction to what Kahm called “geometric stripe painters” and color field painters, such as Kenneth Noland, who was very interested in Navajo textiles, Kahm began making geometric pattern paintings, exemplified

by Abstract 1 and Abstract 2, both acrylic works on paper from 1994. Kahm was also looking at Pendleton blankets and “taking out any kind of imagery. That was different for me: I grew up painting figures: powwow dancers, and tipis … so this was fresh for me and I began to get into concepts and ideas, [embracing] different ways of making paintings.” The fact that works such as Abstract 1 and Abstract 2, which are best characterized as Neo-Neo-Geo, have such a close stylistic identity—if not sister and brother, then certainly cousins—underscores Kahm’s penchant for working in series.

In our conversations Kahm spoke repeatedly about the processual and experimental nature of his studio practice, which partially explains the diversity of his work in the late 1990s. He had in mind a diptych painting on canvas from 1994, Connection—that is, cultural connection—when he recalled working on occasion with symbols or that he developed collage elements by painting on burlap in a diptych format. His discovery of Paul Klee’s pictography is self-evident in Connection, but just as important is Kahm’s recollection that he was “looking at Cree syllabic characters, [being] interested in those forms, those abstract shapes. And rather than making any kind of words, I was more interested in the abstract forms.”

At six by seven feet, Connection is an early indicator of the significance of scale in his work—and that cuts both ways, from the heroic to the intimate.

Although he continued to make representational work at times while in Kansas City and in graduate school at the University of Alberta, where he earned his MFA in 1997, Kahm committed to abstraction and chose to stain canvases, which he described as a more direct way of working. Both the scale (65 by 120 inches) and the dramatic title of Almighty Voice from 1997 reflect Kahm’s interest in Barnett Newman’s synthesis of Dionysian and Apollonian elements in his heroic color field abstractions. Like Newman’s titles, such as Achilles, The Stations of the Cross, and Jericho, Kahm’s Almighty

Voice evokes an epic history. Almighty Voice, also known as Voice of the Great Spirit, also known as Jean Baptiste, was a Cree Indian charged in 1895 with illegally slaughtering a government cow, but he escaped from jail, killing a Mountie in the process. While on the run in 1897, he and two of his relatives held off one hundred police officers and civilian volunteers for two days before being killed by cannon fire. An all-too-familiar incident I fear, its significance for Kahm is reflected in his statement, made one hundred years after the death of Almighty Voice: “I’ve had that title for a long time, and I’ve been saving it for just the right painting. I knew it had to be a strong painting.”

Both Almighty Voice and Parfleche/ Artificial Components (1997) were included in Two Voices Echo, Kahm’s

above Jeff Kahm, 2017. Photo: Jason S. Ordaz. Image courtesy of the Institute of American Arts Archives, Santa Fe, New Mexico. opposite Jeff Kahm (Plains Cree, 1968–2021), Vernacular (2012), acrylic on canvas, 90 × 90 × 4 in. Image courtesy of the Estate of Jeff Kahm. Jeff Kahm art reproduced by permission of the Estate of Jeff Kahm. All rights reserved.

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above Jeff Kahm (Plains Cree, 1968–2021), Prelude (2014), acrylic on canvas, 19 × 19 in.

Image courtesy of the Estate of Jeff Kahm. Jeff Kahm art reproduced by permission of the Estate of Jeff Kahm. All rights reserved. opposite Jeff Kahm (Plains Cree, 1968–2021), Converse (2012), acrylic on canvas, 90 × 90 × 4 in., collection of the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe, New Mexico. Jeff Kahm art reproduced by permission of the Estate of Jeff Kahm. All rights reserved.

MFA thesis show at the University of Alberta. The stylistic twinning in such works makes pointless an attempt to parse which parts or aspects are inspired

by Native or modernist forms, especially as he was increasingly aware of modernism’s debts to Native art. His interest in parfleches was one, he explained, with his interest in Jackson Pollock’s Native-inspired “primitivism,” and so he was constantly making connections: “So now I’m starting to really slow down and study these parfleche designs … [noticing] how they have this modernist feel. Starting to realize that these modernists were already borrowing, people like Kenneth Noland.” Thus, I was prompted to ask what looks in retrospect like a frankly rhetorical question: Is it fair to say that you identified two streams—an Indigenous one and a modernist one—that are commingled in your work? And without hesitation he responded, “It was a perfect marriage.… I think that’s what they were doing, these modernist, formalist painters: they were seeing what

I was seeing. It was just too obvious, and it is a perfect marriage, working this way.”

This attitude was embodied, he pointed out, in the show’s title, Two Voices Echo.

Since 2010 Kahm has been featured in a string of solo and group exhibitions in the United States, Canada, and Europe, and even a short list reveals an expanding recognition of his achievement: Paradigm, at the Urban Shaman Contemporary Aboriginal gallery in Winnipeg (2013); Native Art Now: Contemporary Indigenous Art at the Nordamerika Native Museum in Zurich (2014–15); the US State Department Art in Embassies program in collaboration with the Institute of American Indian Arts (2015); and a show of small, experimental works at Chiaroscuro Gallery in Santa Fe (2020–21), among numerous others. These were preceded by his solo show Vernacular (2012), at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe, notable especially for a pair of large works: Vernacular and Converse, both acrylic on canvas paintings, 90-by-90-by-4-inches large.

In identifying these as investigations of the process of painting, I want to borrow a passage I wrote about Saulteaux painter Robert Houle’s parfleche-inspired abstractions. “In Systemic or serial painting, typically the basic format, structure, or design is given in the first instance and repeated in subsequent works, and the number of pictorial elements is kept to a minimum.

Reductive and somewhat repetitive, the unique invention of each painting in the series takes place within the parameters of the system, which it reinforces and subtly modifies. The overall sameness of the series tends to amplify the specificity of each individual painting.”3 In the case of Vernacular and Converse, Kahm uses just one element—stripes—to achieve uniformity, diversity, and complexity and he affirms the familial nature of the works collectively with the word vernacular: of or relating to the common style of a particular time, place, or group.

Opus and Prelude (both 2014) are more modestly scaled at 19 by 19 inches, and their calming horizontality hints at a kinship with the work of Agnes Martin.

3. W. Jackson Rushing III, “Troubling Abstraction: Robert Houle’s Indigenous Modernism,” in Robert Houle: Troubling Abstraction, ed. Mark Arthur Cheetham, Gerald McMaster, W. Jackson Rushing, and Carol Podedworny (Hamilton, ON: McMaster Museum of Art, 2007), 29.

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They belong to Kahm’s Music series— works unified by style and musical titles, including Groove and Tempo. As such we are reminded that in the early 20th century artists and critics lauded the synesthetic musicality of abstraction in the belief that music was the highest art form for being the least literal and referential. The poetic and emotional quality of the colors in these paintings slightly belies the punctilious rigor of their composition, which depends on the interplay of linear forms of varying widths.

Aria and Chant (both 2014), 19-by-19-inch acrylic paintings on canvas from the same series, are best understood and appreciated in relation to each other. Their titles remind us that Kahm was a formalist interested in metaphoric possibility. An aria, sung by a single voice, is often the occasion of a striking solo performance—unique and singular—whereas chanting often seeks universality. The blanket-like horizontal bands in Chant affirm Kahm’s attraction to a variety of Indigenous textile arts and its tangy, saturated red functions, in modernist parlance, as an abstract visual equivalent for a passionate musical experience. Featuring dynamic asymmetry and the sharp contours of bold color combinations, the works in this series manifest the patient exploration of a theme that typifies Crow beadwork and parfleche painting, as well as the geometric abstractions of Josef Albers.

Thus, to know these works well is to be seriously engaged with intertextuality.

In closing I want to consider carefully and annotate an artist statement from Kahm’s website. My annotation/ interpretation is derived from our conversations (and it is with great sorrow that I must speak of him in the past tense).

Early in his statement he established the fact that his study of pre-modern Indigenous art was a crucial component of his research on non-objective art, and that his project had cross-cultural hybridity at its core from the beginning. He recognized, for example, “The similarities between Indigenous abstraction and the modern art aesthetic.” Expressing an awareness in his work of these similar aesthetic traditions gave his painting a double historicity. Kahm was a natural heir to still flourishing Indigenous art forms with roots in antiquity that emphasized

geometric designs, including quillwork, beadwork, textiles, and parfleche and pottery designs. Just as natural was his inheritance of the Indigenous-inspired modernism of Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, and Kenneth Noland, et al.

Crisp, clear, linear, ordered, dynamic, logical, and seemingly autonomous, he always “proved” his designs by testing them in the studio before production.

Kahm also said, of Indigenous geometric patterns, that “it is precisely in their use as symbols that they continued.

Various Indigenous cultures also used abstract and geometric motifs not only … as a visual language … but to create meanings that symbolically represented the physical and social world.” In other words, as in modernist practice, Kahm’s Native predecessors weren’t necessarily picturing things literally, but evolving a visual language that makes objects and society manifest symbolically. He found this tenacity of symbolic potential especially attractive. Kahm also stated, “In essence, my work is a fusion of Indigenous

motifs …[and] the modernist aesthetic.”

Note carefully the word essence, which implies the transhistorical, to refer to the ultimate nature of his painting and the idea that that essence results from finding a common ground between a relatively new art that was deeply informed by a relatively old one.

Kahm said, “In the end, geometric abstraction seems to me the most viable approach to explore the confluence of time and culture at a metaphorical level and one that resonates universally.” What I have reviewed here is Kahm’s thoughtful theory that underpins an aesthetic that encourages new discourse about the dialogue between the synchronic and the diachronic and between universal essence and cultural and historical specificity. His chosen mission was a serious one: to make art that is precisely about now that will have the staying power of iconic works from not one but many great cultural traditions. In an email he emphasized to me that it “seems more truthful to work this way.”

W. Jackson Rushing III, PhD, is Professor Emeritus of Visual Arts at the University of Oklahoma, curator, and author of numerous books about Native art.

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KarmaHenry.com “Waning Crescent,” acrylic on canvas, 16 × 20 inches, 2021

Jackie Sevier + Chessney Sevier northernplainsstudio.com Pathways Native Arts Festival Buffalo Thunder Resort, Santa Fe, NM August 20–22, 2021

Bighorn Rendezvous Art Show Brinton Museum, Big Horn, WY July 10 – August 21, 2021

chessneysevier.com Texas Range Cow, 2021, gouache

Lady’s Purse with Chokecherries, mixed media, 2021

Argentium silver necklace with druzy quartz crystal.

Photo: Ann Sherman

Nakota jeweler, silversmith, sculptor & textile artist Amuletic forms with audio esthetics. Commissions welcome

nelda Schrupp

HEALING SPIRIT DRESSES in four direction colors SPIRIT DRESSES honoring abused and battered women

August 21 & 22: Free Indian Market Scottish Rite Temple, Santa Fe, NM

(701) 740-0775 NeldaDBANakotaArts.com

KW Walkingstick Pottery

walkingstickpottery.com

Hand-coiled Cherokee Pottery

2021 Santa Fe Indian Market Lincoln W 768 Cherokee Art Market

Uktena, 2021, hand-coiled ceramic jar, 91/2 × 10 × 4 in.

Kelly Church Ottawa and Pottawatomi – Gun Lake Band

woodlandarts.com

An Interwoven Legacy: The Black Ash Basketry of Kelly Church and Cherish Parrish Grand Rapids Art Museum, Grand Rapids, Michigan August 28, 2021 – February 26, 2022 New works from both artists

Art of the People: Contemporary Anishinaabe Artists Saugatuck Douglas History Center, Douglas, Michigan July 1 – October 1, 2021

“Breathe in All That Is Beautiful”

by Kelly Church, 2021, birchbark, porcupine quills, 15° beads, sweetgrass, white cedar bark, sinew.

Photo: Richard Church (Odawa/Ojibwe)

SWAIA Santa Fe Indian Market Booth PLZ 19, also at swaia.org August 21 & 22, 2021

Traci Rabbit Traci Rabbit Traci Rabbit

Cherokee Nation Cherokee Nation Cherokee Nation

billandtracirabbit.com billandtracirabbit.com billandtracirabbit.com “OklahomaBeauty” Beauty” “Oklahoma “Oklahoma Beauty” acrylic canvas acrylic on on canvas acrylic on canvas 24x36

24x36 24x36

PROFILE

Navajo Basket Maker

SALLY BLACK

By Kelly Church (Pottawatomi/Ottawa/Ojibwe)

H

AILING FROM Monument Valley in southwestern Utah, Sally Black has dedicated her artistic career to furthering the genre of three-leaf sumac coiled basketry. Her mother Mary Holiday Black and maternal grandmother Betty Holiday were celebrated basket makers and weavers in their own right. The National Endowment for the Arts recognized Mary Black’s accomplishments by naming her a National Heritage Fellow. Growing up in this creative environment, Sally Black began weaving her own baskets at age eight and, inspired by her mother’s rug weaving, adapted pictorial designs to basketry, sometimes now called “Story Baskets.” Even her seemingly nonobjective abstract designs, such as the classical wedding design, relay tales from Navajo oral history.

Sally Black’s baskets have garnered top awards at the Heard Fair, Gallup Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial, and other Native art markets. She is a first-language Navajo speaker who presents and educates the public about Navajo basketry throughout the Southwest. I recently had a phone visit with this acclaimed basket maker.

KC: First of all, how have you been doing?

SB: I’ve been doing fine. I’ve been busy with a lot of baskets and just working.

KC: And how was the pandemic for you?

SB: Well, it was terrible.

KC: Were you able to harvest during the pandemic?

SB: Yeah, I did. I had no choice. I’ve got to do it. Well, last year I think it was April and May, they kind of did a roadblock. They had to do all that, and it was kind of hard, so we didn’t really gather at that time.

KC: Where do you live?

SB: I live in Monument Valley, [toward] the Arizona side. We used to live in Douglas Mesa. I was raised there. I left school when I was in fifth grade, and I never went back to school. So I moved. Then I had a workshop with Santa Fe in a museum. We did a workshop for two weeks, and it was really tough for me.

My sister-in-law was the only one to translate for me. Back in ’80.

KC: So you were only fluent in your own language up until the 1980s?

SB: Yes. 50 | FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

KC: How did you learn English? Was it just by being around it? Or did you make a concentrated effort to go to a class?

SB: I decided to go back to take adult education. My brother said, “You should move to Blanding, Utah, and take classes over there. That might help.” So I moved to Blanding for four and a half years. That’s where I really learned. Then, after I finished and I graduated. I was so surprised I graduated. I got through our graduation and I didn’t even know that they picked me to do some speech. This was back in ’93.

KC: You gave a speech at your graduation?

SB: Yes. When they passed out those invitations, I looked it up, and my name was like “Sally Black, Speech” at this time. And I jumped up, and ran to my teacher, and I said, “You know what?

I don’t even know what to say. I just found my name in this,

SALLY BLACK

above Placing the Stars series plaque, split sumac reeds coiled on three-sumac rod foundation, aniline dyes, 18 in. diameter.

Photo: Lambert Wilson. opposite Sally Black carrying sumac bundle. Image courtesy of the artist.

and I’m not even ready,” but everybody is going up there. They’re all lining up, and they’re doing their thing, and I’m like, “Ah—” I kind of blacked out. I’m like, Okay, and then I just thought, I did a lot of presentations at places. I went to Chicago, Washington.… I went to different places like Albuquerque, Phoenix, Tucson, and Santa Fe, and Salt Lake. I’m like, Okay. I think I can do it. I’ll just do my best.

So I just did it my way, and what scares me is all these students. They go up there. They’re presenting their speech.

They’re crying. And then I thought, I better not do that. And I went up there, and I just got tough. I just thought of Santa Fe and Washington when I saw all these people around me, and I just thought that way, and I just concentrated

on what I was doing, and then I just thanked everybody who helped me out at the school. That was it. And I sat down, and everybody was all clapping their hands. When I stepped down, I saw all the audience was crying, and I’m glad I didn’t even cry.

KC: What a great memor y and experience. When did you learn to weave?

SB: You know, I started doing baskets when I was eight years old. By watching my mom, and that’s how I learned. Even though she told me that I was too young to learn, but I forced myself to do that. I start off with a water jug, and then I start doing wedding baskets. My very first

wedding basket was kind of square. Not all good, but I had some brothers who were all laughing about it. You know how brothers are.

They said, “You think that you’re going to do it? I don’t think so.” In myself, I have this power. I can do it. And a belief.

And then I thought I’m going to do it. I’m going to see myself somewhere. I want to see myself on a poster. I want to see myself in a magazine. Even though I am learning, I’m going to make my brothers see, and then I start doing that and I keep doing that. I keep trying to fix my weaving, and I keep going. Back in ’76 I sat down with my mom. My mother is rug weaving and basket weaving, and she does some different arts on the NO. 31, SUMMER 2021 | 51

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night just to surprise my family. I just kept weaving. While I go herding sheep, I take a nap while the sheep are out there. By the time they’re back, the basket was done.

When my mom came back, she said, “Who brought that basket?

I looked at my mom. I said, “I did.

I made it.” My dad and my mom were looking at me. “I don’t think so.” I said I did. And I was too shy to sell that basket myself, so I gave it to my mom.

And then they took it to an old trading post. There was a place called Oljato Trading Post. Then I guess there was a lady named Barbara from Santa Fe that started going down there, and she saw that basket and she wanted to know who made that basket. That’s how they found me. Through my mom.

KC: Was that your first big basket sale?

SB: That was the first one. The Oljato one.

The Heard Museum came later. And the trader’s name was Virginia Smith and Ed Smith. They’ve both passed away. side too. So I said, “You know what? All these people around here, they only do wedding baskets. How come they just only do wedding baskets? Can I change?

Can I do designs on the baskets?”

And she was just looking at me.

And she said, “I don’t know. If you want to.” And I said, “I’m going to put on some rug designs that you’re doing.” So I start doing that rug design on the basket, and her favorite one was always the Yé'ii Bichei. And then that’s what I did. I kept doing that. And then I don’t know somewhere in ’78, I made a big Yé'ii Bichei.

It’s about probably 30-something inches.

It was big. That’s when there was a lady who came from Phoenix, and she saw me working on it, and she said, “Sally, take it to the Heard Museum.” After I finished, we went to Phoenix, and that was the first time I visited Phoenix.

KC: Was that your first museum sale?

SB: Yeah, they bought it. My very big basket—they bought it first. Ever since then, I started doing a lot of designs.

