First American Art Magazine No. 35, Summer 2022

ARTISTS TO WATCH | SANTA FE INDIAN MARKET | RACING MAGPIE | BRIAN TRIPP

FırstAmericanArt MAGAZINE

JIMMIE CAROLE FIFE | EMIL HER MANY HORSES DANIEL McCOY JR. | NOREEN SIMPLICIO

NO. 35, SUMMER 2022

DISPLAY UNTIL OCT. 3, 2022

OPENING JULY 2, 2022

Join us for the grand opening of the new permanent exhibition, Here, Now and Always. Explore how culture illuminates the past and informs the future of Native art and lifeways.

Figurine, Mary Evangeline “Vangie” Suina (Cochiti Pueblo), 1984, Bequest of Sarah Crane, 58157/12. Sponsored by Ann Parker and Angelo Joaquin, Jr.

August 17–19, 2022 Supporting educational programs and future exhibitions.

Learn more at wheelwright.org/benefit

Wheelwright Museum OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN 704 Camino Lejo, Santa Fe, NM

2ND ANNUAL CASE TRADING POST

Artists Market August 19–20, 2022

Confirmed Artists: Janice Black Elk-Jim Yazzie Johnson & Gail Bird Cippy Crazy Horse Waddie Crazy Horse Felicia Fragua Benjamin Harjo, Jr.

Kevin Honyouti Ronald Honyouti Daniel Jim Devan Kicknosway Raynard Lalo Elizabeth Manygoats

Shanna Patterson Perry Shorty Quaid Shorty Deanna Tenorio Robert Tenorio

PHOTOGRAPHY ON LEFT AND CENTER BY VANCEFOX.COM

NOW OPEN. 10:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m., Monday – Friday. Gift store.

Closed weekends and state and federal holidays.

Visit soon!

GREAT BASIN NATIVE ARTISTS GALLERY Changing exhibitions of historic and living visual artists from throughout the Great Basin www.greatbasinnativeartists.com

“INHERITANCE,” BASKET EXHIBITION. PHOTOGRAPHY ON RIGHT BY MELISSA MELERO-MOOSE (NORTHERN PAIUTE/MODOC).

STEWART INDIAN SCHOOL CULTURAL CENTER & MUSEUM 1 Jacobsen Way Carson City, Nevada (775) 687-7608 www.stewartindianschool.com

1 7 T H A N N UAL

CHEROKEE ART MARKET I N – P E R S O N EVENT | O C TO BE R 8 – 9

“Moundville Duck” Crystal Hanna

HARD ROCK HOTEL AND CASINO TULSA SEQUOYAH CONVENTION CENTER Elite Native artists from across the U.S. present new work at one of the largest Native American art shows in Oklahoma.

Add to your collection with exquisite jewelry, pottery, sculpture, paintings, textiles and much more.

cherokeeartmarket.com

INDIGENOUS ARTS FESTIVAL BUFFALO THUNDER RESORT & CASINO | SANTA FE, NM

AUGUST 19, 20 & 21, 2022 ARTS MARKET • CREATIVE ENTREPRENUERS PUEBLO FASHION • FOOD TRUCKS • INDIGENOUS FILMS

30 Buffalo Thunder Trail, Santa Fe, NM 87506 | BuffaloThunderResort.com | PoehCenter.org

HOUSER

“Kiowa Song,” bronze edition of 4, 1990, 56” H × 36” W × 36” D The Allan Houser Gallery 125 Lincoln Avenue, Suite 112 Santa Fe, NM 87501 (505) 982-4705 Monday – Saturday, 10:00 AM to 5:00 PM

The Allan Houser Sculpture Gardens at Haozous Place 26 Haozous Road, Santa Fe, NM 87508 TOURS BY APPOINTMENT ONLY CALL (505) 471-7409 to reserve

houser@allanhouser.com | allanhouser.com | facebook.com/allanhousergallery

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

For a free brochure on the Act, including how to file a complaint, please contact: 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

Kathy Dickerson, Kiowa, Kiowa Women’s Boots, ©2005

Bettilynn Nez • Leonard Nez • Orville Tsinnie • Charles Loloma • Karl Nataani • Joe Pacheco • Mary & Joseph Calabaza • Morris & Virginia Tso • Venita Cowboy • Mary Tom • Tom Hawk • Edison Cummins • Alison Lee • Kyle Lee Anderson • Trent Lee Anderson• Wyatt Lee Anderson • Roger Tsabetsaye • Nick & Mewee Rosetta • Ray Lovato • Chris Pruitt • Pat Pruitt • Colin Coonsis • Rolanda Haloo • Robert Sorrell • Monty Claw • Lorenzo Shirley • TIm Herrera • Isaiah Calavaza • Isaac Coriz • Gary Custer • Ernest Rangel • Steve Yellowhorse • Stewart Yellowhorse • Clendon Pete • Abraham Peina • Wayne Muskett • Adrian Pinecoose • Cody Sanderson • Mark Crawford • Michael Roanhorse • Dakota Willie • The Kee Family - Mildred, Isabel, Edith, Floyd (Mario), etc. • Duane Maktima • Nick Brokeshoulder • Randy Brokeshoulder • Brent Brokeshoulder • Raynard Lalo • William Gashweseoma • Ryan Gashweseoma • Carl Naquatewa • Clark Tenakhongva • Manfred Susunkewa • Horace Kayquoptewa • Eric Kayquoptewa • Brendan Kayquaptewa • Wendall Silas • Eric Holmes • Kevin Sekakuku • Kevin Quanimptewa • Kevin Honyouti • Brian Honyouti • Manuel Chavarria • Larry Melendez • Kevin Chavarria • Sam Masayumptewa • Lenno Polinyumptewa • Larrin Nasoftie • Tim Talawepi • Loren Honyouti • Brian Holmes • Dustin Holmes • Jared Quamahongnewa • Jerel Quamahongnewa • Augustine Mowa III • Larsen Harris Jr. • Ryon Polequaptewa • Tayron Polequaptewa • Qöyangnuvtu Mowa • Floyd Torivio • Sandra Suhu • Andrew Sahmie • Ida Sahmie • Anoinette Concha • Bonnie Frague • Diane Lucero • Edwina Tortalita • Chris & Vera Fragua • Clifford & Kim Fragua • Darrick Tsosie • Michael Kanteena • Ramson Lomatewama • Justin Red Elk • Brandon Phillips • Abby & Clayton Panteah • Sedrick Banteah • Edwin Begay • Stewart Alonzo • Lena Boone • Evalena Boone • Leland Boone • Daphne Quam • Mike Tucson • Mike Yatsayte • Angel Yatsayte • Brian Yatsattie • Enrike Leekya • Freddie Leekya • Sarah Leekya • Delvin Leekya • Hayes Leekya • Edison Bobelu • Robert Weahkee • Chase Weahkee • Joshua Leki • Annette Tsikewa • David Tsikewa • Phillip Tsosie • Roy Davis • Albert Livingston • Ruben Saufkie • Jake Livingston • Dennis & Nancy Edaakie • Timothy Edaakie • Bobby Silas • Anderson & Avelia Peynetsa • Anderson Jamie Peynetsa • Darla Westika • Harvey Harker • Rickson Kallestewa • Erma Kallestewa Homer • Doris Jose • Terri Goode • Fred & Della Cruz • Joe Ben Jr. • Zachariah Ben • Duke Sine • Tim Alfred • Adam Suetopka • Randy Howato • Gary Tso • Hunter Tso • Justice Tso • Paul Tso • Jack Tom • Wilson Romero • David Draper • Marla Allison • Jennifer Curtis • Wanesia Masquidace • Craig Agoodie • Alex Beeshligaii • Victoria Haley-Anderson • Jasper Nelson • Cassimiro Toya • Adrian Wall • Eric Kayquoptewa • Alta Yesslith • Sylvia Naha • James Nampeyo Garcia • Dee Satala • Melissa Ami • Eric Fender • Glenn Gomez • Caroline Elliott • Ryan Roller • Jordan Roller • Sharon NaranjoGarcia • Carlos Laate • Roxanne Seoutewa • Ferdinand & Sylvia Hooee • Todd Westika • Sheldon & Nancy Westika • Elizabeth Manygoats • Irene White • Alice Cling • Vickie Martinez Tafoya • Dolores Toya • Marcella Yepa • Emma Yepa • Irene Williams • Frederica Antonio • David Antonio • Alvina Yepa • Jacob T. Frye • Felix Ortega • Ed & Dina Yepa • Cindy Fragua • Marcella Yepa • Gabriel Gonzales • Phillip Vigil • Craig George • Tim Washburn • Alan Freeland • Douglas Miles • Parker Boyiddle • Hongvi Marquez • Ferris Satala • Craig Grover • Wally Grover • Harold Nevayaktewa • Randy David • Namath Nevayaktewa • Larryn Masawytewa • Garryn Masawytewa • Curtis Yowytewa • Cordell Sakeva • Daryl Sakeva • Jack Antone • Darwin Puhuyaoma • Lorren Talashoma • Jonah Hill • Bennett Kagenveama • Reggie Mitchell • Eugene Mitchell • Ed & Jennie Vicenti • Zayvien Kewanwytewa • Bryan Quamahongnewa • Jason “Jay” Bobelu • Tony Chino • Delbridge Honanie • Gabe Sice • Rick Manuel • Jennifer Curtis • Marc Antia • Ray Scott • Emmett Navakuku • Shawn Bluejacket I have operated Bahti Indian Arts -started by my father- for 50 years. It would not have been possible without the many, many artists who supported me by allowing us to carry their work. The names here are but a few of those who have helped and supported me (and each other) through the decades. To them I owe a huge debt of gratitude. www.bahti.com

GORDON COONS LAC COURTE OREILLES CHIPPEWA

Washita 1868: Remember Our Relatives, 2022, fumage (smoke art) on paper

www.gordoncoons.com Santa Fe Indian Market, booth 727 LIN W

CHIEFS, Clans & Kin ART OF THE FIVE CIVILIZED TRIBES

An exhibition of 34 Five Civilized Tribes artists with Irish, Scottish and Welsh ancestry exploring history, culture, identity, family and survivance through more than 60 artworks.

CHOCTAW CULTURAL CENTER July 23 - Dec. 31, 2022 1919 Hina Hanta Way, Calera, OK 74730

issue no. 35, summer 2022

FEATURES

DEPARTMENTS

New Trajectories: Four Rising Stars to Watch

By Staci Golar

26

Recent Developments

By Liam Hart and America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

18

Remake the World, Remake Ourselves: The Cultural Geometry of Brian Tripp and His Circle

By Nanette Kelley (Osage Nation/Cherokee Nation)

34

Seven Directions Joanna García Cherán (P'urhépecha)

22

102

The Road to Racing Magpie: Arts Advocacy on the Northern Plains

By Tawa Ducheneaux (Cherokee Nation)

42

Art+Lit Randy Lundy: Cree Writer and Poet

By Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD Calendar

By Liam Hart and America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

110

A Centennial of Progress Repelling Pseudo-Indians: Santa Fe Indian Market and the Indian Arts and Crafts Act

By Suzan Shown Harjo (Cheyenne/Hodulgee Muscogee)

49

Santa Fe Indian Market Through the Decades

By Suzanne Newman Fricke, PhD, and America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

52

64

REVIEWS Exhibition Reviews

88

Reports

98

70

MEMORIALS

ARTIST PROFILES Jimmie C. Fife: Mvskoke Painter and Textile Artist

By Stacy Pratt, PhD (Mvskoke)

64

Emil Her Many Horses: Oglala Lakota Beadwork and Quillwork Artist

By Andrea L. Ferber, PhD

70

Daniel McCoy Jr.: Muscogee/ Citizen Potawatomi Painter

By Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD

76

Noreen Simplicio: Zuni Ceramic Artist

By Miranda Belarde-Lewis, PhD (Zuni/Tlingit)

82

76

Enoch Kelly Haney (Seminole Nation/Muscogee, 1940–2022)

By Gena Timberman (Choctaw Nation)

106

Ardina Moore (Quapaw/ Osage, 1930–2022)

By Candice Byrd (Quapaw/ Osage/Cherokee Nations)

107

Olivia Skenandore (Oglala Lakota/Chicana, 1948–2022)

By Hoka Skenandore (Oneida/ Oglala Lakota/Luiseño/Chicano)

108

cover Avis Charley (Spirit Lake Dakota/Navajo), Our Days of Opulence, 2022, oil on canvas, 40 × 30 in., collection of the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, museum purchase, 2022.5.1. Photo: Hadley Fruits. Image courtesy of the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, Indianapolis.

82

Artist Kaa Folwell (Santa Clara Pueblo) modeled for this portrait with her ceramic jar.

NO. 35, SUMMER 2022 | 15

issue no. 35, summer 2022 ISSN 2333-5548 (Print) • ISSN 2333-5556 (Online) Publishing Editor: America Meredith (Cherokee Nation) Literary Editor: Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD (Euro-Canadian) Contributing Editor: Stacy Pratt, PhD (Mvskoke) Web Editor: Shelley Patrick (Mvskoke) Marketing Director: Barbara Harjo Circulation Manager: James G. Bland Copy Editors: Rosa Cays (Chicana) and Jo Ann Reece Proofreaders: Staci Golar, Jo Ann Reece, Madeline Sobral (Cherokee Nation), and Angela C. Villa (Chicana) Layout and Design: America Meredith (Cherokee Nation) and Corey Yazzie (Navajo) Social Media: Staci Golar, America Meredith (Cherokee Nation), Jackie Sevier (Northern Arapaho), and Stacy Pratt, PhD (Mvskoke) Intern: Liam Hart

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

Editorial Advisory Board

heather ahtone, PhD (Choctaw Nation/Chickasaw) Roy Boney Jr. (Cherokee Nation) 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) Leah Mata Fragua (Coastal Chumash) Anya Montiel, PhD (Mestiza/Tohono O'odham descent) Denise Neil, PhD (Delaware Tribe/Cherokee Nation) Jami Powell, PhD (Osage) Mary Jo Watson, PhD (Seminole Nation) India Rael Young, PhD

Advertising Representative

Barbara Harjo, 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 ©2022 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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EDITOR’S GREETING

T

HE STARS SHALL ALIGN this fall in Northern New Mexico.

With so many significant and concurrent celebrations, institutions and individuals have partnered to form Indigenous Celebration 2022, honoring the deep history of Native art in the region. School for Advanced Research celebrates its 115th year, while Santa Fe Indian Market, La Fonda on the Plaza, and Gallup Intertribal Ceremonial each hit their centennial this year. Founded as the Museum of Navajo Ceremonial Art by Mary Wheelwright and Hastiin Klah (Navajo, 1867–1937), the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian celebrates its 85th anniversary with a new executive director, Henrietta Lidchi. The Institute of American Indian and Alaska Native Culture and Arts (IAIA) celebrates its 60th anniversary with two new MFA programs, while its downtown museum, the IAIA Museum of Contemporary

Native Arts, celebrates its 50th anniversary.

The Santa Fe Botanical Garden, which features Native American art in the form of public sculptures and temporary installations, celebrates its 35th year.

Over time, Indigenous art institutions have become progressively run by Native people, who are free to take risks and make their own mistakes in the quest to promote and showcase Native arts and cultures. The diversity of venues today is dizzying, especially compared to the venues of the previous century.

The precursors to Gallup Intertribal and Santa Fe Indian Market were extravagant world fairs that showcased Native art in the context of anthropological curiosities to fine art and regional fairs, such as the 1881 Albuquerque Territorial Fair, featured Pueblo artists demonstrating their weaving techniques on looms.

Other early fairs that highlighted Native American art continue today, such as the

annual fall Cherokee Indian Fair in North Carolina, first launched in 1914.

In the last decade, art advocates have increasingly wondered if perhaps the era of the art market had passed. Museums, museum stores, galleries, and gift stores carry Native art, and many artists have represented themselves through open studios and online. However, last year, even crowds reduced by the ongoing COVID-19 scare supported artists from seven concurrent Native art markets in Santa Fe alone. Museums and galleries provide us with wonderful opportunities to connect with and contemplate the art, but art markets, noisy and chaotic as they are, allow us the opportunity to converse with and connect to the artists themselves. We have such a luxury in the Native art world that we can meet many of the most prominent Native artists living today in person. Although they have their place, Instagram and Etsy can never replace these human connections.

See you at the markets!

—America Meredith (Cherokee Nation) NO. 35, SUMMER 2022 | 17

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS

who lived on the land where Chicago is now located.

TRIBES

The WHEELWRIGHT MUSEUM OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN hired Henrietta Lidchi, PhD, as its new director.

Lidchi served as the head of research and collections and chief curator of the Nationaal Museum van Wereldculturen in Leiden, the Netherlands, and keeper of the National Museums Scotland, in Edinburgh, United Kingdom.

Seven tribes will develop their own community-based NATIVE ARTS AND CULTURE COUNCILS. The Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries, and Museums will provide the Alabama-Coushatta Tribe of Texas, Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma, Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin, Iowa Tribe of Kansas and Nebraska, Muscogee (Creek) Nation, Pamunkey Indian Tribe, and Pueblo of Acoma with training, consulting, funding, and other support, with funding from the Ford Foundation.

ORGANIZATIONS

MUSEUMS

above Rachelle Pablo. Photo: Daniel Ulibarri.

Image courtesy of 516 Arts, Albuquerque.

The FIELD MUSEUM in Chicago unveiled its newly renovated North American Native Hall to the public on May 20, 2022, with the long-term exhibition Native Truths: Our Voices, Our Stories. The Field Museum’s new

exhibition, curated by Alaka Wali, who has now retired, with an 11-person Native American advisory council, seeks to tell the stories, through words, music, dance, and visual art, of Native peoples

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Albuquerque-based nonprofit art center 516 ARTS hired Rachelle B. Pablo (Navajo) as its curator. A US Army veteran, Pablo earned a master’s degree in art history from the University of Delaware, a bachelor’s degree from the Institute of American Indian Arts in studio arts with a minor in museum studies, and an associate of arts in anthropology and liberal arts degree from Central New Mexico Community College. Pablo was a curatorial fellow at the Peabody Essex Museum and interned

at the National Museum of the American Indian and at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts.

ART FAIRS The Tlaxcala Ministry of Culture and the Tlaxcala Art Museum are launching a new BIENAL INTERNACIONAL DE ARTE INDÍGENA. The fair will be held in Tlaxcala, Mexico, toward the end of 2022 and will include Indigenous arts from not only the Americas but worldwide.

ART SHOWS Charles W. Bloomfield (Pyramid Lake Paiute) won best of show at IN THE SPIRIT: CONTEMPORARY NATIVE ARTS EXHIBITION, an annual art show highlighting the Pacific Northwest hosted by the Washington State Historical Society. Alison Bremner (Tlingit) won the Spirit of the Northwest Award; Linley B. Logan (Tonawanda Seneca) won the Honoring Innovation Award; and Terresa White (Yup'ik) won the Honoring the

Ancestors Award. Cynthia Masterson (Comanche), Annette Pierre (Kalispel), and Carly Feddersen (Okanagan/Sinixt) all won Purchase Prizes.

Tonia Hogner Weavel (Cherokee Nation) won best of show at the 51st annual TRAIL OF TEARS ART SHOW hosted by the Cherokee Nation at Cherokee Springs Plaza, Tahlequah, Oklahoma, since the Cherokee Heritage Center is closed for renovations. Category winners were James Smith (Cherokee Nation), painting; Tama Roberts (Cherokee Nation), sculpture; Lisa Forrest (Cherokee Nation), basketry; Crystal Hanna (Cherokee Nation), pottery; Don Dugger (Cherokee Nation), jewelry; Robin Stockton (Cherokee Nation), graphics; Ramona Lossie (Eastern Band Cherokee), miniatures; Deana Ward (Choctaw Nation), diverse; Brenda Bradford (Muscogee), photography/digital art; and Hattie Lee (Cherokee Nation), emerging artists. Jeff Edwards (Cherokee Nation) won the Trail of Tears Award; Jack Test

(Cherokee Nation) won the Betty Scraper Garner Elder Award; and the Bill Rabbit Legacy Award went to Tama Roberts. J. Ross Davis (Cherokee Nation) won the Jennie Ross Cobb Photography Award.

Dylon Nottingham (Cherokee Nation) was awarded best in the Cherokee Art Market Youth Competition.

ART MARKETS Lyndon Tsosie (Navajo) won best of show at the Autry Museum of the American West’s annual AMERICAN INDIAN ARTS MARKETPLACE in Los Angeles. Dallin Maybee (Northern Arapaho/Seneca) won the Jackie Autry Purchase Award. Classification winners were Don Johnston (Qagan Tayagungin Unangax̂ ), basketry; Glenda McKay (Ingalik Athabascan), beadwork and quillwork; Leslie Bitsie Jr. (Navajo), clothing and personal attire; Lyndon Tsosie (Navajo), diverse cultural art forms; Daniel John (Navajo), jewelry; and Rowan Harrison (Isleta Pueblo/ Navajo), painting and mixed media.

NO. 35, SUMMER 2022 | 19

The Muscogee (Creek) Nation hosted its inaugural MVSKOKE ART MARKET at the River Spirit Casino and Resort in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Kenneth Johnson (Muscogee/Seminole) won best of show.

Classification winners were Micah Wesley (Kiowa/Muscogee), painting; Dan Beaver (Muscogee), diverse art forms; Mary E. Smith (Muscogee), basketry; Brian Waytula (Cherokee Nation), drawing/ graphic art/photography; Cathy Abercrombie (Cherokee Nation), textiles (traditional dress/regalia); Starr RobideauMorales (Cheyenne-Arapaho/Ojibwe/ Lakota), textiles (modern/contemporary); Pati Belgarde-Cornelius (Turtle Mountain Ojibwe), beadwork/quillwork; Crystal Hanna (Cherokee Nation), pottery; A. Wayne Earles (Caddo), sculpture; and Jolene Bird (Kewa Pueblo), jewelry (stone/ metal). Jimmie Carole Fife (Muscogee) won the Mvskoke Heritage Award.

AWARDS & HONORS NATIVE WOMEN IN THE ARTS, based in Toronto, announced that its 7th annual BARBARA LARONDE EMERGING

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ARTIST AWARD goes to Candace Twance (Netmizaaggamig Ojibway), a mixed-media artist and abstract painter.

The award honors Indigenous women and nonbinary artists from Northern Ontario and comes with a stipend of Can$5,000, while all shortlisted nominees receive Can$1,500. This year’s shortlisted artists are Faith Turner (Cree/Dene), Naomi Desrochers-Caron (Wikwemikong Ojibway), Ruby Thompson (Sheguiandah Ojibway), Lynsey Kapera (Métis), and Cheryl Suggashie (Pikangikum Ojibway).

The UCROSS FOUNDATION in Clearmont, Wyoming, named its two SPRING 2022 NATIVE AMERICAN FELLOWS: illustrator and lighting designer Savannah LeCornu (Tsimshian/Athabascan/Haida/ Nez Perce/Nisga'a) and poet M. L. Smoker (Fort Peck Nakoda/Dakota/Lakota). Both fellows will have a residency at Ucross’s 20,000-acre ranch, $2,000 award, $1,000 travel stipend, and opportunities to present their work publicly at Ucross.

The UNIVERSITY OF SASKATCHEWAN gave KC Adams (Cree/Ojibway)

its first OHPINAMAK AWARD, a new Can$10,000 prize for Indigenous artists. ohpinamak is Cree and translates as “to lift others.” Jury commendation prizes went to Holly Aubichon (Métis), Darren Gowan (Day Star Plains Cree), Laura Grier (Délınę), Audie Murray (Métis), Taryn Walker (Nlka'pamux/Syilx), and Brody Burns (Treaty Six Cree), who will each receive Can$1,000 and an exhibition.

PHOENIX FASHION WEEK named Norma Baker-Flying Horse (Hidatsa/ Dakota/Nakoda), the owner of Red Berry Woman, its 2022 DESIGNER OF THE YEAR. During a three-month designer boot camp for emerging designers, the Phoenix Fashion Week Team admired Baker-Flying Horse’s designs. As a reward for her accomplishments, the Agency Arizona, a modeling company, will promote her studio.

The SAN FRANCISCO ART INSTITUTE (SFAI) gave its alumna Linda Lomahaftewa (Hopi/Choctaw) an honorary doctor of fine arts degree.

Lomahaftewa is a Santa Fe–based painter,

A L I V I N G , B R E AT H I N G EXPERIENCE

C H O C T A W C U LT U R A L C E N T E R . C O M

NOW OPEN NOW OPEN printmaker, and educator. Of the first cohort of Institute of American Indian Art students who attended SFAI—Kevin Red Star (Crow), T.C. Cannon (Kiowa/ Caddo, 1946–1978), and Bill Prokopiof (Unangax̂ , 1944–1999)—Lomahaftewa was the only one to complete her BFA there. She went on to earn her MFA degree from SFAI.

PROJECTS As part of her LAKOTA ART BOXES project, Charlie Nicole Cuny (Oglala Lakota) donated and delivered free art supplies to children on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota during quarantine. Charlie has delivered over 400 art boxes since November 2021. Her goal is to make this her full-time job.

REPATRIATION The SANTA BARBARA NATURAL H I STORY M U SE UM re tu r ne d Chumash funerary artworks and human remains to the SANTA YNEZ BAND

OF CHUMASH INDIANS. These were disinterred from Santa Rosa Island, California, and include the remains of Arlington Springs Man, who dates from 13,000 years ago and is among the oldest known human remains in North America. Kenneth Kahn, tribal chairman, says that the tribe will repatriate and rebury the remains and funerary items.

Batah Kuhuh Alligator Gar Fish Effigy Bottle (2018), by Chase Kahwinhut Earles (Caddo) was destroyed during the rampage. On social media, Earles wrote, “I am heartbroken, devastated.”

Authorities accused Johnny Lee Brown of trespassing and illegally excavating more than $300,000 worth of Indigenous art estimated to be 3,000 to 5,000 years old on the TIGHTWAD ARCHAEOLOGCHOC C U SITE L T Uat R Truman ALCEN T EinRMissouri. .COM ICAL Lake The PORTLAND ART MUSEUM inT A W Several accomplices are presumed to Oregon repatriated items to the TLINGIT have helped Brown to break into the site NAANYA.AAYÍ CLAN through the and steal items on at least ten occasions Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida from 2016 through 2021. Osage Nation Indian Tribes of Alaska. These include representatives said that Brown caused ceremonial robes, headdresses, and hats irreparable damage to the cultural history that were taken from Wrangell, Alaska, of the Osages and related tribes. in the 1930s and 1940s, but returned to clan leaders in a private ceremony.

WRIGHT’S GALLERY in Albuquerque has suffered two break-ins since the CRIME & LEGAL ISSUES beginning of the pandemic. In May 2022, two thieves caused $100,000 in damages.

Angry at his girlfriend, Brian Hernandez While stealing several pieces of jewelry broke into the DALLAS MUSEUM and two rugs worth nearly $20,000, the OF ART IN TEXAS and destroyed thieves also destroyed a 115-year-old $5,153,000 worth of Greek and Native jewelry display case.

American artwork. A ceramic sculpture,

EXPERIENCE A L I V I N G , B R E AT H I N G

NO. 35, SUMMER 2022 | 21

SEVEN DIRECTIONS

JOANNA GARCÍA CHERÁN A P'urhépecha artist, writer, and museum professional shares her top seven list

A

F REELANCE CULTURE WRITER, photographer, and museum worker, Joanna García Cherán (P'urhépecha) was born and raised in Barrio Logan, San Diego, California, where she grew up in a P'urhépecha community in diaspora.

She has worked at Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (the de Young and Legion of Honor museums) since 2018 and will soon be a master’s student in the art history program of Williams College in Massachusetts.

García Cherán earned her bachelor of arts degree in 2017 from the University of California, Berkeley, in history and Spanish literature. Her work on arts and culture can be found in Hyperallergic, Artsy, and Latina magazine. joannagarciacheran.com CENTER. One of the biggest issues with amplifying the visibility of TRANSNATIONAL INDIGENOUS IDENTITIES below the southern US border is the myth of a Latine monolith.

The latter identity does not denote race. Rather, it is a shared cultural and geographical identity that includes all races under one umbrella such as white Latinos, mestizo (mixed race), Asian, Black, Indigenous, etc. In effect, this “shared heritage” often misidentifies Indigenous peoples and omits our struggles for self-determination. Both sides of my family have spoken P'urhépecha and lived in our ancestral homeland of Cuanajo, Michoacán, Mexico, since time immemorial until my generation, when my parents immigrated to the United States. Much of my work is informed by my family’s experiences in Cuanajo and in diaspora. I aim to exalt the stories of transnational Indigenous peoples like that of my family and interrupt the mischaracterization of our identities as Latine.

above, left Comunidades Indígenas en Liderazgo logo. above, right Joanna García Cherán. Image courtesy of the author. opposite Mari Hernandez (Chicana), detail of Silia, 2020, inkjet print on paper. Image courtesy of the artist. ©Mari Hernandez.

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WEST. One of my favorite organizations to follow is COMUNIDADES INDÍGENAS EN LIDERAZGO (CIELO) of Los Angeles, an intergenerational organization led by Indigenous women who empower Indigenous migrant communities in the United States. Founded by two Zapotec women, Odilia Romero and Janet Martinez, their focus on Indigenous language advocacy and revitalization is far-reaching. Since 2016, CIELO’s annual events like the Indigenous Literature Conference and the Weaving Words and Rhymes concert have nurtured

engagement with Indigenous languages, especially with younger generations. Beyond their public programming, CIELO works with the Los Angeles Police Department to provide language advocacy for Indigenous language speakers and cultural competency trainings. mycielo.org EAST. The Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery announced the most recent finalists in the 2022 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition. MARI HERNANDEZ (Chicana) is one of them, who photographed members of the Tāp Pīlam Coahuiltecan Nation, a cultural heritage organization based in San Antonio, Texas. Through her portrait of Silia Lopez (Tāp Pīlam), the artist explores the history of identification photographs. The subject in profile is strong, composed, and dignified.

Her attire, including her wool cowboy hat, delicate feather, neat braids, and floral blouse, place her within the historical vaqueras of Texas—the first cowgirls. marihernandez.com SOUTH. This summer RADIO UEKORHENI launches a new series on the experiences of P'urhépecha women in education and professional fields. Founded in 2017, Radio Uekorheni is a community-based radio station established in Huecorio, a P'urhépecha pueblo in the municipality of Lake Pátzcuaro in Michoacán, Mexico. Since its inception, the collective running NO. 35, SUMMER 2022 | 23

EMILY ARTHUR New Prints

the station has been guided by the principles of collective work (anchekorheta), community service (marhoatspekua), and self-determination, with the goal of disseminating and preserving local stories through photo stories, radio, and podcasting. Their programming primarily focuses on the P'urhépecha language, women’s rights, and territorial struggles.

Their work extends to community activities such as conferences, customary games, film nights, workshops on handmade paper, youth radio production, and community-based, participatory cartography. In 2020 Radio Uekorheni organized Huecorio en el Tiempo, a photographic exhibition illustrating Huecorio’s community life in the 1950s and 1960s, with the goal to build a communal archive through an Indigenous lens.

Uekorheni is in the process of purchasing equipment and setting up their headquarters. The collective is run by five community members: Sandra Jasmin Gutiérrez de Jesús, María Guadalupe Gutiérrez de Jesús, Tania Domínguez Gallegos, Vianney Villaseñor Botello, and Angélica Jazmin Nepomuceno Rendón (all P'urhépecha). While their station, XHSIBS 90.7 FM, is syndicated in Mexico, the team at Radio Uekorheni use podcasting and Facebook to reach their local community as well as the P'urhépecha Indigenous migrants throughout Mexico and in the United States. uekorheni.org

crowsshadow.org 48004 St. Andrew’s Road | Pendleton, OR 97801 | 541-276-3954 No Where Left to Go (Water Birds), 2021, lithograph, 34” x 24”, edition of 18 Collaborating Master Printer, Judith Baumann 24 | FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

NORTH. I recently read FRESH BANANA LEAVES: HEALING INDIGENOUS LANDSCAPES THROUGH INDIGENOUS SCIENCE by Jessica Hernandez, PhD (Zapotec/ Maya Ch'orti'), an environmental scientist. Hernandez works out of the Pacific Northwest and tackles mainstream Western environmentalism by unpacking subjects like the difference between healing and conservation, Indigenous stewardship, settler colonialism, and the birth of Western conservation.