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KC: Where do you get your designs from—your imagination? From your culture?

SB: Culture. Yeah, I got it from my mom … because she used to put a lot of Yé'ii Bicheis in rug weaving.

KC: How do people accept it? Like your mom and people around you? I know the outside world is excited.

SB: They were kind of like, “You’re not supposed to be doing that. You’re not supposed to.” You know, you never put the things on the basket, but I didn’t listen. I told them I go along with my own heart.

The first time when I did a wedding basket, they were hunting for a week. It was deer hunting season. They went, so I was the only one who was home. At the same time, I took care of the livestock. I took care of the sheep, and I had to run around. I started a wedding basket. I keep going and going and going. That was the first one. I kind of made it big. Probably about almost 30 inches. I stayed up all

KC: We’ll mention them because it’s always nice to remember those people who had enough belief and confidence in your work to do that.

SB: Mm-hmm. They did. So they’re the ones. And then after that, I used to sell my stuff to this guy from Phoenix. It was like a secondhand store. I used to weave for them too. Then later on I got to know Steve Simpson and Barry Simpson [the owners of Twin Rocks Trading Post in Bluff, Utah] and their mom and dad. I used to sell my baskets to them, and I used to work with them a lot. Then people started weaving. I think after ’86, ’87, then people started doing designs on the baskets.

KC: Like you. You started something with weaving in designs. So those were the first few people that took notice and gave you the credit you deserve for your weavings. Do you remember your very first Santa Fe Indian Market? What did you sell there that year?

SB: I sold a big basket. Squash blossoms.

I did a workshop with a museum in Santa

SALLY BLACK

Fe—it was two weeks. There were a lot of other tribes. All the basket weavers were from all over. That’s how I got into Santa Fe Market. They asked me to apply. So ever since then, I get invited to places when they find out I’m doing a lot. I was invited to Taylor Museum [now the Colorado Springs Fine Art Center] in Colorado Springs where I got the best of show in ’98 or ’99. In Santa Fe, I got the best of category.

KC: What is sumac? Tell me about this plant.

SB: It’s a bush. They need moisture and grow along the river.

KC: Do you harvest at a certain time of year?

SB: We start up from October all the way up to the end of April. Once it turns green in April, they only use it for the inside of the basket. They’re called rods. We harvest the sumac in the fall. And then after that, we bring it back and then we wait for like four days, and then we start.

What we do is we sort out all the different sizes, and then we have to clean them, and

above Female Yei Bei Chei, split sumac reeds coiled on threesumac rod foundation, aniline dyes, 17 in. diameter. Photo: Lambert Wilson. opposite Christmas, split sumac reeds coiled on three-sumac rod foundation, aniline dyes, 11 in. diameter. Photo: Lambert Wilson.

NO. 31, SUMMER 2021 | 53

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They order. Some of them I don’t have a clue, but some give me an idea to do.

KC: What is your favorite spot, Sally, when you weave?

SB: I sit in my kitchen, and that’s my favorite spot. There are two windows on the side, so I can see clear. I always like to just concentrate quiet. But back in my younger days, I liked to listen to the music. I loved to watch the movies.

But at my age now, I always just want it to be quiet.

KC: Does all your family weave?

SB: Well, all the girls are weaving and including me. There are four of us.

KC: What is your mom’s name?

above Yellow Yei Bei Chei, split sumac reeds coiled on three-sumac rod foundation, aniline dyes, 30 in. diameter. Image courtesy of the artist. opposite Red Yei Bei Chei, split sumac reeds coiled on three-sumac rod foundation, aniline dyes, 17 in. diameter. Photo: Lambert Wilson.

we have to split them. Then we have to take out the middle center part, and we dry the top part and peel the bark, and then we dye them different colors.

KC: Is the bark thick?

SB: Yeah. But you have to make it the thickness that you want to use, what size you want it. And we know what size we can use by splitting. The best time for us to gather is in October.

KC: So does sumac grow plentiful where you live?

SB: There is some out in the canyon, but they’re not as good as the ones that we use, the ones that we get from along the river. And if we were smart, we could’ve got a lot and plant at our own place, but we never thought about it before.

But we planted some this year, and they are growing. They’re green now. Very exciting.

54 | FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

KC: So do you water it every day? Or how do you care for it when you’re growing it at home?

SB: Well, it doesn’t really rain here in the summer. Just along the river. But here we start watering every like five days, four days. We don’t water every day because we might ruin it.

KC: What is your favorite thing to weave? Like when you would sit down excited about weaving something, is it anything that day? Or is there one basket that you’re like, “I really like doing this one,” and you do it over?

SB: Well, I sit down, and sometimes I just start anything I think of.… Sometimes I don’t even know what I’m going to make.

I look around, and then I start thinking, trying to put them together. So they’ll come out something. And then sometimes people call me and they say, “Can you make this kind of basket for me?”

SB: Her name is Mary Holiday Black.

Yeah, her maiden name and the marriage name. Back in ’95, she’s the one who got the National Heritage Fellowship Award in Washington, DC, because she’s the one who was the first well-known basket weaver, and at that time she used to cut a lot of sumac, the one that we use for baskets. They used to sell it to people who didn’t have vehicles at the time. So she kind of helped a lot of people to do baskets.

KC: You have brothers?

SB: I have seven brothers too. Five of them are weaving. They’re weavers and really good weavers.

KC: Do you guys encourage your nieces and nephews? Or when they are just ready, do you just teach them? Like when I teach, I am there when they want me, but I don’t push if they aren’t ready.

SB: Oh, yeah. That’s how it is too. They want to, they can, because nobody forced me to do basket weaving. I wanted to do something, so I did.

KC: What do you dye your baskets with?

SB: Well, I’ll mix. I use Rit dyes, and then I use plant roots.

KC: Is there a favorite design of yours?

You said your mom's favorite was the Yé'ii Bichei. What about you? Do you have a favorite design?

SALLY BLACK

SB: Well, my favorite design—I don’t want them to get jealous. I just love all designs.

I used to do a lot of eagles, and I used to do a lot of day and night. I used to do Fire God. I used to do butterflies, turtles, frogs, and more.

KC: Over the pandemic, what kind of things did you get to weave?

SB: I did a lot of hummingbirds and I did turtle with many colors. I just called them “Rainbow Turtle.” I just did a lot of designs that were ordered. And then some of them send me their own ideas, what kind of designs that they wanted. So I’ve been working on those. It keeps me out of trouble, not going anywhere, just stay home, and I did a lot, and it was okay.

KC: So you were definitely busy.

SB: Yeah. But, the end of November, I got sick. All the way for the whole month. I was coughing, didn’t feel good. I was just taking all these herbs and drinking water.

Lemon with tea, honey. I drink that, and it was miserable. It was awful, that feeling.

I just fought through it.

KC: Like the COVID virus?

SB: Mm-hmm. I think that’s what it was, because all the symptoms that they went through are what I went through and what I experienced. I’m all right now.

KC: I’m so thankful, Sally, that you feel better. How do you feel today?

SB: Right now, I feel myself.

KC: So tell me, what are you planning on bringing to Indian Market this year?

SB: I’m thinking of making a Yé'ii Bichei. I started Placing the Stars. It is about Coyote and Man, and they always ask for eagle, flag baskets, and probably butterflies, and I might make some turtles.

KC: What is the style of your baskets called?

SB: They’re called coiled. You can use them any way you want it, like decoration.

You can display on your wall, you can put

it in a showcase, or you can just buy a stand and put it there.

KC: What’s the smallest basket you make?

SB: A small wedding basket. Sometimes they use it for, you know, when baby has its first laugh. They put salt in it. And when they make a dinner for the baby’s first laugh, they put their salt to give away.

[It’s] probably about two inches.

KC: And your biggest one is 30 inches, you said?

SB: Oh, the biggest is probably 40 inches.

That was high. The biggest one I did.

There is a lot going on this year and last year. Even the plant, the sumac, they’re not so happy like the way they used to be. I think it kind of bothered the sumac too, but it was okay. You know, they’re not really tough. That’s what it was saying too. And the places where we used to cut sumac, even when we trimmed them, we’d go back, and they’re not so happy.

KC: So how do these sumac regenerate or grow? Like my trees drop seeds, and they take two years to germinate.

SB: This one we trim every year. We cut them, and it grows back every year. They are not so good. They were not growing so fast and too little, and I don’t usually use the one that’s really small. So I started growing at my house too, and they are just starting to grow.

KC: Do you have something planned to enter for Indian Market competition?

SB: I’m thinking of like a really nice, fine Yé'ii Bichei.

KC: Is there something you want to say to people that are coming to market this year?

SB: Well, I’d sure like to get to know more people, get to know more new friends through the market. I’m just really looking forward to that.

Sally Black is represented by Garland’s Indian Jewelry and Hoel’s Indian Shop, both in Sedona, Arizona. You can contact Sally via michael33444@yahoo.com and see her at SWAIA booth MAR 817. She will be happy to visit with you and share her beautifully designed baskets.

NO. 31, SUMMER 2021 | 55

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Hopi Carver

RYAN GASHWESEOMA

By Michelle J. Lanteri

F

ROM THE VILLAGE OF MOENKOPI on the Hopi Third Mesa in Arizona, Ryan Wisiwma Gashweseoma carves boxes and katsina dolls that share the intricate symbols of Hopi culture with the world, as filtered through his own experiences. He has created a new art form that combines katsina dolls made of cottonwood root with boxes made from woods like padauk, lacewood, and purpleheart.1 He places a doll at the front or on the top of each box and, in some versions, he includes a doll on some or all sides of a box.

Both the katsinas and boxes bear colors and designs that exude distinctively Hopi aesthetics that correspond to the people’s understanding of the world. Gashweseoma draws inspiration from everything around him. He continues to be inspired through sharing Hopi designs with public audiences through his art, where each work finds a new home and makes new connections through traveling across cultures.

In Hopi worldviews, katsina dolls, or katsintithu, represent particular katsinas or spiritual and ancestral beings that guide and influence the well-being of the Hopi people. The katsinas, who number around 200, leave their homes in the San Francisco Peaks to visit the Hopi villages for half the year, from the winter solstice to the Niman, or July Home Dance.2 Through ceremonial and social dances, among other rituals, the katsinas’ presence and the people’s coinciding cultural protocols during this time offer many opportunities for the Hopi people to maintain balance in their communities. During these months and throughout the year, the Hopi people pray for water and the health of all beings in the world.

Gashweseoma puts his own spin on the “old style” of Hopi carving of katsintithu, a set of aesthetics revived in the 1970s by a group of male Hopi artists that creates a continuum with katsina dolls made during the 1880s.3 Of these artists, Manfred Susunkewa, a leader in the movement, notably brought back the old style as a way to connect to earlier generations and to rekindle the art of creating gentler, more approachable katsintithu.4 As such, the old style katsintithu offer a return to a bygone way of making the dolls that predates two later developments in the art form: the action style of the 1930s and the hyperreal style of the 1960s.5 In terms of identifying the old style, these katsintithu are made of cottonwood root like the action and hyperreal styles,

but their arms and feet are carved in conventions that reveal them as old style. With hands held in fists, the arms are placed flush against either side of the abdomen and the feet are parallel and flat at the base of straight legs. In old-style katsintithu, Hopi artists paint the figures with douma, or white clay, and cover this base layer with pigments in pastel and jewel-like hues that reflect the colors of the directions and related associations of seasons, beings, rituals, and gatherings.6 The dolls also receive feathers, or paahos, and other embellishments from their makers that further breathe life into their existence in home circles and for their journeys into private and museum collections. The entire construction and composition of the dolls are grounded by the

1. Barry Walsh, with photography by Anna Kim Walsh, The Great Tradition of Hopi Katsina Carvers: 1880 to Present (Tucson, AZ: Rio Nuevo Publishers, 2019), 191–92.

2. Barton Wright, with photography by Peter L. Bloomer, Hopi Kachinas: The Complete Guide to Collecting Kachina Dolls (Flagstaff, AZ: Northland Publishing, 1977), 7.

3. Walsh, The Great Tradition of Hopi Katsina Carvers, 7, 131.

4. Walsh, 131.

5. Walsh, 7.

6. Ryan Gashweseoma in discussion with the author, April 10, 2021. Note: All information that follows comes from this discussion. The author offers much gratitude to the artist for this conversation.

56 | FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

RYAN GASHWESEOMA

cottonwood tree, a water-seeking being.

As such, the katsintithu convey prayers for water and well-being for all.

An award-winning woodcarver, Gashweseoma demonstrates and shows his work at markets, museums, and cultural heritage sites. These include the Santa Fe Indian Market, the American Indian Arts Marketplace at the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles, the Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff, the Heard Museum in Phoenix, and the Montezuma Castle National Monument in Camp Verde, Arizona. A chapter in the recent book, The Great Tradition of Hopi Katsina Carvers: 1880 to Present (2019), focuses on his art practice. Gashweseoma is currently based in Hawaii with his wife, daughter, and two sons.

ML: Can you tell us about your background?

RG: I’m from the Katsina and Parrot clans, and my family roots go back to a village called Hotevilla based in Arizona.

At the age of five, I moved to Tuba City.

In 2003 I graduated from Tuba City High School. I am the oldest of five siblings.

I’ve got three brothers and one sister.

My parents are Ronson and Phoebe Gashweseoma.

When my wife, Rainbow, and I were expecting our first child in July 2009, I really didn't know what I was going to do to provide as a father. Luckily my father-in-law introduced me to carpentry, and then I started working in Las Vegas.

I worked there with my father-in-law, and every year I would go to school for a weeklong class. One class I went to was for cabinetry and woodworking. The first thing we built was a stool, and then next was a child’s lawn chair. I showed my wife, and she thought they were really nice.

She also wanted a chest of drawers, with our daughter to be born in a couple of months. We looked at stores, and then she asked if I could build her one. So I asked my father-in-law if he could help me do that. From there I built a cedar chest for my daughter with images of a water maiden, a cornstalk with a rain cloud and rain coming down, and a sun, since my

wife’s clan is Sun clan. Then the recession hit, and I lost my job. So I started carving and then started making these little boxes.

That was the beginning of my career in woodworking.

ML: How did you get started with carving, and who are your mentors?

RG: When I was growing up in Hotevilla and visiting during the summers, I stayed with my grandmother. Her brother, Benjamin Wytewa, my grandpa, had his own carving area on the back porch. I would go there and sit and watch him.

above Broadface Katsina, 2017, cottonwood root, natural and dyed horsehair, leather, duck feathers, parrot feathers, corn husks, yucca, natural pigments, 11 × 3 in. opposite Ryan Gashweseoma with one of his katsintithu.

Photo: Rainbow Gashweseoma.

Image courtesy of Ryan and Rainbow Gashweseoma.

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above S u m m e r S o l st i ce , 2 02 1 , h u m i d o r o f wa l n u t wood, Spanish cedar, acrylic, cottonwood root, 6 × 12 x 12 in. All images, unless otherwise indicated, courtesy of the artist. opposite Qootsaaf Katsina (Ashes Katsina), 2020, natural pigments, hand-cut abalone shell, cottonwood root, duck feathers, Lady Amherst's pheasant feathers, 9 × 3 in., private collection.

58 | FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

He’d talk to me in Hopi about what he was carving. Every time I’d go to visit, he’d be the person I’d go to see. He always liked to carve a Koyemsi, or a Mudhead, in a blanket. He would paint those with acrylic paint to make them look like Pendleton blankets. He was one of my biggest inspirations growing up.

When I was getting older, I would also visit my uncles in Hotevilla. They had these woodsheds as their studios.

My uncles would be carving these dolls that looked like they were coming to life, with their posing and the flow of their kilt. I didn’t know people could carve like that. It was like the Hopi version of Leonardo da Vinci. So I started seeing the

older men bringing back the old style of carving. The men reviving the old style … is something out of this world. One of my uncles gave me a piece of cottonwood root to carve on with a knife. That’s when I started whittling. Another person who inspires me is my clan uncle, Clark Tenakhongva, from Hotevilla. He made the most amazing, old-style carving. He had his own unique style, different from everyone else. Manfred Susunkewa is another inspiration of mine. His dolls have so much fine detail. Everything’s handmade, and the feel of the work is elegant and beautiful. You usually only see the old-style dolls in museums or private collections or auction houses.

RYAN GASHWESEOMA

Now that it’s been revived, a lot of young men are carving in the old style.

I thought the dolls were very elegant and subtle with beautiful, unique features to them. The colors were so natural, not so bright, but subtle.… They used the fan of the grouse feathers, and the dolls had so much detail. It was like seeing a real katsina but in carved form. So I started doing old style with flat dolls. The first flat doll I made was a grandmother doll. My dad picked it up and brought it to a place next to the Hopi Cultural Center.

He sold his Hopi-style belts there. He asked me how much I wanted for it, and I told him to price it for whatever he thought was right. So my very first carving sold for five dollars. I felt like the richest kid. I started focusing on carving until high school when I started playing sports and working.

Then, fast forward, I started my carving again and was trying to get back to what I had learned. I carve in old style with the arms on the belly in a style that people sometimes call “bellyache.” As a Hopi, everything on the dolls is found from the earth—the wood, the paint—everything’s given to you from Mother Earth. We use parrot and pheasant feathers and feathers from the grouse. The paint colors correspond to the four directions, but they also represent the sky, the stars, certain flowers, certain kinds of seasons, the sun. All the colors have a specific and special meaning. Hopi people believe that everything on this earth has a life form. In our dances and ceremonies, we pray for the whole entire world, down to the smallest organism.

ML: Can you talk about your carving process and the materials you use?

RG: I basically start carving and think to myself, “I’ll make this one.” It’s kind of like the art coming alive by itself, where the katsina will give you a sign. When I do my katsinas I also do my research. I’ll find a katsina that I’ve never seen or that Hopi people have never seen, and then I recreate it. In doing so, I go through old photographs, like the ones by Jo Mora from the early 1900s. My friend Chad will send me books of katsinas that I’ve never seen. Out of those pictures, I bring those katsinas to life. Then I’ll ask my male relatives about certain katsinas, and they’ll tell me to ask certain people who have seen that particular katsina. Then I can explain what the katsina means. There are more than 200 katsinas and around 100 that we know of. It’s like reviving all the old katsinas in the old photos and bringing them back to life, so that the younger generations who become carvers will know that these katsinas exist and will learn their meaning and purpose. That gives my carving inspiration.