To fully understand the author’s positionality as Zapotec and Maya Ch'orti', Hernandez carefully explains the role of racial systems and hierarchies existing in Latin America while dispelling the myth of a Latine monolith in the environmental discourse. jessicabhernandez.com

SEVEN DIRECTIONS

The single word, Kaxúmbekua, encompasses the essential tenets of P'urhépecha culture, including respect, humility, kindness, honesty …

ABOVE. HUÍCHU KUÁKARI (José Juan Álvarez, P'urhépecha) encourages his students to speak softly. The P'urhépecha pyrography artist, writer, and organizer currently teaches an introductory P'urhépecha language and culture course via Zoom to a dozen students with P'urhépecha heritage living in the United States, myself included. Kuákari’s many projects aim to preserve and promulgate P'urhépecha knowledge for future generations. In 2019 Kuákari expanded his reach by self-publishing KAXÚMBEKUA (Ethical and Moral Values of the P'urhépecha Culture), his antidote to the current threat of cultural erasure our communities face, especially those in the United States. KAXÚMBEKUA summarizes the ethical and moral values of the P'urhépecha culture from the perspective of a P'urhépecha elder, a departure from most published work on the subject available today. The single word, Kaxúmbekua, encompasses the essential tenets of P'urhépecha culture, including respect, humility, kindness, honesty, even the socially acceptable volume with which to speak. Since publishing his first book, Kuákari released JAKÁJKUKUA (Sabiduría, Creencias y Supersticiones Purépechas), MIÚKUA (CALENDARIO PURÉPECHA), and a P'urhépecha-to-Spanish dictionary. huichukuakari.com BELOW. BOOM OAXACA: CONVERSACIONES DE CAMPO A CAMPO at Arte Américas in Fresno, California, features new work by internationally acclaimed Oaxacan artists Narsiso Martínez (Zapotec) and Tlacolulokos, the collective comprised of Dario Canul and Cosijoesa Cernas, both Zapotec.

These artists provide an opportunity for dialogue around food sovereignty and Indigenous sovereignty germane to the approximately 50,000 Oaxacan immigrants residing in California’s Central Valley. Through a series of interviews and visits with local community members, Martínez and Tlacolulokos humanize and speak to the conditions of immigration, food, invisible labor, and borders. This exhibition remains on view through August 14, 2022. boomoaxaca.com

above, top Narsiso Martínez (Zapotec), Always Fresh, 2018, ink, charcoal, gouache, gold leaf, and collage on reclaimed produce boxes, part of Boom Oaxaca: Conversaciones de Campo a Campo. ©2018, Narsiso Martínez. Photo: Roger Gonzalez. above, right Cover of Fresh Banana Leaves by Jessica Hernandez (Zapotec/Maya Ch'orti').

Image courtesy of North Atlantic Books. opposite Radio Uekorheni studio in Huecorio, Michoacán. Image courtesy of Radio Uekorheni.

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NEW TRAJECTORIES Four Rising Stars to Watch

By Staci Golar

O

NE OF THE MOST EXCITING TIMES to pay attention to an artist’s career is when they are poised to gain national or international acclaim.

This doesn’t always mean they are new to creating. Some work for years before galleries and museums start to share their artwork. Others study art in college and then create a more public career upon graduation. Whatever the case, seeing an artist blossom to a bigger audience is a thrill.

Four promising Indigenous artists to keep an eye on include mixed-media, beadwork, and installation artist Mikayla Patton (Oglala Lakota), paper sculptor Rain Scott (Acoma/Navajo), beadwork and quillwork artist Monica Jo Raphael (Grand Traverse Odawa-Ojibwe/Lakota), and painter Robyn Tsinnajinnie (Navajo).

What makes these artists stand out? All show a deep commitment to their practice, whether they are evolving established art forms, as with Monica Jo Raphael’s exquisite quillwork accessories and Rain Scott’s paper “pottery,” making work that invites dialogue like Mikayla Patton’s contemplative installations, or confronting viewers with uncomfortable truths as do Robyn Tsinnajinnie’s paintings. All are leaving predictability behind and instead make us wonder what they’ll create next. Each has a compelling story to share, and now their stories are getting noticed.

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MIKAYLA PATTON LAST FALL VISITORS to the Roswell Museum in New Mexico encountered a powerful dialogue taking place in one of the galleries. It was not a conversation between people, but between new and old artworks as selected and created by Oglala Lakota artist Mikayla Patton. The dramatically lit space showcased a Lakota beaded buckskin dress, which the artist purposefully freed from the confines of its archival case and suspended across from several box-shaped vessels that appeared to be floating and looking in its direction.

The installation, called Visitation, was the culmination of Mikayla’s residency through the Roswell Artist-in-Residence Foundation program.

The artist says the installation came from a kind of culture shock. It was the first time she was in a non-Native museum space like that. “I was missing home, and I saw this traditional Lakota dress that was probably missing home, too.” She wrote a letter to it as part of the installation:

above Mikayla Patton (Oglala Lakota), Back to the Land we go, 2022, glass beads, deer hide lacing, acrylic on handmade paper, parfleche without fringe: 4 × 6 × 4 in.

Takúye, Thank you for being here, I know it’s been a long time since you’ve been home and with relatives. There is so much I need to tell you and much more I need to remind you. Many of our young people are reviving the Lakhota language in our homelands and our womxn ceremonies are being

held again. I brought you here because I know you need to be fed. When I first saw you I thought about how much someone misses you, how you’re meant to be danced in, moved around, to feel alive. You don’t belong here, but the worst part is they don’t even know who you belong to.…1 Mikayla created the boxes that are suspended across from the dress.

Inspired by parfleches, the rawhide containers Plains women have made and decorated for centuries to store all manner of precious objects, hers are constructed from handmade paper, acrylic, porcupine quills, deer hide laces, and pigments. They float empty, adorned with what Mikayla describes as “Lakota motifs of power” and long strips of deer hide fringe that touch the ground.

“They contain an unseen force that is the essence of feminine vitality, like roots they are stable, yet like bodies they move,” she wrote in her artist statement.

Mikayla says she’s been “making weird things here and there for a long time.” Growing up on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota, she learned to bead in tribal school and to draw in high school. She decided to go to the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) to learn more skills and “gained a deep understanding of art through an Indigenous worldview.” She graduated in 2019 with a bachelor of fine arts degree.

Deeply thoughtful and process-oriented, her current work is rooted in the earth, feminine energy, and her ancestral background while exploring Lakota design and abstraction. Her art also examines materials, which “provide another aspect of adapting and innovation, something that continues to make Indigenous people resilient as f—,” Mikayla writes. “I’ve been drawn to different materials throughout my life in very personal ways. They can tell me that I need to slow down or I need to be patient. Continuous learning is important to my work.”

1. Mikayla Patton “Back to the Land we go,” 2021, mikaylapatton.com/installation.

above, top Mikayla Patton (Oglala Lakota), Visitation, installation view, 2021, laser cut and etching on handmade paper, acrylic with glass beads, porcupine quills, deer hide lacing, dimensions vary. above, bottom Mikayla Patton (Oglala Lakota), If Star Womxn lived here, 2020, laser etching and cutting on handmade paper, deer hide lacing, 12 × 9 × 7 in.

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and two residencies during this pandemic.

These residencies challenged Mikayla to push her work in new directions.

However, the core of her work is her unique voice and perspective, and it remains strong. “I have something to share that informs this country of its history and the lack of,” Mikayla writes.

“It’s about retelling and taking back space.

What drives me is my freedom to exist as a Lakota womxn. I have agency and the only way I know how to assert that is through visual expression and materials.”

See more about Mikayla’s work at Hecho a Mano and Chiaroscuro galleries in Santa Fe or at mikaylapatton.com.

RAIN SCOTT

The materials also play off of and inform each other. “I like to work on small beaded/quilled works to help me establish a larger idea which is still being conjured up. Beadwork/quillwork requires a lot of patience, that is something that is challenging to maintain. So, when I’m working on one material, I think about how to apply it to another.” In some of her smaller pieces, Mikayla stitches beadwork or vegetation directly on hand-pulped paper as if they were quills.

As her art career evolves, Mikayla continues to respond to her surroundings.

She was honored to receive a fellowship 28 | FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

ACOMA PUEBLO AND NAVAJO paper artist Rain Scott’s work doesn’t fit neatly into a category. It has unmistakable roots in Southwestern Pueblo pottery, yet it’s not pottery at all. Instead, it’s what Rain calls contemporary Indigenous origami, both a technique and a finished art form that the artist essentially invented, adapting Japanese origami techniques to create pottery-like vessels with intricately folded pieces of paper.

How does a new art form like this come about? We have to go back a few years in Rain’s life to find out. Born and raised in Phoenix and currently residing in Chandler, Arizona, Rain grew up around people who make beautiful objects. His father, Ray Scott (Navajo), is a silversmith and his great-grandmother Marie Juanico (Acoma) was a potter. “I really wanted to learn pottery,” Rain says, “especially when my mom would tell me stories about my great-grandmother.”

However, he was unable to make the right connections and had not found someone to show him Acoma pottery techniques.

On the other hand, Rain had been making origami since middle school. One day he was experimenting with the paper and created a shape that fit into the next and used it to create three-dimensional animals. His first experiment to create work modeled on pottery was a small bowl, and eventually he progressed to

making a larger vessel by the end of 2018.

The process is time-intensive and meditative. Starting with letter-sized sheets of paper, Rain cuts these down to 32 identically sized pieces. These are then folded into a shape with two points at the top and two pockets at the bottom, so that the two units can fit into each other. Each row sits atop the next, but rather than a continuous coil, as one would do with pottery, it’s more a stacking technique in distinct rows. He pre-folds as many pieces as he can before assembling a form. “I think I folded about 5,000 pieces in advance for a large piece, but it wasn’t enough,” Rain says. “I never know how much I’ll exactly need. I rarely draw out or sketch what I do.”

Don’t assume Rain’s art is all process with no content, however. “For me art is a great way to provide commentary on the social and political climate of our ever rapidly evolving world,” Rain says, thoughtfully. “I believe that art should do more than just look pretty. It should be inspiring or have a purpose behind it.”

His approach is exemplified in Would You Drink This?, one of the more technically complicated pieces Rain has created thus far. The vessel’s interior is filled with pine pitch (tree sap that was boiled down with ground charcoal and deer and rabbit droppings) to simulate oil with dollar bills floating in the black liquid. The container itself represents Mother Earth and the shape references the water jars that Pueblo women would carry to transport water. A gourd dipper sits on the edge and has the question Would you drink this? etched into the handle. Rain dedicated the piece to Giiwedin (Leech Lake Ojibwe) and other Native water protectors in Minnesota who continue to protest an expansion of an Enbridge Line 3 oil pipeline, as well as all land defenders across Turtle Island and Hawaii. If the piece sells, Rain will donate all profits to organizations that support the water protector legal defense fund and spread awareness about fighting future projects that will harm Mother Earth.

As to what’s next creatively for Rain, it might finally be clay pottery. In

a moment of kismet, Rain’s 2021 Santa Fe Indian Market booth neighbor was Acoma potter Prudy Correa. “We talked a lot over the weekend, and it turns out she is a family friend. Her grandmother and my great-grandmother were actually friends in school.” Rain asked if she would be his teacher when he moves back to Acoma, and she graciously said yes. How might the paper pieces influence the clay work and vice versa? We’ll have to wait and see.

In the meantime, find Rain’s paperbased work at the 2022 Santa Fe Indian Market, at King Galleries in Scottsdale, and on TikTok at @kornertableart.

above Rain Scott (Acoma/Navajo), Minah' Dee (Keeper of the Salt), 2022, folded archival paper, macaw feathers, turquoise, shell beads. Image courtesy of the artist. opposite, top Rain Scott (Acoma/ Navajo) with Honoring the Past, folded archival paper, 131/2 × 131/2 in.

Photo: Charles King. Image courtesy of King Galleries, Santa Fe. opposite, bottom Rain Scott (Acoma/Navajo), Handling the Past, folded archival paper, 71/2 × 6 in. Image courtesy of the artist.

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above Monica Jo Raphael (Grand Traverse Odawa-Ojibwe/Lakota), Zaaagi-Mashkiki (Love Medicine) Amulet, 2021, porcupine quills, birchbark, natural dyes, commercial dyes, vintage French glass seed beads, sterling silver beads, Czech cut beads, genuine elk teeth, smoked deer hide ties, 17 × 5 in. opposite, top Monica Jo Raphael (Grand Traverse Odawa-Ojibwe/ Lakota), detail of Gizhe Manido Gitigaan (God’s Garden), 2022, porcupine quills, caribou hair tufting, sweetgrass, spring birch bark hat, fabric, smoke deer hide, 11° Czech beads, 24k gold beads, vintage French glass seed beads. opposite, bottom Monica Jo Raphael (Grand Traverse OdawaOjibwe/Lakota), Nuh-Muh-Nuh Daawina Akin (The Homelands of the Comanche People), 2020, porcupine quills, birchbark, natural dyes, commercial dyes, vintage 13° glass seed beads, 13° 24k gold Czech charlotte cut beads, antique glass pony beads, antique brass thimbles, brass hawk bells, horsehair, smoked braintanned deer hide, 14 × 6 in.

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MONICA JO RAPHAEL IN 2018 MONICA JO RAPHAEL (Grand Traverse Ottawa-Ojibwe/Lakota) ended a decades-long career in substance abuse prevention and health and wellness with tribal agencies to pursue a full-time art career. Why? A data point that created a tangible sense of urgency for her. “My work helping our communities was all based in research and data collection,” she says. While it may sound unusual, one of the things that stood out to her was a statistic about life expectancies. She saw it and considered where she was in the arc of her own life. “I really started thinking about how much time was left and decided that I wanted to follow my dreams.”

An enrolled member of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians, Monica is a fifth-generation quillwork artist who spent most of her life in Peshawbestown, Michigan.

Though she didn’t decide to pursue her art full-time until recently, she’s always made miikawaadad or beautiful things.

She learned to embroider porcupine quills on birchbark from her father and her auntie, master quillwork artist Catherine Baldwin (Grand Traverse Odawa-Ojibwe, 1935–2001). Monica has also spent a lifetime beading and sewing regalia that has graced dancers across the US and Canada. Her current work blends all of her skills into unique accessories where bright, beautifully designed flora and fauna are made from quills, beads, and sometimes caribou tufting on birchbark.

All of Monica’s pieces tell a story.

One of her newest creations, a hat called Gizhe Manido Gitigaan (translating as “God’s Garden”), tells a portion of the Anishinaabe Creation Story. “God created his garden, and added the birds, plants, animals, and medicines,” Monica recounts. “Anishinaabe was the last to be created. God told Anishinaabe that he created a beautiful garden for us and that everything provided will take care of you in the same way as you take care of it.” The top of the hat consists of braided sweetgrass, while the birchbark sides and brim burst with colorful quilled flowers and animals accented by a beaded edge.

The hat represents an extraordinary amount of technical skill and patience.

Monica notes that the quillwork alone took some 392 hours.

Though Monica now lives in Oklahoma, her mother and father still live on the shoreline of Grand Traverse Bay where she regularly returns to gather all of her materials. “It’s really, really important to me that I keep the customary art of quillwork and birchbark work alive, so I use all natural materials and materials that I actually gather. The real art of it is knowing how to gather, harvest, and prepare the materials,” she says.

Monica will be participating in this year’s art market circuit, including the Santa Fe Indian Market in August. Stay up to date with her work by following @miikawaadad_beautiful_things on Instagram.

ROBYN TSINNAJINNIE IT’S EASY TO BE PULLED INTO Navajo artist Robyn Tsinnajinnie’s paintings. In the alternate worlds that she creates, women in familiar domestic scenes gaze directly and unabashedly at the viewer, inviting a stare back. Alien color palettes and objects scattered throughout the painting’s settings beg for more inquiry. Humor, whether found in the text or placement of the objects, disarms the viewer and provides a way in. The viewer laughs until pondering the items that surround the women: Wait, does that jar of Vienna sausages contain a severed finger? Why is that woman trying to peel her face off? Why are those sheep shears on the table? Why did I just laugh at all of that?

A recent IAIA graduate, Robyn received her BFA in studio arts with an emphasis on painting in 2020. Since then she has been breaking into the scene with work that makes no bones about the story it wants to tell about the endless double standards, misogyny, and sexism that women, and in particular Native women, face in the United States. While her work easily speaks to many different cultural groups, the landscapes and women’s clothing and accessories offer clues to the Native cultures from which the painting’s subjects originate.

Growing up on the Navajo Reservation near Tinian, New Mexico, Robyn heard stories that Navajo women shared and became acutely aware of their common fears and experiences.

Later in her childhood, she moved to a non-Native community in Utah and experienced culture shock on top of all of this. “I’m brown, I’m really tiny (4 foot, 11 inches), and I’m a woman. I really had a lot of fear for a long time about how I was perceived and things that happen to people like me, especially knowing Native women are more targeted for violence.” At one point in high school, she started to realize that she could use her differences to her advantage and started expressing this by painting female figures juxtaposed with graffiti. Robyn knew she wanted to continue with art in college and enrolled NO. 35, SUMMER 2022 | 31

at IAIA, where she honed her painting skills. She felt she found her authentic voice during her junior and senior years.

“I just got more and more angry at all the ridiculous stereotypes that are aimed at women and at being sexualized and degraded because of my size and gender.

I got really mad. But I figured out that if I paint about it, I can get the anger out and move on. I can digest that anger with my paintings.” Robyn continues, “I started painting powerful women in stereotypical situations, but I put them on top, so that they win at the end of the day. I started painting women being looked at as they should be. I saw that other women started to relate to the work and that made me want to do it even more.”

Robyn often paints in a series, depending upon how ridiculous something she observes hits her. “Whenever I come across something really stupid [toward women], I see images in my head, and I have to get them out. Otherwise, I will go over them over and over in my head.”

Robyn’s senior exhibition at IAIA, A Good Wife’s Guide, consisted of five acrylic works on canvas that addressed a variety of topics but focused on the heavy decisions women have to make every day.

Each painting shows a woman placed in a different area of the home. In Jack’s Back a bubblegum pink–skinned woman with jacla earrings sits holding a jack-in-the-box embellished with a question mark. Another jack-in-the-box on the table has already popped open, only instead of a toy, a boxing glove is found on the end of the spring.

Scattered on the floor are alphabet blocks that spell out Jack’s Back. “Unfortunately, I’ve seen friends in abusive relationships, and those are like a time-bomb. You don’t know if it’s going to be okay at the end of the day,” Robyn shares. “The woman in the painting doesn’t know when the next abuse is coming but is holding things together for her own sake or the sake of her children, needing help while no one does anything about it.”

Serious subject matter continues in Robyn’s latest series spanning the past year. This set of ten paintings deals with the forced sterilization of Native women that occurred after the Family Planning Services and Population Research Act of 32 | FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

ACTION | ABSTRACTION REDEFINED Fritz Scholder (Mission/Luiseño), New Mexico Number 21, 1965, oil on canvas, 71.375 x 55", MoCNA Collection MS-27

1970 in the United States. During that time an estimated 25 percent or more of Native women of childbearing age were sterilized without their consent.2 A work in progress shows a male figure in gynecological exam table stirrups.

Robyn’s male partner saw the painting as it began to take shape and thought it was scary, she recalls, while the women who have seen a preview were intrigued but not alarmed. Turning the (exam) tables to cause discomfort in a male viewer is something Robyn is okay with. Overall, however, she wants women to look at her work and be able to process feelings about all of the injustices. She wants it to “be a reminder to women to keep doing what we’ve been doing forever: take a hold of who we are, to keep going, and take care of and heal ourselves.”

Follow Robyn on Instagram @sanftmutig_one.

2. Briana Theobald, “A 1970 Law Led to the Mass Sterilization of Native American Women. That History Still Matters,” Time, November 28, 2019, web.

On view July 29, 2022–Jan. 7, 2023 Presenting modern Native American art from the 1940s through the 1970s, this exhibition features 55 artworks by leading artists such as Fritz Scholder (Mission/Luiseño), George Morrison (Chippewa), and T.C. Cannon (Kiowa).

fac.coloradocollege.edu 30 W. Dale St., Colorado Springs, CO 80903 Action/Abstraction Redefined was cocurated by Dr. Lara Evans, Professor of Art History, IAIA Research Center for Contemporary Native Arts Director; Tatiana Lomahaftewa-Singer, curator of collections, IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts; and Dr. Manuela Well-Off-Man, chief curator, IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts.

opposite, top Robyn Tsinnajinnie (Navajo), Why Do You Need This?, 2021, acrylic on canvas, 24 × 18 in. All images courtesy of the artist. opposite, bottom Robyn Tsinnajinnie (Navajo), Finger Food, 2019, acrylic on canvas, 36 × 48 in.

Supported by

above Robyn Tsinnajinnie (Navajo), Pumpkin Head, 2019, acrylic on canvas, 54 x 42 × 54 in.

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REMAKE THE WORLD, REMAKE OURSELVES The Cultural Geometry of Brian Tripp & His Circle

By Nanette Kelley (Osage Nation/Cherokee Nation)

T

H EY SOAR THROUGH THESE SKIES for the first time since 1892, through fog-blanketed sandstone cliffs and over salmon-filled rivers. With a nine-foot wingspan, they brush the morning dew from 2,000-year-old coastal redwood trees. Reintroduced in spring, with Yurok, Tolowa, Hupa, Shasta, Wintu, Tsnungwe, Wiyot, and Karuk homelands once again in view, two California condors signal balance and renewal.

The condors fly over the more rural third of California known as the Northstate, further north than Sacramento.

Tribes here are interwoven, connected through a network of cultural, educational, and activist groups. The art of Indigenous peoples of this region is underrepresented in public arenas.

Artist Frank Tuttle (Yuki/Wailaki/ Konkow Maidu) told me one reason is that “the Indigenous artists don’t set out to highlight their work but come from more of a hermetic point of view. Their 34 | FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

work is not necessarily meant to be seen, but a way of seeing, or a passion, which provides a voice.”

In the Northstate, contemporary art’s role is an extension of Indigenous knowledge and ceremony and takes precedence over its potential as a commodity.

Comparable to geometrical patterns within a basket, Northstate peoples utilize contemporary art to communicate their relative positions within sacred spaces.

“There is a spherical, lived experience here that is a much larger story,” says Tuttle.

An artist who exemplified Northstate Indigenous values was Brian Duane Tripp (Karuk, 1945–2022), or as friends call him, BDT. Tripp crossed over a few days after our last interview for this article. I also interviewed Tripp for two educational films: one about Tripp and the other about his friend Rick Bartow (Wiyot, 1946–2016), whom he fondly remembers dancing with on Wigi (the Wiyot place name for Humboldt Bay) not far from Tripp’s birthplace. As he

explained, “I was born in Eureka on the coast, and they called me Coastal Kay-rock. Of course, Karuks are inland, and Kay-rock is slang for Karuk.”

Tripp’s parents were from Karuk ancestral territory, the upriver region of the Klamath River watershed. Karuk means “upriver.” His father, Amos Tripp, from the village of Katimiîn, worked in the timber industry. His mother, Violet Donahue Tripp, from nearby Asánaamkarak, was one of the founding board members of the Indian Tribal and Educational Personnel Program at Humboldt State University (HSU, now California State Polytechnic University, Humboldt) as well as the United Indian Health Services, whose logo Tripp designed.

He was creative throughout his childhood and received some formal art training in high school. After service in Vietnam, Tripp studied art at HSU. Married and working multiple jobs, he remembered one night preparing for a show and saying, “God, I wish all I had

to do was my artwork.” Within a year he divorced, his jobs ended, and his art was all he had to do. He never finished his art degree, yet on the strength of his cultural résumé, he taught a Native American art course for five years at HSU. Tripp had no interest in a phone, car, or passport. This became problematic when curators invited him to an art residency in Japan or to create a site-specific installation in Latvia. To make sure he had safe passage and was able to easily return to the United States, especially as a person with brown skin, friends stepped in and persuaded him to get a passport.

Tripp was an artist and poet of veneration; however, to his communities, he was a keeper of culture; a singer, dancer, and activist who was central to the revival of ceremony. His legacy continues to guide his communities toward balance and cultural revitalization. In 2018 the Alliance for California Traditional Arts honored Tripp with the California

Living Heritage Award for his work in the revitalization of ceremonial life in the Klamath River region. Ceremonies, such as the World Renewal Dance and Brush Dance, provide the foundation for ancestral and contemporary Northstate Indigenous arts that now flourish.

With some exposure to New York and the Southwest, Tripp otherwise shied from promoting his artwork beyond Northern California. Some attribute his last-minute retreat from a Heard Museum exhibition in the 1980s to Tripp’s discomfort with the idea of success. Still, his work is in major collections and museums such as the Crocker Art Museum, Humboldt Arts Council’s Morris Graves Museum of Art, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, J. Paul Getty Museum, Oakland Museum of California, and, outside of California, the Denver Art Museum, Library of Congress, and Yale University.

above Lyn Risling (Karuk/ Yurok/Hupa), Achviivkaam Tu'ípak (Condor Returns), acrylic on canvas. Image courtesy of the artist. opposite Brian D. Tripp (Karuk, 1945–2022) with poem at home, 2022. Photo: Nanette Kelley (Osage/Cherokee).

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FRANK LAPENA & A GROWING MOVEMENT ARTIST, AUTHOR, AND EDUCATOR FRANK LAPENA (Nomtipom Wintu, 1937–2019) once stated, “I believe that art is one answer to preventing the emptiness that the loss of culture or the indifference of society will impose. We are still alive.”1 LaPena curated Tripp’s first professional exhibition. In the 1970s, the Indigenous peoples of Northern California began to hold art events at the University of California (UC), Davis; D-Q University; and Sacramento State University. During this time, Tripp met LaPena, an art professor and director of Native American studies at Sacramento State, and George Longfish (Seneca/ Tuscarora), artist and former director of the C.N. Gorman Museum at UC Davis.

Both encouraged Tripp and invited him into group shows with Northern California artists such as Harry Fonseca (Nisenan Maidu, 1946–2006) and Jean LaMarr (Northern Paiute/Achomawi).2 Of LaPena and Tripp, “ceremony was important in both of their artistic visions,” says Carla Hills, curator, scholar, and longtime partner to LaPena. Hills described LaPena as a mentor to Tripp,

who explained to me that the mentorship evolved into a collaborative relationship.

Starting in the 1970s, the two visited each other’s tribal homelands, which promoted an Indigenous artistic exchange that expanded to their respective communities that culturally thrive today.

In 1974, inspired by his community and LaPena’s support, Tripp coordinated In-Din-Art-I-Facts, the first contemporary Indigenous art show in the Northstate.

Although the exhibition was in a rural region, it signified the growing collective movement of Northern California Indigenous artists.

“It’s kind of difficult to place a movement, but so far as Frank was concerned, the ’85 show at the Crocker was it,” says Hills. She was LaPena’s assistant and the liaison for the Crocker Art Museum’s traveling exhibition, The Extension of Tradition: Contemporary Northern California Native American Art in Cultural Perspective (1985–86). Among the first major exhibitions to combine California Native American ancestral and contemporary works, the exhibition was an “extension” in the sense that ancestral arts were created with introduced materials. Artists from The Extension of Tradition are recognized as the cornerstones of the contemporary Northern California Indigenous art scene. Curated

by LaPena, exhibiting artists included LaPena, Tripp, Tuttle, LaMarr, Dalbert S. Castro (Nisenan Maidu), Frank L. Day (Konkow Maidu, 1902–1976), Harry Fonseca (Nisenan Maidu, 1946–2006), Karen Noble [Tripp] (Chimariko/Hupa/ Karuk), and George Blake (Hupa/Yurok).

Thirty-four years after the success of The Extension of Tradition, Frank LaPena curated When I Remember I See Red: American Indian Art and Activism in California (2019–20) with Mark Dean Johnson. These two surveys bookend the flourishing California Indigenous contemporary art movement. When I Remember I See Red featured more than 40 Indigenous artists who confront the injustices of colonization and see a present and future balance and identity.

CULTURAL GEOMETRY MUCH OF THE HISTORICAL and contemporary arts of the Northstate tribes include wood and bone carving, painting, and basket weaving with intricate, geometric patterns. “The women were basket weavers and we talked in the same language, the designs, and stuff, but the men were painters and painted geometric designs and shapes on bows and arrows,” said Tripp.

Early in his career, Tripp spent time studying the patterns in the basketwork of local North Coast weavers such as Elizabeth Conrad Hickox (Wiyot/Karuk, 1875–1947) at the Clarke Historical Museum in Eureka. “So much of our stuff got ripped off and taken,” said Tripp. “I used to go down to the museum all the time and look, and it was always kind of a double-edged thing. On one end it was there to look at, which if it was still in [connection with] families that was good, and it inspired me, and on the other end, a lot of it had been dug up,” often from graves.

Tripp was not impressed with California Governor Gavin Newsom’s

1. Frank LaPena and Mark Dean Johnson, When I Remember I See Red: American Indian Art and Activism in California (University of California Press: Oakland Press, 2019), 6.

2. Mark Dean Johnson, Moira Roth, and Diane Tani, Brian D. Tripp (Berkeley: Visibility Press, 1992), 33.

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2019 apology to the state’s Native Americans for the historical mistreatment, violence, and neglect they endured. “I’m sorry, Governor Newsom, but your apologies don’t get it,” said Tripp. “I carry a grudge, I carry anger, in my makeup. It’s one of my angers, one of my hurts that had a big influence [on] my art, in my life.”

ART, CEREMONY & ACTIVISM “BRIAN, WITH HIS GEOMETRY and shapes and lines, was [creating] figurative ceremonies and soul making. It’s a spiral we keep visiting and revisiting. It’s the idea that is behind a song,” Tuttle shared with me.

A large basket by Louisa Keyser (Washoe, ca. 1829–1925) that she titled All my Friends Are Dead or Dying is the inspiration behind Tripp’s signature stories in written and spoken word

combined with material art. In fact, each title of his artwork is the beginning of a story. Artist Robert Benson (Tsnungwe) explained that many of Tripp’s poems and stories are about world renewal: “In the face of colonial oppression, the answer is, we renew our own world.”

In the early 1970s, Tripp and his family worked with Karuk elders to help restore the Brush Dance at Katimiîn, the Karuk people’s center of the world. “The Brush Dance is a healing ceremony for one person. It’s for all of us to make us all feel better, but it’s primarily to help one person whereas the other ceremonies are for the whole world,” said Tripp. Years later he also helped with the revival of the Yurok Jump Dance at Pecwan.

Tripp took Benson to his first Brush Dance where they danced together.

“Because of Brian’s insistence on inclusion,” says Benson, “we’ve all been able to have that very beautiful, rich, and powerful cultural experience.”

above Frank Tuttle (Yuki/ Konkow Maidu), A Dancing Cape, 1987, mixed media on Rives BFK paper, 30 × 42 in., collection of the Crocker Art Museum, 1987.5. Image courtesy of the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, California. opposite Frank LaPena (Nomtipom Wintu, 1937– 2019), North Mountain, n.d., acrylic on canvas, 48 × 108 in., private collection. Image courtesy of Carla Hills.

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above Brian Tripp with drum and drumsticks, 2017. Photo: Bob Doran (CC BY SA 2.0). opposite Brian D. Tripp (Karuk, 1945–2022), When Squares Straightened Out Circles, 1990, mixed media assemblage, dimensions variable, private collection. Image courtesy of the Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento, California.

Inspired by Tripp, Benson built the Tsnungwe xontah (ceremonial house) at the confluence where the South Fork Trinity River meets the main Trinity River. To date, three Flower Dances (women’s coming-of-age ceremonies) have been held there. North of the xontah and just east of where the condors were reintroduced, many Karuk live in their homelands along the Klamath River channel, surrounded by their stolen sacred lands.

3. LaPena and Johnson, When I Remember I See Red, 85.

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Tripp’s assemblage, When Squares Straightened Out Circles (1990), addresses the theft of sacred lands and references how, in 1852, colonists used Mount Diablo to survey and divide Indigenous Californian homelands into private property for non-Natives.3 Interpreted by a circle of feathers under a plumb bob, tied through a pulley and weighted by a sack of money, the artwork’s title refers to the cyclical notion of the geometry of the world and the circle of life versus the geometry of a grid.

When the US Forestry Service planned to connect the towns of Gasquet to Orleans (the G-O Road), over lands sacred to Karuk and neighboring tribes, Tripp, Tuttle, Julian Lang (Karuk/Wiyot/Konomihu Shasta), and others banded together in protest. With the court’s decision that “wilderness” takes precedent over Indigenous rights, land issues continue. The proposed road “runs through the spirit people’s land. The Marble Mountains [are the] container,” said Tuttle. The G-O Road was one of the hot topics that contributed to the awareness of the need for a Native American studies department at HSU. Tuttle was one of Tripp’s students at HSU, and so was Libby Maynard.

A Northstate printmaker, Maynard is director emeritus and co-founder of the largest local arts agency, Ink People Center for the Arts, where Tripp served as artist-in-residence. “Natives recognize Libby’s genuineness,” Tuttle observes.