The paints I get are from Third Mesa, and a couple from Second Mesa, like the black paint. The yellow is from Utah. The red paint is from New Mexico. The white, the blue, the purple, the greens—they all come from Hotevilla. Most of the time, if there are paints I don’t have, I can trade with some carvers for other pigments or feathers. There’s one pigment, cobalt blue, that I get from Italy. That paint is so different from the other pigment paint. I buy my brushes from stores.

The dolls aren’t all one piece. The horns, the ears, the eyes, the mouth, they’re all carved out of little pieces of wood and then

glued on. But some carvers do make the whole doll in one piece, in old style—that’s craftsmanship, a lot of talent right there. Then you sand with grit number 2 paper and whitewash with douma.

Douma is a white clay slip or a whitewash pigment. That’s like our canvas. After it dries, we can add the paints.

ML: Where do you draw inspiration for the designs you select for your artworks?

RG: As a Hopi, I was taught about our culture, and that everything in this world has meaning. I get a lot of inspiration from a lot of things that I see in this world, maybe just going for a walk or traveling. Or I look at my kids, my family, friends, and things that are going on with the world. I bring all that in, and then I start creating. All my designs that go on my boxes come from the teachings I was taught by my grandfathers, my uncles, and my dad.

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I create art and keep sharing it with the world to let them know that we Native Americans and we Hopis are still here, that we’ve been here, and that we’re not ever going to go anywhere.

above Blessings, 2020, humidor of walnut wood, Spanish cedar, acrylic, 7 × 14 × 14 in. opposite Heheya Katsina, 2020, natural pigments, hand-cut abalone shell, cottonwood root, cordage, natural raw cotton, 8 × 3 in., private collection.

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With my boxes, I incorporate those designs and symbols and the katsina dolls. Then I go to my shows and can share what we do as Hopi people this way.

My boxes tell a story of what I was taught, and what we learned as children growing up. To this day, I’m still learning, and I get inspiration wherever I go and from anything I see and come across. I just try to keep my eyes open and see what the next thing is that I can create and the next big thing that comes to mind.

ML: What stands out from your experiences during your first art shows?

RG: In 2010 my first market was the Hopi Heritage Festival in downtown Flagstaff, Arizona. The Hopi tribe runs it. I got the idea of making boxes and putting katsina designs on top of the boxes because I wanted to bring in a new category. The idea was that when I put a Hopi design down, those symbols would have a meaning that would incorporate

the katsina doll. All the Hopi designs and symbols have stories and teachings behind them. In the Palikmana [Butterfly maiden katsina], the checkerboard design on the forehead represents corn and life.

When I started showing at the Autry Museum in Los Angeles, my wife and I drove this big RV that we borrowed from my mother-in-law. There were tons of artists there with paintings, jewelry, and sculpture. As I started showing my artwork, people were asking about me incorporating the katsinas into the boxes.

An artist, Joe Cajero, came by my booth and bought one of my boxes. It had a carved flower with two butterflies on each side. I was so happy. After he bought the box, he gave me some advice. He said, “It looks like you’ll be doing something good with your art.” Then he said, “One piece of advice is to make smaller things.”

He explained that in doing that, potential collectors will have a variety of choices.

He said, “For the next market, make smaller boxes, and you’ll thank me later.”

RYAN GASHWESEOMA

I took that advice and I went home and started making smaller boxes. People also told me to make art to put in the judging category for the markets, and that would also help sell my art and get my name out there. So that was my first year, and the next year I applied for more art shows and was getting recognized for my work. I still make a range of boxes, from small, medium, to large, to bigger ones. I have a selection of boxes that I always bring. I also have a range of sizes of katsina dolls that I always bring.

ML: How has living in Hawaii changed your perspectives on Native art and culture?

RG: I’ve been here for almost a year, and I think we’re going to stay another year and then move back to Arizona. Hawaiian culture is so similar to Hopi. For Polynesian cultures, the ocean has a very big role.… It’s very sacred and spiritual, like the sharks, the stingrays, the turtles, and the tuna fish. For Hopis, we think the same way about the deer, the bear, the antelope, and the animals. We hold those animals and the water sacred.

We always pray for rain. Without rain, there’s no life.

Looking at some of the carvers here, it’s like a whole different form of art. They have their own inspiration that they carve from. Some of the carvers that I’ve come across really have that artistic and creative craftsmanship that people want.

There have been a couple of times I’ve gone to the local market where Polynesian artists have carved turtles, whales, octopi, and dolphins. They’re so intricate. In their cultures, their designs all have a meaning, and it’s just breathtaking. For them, the triangles represent shark’s teeth and mountains. It’s really spectacular.

When I moved to Hawaii, I didn’t know anybody except for a family friend. He introduced me to one of his friends who is a Polynesian historian. He’s been showing me paintings of their ancestors’ weapons and carvings. I want to incorporate some Hawaiian designs and some Hopi designs into a piece.

Surfing is a big sport here … I want to create a surfboard with some Hawaiian and Hopi culture with some symbols. Living here on the island is so much inspiration.

ML: As an artist, what are your hopes for the future?

RG: I create art and keep sharing it with the world to let them know that we Native Americans and we Hopis are still here, that we’ve been here, and that we’re not ever going to go anywhere.

With my art, I share my culture with the outside world and with different people of different ethnicities. I share with them that this is who I am as a Hopi and what this means to me.

I want the world to know my perspective on my craftsmanship, and I want to share my art with the world that people

can take home and share with their family or friends. In doing that, they take a piece of my heritage and culture back to their families. I want to make my kids and my family proud, and I want them to know from my heart that this what their dad loved to do.

INSTAGRAM @TALAVI_WOODWORK Michelle J. Lanteri is the curator of exhibitions and collections at the Millicent Rogers Museum in Taos, New Mexico. She earned a master’s degree in art history from New Mexico State University and is a doctoral candidate in Native American art history at the University of Oklahoma.

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Muscogee/Seminole Jeweler

KENNETH JOHNSON

By Michole Eldred (Catawba/Eastern Cherokee)

W

HAT WO U L D A JEWELER who has b een creating jaw-dropping jewelry for more than 30 years do to keep his art fresh and exciting? He takes a chance and tries new things. The old cliché, “If you build it, they will come,” rings true with Kenneth Johnson and his creative ingenuity. He is not setting aside his jewelry making. He is using it as a launching pad to expand into multiple projects. The people will come. They will explore his new creativity. They will be influenced and motivated.

When Johnson began making jewelry in Albuquerque, he realized that making art could lead to his survival.

He traded a simple pair of earrings for food. That was the beginning. He then began trading his jewelry for all types of goods, even tires for his car. He quickly realized that as a Mvskoke person who was making art in the Southwest, he had to find his own creative identity. Johnson explains his artistic philosophy: Contemporary and traditional are such problematic, binary terms. Early in my career I was so overwhelmed by what has already been offered by jewelers in the Southwest, I had to go find my own identity. Basically that is what is current. It’s current events.

It’s current tools, current materials.

I refer to our culture, which is not gone. It’s here. It’s current. There was a return to the traditional canoe to the Muscogee Nation and cutting out the insides with a chainsaw. And you can say, well, that’s not traditional.

But you know if our ancestors had a chainsaw, they probably would have used it. Treaties negotiated for blacksmiths. We worked metal. Precontact, we worked metal. I embrace that.

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KENNETH JOHNSON

I’m always taking classes and learning more. I’m not done yet.

Restless to make art. I’m looking for ways to tell a story. I’m a vessel to make things happen. I focused on the ivory-billed woodpecker, an ancient mound builder design image.… [I] designed it into this bracelet.1 Enrolled in the Muscogee (Creek) Nation and of Seminole descent, Johnson grew up in Oklahoma and attended Seneca Indian School in Wyandotte, located in the northeast corner of the state, and then completed high school at Sequoyah High School in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. He studied mechanical engineering at the University of Oklahoma before transferring to the University of New Mexico, where he met Johnson Bobb, an Oklahoman metal sculptor who had moved to Albuquerque. Bobb inspired Johnson to pursue fine arts as a career.

Johnson’s work is often recognized by his signature stamp work and engraving of Seminole patchwork, Southeastern designs and symbols, and his usage of coins. He continues

to expand his design imagery. He has recently released a line of jewelry using mokume gane, a Japanese technique of mixing different metals to create unique textures.

“The layers of color you see in my jewelry speak to the undulations of time in the landscapes around you,” Johnson shared in an artist statement. “Look at the mountains and the streambeds, and you will see the layers of earth worked over time. Our lives are formed in upheaval and major events over time that shape our character.”

His recent jewelry placed highly in the 2021 Heard Fair competition.

The delicate Platinum Twist Bracelet set with diamonds and rubies won first place in the fair’s bracelet division.

Lander Turquoise Gold Spider Pendant and Sampler Chain placed second in the necklace division. The craftsmanship and skill in these pieces are superior. Johnson’s metalwork and jewelry will be featured at the opening of the First Americans Museum in Oklahoma City on September 18, 2021. He is also in the planning stage of the creation of special gorgets and bolo

Treaties negotiated for blacksmiths.

We worked metal.

Precontact, we worked metal. I embrace that.

above Mokume Gane Bracelets, 2021, hand-stamped sterling silver and copper mokume gane with a 22-karat yellow gold overlay. opposite Kenneth Johnson holding a cast metal canoe paddle, component of Star Turtle sculpture, 2021. He is wearing a custom bracelet and canoe paddle pendant.

All photos: Justin Rogers, justinrogersimages.com.

1. “Indigenous Community Speaker Series: New Directions in Contemporary Indigenous Art,” NSU Center for Tribal Studies, streamed live on November 19, 2020, Facebook video, 1:01:56, web.

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above Lander Turquoise Gold Spider Pendant and Sampler Chain, 2021, Landers turquoise cabochon set in Austrian fourducat coin, spider pendant design, pendant: 2 × 7/8 × 5/8 in., private collection. Landers cabochon weight is 24.7 carats.

Gold purity is 23.7-karats. opposite Woodpecker Gorget Necklace, 2021, sterling silver, copper, bronze, 4 × 2 in. gorget on 20-inch silver chain. The unique gorget was commissioned as the 2021 Distinguished Leadership award, given to Chickasaw Nation Governor Bill Anoatubby, who has served nine consecutive terms as leader of the Chickasaw Nation.

ties to be presented to the chiefs of the Muscogee and Seminole Nations this summer. 2 One of Johnson’s small pendants provides a starting point for a much larger project. Johnson has been collaborating creatively with Matthew Eaton, a sculptor and assistant professor at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), for several years. Their relationship began over a lunch conversation before Johnson picked up his artist in residency at IAIA. Johnson’s residency was funded by an NEA grant developed by Lara Evans (Cherokee Nation), a grant expanded to allow NEA to serve greater tribal areas, which enabled New Mexican artists to participate. During his residency, Johnson worked with Eaton at IAIA’s bronze foundry.

This collaboration has led to constant conversation between the two artists about how to bring Johnson’s work into a sculptural form. They are currently

collaborating on a series of large bronze sculptures based on Johnson’s jewelry, which began with a small turtle pendant created by Johnson. Texas sculptor Luke Sides enlarged the turtle pendant into a three-dimensional, digitally sectioned model. Matthew Eaton took the model and assisted in fashioning it into a mold.

From these processes, a three-by-threefoot turtle will be cast in bronze. A five-foot-long canoe paddle designed

by Johnson will be placed vertically on the turtle’s back. A bearing system will allow for the paddle to spin from atop the turtle shell. A limited edition of twelve is planned. The first casting will be a gifted donation to the 2021 IAIA gala auction, which raises much-needed funds for student scholarships. Several of the other Star Turtle bronzes are slated to be placed in museum collections, as well as in Johnson’s new storefront at 135 West Water Street in Santa Fe, just a block from the Plaza.3

2. Kenneth Johnson, in discussion with author, April 2021.

3. Matthew Eaton and Kenneth Johnson in discussion with author, May 2021.

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KENNETH JOHNSON

The canoe paddle component of Johnson’s Star Turtle sculpture draws inspiration from his participation in an earlier project called the Mvskoke Canoe Paddle Project. Johnnie Diacon (Thlopthlocco Muscogee), a painter from Tulsa, participated in the paddle project and describes its origins and process: Mvskoke bowyer and member of the Mvskoke Cvkotakse Seccvlke (Muscogee Bow Shooters Society), John John Brown, a couple of years ago went back to our ancestral homelands in Alabama and harvested a 200-year-old poplar tree in order to make a traditional Mvskoke canoe.

From the leftover wood, he fashioned six old-style paddles. He and the Mvskoke jeweler/metalsmith, Kenneth Johnson, came up with the Paddle Project in which these paddles would be given to six major Mvskoke artists

to finish using their particular artistic talent. I was fortunate enough to be chosen as one of the six. The other artists that were chosen are Enoch Kelly Haney, Dan Beaver, Jon Tiger, Toni Scott, and Nelson Harjo. A few of these paddles, including mine, and the canoe were on display in the Mvskoke Dome during the 2018 Mvskoke Festival in Okmulgee, Oklahoma.

From there they went to the College of the Muscogee Nation for a couple of weeks before they were joined by other paddles for the start of their tour, along with the canoe, around the country.… I am very humbled and honored to have been chosen to be a part of this project.4 The Mvskoke Canoe Paddle Project was a forerunner to an anticipated installation along the Oklahoma River at the First Americans Museum in Oklahoma City. Johnson is consulting on the

logistics of the installation, predicted to include 20 artists who will each create individual paddles.

Johnson’s determination to continually challenge himself to grow as an artist includes his ability to incorporate new media and materials. He is participating in one of the most current art forms of nonfungible tokens (NFTs).

An NFT is a unique token attached to a digital work of art that proves the work’s authenticity. It gives ownership to the buyer, who gains the right to trade the piece. The tokens are “minted” or generated on a blockchain, making their ownership and original creator clear and traceable. This exclusivity, traceability, and authenticity make NFT artworks scarce and thus valuable. Artists can sell these works on exclusive platforms such as Nifty Gateway, OpenSea, and SuperRare. 5 Johnson is participating in the first NFT platform of all Native

4. Johnnie Diacon, personal photo journal notes, August 2018.

5. “What are non-fungible tokens?,” NonFungible, accessed May 10, 2021, web.

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above Assorted signature Kenneth Johnson bracelets, some set with diamonds and rubies, 2021. opp osite, top G o l d Co i n Earrings, hand-stamped, engraved gold earrings with omega backs. Made from four high karat gold 1915 Austrian Ducat Coins (just under 24-karat gold). opposite, bottom Gamma Delta Pi Butterfly Pins, silver, turquoise. Kenneth Johnson has created these pins inspired by eyespot butterflies for pledges of the Gamma Delta Pi, a Native American sorority at the University of Oklahoma for the last 15 years.

"This Butterfly represents G amma Delta Pi pledges emerging into the professional world. I use natural Sleeping Beauty turquoise in the wings to represent the protective eyes of their families, friends, and communities as they go out into the world. Gamma Delta Pi alum recognizes each other at the sight of these pins."

—Kenneth Johnson

American artists, which will consist of a juried group of Native artists who will be creating their own individual NFTs. The launch of this platform will be revealed at the 2021 Santa Fe Indian Market.

Johnson’s fascination with the arts goes beyond his own creative artwork.

He has a passion to encourage others to experience art for themselves.

He serves as chairperson of the board of directors at the Ralph T. Coe Center for the Arts in Santa Fe. He uses his service on the board as a platform of action. As part of a guiding committee, he plans to encourage young artists from the Coe Center’s hands-on program, which supports high school–aged students to engage and explore art and cultures from around the world, to create a mural with established artists and community members. As part of Johnson’s philosophy that art is not fixed in time, he is helping to build upon the Coe Center’s

historical collection and drive it into the future. One way that the Coe is putting this philosophy into action is by allowing individuals to explore the collection through looking and touching the art.

Studying art from afar is limiting. A basket or a pot is meant to be held and felt. The Coe is designing this experiential form of art research to inspire artists to use what was made in the past to interpret into their own creative expressions.6 Johnson is constantly reaching back into cultural history to pull it into the present. He plans for future projects while maintaining his current work. His choice of materials and techniques are constantly in flux between those that have always been in use by our ancestors to those we can project for use in the future.

Johnson is not a man willing to stay dormant. He creates his art according to his words: “I’m not done yet.”

KENNETHJOHNSON.COM 6. Carrie Marsh, community relations consultant with Ralph T. Coe Center for the Arts, in discussion with author, May 2021.

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KENNETH JOHNSON

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Kickapoo/Mvskoke Comic Artist, Musician, Playwright, and Actor

ARIGON STARR

By Stacy Pratt, PhD (Mvskoke) of them focused on the lived experiences of Indigenous people, and most of them very funny.

Starr’s story as an artist begins with her childhood in a military family. She is enrolled in the Kickapoo Tribe of Oklahoma, has lived many places throughout her life, and is currently based in Los Angeles. Starr’s father, Ken Wahpecome (Kickapoo, 1934–2005), and mother, Ruth Cornell Wahpecome (Mvskoke/Cherokee/Seneca), kept their family’s ties to their tribal nations in Oklahoma strong by frequent visits, and they encouraged their daughter’s creativity from a young age. The confidence they instilled in her has carried her through a long career in the arts.

I spoke with Starr from her mother’s home in Okmulgee, Oklahoma, in a virtual interview.

SP: You moved around a lot as a child in a military family.

How did that experience of the wider world influence you as an artist?

L

OOK! LOOK! On the stage and in the comics and on the radio! It’s a playwright! It’s a comedian! It’s a musician! It’s an illustrator! It’s an actor! It’s … Arigon Starr, who is all of these things and more.

It all started in a government lab—No, wait. That’s the story of Starr’s popular character, Hubert Logan, also known as Super Indian. The Super Indian franchise started as a radio series. Later, it became a weekly web comic, then a series of graphic novels.

Recently, Native Voices at the Autry, an Equity theater (that is, a member of the Actor’s Equity Association union) devoted to new works for the stage by Native writers, commissioned three fulllength episodes of Super Indian. The New Adventures of Super Indian, radio play version, was streamed in weekly installments beginning in April 2021.