“She has an innate, aesthetic connection to working with social practices that resonates with Indigenous artists.”

Maynard says, “One of Brian’s greatest gifts has been to inspire especially the young people with grace.” With an appeal of youthful energy, his love of rock and roll, and being active in the local reggae scene, Tripp’s studio was a multigenerational hangout for those in the arts and culture scene.

“Brian’s work stands as a statement of sovereignty and continuation of identity,” says Benson. “Just the fact that it’s loved by people in the art world is a

statement that ‘Yes, we can continue, and we can keep making and remaking our culture.’ He’s shown how to do that in a way that doesn’t demean [the culture], doesn’t alter it inappropriately. Remake the world, remake the culture, remake ourselves, and continue.”

The three red male figures in Tripp’s painting, Morning Round and the Brush Dance, are continuations of his identity.

Me, Myself, and I embody Tripp, and reoccur and tell stories throughout his body of work. As he told me, the two red figures in the middle, Me and Myself, escort young women going into the dance for the first time. “The figure on the far left is I,” Tripp explained. “He likes to be front page, center stage, he likes to see his name up in lights. He likes spotlights, he likes floodlights, he likes, you know, all those different kinds of headlights.” He laughed. “Then when all else fails, he’s

got a ten-cell flashlight he likes to shine on himself.”

“Brian always said his works weren’t finished, and you need to believe if the artist says finished or not, but with Brian, you never let him take a piece back,” says Maynard.

A decade ago, Christopher Peters (Yurok/Karuk), former CEO and current president of the Seventh Generation Fund for Indigenous Peoples, bought Morning Round and the Brush Dance. Tripp believed the painting wasn’t finished. “[Those are] my favorite famous last words: ‘It’s not quite done yet.’” Tripp took the painting back to “finish it,” but his son framed it before he could. He lamented, “Now it’s behind glass, and I don’t know if I should take it out and try to finish it up or just leave it.”

Julian Lang said it best: “Brian, he’s always reconstructing.”

THE CIRCLE MARK DEAN JOHNSON, the curator and former San Francisco State University professor, describes Tripp as the first Northstate artist to work with abstract basket designs and ceremonial designs in contemporary art. Now these elements are stylistically embedded within Indigenous communities located on the Klamath River and surrounding river systems. This circle of Northstate Indigenous artists who formed in the 1970s and 1980s has expanded into a robust community today.

One such artist is painter Lyn Risling (Karuk/Yurok/Hupa). Risling is an educator but also a painter and regalia maker. After taking classes at UC Davis from George Longfish and Carl Nelson Gorman (Diné, 1907–1998), she integrated her culture into her own artwork. After she met Tripp, she began NO. 35, SUMMER 2022 | 39

above, top Brian D. Tripp (Karuk, 1945–2022), Morning Round and the Brush Dance, unfinished, mixed media, private collection. Photo: Nanette Kelley (Osage/Cherokee). above, bottom Left to right: Frank LaPena (Nomtipom Wintu, 1937–2019), Amos Tripp (Karuk, 1943–2014), Brian Tripp (Karuk, 1945–2022), Frank Tuttle (Yuki/Konkow Maidu), Julian Lang (Karuk/Wiyot/ Konomihu Shasta), and Alex Ramirez (Rumsen Ohlone, 1928–2012). Photo: Chag Lowry (Yurok/Maidu/Achumawi).

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expressing her culture in more abstract ways. He inspired her to see the patterns in their regalia and the environment, such as their mountains and trees. “He was the star artist,” says Risling. “He was the contemporary artist of our time. Before that, it was few and far between who were doing contemporary art and bringing culture into their art.”

George “Pordie” Blake (Hupa/ Yurok) is another artist from this community, a National Endowment for the Arts National Heritage fellow, a canoe maker, bow maker, carver, jewelry maker, and singer. Despite these many accomplishments, Blake says, “There seems to be a lack of respect with us in this region.”

At one point, Blake stopped exhibiting, frustrated when a curator attempted to pigeonhole him. “I was told I would be the

‘traditional artist’ in the show, and they would be the ‘contemporary artists,’ he said, “but I do both and won’t do anything but the both.” He admires Tripp’s work because of its cultural connection, and says, “We’ve been friends since second grade!” The two attended elementary school at the mouth of the Klamath River where their fathers were timber fallers.

Julian Lang is a writer, artist, and Karuk language instructor in an Advocates for Indigenous California Language Survival’s master-apprentice team. Lang weaves his language into his art, as he did with his collaborative installation, Markings. Part of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) project Revelatory Landscapes (2001) is at the museum and sites around the San Francisco Bay. The installation, in a freeway underpass in San Jose, is a word poem of nouns representing creation on freeway columns, with Karuk on one side and English on the reverse. Tripp exclaimed to Lang in 2001, “You beat me!” meaning Lang had a piece in the SFMOMA before Tripp. Lang provided a possible explanation as to why Tripp, who exhibited alongside the most recognizable Indigenous artists in the state, is largely unrecognized outside his region.

“Brian had an abhorrence of the gallery model; he couldn’t see selling something for $20,000 and he gets ten. That business model seemed exploitive to him.”

Painter and woodcarver Alme Allen (Karuk/Yurok) credits Tripp, his uncle, as his artistic mentor and a key figure in his tribes’ cultural revitalization. Via email, he told me, “Brian has made a monumental impact on several generations of tribal people in Northwestern California and far beyond.” Allen wrote that in the 1970s, Tripp and his generation gained the knowledge and tools from the Karuk cultural bearers, a handful of elders raised in the old ways who spoke Karuk as their first language. “Brian was on a long journey that has helped to define us as California Indians, although his visual arts are merely an extension of our old ways and teachings.”

Robert Benson, whom Tripp inspired to build the Tsnungwe cere-

monial house, is a woodcarver whose sculptures and installations feature ceremonial geometric designs. He feels that a viewer does not need to be Native to understand Tripp’s work and says, “Anyone fluent in the language of art can read that he is talking about ceremony.”

Benson taught for decades at College of the Redwoods at HSU and co-curated the exhibition River as Home (2013) at Morris Graves Museum of Art in Eureka. The largest contemporary Native American art exhibition in Northstate to date, River as Home marked the first time Indigenous art encompassed the entire museum.

CONTINUING ON IN 2021, CO-CURATOR of the River as Home exhibition and HSU gallery director Brittany Britton (Hupa) curated BDT: A Retrospective at the Goudi'ni Native American Arts Gallery at Humboldt State University.4 The retrospective included Brian Duane Tripp’s art from 1969 to 2021.

BDT displayed Tripp’s breadth and depth of disciplines and media, held together by the commonality of ceremony and embodied by woodpeckers, deer, poetry, patterns, and bold colors.

Known for unorthodox materials such as aluminum foil, marine twine, rocks, and duct tape, Tripp also frequently used black stones. Lang joked, “We use those black stones to cook acorns, but because of Brian, there aren’t any left!”

One of the standouts in the exhibition is White Deer (1987), merely a beautiful painting at first glance. Britton explains the painting references the White Deerskin Dance; the rigidness of the deer’s back represents the pole that holds the deerskin in ceremony. Benson elaborated on the piece: “The simplest element of geometry is steeped in the act of offering a prayer object. Brian was able to preserve the cultural integrity yet allow viewers to feel that experience of ceremony.”

In one of his last recorded interviews with me, Tripp said, “A Karuk prayer is said every time the new moon comes up: ‘May I live to grow old.’”

Tripp once said: “I started doing it, kept on doing it, and now here I am toward the end of it. We’re all from the spawning ground. It’s the one we all know, at one time or another, we all swam from the same hole.” He continued to tell me the story as he flipped through pages of his poems and drawings. “Like the salmon, if you know what your water tastes like, then you know how to find your way back home—what our grandma used to tell us.”

On May 13, 2022, as his nephew Alme Allen said, Brian D. Tripp “crossed the river and took the old trails.”

above, top Brian D. Tripp (Karuk, 1945–2022), White Deer, 1987, mixed media on paper, collection of the Morris Graves Museum of Art, Humboldt Arts Council Permanent Collection.

Photo: Nanette Kelley (Osage/ Cherokee). above, bottom Julian Lang (Karuk/Wiyot/Konomihu Shasta) in collaboration with Hargreaves Associates, Markings, 2001, vinyl installation under the Guadalupe Parkway, San Jose, California, part of Relevatory Landscapes organized by the San Francisco Museum of Art. Image courtesy of Julian Lang.

4. Goudi'ni is a Wiyot place name for the town of Arcata that translates as “one is way up and one looks back.”

“Goudi'ni at 10: One Way Looking Back,” Cal Poly Humboldt Department of Art, web.

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THE ROAD TO RACING MAGPIE Arts Advocacy on the Northern Plains Creating a community arts space immersed in Lakota values is a marathon, not a sprint.

By Tawa Ducheneaux (Cherokee Nation)

I

N THE TIME-SPACE CONTINUUM of creators and space makers, Racing Magpie has emerged within the racetrack of the sacred He Sapa, the Black Hills, of South Dakota. It has been a long time coming, which is how I imagine the magpie felt as she won the great race between the two-leggeds and the four-leggeds, having ridden much of the way on the back of her four-legged rival, the young bison. Previously spaces for Indigenous creators in the Black Hills region, or the Northern Plains for that matter, have been limited or defined by outsiders who often commodified cultural expression. The hanging head of 42 | FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

the warrior on horseback, dreamcatchers, and chicken-feathered headdresses abound in gift shops and the regional attractions. While evolution honors the pace of time, over the last several years there have been an emergence of Nativeowned and led organizations working to undo the obsolete and stereotypical images that define Native peoples in the public psyche. Racing Magpie is one of those new spaces, reimagining how the collective can shift its understanding of indigeneity.

Racing Magpie is a nonprofit arts organization and contemporary collective for creativity, congregation,

sustainability, and learning, located in Mniluzahan (Rapid City, South Dakota).

In addition to a gallery, artist studios, and a community space, Racing Magpie supports a tristate leadership program, collaborative consulting in the arts, and participation in a disruptive philanthropy program with the Waterers, an initiative stemming from ArtPlace America. Racing Magpie’s Winter Camp program is a monthly community gathering, operating in a hybrid format with virtual Lakota cultural conversations and presentations, discussion-centered programming, and workshops that connect people across not only the larger Oceti Sakowin (Seven Council Fires), and the original Lakota and Dakota treaty territories, but all who can access the content through Facebook and YouTube.

Mary V. Bordeaux (Sicangu Lakota/ Oglala Lakota) is the creative director at Racing Magpie. Mary received her undergraduate degree from the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) and her MFA from the University of the Arts in Philadelphia, both in museum studies and exhibition design and planning. She is currently working on her educational doctorate at Saint Mary’s University researching Lakota epistemology. At the Heritage Center at Red Cloud Indian School on the Pine Ridge Reservation, Mary held the roles of cataloger, collections manager, curator, and interim director over a ten-year period. For two

and a half years, she was the museum curator and director of cultural affairs at the Indian Museum of North America at Crazy Horse Memorial. She served as the program manager of fellowships and vice president of operations and programs at First Peoples Fund for five years. She also co-curated a Native art exhibition in Venice, Italy, during the biennale, and is the first Native woman to be president of the board of directors of the South Dakota Arts Council.

Peter J. Strong is the director of Racing Magpie. He received a bachelor’s degree in history at Marshall University and a master’s degree in history and museum studies at George Mason University. He served as director of the Heritage Center at Red Cloud Indian School from 2005 to 2013 and vice president of operations and programs for First Peoples Fund from 2013 to 2015 before cofounding Racing Magpie in 2015 and serving as its director. Peter has served on multiple art organizations’ boards of directors. He was the first executive director for the Native POP: People of the Plains cultural event and is an adjunct instructor at Oglala Lakota College. Peter also began the MFA program in cultural administration at the Institute of American Indian Arts this year.

Mary and Peter’s paths first crossed professionally at the Red Cloud Heritage Center. There I believe their shared search for solutions to the complexities of the collections spurred their partnership. Living together as partners and parents and being actively involved in many community leadership roles has strengthened their bond and enabled them to build Racing Magpie. Theirs is an admirable connection that is evident in the conversations we’ve had over the years. We’ve discussed the challenges of cultural caretaking of collections with preservation and conservation standards in mind and sharing ideas, resources, and connections for future generations.

Their vision results from their varied and extensive experiences in diverse educational institutions and museums coupled with active listening to and humility for all those they work with.

Peter’s experience over the years in cultural institutions started out in history

museums, where he felt the primary focus was always on items and objects, but the stories of the people behind those items captured his interest. In retrospect Peter sees the beginning of a shift while he interned at the Benjamin and Vladka Meed Registry of Holocaust Survivors at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC. There he saw how an institution could use history to help connect people through their stories.

When he landed at Red Cloud in 2005, Peter says: “I learned first-hand how one-dimensional Western historical museums could be compared to the living continuum of the creative expressions of Lakota and other Native people and artists. That is where I got my passion and really learned and watched and experienced the importance of artists and creators as the center of Native cultures, Lakota culture especially.”

Mary says her love of creative expression guided her toward museum studies: “Going into the museum studies program and working in the student gallery gave me proximity to artists

above Mary V. Bordeaux (Sicangu Lakota/Oglala Lakota) and Peter Strong, co-founders of Racing Magpie. Photo: Hoka Skenandore (Oneida Nation/ Oglala Lakota/Luiseño/Chicano). opposite Lakota sewing circle at Racing Magpie. All images, unless otherwise specified, courtesy of Racing Magpie, Rapid City, South Dakota.

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ABOUT THE LOGO Racing Magpie's logo was designed by John Paul Rangel (Mestizo).

A GREAT RACE was held between the two-legged and the four-legged as the world was deciding its order. A young female bison was favored to win for the four-legged, and a young Lakota man and the birds ran for the two-legged.

In the end the young man fell behind as had all the birds except one. The magpie, who during all the racing and competing was forgotten about, rode on the back of the bison and in the end flew ahead and won the race for the two-legged. The race also created the red race track around the Black Hills and pushed up the He Sapa at the same time, adding to its place as “the heart of all that is."

—Racing Magpie

Bison Tracks

Wings of the Magpie

The Great Race Track

He Sapa / Black Hills

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and helped me realize this is where I find the joy in art. It is in the process of working with artists and being in community and creating something together.” During her time at IAIA, she experienced working directly with artists to help them realize their artistic visions and communicate with the world. IAIA’s museum studies program taught her hands-on about exhibitions, collections, and museums. Mary and Peter would soon work together at the Heritage Center at Red Cloud.

The heritage center opened during the 1960s civil rights era with a desire to reflect the community and launched the annual Red Cloud Art Indian Show in 1969. The competitive show is open to any enrolled member of a Native American tribe or Canadian First Nations, aged 18 or older. The institution purchased award-winning pieces from the art show beginning its permanent collection. Mary says: “The thought was that there was all this great art being produced, and the best of the best shouldn't leave. It should stay there for the children going to the school to view and see.” In addition to the pieces collected from the art show, significant private collections of older items that had been extracted from Lakota communities were donated back.

Brother C.M. Simon, S.J. (1936–2006), a Jesuit brother, served more than four decades as the sole employee of the heritage center. He single-handedly acquired and managed the collection, while emerging as one of the foremost experts on Plains Native art until his death.

Coupled with the growing contemporary collections, the largely uncatalogued collection was a huge undertaking and learning experience for Mary and Peter. Mary was hired on a one-year contract in 2004 to catalogue the entire collection in one year. Immediately she realized the much greater needs of the collection and petitioned the institution to earmark funds to also upgrade storage furniture and professional collections database software. Once Peter joined a year later, Mary began the more comprehensive process in earnest. “In order to help the world see the incredible resource

in that permanent collection, we needed to catalogue and rehouse what Brother Simon said was a 2,000-piece collection of contemporary Native art and historical pieces of Lakota art,” Mary realized. “We originally planned for a two-year project, but quickly realized it was going to be much more than that. When the dust settled six years later, we had developed an entirely new collections management policy, engaged a bevy of summer interns, and had catalogued and better protected almost 10,000 pieces in that collection.

Having that knowledge of the actual scope of the collection has been the foundation for all of the programs and community relationships that have grown since that time.”

Peter and Mary also worked to update and professionalize other programs at the heritage center and prepare it for the future. The exhibition program became more sophisticated, both for in-house and traveling shows.

The museum store purchases, markets, and sells locally created artwork.

Peter and other staff members worked diligently to update and standardize policies and procedures to be fairer and more equitable, and updated point-of-sale software for efficiency and ease of use.

They resurrected an online sales program that now grows each year, sending Lakota arts out to the world, and stimulating the local economy on a large scale.

Peter transitioned to become the first vice president of operations and programs at First Peoples Fund (FPF) in Rapid City, where he hoped to support Native artists on a national level through their great programming.

Shortly after Peter moved to FPF, Crazy Horse Memorial courted Mary to become the Indian Museum of North America’s curator and director of cultural programming. Mary saw an opportunity to be the first person to bring a Native voice as a museum professional to this tourist destination for more than 1.4 million visitors each year—many of whom might not interact with Native history or cultures any other way. She developed the professional policies and began a collecting strategy. After two and a half years she realized that was as far as the institution was ready to go at that time. Mary left to join a doctoral program

at St. Mary’s University in Minneapolis, and then joined First Peoples Fund in 2017 (eventually becoming its vice president of operations and programs), all while working with Peter to open Racing Magpie in its first iteration.

A shift, perhaps unseen by many, occurred in downtown Rapid City in 2013. Led by Sandy Swallow (Oglala Lakota), a small group of artists convened to celebrate the Gathering of People, Wind and Water (later renamed Native POP: People of the Plains), named for Yuki Nagase’s large-scale sculpture Passage of Wind and Water in the newly completed Main Street Square. While Peter was working for FPF and Mary was at Crazy Horse, Mary helped run that first art event with ten artists and served on

above, top Talking circle for the Buffalo Nation project (2021)

by Keith BraveHeart (Oglala Lakota). BraveHeart is at far left.

Near door, clockwise: Mikayla Patton, Wade Patton, Donald F. Montileaux, and Roger Broer in red. Also pictured are Stan Hawkin and Dr. Craig Howe (all Oglala Lakota). above, bottom Left to right: Jhon Goes In Center, Dwayne Wilcox, and James Star Comes Out (all Oglala Lakota) in the Racing Magpie studio.

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above, top Installation view of the traveling exhibition Responsibilities and Obligations: Understanding Mitákuye Oyás'in (2017–20), launched from Racing Magpie. above, bottom Micheal Two Bulls (Oglala Lakota) and a 2018 mural he painted as a partnership between Racing Magpie, Black Hills Playhouse, NeighborWorks, and the Lemmon Avenue Community Garden, where it is installed in Rapid City, South Dakota.

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the committee for four years. In its second year, Peter chaired the coordinating committee and eventually became its first executive director while still working for FPF. Native POP grew and now features about 50 Native visual artists each July with performing artists, films, fashion designers, and culture bearers. Peter says: “Our approach to arts and cultural work has always prioritized Native artists and their voices as well as collective decisionmaking whenever possible. Everything is rooted in Lakota ways of thinking and moving in the world. Native POP fit well into that way of working—a mostly Native

organizing committee with members making decisions about how to best feature and uplift the creativity of Native people. While we hope we gave everything we could, we also learned a lot about that process, event planning, and the impact that events like that can have on our community. We carry all of those things into the next evolution of Racing Magpie.”

When aske d ab out a l l t he experiences in these institutions and programs, both non-Native-managed and Native-centered, that led them to establish Racing Magpie, Mary says what was important “for me was having some autonomy over how things were being exhibited, how we were working with artists, and how we were working with community. When you work for an institution, you’re kind of beholden to their values, ways of working, and understanding of our community and artists.”

Peter remembers always questioning the process together: “How do we create something that centers the voices of the artists and that creative process? I know I was inspired when I worked at First Peoples Fund by seeing other Native communities around the country taking a leap and working together to move forward in a way that supported their community. And looking around Rapid City and western South Dakota, we didn’t see a place for that. What was happening here was mostly white-led institutions that were finding ways to capitalize on romanticizing Native art. So what does the other approach look like?”

The years of conversations with artists in the community about their needs—particularly musing about having a space away from home to work—led them to incorporate and begin work as Racing Magpie. In 2016 Racing Magpie leased a location in downtown Rapid City to begin building community. Over its first four years, the first location grew from 2,500 to 7,500 feet and included a gallery, a meeting space, and 19 affordable studios, including a pottery studio. They also hosted numerous community events, from bands to community feeds to Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women events. They supported various creative endeavors, including the Bird Cage Bookstore. Bird Cage began in a ten-foot-square studio as the dream of

Lily Mendoza (Cheyenne River Lakota) and quickly grew into two studios and then into a 400-square-foot space. Within three years, Bird Cage was in a position to move into its own storefront in downtown Rapid City.

Racing Magpie faced many obstacles during its first years as it strove to center Lakota ways of being and deep relationships with the community. Mary explains, “There’s a lot of social and systematic pressure to do things a certain way. The give-and-take built into the American system has the expectation that we have to compromise on everything. In not wanting to do that, we wanted to have a little bit of control that we never had at any institution. To begin with Racing Magpie was incorporated as an LLC [limited liability company].

I resisted much longer than Peter did and asked myself if being a nonprofit was the right way to go, because then you’re in that realm of having a board again, and potentially not being able to work for the institution anymore.” They realized over time that shifting to a nonprofit status enabled grants eligibility and support through financial donors, and yet gave them some level of independence to center the work on supporting the artists and the community in the way they wanted.

Unsurprisingly, when the pandemic hit in 2020, Racing Magpie also realized the limitations of being a tenant in such dire times. The community and artists told them that it was the spirit and programming, not the building, that was most important, so they ended their lease. Since they pivoted to virtual programming during the pandemic, they were able to purchase a property in Rapid City and renovate it to their needs. In early 2021 they partnered with two Native Community Development Financial Institutions (CDFIs)— Four Bands Community Fund and Lakota Funds—to purchase two buildings in a quiet area near the campus of the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology. Racing Magpie spent most of 2021 working with a contractor to renovate one of the buildings, adding accessibility for all of their community members and making it more of a home. Racing Magpie is holding ongoing brainstorming and strategizing conversations with artists and community to envision the future for the second building. The new location offers more room to grow and true ownership of space. Slowly it’s opening to the public with the greatest care for the health of the community.

Racing Magpie operates in a space that often feels in between in the Western definition of art—not quite a pure gallery, not a museum, not a maker space, and not a community center. When asked to describe a space that cannot quite be understood without visiting and connecting, Mary says: “I just describe us as a collective space. We have a gallery, a community space, and art studios to focus on art and community, creativity, and making.” They find strength and direction in Lakota community and values.

“We keep in mind that often the older and more established arts organizations get, the less agile they get,” says Mary.

“Our hope is to always be flexible, to not compromise our values, to not compromise the core of who we are; to be in good relationship with the community, with Lakota people first and foremost.” Peter adds, “I do my best, especially as a white man working in this organization and helping in this community. I always keep in mind the practice of stepping up

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NO. 35, SUMMER 2022 | 47

above, top Dwayne Wilcox (Oglala Lakota) at an solo painting exhibition, 2020. above, bottom Co-curators of Responsibilities and Obligations: Clementine Bordeaux (Sicangu Lakota/Oglala Lakota), Mary V. Bordeaux (Sicangu Lakota/ Oglala Lakota), and Layli Long Soldier (Oglala Lakota).

48 | FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

when asked or needed but also stepping back and pointing the spotlight at the artists or the community when we need to—being there for our community and our artists as best we possibly can.”

Racing Magpie strives to overcome the expectations that colonial structures and systems have placed on Native people and artistic expression. Mary says: “We have a colleague that says, ‘How do we be less trash in the ways we move within the world?’ I am a firm believer in always asking ourselves that individually and as an organization. There is a lot of learning and unlearning that we continue to do—a lot of colonial entanglements that we need to get rid of, but they are still there. We are human, and so we are always trying to be better, always trying to be ‘less trash,’ trying to be flexible, and be responsive to

our community. We give ourselves time to think, room to make mistakes, and space to keep trying.”

Mary’s father played a big role in her mindset and career trajectory at her high school graduation. “When I graduated high school, and graduation just got over, everyone’s outside and happy and excited.

My dad put his arm around me, and he said, ‘You know, I expect you to change the world.’ I thought, Gosh, what an a— hole to say something like that to me. I just graduated high school. I’m only 17. Leave me alone, old man.” She laughs. “But you know, it did stick with me, and it always felt like the weight of the world was on me. It wasn’t until my oldest son was born that I realized that my world was my son.

It was about him and his world. I realized when my dad said, ‘I expect you to change the world,’ it was about making sure the place was better for the next generation.”

This sentiment can be seen in the formation and trajectory of Racing Magpie, especially in Mary and Peter’s plan to focus on uplifting Lakota artists and community and the effect that will have on the future generations and to “change the world.” Mary adds: “Our plan was to concentrate on working with Native people, Native community, and working with people who will center on Lakota people and community in the way that I think we deserve. All of this leads back to my dad telling me to change the world. It’s time to be able to focus on Native people. Hopefully, I opened a few doors for people, or at least, to push the grass down a bit, so they can get through a little easier.”

When asked about advice for those wanting to create collaborative and Indigenous art organizations in their community, Peter says: “Take your time, listen, build real relationships, be in real relation. Lift up others. Don’t hesitate to prioritize your ways of thinking over the dominant society, and don’t feel tied to doing things the way that other people have done it. Know that you may need to try and fail, and to learn from that experience and continue building.”

Mary concludes, “Absolutely. Be flexible, know that you are going to make mistakes. Know that it’s okay to make mistakes, but to keep trying, keep doing your best, and less trash.”

A CENTENNIAL OF PROGRESS REPELLING PSEUDO-INDIANS Santa Fe Indian Market and the Indian Arts and Crafts Act

By Suzan Shown Harjo (Cheyenne/Hodulgee Muscogee)

A

S THE ROARING ’20s stoked the greatest wealth disparity in the country until the present day, some of the ultra-rich and famous gravitated to secluded environs to cultivate their talents and contemplate their good fortunes. Others, mostly intellectuals and artists, traveled throughout the Southwest to observe and document the “Vanishing Indian,” whose populations were at near-extinction levels, and whose peoples, while economically impoverished, were culturally wealthy, but their lands and waters were being confiscated and poisoned.

Living on former and present Native lands, many ended up in art colonies in Northern New Mexico’s sweeping landscapes where aspen groves, mountain air, and the pristine waters of Taos and Santa Fe were far away from the teeming crowds and congestion of New York, Los Angeles, and London.

Also gravitating to the art colonies and hot springs was a host of wannabes and ustabes (non-Natives who “want to be” Native, but aren’t, or who thought they “used to be” Native in a former life), along with those having even greater entitlement derangements: “I am Indian (or a chief, princess, warrior, or artist), because I say I am.” Some impostors studied the techniques of coiling and molding clay and weaving textiles and baskets and sold their work as being Indian-made or Indianstyle. Lazier and cashier hucksters bought Native-made artworks on the cheap and

above John Collier, US Commissioner of Indian Affairs, Washington, DC, 1933 (PD).

sold them at high-end prices, pocketing all the profits and now and then springing for a cold pop for the Native artist.

Born into this early 20th-century New Mexico mix were the Santa Fe Indian Market (SFIM) and the Indian Arts and Crafts Act (IACA). Both were inspired by the people, arts, lands, and ways of the Apache Tribes, Navajo Nation, and 19 Pueblos, and driven by increasing numbers of predatory elements in Indian Country: land grabbers, culture vultures, and identity thieves. While SFIM was building interest in Native artwork and cultivating collectors as part of the Santa Fe Fiesta, the IACA was being incubated in the town and Pueblo of Taos.

In Taos, John Collier met Antonio Lujan (Taos Pueblo). Collier, a social worker and poet from Atlanta, studied sociology at

Columbia University in New York City and the Collège de France in Paris. Lujan, an Indigenous architect/builder, introduced Collier to Pueblo leaders throughout New Mexico. Lujan was constructing a Pueblostyle, three-story adobe home for writer Mable Dodge, his future wife.

Collier, Dodge, Lujan, and most Taos artists were appalled at the US federal government’s confiscation of Pueblo land and water and suppression of Pueblo religious freedom. Starvation and imprisonment were punishments for going to their sacred places, including Bear Lake, Blue Lake, and Sacred Mountain.

Sickened by the non-Native impersonation of Pueblo artists—especially egregious given their rapidly diminishing natural resources and dire economic straits— Collier traveled throughout the Southwest, finding Native cultural wealth alongside economic impoverishment, surrounded by anti-Indian bigotry. Collier returned to Taos, as he did repeatedly, until retiring from teaching in New York and making his home there until the end of his life in 1968. In 1921 with Dodge and Lujan, he organized artists to support Indian cultural, artistic, and property rights and to oppose all efforts to undermine or dismantle them.

Members of Taos and Santa Fe art colonies supported many Pueblo artists and religious activities, helping many Native Peoples through the worst of the Great Depression. They waged a public relations fight against two legislative proposals: 1) for the federal government to take Pueblo NO. 35, SUMMER 2022 | 49

above David Bradley (White Earth Ojibwe), Land O Bucks, Land O Fakes, Land O Lakes, 2006, acrylic paint on paper over wood, 16 × 16 × 13½ in., collection of the Denver Art Museum, 2010.396, Native Arts acquisition fund. Image courtesy of the artist. opposite Indian Market poster artist David Bradley (White Earth Ojibwe), 1984. Photo: Hollis Engley. Image courtesy of the Palace of the Governors Photo Archives (NMHM/ DCA), HP.2014.14.1927, The Santa Fe New Mexican Collection.

lands, give non-Native squatters ownership “rights” and keep the majority of the acreage for itself to “manage” as public lands, and 2) for all Pueblo ceremonies, dances, and feasts to be outlawed, which was the de facto case under the Civilization Regulations, but those did not have an underlying law. The Museum of New Mexico Foundation also opposed these bills, but a powerful women’s organization that was a mainstay backer of SFIM also opposed Pueblo dances as immoral.

To successfully lobby to defeat both bills, Collier cofounded the American Indian Defense Association (AIDA) in 1923 with another Indian policy reformer, Zitkála-Šá (Red Bird), aka Gertrude Simmons Bonnin (Yankton Dakota). Collier’s reform writings as AIDA executive secretary and editor of American Indian Life resulted in his being tapped by President Franklin D. Roosevelt to serve as the Indian Affairs Commissioner. Collier served in that position in the New Deal Administration from 1933 to 1945. Once in place, he worked on the Indian New Deal with Interior Solicitor Felix S. Cohen and his wife, Lucy Kramer Cohen, who brought experience in anthropology, statistics, and languages to her volunteer work for the interior. In addition to stanching the loss of Native lands to non-Indian banks and developers’ pockets, Collier and the Cohens struck a blow for religious freedom and Native cultural rights by convincing Interior Secretary Harold L. Ickes to 50 | FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

withdraw the Civilization Regulations, thus ending the half-century reign of terror that criminalized everything that was culturally distinctive about Native Peoples.

In 1935 President Roosevelt signed IACA into law to protect Native artistic and economic rights, and to defend the public against fraud. IACA was originally titled the Pseudo-Indian Act, a spare and elegant bill that simply proposed to make it a criminal offense to impersonate an American Indian person, much like existing laws that made false impersonations felonies, and it did not stop at the arts. As enacted, IACA dealt only with arts and crafts. Native organizations now advocate for coverage of the writing and performing arts, and academia.

IACA was a little-used law through the Great Depression, lead-up to and recovery from World War II, and the Indian termination laws of the 1950s. By the 1960s and 1970s, with new age and hippie migrations to Indian Country, sales of Native art imitations and sales were on the rise.

The Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) was established in 1962 in Santa Fe as the only US Indian art school.

New and exciting works by T.C. Cannon (Kiowa/Caddo) and other students and a faculty that included Allan Houser (Chiricahua Apache) and Fritz Scholder (Luiseño) attracted great press attention and serious art collectors, in addition to those who had become regular visitors to the annual Indian Market.

One IAIA student, David P. Bradley (White Earth Ojibwe), moved to New Mexico after serving two years in the Peace Corps, where he lived in Guatemala with a Maya family and in the Dominican Republic. He graduated first in his class in 1979, married artist and educator Arlene Loretto (Jemez Pueblo), and began what would be a 20-year stint as an Indian Market booth artist. In the first cohort of SWAIA Fellows, Bradley won top prizes in the market’s painting and sculpture classifications and was the 1984 poster artist.

Bradley heard complaints of “many legitimate Indian artists who were denied participation and several fake Indians who were selling.” He told me that market “had become very lucrative, and it was attracting con-men from all over.”