That’s just the latest project for this prolific multidisciplinary artist. She always seems to have several projects going, all 68 | FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

AS: My dad’s duty station changed every two years, and we started in Florida. We went to New Jersey. We went to Maryland; Memphis, Tennessee; and then Maryland again; Gallup, New Mexico; Subic Bay, Philippines; and back to San Diego. When I was first in school, I was always the only Native kid in the school except for my sister. Inevitably, the teacher would mispronounce my name, and then they would go, “You’re Native. Tell us a little bit about your culture.” And I’m, like, six. I don’t know what to say. I had to become an expert as a child, and I did my best. But still, I feel bad. I don’t know what I told those children about being Native when I was six years old. I did not want to be a cultural representative at that age, but that’s what happens. Being the only Native kid in class—what a responsibility!

My parents did the best they could, but of course they were of the generation where they were told, “Don’t speak your language. Don’t be Indian.” So we got left out, and they got left out, too, because that’s what their parents told them. But as far as being influenced by the moving around, it was mainly through pop culture. You had to have some pop culture references as you moved around, so you could talk to the kids that grew up in that community.

SP: You are a multidisciplinary artist. How did that come about?

AS: I started out as a visual artist, and the first art I remember doing as a child was picking up crayons and trying to draw

ARIGON STARR

comics. As I went through school, I started to like songs and decided I wanted to write songs. I wanted to learn to play guitar. I wanted to play piano. My mother was so kind. My dad was so kind. They provided the guitars, the piano lessons, the construction paper, the pencils. They always said, “Go for it. Knock yourself out, you know?” So, with that behind me, I could just ask myself, “What do I want to do?” I wanted to tell stories, and I think, that’s the bottom line of all of the stuff that I do: storytelling, but also humor. Those things are most important. If anything, I’m a storyteller first, and then I like to make people laugh, and then I do it with any tool I want to do it with.

SP: Tell me about Super Indian.

AS: Super Indian has made a full circle back to the Autry. It started as an Autry project back in 2006. They wondered why Natives didn’t have any kind of audio theater. It was because people didn’t have the money, they didn’t have the skills, technology, et cetera. So, the Autry got grant money to work with a bunch of different radio professionals through Native Voices and the Native Radio Theater project, which was part of Native Voice One. I thought this was the time to write a story about a Native superhero, because I was a big fan of the Batman TV series of the 1960s. I love “POW! BANG! BAM!,” you know, the pop art and the comedy, which is something you hardly ever saw in Indian Country at the time. Now more artists are doing it, which is great, but back then that wasn’t the case.

Basically the story has stayed as it always has been: An ordinary reservation boy eats tainted commodity cheese and gains superpowers. We did the show live with live actors, live sound, live sound effects, on the stages of the National Audio Theatre Festival in West Plains, Missouri, broadcast live on National Public Radio. It was great. We laughed.

We had a good time. There were radio professionals from all over the country, so it was great fun, and that fun translated into Native Voices saying, “Hey, why don’t you develop a whole series, and we’ll do

the same thing in Los Angeles?” So, that’s what we did. In 2007, they commissioned me to write about ten scripts, thinking it would be a series aired once a week for ten weeks, but it didn’t work out that way.

We ended up bundling the five-minute scripts into an hour, but people liked it, and a lot of people got exposed to this medium of doing live radio theater and just audio theater in general. There was no more funding, but I had more scripts.

I took the scripts that we didn’t perform, and I decided to make a comic book out of them. So it didn’t die because of underfunding. I just needed to keep going with this world. I’m an artist. I can draw. I can do these things, and I just taught myself how to do Photoshop, how to do Illustrator, and I did the web comics and then the graphic novels.

I thought this was the time to write a story about a Native superhero, because I was a big fan of the Batman TV series of the 1960s. I love “POW! BANG! BAM!”

above Super Indian, digital illustration, dimensions variable.

All images courtesy of Wacky Productions Unlimited. opposite Arigon Starr, 2021.

SP: You also perform, besides being a writer and illustrator.

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AS: What I have enjoyed seeing change is just that we are more present. And women are making sure that we’re in the room, you know? The Native guys, and of course the audiences, started to say, “Oh, the women are kind of funny.

They’ve got stories. Oh, my gosh. I’m laughing at that. Should I be laughing at the Indian?” When I do a show, I always have to explain that it’s okay to laugh at the Indian. I give you permission.

But when I started, I didn’t know that I was doing comedy. I didn’t want to do stand up. I thought that would just be too painful, but humor sneaks into all of my work. I would write a song like “Junior Frybread” [about a man trying to go to every frybread booth at a powwow], and how can you talk about that and not have it be funny? When it is time to bring the non-Indian audience into the show, I go, “You’ve had frybread, right?”

Usually they will know frybread, so it’s a teachable moment, but it’s also humorous.

And I was always telling stories while performing. I’m not a shoegazer. I want to bring people into the world that I live in and just say, “Hey, you know, we laugh. I mean, yeah, there’s tough, horrible things, but there’s also a lot of humor.”

above Page from Super Indian Coloring Book: Let's Pow-wow!, story and art by Arigon Starr (Kickapoo/Mvskoke), Super Indian Comics, 2020. opposite Detail of Super Indian Coloring Book: Let's Pow-wow!, story and art by Arigon Starr (Kickapoo/Mvskoke), Super Indian Comics, 2020. Coloring pages are available for free download at: superindiancomics.com/ coloring-book-pages

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AS: Yes, and I miss that so much … going out, putting a set together, weaving it together with all the different songs that I’ve written, or writing some new ones for it. I miss that part. I really do. It’s fun to interact with an audience live in the moment. I think any performer will tell you that, whether they’re a musician or an actor or whatever they do. I want the feedback. And with comedy, without an audience, it’s just like, “Is this joke working?” I can’t tell. I mean, I’m laughing inside, but.…

SP: We Had a Little Real Estate Problem: The Unheralded Story of Native Americans & Comedy by Kliph Nesteroff came out this year, so comedy has been on everyone’s minds. How have you seen Native comedy change in your time?

SP: You have been so brave and persistent as an artist, always learning what you need to learn to get your ideas into the world. What advice would you give to new artists about that?

AS: I would have them explore as many genres and mediums as they can because you just never know which one is going to be the one for you. You should go at whatever you’re doing, not because you want to make a buck or want to be famous, because that stuff is fleeting. You need to think, “What legacy am I trying to leave behind, and what do I want to continue beyond my life?” I think about the times I would spend around the kitchen table with my aunties and my cousins, my grandma and grandpa, and everyone.

That would always make me think of home and feeling safe, just having it be okay to be Indian—being around the table, being around the kinfolks. And

ARIGON STARR

what did they do? They laughed. They were not constantly like, “We need to overthrow the government!” I mean, maybe we do, but, you know, first let’s have a cup of coffee.

Emerging artists need to remember that kind of stuff. Don’t be afraid to talk to old folks like us, you know? If somebody wants to pick my brains about how I do the things I do, let’s talk. Those opportunities were afforded to me when I was coming up from other artists who were already established, and also non-Indian artists. The comic book community, for example. They’re so giving. We’re all nerds and geeks, and they would answer questions. I went to so many comic-cons and asked people so many questions about how to make comics, because I have skills—I can draw—but you’ve got to tell a story in a picture, especially in comics, and they could tell me about that.

I always try to tell the young folks that it’s great that you can draw that muscled, chiseled guy, but what’s the story? It’s not just pictures on a page. It’s dynamic art storytelling.

SP: Who are some of your mentors and influences?

AS: I have quite a few. In the non-Indian world, I am a Beatles fan. I grew up loving British rock, and that kind of music just stayed with me. As I continued to read comics, I loved the X-Men, and, but I love all of it—DC, Marvel. I don’t have a preference. It’s like the Beatles or the Rolling Stones. You don’t have to choose. They’re both great. And I love British humor like Monty Python. Their humor is just so weird. It makes me happy, and I wish there was more weirdness in our Native humor. It’s coming. I see those influences coming. But that kind of humor definitely influenced how I would tell a story or how I would write.

In the theater world, my biggest influence is probably August Wilson. I like that he tells stories from community, and they’re just slices of life. Yes, big traumatic things happen within the story, but it’s not, like, you know, the War of 1812 happened, and I had to deal with it.

And then as I started to go more into comics, it was Dave Gibbons and Alan Moore and Watchmen, stuff like that. Great stories can be told. You don’t have to just stick to history. I mean, history’s great. We’ve got to sneak history in when we can. But you can also use history as a jumping-off point for the stories you want to tell.

SP: How have you handled the pandemic as an artist?

AS: It’s been really stressful to create during the pandemic, but the projects that came my way during it needed to be done. I did two projects with The Nib. One was about the Social Distance

Powwow on Facebook, and the other one was about a Navajo phlebotomist who died of COVID back in the early days when it was rampant on the rez out there. That story needed to be told, and I was so glad that those writers came to me for it. And it was on a political site, so I thought maybe that would give me some added gravitas that I do not have in the community, because, you know, they think: “Well, she’s funny. She doesn’t do serious stuff.”

Then I colored an 89-page book about Sacagawea and served as their cultural consultant. So, every day has been full of something to do. I was never bored. I will never be that person. No NO. 31, SUMMER 2021 | 71

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going to happen.” I feel weird saying that because that’s not the expected feminine way to be. But it’s how I am. I know that it’s hard to work with me sometimes. I probably have a reputation, but nobody tells me, and I don’t ask. I just go and do.

SP: Seeing you do it has made a lot of us go, “Well, clearly this can be done, and you can ask for these things.” You’ve been doing it since the ’90s when it was even more expected that Native women should be modest and take whatever was offered. You’ve really busted through that.

AS: Yeah, I’ve always been that kid. I grew up that way, and my parents facilitated it. There were many long car rides to and from my dad’s duty stations. We’d be getting in the car driving to Oklahoma from New Jersey, and my dad wouldn’t take breaks. He would need some entertaining about 2:00 in the morning, or my mom would be driving and getting sleepy. They would say, “Can you tell me a story?” And they just let me talk nonstop.

I was raised that way, and when you’re trying to out-funny your Oklahoma cousins. It’s fun. I mean, they have to put us in the back room of the restaurant, because we’re too loud. I was raised in that environment.

SP: Going back to Oklahoma was important to your family, to keep those ties?

matter what happens, I’ve always got something to do. above Council of Pueblo Justice, 2017, digital art poster, dimensions variable. opposite Laguna Woman, digital illustration, dimensions variable.

Shayai Lucero (Laguna) advised Arigon Starr on styling this super hero.

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SP: You do always have something going on. How do you keep it fun?

AS: I choose my projects wisely, and I always go after something that I’m really passionate about. I try to sell the project I have in mind, not take whatever little thing they offer. I’m like, “No, I don’t want that little thing. This is what I want to do. And if you want me, this is how it’s

AS: Yes. When we had a break, there was no, “Oh, let’s go to Hawaii.” No. We’re going to Tulsa, and if we’re lucky, we might get to drive down to the magical town of Stroud or Shawnee.

SP: In the past, there has been this idea that to be a “real Indian,” you have to grow up on a reservation or always stay with your community. I think that is changing, partly through art like yours that represents the diversity of Native lives and how those cultural ties are kept strong.

AS: There are people who have questioned me because I didn’t grow up here

ARIGON STARR

[in Oklahoma]. They say, “You’re not really Oklahoman.” I’m not, but I am because of those ties with my family, our stories, and the stories of other Oklahoma Indians I would meet on the road. That kept all of this alive, this Oklahoma thing.

That’s why I want to continue to tell that story in my plays.

When August Wilson started writing about community, he wrote a Century Cycle [a collection of ten plays].

He wrote a different play about each era of the African-American experience in the 1900s, in decades, and I thought, “Oh, I need to do that, too.” Because who’s doing this for our community? Who is documenting the 1900s in Oklahoma in a play?

That’s what I’m doing, and I’m setting them all in Oklahoma. Round Dance was set in Los Angeles, but it was about Okies who moved from Okmulgee, as part of government relocation, and their experiences with other Okies in Los Angeles. So, there’s going to be those kinds of stories.

But they’re Oklahoma stories. I think I’ve got four out of the ten written so far.

SP: That sounds like an exciting project.

Besides those plays, what are you working on?

AS: Killers of the Flower Moon has everyone’s mind on the 1920s, and that’s a rich decade for Natives in Oklahoma. There was an incident with a major league baseball team featuring Pawnee baseball player Mose Yellow Horse and Babe Ruth.

I want to write a show about that, so that’s what I’m going to do, in addition to finishing up Super Indian, Volume Three, which has been on my drafting table forever. There’s just some more drawing that needs to be finished. And there’ll probably be some more theater stuff.

I am working with Cherokee [Nation] author Traci Sorell on a book she wrote about Native baseball players in the major leagues before Jackie Robinson— Charles Albert Bender [White Earth Ojibwe] and Jack Meyers [Cahuilla], who played for the Philadelphia Athletics and

the New York Giants. They faced each other in the World Series. It’s a children’s book that I’m illustrating, and it’s being published by Kokila, an imprint of Penguin Random House. That will be out in 2023.

When it comes to Arigon Starr, there is always something to look forward to: something funny, something controversial, something familiar or something unexpected. It’s always exciting waiting to see what’s next and what form it will take.

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SPOTLIGHT

SPOTLIGHT Chris Pappan’s Scout’s Honor

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ITLING HIS INSTALLATION after the promise Boy Scouts make to uphold a code of conduct, Chris Pappan (Kaw/Osage/Cheyenne River Lakota) takes a jab tinged with irony at the organization’s longstanding practice of appropriating Native cultures.1 Scout’s Honor begs the question, to what are scouts pledging allegiance? Drawing portraits of Native peoples over five 1960s and 1970s Boy Scout neckerchiefs, Pappan creates an installation that effectively repurposes—or rather reappropriates—the ephemera to expose the systemic racism embedded in it and the organization.

Each neckerchief is imprinted with a Boy Scout chapter’s insignia, many of which are caricatures of stereotypical “Indian warriors.” These insignias mark just how central a white imagination of indigeneity is to the organization’s identity. Pappan juxtaposes such imagery with ink portraits of Native people drawn from historical photographs. Indulging in their details, in their individuality and humanity, he articulates pores, furrowed brows, and the texture of quillwork. Effecting such juxtapositions, Pappan exposes the dissonance between the white fantasy of the “Indian” and the lived reality of Native peoples.

The green neckerchief has a distinct insignia: an image of Spanish conquistador and missionary Junípero Serra, who has been increasingly publicly scrutinized for his formative role in the brutal, genocidal California mission system. Serra’s portrait accompanies text commemorating an organization’s anniversary. Observing this neckerchief alongside the others, we could ask, what does Serra have to do with the Boy Scouts? Their popularity is not unrelated in a country that commemorates its foundation of invasion, slavery, and genocide, and where practices of appropriation are more widely visible than Native peoples and cultures themselves.

Scout’s Honor’s title also recalls one of the Boy Scouts’ accomplices of cultural misappropriation and racism: sports teams. Many American sports teams and their fans defend their racist and offensive names, mascots, and paraphernalia under the pretense that they “honor” their Native subjects. While a number of teams, amid ever-urgent calls for social justice, have recently changed their names, many others have not.2 By extending his critique beyond the Boy Scouts, Pappan insists that the stakes are not limited to team names, Boy Scout ephemera, statues, or institutional promises. We must also reckon with the ideologies and structures that connect and undergird them.

above Chris Pappan (Kaw/Osage/Cheyenne River Lakota), Scout's Honor, 2020, ballpoint pen on vintage Boy Scout neckerchiefs, approximately 100 × 20 in., installed in the artist's studio. Both images courtesy of the artist. opposite Detail of Scout's Honor.

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1. See Philip J. Deloria, Playing Indian (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998); See Vincent Schilling, “Native voice helped create the Boy Scouts, Charles Eastman ‘Ohiyesa,’” Indian Country Today, September 20, 2019, web. Examples of cultural misappropriation by the Boy Scouts include invented ceremonies and regalia. Such practices stroke and enact white fantasies of a wild frontier and promote negative stereotypes of Native peoples. The Boy Scouts’ practice of appropriation has been linked to Dakota author and physician Dr. Charles Eastman, who cofounded the Boy Scouts. Pappan is most concerned with the implications and persistence of this practice and how it is a part of larger, systemic issues.

SPOTLIGHT

Another revealing, potent detail in Scout’s Honor is in the neckerchief that is also a map of the scouts’ campground Baiting Hollow. Numerous sites are marked by a tipi; their names are predictable: “Sunrise,” “Arrowhead,” and “Roanoke.” Another site is named after the Shinnecock Indian Nation. A quick google search of the camp’s name suggests it is in Suffolk County in eastern Long Island, New York—on Shinnecock land.

By overlaying the map with individuals’ portraits, Pappan exposes the absence and erasure of Native peoples in a space where a fabricated idea of indigeneity is central to its making and identity.

By looking closer at Pappan’s installation strategy, we can appreciate how the figures are placed in conversation with one another, as if speaking back to the neckerchiefs. Stacking the neckerchiefs in a rhythmic succession, he creates the visual and narrative form of a column.

Pappan hangs each neckerchief slightly away from the wall, making them appear less like archival documents, enlivened through the possibility of movement from an occasional breeze.

Each neckerchief frames two portraits drawn with such symmetry that they appear at once as mirror images and as twins: it is as if they are in conversation both with themselves and one another.

For example, the two wearing vests adorned with quillwork diverge from the Boy Scout insignia, as if splintering from it—a potential metaphor for disagreement. Looking at the neckerchiefs all together, a pattern emerges: an alteration between heads turned away and facing each other, grounded by a central image where the faces are drawn side by side.

Staging this internal dialogue, Pappan reflects on the varied ways Native peoples navigate systemic and internalized racism.

Scout’s Honor is part of a nascent body of work by the artist that contends with William K. Powers’s book, Here is Your Hobby: Indian Dancing and Costumes. Published in 1966, it is a contemporary of the neckerchiefs. This how-to book promises to teach its readers Native dances, if they follow the

instructions step-by-step and mirror the pictured gestures. The book promotes an understanding that indigeneity can be commodified, capitalized, and consumed through imitation; an understanding where the white imagination is central, not Native communities, philosophies, and relationships, nor calls for self-determination and sovereignty from the Red Power Movement. Indeed, at the time of the book’s publication, while white Americans appropriated Native cultures for sport, for commodity, and to absolve identity crises, it was illegal for Native peoples to hold their own ceremonies. Here is Your Hobby was published twelve years before the American Indian Religious Freedom Act was passed.

While Pappan takes up Powers’s book more directly in his recent ledger drawing series, Of White Bread and Miracles (2020), it is helpful to mention it here, as to not forget that these neckerchiefs were worn and circulated. For these acts of appropriation are not isolated to the campsite nor simply taken on and off. And when we remember that these neckerchiefs were worn on the back of the body, it is haunting to realize that one would now also wear the portraits of Native peoples Pappan has so dutifully drawn. Taking on the scouts’ pledge, Scout’s Honor demands for the truth to be unveiled—for cultural misappropriation to be held accountable for every accomplice, layer of complexity, and promise it breaks.

—Iris Colburn

2. One example is the Chicago Blackhawks, a hockey team. Blackhawks founder, Frederic McLaughlin, named the team for the US Army 86th Infantry Division, which he commanded. The division was nicknamed the “Blackhawk Division,” after the Sauk military leader Black Hawk (1767–1838), also known as Mà-ka-tai-me-she-kià-kiàk.

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IDABEL, OKLAHOMA

Contemporary Caddo Art Museum of the Red River

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MONTH BEFORE Contemporary Caddo Art opened at the Museum of the Red River, Spiro and the Art of the Mississippian World opened at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City. Spiro Mounds are located a little more than 100 miles north of Idabel, which is located in the Caddo homelands.1 The two exhibitions overlapped, and several artists had work in both. In her FAAM review of the Spiro exhibition, America Meredith (Cherokee Nation) notes that it included only one image of a living Native person and questions the museum’s presentation of the artwork.2 Contemporary Caddo Art is not extensive enough to be a corrective to the shortcomings of the Spiro exhibition’s presentation of contemporary Caddo art and life, but it does present a selection of Caddo art that highlights the vitality, diversity, and pride of this artistic community. It includes work by established and emerging artists: Chad “Nish” Earles, Chase Kahwinhut Earles, Wayne “Tay Sha” Earles, Raven Halfmoon, Yonavea Hawkins, Kira Hayen, Jereldine Redcorn, Jennifer Reeder, Alaina Tahlate, and River Whittle.

The Museum of the Red River’s collection of ancient and historical objects from the region3 inspired a revival in Caddo pottery that began with a 1991 visit by the Caddo Cultural Club. That visit first introduced Jereldine Redcorn (Caddo/ Potawatomi) to her ancestors’ ceramic legacy. The part the museum played in Caddo art history places Contemporary Caddo Art in an especially meaningful context. This small exhibition highlights the pride that Redcorn’s revival of ancient techniques and imagery instilled in Caddo artists. That pride, mentioned in almost every artist statement, seems to be a liberating factor that allows these artists to follow their visions, refine their techniques, and bravely reflect their lived experiences.

The Caddo Nation, today in southwestern Oklahoma, are the descendants of the Caddo Confederacy, a network of more than 20 tribes spanning Arkansas, Louisiana, Oklahoma, and Texas. Like the Wichita and Affiliated Tribes, they are related to the people who built Spiro Mounds. The Caddo have maintained their unique dances and songs that relay their complex history, straddling the Southern Plains and the Southeastern Woodlands.

Museum of the Red River Director Henry Moy curated Contemporary Caddo Art with initial consultation from Caddo ceramicist Chase Kahwinhut Earles whose work, along with that of Redcorn, was part of both this exhibition and the Spiro exhibition. Moy’s curatorial statement distinguishes between “emulations” and “inspirations,” describing the former as works created using ancient or historical methods and tools to be representations or re-creations of ancient works or styles, and the latter as “works created by artists who use and/or reinterpret

above Yonavea Hawkins (Caddo/Delaware), Red Star, 2020, moccasins with 11° cut glass beads, thread, sinew, and deer hide, 3½ × 6½ in. each, and Delaware Rose, 2018, bandolier bag with 11° cut glass beads, wool broadcloth, metal cones, rayon taffeta ribbons, silk yarn, strap 60 × 3¼, pouch 10¼ × 14 in. Image courtesy of the artist.

traditional methods and designs but manipulate them in new ways.”

Of course, traditional is a problematic descriptor, but including emulations as a category is an interesting way to contextualize work like Caddo sculptor A. Wayne “TaySha” Earles’ stone weaponry or Chase Earles’ pottery made with Red River clay, using ancient techniques and designs, in an exhibition of contemporary art. After all, “emulations” are made by living artists, within their own cultural context, no matter how closely they replicate ancestral methods and materials. As Albuquerque-based ceramicist River Whittle

1. Since the Choctaw Removal of 1831 through 1833, the area that became Idabel, Oklahoma, has been located within the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, but it was Caddo lands prior to European and African contact.

2. America Meredith, “Spiro and the Art of the Mississippian World” (Exhibition Review). First American Art Magazine, no. 30 (Spring 2021), 80.

3. Some of the Museum of the Red River’s pieces were loaned to the Spiro and the Art of the Mississippian World exhibition.

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(Caddo/Delaware) points out about her emotionally evocative River Dreams of Snake Woman, even when pieces are made using some ancestral designs, many Native artists who want to create what Moy calls “emulations” cannot use entirely “precolonial methods … because of a lack of access to resources and relatives,” even when they might desire it.

What Moy terms “inspirations” include pieces such as Chad “Nish” Earles’ (Caddo) standout graphic works on skateboard decks, paper, and canvas.

Echoing the same aesthetics of Redcorn’s incised pottery, Chad’s pieces pulse with precision linework of repeated circular and knot designs. Movement radiates out from the center of his red-on-white 2015 screen print Kah-o’-shun (Dance) in an optical illusion that calls to mind drums and heartbeats aligning in dance.

His graphic design background is further evident in the bold designs on the skateboard decks, which are made to literally move across the earth and launch riders into the air. Like pottery designed to be used, the skateboard decks present a type of art meant to be worn away by use.

While the exhibition features well-known artists like the Earles family and Redcorn, it also includes works by emerging talents such as digital artist Kira Hayen (Caddo/Delaware). Hayen’s Shahat is one of two portraits that address gender identity. The Caddo language has non-gendered pronouns, Hayen translates Shahat as “Cousin.” In the portrait, an androgynous subject poses with hands clasped, tangled in long, black hair above the head. They wear “cheek dots and Moundbuilder tattoos that are considered ‘traditionally feminine,’” according to Hayen’s artist statement.

The muscular build of the figure presents as being somewhat masculine, and a multistrand necklace over their bare chest hides their neck. Red eyeglasses atop their head bring them into a current context and draw the eye to red cheek dots and full lips. Their facial expression is content, casual, confident. Hayen writes that the portrait “posture[s] that happiness in the face of oftentimes violent oppression is an act of political resistance,” a sentiment expressed by many of the works in this exhibition.

Several portraits in Contemporary Caddo Art show Caddo people in

current situations, including Hayen’s other portrait, Nattih (Woman), Jennifer Reeder’s (Caddo) loom-beaded female portrait, Kiotse, and Yonavea Hawkins’ (Caddo/Delaware) pencil drawing of an elder in a waiting room suggestive of a bus station or possibly an Indian Health Service clinic. (Hawkins is also represented by Delaware Rose, a stunning beaded bandolier bag.) Alaina Tahlate’s (Caddo/Delaware) colored pencil Still Life of Caddo Regalia on a Mirror (2013) functions as a portrait without a figure, portraying a Caddo person who has stepped away but will return to put on the regalia and carry on dancing.

This exhibition shows that innovation, resourcefulness, and a spiritual core of creativity are as much a part of Caddo artists’ heritage as the ancient techniques and symbols that they carry into the future. It provides a glimpse of contemporary Caddo art that turns up the volume of living Caddo voices in a conversation that too often attempts to speak over or for them.

—Stacy Pratt, PhD (Mvskoke)

MINNEAPOLIS

Inherent Right: Peter Williams All My Relations Arts Gallery

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UCCINCT YET compelling, Inherent Right: Peter Williams illustrates the artist’s creative and activist practices. All My Relations Arts Gallery in Minneapolis gave Peter Williams (Yup'ik) the opportunity to showcase his transition from fashion work to fine art and the controversial material at the center. Adorning the walls of this contemporary Indigenous art gallery are works of fish skin and sea mammal fur.

Comprising Inherent Right are a dozen wall hangings that the artist calls “fur and fish paintings,” a handful of fur-based jewelry pieces, five mannequins' worth of fashion pieces accompanied by photographs of models wearing them out in the world, and Harvest: Quyurciq, a 21-minute documentary that ties these elements together. All of these pieces speak both to Williams’s interdisciplinary

practice and the consistency of the animal material with which he approaches it.

Through Don’t Touch Anything Else But You Can Touch This, a small offering of touchable seal and sea otter in the gallery entrance, the visitor is drawn into Peter Williams’s devotion to these furs.

Beyond it stands a successful exhibition of art precisely crafted with a minimalism that highlights the natural beauty of its materials. Yet, it could have benefited from more visually impactful pieces— those that allow the materials to stand alone in making the artist’s argument for “inherent rights.”

At the heart of this exhibition is the idea that Alaska Natives have the right—no matter how much PETA may object—to subsistence which includes the use of marine mammals for food, shelter, clothing, and other uses necessary to maintain the life of the taker. As noted in the artist’s self-authored labels, this idea was rendered a legal right in 1994 through an amendment to the Marine Mammal Protection Act (MMPA) that ensured that certain Indigenous groups could maintain access to these animals as well as the economies and way of life they help to provide.

For thousands of years, Indigenous people who belong to the lands now called Alaska have harvested these animals with restraint and reciprocity.

Yet a 1911 international treaty and the 1972 MMPA were brought about due to the near extinction of the sea otter caused

by Russian settlers, who attempted to monopolize the maritime fur trade and enslaved Indigenous people in the early 19th century.

With Inherent Right, Peter Williams—a relatively young Yup'ik artist based in Sitka, a small city situated in wild beauty—reclaims some of what was taken from his ancestors and others in the region. Yet, he has taken those practices into a new and somewhat murky territory. As demonstrated by Harvest: Quyurciq playing on loop in the gallery, Williams does not only hand sew the sea otters and seals into fur paintings, first he prays for, tracks, and ultimately asks for each of the lives of these animals.

He shares the gift of the animals with his community by eating the meat together and teaching these harvest skills to the next generation of Alaska Native youth.

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above Peter Williams (Yup'ik), installation view of Seasons' Transitions, 2010, sea otter fur, seal fur, thread, series of twelve works, 12 × 12 × 3/4 in. each. Photo: Taylor Rose Payer (Turtle Mountain Chippewa).

But unlike his ancestors, the artist has pursued subsistence in an additional way: selling sea otter and seal furs to high-end fashion designers in New York City. The gallery features examples of these fashion pieces on a set of mannequins, and most effectively, within a series of photographs.

In one of these, Women’s National Basketball Association player, Cheyenne Parker, wears a Peter Williams sea otter hat and pair of shorts, while holding a sealskin basketball against a natural Sitka backdrop. The photograph evokes a strong sense of place, ingenuity, and contemporaneity in Williams’s work. Not unlike non-Native-harvested furs, these indulgently worn pieces are a stark visual reminder of what Williams refers to as the “capitalist, colonialist world”—one which he, as an artist, lives and depends upon, despite his vastly different relationship with the material.

While all the pieces in the exhibition include marine mammal fur or fish skin, certain ones best demonstrate their relationship to the artist, his harvest practices, and visual language.

As the largest piece in the exhibition, The Endangered Myth is a collage of multicolored furs, in a scale that offers a vessel to hold the weight of each life given to the artist and his heavy message. The patchwork quality of this piece brings to bear the life of each individual sea otter, 78 | FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

and every step the artist took to harvest them over the course of 14 deliberately slow years. While looking at this piece, it is easy to imagine Peter Williams giving a last sip of water to each of these sea otters just as he did in Harvest: Quyurciq. A Yup'ik rite performed at death, Williams offers this gesture with the same deference that marks his prayers for the animal who is giving its life.

From the harvest rituals to the design and craft of the consequent pelts, Williams brings a clear sense of intentionality to his practice. This is evident not only in the film, but also in pieces like Seasons’ Transitions, a grid of twelve small fur paintings. In this piece, the artist is as intentional with his text-based language, which reads “to live Indigenously is to live seasonally,” as he is with his streamlined visual language. From the rich textures and color gradients to the nearly invisible thread denoting separate scraps, these fur paintings celebrate both the beauty of the sea otters themselves and the artist who highlights the fur with restraint and a curatorial sensibility.

A particularly moving aspect of Inherent Right is the artist’s use of self-authored labels, titles, and digital projections to argue for Indigenous rights.

Pieces like Who Decides My Authenticity? feature history-laden imagery projected

onto sea otter fur backdrops, including the text of the statute detailing the MMPA exemption for Alaska Natives, a silhouette of a judge and his gavel, and the scales of justice. These mixed-media pieces add a contemporary digital fine touch to deeply historic material, effectively reflecting Williams’s quest to pass on the traditional practice to the next generation.

Other pieces are small in scale and visually simple yet are accompanied by research-heavy labels written by the artist.

He denotes the exact populations of sea otters in California (3,272) or southwest Alaska (54,771), but it is unclear how those numbers are supposedly represented by each piece’s height. Despite the worthwhile efforts to leave visitors with an appreciation for the subsistence hunting rights inherent to Alaska Native people, these pieces are some of the least visually compelling in the exhibition.

A one-man show in nearly every respect, Inherent Right is a solid introduction to Peter Williams, his marine mammal furs, and their journey into the gallery and art world. It is timely for the All My Relations Gallery. Director Angela Two Stars (Sisseton Wahpeton Dakota), chose this exhibition for the reopening that followed many months of public health crises, the killing of George Floyd by a Minneapolis police officer, and subsequent peaceful protests and unrest in the neighborhood. During this time Two Stars says the space was used for food drives, safety, and gatherings, because as she sees it, “the gallery belongs to the community.” These are strong words coming from a Dakota artist who has returned to this Dakota homeland after generations of exile. She and gallery docent Alan Gross (Leech Lake Ojibwe) expressed appreciation for Peter Williams and the lessons he brought to Minneapolis all the way from Sitka, Alaska. They noted that a number of Lakota, Dakota, and other Native visitors to Inherent Right make connections between the sea otter harvest and the historic buffalo hunt, an important practice to their nations. Two Stars believes it is invigorating to see these cultural practices being passed on and celebrated in the gallery: “It feels good to offer the community space to come for joy after it was used for protection and grief.”

—Taylor Rose Payer (Turtle Mountain Chippewa)

above Nicholas Galanin (Tlingit/Unangax̂), Never Forget, 2021, steel, iron, paint, 712 × 4,327 in. Photo: Lance Gerber.

PALM SPRINGS, CALIFORNIA

Never Forget Desert X

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HOSE LAND IS INDIAN L AND? Breathtaking and massive, Never Forget (2021) emerges from the California desert landscape of the Coachella Valley with the phrase INDIAN LAND in 45-foot block letters. Never Forget is Tlingit and Unangax̂ artist Nicholas Galanin’s powerful (and perfectly Instagrammable) contribution to the biennial exhibition Desert X. Each letter is made of huge slabs of white corrugated metal arranged in a slightly crooked fashion to mimic the iconic Hollywood sign. Recalling the history of the original Hollywood sign, Galanin points out that it “was erected to promote a whites-only development,”1 while also intersecting with the rise of entertainment industry tourism in Palm Springs. Now considered a desert getaway from the big city, Never Forget claims that Palm Springs is in fact “Indian Land.” Its location straddles the checkerboarded land of the Agua Caliente Band of Cahuilla Indians reservation and the city of Séc-he (“sound of boiling

water” in the Cahuilla language), known to most as Palm Springs. Despite no explicit representation in the exhibition, the tribe has a particular absent presence throughout the city: yellow caution signs with Cahuilla words are scattered around the city; the visitor center distributes pamphlets about the tribe; and they have a casino and other tourist businesses in the area. Palm Springs is abundant in subtle indications that it is home to the Cahuilla.

Galanin, an artist who describes himself as “creatively sovereign,” 2 is known across the globe for (literal) groundbreaking work such as Shadow on the Land, an excavation and bush burial (2020) at the Sydney Biennale and White Noise, American Prayer Rug (2018), and also intimately known within his tribal communities for carving totem poles. With Never Forget, Galanin nudges visitors to question their entitlement and “asks settler landowners to participate in the work by transferring land titles and management to local Indigenous communities.” 3 On the day I saw this piece, I encountered most likely non-Native visitors stopping by the work for a quick Instagram snap, reminding me that Never Forget is not an artwork made for the members of the Cahuilla community.

Continually perplexing about this work is how the writing fluctuates between levels of visibility. I visited the work midday, when the sun is directly overhead and reaching its hottest temperatures of the day. Almost like a mirage, the letters are no longer stark white as seen in the promotional materials but rather blend into the natural background, making it harder to see. This effect blurs the distinction between the INDIAN LAND and Indian land. If you did not already know it was there, you might even have missed it. Different from the Hollywood sign, perched up on the hills of Tovaangar, that is, Tongva territory, Never Forget is situated at the bottom of the San Jacinto Mountains, and is dwarfed in size.

Despite its surface appeal, Never Forget reminds me of the unnaturalness of borders and how naming land is a way to claim it. The lettering made of industrial materials, the metal bars holding the weight of the work, and even the corral of chain-linked fence at the base of the work with a “keep out” warning are unwelcoming and signal the fabrication, construction, and fallacy of claiming land as one’s own. This construction stands in opposition to the looming San Jacinto Mountains, and the people who have lived in, loved, and fought for these lands

1. “Nicholas Galanin,” Desert X, accessed May 19, 2021, web.

2. Nicholas Galanin, “Artist Conversation: Like a Wrecking Ball: Using Art and Humor to Confront Racist Statues in Australia and the USA,” University of Virginia Arts & Sciences, November 19, 2020, web.

3. “Nicholas Galanin,” Desert X, web.

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for millennia, despite a violent history at the hands of the Spanish, and then the United States. In this line of thinking, I recall the red spray-painted scribble of Indian Land on the US property sign at Alcatraz during the Indians of All Tribes’ occupation from November 20, 1969, through June 11, 1971. In that case, the use of the phrase was a signifier of active resistance and transformation of an unused federal prison back into an Indigenous community on Ohlone homelands.

Accompanying the work is a GoFundMe fundraiser meant to encourage “participation” from viewers that goes beyond the pseudo–land acknowledgment Never Forget represents.