By the mid-1980s Bradley recalled, “some of the other Indian artists and I started to organize to clean up SWAIA” (Southwestern Association on Indian Affairs), SFIM’s organizational sponsor.

They “convinced SWAIA to tighten the application process and several high-profile frauds left,” such as Melody Light Feather, who falsely claimed to be Pima from the Gila River Indian Community. “There were more than a dozen fakes exposed.”

One of those unmasked was Randy Lee White, a white artist from Texas who moved to Santa Fe and invented a flamboyant Lower Brulé Sioux persona.

White wore fringed leather outfits and “war paint” on his face, usually a sickly green and muddy brown-black. He and his agents made a killing from gallery sales of “Randy White Horse” paintings.

White was exposed as a fraud when a young Lower Brulé Lakota artist, who admired White’s work, went from family to family on his South Dakota reservation, hoping to gain an introduction to the painter. With only 1,000 tribal citizens, it did not take long to discover that not one of the Sicangu Kul Wicasa Oyate was related to, knew, or had heard of White. In the meantime, White was going through a tumultuous divorce, and the woman who knew him back when was telling it all to anyone in the Santa Fe Native art scene.

Bradley and friends, Dominic Arquero (Cochiti Pueblo) and Imogene Goodshot Arquero (Oglala Lakota), started the Native American Artists Association (NAAA) in 1987. “Our motivation was that, after 500 years, the white man has taken

nearly everything Indians have,” he said.

“Now that our very identity has become a marketable commodity, they want that, too.”

NAAA supported the national effort to amend the 1935 IACA and lobbied to strengthen New Mexico’s 1978 Indian Arts and Crafts Sales Act. “Many of the pseudoIndian profiteers just went to the galleries and continued their fraudulent activity, so we went to the media,” Bradley said, and “things got ugly fast.”

The new ugly came to SFIM in the form of two pseudo-Cherokees, artist/ writer Jimmie Durham and writer/artist Ward Churchill, who hand-delivered their multipage diatribe against Bradley and the pending IACA amendments to all artists’ booths. That same weekend, Bradley and other NAAA artists began to receive death threats on their home telephones.

Durham had been publicly exposed by his former employer, the International Indian Treaty Council (IITC), in a mid-1980s open letter from founder and director Bill Means (Oglala Lakota, Wicahpi Koyaka Tiospaye). Durham represented IITC in New York and Geneva until his employers discovered that he misled them and thousands of people in Indian Country, the US Congress, and the United Nations in policy and business dealings by misrepresenting himself as Wolf Clan Cherokee. Means’s letter denounced Durham as perpetrating fraud by falsely claiming to be Native American.

Fleeing the jurisdiction of New York, Durham moved to New Mexico and tried to show in SFIM and local galleries. He fled again to evade the law, this time to Cuernavaca, Mexico. He then moved to Germany, where German hobbyists promoted him for exhibitions in Europe and worked with his backers to set up US museum and gallery shows during the ten years before his death in Berlin in 2021. He tried to explain away his myriad detractors by saying he was caught in an American Indian Movement split.

Durham’s pal Churchill also lied about his identity by claiming to be United Keetoowah Band Cherokee and Muscogee Creek. The University of Colorado fired him in 2007 from his tenured professorship for multiple counts of academic misconduct, including plagiarism, fabrication, falsification, and other infractions.

Churchill and Durham’s campaign to sully Bradley’s reputation and to stop the New

Mexico version of the IACA failed when the 1990 IACA amendments became law. Their attempts to pass as Native artists became illegal and punishable with significant fines and prison time.

Author, historian, and theologian Vine Deloria Jr., Esq. (Standing Rock Sioux); anthropologist and educator Dr. Bea Medicine (Sihasapa/Minnecoujou Lakota); political analyst Dr. Richard Allen (Cherokee Nation); and others publicized and bolstered Bill Means’s exposure of Durham and Churchill. Hank Adams (Assiniboine-Sioux/Frank’s Landing Indian Community), the president of the Survival of American Indians Association, researched and prepared definitive genealogies of Durham and Churchill, tracing both sides of their families to northern Europe, without any Native American or other non-white ancestors.

The 1990 IACA amendments stiffened penalties for a person falsely claiming to be American Indian and extended the law to those promoting non-Native artists as being Native. That made galleries, museums, and auction houses take notice. Many stopped carrying, promoting, collecting, and selling pseudo-Indians’ work as being Native American. The US Federal Trade Commission has its own statutory authority and enacted a similar law by

charging and securing large monetary settlements with faux “Indian” arts and crafts businesses that violated IACA with false or deceptive advertising and sales.

SFIM and IACA have developed over the past century with the same goals and guiding principles: enhancing appreciation for, increasing the economic value of, and promoting Native-made work, as well as keeping non-Natives from cashing in on Native artists’ ideas, techniques, and work.

The market and law strive to rid the arts and crafts world of impostors who prey on Native Peoples and collectors alike.

When Churchill sued the University of Colorado, dozens of Native Americans he had wronged joined the school’s brief arguing against his reinstatement.

During the trial, he attempted to create the impression that he was Native by taking his oath on an eagle feather, a stunt in violation of the federal law prohibiting non-Natives from possessing eagle feathers. He lost before the state’s high court and, in 2013, the US Supreme Court did not grant his appeal. He addressed the subject of his Indian claims in this way: “I never said I was f—ing Sitting Bull!”

In 2019, Native artists and scholars contributed to a special issue, Fraud in Native American Communities, of the American Indian Culture and Research Journal published by the American Indian Studies Center, University of California, Los Angeles. Most of the pieces were on Durham. After falsely promoting himself as being Cherokee and Indian for decades, Durham wrote this 1993 statement to Art in America: “I am not Cherokee. I am not an American Indian. This is in concurrence with recent US legislation, because I am not enrolled on any reservation or in any American Indian community.”

A cautionary note. Just because some pseudo-Natives have expired or been exposed, their backers still have art to sell, and their curators still have reputations to protect. There is still money to be made, and thousands of con artists are now passing or trying to pass for something they are not. Most are performers, writers, and professors, which is why Native People are calling for more IACA amendments to meet the societal need. The last amendment was more than 30 years ago. The longer we wait for change, the more Native People will be displaced and locked out by impostors.

There really is no time to waste.

NO. 35, SUMMER 2022 | 51

SANTA FE INDIAN MARKET THROUGH THE DECADES The Early Years: 1922–1959

By Suzanne Newman Fricke, PhD

W

HAT WOULD LATER become the Santa Fe Ind i an Marke t , t he Southwest Indian Fair and Industrial Arts and Crafts Exhibition opened on September 4, 1922. From 1922 to 1931, the Southwest Indian Fair took place inside the old armory building located behind the Palace of the Governors. The fair’s goal was to encourage Native American arts and crafts, revive historic art forms, keep the arts of each tribe and Pueblo as distinct as possible, establish markets for American Indian–made products, secure reasonable

prices, and show the authenticity of Native American arts.

The fair owes its formation to several advocates for Native American culture.

“Rose Dougan, herself an ardent patron of Indian art [suggested] an Arts and Crafts Competition to be held as a feature of the annual Santa Fe Fiesta,” wrote artist, professor, and Museum of New Mexico curator Kenneth Chapman.1 Dougan also funded an endowment that provided some of the prize money for this venture.

Anthropologist Dr. Edgar Lee Hewett hired Chapman to oversee this art fair.2 Hewett had organized the Panama California Exposition in San Diego in 1915 and founded the Museum of New Mexico (MNM) in 1909 and its art gallery in 1917. Hewett and the museum organized various events in New Mexico, including archaeological digs and projects designed to help Native American artists.

Rose Dougan and her partner Vera von Blumenthal worked with the museum in their effort to promote women-made arts. The two women had traveled across Russia—von Blumenthal’s home country—purchasing handmade lace, which they sold at a cooperative in California. Once in New Mexico, they invested in pottery and purchased pieces at San Ildefonso Pueblo to resell them.

After two years, von Blumenthal and Dougan left northern New Mexico, but they gave funding for the museum to take over their pottery program.

The New Mexico Association on Indian Affairs (NMAIA) organized in 1922 to fight for Indigenous rights, including defeating the proposed Bursum Bill, that would have eroded Pueblo lands claims. Part of NMAIA’s larger advocacy for Native rights included coordinating the new Indian fair, aided by staff from the

1. Kenneth M. Chapman, “The Indian Fair,” Art and Archaeology, nos. 17–18 (1923): 219.

2. Kenneth Chapman, KMC Memoir, AC 156, “The von Blumenthal-Dougan Project—1917–1919,” Indian Arts Research Center Files, School for Advanced Research, 9.

52 | FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

Museum of New Mexico and the School of American Archaeology (later renamed the School of American Research and then the School of Advanced Research, known as SAR).

The Santa Fe Fiesta has taken place almost every year since 1712 to commemorate the Spanish reconquest of New Mexico in 1692 by Don Diego de Vargas, after the Pueblo Revolt of 1680.

It featured the procession of La Conquistadora, the wooden statue of the Virgin that missionary Fray Alonso de Benavides brought to Santa Fe in 1625. The fiesta was held in 1912, 1916, and 1918, and finally became an annual event in 1922.

THE 1920S T H E BE ST T R I BA L DI SPL AY WINNER in 1922 was beadwork from the Assiniboine and Sioux Tribes of the Fort Peck Indian Reservation in Montana. Sixteen Pueblos participated that year: San Juan (Ohkay Owingeh), Santa Clara, San Ildefonso, Tesuque, Santo Domingo (Kewa), Cochiti, Zia, Isleta, and Acoma Pueblos. Taos, Picuris, Nambé, and Pojoaque Pueblos were not invited to the first fairs, likely because the pottery from these Northern Pueblos was mainly unpainted, and fair organizers considered it utilitarian. According to the rules, only the artist could submit pieces and win prizes to prevent dealers from benefiting from the prizes. Each piece could be entered only once and no non-Native items, designs, or materials would be accepted. The job of choosing and training the judging panel fell to Chapman, the museum’s foremost expert on pottery who served as the head judge at the majority of Santa Fe Indian Fairs from 1922 into the mid-century. This gave him enormous influence over the designs and styles that won awards and those which were ignored. The panel of three judges, mostly if not all non-Native, evaluated each piece submitted for the competition.

Some of the people he chose as judges included anthropologist Wesley Bradfield; physician and art collector Harry P. Mera; writer Oliver La Farge; MNM/SAR assistant director and contributor to the museum’s magazine, El Palacio, Elizabeth deHuff; founding

above Art displays at the first Southwest Indian Fair, National Guard Armory, Santa Fe, 1922. Photo: Guy Cross. Image courtesy of the Palace of the Governors Photo Archives (NMHM/DCA), 001500. opposite David Bradley (White Earth Ojibwe), detail of Santa Fe Indian Market, 2001, acrylic on canvas, 36 x 96 in., collection of the University of Wyoming Art Museum, 2002.2. Image courtesy of the artist.

editor of El Palacio, Paul Walter; archaeologist and founder of the Pueblo Grande Museum, Odd Halseth; Portuguese artist Carlos Vierra; ceramic technician and archaeologist Anna O. Shepard; MNM employees Marjorie Lambert and Bruce Ellis; architect John Gaw Meem and his wife Faith Meem; and Margaret McKittrick Burge, NMAIA chair.

Pots were judged against other entries from the same Pueblo. This was done because fair organizers saw work from each Pueblo as distinct. Chapman and the other judges wanted to encourage each Pueblo’s potters to maintain a specific style. Potters were not to copy innovations from other Pueblos just because they were popular. Though the pot should follow the ideals of the Pueblo in which it was made, fair standards also encouraged individual, artistic innovations. Pots were not to be mere copies of other examples, which would lead to stagnation and homogeneity, but should highlight the artist’s ability to improvise within a specified vocabulary of design elements, materials, and patterns.

Chapman advised the judges to evaluate a pot by looking at how well it was made. The shape was to be as perfectly symmetrical, smooth, and balanced as possible. Chapman advocated a hands-on approach to judging, instructing the

potential judges to pick up and feel the pot. Only by feeling a pot could the judge determine the evenness of the walls and the vessel’s weight; a vessel that was too heavy indicated that the potter had left too much material and not thinned the walls adequately. Chapman suggested that a judge “ring” the pot by tapping the outer wall. A pot that produced a clear ring indicated that it was well made with an even, regular shape and no air bubbles in the wall, while a dull sound possibly indicated cracks in the base, rim, or side. This method of judging favored the vessels from certain Pueblos. Pots with thin, hard walls, like those from the Tewa villages along the northern Rio Grande or the Keresan Pueblos, Acoma and Laguna, made the best ring, while thick and soft clay, used at Zia, produced a less distinct tone. After assessing the manufacture of the vessel, Chapman taught the judges to look at the aesthetics of the piece.

He based his approach on three ideals: rhythm, balance, and harmony, to be reflected in both the shape and the decoration.3 In 1922 Maria Martinez (San Ildefonso Pueblo, 1887–1980) won for the best undecorated large jar and the grand prize for best individual exhibitor; she came in second for the best exhibit from San Ildefonso behind Tonita Roybal (San

3. Kenneth Chapman, private papers, Kenneth Milton Chapman Files, Box 5, “Points for the 1934 Indian Fair Judges Course,” Laboratory of Anthropology.

NO. 35, SUMMER 2022 | 53

above Pueblo ceramic artists and collectors on Palace of the Governors portal during Indian Fair at Fiesta, 1955. Photo: Miles Masters. Image courtesy of the Palace of the Governors Photo Archives (NMHM/DCA), 098340. opposite Margaret Tafoya (Santa Clara Pueblo, 1904–2004) on Plaza during Santa Fe Indian Market, 1971. Image courtesy of the Palace of the Governors Photo Archives (NMHM/DCA), 190688.

Ildefonso, 1892–1945). The Dougan Fund established by Rose Dougan provided financial awards for pots: $5 for first place and $2 for second for pottery from any of the 16 Pueblos. Special prizes were given for jars larger than 50 inches in diameter, both decorated and not, open to artists from all Pueblos. A grand prize was given to the best exhibit.4 At the first Southwest Indian Fair, director Edgar Lee Hewett complained that the cost of some of the pottery had increased too much, noting that an ordinary-sized bowl by Tonita Roybal was priced at $12.

Chapman retorted that potters understood the market for their wares better than anyone else and had the right to price them accordingly. He asked Hewett, “Do you know any better way for them to find what the buyers will pay?”5 Chapman had admired Roybal’s bowl, describing it as “a little gem,” and within a half hour it sold for the price as marked, plus the fair’s 10-percent handling charge. Maria

Martinez, Tonita Roybal, and Susana Aguilar (San Ildefonso Pueblo, ca.

1876–1949) consistently won prizes in the fair’s five years.

In 1922 fair organizers also founded the New Mexico Association on Indian Affairs, which not only ran the fair but also advocated for Native Americans and opposed anti-Native legislation. In 1927 Hewett resigned as director general of the fair and ended his association between MNM/SAR and Santa Fe Fiesta and Indian Fair to work as the head of the department of anthropology and archaeology at the University of New Mexico.

THE 1930S THE GREAT DEPRESSION meant fewer tourists, so artists were less inclined to travel to Santa Fe with their artwork for the fair. NMAIA decided to hold many smaller fairs at individual Pueblos.

Though this limited the opportunity for

the artists to network, it maintained some sort of relationship between the judges and the artists. Fairs were held in San Juan, Cochiti, Picuris, Acoma, Zia, and Shiprock on the Navajo Reservation, and at the Santa Fe Indian School. Chapman continued as head judge, traveling with the other judges from pueblo to pueblo to evaluate the work.

The small local fairs, not as effective as a single centralized fair, drained NMAIA’s funds. NMAIA considered discontinuing the fairs altogether, but, remembering the success of the fairs during the 1920s, they redoubled their efforts. The results were less than satisfactory. In 1931 Monica Silva won first prize, but no other entry from the Pueblo was deemed worthy of a second-place prize. In 1935 Chapman chastised the potters for the poor quality that he found at the local fairs when, as Chapman writes, “Elizabeth White, Wm. P. Henderson, and myself attended the Fiesta at Cochiti, July fourteenth, and found the arts and crafts exhibitions so disgracefully poor that we gave reprimands instead of prizes, except for one blue ribbon and an award of $2.50 to Helen Quintana, for two pairs of crocheted leggings such as are worn in the deer dance.”6 In 1936 Margretta Dietrich NMAIA director, and Maria Chabot, NMAIA secretary, returned the Indian Fair to Santa Fe. Later, Chabot invited Maria Martinez and Tonita Peña (San Ildefonso Pueblo, 1893–1949) to be judges, but they declined.

THE 1940S THE MARKETS HELD IN SANTA FE in the 1940s faced organizational issues. The merchants around the plaza disliked the competition for buyers and accused the fair artists of crowding the area, especially as space assignments were not allocated, forcing artists to sleep in their spots overnight to keep their spaces. During World War II, local markets took place in the pueblos as opposed to Saturday markets in the Santa Fe Plaza. Competition categories shrank, although Hopi katsintithu were added in 1949. 7

4. Kim Baca, “Indian Market Timeline,” Santa Fe New Mexican (August 14, 2011), Z025. Six classifications were awarded prizes.

5. Kenneth Chapman, “The von Blumenthal-Dougan Project,” Indian Arts Research Center Files, 5.

6. Kenneth Chapman, Box 3, “Chapman: Indian Fairs 1935-36,” Laboratory of Anthropology, Chapman to Faith Meem, July 18, 1935.

7. Sheila Tryk, Santa Fe Indian Market: Showcase of Native American Art (Santa Fe: Tierra Publications, 1993), 137.

54 | FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

THE 1950S THE FIESTA INDIAN MARKET grew smaller in the years following World War II, and the prize money shrank accordingly, decreasing from $148 in 1950 to $124 in 1953. NMAIA had seven classifications and three divisions for Fiesta Indian Market under the Palace of Governors portal. Native artists camped at the portal the night before. Judging took place Saturday morning at 9:30 a.m.

Ribbons and prize money came from donations and remained modest.

By 1955 Indian Market was only a small part of the fiesta, and the aging organizers discussed discontinuing the fair. Determined to save this important cultural center, curators Bertha Dutton of the Museum of New Mexico and Sallie Wagner of the Museum of Navajo Ceremonial Art (now the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian) teamed up with art dealers Al Packard and Rex Arrowsmith to revitalize the market.

In 1956 NMAIA launched an annual Indian Artists Exhibition in partnership with the Museum of New Mexico. This juried, competitive art show, the brainchild of Dorothy Dunn, predominantly featured paintings.

Opening in July in the museum, the Indian Artists Exhibition remained on view through Santa Fe Indian Market.

Judges included Native painters Velino Herrera (Zia, 1902–1973) and Theodore Suina (Cochiti, 1918–2019). Individuals and organizations like the School of American Research and Twentieth Century Art Club of St. Louis funded the prizes, which were more robust than those of Indian Market.8 In 1959 the Southwestern Association on Indian Affairs (SWAIA) formed and separated from the New Mexico Association on Indian Affairs. This new nonprofit organization still advocated for Indigenous issues, particularly healthcare, but increasingly focused on the arts and Santa Fe Indian Market.

The Recent Years: 1960–2022

By America Meredith (Cherokee Nation) THE 1960S

I

N 1961 INDIAN MARKET finally broke free of the fiesta and had its own weekend in August. It expanded beyond the portal into the Plaza and onto Palace Avenue, adding 150 artists in 1964. In 1961, total prize money was $262 (about $2,585 today), but by 1967, it was up to $1,000 for 35 categories (about $8,841 today.)9 Booths were assigned in advance.

The annual painting exhibition, now called the Contemporary Indian Art Annual Exhibition, continued through 1965. SWAIA rented space at the 1964–65 New York World’s Fair to educate the public about Southwestern Indian jewelry and how to detect fakes. This exhibit traveled nationwide.

Art dealer Al Packard served as the association’s president in the early 1960s, followed by Rex Arrowsmith; however, Native American people played

increasingly active roles. By 1962 Preston Keevama (Hopi, 1919–1996), the San Juan Pueblo governor, served as SWAIA’s vice chairman. Native American artists increasingly served as judges of the art and dance competitions. Popovi Da (San Ildefonso, 1923–1971) judged painting and funded the Maria of San Ildefonso Special Award for exceptional pottery.

THE 1970S INDIAN MARKET GREW IN SIZE and stature during the 1970s and began to overshadow fiesta. Santa Fe acknowledged the market’s financial and cultural impact on the city. Galleries held special exhibitions during the market, spreading the event citywide. Crowd estimates rose from 10,000 to 50,000 during the decade.

Indian Market’s 50th anniversary sparked reflections on its long history.

Judging had previously taken place at the booths, but in 1972, La Fonda offered space for the competition.

Judges deliberated on Friday evening, and artwork was returned to artists in time for Saturday morning sales. The Santa Fe New Mexican announced Indian Market prizewinners, and the society column tracked celebrity Native artists at private parties..

8. “Santa Feans Dominate 43rd Annual Art Show,” Santa Fe New Mexican, August 16, 1956, 13; Dave Weber, “About the Arts,” Santa Fe New Mexican, July 14, 1957, 13.

9. “Indian Market Begins Manana,” Santa Fe New Mexican, August 23, 1961; “SF Indian Market Aug. 19–20,” Santa Fe New Mexican, August 6, 1967. All estimations of current values were calculated through Inflation Tool, www.inflationtool.com.

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Increased popularity brought pressures to professionalize. New artists had to submit photographs of their work to be juried in. In 1973 SWAIA introduced a $5 booth fee. The number of artists and booths was between 300 and 500 during the 1970s. By 1976 all four streets around the Plaza were closed to traffic.

Hoping to attract the best artists, SWAIA dramatically increased its prize money. From modest amounts at the beginning of the decade, total prize money awarded increased to $5,000 in 1976 (about $25,911 today) and $16,000 by 1978 (about $72,333). 10 Judges awarded prizes for artwork, dances, and clothing. In 1976 the association added experimental and youth classifications.

Quality issues around turquoise reached a crisis point in 1975 when 90 percent of the turquoise jewelry was disqualified for being imitation or treated.

SWAIA also cracked down on artists selling mass-produced items. Dealers were banned from selling at market; only artists or their family could conduct sales.

Fraud posed a growing problem.

New Mexico amended its 1973 Indian Arts and Crafts Law in 1978 to define Indian art as being handmade by a member of a federally or state-recognized tribe and laid out fines. Several Indian Market award winners were later found to be non-Native.

In 1977 about 100 unsanctioned vendors set up during Indian Market.

That same year, courting the absurd, Paul and Sara Livingston, non-Native jewelry vendors, filed a complaint with New Mexico’s Human Rights Commission saying that SWAIA was racist for only allowing Native Americans to enter Indian Market. The commission ruled that, as a private nonprofit, SWAIA could limit its market to whomever it chose.11

THE 1980S THE HEYDAY of Santa Fe Indian Market in the 1970s, when collecting Native jewelry reached a fever pitch, continued into the 1980s. Paternalistic do-gooding

gave way to celebrity culture. “The best thing Indian Market did for us was to give us confidence,” Pablita Velarde (Santa Clara Pueblo, 1918–2006) said in 1981.12 Santa Fe saw its largest retail sales all year during Indian Market weekend and saw that Indian Market brought more visitors to Santa Fe than any other annual activity. Hotels across Northern New Mexico booked up months in advance. In 1987 the market contributed an estimated $150 million to the local economy.

Despite outcry from hoteliers, SWAIA moved the 1981 market from the second week of August to the third so as not to conflict with Pueblo feast days.

Unmoved by business owners’ pleas, the director cited SWAIA’s first duty to the needs of its Native artists. That director was the first Native American woman to lead SWAIA: textile artist and designer Ramona Sakiestewa (Hopi). “I was president of the board and ran SWAIA as an unpaid director,” wrote Sakiestewa.13 Sally Kandarian, SWAIA’s secretary, was the lone employee. “The board members and 40 great volunteers pulled off setting up and taking down market each year.”

Of the 28 board members in 1982, six were Native Americans. After others briefly served, Don Owen became SWAIA president and later director.

SWAIA created its standards committee and introduced fellowships for promising Native artists and writers in 1980. That year, 500 artists exhibited in 325 booths. By 1988, 830 artists fit into 412 booths spilling north along Lincoln Avenue. Only about a third of applicants were juried into market. A quota system limited the number of non-Southwest artists to 10 percent of the booths. Best of show was $1,000 throughout the decade.

La Fonda hosted the first Friday award winners preview in 1984.

SWAIA introduced a Saturday Pueblo feast in 1980, a Thursday auction in 1983, and a powwow in 1987. To raise funds, SWAIA raffled off donated artworks and sold limited-edition posters and official T-shirts. The “costume prizes” became the Sunday clothing competition.

SWAIA experimented with its first Winter Market in 1989.

The City of Santa Fe made some surprisingly passive-aggressive moves toward SWAIA, such as hosting an alternative market during Indian Market in 1981. Despite Indian Market’s persistent problems with non-market vendors, the city issued temporary vendor permits for only $1 during market weekend. SWAIA hinted that it could change venues and circulated a questionnaire to visitors in 1988, asking for their thoughts on a potential move to the Santa Fe Indian School, the racetrack, or another city.

More and more non-Native artists were claiming Native identity, and some even entered Indian Market, such as Riverwoman Freesoul. By 1987 SWAIA required market artists to be enrolled tribal citizens and have at least one-quarter Indian blood. State authorities forced non-Native artists such as C. J. Wells to stop falsely claiming American Indian identity.14 The Native American Artists Association formed in Santa Fe in 1987 to address the increasing issues of Indigenous identity fraud.

The public thirst for Native art in the 1980s was unquenchable. Visitor estimates for Indian Market week ranged from 75,000 to 150,000.

THE 1990S NOW FULLY STAFFED, SWAIA focused exclusively on art and culture, as reflected in its 1993 name change from Southwestern Association for Indian Affairs to the Southwestern Association for Indian Arts. In addition to Indian Market, SWAIA hosted a storytelling conference, multiple powwows, an Albuquerque Indian Market, and other events.

A Masters of Indian Market program hosted a Masters Market at Santa Fe Community College and exhibited in New York in 1996. These side events were discontinued in 1998 to reduce growing debt. SWAIA’s deficit ballooned to $385,000 in 1999.15

10. “Santa Fe Indian Market scheduled for Saturday,” Santa Fe New Mexican, August 18, 1978.

11. Scott Sandlin, “High court disbars Albuquerque lawyer,” Albuquerque Journal, August 28, 2014, web. After issuing several similar complaints to other New Mexico institutions, Paul Livingston earned a law degree at the University of New Mexico but was eventually disbarred in 2014.

12. Jill Warren, “She follows her mother’s artistic path,” Santa Fe New Mexican, Augusts 18, 1981, 26.

13. Ramona Sakiestewa, email message to author, July 10, 2021.

14. Howard LaFranchi, “Protecting the integrity of Indian art. Indian artists work to strengthen safeguards for their market,” Christian Science Monitor, October 4, 1988.

15. Hollis Walker, “SWAIA tackles $250,000 deficit with layoffs,” Santa Fe New Mexican, October 31, 1998; Morgan Lee, “SWAIA Says Debts Reduced,” Albuquerque Journal, November 20, 1999.

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Indian Market grew more, from 1,000 artists in 1990 to 1,200 by 1992, with 500 booths, including 50 booths at DeVargas Center, and 600 booths by 1995. The DeVargas booths, canceled in 1996, were replaced by booths in Cathedral Park and more streets downtown. While some booths were set aside for newcomers, the overwhelming majority went to tenured artists, who shared space with relatives. With the passage of the 1990 Indian Arts and Crafts Act, SWAIA dropped its blood-quantum requirement and by 1992 it opened applications to any enrolled citizen in a federally recognized tribe, with the 10 percent quota for non-Southwest artists still in place.

The best of show award was eliminated in 1994 and 1995.

Instead, $1,000 went to the best of 11 classifications: jewelry, pottery, two-dimensional, katsintithu, sculpture, monumental sculpture, textiles (including basketry), diverse, youth, and poetry. The Sunday Native American clothing contest added a “contemporary” classification in 1995. Lifetime Achievement Awards, introduced in 1995, went to Allan Houser and Maria Martinez. Saturday night’s dinner became a gala reception at La Fonda. SWAIA organized live concerts in the plaza in 1995.

Fellowships increased to $3,000 in 1997, and SWAIA published its first website in 1995.

In December 1994, the board forced Don Owen to resign two months before his five-year contract ended. He had served as director for five years but had volunteered with the organization for 30 years. Market artists protested his ouster and circulated a petition calling for new board elections.16 To placate artists, the board formed the SWAIA Council of Artists.

The association hired Paul Gonzales, later Paul Rainbird (San Ildefonso) as president in 1995 but did not renew his contract in 1998, prompting five of the 16 board members to resign.17 Booth fee increases in 1998 sparked outrage. The organization hired Jean Marquardt, who specialized in financial reorganizations of nonprofits, as its director. She restored SWAIA's financial health, but the board did not renew her contract.

THE 2000S IN THE AUGHTS, SWAIA’s executive directors were Barbara Walzer (2000–02), Jai Lakshman (2002–04), David Cloutier (2005–07), and Bruce Bernstein (2007–12). Walzer, Lakshman, and Cloutier all chose to resign. Event planning is a challenging vocation, and planning a series of massive, gala events topped off by a sprawling market with more than 1,000 artists is no easy task. The organization was debt-free by August 2000. Its 2000 budget was $800,000, reduced from $1 million in 1997, and supported five employees.18 In a comparatively calm decade, Lakshman shared his goals for market: “What we have to do here is to let the market step into its own light. And the light’s really created by the culture, by the generations, by the vision, by the integrity that is brought to the market through the art and the people who make the art.”19 His views were echoed by many.

above Basket maker Sally Black (Navajo) demonstrating at Santa Fe Indian Market, 1984. Image courtesy of the Palace of the Governors Photo Archives (NMHM/DCA), The Santa Fe New Mexican Collection, HP.2014.14.664.

The decade saw a streamlining of standards to be flexible to new materials and techniques. Beadwork and quillwork became a separate classification in 2005. The Native Cinema Showcase, a festival of films by and about Native people, was a partnership between SWAIA, the National Museum of the American Indian, and the Center for Contemporary Arts, which grew throughout the decade as it moved to different venues throughout Santa Fe. In 2006 SWAIA revived its Winter Market, with 100 artists at the Inn at Loretto, but this time it became an annual event.

The Great Recession hurt turnout and sales at the 2008 market, but things looked up by 2009. Buffalo Thunder entered a three-year partnership with SWAIA that included a commercial art gallery in the casino resort. Winter Market 2008 took place in the newly completed Santa Fe Community Convention Center, where Indian Market previews have taken place since 2009. The spacious hall allows crowds of collectors to see all the competition pieces in a grand setting befitting the incredible inspiration, talent, and labor poured into each art piece.

16. Hollis Walker, “SWAIA meeting turns angry,” Santa Fe New Mexican, December 8, 1994.

17. Hollis Walker, “SWAIA director won’t return, board decides,” Santa Fe New Mexican, September 24, 1998.

18. Morgan Lee, “SWAIA Clears Out Debt,” Albuquerque Journal, August 26, 2000.

19. Heather Brewer, “Richness and consistency,” Santa Fe New Mexican, August 20, 2003.

NO. 35, SUMMER 2022 | 57

above Cara Romero (Chemehuevi), The Last Indian Market, 2015, photograph on Legacy Platine paper, 36 × 119 in., image courtesy of the artist. This photograph will be part of Honoring Tradition and Innovation: 100-Years of Santa Fe's Indian Market 1922–2022 at the New Mexico History Museum.

The Ford Foundation provided a $75,000 grant to hold forums to develop a strategic plan for Indian Market’s second century. These talks, begun in October 2009, identified key subjects to address for the future: “authenticity, traditional versus contemporary art, commodification, self-representation, and critical discourse.”20

THE 2010S IN 2010 Bernstein launched SWAIA 365, a series of partnerships and events to promote Native art all year round. These included public roundtable discussions, art business seminars, literary readings, exhibitions, and film festivals.

The ethos of letting artists guide SWAIA’s evolution continued to foster positive changes, such as the 2010 introduction of classification X: film and classification XI: basketry. Formerly classified as part of textiles, basketry as its own classification was quickly vindicated when Jeremy Frey (Passamaquoddy) won best in show with a black ash basket in 2011. That year also saw SWAIA open up Indian Market applications to First Nations artists from Canada for the first time. Fifteen First Nations artists were juried into the 2011 market.

In 2012 deputy director John Torres Nez (Navajo) succeeded Bernstein at the SWAIA helm, with the title of chief operating officer. In a shocking turn of events, Torres Nez resigned in March

2014, followed soon after by Tailinh Agoyo, director of public relations, and Paula Rivera (Taos Pueblo), artist services associate. The three formed the Indigenous Fine Art Market, which took place in Railyard Park overlapping Indian Market weekend. The new market lasted several years, but Agoyo and Rivera parted ways with Torres-Nez21 to form We Are the Seeds that also hosted a concurrent market at the Railyard.