Critical of them, Galanin’s fundraiser calls land acknowledgments, “lip service to Indigenous existence, without meaningful action of land return to Indigenous nations.”4 The fundraiser lists the artist and Alaska-based nonprofit First Light Alaska as beneficiaries, with a note that funds will be distributed to the Southern California–based Native American Land Conservancy. In the romanticized version of the desert that Palm Springs embodies, I view this work and its fundraiser as step zero in the Indigenous fight for land back—a marker that simply states that this land does not belong to any settler-colonial owner.

With a goal of $300,000, as of May 18, 2021, the fundraiser has raised $19,322 since it was created on March 8, 2021.

Returning to the physical work, what then does it mean to denote a place as Indian generally rather than Cahuilla specifically? Never Forget has received pushback, particularly from California Indians, and I know I am not alone in asking why letters don't instead spell out Cahuilla Land, or Séc-he. Questioning the lack of specificity but also the originality of the work, artist Weshoyot Alvitre posted on Instagram a work of her own she completed several years ago with the phrase TONGVA LAND in place of the Hollywood sign, as well as a direct response to Galanin’s work in a version with CAHUILLA LAND: “Just in case

anyone was wondering whose land IT’s on… Much respect to the Original people of the San Jacinto Mountains […] they are Cahuilla.”5 Others also claimed that the artist did not work directly with the Agua Caliente Band,6 though the GoFundMe says, “We are grateful to have the opportunity to work with the Indigenous people in this place.”7 I pull in this commentary alongside the colossal Never Forget to remind us that as Indigenous artists, scholars, and community members, our work is never simply our own, and it is never free from criticism. Artists like Alvitre, as well as Native women and queer folks, are often the ones who donate their labor to hold us accountable. They beg us to ask: What is the productive, anti-colonial work that Never Forget does, if any? What does it mean to nonspecifically ask people to pay for Native land? How does naming land as ours alter our relationship with it and the natural world?

In asking myself these questions, Never Forget demonstrates the limits of (English) language and Native representation in Western institutions. Many will tell you that Indian/Native/[x tribe name] land does not mean ownership in the colonial sense but rather signifies a relationship or belonging to. Given this, what then is the point of such statements if they need that explanation?

The “movement for land back” cannot proceed without consideration of the words we use and communities we are responsible to. Additionally, in claiming that return of Indigenous sovereignty over land must pass through a GoFundMe then through two nonprofits, and finally purchased (instead of given or taken back), the lengthy process undermines the urgency and desperation in calls for #LANDBACK. Ultimately, Never Forget, in all its grandeur, brings important conversations to the fore about what collective terms like Indian obscure, including the voices Native to the lands where we exhibit our art. I ask again: whose land is Indian land?

—Isabella Robbins (Diné)

4. Nicholas Galanin, “Landback,” GoFundMe, web.

5. Weshoyot Alvitre (@weshoyot), Instagram post, March 10, 2021, web.

6. Brian Blueskye and Amanda Ulrich, “‘We aren't just this monolith’: Desert X ‘Indian Land’ artwork sparks debate,” Palm Springs Desert Sun, March 12, 2021, web.

7. Nicholas Galanin, “Landback,” GoFundMe, web.

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SANTA FE

Clearly Indigenous: Native Visions Reimagined in Glass Museum of Indian Arts and Culture

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LEARLY INDIGENOUS: Native Visions Reimagined in Glass is one of the first sur veys of glasswork in Indian Country. The origin of this movement has been a long and winding road. Now we witness the power of a new medium taking hold in numerous Native communities, and the infinite possibilities for new forms of creative expression.

While scouring the archives of the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in 2012 for material to include in its anniversary catalogue, 50/50: Fifty Years, Fifty Artists, I came across writings by a cofounder, Lloyd Kiva New (Cherokee Nation, 1916–2002). In those early 1960s texts, New discussed his ideas (premonitions, really) about how new materials and media would come to redefine the parameters of Indigenous art forms, and glass was his case in point.

In the early 1970s Lloyd queried the Rhode Island School of Design about constructing a hot shop on the institute’s campus. Rhode Island sent celebrated glass artist Dale Chihuly, a prominent figure in the American Studio Glass movement, who built the institute’s first hot shop and taught glass art there for a semester. After Chihuly departed from IAIA, the glass arts classes were taught by artist Carl Ponca (Osage, 1938–2013) for several years before giving way to more custom-bound courses. Today IAIA again has a hot shop on its campus, and Patrick Morrissey has taught glass arts courses for eight years.

For several early IAIA students, the spell of glass had been cast and would prove unbreakable. One of those students was Tony Jojola (Isleta Pueblo), who along with Larry “Ulaaq” Ahvakana (Iñupiaq) and Marvin Oliver (Quinault/Isleta, 1946–2019) represent

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the first generation of the Native glass art movement. These artists mastered the technical prerequisites and carried glass into the fold of contemporary American Indian art. A second generation of glass artists emerged, including Brian Barber (Pawnee), Dan Friday (Lummi), Raya Friday (Lummi), Ramson Lomatewama (Hopi), Carol Lujan (Diné), Ira Lujan (Taos Pueblo/Ohkay Owingeh), Robert “Spooner” Marcus (Ohkay Owingeh), Preston Singletary (Tlingit), and Raven Skyriver (Tlingit). This second wave expanded the art form creatively and geographically, and the notion that Native artists should express their creativity through their respective local, historic art forms was forever shattered.

Over recent decades many of New’s musings have come to fruition: glasswork has infused Indian Country with a dynamic new way of reinterpreting and translating tribal art forms without relinquishing their cultural integrity.

The beaded portrait Lloyd Kiva New (2002), by Marcus Amerman (Choctaw Nation) that hangs near the entrance to this exhibition, welcomes visitors with a piercing gaze. New's presence is tangible.

Co-curated by former Heard Museum CEO Leticia Chambers, PhD, and artist Cathy Short (Citizen Potawatomi), Clearly Indigenous is the largest survey of Indigenous American glass art to date. On display are more than 130 pieces of blown, cast, fused, hot-sculpted, kiln-fired, and/ or sand-carved glass art objects by 33 individual Native artists—28 from the United States and 4 from New Zealand and Australia, plus work by master glass artist Dale Chihuly.

The curatorial statement explains the exhibition’s scope as two-pronged, focusing: “on how Native artists have melded ancestral ways with new methods and materials in glass,” while “concurrently examining the historical narrative of how glass came to Indian Country.”

Curators organized the works into the themes of Innovation, Tradition, and Continuity. Works are further categorized under subtitles, such as Ancestors’ Voices, Animals of the Land, Animals of the Sky, Bridging Two Worlds, Gifts from the Sky, Imagining the Future, Legends of the Sea,

Northwest Coast Vessels Reinterpreted in Glass, Pueblo Pottery Reengineered in Glass, Sea Scapes, and Textiles Recreated in Glass.

Great attention was given to allowing the eye to comfortably take in dozens of colorful creations, with nothing positioned to obstruct or strain the view.

Although the exhibition space is defined by many glass-filled glass vitrines, it contains a sense of fluidity—reminiscent

above Dan Friday (Lummi), Watcher Totem, 2020, hotsculpted glass with cane, 14 × 5 × 7 in. Photo: Alec Miller and Friday Glass. Image courtesy of the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs.

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above Preston Singletary (Tlingit) and Djambawa Marawili (Yolngu), Untitled, 2017, blown and sand-carved glass, 32½ × 5 × 5 in. Photo: Russell Johnson.

Image courtesy of Preston Singletary Studio, Seattle, Washington.

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of flowing water, keeping visitors moving through the color. Although Clearly Indigenous is an unprecedented endeavor in Indian Country, visitors may detect thematic undercurrents in its works. The voices are unified, not homogenized.

Some works speak to environmental issues, as illustrated in Swept Away/Water is Sacred, Water is Life (2017) by Angela Babby (Oglala Lakota) and Adrift (2017)

by Raven Skyriver, which implore us to protect our natural resources and animal relations. Others including Marcus’s Dragon Fly (2017), Ira Lujan’s Quail Canopic (2017), Ed Archie NoiseCat’s (Shuswap/Lil'wat) Thunderbirds (2019), and Friday’s Watcher Totem (2018), honor the winged creatures they depict and their agility, creativity, wisdom, and mischief. Friday explains his piece as “an encourager of life, this is the nature of the Raven … the Trickster who stole the sun for mankind.”

Other artworks explore humanity’s place within the universe by asserting power over it to ensure our survival and yielding to the power it holds over us. Will there be abundance, as seen in Oliver’s A River’s Spirit and Offering (2013)? Or will we find ourselves alone with only a symbol connecting us to forgotten worlds, as suggested in Australian artist Gunybi Ganambarr’s (Yolngu) Untitled Vase (2017)?

Other works pay homage to their makers’ cultural heritage, as beautifully represented in Carol Lujan’s Grandmother’s Legacy series (2014/2019) and the trio of Amerman and Singletary hand-blown collaborative sculptures based on precontact Dhegiha Siouan head pots: Kill Bear, White Bear, and Morning Star (2009). Amerman says, “Reinterpreting the cultural material through faithful depictions of their designs is a way to experience the ancestors.”

Through collaborations Singletary has revealed previously unknown creative facets of some of our most illustrious artists, including several celebrated Pueblo clay artists represented in the exhibition: Tammy Garcia (Santa Clara Pueblo), Jody Naranjo (Santa Clara Pueblo), and Virgil Ortiz (Cochiti Pueblo). These works will stand on their own in the larger canon of Indian art.

A broad survey, like this exhibition, would also reflect on our tumultuous and traumatic history. Babby’s Kiksuyapi 1890 (Remember, Never Forget) (2018) does precisely that, bringing back our painful memories of the countless lives taken as Lakota people defended their ancestral homelands from attacks by the US calvary.

Lighter, easier on the heart works include Charmed (2012–18) by Joe Feddersen (Okanagan/Sinixt) and Dream Cloud (2017) by Raya Friday. Feddersen’s piece, the largest in the exhibition, is a tapestry assembled from 168 translucent, fused-glass charms in various images and symbols, some draw from Plateau petroglyph forms, “shimmering and casting shadows like a waterfall,” as one description reads. Friday’s delicate hanging piece is suspended from silver chains above its description label and an empty space on a shelf with several other pieces, giving it the illusion of floating.

“The body of work I keep coming back to focuses increasingly on our complex relationship with water,” says Friday.

“When I was making Dream Cloud I was thinking about a not-too-distant time and place where good water and good dreams were the same thing—both sacred and temporal, like dew on a web.

I see the repercussions of our impact on the earth and each other: our intentions, good and bad, have an unseen life … that takes the shape of water, sometimes visible, sometimes vapor.”

Directly under the trio of head pots rests Life is Short, Remember to Live (2012), by Adrian Wall (Jemez Pueblo).

I’m drawn to this white enameled and fused glass skull with a set of scarlet wings by the elegance of its colors and bold features. My reading of the piece is that death and freedom are tethered by a sense of how short our lives really are. “That’s exactly what I was trying to portray,” Wall assures me via email. That’s one of the most powerful messages emanating from Clearly Indigenous: Native Visions Reimagined in Glass. These glass sculptures are exemplary on a collective level and through each piece of work’s beauty and merit.

—RoseMary Diaz (Santa Clara Pueblo)

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SANTA FE

Shonto Begay: Eyes of the World Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian

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TEPPING INTO the Ne oImpressionist-inspired world of Shonto Begay’s narrative painting, I ready myself for a journey through a gamut of emotions. I have experienced the artist’s work before: I know going in that part of the deal is the donning of a silent fortitude.

At first, when greeted by the exhibition’s title painting, the mood is mostly light if deeply reflective. As the painting situates the viewer inside a large cave, the eye is directed outward to scan the ruins of ancient structures whose ladders still reach for the sky, while sandstone cliffs on either side yield to a green valley and its river, and blue mountains rise in the distance, the tallest of which draws the gaze upward and into a color-saturated and form-filled sky. Once there, more is revealed. An image emerges of an elder smoking from a sacred pipe. An architectural form resembling ruins near the cave is suggested, and the silhouette of a dancer begins to take shape. This triad of cultural touchpoints says, This is where the story begins.

As a starting point, Eyes of the World serves its role well. It is a grounding invitation into the exhibition, and an introduction to the artist’s worldview, tribal belief system, and philosophy on creating, some of which is expressed in the painting’s accompanying text panel.

Turning the corner into the main gallery (or more accurately, following the flow of the hogan-shaped interior of the museum, since it doesn’t really have corners), I am met with melancholy remembrance as my sight reaches The Ride (2008). The scene is reminiscent of one from my childhood, replete with characters who resemble some of my now-gone relatives, rumbling down the dusty roads of the rez in an old pick-up truck while listening to Singing Wire on

KUNM radio, with Paul Ortega’s “Bird Song” chirping through static-y speakers.

Here, the truck is also a familiar character, and like the VW Bug in Begay’s Lost Among Us (1997), it has been centralized as such in the image.

Next, as I stand in the presence of Grandfather (2020), Promise of the Coming Storm (2018), and Drawn by Light (2018), my reverence for Mother Earth and the power of nature is reaffirmed. Likewise, taking in the spiritual nourishment of Glittering World (2003), Hero Twins: On the Edge of Creation (2016), and The Shaman (1991) provides a renewed sense of emotional equilibrium. It’s a good, solid feeling that gives me the strength to walk toward the works that I expect will evoke deeper sentiment and confront weightier subjects.

And they do. The Pink Letter (1999), Homeward Bound (2016), and Remember Us (2020) seem to compose a somewhat chronological, episodic story of hope, loss, and longing—possibly the most universally shared trifecta of the human bonding (or un-bonding) experience. But as anticipated, the heaviest feelings are yet to come.

Helpless (1996), The Walk (2006), Yellow Dust Eve (2008), and Watching Us (2014) traverse painful terrain and blast through false narratives about some of the harsh realities that have befallen the Navajo people and many other Native communities. Respectively, these paintings address the unrelenting grip of alcoholism; The Long Walk (in which the US federal government forcibly removed more than 10,000 Diné from their historic stronghold and led them into imprisonment at Bosque Redondo between 1863 and 1866); the extraction of 30 million tons of uranium from Navajo lands from 1944 to 1986, with its subsequent and still lingering toxic effects on the people and their environment; and the cruel BIA boarding school system that attempted to assimilate Native people into mainstream American ideology by steering them as far away as possible from their tribal cosmologies and core life values and attempting to degrade them into believing that there was something inherently

wrong with being Indian, so it was best to rid oneself of any cultural trappings thereof. All of these works portray their subject matter with gut-wrenching detail that sometimes makes it difficult to keep looking, but even harder to look away.

Most of the nearly three dozen works that comprise Eyes of the World are rendered in acrylic on canvas in the artist’s hallmark kinetic style, where “strokes, circles, lines, squiggles, curlicues, dots, and slashes are part of a visual chant through the spirit world,” as one of the exhibition’s text panels explains. (Thirty-one such little marks comprise an alphabet in the paintings, which the artist uses in every work.) The ten pen-and-ink drawings that complete the Hero Twins series (1980) represent the only departure from Begay’s usual media.

They are displayed in two groups of five on opposite walls in the very center of the museum. Their placement here feels right: it was they who protected the Diné by destroying the Monster Gods, so it is only fitting that their likenesses here be granted the same gesture of protection.

While it’s possible to decipher several of Begay’s paintings as interpretations of historic European works—for example Claude Monet’s Luncheon on the Grass (1865–66) becomes Begay’s Afternoon Green (1999) and Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus (ca. 1485) is reflected in his White Shell Woman (1993)—to do so would be to miss the point entirely. Even in rendition, these works are thoroughly of the artist and completely Diné. And I find it oddly satisfying to see all the fashions and notions and environments of the Near East that are depicted in this painting replaced with those of Native origin.

Begay has rewritten this chapter of the Eurocentric art story in his own words, and now it includes us.

If pressed to choose any favorite pieces from the exhibition, Afternoon Light (2020) and In the Days Following Summer (2015) would be in close running.

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(possibly inspired by Begay’s own parents?) in focus, who are engaged in the simple activities of reading the paper and working a crossword puzzle. A single beam of light intersects the scene and leads the eye to a partially open door; a figure resembling the artist stands in the doorframe. Is he letting in the light or trying to keep it from escaping?

In the Days Following Summer portrays a young mother, who steadies herself against fast-swimming river currents as she prepares to collect water in a large clay jar, all the while with her infant and his cradleboard secured to her body by strips of cloth or hide.

Her expression does not conceal the tension of her challenging situation or the fragility of the pair’s continued survival. Imposing cliff walls surround them, adding tension to the already fraught energy of the painting, while a floating butterfly and several ravens hovering near the water symbolize “a newfound freedom” and the endurance of the Diné over vast stretches of time and hardship, respectively. For me, this is the most emotionally stirring piece in the exhibition. There is no escape from knowing that this was a difficult subsistence, and I tell myself that it’s okay to cry.

Moving through Eyes of the World feels something like progressing through the chapters of a familiar story. As events unfold, we are drawn deeper into the narrative until, eventually, it becomes part of our own. Of course, the well-written, informative, and detail-rich text panels that accompany the work help keep us tethered to each unfolding passage.

Taking a final glance at the eponymous painting at the beginning of the exhibition, I realize that it is the metaphorical kaleidoscope from which all the other works tumbled, and within which they are ultimately contained. I think I’ll go ’round once more and give the scope another spin.

When visiting, don’t overlook the four pieces displayed in the “nook,” where the main Klah Gallery funnels into the adjacent gallery space. A small painting 84 | FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

hangs above a painted chair, which is angled to share a three-quarter view, while two painted denim jackets (1999), both untitled, complete this curiosity cabinet of sorts.

Shonto Begay: Eyes of the World was curated by Zachary Taylor (Chickasaw), the Andrew W. Mellon curatorial fellow at the Wheelwright. The exhibition opened on April 10 and runs through October 3, 2021.

—RoseMary Diaz (Santa Clara Pueblo)

above Shonto Begay (Diné), In the Days Following Summer, 2015, acrylic on canvas, 72 × 48 in.

MUSIC REVIEW

Creation Never Sleeps, Creation Never Dies: The Willie Dunn Anthology Light In The Attic Records, 2021

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ight In The Attic Records (LITA) has just released a compilation of songs by the criminally underknown Mi'kmaw singer-songwriter and filmmaker, Willie Dunn (1941–2013). Gathered from various previous releases, as well as unpublished works, Creation Never Sleeps, Creation Never Dies: The Willie Dunn Anthology is the fourth in a series of anthologies and reissues the Northwest-based record label has produced of Native singer-songwriters of the 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s.