Artist and board member Dallin Maybee (Northern Arapaho/Seneca) became SWAIA's chief operating officer in May 2014 and served through the end of 2017. In 2015 he launched Indian Market: EDGE, an exhibition at the convention center. Visitors engaged directly with the artwork at IM:EDGE, especially monumental sculptures, installations, and two-dimensional work—with no limitations.

In a controversial move, SWAIA ended tenure (a practice that allowed established artists to enter market without submitting images to be juried in) in 2016, the same year it stopped mailing out applications and required applications to be submitted online. Only 200 artists still had tenure.22 The organization had to introduce stop-gap measures for the many SWAIA artists who did not have computers or adequate internet access.

To assist some artists left out of market by these changes, the nonprofit Keshi Foundation launched the Zuni Show in the Scottish Rite Temple north

of the Plaza in 2016 and 2017. Authors Gregory and Angie Schaaf then organized the Free Indian Market, open to all tribes, in that same location beginning in 2018.

SWAIA hired Ira Wilson (Navajo, 1971–2021), previously from the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center in Albuquerque, in 2018 but did not renew his contract.

Amanda Crocker stepped in as interim executive director.

THE 2020S THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC forced Santa Fe Indian Market to go virtual for the first time. Kim Peone (Colville/ Eastern Cherokee) was hired as executive director and worked with artists to create e-commerce websites to serve them all year round. Going beyond other art markets, Santa Fe Indian Market created a virtual interface, NDN World, in which visitors could choose an avatar, attend art exhibitions and concerts, and interact with others in real time. In 2021 the market was in person again, although many collectors and artists stayed home out of caution. In the interest of social distancing, the number of market booths was reduced, sparking other institutions to host their own markets to help artists, many of whom had lost two years of sales.

Now Northern New Mexico art institutions and businesses have partnered to form Indigenous Celebration 2022, and the centennial promises to be one of the best Indian Markets yet.

20. Arin McKenna, “Looking Ahead,” Santa Fe New Mexican, August 15, 2010.

21. Andrew Oxford, “Grand jury indicts former SWAIA exec on embezzlement charge,” Santa Fe New Mexican, May 6, 2016, web. In 2016 a grand jury indicted Torres Nez for embezzling $37,000 SWAIA artists had raised to benefit Japanese tsunami victims.

22. Ann Constable, “In nixing tenure, SWAIA prompts questions about market makeup,” Santa Fe New Mexican, August 28, 2015.

58 | FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

Dolores Purdy (Caddo/Winnebago) Santa Fe Indian Market Booth FR N 319

Rezzies

colored pencils on antique paper

15.5” x 13”

www.dolorespurdy.com

www.dolorespurdy.com Rezzies

colored pencils on antique paper

15.5” x 13”

HEIRLOOM ADORNMENT

Santa Fe Indian Market Booth POG 122 K E R I ATA U M B I

AtaumbiMetals.com Santa Fe Indian Market Booth FR N 319

Dolores Purdy (Caddo/Winnebago)

NO. 35, SUMMER 2022 | 59

Kelly Church Ottawa and Pottawatomi, Gun Lake Band

woodlandarts.com black ash basketry, birchbark biting & fiber arts

Santa Fe Indian Market

August 20 & 21, 2022 | Booth LIN-E 738

“This Present Moment: Crafting a Better World” Renwick Gallery, Smithsonian Art American Art Museum, through April 2, 2023

NeldaDBA NakotaArts.com

(701) 740-0775 Nakota jeweler, silversmith, sculptor & textile artist

TATANKA IN FLOWERS

SWAIA Indian Market, NM Booth PAL S 219 Aug. 20 & 21 Northern Plains Indian Art Market, SD Sept. 23–25 Cherokee Art Market, OK Oct. 8 & 9

nelda Schrupp

HONORING THOSE LOST AT BOARDING SCHOOL ribbon skirt

Tucson Museum of Art Fall Artisans Market, AZ Nov. 18–20 Tubac Art Fiesta, AZ Nov. 24–27, 2022

Commissions welcome

KARMA HENRY OWENS VALLEY PAIUTE

KarmaHenry.com Cerrillos

acrylic, 2021, 12 × 12 in.

Santa Fe Indian Market Aug. 20 & 21 | Booth LIN W 784

Chessney Sevier Jackie Sevier Santa Fe Indian Market

Booth LIN W 790, August 20 & 21, 2022

Northern Plains Indian Art Market Sioux Falls, SD, September 23 – 25, 2022

Prayer, 2022, intaglio etching, 3 × 3 in.

Cherokee Art Market

Catoosa, OK, October 8 & 9, 2022

northernplainsstudio.com

Bighorn Rendezvous Art Show Brinton Museum, Big Horn, WY July 10 - August 21, 2022

chessneysevier.com

KW Walkingstick Pottery

Hand-coiled Cherokee Pottery

2022 Santa Fe Indian Market Lincoln E 759 Cherokee Art Market

walkingstickpottery.com

Magnolia, 2022, hand-coiled ceramic jar, 171/2 × 15 × 15 in.

benjamin harjo jr. american indian artist warriors of fire, 2021, gouache on Arches watercolor paper, 14 × 10 inches

benjaminharjojr.com

“Even in Darkness” 2022 • oil on canvas 36×48"

Cherokee Nation

“Looking to the Future” 24 × 36 in. acrylic on canvas

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billandtracirabbit.com info@billandtracirabbit.com 918-825-3716

PROFILE

Mvskoke Painter & Textile Artist

JIMMIE C. FIFE

By Stacy Pratt, PhD (Mvskoke)

J

IMMIE CAROLE FIFE was around eight years old when she painted her first mural—on the wall of her family home on their allotment in Dustin, Oklahoma. It was around 1948.

“Nabisco Shredded Wheat would put little cards with drawings and facts about Indians on them in the cereal box,” she recalls. “They had drawings of tipis, facts about how buffalo hides were tanned, how meat was dried, that kind of thing—mostly about Plains tribes. I read them over and over, hoping to get a different card each time. Eventually, we sent in labels and got a little booklet with those pictures and stories, and I probably memorized it.”

When her mother, the artist Carmen Fife (Mvskoke, 1915–1986), put up wallpaper on one wall of the kitchen, Carole (the name her family calls Jimmie) had an idea. Her father, James “Jim” Fife (Mvskoke, 1904–1994), spent weekdays working at Pan-American Petroleum in Tulsa, and he would bring home quality art supplies for his wife and children on the weekends. He had recently brought home brightly colored chalk.

“I thought, I have an idea,” Fife says. “‘I’m going to draw an Indian village all over the wall.’ I stood on a chair and started at the top. I went all the way to the floor, drawing. I drew everything I knew about Plains Indians from reading.

I couldn’t wait until Mama woke up the next morning. When I heard her get up and go to the kitchen, I followed her. She was standing there, noticing my mural, and she just said, ‘Oh my. Well, you did a good job.’ She left it up there for years. I thought it was so good!”

Jimmie Carole is the eldest of Jim and Carmen Fife’s eight children,1 one of five daughters who are all artists.

Matrilineal: Legacies of Our Mothers,

an exhibition that Laura Marshall Clark (Mvskoke) curated at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (MoCNA) in Santa Fe from July 29, 2022, to January 15, 2023, will present the art of three generations of Fife women. These are Carmen; Jimmie Carole and her daughter Maya Stewart, designer; Sharon Mouss, writer; Phyllis Fife and daughters Shelley Patrick, muralist, multimedia artist, designer, and Stacy Pratt, writer; Sandy Fife Wilson, shell carver and textile artist; and Robin Fife Jenkins, designer and beadwork artist (all Mvskoke).

STORIES FROM HOME FIFE ALMOST ALWAYS SPEAKS of art in stories, and of stories in her art—family stories, community stories, stories about her extensive travels, stories she has heard or dreamed. The story surrounding the creation of her commissioned mural, The

1. Jim and Carmen’s eldest child, Hannah, died as an infant.

2. “The Earth is Our Mother,” Seattle Office of Arts & Culture, web.

64 | FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

Earth is Our Mother (1976), illustrates the nature of her Mvskoke community in rural Oklahoma, whose daily life she depicts in so many of her paintings.

As the Seattle Office of Arts and Culture describes, The Earth is Our Mother shows the “leaders of five dominant Southeastern Indian tribes discussing their destiny. The figures, from left to right, represent the Choctaw, who were primarily located in southern Mississippi before removal, the Muscogee Creek, a confederation of tribes that primarily lived in Alabama and Georgia; the Seminole, located in Florida; the Chickasaw, from northern Mississippi and Alabama, west of the Muscogee Creek Confederacy; and the Cherokee, located mainly in eastern Tennessee and western North Carolina.2 The US government forcibly removed the majority of these tribes to Indian Territory (now Oklahoma) in the 19th

JIMMIE CAROLE FIFE

century. The Earth is Our Mother mural is located at the Daybreak Star Indian Cultural Center, a social service provider, community center, and cultural home for urban Indians in Seattle. “Our mother was always encouraging us to take every opportunity to learn and travel, so when Daybreak Star announced they were looking for artists to do murals, she told me to write and ask for an application,” Jimmie Carole recalls.

Her parents, Jim and Carmen Fife, both attended boarding schools.

Jim attended Euchee Mission Boarding School in Sapulpa, Oklahoma, while Carmen went to Chilocco Indian Agricultural School in Chilocco [now Newkirk], Oklahoma. Both obtained college educations. All of their children graduated college or trade schools, several with post-graduate degrees. Fife says they encouraged their children to know and respect their Mvskoke culture and

community while also learning about the wider world and its opportunities.

Also educated at Chilocco, Jimmie Carole earned a bachelor of fine arts degree from Oklahoma State University, a teaching certificate from the University of Oklahoma, and a certificate of commercial art from what is now Oklahoma State University Institute of Technology.

In 1960 and 1961, the Rockefeller Foundation gave her a scholarship to attend the Southwest Indian Art Project at the University of Arizona in Tucson, a precursor to the Institute of American Indian Arts. In the 1970s and 1980s, she designed for the Fife Collection, a fashion company that her sisters Sharon, Phyllis, and Sandy founded and ran. After several years of travel around the world as an art buyer, she retired as a public school teacher in the small town of Washington, Oklahoma.

Fife was among 12 artists commissioned to paint murals for the Daybreak

above Memories of the Homeland, 2016, gouache on paper, 381/2 × 51 in., collection of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. opposite Jimmie C. Fife at the Broad, Los Angeles. Photo: Maya Stewart (Chickasaw/Mvskoke/ Choctaw). All images courtesy of the artist.

NO. 35, SUMMER 2022 | 65

PROFILE

They knocked the painting off the sawhorses and ran across the back of the canvas. Their shoe tracks were right across the middle.

above Take Me to Church, 2016, watercolor on paper, 22 × 25 in., collection of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation. opposite Mississippian Mind Games, 2017, gouache on paper, 24 × 36 in.

Center. She looked for a place in her small town large enough to paint on the massive canvas. She ended up in an unused funeral home. “It had all kinds of doors to little rooms with machines and tools we didn’t know the use of and an embalming room,” she recalls. “Upstairs were caskets and death certificates and all kinds of shrouds.”

The artist bought a linen canvas and built a stretcher with the help of her brother-in-law, Orville.3 “We put it up on sawhorses in the parlor of the funeral home, and I got a ladder so I could reach the top of the canvas, which was 12 feet high,” she says. “I sketched my painting, then on Halloween, some boys from a neighboring town broke into the funeral home. They knocked the painting off the sawhorses and ran across the back of the canvas. Their shoe tracks were right across the middle.”

Her brothers Tim, Brian, and Bill4 and brother-in-law chased the boys and took them to the jailhouse, where their parents were called to pick them up.

Her sister, Phyllis, had learned canvas repair and restoration at the Institute of American Indian Arts, so she repaired the canvas, and the mural continued on, but that was not the last of its adventures.

“One day, I was painting, and I heard, ‘Creak, creak, creak,’” says Fife. “It sounded like a casket coming down the stairs, one stair at a time. I quickly cleaned my brushes and ran home, about half a block away. I called my mother, and she said, ‘It’s not a casket. Go see what it is.’”

She came with me to look. There were three doors along the back of the room where I was painting, and I had tacked wooden panels over them so nobody could come inside. It turned out that one of the boards came loose and was

3. The late Orville “Don” Patrick, the author’s father, was a residential hall director at the Institute of American Indian Arts in the 1960s and retired as the superintendent of a rural Oklahoma school.

4. These were the late Tim Fife, master mechanic and former councilman of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, Brian Fife, master mechanic, and eldest brother Bill Fife, former Principal Chief of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation (all Mvskoke).

66 | FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

JIMMIE CAROLE FIFE

starting to fall down a little bit at a time, making that creaking noise. Just like my mother said, there’s always an answer for everything. You don’t have to be scared.

But I was!”

When Fife finished her mural, her sister Sharon organized an exhibition in the funeral home featuring several of Jimmie Carole’s paintings along with the mural, so the people of Dustin—who had been curious for weeks—could see what had been going on. Senators, Bureau of Indian Affairs officials, and Oklahoma poet laureate Leslie A. McRill attended, along with most of the townspeople. “It was packed,” says Fife. “I was just hoping the floor of the funeral home wouldn’t fall in.”

Since then, Fife’s art has been exhibited in far more prestigious venues. Her artwork has been shown internationally and is in public collections including the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in New York and Washington, DC. In 1997 the Five Civilized Tribes Museum in Muskogee,

Oklahoma, named her a Master Artist.

She has participated in and won awards at art markets including the Santa Fe Indian Art Market, Heard Museum Guild Indian Fair and Market in Phoenix, and Eiteljorg Indian Market and Festival in Indianapolis.

STORIES OF THE WORLD AS A QUILTER AND DESIGNER, Fife works in abstraction with unusual angles and textures. Though almost always representational, her paintings of Mvskoke life convey a sense of the universe and time through intricate background details, including mound builder motifs and designs from the ancestral homelands of the Mvskoke people. Her lived experience as a Mvskoke person as well as research and oral history deeply inform her art.

Fife says she does not consider herself an “artist,” because in our family, art is such an everyday behavior. Though

she always created art in various media, she did not have formal art lessons until college. When she first began to paint “seriously” as a college student, she told her mother that she wished we were from a more interesting tribe, with more interesting things to paint. At that time during the late 1950s and early 1960s, Plains and Southwestern imagery overshadowed the art of Southeastern tribes in the markets and galleries. Her mother, Carmen, who had studied alongside several well-known artists, including members of the Kiowa Six, told Jimmie Carole that Mvskoke life just seemed boring to her because she was in the middle of it, and that she would find that people outside her community would not find it boring.

As she traveled the world to Japan, Guatemala, Thailand, Korea, and other countries in the 1960s and 1970s, Jimmie Carole discovered that was true. She began to paint historical and current Mvskoke scenes and people she knew, heard of, or dreamed about. She continues to travel and has visited Europe several times, including her favorite trip NO. 35, SUMMER 2022 | 67

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to Bilbao, Spain, in Basque country with her daughter, designer Maya Stewart (Chickasaw/Mvskoke/Choctaw). There they visited the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, fulfilling a lifelong dream. above Never Underestimate the Talents of a Creek Grandma, 2021, watercolor on paper, 16 × 11 in. opposite I See the Future, 2018, gouache on paper, 16 × 141/4 in.

STORIES ACROSS TIME & SPACE FIFE’S LIFE EXPERIENCES contribute to the stories that inform her paintings and have a story behind them. Always, these stories, real or imagined, include details, mundane or supernatural, that convey the painting’s “story” through a particularly Mvskoke concept of time/

experience that scholar Laura Harjo (Mvskoke) has termed a “kin-spacetime envelope.”5 Fife’s paintings embody the experience of one detail leading to a memory that grows into a story, which brings a person from the past into the present through her portrayal, and into the future through the seeing. For Mvskoke people, this is a constant experience, Fife says. Her paintings reflect this continuum—not through deliberate choices but as a consequence of being a Mvskoke artist.

“My parents would critique my paintings and tell me what I needed to do,” Fife says. “They had a lot of information about the old ways. For example, one time I painted a picture of a man sitting with a woman who was trying to get a quilt done. She was really in a hurry and asked her husband if he would help her, so in the painting, he is sewing. The man looked like my Uncle Dan, and I called it You Better Not Tell Anybody. Daddy was laughing at it, and he said, ‘You know what you need? All the Indians used to have a picture of Will Rogers on their wall.’ So I painted a picture of Will Rogers hanging on the wall in the background. I always paint details in the background, and I’ve done that for a long time … different things that remind me of Creek life.”

“Creek life” has universality for Fife.

She’s seen it in her travels, and it struck her recently while watching coverage of the war in Ukraine. “On television, there were about five old men talking about the war in Ukraine,” she says. “One of them built stairs for buildings. He said, ‘You have to know the wood. You have to know this and that…’ The other men were saying, ‘Yes, he’s built beautiful stairs in almost every big building in Kyiv.’ One of the men said, ‘He’s the Elon Musk of Kyiv stairs.’ They were laughing and talking, and they sounded just like old Creek men standing around talking at a time that was so serious. The reporter asked the stair builder if he was going to catch a bus to Poland, and he said: ‘No. This is our homeland, our home.’ As soon as he said that I just thought, ‘That’s what happened to the Creeks.’ They weren’t going to leave for anything. They were going to stay until the end. We felt that way too. I immediately thought of the painting, and it was

5. Laura Harjo, Spiral to the Stars: Mvskoke Tools of Futurity (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 2019), 28.

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something I had to do … so I did it.” In April 2022, Our Homeland, Our Home won the Mvskoke Heritage Award at the inaugural Mvskoke Art Market, hosted by the Muscogee (Creek) Nation in Tulsa.

Fife said ideas for artwork often come suddenly to her. “I don’t know if it’s like this for all artists, but sometimes I dream of things, and I get up and just start,” she says. “Or I’ll see a design or think of something that reminds me of something else that reminds me of Creek life, and I just know to paint it.”

LIFE, LEARNING & INSPIRATION FIFE COLLECTS BEAUTIFUL, interesting objects and materials. Sometimes they provide inspiration, as well as a challenge: “I’m never bored, and I love a challenge in art or quilting or anything,” she says. “I love to find hard things to do and figure them out. For example, I’m not good at math, so when I look at old Creek designs and other things from long ago, I have to figure out how to make what I want with them, and I usually do it by folding papers, using a string, making my own designs. A lot of people do it on the computer, but I design things faster by hand than I could on a computer.”

Fife is also the epitome of a lifetime learner, taking workshops and classes on watercolor, quilting, bookmaking, and whatever seems interesting: “I like to paint with gouache, and I’ve been taking watercolor lessons for around eight years or so,” she says. “I still feel like I’m not a watercolorist. But I love learning new things every day. I feel like I can learn something from every class I take and every artist I know. When I first started quilting, I had already made a quilt that I sold to the Smithsonian, but I didn’t really know what I was doing. I was just eyeballing everything, making up my designs, but when I took a quilting class much later, I found I could bring to life some of my ideas with more precision using the new techniques while keeping the creativity.”

Fife is a Mvskoke wife, mother, aunt, educator, and active community member. Within all those roles, she has always prioritized the creation of art, even during a time when the outside world did

not encourage women to do that. “It’s because of our mother,” she says. “If we had something to do concerning art, she would let us do it. People would come to the house, and we would be drawing a picture or painting or making a quilt or clothes. They would ask why we weren’t washing dishes or something. We would just tell them, ‘Mama let me do this.’ And she did. She taught us that we should do art first, because the idea might not always be there, but the dishes will always still be there!”

Fife’s mother raised her to value art and that’s how Fife raises the next generation of artists in her family. Asked how it feels to see them getting formal education and creating art, carrying on that tradition, Fife says, “I just expected it.”

Her parents expected it of her, and our generation will expect art-making

from the next one. As she was taught, Fife paints stories in layers of kinship and time, reaching way back and years forward—for all our Mvskoke ancestors and descendants throughout the universe.

“I think of our grandparents sending everyone to school so we would get an education and encouraging our art. I just want to represent what they had in mind for all of us,” she says. “I like to explore and do different things, and now I’m old enough that I don’t care what anyone thinks. I just do my art, and that’s what I have to say.”

Jimmie Carole Fife will exhibit at the 2022 Santa Fe Indian Market, and her work will be on view at Matrilineal: Legacies of Our Mothers at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts.

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Oglala Lakota Beadwork & Quillwork Artist

EMIL HER MANY HORSES

By Andrea L. Ferber, PhD

O

NE MAY NOT KNOW IT from his soft-spoken demeanor and quiet humility, but Emil Her Many Horses embodies a cultural powerhouse nurturing a resurgence of Indigenous knowledge.

An artist and scholar, he is best known to many as a curator at the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) in Washington, DC, where he has worked since 1998.

His beadwork is in the collections of the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles, the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art in Indianapolis, and the Plains Indian Museum in Cody, Wyoming, as well as the Aktá Lakota Museum, the Heritage Center at Red Cloud Indian School in South Dakota, and the NMAI. Emil Her Many Horses was born in 1954 on the Pine Ridge Reservation and grew up on the Rosebud Reservation nearby, both in South Dakota.1 His Lakota name is Taopi Cikala (Little Wound). His mother worked as an operating room nurse, and his father was an environmental health technician at the Indian Health Services in Rosebud. He is one of eight children—five of whom have earned advanced academic degrees. Though they highly valued Lakota culture and practices, his parents did not teach their children the Lakota language because they wanted them to succeed in school.

Her Many Horses recalls his surprise at a powwow when he heard his father give an invocation in Lakota. “We didn’t even know Dad could speak so fluently!” Her Many Horses says. “Language is not my strong point. A lot of language is coming back through prayer, ceremony, and song. My dad was a Catholic and participated in traditional ceremonies such as the Sun Dance.” Her Many Horses wrote about this ceremony in an essay for the recent exhibition catalogue, Dakota Modern: The Art of Oscar Howe (National Museum of the American Indian, 2022). He has also revived cultural practices within his family, such as a ball-throwing ceremony for girls who reach puberty.

Her Many Horses was motivated to learn beadwork in junior high when he saw a beautifully beaded object that he desired but could not purchase. He learned geometric beadwork from Alice Fish (Sicangu, 1900–1984). Many families regularly commissioned her to make regalia and accessories. “We called her Grandma Fish,” he says, “I used to bother her all the time.”

She planned complex designs and the color combinations in her mind, then drew on paper, which remains part of Her Many

Horses’s practice. He has since studied so much of her beadwork in collections across the country, he can immediately distinguish it from other artists’ work. Initially Her Many Horses beaded belt buckles and purses, which he sold to the wives of doctors connected to the Rosebud IHS Hospital.

The journey Her Many Horses has traveled to be a celebrated artist and curator has been more circuitous than one might think. He earned a degree in business administration from Augustana University in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and after college worked as a bank manager. Then he applied his business acumen to a finance office at a Jesuit mission on Rosebud where in his free time he explored the collection of the Buechel Memorial Lakota Museum. The museum was part of the Jesuit mission, and, when the museum needed a director, he interviewed and got the job.

1. Emil Her Many Horses in discussion with the author, March 31, 2022, and email messages to author, April 26, 2022.

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EMIL HER MANY HORSES

A business background prepared Her Many Horses well for this position.

He learned about collection management, exhibition design, and other curatorial responsibilities by attending conferences and networking with professionals in the field. Though he now works for one of the most prestigious institutions in the world, his family was at first skeptical of his move into a museum career. “A lot of Native people consider museums to be ghost houses,” he explains. “My dad told me museums were spooky.”

Her Many Horses’s experience at the Buechel Museum was positive, but after eight years he left to study with a Jesuit order and considered becoming a priest. During this contemplative time, he continued to visit collections,

above, left Red Shawl Woman, 2007, tanned hide, glass seed beads, horsehair, ribbon, cloth, commercial leather, metal brads, wooden stand, private collection. above, right Otter Pouch, 2016, otter pelt, hide, wool, glass seed beads, sequins, hawk bells, collection of the Washington Pavilion, Sioux Falls, South Dakota. opposite Emil Her Many Horses.

All images courtesy of the artist, unless otherwise noted.

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above Honoring Our Lakota Vietnam Veterans, 2002, deerhide, glass seed beads, cotton, wool, synthetic fabric, feathers, wood, 441/2 × 26 in., collection of the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, 26/604. opposite Tasunka Ota Win (Many Horses Woman’s) Shoes, 2015, glass cut seed beads on Christian Louboutin lace-up, open toe heels, private collection. Image courtesy of the artist.

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even interning at the Field Museum in Chicago. After a move to New York, he familiarized himself with the massive Lakota collection at the National Museum of the American Indian, which was in the Bronx at that time. After photographing and researching beadwork and quillwork, he decided to return to the museum field.

The assistant director at the time, Bruce Bernstein, offered him a curatorial position 22 years ago.

Through several career shifts, Her Many Horses continued his artistic practice. In the late 1980s he entered his first

competition with an eleven-inch doll made from tanned hide. When searching for a miniature belt buckle, his dad offered his watch clasp. With this he won first place at the Northern Plains Indian Art Market in Sioux Falls.

Her Many Horses has made several dolls since that recognition, and frequently these dolls honor women.

Red Shawl Woman (2007) wears a hide dress with matching moccasins adorned with red, white, and blue beads in an Alice Fish–style geometric pattern. The doll also wears an elaborate breastplate

EMIL HER MANY HORSES

and carries a handbag. Red Dress Special (2019) is a 45-inch mannequin. Her regalia includes a headband, choker with a turtle amulet, medallion necklace, hair ties, a wide belt, purse, moccasins, and leggings—all fully beaded with symmetrical designs. A border of red triangles and chevrons in orange, yellow, and blue are set against a white background. Otter pelts with beaded fringe nearly reach her ankles. Her face is shrouded in a dark blue mask with a bright red handprint, which has become the symbol for missing and murdered Indigenous women (MMIW).

This work might be understood in relation to the Faceless Dolls Project, a series of public workshops produced in 2012 by the Native Women’s Association of Canada to make 582 dolls representing known cases of MMIW. In 2002 Her Many Horses completed Honoring Our Lakota Vietnam

Veterans, a miniature tipi with eight figures to honor Vietnam War veterans, especially his uncle, Charles Pablo (Oglala Lakota, 1941–1995). “Veterans are today’s warrior societies,” the artist explains. Stars, US flags, and helicopters decorate the beaded tipi. The four female figures wear Lakota regalia, while four male figures wear US Army uniforms.

The female relatives welcome the four warriors home. Each has a unique pair of tiny moccasins. This work is featured in Small Spirits: Native American Dolls from the National Museum of the American Indian by Mary Jane Lenz (University of Washington Press, 2004), in which the author gives a broad overview of different uses dolls have had in various tribes across time.

Her Many Horses learned Eastern Sioux floral style beading from his maternal grandmother, Grace Pourier

(Oglala Lakota, 1909–1988), who passed the knowledge from her French/Lakota grandmother. He has applied this floral style on dresses, umbrellas, fans, parfleche cases, baby doll carriages, horse masks, luxury footwear, and even a gramophone.

The Aktá Lakota Museum has an intricately crocheted parasol and fan beaded in this style, which the artist completed in 2013. Often an eagle is central to these designs. “The eagle is an important bird,” says Her Many Horses, “in the sense that it can fly the highest and carry our prayers to God/Great Mystery…”

Night Sky Dress (2017) is an upcycled cocktail dress that Her Many Horses found at a vintage store. It already had the silver-colored metal embellishments that emulate a brilliant, starry expanse.

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above Eastern Sioux Style Beaded Parasol and Fan, 2012, tanned deer hide, glass seed beads, vintage parasol, lace, bamboo fan, collection of the Aktá Lakota Museum, Chamberlain, South Dakota. Image courtesy of the Aktá Lakota Museum. opposite Lakota Paint Kit, 2007, rawhide, tanned hide, glass seed beads, tin cones, dyed horsehair, tortoise carapaces, bone, pigments, cloth. Image courtesy of Home and Away Gallery, Kennebunkport, Maine.

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represents the four directions. Her Many Horses notes this continues a legacy of altering (and Indigenizing) settler-colonial clothing, in this case using fine glass seed beads sewn in lane stitch.

Her Many Horses’s curatorial projects provide historical context for his artistic work, notably Identity by Design: Tradition, Change, and Celebration in Native Women’s Dresses, which opened in 2007, and A Song for the Horse Nation, which opened in 2009. Celebrating the longstanding alliance between Indigenous and horse nations, the latter featured equine regalia as well as representations of horses in nearly every medium. The exhibition opened at the George Gustav Heye Center in New York, then traveled

to the NMAI in Washington, DC, and remains accessible online.

In college, Her Many Horses made a beaded baby cradle with three horses on each side and has made numerous horse masks. Typically these masks incorporate symbols of power, such as the bison head or eagle, underscoring attributes of the individual horse. His great-grandmother Susie Blunt Horn Matthews (Oglala Lakota, 1886–1974) frequently depicted horses in her beadwork, and Her Many Horses has applied this motif to several pairs of Christian Louboutin stilettos.

Her Many Horses credits beadwork artist and fashion designer Jamie Okuma (Luiseño/Shoshone-Bannock) for inspiring him to delve into fashion. At

EMIL HER MANY HORSES

the Heard Museum Guild Fair in 2015, he offered Okuma a Pendleton blanket when he asked permission to bead a pair of heels as she had done. She happily agreed, and since then he has made six pairs. “I never thought I’d pay $1,000 for a pair of shoes,” he says with a laugh. One pair has four horses in different colors that represent the cardinal directions and seasons: blue is west, red is north, yellow is east, and white is south. He has also beaded shoes with Eastern Sioux floral designs.

Beyond dolls and many forms of beadwork, Her Many Horses creates other items that keep his cultural heritage alive. In 2007 he made Lakota Paint Kit with all the necessary tools a Plains artist would have carried to practice their craft: a beaded hide box to hold pouches for earth pigments, turtle shells for mixing paint, and bone fragments/ paint brushes used to absorb and apply pigments. Historically Lakota women painted buffalo hide robes and rawhide parfleches, while men painted tipi covers, shields, and winter counts.

Her Many Horses continues to practice the Roman Catholic faith of his family but admires other spiritual ways, including those of the Native American Church. The Native American Church emerged in the early 20th century and maintains many tenets of the Christian faith. In homage to this, he made beautiful instruments to be used during prayer ceremonies in the Native American Church: a gourd rattle, a fan with macaw feathers, and a beaded staff.

When asked if there are many artists in his family, Her Many Horses said his nephew has become a great beadwork artist, but the family has more dancers than artists. He views his many roles as an artist, curator, scholar, administrator, and advocate as interrelated. “As an artist and curator I like to follow tradition,” he says.

Some of the most formative texts he has read include Lakota Belief and Ritual by James Walker (1980) and John Neihardt’s classic, Black Elk Speaks (1932).

Her Many Horses is inspired every day in his position at the NMAI, where

he and his colleagues manage the world’s largest collection of art by Indigenous peoples of the Americas. But he is most energized by interacting with fellow artists on the “art market trail,” traveling to six art markets across the country each year. Like many others, he found the diminished interpersonal connections during the pandemic to be one of its more difficult challenges. Even so, he continues to work on his art one to two hours each evening, and more when preparing for a market or competition. While he has won many accolades for his impeccable beadwork, quillwork, and doll-making skills, he says praise from elders is “better than a blue ribbon.”

Emil Her Many Horses will exhibit at the 2022 Santa Fe Indian Market, booth PLZ 67. He will also have a booth at the Northern Indian Art Market on September 24 and 25, 2022, in Sioux Falls, South Dakota, and at the Cherokee Art Market on October 8 and 9, 2022, in Catoosa, Oklahoma.

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Muscogee/Citizen Potawatomi Painter

DANIEL MCCOY JR.

By Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD

B

ORN IN TULSA, OKLAHOMA, Daniel McCoy Jr. belongs to a family of artists. His maternal g r an d f at h e r uph ol s t e re d furniture, and his grandmother was a seamstress who, along with other family members, introduced Daniel to Indigenous art exhibitions at galleries and museums such as the Philbrook Museum of Art and the Cowboy Hall of Fame (now the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum). Daniel McCoy Sr. was a non-Native biker from Tulsa who was stationed in California while in the US Air Force. After he was discharged from the service in 1965, he remained in California during the counterculture movement and became known for pinstriping Harley Davidson motorcycles.

At age 15, McCoy Jr. attended Sequoyah High School, the Cherokee Nation boarding school in Tahlequah, Oklahoma, where he was mentored by renowned artist Mary Adair (Cherokee Nation). With Adair’s encouragement, he entered national art competitions, most notably at the Heard Museum.

After boarding school, McCoy enrolled at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe but soon returned to Oklahoma for the birth of his first son. Back in Oklahoma he worked in a commercial sign business painting billboards and television backgrounds. Years later he returned to the IAIA to complete his degree and soon settled in Santa Fe with his family. His work is exhibited throughout the United States, and he has received numerous awards including the SITE Santa Fe Scholar Award and the Oscar Howe Memorial Award at the annual Red Cloud Indian Art Show in South Dakota.

MRS: You were welcomed into a “household of artisans, farmers, music, and subculture.” Can you talk about 76 | FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

your early life and how this mashup of professions influenced you?

DM: It’s a long story with lots of branches.

Basically I grew up on a small farm in rural Oklahoma in an area called Bristow.

It was allotment land that belonged to my grandfather who is Citizen Potawatomi, and my grandmother is Muscogee Creek.

My grandfather built furniture and was good at gardening. My grandmother worked in the medical field and was also a good seamstress. She has an interest in Westerns and horror movies.

MRS: That makes sense after seeing some of your work.

DM: My mother instilled a work ethic in me. She was that driving force to pursue a future in art. She inspired me with her

sense of humor and excellent taste in music during those days. My dad was a veteran of Vietnam. After he was released, he joined a biker gang in San Bernardino.

He brought that subculture with him.

He even lived here in New Mexico near Santa Fe at a compound at one time. I didn’t find these things out until after he passed on. My aunt lived up in New York.

We would visit her. I saw the birth of hip hop and graffiti culture on our visits. I saw Keith Haring’s art. I would go back to Oklahoma and look at Life magazine and see these different connections.

My grandparents collected Native art—Woody Crumbo, Acee Blue Eagle, Joan Hill—artists who were from the same tribes as my grandparents. I think it was a sense of pride. They were

DANIEL McCOY JR.

above Shoshone Madonna II, 2015, oil on canvas, collection of the Heritage Center at Red Cloud Indian School. opposite Daniel McCoy Jr. in his studio. All images courtesy of the artist.

really proud of Native art. When we got together, we would visit museums or see art shows. I remember seeing a Woody Crumbo show when I was really little.

My dad was non-Native—he’s Scots-Irish. He was a pinstriper. He pinstriped hot rods and Harleys. When I looked at the pinstripe on the front of a ’51 Mercury, I thought it looked like an Archie Blackowl or a waterbird design. I thought they were the same thing. It was the line quality. I had no idea then that it was two different things.

I always tried to transcend those borders. I felt mixed blood at home, but once I started traveling, that stuff meant

nothing at all. Those lines are blurred, and it’s what you make out of it. I’m still trying to make my family happy with what I do.

MRS: You’ve mentioned the importance of Mary Adair in your life. What impact has she had, or does she still have, on your life and work?

DM: I went to this little country school called Olive in Creek County, Oklahoma.

It was a real small school. Basically the only thing you can do is go to vocational school, the service, or have a family real young. Your options are limited so I went to boarding school, because some of my family had. I was in Mary’s classroom around age 15. I saw some other artists

there with technical ability. I wanted to be a part of any art program. Mary took me under her wing. We [students] studied different artists from the Native genre. We would do a report on them, study their artwork, then make something that looks similar to theirs—Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, Bill Rabbit, and Johnny Tiger Jr. We would send our work to student art shows. Lo and behold, we started selling.

My art career started when I was about 15 or 16. I would get a check back in the mail and have money back in boarding school. That was big stuff [laughs]! She took us around to meet other artists and see shows. We did star quilts. We did beadwork. We experimented to see what NO. 35, SUMMER 2022 | 77

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a handful of people close to me would understand. My dad had a lot of old black light posters, Grateful Dead posters, and all those different subcultures from the Bay Area. I collected comics. Jack Kirby was a big influence. But what I wanted to do was put all that together with Native art. Graffiti was also big, but I wasn’t very good at it. Every time I tried I would get arrested [laughs]. I got arrested really quick. I was from the country, what was I going to spray paint, a tree? I got hired as a billboard painter. My first job was to clean and touch up a billboard that a graffiti artist painted over. That got graffiti out of my system really quick. I’m very influenced by music. Not so much movies but more so books. I would look at contemporary New York painters. I would create art to the music of Art Blakey. That was so inspiring. I wear my influences on my sleeve. I collect old records. I collect so much reference material.

MRS: Your work is so closely engaged with music.

our niche was. She instilled a work ethic in us that is still there. It all goes back to Mary. She’s a wonderful person, and I love her.

MRS: You attended the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. What did you take from that school that still lingers with you?

DM: My immediate family and I are all very tied to IAIA. We would get these promotional packages from IAIA at the Sequoyah Boarding School. We wanted to paint like the artists there, but Oklahoma had its own style. There’s a wall in Amarillo, and you can’t cross over. That’s not true now. We wanted to paint like the Southwestern artists who we see. Mary showed us Native Peoples or Southwestern Art magazines. We would try the different techniques of these painters.

I got a scholarship. What IAIA was teaching then was very conceptual.

We were still doing Flatstyle art. They made us switch to oils. My technical skills weren’t up to the skills of the older students, but I still tried really hard.

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IAIA and Sequoyah were too similar. I had been burned out at school.

My son Roman was about to be born, so I went home. I gave up and crashed and burned, which was embarrassing and shameful. I didn’t know I was empowered yet. Something had been put in my head by then. I tried to hustle my artwork in Oklahoma City and Tulsa, but it wasn’t as easy as in Santa Fe. So I became a commercial artist. I did billboards, buses, television backdrops. I did that for six or seven years in Tulsa. In the late ’90s, I decided to go back to school. When I did, I had that technical ability in place. We are still connected to the IAIA. My wife [Topaz Jones] is painting a mural there now with our children.

DM: When you hit adolescence, whether you know it or not, you copy your parents, your uncles, your cousins, your elders. I grew up seeing Kiss. Abdul Mati Klarwein did the Santana album cover that I love.

I just love his artwork. Rick Griffin did a bunch of Grateful Dead stuff. Quicksilver Messenger Service. Robert Williams was involved with the Hell’s Angels stuff, so I would see that with my dad. I would also see Cat Stevens records. He did his own artwork.

MRS: I love the Mona Bone Jakon cover.

That song “Lilywhite”…

MRS: Your work amalgamates 1960s psychedelia, posters for acid rock bands, pop art, street art, graffiti, punk, Art Nouveau, Bacone School Flatstyle, tattoos, graphic novels, comics, and abstract painting.

DM: I grew up with that record. Whatever is big at the time I don’t get until 20 years later. Right now, I’m inundated with ’80s stuff that isn’t as cool. I gravitated towards the psychedelia records. We would put on those records and listen to them, but I would study the artwork on the covers.

Even stuff I hated like the Eagles would still have some cool lettering. I remember my parents played “One of These Nights” like 25 times in a row [laughs.] I can put that stuff on, and it charges a certain battery in my head.

DM: There’s usually a personal narrative that I try to hide or cloak. Maybe

MRS: You’ve said that you paint “to leave an imprint—to re-create past

DANIEL McCOY JR.

triumphs, current disasters, and inspiring stories.” Can you expand on this statement?

DM: My dad was an artist and like I said, everybody in the family did something.

All I had left of my dad was his artwork, a few portfolios. I realized the importance of artwork early on and how it can instill or communicate to many people.

You never know who’s watching, who the audience is, or what they’re taking from it, their presumptions, how it makes them feel. It’s a magic thing. It’s a language you’re speaking to other artists and whoever will listen.

I had a little drawing table and was there by myself before my brothers were born. I worked everything out by drawing. People still tell me, “Hey Danny, I’ve got this drawing you gave me from second grade.” During this pandemic, you can give a painting to somebody when things are down, and it really makes their day. There’s a power in that. I guess that’s why I want to leave an imprint. I get exhausted, but within a few days I’m back in my studio. All my kids create. It’s a language that we all speak.

MRS: Your painting, Insulin Holocaust (2011), is based on your family’s relationship with diabetes for 50 years.

It’s powerful. Both sides of my family, especially my mum, are now experiencing the debilitating side effects of diabetes. How did diabetes shape this painting?

DM: Diabetes runs in my family. Diabetes affected my grandparents. We started eating out of the box instead of from the ground, from farm to table. I lost my grandmother to diabetes. I started that painting in 2011 the day I found out my mom had become diabetic. It’s interesting how genetics work. I’m prediabetic now and am working hard to fight that off.

It’s upsetting because you don’t realize how bad this food is for you. I do want to work more on that subject matter especially now that I’m fighting it so hard. I’ve lost some friends to it already. It doesn’t matter when or where, how healthy or big, it seems to affect our family somehow. So that’s what that painting is about. I took some hints from Disney—Lady and the

Tramp—and there’s also a void, a void of what people are missing from capitalism being put on food. It should be our God-given right to have good food.

Some people don’t have the resistance to fight this. Sugar is a problem.

MRS: In the second work I mentioned, the drawing Inner-City Southwest Disenchantment, you also take on a historical and social issue shown in a National Geographic documentary, though the audience isn’t exactly clear what that issue is. Can you speak about how this work came about?

above, top Insulin Holocaust, 2012, acrylic on canvas. above, bottom Inner-City Southwestern Disenchantment #1, 2012, India ink on paper. For entire comic, see FAAM no. 1 (Fall 2013), 78–79. opposite Canyon Walls, 2021, oil on wood.

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above Hot Sauce Man and Burrito Man Get to Go Outside Again, 2020, acrylic on canvas. opposite Aspens in the Fall, 2018, oil on canvas.

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DM: That’s my comic work. That piece and the diabetes piece were created in the same room around the same time. It was a rough time, a lot of changes then. My wife and I were watching something on A&E about Andrew Jackson. That fired me up. The National Geographic program referenced in the comic was about mound builders and stone masonry. They were saying, “Did the Natives make this?

Surely not. It must have been aliens!” I can’t watch these shows. It drives me up the wall. There have been different peaks of humanity. You have these great rock masons, abstract mathematics, it goes on and on. These “educational” programs are so ridiculous.

[The comic emerged] rather spontaneously. I like my comic work to be abstract or to have a dreamscape feel to it. Maybe it starts off in a modern living room but goes into a thought process

where the verbiage is poetic. Maybe the outcome isn’t like “Superman rescues the puppy from the tree, and all is good.” I like to leave things hanging. I was feeling some inner-city disenchantment. It was a rough time. I’ve shaken that negativity now. The Southwest is my home away from home. I never thought I’d raise kids here, but my kids have New Mexican accents [laughs].

MRS: What do you struggle with as an artist? What do you work to overcome?

DM: There’s a sense of morals I’d like to address. Sometimes there’s a message, but I don’t want to be too negative. I also want to right a wrong over an issue I’ve been obsessing about. I’ve been doing that before I even knew what art therapy was; I was trying to reveal something to myself. I also try to reveal something to the audience. At the same time, I want

DANIEL McCOY JR.

to entertain people. I want them to say, “Oh, this is different.” I thrive off that.

I would enter some more conservative shows and liked being the sore thumb. I couldn’t stand Trail of Tears paintings. I’d wonder, Why do we have to honor this? So I’d do something different. I’d do a Ford F-150 with rocket blasters.

Now I don’t see it as an uphill battle—a lot of the younger generation of Native artists are producing some groundbreaking art. The art I see at the museum I work at, SITE Santa Fe—I enjoy that just as much. I enjoy other people’s exhibitions more than setting up my own. Getting out of this pandemic, which has only been recent, I enjoy seeing new thought processes. I think Native women artists are saying the most powerful things I’ve ever seen. It takes me back to Joan Hill’s work. It’s that language, a certain set of colors, certain techniques.

I enjoy observing this movement.

MRS: You’re present on apps like Instagram. How important is it for you and other artists to show your work there and other glimpses into your life?

DM: First, social media was a gamechanger. Not only did I rediscover underground bands that I thought had broken up, but when Facebook first came out, I was able to sell art and live in a rural area. I was also able to see what other artists were doing. When Instagram came around, you could see which way an artist was—if you see more selfies than artwork, Aha! What I don’t like about it is that it puts this bizarre competitiveness against Native vs. Native. I think we need to come together and make this incredible stew that’s unstoppable. I can see it get ugly. I’ve also had a lot of copycats. I kind of stepped away from it. But it can be positive. The work gets out there and reaches people.

MRS: What are you working on these days?

DM: I’m in Chiefs, Clans, and Kin, a show about people who have Scots [and] Irish ancestry and Southeastern Native ancestry. It’s more common than I knew.

Right now I’ve been looking at a lot of precontact artwork of all types, all up and down the continent. I see these great comparisons of line quality. It’s proof that

there was a lot of activity going on preColumbus. The art tells me a different story. I’m doing new work based on that.

I’m also doing New Mexico landscapes.

I avoided landscapes for 20 years, but I started hiking with friends and my kids and got into nature more. I studied the New Mexican landscape but still do it in a cartoon kind of way. I still have R. Crumb and Dr. Seuss’s influence instead of these New Mexico painters that people copy over and over.

MRS: I can see the R. Crumb influence.

DM: Crumb is a huge influence on me— his prolific turnout and his dedication to artwork with original content. The Cheap Thrills album by Big Brother and the Holding Company was always in rotation growing up. I would study the cover closely and wonder where it came from. It seemed like a different world produced it somehow. Anyways I hope to take his influence into a science fiction– influenced territory and combine it with Native imagery.

I plan to combine this new work with my recent interest in landscapes.

The landscapes give me a meditative feeling while creating them. I start off with a sketch first, maybe a few reference photos of the location. When creating the linework I start at the top left and finish at the bottom right of the surface.

It begins to paint itself; this is where the meditation comes into the process. I really get into it, the more closely I look at the complexity of nature, the more interesting the composition becomes. To attempt to replicate nature with the ability I have been given is very much a release.

I hope to start here in the Southwest and take these landscapes to the Southeastern Woodlands. I am challenged to produce these bright green landscapes and make them work somehow.

The pandemic has changed me. I’m trying to navigate back home and thank the people and artists who have helped me on this path. I wish to pay respect to them all through the art.

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Zuni Ceramic Artist

NOREEN SIMPLICIO

By Miranda Belarde-Lewis, PhD (Zuni/Tlingit) It’s not art. It’s way beyond art; it’s my whole life.

—Noreen Simplicio (Zuni)

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UNI POTTERY IS KNOWN around the world, and Noreen Simplicio is known for her de:wa', her pottery. A member of the Badger clan and a child of the Eagle clan, Noreen has been making and teaching how to make pottery at Zuni Pueblo for nearly 40 years.

The ollas she creates are built coil by coil out of natural clay harvested from the rolling hills on the Zuni Reservation.

The designs follow Zuni aesthetic patterns featuring deerin-the-house, concentric floral medallions, rain birds, frogs, and tadpoles. The designs and layout pay homage to ancient Zuni artistic practices. Most important to Noreen is that Zuni pottery not be thought of as a “dying art” and that she and other potters share their unique skills and gifts with others who want to learn.

The two-dimensional designs of frogs and lizards have sprung to life through Noreen’s artistic innovations.

Her distinctive style of de:wa'-making includes sculptural elements that provide texture to the smooth walls of her pottery. Three-dimensional frogs and their buggy eyes peer out over the rims of some of her pots, looking like a row of watchful dakkya'kwe, or frog people, waiting for the moment to jump out. In other pots, Simplicio has expertly captured the movement of misho, the lizards, as they zigzag their way across the high desert floor. On these vessels, the lizards are scattered across the surface of the pots, their heads gracefully lifted off the shoulders and rims of the ollas, casting their own shadows when viewed in the light.

Another three-dimensional innovation Noreen has brought forth is carving Pueblo scenes out of the shoulders of her vessels. She carefully carves the iconic, stacked, and mud-packed architecture of Pueblo middle villages out of her finished pottery, encircling the pots’ shoulders, floating above Zuni designs wrapped around the bodies of the pots.

Sometimes the walled scenes include the he'bok'onne, the outdoor ovens now synonymous with Pueblo bread and cooking. Sometimes small figures delicately occupy the village scenes, a visual and metaphorical connection to Zuni people being cradled and supported by the longevity of our arts.

Many academic texts focus on the long-standing legacy of clay and ceramics for utilitarian and ceremonial uses of pottery

by Ancestral Pueblo peoples in what is now the American

Southwest. Far fewer texts focus on the voices of Zuni potters themselves, with the notable exceptions of Dialogues with Zuni Potters (1995) by renowned Zuni potter Milford Nahohai, and the I am a Zuni Artist video series by ShiwiSun Productions, a Zuni production company with a series of artist mini-biographies on YouTube. In Noreen’s video, she shows us the hill on the mountain where she harvests raw clay, speaks openly about the spiritual protocol she follows before she gathers her materials, and reminds us that such an intimate connection between the earth and one’s art is a blessing and one worthy of a prayerful acknowledgment.1 Noreen’s individual accomplishments with clay have resulted in jobs and commissions that involve the broader Zuni community, particularly Shiwi (Zuni) youth. When asked why she is so invested in teaching others how to make Zuni pottery, she says, “I’ve done what I’ve needed to do with it, I need to share. This gift was given to me for a reason: to share.

My ideas, my thoughts, my clay.” Through each of the projects mentioned here (the hands, the giant olla, the spiral wall installation), Noreen brings individual expression to the shared artistic practice and legacy of Zuni de:wa'. The Zuni Youth Enrichment Project (ZYEP) sponsored these projects.

1. “I Am a Zuni Artist: Noreen Simplicio,” ShiwiSun Productions, July 24, 2018, YouTube video, 6:00, web.

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NOREEN SIMPLICIO

above Polychrome Olla, pigment, clay. Image courtesy of Keshi the Zuni Connection, Santa Fe. opposite Noreen Simplicio (Zuni) with her monumental, community Zuni olla rain barrel at the Zuni Youth Enrichment Project center, Zuni, New Mexico, 2019. Image courtesy of the artist.

ZYEP worked with a company in Albuquerque that makes giant concrete containers for collecting rainwater and hired Noreen to conduct a two-weeklong pottery class. The culminating project was painting a massive concrete barrel. A dozen Zuni youth and several adults took the class and collaborated in the process of designing the giant olla. Noreen provided examples of her designs to the class, and the group decided by discussion and consensus which designs should be used. Noreen’s final designs were met with enthusiastic approval from the class, and Noreen proceeded to outline the design on the pot. The students were delighted to help paint the final design on the giant olla.

The class loved the process, and now the rain-collecting barrel proudly sits

outside the youth center on the south side of the river in Zuni.

For centuries, clay Pueblo pots have been used for water—gathering, holding, drinking, blessing. All aspects of Pueblo culture, past, present, and future, are intimately tied to a reverence for water. Being born and raised in the semi-arid, high desert plateau of the American Southwest has a way of providing a hyperfocus on everything related to water. “Water is life” is not just an activist phrase, but a stark reality of Pueblo life. From precontact times to the present, the aspirational prayers for abundance of life are predicated on access to water. Before water systems brought tap water to Zuni, gathering water from the river and preserving rainwater in clay pots defined daily life

and survival, intimately binding pottery to the culture and history of the Zuni community. The fact that the pottery designs were used to decorate a rain gathering barrel is not lost on Noreen.

In March 2018, ZYEP worked with Noreen on a collaborative project to connect the youth and the community.

Noreen wanted to help the young people feel a sense of ownership of their culture, history, and their new youth center through an art project. The A:shiwi A:wan Museum and Heritage Center launched the A:shiwi Map Art project, which illuminated one of the many facets of shared Zuni culture: knowledge of a spiral petroglyph found in many of our ancestral home sites, including our point of emergence in the Grand Canyon.

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NS: Yeah, and then the personal experiences as well. It involves a lot of things: your thoughts, your feelings, your emotions. When you’re creating art, all those things come into play. And just doing it from your heart, that’s what works for me. It’s not something that’s taught to you. I believe it’s something that’s given. Almost 40 years ago I put my hand into some clay and that was it. I was hooked. Connected.

MBL: There are some generational differences in thinking about sharing cultural knowledge at home. Can you talk about how you navigate that?

NS: The whole thing about it is your legacy. Your teachings, your experiences, your thoughts, what you share. Some elders say don’t share because it’s going to get taken away if you share, but it needs to be shared. How else is it going to live on? I love teaching it, I love sharing it. and migration history using our spiral design and our pottery.

Noreen created rectangular slabs of clay and distributed them to the Zuni schools, Zuni Tribal government complex, Zuni Recovery Center, and friends and family. Everyone who participated, from elected Zuni officials and tribal members in recovery to young people, make up who we are as a pueblo.

Keeping the community resources in mind, Noreen oversaw the painting of approximately 750 individual potsherds created by a huge cross section of Zuni society. The sherds were placed on a monumental wooden spiral and then wall-mounted and unveiled at the Zuni Youth Center in March 2022.

The center image fe atures Chimikyana'kya Dey'a,2 known in English as Ribbon Falls, the exact site Ancestral Shiwis emerged from the fourth world into this one. The spiral then radiates out, leading to the formation of the clan system, acknowledging the directional colors, and eventually to Halona: Idiwana'a, The Middle Place, known to all now as Zuni Pueblo. Noreen, in turn, commissioned Edward Lewis (Zuni) to paint the clan system that now surrounds

the finished and installed piece, Journey of Our Emergence. She commissioned Corey Seowtewa (Zuni) to paint the image of Ribbon Falls in the center of the spiral.

Noreen thanked the community for their enthusiastic help and cooperation.

She is excited to see wider recognition of potsherds, not only as tangible evidence of our continuous existence in this specific territory but also as a means of expressing our individuality within a shared Zuni method of cultural identity.

MBL: What do you want the world to know about Zuni pottery?

NS: I don’t want Zuni pottery to become a dying art. It’s important that other potters, as well as myself, share it, being able to share our knowledge and experiences as potters, especially with the youth. We tend to believe there’s a purpose in life for most of us. I believe my purpose is to learn this as much as I could and share it with whoever wants to learn it. Deep down I believe it’s meant to be shared.

MBL: The sharing you’re talking about—is that the technological ability to make it?

MBL: Why do you teach pottery making?

NS: I love teaching. Not everyone is going to grasp it, but it might leave some kind of mark. Maybe a thought or a word I say might influence or inspire somebody, especially the youth, in having balance in their life. How the clay work is who they are and their culture. Everything has been handed down from generation to generation. It’s not just clay; it’s far more than that. The reason why I’ve been blessed with all of it is that I cherish where [the clay] comes from and where I come from. Knowing you are Zuni, knowing you come from this special place at Ribbon Falls. It’s all about connecting to the earth, and not everyone will connect with the earth, but if you do it from your heart, you will connect with it.

MBL: I’ve heard many artists talk about the emotions connected to their medium. Do you experience this too?

NS: Our feelings are connected to the practice of making. You need to connect to whatever it is. I had a student who was always in a bad mood. He tried to rush the clay; he would get angry. I told

2. Thanks to Curtis Quam (Zuni), cultural educator of the A:shiwi A:wan Museum and Heritage Center, for assistance with spelling of Zuni place names. —Ed.

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NOREEN SIMPLICIO

him, “It’s not going to work. It’s not in your heart,” that he had to have the right feeling. He said, “What does that mean?”

[Laughs.] I told him he had to connect in his heart, and that the clay would know that he was connected to it. It’s not just clay. It’s your thoughts and feelings.

That’s a powerful message that I want any artist to know: that you need to connect to it.

MBL: To whatever your medium is?

NS: Yeah, that’s the most important thing.

There’s not a day that goes by that I don't think about the clay. It’s just such a part of my life that sometimes I have to make sacrifices and get away from it for a while, because I'm so involved with it. It’s almost like another child. [Laughs.]

above Noreen Simplicio, Edward Lewis, Corey Seowtewa, and community collaborators (all Zuni), Journey of Our Emergence, 2022, ceramic sherd mosaic and painting installation at the Zuni Youth Enrichment Project community center, Zuni, New Mexico. Image courtesy of the Zuni Youth Enrichment Project.

MBL: One of the biggest collaborative projects you’ve worked on is this spiral.

Can you tell us about it?

opposite Polychrome Bowl with Deer and Frog Designs, pigment, clay. Image courtesy of Keshi the Zuni Connection, Santa Fe.

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one people and work together. It was just an awesome project.

It’s a powerful mural based on our migration history. The middle of the spiral is Ribbon Falls where we emerged from. Along the spiral are pueblo dwellings indicating the places we settled along the journey.

MBL: Are the circles around the outside of the spiral the clans?

NS: Yes, that’s the clan system. You have to come see it. It’s just an eye-opener.

Once it went up I was like, Wow! That is so amazing. One of a kind in the world.

And what was really cool about it was that it was a community effort project. Some of the kids came in and said, “Hey, that’s my piece!” and they really felt ownership and felt good about what they were a part of. So it was history, and it was really cool.

I’m so glad that people were willing to come together and help, especially during these hard times we’ve had, but people were still willing to help.

MBL: Going back to this idea of a community connection, you could have used any images to represent Zuni.

Why did you ask folks to paint pottery sherds?

above Deer Pot with Pueblo, 2008, hand-harvested and hand-processed clay, pigments.

Image courtesy of Keshi the Zuni Connection, Santa Fe. opposite Tile from the Strong Hands project, hand-harvested and hand-processed clay, pigment. Image courtesy of the artist.

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NS: We’re very fortunate because these types of projects exist. The youth center makes sure that the youth are involved in some sort of art project that gives them ownership about where they come from and what they helped create. So many people were involved in it. Our government, friends and family, folks in recovery—they were involved. When it finally went up, I cried because of what was involved: putting things together, people working together. That’s who we are as Zuni people. We’re supposed to be

NS: Because I had to think of what evidence we have that our ancestors did the journey. What evidence do we have today that says, Yes, Zunis settled here.

And I thought about the potsherds. That’s how that came to be. The pottery sherds are evidence. When you go to ruins or old sites, if you’re lucky, you find a potsherd. Somebody asked me, “Are you going to go out and pick the potsherds?”

I said, “No! I’m going to go to jail if I do that!” [Laughs.]

It just popped in my mind: have the kids do it. I made slabs of clay. I gave each kid a 4-inch-by-4-inch slab of clay and a toothpick. I showed them pictures of pottery sherds and told them to cut out any shape that they wanted, and they did it. They really enjoyed it. When I went to the schools and asked for help, they immediately responded. Everyone I asked, nobody said, “Why?” They just helped me.

NOREEN SIMPLICIO

This was never done, so I had no idea. Every phase just came to me like it was meant to be. I’m just so relieved this is done. I started this in 2018, and it took this long. It just got installed in March of this year [2022].

MBL: What art markets do you participate in?

NS: Let’s see … Santa Fe Indian Market, the Museum of Northern Arizona, the Heard, the Hubbell Trading Post auction, the Sharlot Hall Museum [in Prescott, Arizona], and that’s about it. And I do online sales through social media.

MBL: How long have you been going to Santa Fe Indian Market?

NS: Since 1985.

MBL: Consecutively? Every year?

NS: Yes. But this year, I got accepted, but I’m not going to be there. Because of finances. I can’t afford to pay it this year.

I’m doing the Free Market.

Someone said, “Well then, go get a job.” I said I don’t want to. As long as I have flour and beans, I’m fine [laughs].

But I love doing what I do. For me, I’m at home, right now. I’m sitting here. It’s quiet, that’s what I love: being in my own space and having the freedom to do what I do. In a job, you don’t have that freedom.

I’ve tried working, but it’s not for me.

I love being my own boss. I love the part of what I do—to connect with people. How many people do you know that say who love what they do, for their job? Not too many.

MBL: Very true. Can you tell me about your Strong Hands project?

NS: In October 2021 I was asked to teach a pottery class to the Zuni language class at Zuni Middle School. They asked me to come teach a Zoom pottery class. I didn’t know if that was going to work, because I teach face to face and like to be hands-on. So they set it up, we did it, and it was really successful!

In March 2020, my mom passed away. I stepped out of the room for just a few minutes and when I came back, she

had already passed away. I felt so guilty because I wasn’t able to hold her hand during her very last breath. It means a lot to hold someone’s hand at that moment.

After I lost my mom, I broke my hand in July 2020. When I broke my hand, I was devastated. I was worried I wouldn’t be able to make my art, but I was so determined that I stayed positive, because I needed my tool back, my hand back. They told me it would take six months, but I was so determined I healed in three months.

When I was approached for the Zoom pottery class, I had to think of a project that would show strength.

Breaking my hand was quite a detrimental event for me, and I thought about losing my mom. In our prayers the phrase for strong hands is in there. So I asked the kids, “What’s the one positive thing

that happened during the pandemic?” I said positive, because there was so much loss, so many negative things. So they did. The [painted ceramic] hands were really creative. Through Zoom the kids told us why they used certain symbols.

One of them shared an image of a sheep, because their family butchered a sheep during Shalako, so the positive was that they fed the community. I wish I could have recorded their answers, but I have their hands. I want to mount them at the youth center, connected like Hands Across America.

This could be an ongoing project and see how many hands we can connect.

How we can show ourselves with our strong hands. I:bi'ah t'summe. I see this as an ongoing project, to show how we’re connected, with our hands, through our clay and our connection to this place.

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LOS ANGELES

The Portable Universe / El Universo en Tus Manos: Thought and Splendor of Indigenous Colombia Los Angeles County Museum of Art

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HEN THE CURATORS of The Portable Universe/ El Universo en Tus Manos: Thought and Splendor of Indigenous Colombia first embarked on their journey to create an exhibition of pre-Columbian artifacts at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), they didn’t realize the profundity of their quest. In fact, it was when they visited one Indigenous group of descendants of the artifacts’ creators in Colombia that they came to understand that the objects they had in their possession told a richer story and one that resonates with Indigenous cultures even today. To the Arhuaco tribe, descendants of the Tairona culture who created some of the works in this collection, what were at first considered pilfered pieces now had the opportunity to transform into vessels, to connect one culture to another, as the curators said, across “both space and time.”

With The Portable Universe, curators Diana Magaloni, deputy director, Dr. Virginia Fields, curator of the Art of the Ancient Americas, and Julia Burtenshaw, assistant curator of the Art of the Ancient Americas, have created a moving exhibition that invites the museumgoer to directly engage with ancient Colombia as well as the contemporary Arhuaco culture. Visitors are invited to sit on one of several specially carved banquitos in front of a projected waterfall to be metaphorically cleansed of their Western perspective before diving deeper into the exhibition itself. The projections on gallery walls of present-day nature and of elders communing, with the sound of ocarina music in the background, invite visitors to not only reflect and exist in the Arhuacos’ world but also to recognize that this and other Indigenous cultures are still here, thriving on their own terms in the 21st century. Their cultures, which include 1.45 million descendants speaking 65 different languages, assert themselves here, miles away from their 88 | FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

homeland, and remain very much visible in one corner of Southern California.

The exhibition is curated from a mix of ceramics, gold alloys, and cotton fabrics, some of which LACMA obtained from an American collection and filled out with striking artifacts from the Museo del Oro in Bogotá, Colombia, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the National Museum of the American Indian.

Combining pieces from a variety of ancient Colombian cultures, including the Tairona, Chimila, Tolima, Calima (including Yotoco), Chocó, and Zenú, the curators highlight both similarities and differences among these cultures in design, material, and time periods.

Perhaps the flashiest but most misunderstood of the materials is gold— or in this case, a gold-copper alloy called tumbaga. The exhibition features a robust selection of votive figures and breastplates made of this material from diverse origins, including the Nahuange period and Muisca people. One particularly striking collection in the exhibit included a gold headdress, nose and ear ornaments, a heart-shaped pectoral breastplate, bracelets, a ring, and anklets. These come from the Calima region of western Colombia and are forged in the Yotoco goldwork

style. Arranged alongside the outline of a human figure, the exhibit allows the viewer to imagine a tribal member at burial, which was installed after consulting with Arhuaco elders.

One piece spotlighted in promotional materials is the Circular House Model, also from the Yotoco people, a physical manifestation of the sentiment behind the exhibition itself. Made from gold alloy, the house represents a kind of universe, the home of an ancient Colombian tribe transported to a new place and time with its door still open, welcoming visitors today.

What is so misunderstood about this gold mixed with copper, symbolic of the melding of life-giving male (gold) and female (copper) qualities, is that it did not hold the same value for these Indigenous tribes that it did for Spanish conquistadors of the 15th and 16th centuries. Belief in the myth of El Dorado, the city of gold, incited invaders to pillage and destroy a way of life in the process. Without gold, metalwork believed to have been from 500 BCE eventually “disappeared.”

“In the rush of wanting to have gold, they ended up destroying their own brother, labeling him savage,” reads a quote from Jaison Pérez Villafaña, an Arhuaco elder who along with elder Mamo Camilo Izquierdo (Arhuaco) collaborated with the curators on this exhibition.