To date they have reissued two 1981 releases, Spirit Child by Willie Thrasher (Inuk) and Northland, My Land by Morley Loon (Cree), and one 1971 release, I’m Lost In The City by John Angaiak (Yup’ik). In 2016 LITA released a double disc’s worth of songs from the ’60s through the ’80s called Native North America (Vol. 1): Aboriginal Folk, Rock, and Country 1966–1985. This anthology includes quite an array of bands and songwriters from throughout Canada, including Sugluk, Sikumiut, Saddle Lake Drifting Cowboys, Leland Bell, William Tagoona, Willy Mitchell and Desert River Band, Gordon Dick, Lawrence Martin, The Chieftones, Lloyd Cheechoo, Philippe McKenzie, Shingoose, David

Campbell, Eric Landry, Ernest Monias, Peter Frank, Brian Davey, and Alexis Utatnaq. I reviewed this compilation in FAAM no. 7 (Summer 2015). A second volume in the works will cover nations south of the Canadian border to include Native singer-songwriters and bands from Mexico and the United States. LITA also made all four of Willie Dunn’s solo albums available digitally, including Willie Dunn (1971) and Willie Dunn (1972) in May 2021, and will rerelease The Pacific (1980) and Vanity of Human Wishes (1984), which will be available August 14, 2021, in celebration of Willie’s 80th birthday. These are all newly remastered

by John Baldwin.

The Willie Dunn anthology is a double-disc release available in both black and translucent red wax vinyl, accompanied by a booklet with an extensive overview of Willie Dunn’s life and career, unreleased photos, interviews, lyrics, and liner notes by Kevin Howes (a.k.a. Voluntary In Nature), who did much of the work to put together the collection. Christi Belcourt (Michif) and Alanna Edwards (Mi'kmaw) contributed artwork., With contributions from Willie Dunn’s family, Bob Robb and Alanis Obomsawin (both Mi'kmaq), John Baldwin’s remastered anthology sounds amazingly good, considering many songs were recorded years ago and years apart.

A direct storyteller, Willie Dunn expresses his deep care for oppressed people, truth-telling, and justice with a syrupy baritone voice. He also reveals his clear disdain (and pity) for corrupt, oppressive political and economic systems. His primary concerns are the conditions Indigenous people around the world face—throughout history and today. His songs are simultaneously specific and universal, and he perfectly accompanies himself on acoustic guitar—simple yet effective and appropriate to every song and situation.

Though he is joined on “Crazy Horse”

by Jerry Saddleback (Cree) and “Sonnet 33 and 55/Friendship Dance” by Dave Jock (Akwesasne Mohawk) and the Akwesasne Singers, the overall album is from a solo singer-songwriter up against the world. Raw and honest, Dunn dares the listener to sit with it and take it all

in. He is not shy in offering answers. A rebel with a cause, his motivations are clear, and his works are right and needed.

I appreciate the courageous decision to start the album off with the longest track, “The Ballad of Crowfoot.”

Beginning with the birth of Chief Crowfoot (Siksika) in 1821, Dunn articulates significant events in history up to 1967 before momentarily looking into the future. Willie Dunn’s delivery and overall performance of this song are masterful. He pulls off the most difficult challenge for any musician, which is to let the music breathe while simultaneously driving the message home. The song seethes in a profound brew of reality, anchored by a deep centeredness in eternity. This song is born out of necessity. The solo guitar at the end stamps the seal and sends it off to the future. “The Ballad of Crowfoot” is also the soundtrack for Willie Dunn’s film by the same name, which is available for viewing freely online.

The 22-track album weaves its way through decades of work, including songs of celebration as well as individual and societal tragedies. Dunn was widely respected for having never sold out to the music industry and never compromising for commerciality. Though many musicians profess this outlook, he lived it. It comes through in this album which crystallizes in the closing words of the last track, “Bear and Fish,” saying it all comes down to this: The sacred bear in search of fish The fish beneath the water’s waves The rivers tumbling to the sea The cycle of a mystery Willie Dunn died on August 5, 2013, just as the first volume of Native North America was finalized for publication. Too often ignored by the mainstream media throughout his life, at least Dunn knew at the end that his legacy would live on through the work of Kevin Howes and Light In The Attic Records. These anthologies and reissues are an integral contribution to music and society. It would be easy for much of this music to simply disappear, along with the lives and visions of these musicians.

History is a story that we are all part of, as long as we have tellers like Willie Dunn.

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Cheyenne/Arapaho Novelist

TOMMY ORANGE

By Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD

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PORTS WERE Tommy Orange’s first passion, but when the Oakland-born author turned 18, he dove into music. Yet after earning a sound engineering degree from community college, fate intervened when he took a job at Gray Wolf Books, the now-defunct used books store in San Leandro, California. There his interest in literature was sparked, and he soon pursued an MFA degree in writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts.

Orange’s debut novel, There There (2018) rocketed to the number one spot on The San Francisco Chronicle bestseller list and quickly joined The New York Times bestseller list. The gritty multivoiced fictional account of Native people in the Bay Area received critical praise and recognition, from the John Leonard Prize and PEN/Hemingway 86 | FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

Award to an American Book Award. The novel also garnered him several prestigious award nominations including the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction.

MRS: Thank you for speaking with me, Tommy. I’ve read that you started writing later in life, but you’ve been involved in music for many years. This creative impulse towards writing songs and writing short stories and novels seems so closely related, no?

TO: I started playing guitar when I was 18 and that was my first serious creative impulse or endeavor. My mom and sister got me a guitar for my 18th birthday. I didn’t even ask for it, but they must have sensed something. I was mostly an athlete, and so I didn’t do well in school. That

being said, when I did start writing, and to this day, there is a lot of musical influence.

I was just reading a book written

by Chilly Gonzales. He’s a pianist. He’s also a producer and a rapper. He’s a character. He wrote a book on Enya, the Irish singer, called Enya: A Treatise on Unguilty Pleasures. It’s a 50-page book. He’s a brilliant musician. He starts the book talking about lullabies and musical taste and how he, for a long time, tried to prove himself as being cool by listening to the most hip music and doing all that kind of stuff. He talks about musical influences, taste, and aesthetics—which is why children love lullabies and people love pop music—this natural impulse towards aesthetics.

I was just thinking recently about losing the ability to really tap into that natural impulse towards whatever you are doing, aesthetics, etc. We did grow up with a piano in the house, and I did have one singular moment when no one was around. The left third of the keyboard on the piano, maybe for like an hour—I was really experimenting with sound for the first time doing some kind of musical thing. It really made an impression on me, but I just sort of compartmentalized that experience as singular and left it there and did nothing with it until I really got into piano when I was 21.

MRS: When you’re writing, what frustrates you? Or, better yet, what do you have to work harder on than anything else?

TO: I think it’s a pretty painful practice to continue to go back to your words and your decisions on the page and make the commitment to dig back into every paragraph and every decision you’ve made knowing full well that, between time itself and revision, you can make it better. You have to because that’s the job, but looking

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back at the words on a daily basis, it’s a painful process.

I play piano regularly, and when I go to the keyboard and play, I don’t have anything I’m trying to do. I just play whatever comes, or I have a certain set of songs that I’ve memorized that I go to.

There’s nothing painful about it, but I also don’t have any ambition towards making something.

I’m working on a new novel now.

I sort of know in my head a lot of what needs to happen, but to approach the page—not so much the new writing which I enjoy doing, making new drafts—but the early and middle drafts, getting them to where they need to be is a painful process of having to really examine what is and what isn’t working about your own work.

MRS: Can you expand on this further: how important is revision and editing to your writing process?

TO: I think revision is everything. If I have an idea and I’m trying it out for the

first time—if it’s a scene or the beginning of a chapter, and I get some insight into something, say while I’m on a run, I take a note. Then I try it for the first time and I think it’s great for the first 24 hours after I’ve written it. Then I have to slog through the revisions to get to it when I can. So the way I think of revision is really about reseeing your own work in a fresh way to get a new perspective on it. I have a lot of techniques to be able to get a fresh perspective. Time will always give you a fresh perspective, but if you want to meet a deadline or want to finish a book in under a decade, you can’t depend on a fresh perspective that time gives you.

So, I try to find all different ways to resee my own work.

I have a robot app that reads my work to me, and sometimes I’ll go for a drive and have the robot read my work on the drive, and I can’t really do anything to it while I’m listening to it, because I’m driving and it’s dangerous. I really go through the process of having to deal with

above Carlin Bear Don’t Walk (Northern Cheyenne/Crow), Storyteller, 2020, oil on canvas, 18 × 24 in. Image courtesy of the artist. opposite Tommy Orange. Photo: Kateri Chui Orange. Image courtesy of the author.

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above, left Carlin Bear Don’t Walk (Northern Cheyenne/ Crow), Cold As Ice, 2019, oil on canvas, 20 × 16 in. Image courtesy of the artist.

Innocence is forgotten when vengeance is necessary. Those words embody the meaning behind this art and define the heart and strength of our Indigenous Women. I always want my art to represent that strength to inspire others, uplift, heal, and motivate.

Also, to remind those of their a n ce sto r s a n d w h at t h ey endured, the resilience they displayed so future generations could exist and carry on the honor of their name.

—Carlin Bear Don’t Walk a b ov e , ri g h t Cover of Tommy Orange's There There (McClelland & Stewart, 2018).

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errors or embarrassing things I’ve done and I can’t touch it. That’s one way to do it. My wife will read out loud to me. I’ll read out loud. I’ll print the work out and go at it with a pen. There’s a lot of different ways to resee and revise. It’s a big part of the process. To get a fresh perspective, to make it better—sentence by sentence—I think you have to employ a lot of different techniques. Long-distance running is a thing that I do to get some of the deeper solutions to problems that I have. More structural problems, I can do on the run.

MRS: Did the critical and commercial success of There There transform your approach to writing? How has your writing matured over the years?

TO: I’ve only put out one book, and I spent six years writing that novel. My

second book that I’m working on—I’m doing things that I’m really loving, and I think they are more mature decisions, and the work is deeper because I’ve been at it longer. But that’s just book number two in the lifetime of a writer.

A lot of times when I look back at the writers that I like, books number one and two aren’t very good. So, I let myself off the hook that way. I try to get the work finished because you can mull over it and put things off for a long time, but you have to decide that something is finished enough.

Even though I started really late, I was taking writing pretty seriously from 2006 to now. It is late but I was going at it pretty hard for 14 years with serious intent. If you look at putting in hours at any discipline, if you go at something for that long, you are more familiar with the process and your relation with the art and what it all means.

MRS: Finally, I learned that the sequel to There There is being released in 2022.

What can readers expect from this book? How will it differ from There There?

TO: When I first started writing it was right after the powwow, really like directly after the powwow, which was my initial instinct. It’s really changed. I sold the book in February of 2020, right before the pandemic. I finished a draft during it, and

ART+LIT

I got an editorial note that gave me a lot of insight. As I learned with editorial notes last time around, it’s really about trying to lead you in a direction and not giving you direction, but you have to come up with all the creative solutions yourself. What I’ve come to I’m really happy with. I have a new deadline on March 31, and we’ll see where it goes from there.

There’s a whole historical component that goes back into a Spanish prison castle where General Richard Henry Pratt held more than 70 prisoners for three years. Half of those prisoners were Southern Cheyennes, which is my tribe.

General Richard Henry Pratt used that experience as a blueprint for the boarding schools that were detrimental for Native people across the country. Prisoners of war were forced to learn English through the Bible and Christianity and military regimen. He saw that as the best way forward for institutionalizing education for Native children. It sounds crazy now, but back then he would have actually been considered a progressive liberal and sympathetic to Indian causes. Going back into history, while also interfacing with the characters from There There in a back-and-forth way, is part of what is happening in the new novel.

MRS: Thank you for this, Tommy. It’s a pleasure to speak with you.

TO: Thank you, Matt.

opposite Carlin Bear Don’t Walk (Northern Cheyenne/Crow), Busby Express, 2018, oil on canvas, 24 × 48 in. Image courtesy of the artist.

Dedicated to my hometown of Busby, Montana, on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. Just another day in the life, things we see and get to experience firsthand growing up in my neighborhood.

There’s a saying back home: “No hope in the game but a tow rope and a chain,” and it applies to everything we do. We improvise and make the best out of any situation because we come from a long line of survivors, and we take great pride in making things work to the best of our abilities.

—Carlin Bear Don’t Walk

CARLIN BEAR DON’T WALK

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n enrolled member of the Northern Cheyenne Tribe, Carlin Bear Don’t Walk is also of Apsáalooke descent.

He maintains Uprising Art studio in Busby, Montana, on the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. Primarily self-taught, Bear Don’t Walk is fearless with his saturated palette which freely uses magenta, tangerine, or violet to electrify his Northern Plains landscapes and portraits. Finding hope and persevering through adversity are the through lines in his paintings that move freely between the past, present, and future.

A dedicated father, the artist and his wife Bonnie just welcomed a new daughter into the world. He has illustrated children’s and young adult books, such as The Reluctant Storyteller by Art Coulson (Cherokee Nation), Wolf Cub’s

Song by Joseph Bruchac, and a forthcoming project. Children, Native and non-Native, are the intended audience for his recent mural at ZooMontana in Billings. Commissioned by the Rocky Mountain Tribal Leaders and the zoo, the 78-foot mural teaches the public about local Native history and current realities.

Bear Don’t Walk exhibited at Indigenous Art in Time at Montana State University. He shows at several art markets, including Native POP in Rapid City, South Dakota, the Missoula Indigenous Art Market, and the Heard Fair in Phoenix, Arizona, where his Flip Side of Paradise won an award earlier this year. This August he will be exhibiting his most recent canvases at Santa Fe Indian Market booth LIN W 759.

—America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

CARLINBEARDONTWALK.COM NO. 31, SUMMER 2021 | 89

MEMORIAL

LEE MARMON September 20, 1925–March 31, 2021

above Lee Marmon with his photograph, White Man's Moccasins (1954) at the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center in Albuquerque, New Mexico, 2006. Photo: Tom Corbett (CC BY-SA 2.5).

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LORIOUS CUMULUS CLOUDS towering over stark desert landscapes. Beloved elders wearing their fiesta finery and silver jewelry. All are rendered in crisp black, silver, and white—timeless, taking their place in the canon of 20th-century American visual culture.

Laguna photographer Lee Marmon rose to prominence, not only in the Native art world but in the popular American psyche.

His photographs—whether of Laguna elders, celebrities like “Dino” Dean Martin, or US presidents—provide an Indigenous perspective within mainstream culture, from Time Magazine and The Saturday Evening Post to The New York Times.

Mainstream influence was not Marmon’s impetus for shooting photography. His father, Henry “Hank” Marmon, advised the budding photographer to shoot portraits of community elders so younger Laguna people would better know them.

This desire to share cultural and community information with upcoming generations of Native youth was widespread among many 20th-century Native American artists. The larger public was just a lucky recipient in this cultural exchange.

Leland Howard Marmon, known to friends as “Pitsy,” was born in Laguna proper on the Laguna Reservation to Lily and Hank Marmon. At age eleven Lee Marmon shot his first

photograph of a truck accident on Route 66. After serving in the Aleutian Islands of southeastern Alaska during World War II, Marmon returned to Laguna and worked for his father’s trading post. While delivering groceries to elders in outlying communities, Marmon began snapping portraits of community members with his compact Graflex Speed Graphic camera 2¼ × 3¼.

These portraits of Laguna, Acoma, and even neighboring Southern Ute people were natural and intimate. “It was better to shoot candid—the way they were,” said Marmon.1 The subjects chose what they wanted to wear and how they wanted to pose.

One Laguna farmer wanted a massive melon he just harvested to be included in his portrait. Their names are known. For instance, Marmon’s best-known artwork, White Man’s Moccasins (1954), was of Jeff Sousea (Laguna), the caretaker of the Mission San José de Laguna. He sits on a ledge of the late 17th-century church, bathed in light and enjoying a cigar (that Marmon provided for him) while sporting high-top canvas sneakers. This image is the opposite of romanticized, exoticized “Vanishing Indian” photographs shot by non-Native photographers of previous decades. Sousea was an individual with agency, immersed in his own Laguna culture, who strategically chose what aspects of Western attire to adopt when they suited his needs. Marmon estimated that he sold at least 20,000 posters of this image.

Reaching far beyond his home community, Marmon moved to Palm Springs, California, in 1966, where he became the official photographer for the Bob Hope Desert Classic golf tournament. There Marmon photographed golfers and celebrities, even shooting photographs for Columbia Pictures until he returned to Laguna in 1982.

The National Museum of the American Indian George Gustav Heye Center in New York gave Marmon a solo exhibition, Pueblo Portraits: 50 Years at Laguna Pueblo (1999–2000), and his fine art career took off. The Southwestern Association for Indian Arts gave him a lifetime achievement award in 2006, and Gallup Inter-Tribal Ceremonial named him a living treasure in 2009. With Joy Harjo (Muscogee/Cherokee), Simon Ortiz (Acoma), and Marmon’s daughter, the prominent novelist Leslie Marmon Silko (Laguna), he published Pueblo Imagination: Landscape and Memory in the Photography of Lee Marmon (2003). Tom Abbott and Marmon cowrote Laguna Pueblo: A Photographic History (2015). In 2009 Marmon sold his papers and 65,000 negatives, prints, and slides to the University of New Mexico’s Center for Southwest Research and Special Collections.

His work is in many other public collections, including the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American and the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center.

Marmon was a consummate storyteller and fiercely independent. As Abbott wrote, “Pitsy, through his own life and work, showed us that life can be lived on your own terms.”2 —America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

1. True Tales of the Blue Eyed Indian trailer, produced by Vincent Nicastro, VNC Films, February 20, 2014, YouTube video, 5:48, web.

2. Lee Marmon and Tom Corbett, Laguna Pueblo: A Photographic History (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2015), xiv.

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MEMORIAL

ETHEL VIGIL January 11, 1950–March 1, 2021

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THELENE WILLOW TAFOYA VIGIL (Santa Clara Pueblo) embodied grace and kindness. She had a warm and embracing energy that radiated outward, and her smile alone could lift a tense or pensive mood. She loved to laugh and make others laugh. It was one of the most marked characteristics of her personality. Sadly, we can hear Ethel’s laughter only in our memories now. She passed away on March 1 from complications of COVID-19.