In fact, tumbaga, alongside cotton, was and is a source of value among Indigenous Colombians, which is still true for the Arhuaco people. Because the Europeans valued the gold more, cotton production, often used in ritual offerings, was ignored and able to continue.

Fragments of three luxury textiles, two painted and one with knots, made in the Muisca style and found in the Cordillera Oriental region of Colombia, are placed near the tumbaga metalwork in the exhibition. In so doing, the curators have juxtaposed elements that held relatively equal value for the Indigenous tribes but were disproportionately valued among the European invaders. These two elements are woven through ceramic pieces and feature exaggerated shapes of male and female figures.

What visitors might find problematic is the lack of dates listed on each

REVIEWS

object’s description. Without that anchor, some visitors might feel lost or unsure of how to categorize an object. However, the curators were intentional in that choice so as to challenge the Western perspective of linear time.

“Throughout the exhibition, we have thus tried to challenge several basic assumptions that visitors may have,” the curators told First American Art Magazine via email. “For example, that objects are inert, or that the golden adornments on view represent personal wealth, and we emphasize that a European timeline for constructing linear history misses the fact that the past is always present, in the artworks and in all of us.”

These objects challenge the viewer to rethink not only their value from the perspective of the creators versus the Spaniards who invaded but also to confront a question of morality. Through the curators’ journey, the conflict between the dispossessed and those who possess comes front and center as a reflection of the colonial past and in the present by the very existence of this exhibition.

Once again, Indigenous cultures are being dispossessed of their sacred objects for the benefit of Western eyes. And in looking at this phenomenon, it is impossible not to connect what happened with these South American tribes with what Indigenous people have faced in the United States

NEW YORK

Dakota Modern: The Art of Oscar Howe National Museum of the American Indian

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LONG OVERDUE retrospective of Dakota painter Oscar Howe (Yanktonai Dakota, 1915–1983) debuted at the National Museum of the American Indian George Gustav Heye Center in New York.

Curated by Kathleen Ash-Milby (Navajo), the exhibition brings together more than 65 paintings created over four decades.

Often remembered for his 1958 missive protesting his exclusion from

and elsewhere in North America—that is, the trespassing of European colonizers who imposed their values and perspectives on people whose works they at best misinterpreted and at worst degraded as “superstitious,” stole and destroyed, forever altering their way of life.

In The Portable Universe, what the curators succeeded in creating with great care was an exhibition that didn’t shrink to fit a space but a space that expanded into a universe, connecting Indigenous cultures and their possessions to visitors on their own terms.

—Laura L. Clark (Muscogee Creek/Cherokee) the Philbrook Museum of Art’s Indian Annual over the insufficient “Indianness” of his work, this exhibition establishes Howe as more than a letter writer; he was an incredible painter. Common motifs in Howe’s works include animals, scenes of everyday life, ceremony, and Dakota history. Dance is a prevalent subject, especially the Eagle Dance, Sun Dance, and Ghost Dance. Gallery wall colors are taken from Howe’s palette: rusty orange, steel blue, sage green, and creamy latte.

Howe’s early work from 1934 to 1952 evinces his mastery of the Flatstyle painting he learned from Dorothy Dunn at the Santa Fe Studio School.

He rendered isolated figures in great detail with little to no background.

These are mostly imagined scenes from

above Unattributed Zenú artist, Bird Finial with Beak Ornaments, 200 BCE–1000 CE, tumbaga (Early Zenú Goldwork Style), Colombia, Caribbean Lowlands, collection of Museo del Oro, Banco de la República, Bogotá. Photo: Clark M. Rodríguez, Museo del Oro and Banco de la República. Both images courtesy of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. opposite Unattributed Calima artist, Circular House Model, 200 BCE–800 CE, tumbaga (Yotoco Goldwork Style), Colombia, collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, gift of Alfred C. Glassell Jr.

the pre-reservation period that seek to document dancing, hunting, or sharing of oral histories.

A striking transformation can be seen in several works from 1952 to 1954.

This shift in approach can be attributed largely to Howe’s completing a bachelor’s degree from Dakota Wesleyan University in 1952 and an MFA from the University of Oklahoma in 1953.1 Woman Buffalo Dreamer (1952) and Three Women (1952–53) split from Flatstyle. Figures are broken down into larger geometric shapes, vibrant paint covers the entirety of the paper, and ambiguity is embraced.

While Howe’s work always remained representational, one can see similar evolutions in the work of artists, such as Piet Mondrian, whose paintings ultimately became purely abstract.

1. Some sources list 1954 as the year he earned his MFA.

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… his application of abstraction is firmly rooted in Očhéthi Šakówiŋ aesthetics.

above Oscar Howe (Yanktonai Dakota, 1915–1983), Fighting Bucks, 1967, casein on paper, 201/4 x 2615/16 in., collection of the National Museum of the American Indian. Smithsonian Institution, 27/0217. Image courtesy of the National Museum of the American Indian.

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The exhibition reiterates this move away from observed realism into Howe’s mature style. One gallery presents five paintings depicting the Sun Dance, the earliest from 1934 and the latest from 1967. Sun Dance from 1949 utilizes threepoint perspective and earthy brown and green tones to show a realistic scene in a perfectly symmetrical composition. In contrast, Sacro-Wi-Dance (Sun Dance) from 1965 appears otherworldly. Multiple foreshortened views from above and below show the pole receding into the distance as two, perhaps three, dancers swirl around the center with their hair blowing in a wind. A fiery vortex of oranges envelopes the whole scene.

Notably these titles reflect a change from English to Dakota, though he did not apply this language systematically during his career.

All the works in this exhibition are paintings on paper. Howe likened textured paper to hide and prepared

heavy cold-pressed, watercolor paper to further emphasize its rugged surface.

These terrains are magnified in wallsized details that accent the solid color fields. He also preferred the matte finish of casein, gouache, and tempera to the transparent or glossy effects possible with watercolor or acrylic. A remarkable drawing of a nine-pointed sunburst shape reveals how the artist meticulously planned his compositions, even indicating tonal progressions like a color-by-number.

The Works Progress Administration trained Howe to paint murals, which he did at several sites in South Dakota. He also designed murals for the Mitchell Corn Palace from 1948 to 1971. A narrow gallery with a blown-up historic photograph of this unusual building displays painted sketches and explains his process for mapping designs onto templates.

Many have been quick to relate Howe’s work to the fractured space of

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Cubism as developed by Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque; however, the artist and the curators emphasize that his application of abstraction is firmly rooted in Očhéthi Šakówiŋ aesthetics.

Beyond this, Howe arguably has more in common with Wassily Kandinsky in that both painters sought to translate sound into visual form. Howe’s Fleeing a Massacre (1969) depicts a woman on horseback. Rider and animal cry out and are surrounded by distressing lines conveying trauma.

Focusing primarily on spiritual experiences, Howe’s subject matter does not challenge stereotypes of Native Americans. But his style continues to surprise. In depicting Dakota ceremonies and narratives, Howe embraced and asserted his difference. In this way his representational paintings reject settler-colonial culture and pure abstraction. A rare indictment of a historical event, Howe’s Wounded Knee Massacre (1960) is to American history what Picasso’s Guernica is to Spanish history.2 Some descriptions of Howe’s legacy lean toward mythologies of genius.

His contemporaries such as George Morrison (Grand Portage Ojibwe, 1919–2000), T.C. Cannon (Kiowa/ Caddo, 1946–1978), and Fritz Scholder (Luiseño, 1947–2005) have also been credited with broadening the art world’s understanding of modern and contemporary Native art. With Dakota Modern, all of these artists have now been recognized with major solo exhibitions.

A catalogue edited by Kathryn Bunn-Marcuse and Bill Anthes, with contributions from Janet Catherine Berlo, Christina Burke, Philip J. Deloria (Standing Rock Dakota), Erika Doss, Emil Her Many Horses (Oglala Lakota), John Lukavic, Inge Dawn Howe Maresh (Yanktonai Dakota), Anya Montiel (Mestiza/Tohono O’odham descent), Denise Neil (Delaware Tribe/Cherokee Nation), and Joyce Szabo is available.

Dakota Modern is on view at the NMAI until September 11, 2022, after which it will travel to the Portland Art Museum in Oregon and the South Dakota Art Museum at South Dakota State University.

—Andrea L. Ferber, PhD 2. The original painting Wounded Knee Massacre could not travel, so a reproduction is exhibited.

NEW YORK

Whitney Biennial 2022: Quiet as It’s Kept Whitney Museum of American Art

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HE WHITNEY BIENNIAL is always one of the most highly anticipated events in the art world, and this year is particularly exciting for its inclusion of Indigenous artists. Though this exhibition was first established in 1932, Native artists were not represented until 1993.

The 80th iteration features 64 artists, of which four are First Nations and Native American: Rebecca Belmore (Lac Seul Ojibwe), Raven Chacon (Navajo), Duane Linklater (Omaskêko Cree), and Dyani White Hawk (Sicangu Lakota). Nearly 25 percent of all of the participating artists have been included in previous biennials at the Whitney.

Titled Quiet as It’s Kept, this is the third biennial in the museum’s new location, an eight-story building designed by architect Renzo Piano that opened in 2015. Quiet as It’s Kept references music, literature, and an exhibition: Max Roach’s 1959 jazz album; a repeated phrase in Toni Morrison’s novel, The Bluest Eye (1970); and David Hammons’s 2002 exhibition in Vienna. The biennial is predominately on the fifth and sixth floors, though some works are situated in other parts of the building.

Curators David Breslin and Adrienne Edwards selected an array of media made by artists across several generations that addresses issues both eternal and of the moment. One perennial debate is: What are the parameters of American?

One conservative critic lamented the inclusion of artists not born within the current borders of the United States, a myopic definition pushed by nationalists. Bilingual didactics are not standard practice for every Whitney exhibition, but English/Spanish are offered in this show—another acknowledgment that “America” is not homogeneous.

Highlights include meticulous paintings by James Little and Ralph Lemon, as well as a text-based piece one discovers on museum walls, windows, and I-beams by Rayyane Tabet. The Beirutborn artist lifted questions from the US citizenship test such as “What is the rule of law?” Divorced from the context of

the exam, the queries prompt readers to consider more subjective answers.

Linklater and White Hawk’s works are on the fifth floor, a markedly different atmosphere than the sixth.

Here one encounters 18,200 square feet of columnless space with glass walls facing the Hudson River on one side and the High Line, a public park and trail on an elevated railway, on the other.

Temporary walls placed at varying angles throughout the gallery display paintings, photographs, prints, and videos.

Linklater’s mistranslate_wolftreeriver_ininîmowinîhk and wintercount_215_kisepîsim (both 2022) appear as a single installation. Four metal bars suspended from the ceiling hold canvas and linen (respectively) in the shape of tipi covers. Each has been weathered and marked with natural pigments including cochineal, tea, charcoal, sumac, and blueberry dye. The artist describes tipis as a “flexible mode of architecture.”

To manifest this point, the installation will change over the course of the exhibition.

The poles can be moved, and the cloth can be spread flat or bunched together.

Linklater’s assertion of his right to make changes contrasts colonial control and fixedness. Specifically, the artist cites the loss of autonomy within the boarding school system as the target of his critique.

White Hawk’s Wopila | Lineage (2021) is a mural-sized wall of minuscule glass beads arranged in rows on aluminum panels. Seven opposing triangles are mirrored against swaths of black (on the top) and white (on the bottom). The mountain or tipi shapes shimmer in beautiful shades of teal, grey, gold, green, red, blue, and bronze. Many viewers express delightful surprise upon first encounter, as evinced by widened eyes and dropped jaws. White Hawk’s practice challenges the misnomer that abstraction emerged in Europe, or even in the modern era. The painters best known for hard-edge abstraction, such as Josef Albers and Frank Stella, worked after Indigenous design traditions had long been established, as seen on items like parfleches.

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billboard, and a sound piece. Three Songs (2021) is a three-channel video installation featuring Sage Bond (Diné), Jehnean Washington, and Mary Ann Emarthle (Seminole Nation) singing about removal and resistance. Each woman has a tattoolike mark near one eye and plays a single drum. The instrument takes on the mark of each woman when she sings.

Chacon’s For Zitkála-Šá series (2017–20) features 13 pairs of lithographs printed at Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts in Oregon. In the spirit of conceptual text-based work that offers instructions—a la Yoko Ono or Sol LeWitt—the artist describes them as portraits of female Indigenous musicians.

For Candice Hopkins reads: At the top is a word / Translate it into / two other languages.

Then each of these / into / three other languages.

Then these three / into two.

Then those two into your own.

Compared to the airy, bright fifth floor, the sixth floor feels ominous and pensive. Breslin explains this design is “to address the polarity of the moment.”1 Nearly every gallery is a black box, and sounds from multiple video works collide in one’s ears. The buzz of helicopters, screams, and explosions dominate from Chilean-American artist Alfredo Jaar’s 06.01.2020 18.39 (2022), a montage of clips from Black Lives Matter protests.

The environment sets the tone for the works, which confront violence and grief. ishkode (fire) (2021) by Rebecca Belmore presents a cast clay sleeping bag that suggests a solitary standing figure.

Flowing from the sculpture is a halo shaped from thousands of bullet casings.

The rifle shells are connected with copper wires and give the appearance of a kind of protective aura. At once haunting and regal, the slight frame suggests unhoused persons trying to stay warm, but also inaccessible personas like royalty or celebrities.

Belmore’s sculpture is installed near a series of four large-scale photographs by Mexican-American Guadalupe Rosales that document locations in her East Los Angeles neighborhood where violence has occurred. Taken during the night, the quiet, empty streetscapes are meditations on loss and absence, which converse beautifully with Belmore’s work.

Raven Chacon is represented by four works: a video, a suite of prints, a

1. David Breslin, “Making the 2022 Biennial: An Interview with the Curators,” web.

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The musical score For Zitkála-Šá is one of several that will be performed during the course of the biennial.

Another of Chacon’s works, Silent Choir (Standing Rock) (2017–22), is a billboard-sized inkjet print on vinyl affixed to a building across the street from the Whitney Museum. It reproduces a photograph of water protectors walking on the Backwater Bridge during the Dakota Access Pipeline protests in 2017. The corresponding sound piece to this photo is played in a gallery on the sixth floor.

The contributions by Native artists to this biennial are all truly exceptional for their deep, historical connections, conceptual rigor, and singular aesthetics.

The works synthesize unique elements from distinct cultures (references to tipis and languages) with shared histories and human experiences. In a word, they are American.

A catalogue is available; however, the most comprehensive guide to all works in the exhibition is the website, where one can also access interviews and the audio guide.

Quiet as It’s Kept runs through September 5, 2022.

—Andrea L. Ferber, PhD

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NORMAN, OK

Ascendant: Expressions of Self-Determination Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art

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SCENDANT is the third in a series of University of Oklahoma (OU) graduate student-curated exhibitions at the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

The curatorial team, led by assistant professor Alicia Harris (Fort Peck Assiniboine), included studio art student Danielle Fixico (Chickasaw/Muscogee), anthropology student Chris Tall Bear (Southern Cheyenne), Native art history student Nathan Young (Delaware Tribe/ Cherokee Nation/Pawnee/Kiowa), and Western art graduate students Meagan Anderson Evans and Olivia von Gries.

They curated the show and published a catalogue in five months. This exhibition of 49 artworks (someone had a sense of humor) features 41 works from the Fred Jones collection with four works borrowed from the university’s Western History Collections and four from the Philbrook Museum of Art. While writers have discussed at length the influences the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) and Bacone College had on 20th-century Native American art history, OU’s central role in this history has been underexplored.

This exhibition focuses on post–World War II Native OU studio art students Oscar Howe, Dick West, and Terry Saul.

OU Native American history assistant professor Alicia Harris writes, with the appropriate caution of a scholar, as opposed to a marketer: “As far as we could determine, Chief Terry Saul, Dick West, and Oscar Howe were the first Native Americans in the United States to earn MFA degrees in painting.”1 All three men were World War II veterans who attended art school through the GI Bill.

Oscar Howe (Yanktonai Dakota, 1915–1983), from the Crow Creek Reservation in South Dakota, is revered in his home state. He studied art at the Santa Fe Indian School and earned his BA from Dakota Wesleyan and MFA from OU.2 An art professor at the University of South Dakota in Vermillion, Howe had a robust and influential art career.

Ascendant traces his development from Studio Flatstyle figurative illustrations to his signature highly abstracted colorist art based on Dakota aesthetics. This past spring, the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) opened Dakota Modern: The Art of Oscar Howe, a major traveling retrospective.

Walter Richard “Dick” West Sr. (Southern Cheyenne, 1912–1996) was a Cheyenne peace chief and a member of the Council of 44. After classes at the Haskell Institute, West earned his AA from Bacone College, then his BFA (1941) and MFA (1950) at OU. He directed Bacone’s art program from 1947 to 1970 and returned in the late 1970s to teach art. He used Flatstyle painting to convey very specific information about Cheyenne culture to younger members of his tribe.

He also painted Abstract Expressionist works and, not included in this exhibition, representational figurative scenes in oils. Nostalgia, West’s woodcarving and the only three-dimensional work in the exhibition, provides visual interest and demonstrates the diversity of West’s oeuvre. His abstract oils were recently highlighted in NMAI’s Stretching the Canvas: Eight Decades of Native Painting (2019–2022).

While West and Howe are widely exhibited, “Chief ” Carl Terry Saul (Choctaw/Chickasaw, 1921–1976) is less known. Yet his dark, almost transgressive, Surrealist work resonates with our current dystopian zeitgeist. His relatives have told me they suspect he suffered from PTSD from his service in the US Army during the war. He attended Bacone before earning his BFA (1948) and MFA (1949) from OU. After establishing his art career and studying at the Art Students

1. Alicia Harris, “Introduction,” in Ascendant: Expressions of Self-Determination, ed. Alicia Harris (Norman: University of Oklahoma School of Visual Arts and Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, 2022), 2.

2. Some sources state he earned his MFA in 1954; The year 1953 is stated by Mark A. White, “A Modernist Moment: Native Art and Surrealism at the University of Oklahoma,” Journal of Surrealism and the Americas 7, no. 1 (2013), 53.

above Terry Saul (Choctaw/ Chickasaw, 1921–1976), Warrior, n.d., acrylic, collection of the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, James T. Bialac Native American Collection. opposite Foreground: Rebecca Belmore (Lac Seul Ojibwe), installation view of ishkode (fire), 2021, clay, bullet casings.

Background: Guadalupe Rosales (Chicana), clockwise: Winter Solstice/Hazards, smok'd, Shortcut, and A night to remember, 2022, photography.

Photo: Andrea L. Ferber.

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above Virginia Stroud (Keetoowah Cherokee/Muscogee), Indian Warrior on Horse Back, 1979, gouache on paper, collection of the Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, bequest of Dr. Patrick Sutherland.

League, he directed Bacone’s art program from 1970 to 1975. His brightly hued, Surrealist oil painting, Salvage (ca. 1948), stands out as one of the extremely few non-figurative works in Ascendant. His other works portray spiritual subjects, such as the syncretic Tree of Jesse (1968) and his many works about Choctaw mortuary rituals. Many portray the defleshing of bones, a common practice throughout the Eastern Woodlands until Christian missionization.

To this core work from three artists, the curatorial team added works by earlier and later artists, for a total of 16—13 men and 3 women—to provide context and contrast. After the Kiowa Six, numerous artists studied at OU in the mid-20th century. Some represented in this exhibition are Woody Big Bow (Kiowa, 1914–1988), Franklin Gritts (Keetoowah Cherokee, 1914–1996), and Acee Blue Eagle (Muscogee, 1907–1959), who, after completing his BFA degree at OU in 1932, became the second director of Bacone College’s art program.

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known for his landscape painting, and a non-objective abstract painting by John O’Neil. Including their work reminds us that Native American art is not hermetically sealed. Native artists are influenced by non-Native sources, and Native art in turn influences non-Native culture.

Other exhibition artists were students of Howe, West, and Saul. West is celebrated for encouraging numerous women’s art careers, but only Ruthe Blalock Jones (Delaware/Shawnee/Peoria) and Virginia Stroud (Keetoowah Cherokee/Muscogee) are shown here.

Stroud’s four 1970s equestrian paintings mark a significant departure from Bacone Flatstyle. Jacob and Evelyn Ahtone (both Kiowa) legally adopted the orphan Stroud. The Ahtone family, who include calendar keepers and ledger artists, retained a book of ledger art. At Bacone, with West’s encouragement and permission from Kiowa elders, Stroud and her sister Sharron Ahtone Harjo (Kiowa) revived and popularized ledgerstyle art in Oklahoma in the 1970s. Their shift from Flatstyle to Plains pictorial art exemplifies a major force in Native American art: revival and the reclaiming of stolen histories.

Ascendant includes other, later Bacone artists, as well as IAIA artists, such as Howe’s student Fritz Scholder (Luiseño, 1937–2005) and Scholder’s student T. C. Cannon (Kiowa/Caddo, 1946–1978).

While Scholder was Cannon’s instructor, their contemporaries have noted Cannon’s influences on Scholder, who famously painted butterflies before arriving at IAIA. Their paintings and prints are far more gestural and expressive than the controlled Flatstyle paintings.

The overwhelming majority of the artworks are figurative works on paper.

Some are individuals but mostly groups wearing culturally significant regalia, dancing, participating in ceremonies, or competing in Native sports. Howe’s pochoir plates seem almost comically outdated, but Howe adds some flair to his Young Indian 1950 wearing a tilted hat, incised silver belt buckle, and gleaming cowboy boots. This swagger and panache can also be found in Franklin Gritts’s Indian Shooting Match (1937). The three men would have been stylish in the late 1970s with pheasant feathers tucked in beaded hatbands, braids, and pencil mustaches, but this scene took place during the Great Depression.

The curatorial team discusses themes of self-determination, spirituality, warrior culture, sovereignty, and Indian cowboys. They explain how US Indian policy influenced the artists’ lives.

In particular, the 1883 Code of Indian Offenses criminalized Indigenous religious practices in violation of the First Amendment. The many detailed depictions of religious ceremonies, notably

by West, ensured ceremonial knowledge would reach generations of Native American youth.

Reading the wall text and catalogue, I realized that I dread reading about Native religion, law, or history within art contexts. Typically I brace myself for egregious factual errors. It was a massive relief to read essays by Native authors with direct, lived experience with these topics.

Chris Tall Bear wrote about Native American spirituality from a place of personal knowledge and discussed Cheyenne teachings in the context of the prophet Sweet Medicine. It was a joy to read an essay about sovereignty by an elected

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tribal official, Nathan Young, to whom sovereignty is not a buzzword or a metaphor but a hard-won political reality.

These scholars could tease out the political activism embedded in seemingly decorative works. One sublime watercolor, Howe’s study for a mural at Fort Thompson Community School on the Crow Creek Sioux Reservation, combines the natural world and architecture in serene but otherworldly layers, almost a Ghost Dance vision.

The accompanying label explains how lawyer and Chickasaw Nation ambassador Charles W. Blackwell (Chickasaw/ Choctaw, 1942–2013) collected the painting: “The ownership and display of these objects in the homes and offices of those engaged in the legal and policy realm of asserting tribal sovereignty not only symbolize their respect and reverence for their culture but also serve as constant reminders of their commitment to … self-determination and tribal self-governance.” Oklahoman Indian artists predominantly painted for their own communities as opposed to non-Native collectors.

The exhibition concludes with an enlarged facsimile of Oscar Howe’s famous 1958 letter to Philbrook after his work was rejected from the Philbrook Indian Annual by Native jurors for not being “Indian” enough. Howe wrote, “Are we to be held back forever with one phase of Indian painting that is the most common way?”3 The next year, the museum added a Non-Traditional Painting category. The impassioned letter speaks to the many constraints Native American artists felt in the mid-20th century.

These artists modeled self-determination in their art, their lives, and the influence they made on their students.

Their generation paved the way for the Red Power movement the legal rights enshrined into federal law in the 1970s.

Reflecting on their lives and struggles is timely considering how many of these legal rights are under targeted attack today.

—America Meredith (Cherokee Nation) 3. Christina Burke, Impact: The Philbrook Indian Annual 1946–1979 (Tulsa: Philbrook Museum of Art, 2014), 2.

SANTA FE

Nani Chacon: SPECTRUM SITE Santa Fe

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ANI CHACON: SPECTRUM (April 8, 2022, through August 21, 2022) visually weaves pathways of strength through a series of gallery and outdoor murals. Chacon (Diné/Chicana) makes art in large-scale to offer clear access to all who encounter her work. She also creates her murals in cooperation with the people and places around her. From her beginnings in graffiti, Chacon channels the unpredictability of that practice into murals made for indoor spaces. At SITE Santa Fe, Chacon’s indoor and outdoor murals chart a history of existence carried on in the artist’s practice of conveying these stories at a heroic scale. Through figuration and abstraction, Chacon creates intersections between the stories being told from an individual perspective on Diné community narratives.

Inside SITE Santa Fe, the gallery featuring SPECTRUM is an environment of geometry to house the Diné stories being shared. The entire space hinges on a series of angles between the outer gallery walls, inner movable wall, and murals installed. Movement is instantly felt, and a sense of twining stories together begins.

The two abstract “weavings”—giant installations of yarn stretched across nails—on both sides of the movable wall, Our Gods Walk Among Us (2022) and Don’t Whistle at Night (2022) remain in constant view throughout the experience in this space. With their cross and triangular forms, the drawings in yarn on these surfaces serve as grounding points for the entire exhibition. Through a lens of weaving, Chacon’s visual narratives connect in a rhythm. They build upon each other as part of a larger whole of Diné creation and cosmology.

The presence of feminine energy plays a significant role in Chacon’s visual allegories. In Between Two Worlds (2017), the artist centers a figure with feminine qualities. A vast variety of insects move on and around this being, speaking to

an exchange of creation between species.

In this work, Chacon honors the insects as the oldest ancestors carrying the most knowledge, as one learns from the audio guide accompanying the exhibition.

The composition evokes a sentiment of welcoming the insects in order to learn from them in many ways.

The foundational experiences of the insects become echoed in The First Creatures Hold the Knowledge of Every World (2022), a colorful mural adjacent to Between Two Worlds. The composition of The First Creatures Hold the Knowledge of Every World evokes a Diné woven blanket with stripes in the background and a serrated diamond at center, with insects surrounding the perimeter and a butterfly placed at the middle of the mural. On the same wall, Emersion to the Blue World (2017) adds to Diné narratives of moving between eras. This mural depicts a woman in side profile with a bird, overlaid on her face, who shares the same eye with her. This implies the guidance of winged beings in offering a kind of tandem vision.

Across the way, Tóóhoołtsodii Grieves Her Missing Baby, Her Tears Create Chaos … and Flood the World (2022) features a female figure who mourns the loss of her child stolen by Coyote. Her pain is indicated by her bloodshot eyes.

In an audio clip, Chacon explains that Tóóhoołtsodii’s tears caused a major flood of the Diné world. In this mural, the artist marks the water through a group of red diagonals in the foreground with black swirls in the background.

These abstract marks connect closely to the “weavings” at the center of the gallery. They allude to a process of teaching and moving through time, if time can be understood as a loom. From here, each narrative, or thread, fills in the stories of existence little by little. In this way, Chacon’s method of weaving critical epochs—mural-making—moves visitors through a series of Diné creation stories that lead to today’s world. For instance, Tóóhoołtsodii’s outstretched fingers suggest this kind of legacy of weaving important events together that connect past, present, and future moments. The scales on her body convey her capability of movement and path-making through water that shifts the cultural landscape of the Diné people.

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above Nani Chacon (Diné/ Chicana), Asdzáá Na'ashjé íí, 2022, acrylic paint on polytab, installation view at SITE Santa Fe. Photo: Michelle J. Lanteri, PhD. opposite Moira RedCorn, DO (Osage/ Caddo/Potawatomi), 𐒹𐓘͘𐓬𐓘 𐓵𐓘𐓧𐓣͘ 𐓷𐓣𐓤𐓣𐓟.𐓏𐓘𐓵𐓘𐓷𐓘 𐓤𐓪𐓨𐓜𐓘, Han-pah tha-lin Wi-kie (Ritual of a Peaceful Day), 2020, oil on paper, collection of Marilyn Yarbrough (Osage). Image courtesy of the artist.

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On the same wall, Four Genders Were Born … (2022) evokes the diversity in identity in Diné worldviews. As visitors learn in Chacon’s audio clip, this mural references a male with female elements and vice versa. With these two nude figures holding hands, this image pushes Chacon’s practice into social commentary of the nude as an art genre. She reimagines this composition through Diné creation stories to arrive at a nude painted in Indigenous terms. She inspires conversations of what an “ideal” might look like in the context of Diné perspectives.

This work also alludes to a Diné weaving composition, with crosses in each corner and a large diamond that envelops the figures’ hands, lower torso, and genitals. Chacon portrays the two beings as woven into the foundation of Diné creation. Both figures face each other, offering a gaze of mutual respect for one another. Here, Chacon also reimagines concepts of the gaze. She overturns its implications of voyeurism and resituates the exchange of glances as one of appreciation and coexistence.

At the end of this wall, Asdzáá Na'ashjé íí (2022), a portrait of Spider Woman, completes the stringing together of epochs in the murals on view. Chacon represents Spider Woman with eight eyes, two sets of arms and hands, and two sets of spider legs. The mural features four red crosses, one in each corner.

Spider Woman, a holy being, gave the art of weaving to the Diné people—a creative process to convey stories for future generations through hózhó, or beauty. She began by weaving imagery of the universe. Her presence in this mural embodies the main thread of Chacon’s process of sharing Diné creation narratives in visual form, as an art of weaving layers of existence into materiality.

For SPECTRUM, Chacon also created three billboard murals of birds made on-site in three locations. One was made in Chinle, Arizona, the birthplace of her mother; one was made in Cleveland, New Mexico, the birthplace of her father; and one was made in Albuquerque, where the artist grew up and where her parents met. Reproductions of these murals are installed on an exterior wall of SITE Santa Fe, adjacent to the railway. These murals allow Chacon to tell her personal creation history and pathways of moving through familial epochs.

Chacon’s project unifies art accessibility and cultural specificity. In her use of acrylic on polytab—a nonwoven polyester fabric also known as parachute cloth—for her interior murals, she can easily transport this lightweight material from her studio to a gallery, where magnets are used for installation. This process offers a teaching by example, sharing the how-to of bringing large-scale murals into a gallery space.

In terms of cultural specificity, she tells Diné creation stories through an art of weaving her series of murals together in a kind of storyboarding. An adjacent wall of drawings and photographs in the gallery informs visitors of her muralmaking process. Through her exhibition, Chacon imparts creative wisdom as part of her legacy of carrying on Diné narratives. She leaves these story threads incomplete—a gesture for the next generation to pick up the arts of storytelling in their own ways.

—Michelle J. Lanteri, PhD

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TULSA

TVLSE: Converging Indigenous Art Tulsa Artist Fellowship Flagship

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HE EXHIBITION TVLSE: Converging Indigenous Art is the first of a series of three events to be located in “Tvlv 'hasse (“Old Town”) / Tvlse-Locvpokv / Tvlse (also known as Tulsa),” as explained in the curatorial statement provided to patrons and guests. Curators Jordan Poorman Cocker (Kiowa/Tongan) and Lois Taylor Biggs (White Earth Ojibwe/ Cherokee), with collaborator and Tulsa Artist Fellow Yatika Starr Fields (Osage/ Muscogee/Cherokee), brought together several artists related to “Tvlse and the greater land base of Indian Territory” whose works present an extensive and diverse grouping of Indigenous art.

Poetry, film, photography, textiles, paintings, and sculpture were spread throughout the Tulsa Artist Fellowship Flagship gallery with images and sounds connected to the histories of the city and its relationship to Indigeneity. From the land acknowledgment near the front door to the mixed-media painting Squash and Squatters (2022) by Anita Fields (Osage/ Muscogee) on the farthest back wall, various perspectives filled the urban concrete room with concepts of Indigenous life. Some works were simpler in form though complex in meaning, like Moira RedCorn’s (Osage/Caddo), 𐒹𐓘͘𐓬𐓘 𐓵𐓘𐓧𐓣͘ 𐓷𐓣𐓤𐓣𐓟.𐓏𐓘𐓵𐓘𐓷𐓘 𐓤𐓪𐓨𐓜𐓘, Han-pah tha-lin Wi-kie (Ritual of a Peaceful Day) (2020). Other pieces featured meticulous craftsmanship, such as the textile portrait Mahtaun (Girl) (2020) by Teri Greeves (Kiowa), whose multitudes of hand-sewn stitches remind us of Native artists’ and Native peoples’ continued endurance in the face of repeated attempts at erasure.

In a small, darkened alcove to the side of the main gallery space played a short film by Sterlin Harjo (Seminole Nation/Mvskoke), producer and director of Reservation Dogs on Hulu. It showed the misadventures of Cepanvkuce Tutcenen (Three Little Boys) (2012), whose antics lead them to mischief, trouble, lessons, and community. The storyline resonated with my sister and me, who are Mvskoke

people from a similar rural community, to the point of uncontrollable laughter.

Additionally, the individually printed script sheets used to create the Hunting, Reservation Dogs #6 (2021) episode were displayed, allowing visitors to study the narrative, cues, and information that were the structure for this particular episode that resonated with so many viewers.

Although only open for appointments due to pandemic safety protocols, TVLSE attracted many visitors, with several members of the surrounding communities showing enthusiastic interest in the prospect of the goal of the project, which is to be “one step in the footpath of many toward the development

of a gallery space and café in Tvlse that holds space for and is led by Urban Indigenous communities, voices, and stories.” As the first phase of the Flagship project, TVLSE incorporated programming including a curator walk-through held during downtown Tulsa’s popular First Friday art event and a closing panel discussion. In collaboration with Tulsa Artist Fellow, Yatika Fields, curators Cocker and Biggs are already beginning the first stages of establishment within the Tvlse area. The Tulsa Artist Fellowship provides support for artists invested in social practices and whose works are meant to be engaging with the city and its communities.

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To wrap up the first of the three happenings for the TVLSE project, Cocker and Biggs led a panel discussion with three guest speakers, Debra Yepa-Pappan (Jemez Pueblo/Korean), the community engagement coordinator for the Native American Exhibit Hall renovation project at the Field Museum and cofounder of the Center for Native Futures, Chris Pappan (Osage/Kaw/Cheyenne River Lakota), artist and cofounder of the Center for Native Futures, and Maggie Thompson (Fond du Lac Ojibwe), founder of Makwa Studio. “Envisioning Space in Old Town” was the theme provided to the Zoom panelists. Yepa-Pappan and Pappan shared experiences and stories of working in tandem with their own communities in the Chicago area to develop an inclusive space for artists of all backgrounds.

Textile designer and multimedia artist Thompson shared insights gained from her experience as director of the Two Rivers Gallery in Minneapolis. Chef Nico Albert (Cherokee Nation) catered.

Other exhibiting artists included Joy Harjo (Mvskoke), Ryan RedCorn (Osage), Leah Palmer (Choctaw Nation), and Courtney Biggs (White Earth Ojibwe/Cherokee). Serving as its own “place of convergence and gathering for Indigenous Nations,” the variety of artistry and history compiled within this exhibition is a testament to the dedication to reestablishing a firmer foundational relationship with the city of Tvlse through continued use and occupation of ancestral territories and treaty lands. Benefiting from the newly established gallery, Flagship, and the support of programs like the Tulsa Artist Fellowship, as well as members of the Indigenous and surrounding communities, TVLSE: Converging Indigenous Art has taken its first step “in the footpath of many.”

Provided at the end of the curatorial statement is a quote by US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo from her 2021 memoir, Poet Warrior. It reads, “We move with the lightness of being, and we will go / Where there’s a place for us.” TVLSE curators Cocker and Biggs and Tulsa Artist Fellow Fields, in respectful reference and thoughtful expression, would like to “welcome you to join us in moving through TVLSE, toward this place, with the lightness of being.”

—Shelley Patrick (Mvskoke) 98 | FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

REPORT ANCHORAGE

Far North Fashion Show Anchorage Museum

O

N APRIL 7, 2022, the Anchorage Museum transformed its atrium with a raised red-carpet runway to host the Far North Fashion Show.

This event, part of the annual Arctic Encounter conference in Anchorage, included a stunning array of clothing and jewelry designed by eleven Alaska Native artists. Garments designed for Alaska’s cold weather featured prominently in the show, including fancy parkas with silver fox, wolf, and beaver fur embellishments.

Examples of Indigenized evening wear and a few garments bearing political messages were also on display.

Siqiñiq Maupin (Iñupiaq) designed and modeled a kuspuk1 with a large ulu (woman’s knife) design on the front

and the words LAND BACK stitched in rainbow lettering on the back. Her kuspuk received applause from the audience. A white and red cloak designed and modeled

by Ruth Łchav’aya K’isen Miller (Dena'ina) featured an image of a tattooed woman with her braids being cut with scissors and the words Endi'ina ya bach'a'ina? (“Where have our loved ones gone?” in Dena'ina), bringing attention to the impact of the legacy of boarding schools on Indigenous families.

Iñupiaq designer Jackie Qataliña Schaeffer introduced the show and told the audience that the fashion “takes nature into art and is art inspired by nature.” This sentiment has been expressed in Alaskan clothing for centuries, as garment makers have always used byproducts from subsistence to create clothing to keep our families warm but also to express who we are and where we come from through designs that reference the lands, waters, plants, and animals around us. For example, a pair of earrings by Cheryl Brantley (Iñupiaq) from Kotzebue included beaded representations of lupin, fireweed, sour dock, dandelion, forget-me-not, Labrador tea, and birch.

Brantley stated in an email, “Being an Indigenous artist, I like to create beautiful

1. A kuspuk or qaspeq is a lightweight Alaska Native overshirt often made with a hood and a front pocket. They commonly have decorative trim, and some have a skirt at the bottom.

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earrings for women, because they really are a statement piece wherever one goes. It’s a way to empower a woman to feel beautiful.

It also means sharing what we have learned and teaching those willing to learn.”

Bobby Itta’s parkas stood out for me as striking examples of Indigenized high fashion that incorporate one of Alaska’s most beloved natural luxuries: fur! Her hand-sewn green velveteen parka with crystal fox ruff was one of my favorite pieces in the show. When I asked her about it, she said, “This one is inspired by the tundra.

The ruff and trim have a lot of browns and orange, and black and white, which are all very earthy but elegant.” For Itta, fashion is a way for her to express and embrace her Iñupiaq culture. “It’s very important to me, because I want to empower our youth to embrace our culture. When I was younger, it wasn’t cool to be part of our culture.

With fashion, we are taking it back little by little. I think fashion helps us express that to other people. Sometimes we can’t say things directly, but using fashion we can show it.” Itta notes that using animal fur is a practice that has been handed down

through generations. In the far north where Itta grew up, fur is nature’s best insulator and is necessary to keep warm.

The theme of family and intergenerational connections showed up in other designers’ work. Almost all of the designers’ bios mentioned they learned to sew by working with a family member such as an aunt, mother, or grandmother. In some communities, family designs are passed on through generations. This shows up especially in qupaq, the geometric trim design used on parkas that function much like a family signature. Iñupiaq designer Qaulluq Clara McConnell comes from a long line of skin sewers who passed down design knowledge to encourage creativity and innovation. Some of the designs include qupaq, as well as references to elements from historical material culture. A black wrap skirt with geometric tattoo designs looked striking paired with eyewear made of bone, a nod to snow goggles that Inuit invented thousands of years ago to prevent snow blindness.

Crystal Toolie (Iñupiaq) flew to Anchorage from Utqiaġvik, one of

above Ruth Miller (Dena'ina Athabascan) wearing Qaulluq designs by Clara McConnell (Iñupiaq). Photo: Sven Haakanson Jr., PhD (Sugpiaq). opposite Crystal Toolie (Iñupiaq) wearing designs by Dena Drake (Yup'ik/Athabascan). Photo: Sven Haakanson Jr., PhD (Sugpiaq).

Topaz Jones (Shoshone, Kalapuya, Molalla, Lummi), Rise Above Little Warrior, acrylic on wood

June 5 - August 14, 2022

The Heritage Center at Red Cloud Indian School 100 Mission Drive Pine Ridge, SD 57770 605.867.8257 www.redcloudart.show NO. 35, SUMMER 2022 | 99

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America’s northernmost cities, to participate in the show as a model. She conveyed via email that participating in this event was meaningful and empowering. “Indigenous fashion is important because self-representation assists immensely in boosting self-esteem and assists in feeling a part of a community. It is important for non-Natives to see Indigenous fashion, because there are rich histories, stories, and traditions that others can learn about. What makes diversity beautiful is learning about each other and acknowledging each other, which can foster respect, understanding, and connections.”

If you are looking to acquire a piece of Alaska Native fashion to incorporate into your wardrobe, I encourage you to support Native designers and organizations directly. Here are a few places where you can shop online for clothing and jewelry designed and made by Alaska Native artists: Arctic Luxe (arcticluxe. com), Naataq Gear (naataqgear.com), Qupak by Corrine (facebook.com/qupakbycorrine), Tundraberry (tundraberry. com), Collective49 (collective49.com), Iñupiaq Custom Mary Designs (facebook. com/CusomMaryDesigns), Sealaska Heritage (sealaska-heritage-store.myshopify. com), Trickster Company (trickstercompany.com), and Alutiiq Museum store (alutiiqmuseumstore.org/artwork/ alaskan-native-artwork).

—Nadia Jackinsky-Sethi, PhD (Alutiiq)

CHICAGO

Center for Native Futures EXPO CHICAGO, Navy Pier

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HIS APRIL the Center for Native Futures made its international art showcase debut at the EXPO CHICAGO and became the first all-Native featured booth in the exposition’s history.

Having concluded its ninth edition at Navy Pier, the International Exposition of Contemporary and Modern Art reported 30,000 visitors with a high attendance of curators and collectors worldwide.

In order to elevate Native artists around the Midwest, one group of Indigenous artists is staking a claim to offset misperceptions of Native art.

The Center for Native Futures (CfNF) is a newly formed, artist-run nonprofit organization that is currently creating an Indigenous gallery space in the city of Zhegagoynak (Chicago). With a focus on Indigenous Futurisms, the center works through artistic means to expand opportunities and reimagine Native realities without colonial limitations. CfNF brings together Native creativity to foster Indigenous artists

and provide a lens to learn from the past, nurture the present, and realize a thriving future. Since its founding in 2021, CfNF has hosted virtual artist talks, has advised institutions and organizations, and continues to develop a Native artist network.

CfNF acknowledges the US government’s forced removal of Potawatomi people and recognizes those who remain and the various Native nations who have called Zhegagoynak home. In efforts to honor the solidarity of displaced Indigenous people, the center aims to prioritize artworks by the Nishnabek, Menominee, Ho-Chunk, Myaamia, and Peoria people of the region, while building relationships with local and national Native artists from all tribal nations.

The six cofounding members represent Indigenous tribes across the country and are artists and writers based in Chicago, or who have connections to the city. The members include Andrea Carlson (Grand Portage Ojibwe descent), Patrick Del Percio (Cherokee descent), River Kerstetter (Oneida Nation), Monica Rickert-Bolter (Prairie Band Potawatomi/Black), Chris Pappan (Kaw/Osage/Lakota), and Debra YepaPappan (Jemez Pueblo/Korean).

The founding members have a combined 20-plus years of working within the arts community and have

above Models and designers at the Far North Fashion Show, Anchorage Museum, Alaska. Photo: Sven Haakanson Jr., PhD (Sugpiaq). opposite Installation view of the Center for Native Futures booth, the International Exposition of Contemporary and Modern Art (EXPO Chicago), Navy Pier, Illinois. Image courtesy of Monica Rickert-Bolter (Prairie Band Potawatomi/Black).

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built ties with tribal communities, Native organizations, galleries, and Indigenous spaces across the country. To uphold accountability, CfNF members regularly consult with Chicago institutions and advise on cultural committees and boards in Illinois to advocate for beneficial change for Native communities. With financial support from organizations like the Terra Foundation of American Art, CfNF is making its presence known to broader audiences in the fine art world, especially with its inclusion in the Special Exhibits section of EXPO CHICAGO. In the midst of booths with chic lounge chairs and benches, CfNF welcomed its artists, and particularly Native guests, to sit in powwow chairs to discuss the artwork and people watch. From textiles to beadwork to oil paintings, the booth showcased various stylized works by five accomplished Native artists from the Great Lakes region as well as works by cofounders Debra, Chris, and Monica. Curated by Debra, the featured artists included June Carpenter (Osage), Kelly Church (Gun Lake Pottawatomi/Ottawa/Ojibwe), Noelle Garcia (Klamath/Modoc/Paiute), Jason Wesaw (Pokagon Potawatomi), and Le’ana Asher (Keweenaw Bay Ojibwe).

Le’ana’s artwork strategically utilizes portraiture as a 21st-century lens into powwow culture, identity, tribalism, and community. Her layering technique with walnut oil paints is evident in Elk Tooth Dancer Dream and reflects the complexities and depth of her subjects as Native dancers counteract assimilation by holding onto their culture. The introspective glance of a dancer in Cherish

With a focus on Indigenous Futurisms, the center works through artistic means to expand opportunities and reimagine Native realities without colonial limitations. focuses on the women’s back and the encompassing presentation and intricacies of the beadwork of the regalia.

June is a self-taught mixed-media artist who addresses systemic injustices against Indigenous peoples through embroidery, beadwork, and hand-cut paper. Her piece Your Other Is My Uncle references her late uncle’s murder with a beaded bulletproof vest with streaming red thread protruding from the neck.

The vest incorporates elements of Osage men’s clothing and details alluding to who and what her uncle represented to his family. In Cherokee Nation v. Georgia, June’s embroidered shawl shows the text regarding the guardian-ward relationship that was established in this country, incorporating the trust doctrine into federal Indian law and reinforcing the inferiority of tribes.

Kelly comes from an unbroken line of black ash basket makers, and her weavings share stories of her life and experiences in today’s world. Her series of woven masks, like Let Us Heal and Breathe, intertwine the beauty of the natural world and medicinal elements, such as copper and sweetgrass, while relating to the current state of the pandemic.

As a multidisciplinary artist based in Chicago, Noelle focuses on themes of identity, family history, and recovered

narratives in her work. Her overtly glistening beaded Revolver (Cowboy Gun) and Rifle (Dad’s Gun) create an impression that calls into question the masculinity and lack of rigidity of the subject matter.

Sharing cultural knowledge, Jason creates works in an array of media, including ceramics, drawings, textiles, and cultural pieces. Ashokmaget Waboyan (Healing Blanket) emulates a jingle dress with the cones comprising snippets from various Potawatomi treaties and cyanotype images. By blending printing techniques with hand-crafting skills, this textile represents an approach to individual health and community empowerment through knowledge. Similarly, Mbish Waboyan (Water Blanket) references women as caretakers of water and incorporates clay harvested from Lake Michigan. The piece examines the power of water and its ability to cleanse or destroy, while relating its significant connection to Potawatomi people.

“It was such an honor to be able to present works of local Native artists to a global audience,” Chris Pappan said. “The response was more than I could have hoped for, and it was great to be able to talk about our work in person to visitors.

I am looking forward to doing it again next year!”

—Monica Rickert-Bolter (Prairie Band Potawatomi/Black) NO. 35, SUMMER 2022 | 101

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Cree Writer & Poet

RANDY LUNDY

By Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD

O

F CREE, IRISH, AND NORWEGIAN DESCENT, Randy Lundy is a member of the Barren Lands First Nation in northern Manitoba. He was born in Thompson, Manitoba, and was raised in the community of Hudson Bay in the parkland region of Saskatchewan. He has published four books of poetry: Under the Night Sun (Coteau Books, 1999), The Gift of the Hawk (Coteau Books, 2004), Blackbird Song (University of Regina Press, 2018), and Field Notes for the Self (University of Regina Press, 2020).

Lundy has also written several works of short fiction, literary nonfiction, and academic essays. His poems have been widely published in anthologies in Canada, the United States, and elsewhere, including Native Poetry in Canada: A Contemporary Anthology (Broadview Press, 2001) and An Anthology of Canadian Native Literature in English, third edition (Oxford University Press, 2005).

Lundy’s teaching and research interests focus on Indigenous poetry and drama, while his personal and aesthetic interests include Ch’an Buddhism and existential philosophies. In 2020 Lundy joined the English department at the University of Toronto, Scarborough, as an assistant professor, in the teaching stream. Later this year, Frog Hollow Press will publish his latest anthology of poetry, In the Dark Times, in a limited edition of 100.

MRS: For those who haven’t encountered your work before, how would you describe it?

RL: Oddly enough (or perhaps not so oddly, since it’s a common question), I’ve written a poem that addresses just this question. It goes like this: 102 | FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

WHAT I WRITE ABOUT Well, landscape, I suppose. Yes, that, and not much else, really.

The moon up there right where you’d expect, just a few hours, now, past full.

Couple of coyotes howling in the fields beyond the east edge of town.

Memory, too, like the woodpecker in the maple just this afternoon. Knocking loudly like someone desperately waiting to be admitted to some secret rite.

And magic. The woodpecker knocked, but no hole appeared. Impossible, you say.

I say, It’s true.

Since I am the one writing the poem, who do you think the audience is going to listen to?

Which brings us to belief. That’s not something I write about. Like a good student, I do as I am told, I write only what I know. Landscape, memory, magic: these are the teachers.

Here, I bow.

Let me tell you about the old man speaking of the seven sacred gifts each of us carries and how each created being carries them as well.

The crow that wakes you in the morning with its crow-talk is speaking its morning prayers to its kin, who are each speaking, each praying, too.

The poem is a little bit tongue-incheek but not entirely. The dominant imagery in all my writing has always been the land and the various creatures that inhabit it, along with water, rocks, etc. And all of it is magic to me. Not magic exactly but imbued with spirit.

That’s closer to the truth.

MRS: Critics have written about the “darkness” of your work. Yet there is the presence of renewal, hope, and light. How do these archetypes battle each other in your work?

RL: Hmm, yes. Well, at the risk of being completely obvious, light and darkness are simply mutually dependent parts of how the world works. Right? In the same way in which the cycles of the seasons and the changes that those bring to the landscape make a regular appearance in the poems, so do the cycles of light and darkness. I am speaking a bit literally, and there is, of course, the metaphorical, which is perhaps what you’re asking about. I don’t know.

I mean life is hard, and it’s a battle that’s never won, so we go through regular cycles ourselves between the dark nights of the soul and the yearning, at least, the reaching toward renewal and rebirth. This just seems to be the way of the world, and that includes our own lives too, emotionally and spiritually. But I don’t want to suggest absolute metaphysical and ethical values to light and darkness. I’m a Pagan, not a Christian, so both light and darkness have their places and reasons for being, and both have their lessons to teach us.

Darkness, like emptiness, must be understood, too, as productive, in that it allows for and perhaps facilitates transformation, and the world is nothing if not a process of constant change and transformation. Anyone who has spent time in sweat lodges will understand what I am failing to articulate. Certainly there is the darkness that destroys. But there’s that other darkness that is generative.

MRS: It seems that poetry is making a resurgence in North America. Do you find this to be true, and is there a reason for it?

ART+LIT

RL: It does seem to be. I might not be best positioned to say if it is or not, since I am not aware of the data and the seeming might simply be a function of the small circles I am somewhat tuned into, but it does seem to be. And if the perception is accurate, I am certainly not qualified to do anything other than randomly speculate as to reasons. So, I’ll do a bit of that.

At least two things leap to mind.

One, the pervasive nature of social media seems to be a contributor. There are just so many more electronic outlets for people’s voices and varying levels of skill and practice than there ever were before.

And access to a variety of forms of print publishing is much more pervasive than ever, the opportunities for self- or vanity publishing. However, I suspect that there is some desire for this mode of language use. All of us cannot help but be aware of the abuses of language that surround us, whether it be the noise of that same social media, or marketing, or political leaders. I’d like to think that if there is some renewed interest in poetry, then it has something to do with an ethical, non-consumptive, perhaps spiritual engagement with language and its possibilities. It’s a romantic notion, I know, but I can’t help hoping that there’s some truth in that.

MRS: Your poetry anthology, Field Notes for the Self (University of Regina Press, 2020), won the book of the year and poetry award at the 2021 Saskatchewan Book Awards. It deals with intergenerational trauma and your reflections on the natural world, to put it briefly. Why do you think this book resonates with audiences, and what does the book mean to you today?

RL: On a basic level, I think that trauma and the “natural” world are experiences that everyone can relate to in some ways, on some levels. Life is bloody hard. It’s a hard experience for most of us in some way or another. Being a human being is just difficult. If it was easy, then maybe we, as a species, wouldn’t be making such a bloody mess of so much. And in the midst of all that, if we look around at the world, at all the kin/relatives with whom

we share this world, for me at least, I find some comfort there. The rocks, trees, birds, grass, deer, coyotes, water, sky, and the stars and planets, all of them are going on continually with their own lives and concerns.

Not to get too romantic here, as I realize life is hard and dangerous for birds and animals too, but all that other life and spirit helps me sometimes put my own struggles into a larger context. Whatever the struggles of a particular day for me, when I remember they are happening amid a whole lot of other life and spirit, that can bring some comfort. And beyond that, there is just immense beauty in the world, if we look. When we don’t look, forget to look, or are discouraged from looking by the many social machines that

above Rand Lundy. Image courtesy of the poet.

… if there is some renewed interest in poetry, then it has something to do with an ethical, nonconsumptive, perhaps spiritual engagement with language and its possibilities.

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it, tried to piece something together, and it turns out he liked it! So, it all happened quickly, for which I am grateful, as the process is often long and slow.

As for the presence of Charles Wright, he’s been for some years now my favorite poet, the one I turn to when I need to be spurred, when I need a reminder of what the heck it is I think I am up to and why. For all writers, we come across certain other writers who just speak to and spark us, and his work has been that for me. Somewhere (and I can’t remember where) I read an essay about his work, and the writer used the phrase “backyard metaphysics” to describe his poems. That struck me and stuck with me. It suggests to me the interpenetration of the mundane, the everyday and something more expansive, something of spirit. I won’t get into quibbles with the term metaphysics and how it doesn’t quite capture my sense of the nature of the world. I’ll just say the infusion of matter with spirit and vice versa makes sense to me. And that can be seen directly, in the backyard—the trees, the birds, the raccoon, etc. So, it’s a matter of hero worship with Wright. I’m a fan, I admire his work, and there are times, too, when I argue with his work, as occurs in at least one of the poems in the new book. Sometimes some of the most fun I have writing poems is when I get into arguments on the page with other poets, especially poets whose work I admire and respect.

MRS: The most difficult part of writing? What do you struggle with?

above Cover of Field Notes for the Self, Oskana Poetry & Poetics, 5 (University of Regina Press, 2020).

would have us not look, then we are lesser creatures. And I put “natural” in quotation marks, because not to do so suggests to me that somehow human being exists outside other being. It does not. And believing it does is part of the reason we destroy so many of our kin. It’s about both looking and how we look, what the frame is. Anyway, the book. I think it’s a good book.

I like what’s in there and what it’s trying to do. I’m glad some others feel the same.

MRS: Your most recent work, In the Dark Times, reflects on the pandemic, lockdown, nature, and much more. From what I have read, Charles Wright also features prominently in your words. How did this book come about, and can you speak to the presence of Wright in it?

RL: Well, it’s a little book, about 50 pages. The editor for Frog Hollow Press (poet Shane Neilson) contacted me to see if I would be interested in submitting something for consideration.

I had some work on hand, so I simply sorted through some of

RL: Just finding time. As all writers know, you love it, and you want to give what’s best in you to it. You want to always give it your best time and energy, not just what’s left over after attending to all the other things we have to do to get through a day. So, there’s that practical matter. And eventually you come to realize that every time is hard. Each time you sit down in front of a blank page/screen, the challenge is renewed. That’s difficulty, but it’s also reward, as it makes for a new, unpredictable adventure every time. If you sit down to write and it’s easy, unsurprising, without challenge, then maybe it’s time to step away for a bit and let some of the unpredictability return.

MRS: In our conversations, I notice that we share a mutual affection for Kurt Vonnegut.1 Why is humor so important now?

RL: To be honest, I haven’t read Vonnegut in many, many years, and even then, I think I only read three to four of the novels. Two things I’ll comment on though: humor and dogs. I remember an anecdote that goes something like this: if you walk into a room full of people and you want to know where all the Indigenous people are, just listen for the laughter. In my experience, it’s true. We do a lot of laughing. It’s healthy, healing, and community building. Lots of teasing tends to happen. There are lots of writing out there that talks about the necessity of humor in the

1. Kurt Vonnegut is quoted in Lundy’s email footer: “And how should we behave during this Apocalypse? We should be unusually kind to one another, certainly. But we should also stop being so serious. Jokes help a lot. And get a dog if you don’t already have one.” From Vonnegut’s book, Armageddon in Retrospect: And Other New and Unpublished Writings on War and Peace (New York: Penguin Publishing Group, 2008), n.p.

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face of the devastations of colonial violence, and we laugh, long and loud, and often at times that might not seem appropriate to some. I love, for example, the joking and teasing that often happens at a sweat—before, in between rounds, afterward. A good thing to be able to tease and joke during the breaks with an old person who’s running the ceremony.

That’s how it’s been for me, at least.

And the injunction to get a dog, I don’t really mean it.

Get a dog only if you’re ready to take on the responsibility to live in a relationship with another person. We are human people; they are dog people. And we have to treat them with the respect they deserve. However, I have lived with dogs for almost the last 20 years of my adult life, and they have much to teach us about what it means to be a person, if we are willing to look and listen and learn. I often joke with people that dogs are the best people I’ve met in life. Truth is, it’s not a joke at all.

MRS: Many thanks for this, Randy.

RL: kinanâskomitin, thank you, Matthew, and readers. I appreciate the opportunity to visit.

Mother Earth fetish necklace

by Ray Tsalate Zuni Pueblo

ODE FOR SPRING I. March. The blackbirds have arrived, have returned.

Their voices a polyphony of flute notes, lifted on the warm west wind this afternoon. It is spring, and I, too, am filled with release. Overflowing.

I wonder if you still hear my voice, old ones, my grandmothers and grandfathers.

I am singing.

I want you to know I have not forgotten.

Everything is close, is near. Nothing has been forgotten. Afternoon song leads into night song and carries on into the next morning.

Through the night the starlight is old, older even than the stones. And nothing is lost.

II. All the things I do not know, all the names I do not know, I carry with me, still, inside my bones.

—Randy Lundy (Cree)

Since 1981 Fetishes Jewelry Pottery 227 Don Gaspar, Santa Fe 505.989.8728 keshi.com

NO. 35, SUMMER 2022 | 105

MEMORIAL

ENOCH KELLY HANEY November 12, 1940–April 23, 2022

above Kelly Haney with his painting. Image courtesy of the author.

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HE HONORABLE ENOCH KELLY HANEY (Seminole Nation/Muscogee) died peacefully at home, surrounded by his cherished family. He was an artist, public servant, businessman, counselor, pastor, youth director, tribal leader, educator, devoted family man, and dear friend. Simply put, Kelly was a warrior. While his presence on this earth was 82 years, his impact and influence will be witnessed and treasured for countless years to come.

Kelly was a longtime member of the Seminole Hitchitee United Methodist Church in Seminole, Oklahoma. Hitchiti is related to hecetv, the Mvskoke word meaning “to see.” Kelly was indeed a person of great vision and was never dissuaded from a cause or a commitment he deemed to be worthy and important to the people around him. When met with opposition and with great barriers, he would see his way around them. Kelly was committed to education and enlightenment. He instilled these values in his family and was so proud of their accomplishments.

He obtained his associate of arts degree from Bacone College in 1962 and a bachelor of fine arts degree from Oklahoma City University in 1965.

An internationally acclaimed artist, Kelly was named a Master Artist of the Five Civilized Tribes in 1975. He continued his artwork through the age of 80 and was always thinking of the next project. He loved to create and believed that projects should be “done right.” The commitment, research, and thoughtfulness he always brought to any project were awe-inspiring.

Known for many sculptures, paintings, and lithographs that honor Native cultures, Kelly is best known for his beautiful sculpture that adorns the Oklahoma State Capitol, The Guardian.

In many respects, he embodied that identity: a guardian of 106 | FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM

culture, education, public policy, vision, and dreams shared by so many.

For more than 60 years, many Native and non-Native people from Oklahoma have wanted to develop a center to tell the stories of the tribes in Oklahoma, perpetuate American Indian art, educate people on Native cultures, and strengthen cultural tourism enterprise. Today, thanks to the unwavering commitment and Guardian Warrior leadership of Kelly Haney and the support and hard work of so many, we have a world-class First Americans Museum (FAM) in Oklahoma City. Kelly was always a force that could transcend party lines and bring people together for important causes, such as this museum. He believed that it is up to all of us to bring what we can to a special project like FAM to sustain it: our experience, our past, our present, and our hope for the future of Native peoples. He knew FAM would be created and he was there on the opening day in 2021 to celebrate this accomplishment.

A true servant-leader throughout his entire life, Kelly was an ambassador of Native cultures and of the State of Oklahoma.

In his public service, he served as an Oklahoma state representative between 1980 and 1986, and as an Oklahoma state senator between 1986 and 2002. He was the first full-blood Native American elected to those offices. He served as the chairman of the Joint Committee on State-Tribal Relations and the chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee. He secured legislation that improved education for all Oklahoma citizens. A bridge builder in Oklahoma, he helped develop working relationships between tribal nations in Oklahoma and the state. He was that special leader in the right places during the right times. This warrior leader understood what it means to be Standing His Ground—as he titled a painting and bronze sculpture—in good times and in challenging times.

Kelly was always committed to his community. He loved serving his tribe, the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma, first as a planner and business manager, then as a councilperson, and finally as principal chief from 2005 until 2009.

Countless awards and recognition honor Kelly’s artwork and commitment to the people of Oklahoma in his public service. His greatest rewards in life were his family and his friends and being with his community. From public service to private life, relationships were paramount to him. He loved being social and traveling and trying new experiences. He never met a stranger and always welcomed new and familiar faces with a good story that was sure to bring warmth and smiles to any occasion. He truly believed that we are all more alike than we are different and that our values are something that connects us all.

We will forever be grateful for Enoch Kelly Haney—a man who was always standing his ground. May we carry on the inspiration of the warrior spirit that this guardian so graciously shared with us all.

—Gena Timberman (Choctaw Nation)

MEMORIAL

ARDINA MOORE December 1, 1930–April 19, 2022

above Ardina Moore, 2021. Photo: Ryan RedCorn (Osage). Image courtesy of the photographer.

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RDINA REVARD MOORE (Quapaw Nation/Osage Nation), Ma-Shra-Gi-Te, Eagle Feather who Gets Up, made her journey in the early morning of April 19, 2022. She was 91. Ardina, my grandmother, was born to Martha Griffin (Quapaw) and James Revard (Osage) on a family hunting trip in Texas on December 1, 1930. She was the first granddaughter of Minnie Track and Victor Griffin (both Quapaw), the last hereditary chief of the Quapaw Tribe. Ardina lost her mother at the tender age of seven. Her father was a traveling musician with a Western swing band called Jimmie Revard and His Oklahoma Playboys.

Ardina was raised by her maternal grandparents, who spoke Quapaw in their household and participated in the Native American Church; her Grandpa Victor served as the roadman.

As a little girl, stitching lace around the edges of her grandmother’s nightdresses was Ardina’s first sewing lesson. She grew into an adventurous young woman under the watchful eyes of her grandparents. They saw formal education as the means for her survival in this world that had witnessed the dismantling

of the traditional Quapaw chief system and the starvation of Quapaw people for lack of promised government rations.

Ardina was the first Quapaw woman to earn a college degree. Hers was in physical education and home economics from Northeastern State University in Tahlequah, Oklahoma.

In college, she met and married James Moore. She became a mother of five, with four of her children surviving to adulthood.

She taught at various schools but continued to sew, now on her children’s clothes.

At an event one evening, Ardina sported a Whitney Point blanket coat that she had sewn for herself. When a woman approached to ask where she bought her coat, Ardina replied that she had made it herself. The woman was so taken by the garment that my grandmother took her information, asked for her measurements, and promised to make her a coat just like the one she was wearing. That was the origin of her design studio Buffalo Sun. From then on, she dedicated a room in her home to her commissions, which she quickly outgrew. After a move or two, she settled her business in a storefront in downtown Miami, Oklahoma. Her tagline was “From Buckskins to Silks,” and she delivered elegance, quality, and practicality.

To my mind as a young girl playing “shop owner” with my sister, Buffalo Sun was a magical playground where my grandmother sewed her original textile creations into suits of regalia, Chanel-inspired dresses, ribbonwork vests, fur hats, and lined coats. Through the 1980s and the 1990s, she won awards from art markets such as Santa Fe Indian Market, Heard Fair, Minneapolis, Eiteljorg, and Red Earth, and events such as Indian Summer and others. She put on fashion shows of Native American couture at the Heard Museum. One of her favorite pieces was inspired by the story of the sacred White Buffalo Calf Woman. She made a long white coat with a shaggy-haired hat.

Ardina believed in building garments that were practical and wearable. “The quality of the