Born in Española, New Mexico, Ethel was the eldest of seven children born to Mida and Cubby Tafoya of Santa Clara Pueblo. She spent much of her childhood with her aunt Rose.

Ethel attended the Santa Clara Day School and graduated from Española Valley High School. She is survived by four beautiful daughters, Angie, Kimberly, Ginger, and Julie—each one her own strong and independent self, all reflections of their mother’s giving spirit; her husband, Joe Vigil of Española, with whom she shared a great love for traveling; her mother; and all of her siblings. Grandchildren and nieces and nephews also brought blessings to Ethel’s life, and she enjoyed close friendships with many of her cousins, including my mother and her siblings, the Cains.

In 1975, Ethel began making pottery full time. Following in our family’s centuries-old practice of coil-built vessels from hand-gathered and hand-processed clay, she shaped splendid bowls and vases, incised them with Pueblo designs, polished them to a glass-like finish, and fired them outdoors using the time-honored techniques of our Tewa ancestors to produce both the black and red finishes that are hallmarks of Santa Clara pottery.

“Ethel was an incredible talent with a sweet spirit,” said her friend, photographer Neil Chapman, who photographed Ethel for his book, Santa Clara Portraits: A Proud Tradition (1999).

“We always enjoyed our time with her,” he said of the many visits he and his wife shared with Ethel during the creation of the book.

For decades, Ethel exhibited her ceramics at Santa Fe Indian Market and the Eight Northern Indian Pueblos Arts and Craft Show. Numerous galleries carried her artwork, including Adobe Gallery, Mudhead Gallery, and Pottery of the Southwest. Her aunts Mary Cain and Teresita Naranjo and the granddaughter of Christina Naranjo are all world-renowned Santa Clara Pueblo potters, who undoubtedly influenced Ethel’s first efforts with clay and whose legacies remained as sources of inspiration through the duration of her career.

Throughout her life, Ethel participated many times in the dances at Santa Clara Pueblo. Some say her personification of Buffalo Maiden was the most beautiful they had ever seen. On those occasions when she wasn’t taking part in a dance, she hosted its requisite feast at her home. “Come to the house and eat!” she would say, pretending to scold me in an I’m-not-takingno-for-an-answer-this-time tone that made the invitation nearly impossible to decline. (On that note, I must say her garbanzo bean stew and red chile had a gravitational pull of their own.)

above Ethel Vigil working in her home studio. Photo: Neil Chapman. Image courtesy of Neil Chapman.

Ethel was my second cousin, once removed (her grandmother was my great-grandmother), and one of the first relatives I met when I moved to Santa Clara with my mother in 1970. I remember her soft voice, her kind eyes, and the loving way she treated us when we arrived, road-worn and uncertain about our new life in New Mexico. She was also one of the first people to acknowledge my Indian-ness—not in a blood-quantum way, but by allowing me to understand how, through our mothers’ families, we were connected. We were family, and she let me know it from the start—a cherished and unforgettable gesture for a kid who had lost her father just a couple of years earlier.

There was no practice or pretense to Ethel’s caring nature, it just seemed to pour forth from her in such a natural way and was simply part of who she was.

Like so many others in my family, I miss my cousin. Her steady and loving presence in our lives was a blessing —to inspire us to embrace self-acceptance, to let us know, in her own quiet way, that she loved us. Ethel’s Tewa name was O'paah, which translates to “the universe,” and she possessed many of the qualities inferred by it. She was full of life, expansive in mind and heart, and generous with her light.

—RoseMary Diaz (Santa Clara Pueblo) NO. 31, SUMMER 2021 | 91

NATIVE AMERICAN ART APPRAISALS, INC. SINCE 1936

CALENDAR July 1–October 1: Douglas, MI Art of the People: Contemporary Anishinaabe Artists at the SaugatuckDouglas History Center, 130 W. Center Street | (269) 857-5751 | sdfai.org July 1–December 1: Santa Fe, NM Collecting Jewelry: Curator H. P. Mera’s Trip to Navajo Country in 1932 at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, 710 Camino Lejo | (505) 476-1269 indianartsandculture.org July 2–4, 9–11, 16–18 & 23–25: Flagstaff, AZ Heritage Festival and Native Art Market at the Museum of Northern Arizona, 3101 N. Fort Valley Road | (928) 774-5213 | musnaz.org July 2–31: Tahlequah, OK Trail of Tears Art Show and Sale at the Cherokee Springs Plaza, 3377 Cherokee Springs Plaza Drive | (918) 439-6546 | visitcherokeenation.com July 9 & 10: Rapid City, SD Native POP: People of the Plains and Native Film Showcase in Main Street Square. Market: Saturday, 10:00 am–8:00 pm | nativepop.org July 15–August 29: Tacoma, WA In the Spirit Northwest Contemporary Native Arts 2021 at the Washington State Historical Society, 1911 Pacific Avenue, fifth floor | (253) 272-9747 washingtonhistory.org

(855) NAAA-INC EMAIL INFO@NAAAINC.COM VISIT WWW.NAAAINC.COM CALL

July 17 & 18: Bernalillo, NM 4th annual Bernalillo Indian Arts Festival at Loretto Park, 237 S. Camino del Pueblo. 9:00 am–5:00 pm, free | (505) 867-9667 | bernalilloindianfestival.com July 17, 2021–February 13, 2022: Santa Fe, NM Storytellers: Narrative Art and the West at the New Mexico Museum of Art, 107 W. Palace Avenue | (505) 476-5072 | nmartmuseum.org July 17, 2021–February 13, 2022: Winnipeg, MB Naadohbii: To Draw Water at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, 300 Memorial Boulevard | +1 (204) 786-6641 | wag.ca July 21–24: Fairbanks, AK 60th annual World Eskimo-Indian Olympics at the Big Dipper Ice Arena, 1920 Lathrop Street | (907) 452-6646 | weio.org July 23: Calera, OK Grand opening of the Choctaw Cultural Center, 1919 Hina Hanta Way. General adult admission $12, Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma tribal members: free | (580) 924-8280 | choctawculturalcenter.com July 23–November 28: Tacoma, WA As Grandmother Taught: Women, Tradition, and Plateau Art at the Washington State Historical Society, 1911 Pacific Avenue, fifth floor (253) 272-9747 | washingtonhistory.org July 30–October 24: Winnipeg, MB Heartbeat of a Nation: Métis Women, 250 Years at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, 300 Memorial Boulevard | +1 (204) 786-6641 | wag.ca July 31–August 9: Gallup, NM 99th annual Gallup Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial in downtown Gallup and other locations | (505) 863-3896 | gallupceremonial.com August 5–November 5: Oklahoma City, OK Memorial: Positive and Negative Space at the Myriad Botanical Gardens, 301 W. Reno Avenue. Solo exhibition for Tony A. Tiger (Sac & Fox/Seminole/ Mvskoke) | (405) 445-7080 | oklahomacitybotanicalgardens.com August 6 & 7: Branson, MO Wahzhazhe: An Osage Ballet at the Mansion Theater, 189 Expressway Lane | (417) 385-1118 | osageballet.com August 6–September 4, 2021: Santa Fe, NM Contemporary Native American Group Show at Chiaroscuro Contemporary Art Gallery, 558 Canyon Road | (505) 992-0711 | chiaroscurosantafe.com

92 | FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

August 7: Tacoma, WA In the Spirit Northwest Native Festival at the Washington State Historical Society, 1911 Pacific Avenue, and Tacoma Art Museum, 1701 Pacific Avenue, 12:00–7:00 pm | (253) 272-9747 | washingtonhistory.org August 7–9: Panama City, Panama, and virtual 9th Annual Festival de Arte Dule at various locations. Art exhibits, concerts, dance, forums, workshops, and film festival | artistasgunas@gmail.com facebook.com/FestivalArteDule August 12–15: Santa Fe, NM Objects of Art Santa Fe at El Museo Cultural de Santa Fe, 555 Camino de la Familia in the Railyard District. Benefit preview: Thursday, August 12, 4:00– 7:00 pm, $35. Show: Friday, August 13–Sunday, August 15, 11:00 am–5:00 pm, $15 per day, $25 run-of-show | objectsofartsantafe.com August 13 & 14: Nuuk, Greenland Qooqqut Festival at the Nuuk fjord system. Free, family-friendly museum festival | +299 36 37 70 | facebook.com/qooqqutfestival August 13–15: Green Bay, WI Woodland Indian Art Show & Market at the Radisson Hotel and Conference Center, 2040 Airport Drive | (920) 355-2244 | woodlandindianart.com August 13–16: Santa Fe, NM Whitehawk Antique Indian & Ethnographic Art Show at the Santa Fe Convention Center, 201 W. Marcy Street | (505) 988-9544 | whitehawkshows.com August 16–November 28: New York, NY Jules Tavernier and the Elem Pomo at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue | (212) 535-7710 | metmuseum.org

CONTEMPORARY INDIGENEITY 2022 Call for Artists Exhibition dates: April 1–August 20, 2022 Submission deadline: October 1, 2021 The Great Plains Art Museum is reviving its juried exhibition, Contemporary Indigeneity. For the fourth iteration of this group show, the museum seeks artists addressing issues and themes relevant to the contemporary Native American experience on the Great Plains. This exhibition is open to all Native American artists working in any medium.

To learn more and to apply, visit: go.unl.edu/contemporary-indigeneity

August 17–20: Santa Fe, NM The Antique American Indian Art Show at El Museo Cultural de Santa Fe, 555 Camino de la Familia. Benefit preview: Tuesday, August 17, 4:00–7:00 pm, $35. Show: Wednesday, August 18–Friday, August 20, 11:00 am–5:00 pm, $15 per day, $25 run-of-show | antiqueindianartshow.com August 18–20: Santa Fe, NM Wheelwright Benefit Event at the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, 704 Camino Lejo | (505) 982-4636 | wheelwright.org/benefit

KESHi

August 19: Santa Fe, NM Get hands on with the Coe! at the Coe Center for the Arts, 1590 Pacheco Street. Interactive art celebration hosted by the Coe and First American Art Magazine with Will Wilson (Diné), Nani Chacon (Diné/Chicana), hoop dancing, DJ Celeste, and more! | (505) 983-6372 | coeartscenter.org

theZuniconnection

August 19–31: Santa Fe, NM Group Exhibition: Celebration of Native American Art at Blue Rain Gallery, 544 S. Guadalupe Street | (505) 954-9902 | blueraingallery.com August 20 & 21: Santa Fe, NM Wheelwright Art Market at the Wheelwright Museum, 704 Camino Lejo.

Artists include Gail Bird, Yazzie Johnson, Cippy and Waddie CrazyHorse, Shawn Deel, Felicia Fragua, Benjamin Harjo Jr., Ranard Lalo, Deanna Tenorio, and Lyndon Tsosie. 8:00 am–4:00 pm | (505) 982-4636 | wheelwright.org August 20–22: Santa Fe, NM Pathways Native Art Festival at Buffalo Thunder Resort Casino, 30 Buffalo Thunder Trail off US Hwy 285. Indoor/outdoor art market with 500 artists from all tribes, hoop dance competition, food trucks, free admission. Hosted by the Poeh Cultural Center and Pojoaque Pueblo | (505) 455-5054 | poehcenter. org/pathways August 20–31: Santa Fe, NM Preston Singletary at Blue Rain Gallery, 544 S. Guadalupe Street. Solo exhibition for the Tlingit glass artist | (505) 954-9902 | blueraingallery.com August 20, 2021–January 23, 2022 Exposure: Native Art and Political Ecology at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, 108 Cathedral Place | (888) 992-4242 iaia.edu/museum August 21 & 22: Santa Fe, NM 99th annual SWAIA Santa Fe Indian Market in downtown Santa Fe. Tickets $20 | (505) 983-5220 | swaia.org

Keshi.com 227 don gaspar santa fe, nm 87501

505.989.8728 Troy Sice: Guardian of the East, detail

since 1981 fetishes pottery jewelry NO. 31, SUMMER 2021 | 93

September 4, 2021–March 6, 2022: Portland, OR Mesh at the Portland Art Museum, 1219 SW Park Avenue. Curated by Kathleen Ash-Milby (Navajo) | (503) 226-2811 | portlandartmuseum.org September 18 & 19: Oklahoma City, OK Grand Opening of the First Americans Museum, 659 American Indian Boulevard | (405) 594-2100 | famok.org September 18 & 19: Prescott, AZ 23rd annual Prescott Indian Art Market at the Sharlot Hall Museum, 415 W. Gurley Street, 9:00 am–4:00 pm | (928) 445-3122 | sharlothallmuseum.org September 25–December 12: Atlanta, GA Each/Other: Marie Watt and Cannupa Hanska Luger at the Carlos Museum, 571 S. Kilgo Circle | (404) 727-2163 | carlos.emory.edu October 2: Evansville, IN Four Winds Native American Art Show at the Angel Mounds Historic Site, 8215 Pollack Avenue. Art market and cultural festival | (812) 853-3956 indianamuseum.org/historic-sites/angel-mounds October 6–9: Tuscaloosa, AL 32nd annual Moundville Native American Festival at Moundville Archaeological Park, 634 Mound State Parkway | (205) 371-8732 moundville.museums.ua.edu October 8–10: Catoosa, OK 16th annual Cherokee Art Market at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino Tulsa, 777 W. Cherokee Street. Reception: Friday, October 8 | (877) 779-6977 visitcherokeenation.com October 16, 2021–January 30, 2022: Athens, GA Collective Visions: Modern Native American Printmakers at the Georgia Museum of Art, University of Georgia, 90 Carlton Street | (706) 542-4662 georgiamuseum.org

August 26–September 6: Virtual and Araucanía, Chile 8th Bienal Intercontinental de Arte Indígena, Ancestral o Milenario (Intercontinental Biennale of Indigenous, Ancestral, and Millennial Art), sponsored by the Fundación y Comunidad de Aprendizaje Escuela Indígena de las Artes +593 099 795 8845 | biai8.art

October 9 & 10: Salt Lake City, UT Indian Art Market at the Natural History Museum of Utah, Rio Tinto Center, 301 Wakara Way, 10:00 am–5:00 pm | (801) 581-6927 | nhmu.utah.edu October 21, 2021–January 8, 2022: Warm Springs, OR 28th annual Tribal Member Art Exhibit at the Museum at Warm Springs, 2189 Hwy 26 | (541) 553- 3331| museumatwarmsprings.org

August 27–September 25: Tahlequah, OK Cherokee Homecoming Art Show at the Cherokee Springs Plaza, 3377 Cherokee Springs Plaza Drive | (918) 439-6546 | visitcherokeenation.com

October 24, 2021–January 2, 2023: Phoenix, AZ Remembering the Future: 100 Years of Inspiring Art at the Heard Museum, 2301 N. Central Avenue | (602) 252-8840 | heard.org

August 28, 2021–February 26, 2022: Grand Rapids, MI An Interwoven Legacy: The Black Ash Basketry of Kelly Church and Cherish Parrish at the Grand Rapids Art Museum, 101 Monroe Center St NW (616) 831-1000 | artmuseumgr.org

October 24–TBA: Denver, CO ReVisión: Art in the Americas at the Denver Art Museum, 100 W. 14th Avenue Parkway | (720) 865-5000 | denverartmuseum.org

September 1–October 9: Portland, OR Joe Feddersen: Inhabited Landscapes at Froelick Gallery, 714 NW Davis Street.

Solo exhibition for this Okanagan/Sinixt printmaker and glass artist (503) 222-1142 | froelickgallery.com September 1–October 9: Portland, OR Kay WalkingStick: Painting as Memory at Froelick Gallery, 714 NW Davis Street. Solo exhibition for this Cherokee Nation painter | (503) 222-1142 froelickgallery.com September 1–December 31: Wewoka, OK Speak: Speak While You Can at the Seminole Nation Museum, 524 S. Wewoka Avenue | (405) 257-5580 | seminolenationmuseum.org September 4–December 5, 2021: São Paulo, SP, Brazil Though it’s dark still I sing, the 34th Bienal de São Paulo, at the Biennial Pavilion, Ibirapuera Park, portão 3, Vila Mariana | +55 11 5576-7600 34.bienal.org.br 94 | FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

November 5–TBA: Phoenix, AZ Toward the Morning Sun: Navajo Pictorial Textiles from the Jean-Paul and Rebecca Valette Collection at the Heard Museum, 2301 N. Central Avenue (602) 252-8840 | heard.org November 18, 2021–March 14, 2022: Asheville, NC A Living Language: Cherokee Syllabary and Contemporary Art at the Asheville Art Museum, 2 South Pack Square. In celebration of the 200th anniversary of Sequoyah presenting his syllabary to the Cherokee national council (828) 253-3227 | ashevilleart.org November 29–December 1: Washington, DC 2021 International Conference of Indigenous Archives, Libraries, and Museums, hosted by the Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries, and Museums (ATALM), at the Renaissance Washington, DC Downtown Hotel, 999 9th Street NW | atalm.org For more events, visit our online calendar at

FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM/ CALENDAR

GRAND OPENING! Saturday Sunday

September 18, 2021 September 19, 2021

10am – 10pm 10am - 8pm

EVENT ADMISSION $5 Timed Tickets for Exhibits required (Available online July 18, 2021)

OFFSITE PARK & RIDE $5 No onsite parking (Free shuttle from designated lots)

GRAND OPENING ACTIVITIES (Featuring First American Artists) Music Cultural Demonstrations Fashion Shows Modern Dance Film Screenings Youth Activities Fireworks (Saturday only)

www.FAMok.org 405.594.2100

First Americans Museum 659 First Americans Blvd. OKC, OK 73129

benjamin harjo jr.

grace in beauty, 2021, gouache on Arches watercolor paper, 16 × 11 in. Photo: Red River Digital.

ABSENTEE SHAWNEE/SEMINOLE ARTIST

AUGUST 20 & 21

WHEELWRIGHT ART MARKET WHEELWRIGHT MUSEUM, SANTA FE, NM

OCTOBER 9 & 10

CHEROKEE ART MARKET HARD ROCK HOTEL & CASINO TULSA, CATOOSA, OK

benjaminharjojr.com

MahotaTextiles.com | 309 W. Muskogee Ave Sulphur, OK | info@mahotatextiles.com

Santa Fe Indian Market August 21-22, 2021 • Booth LIN E 722 2021 MIAC Living Treasure Exhibit Now Open at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture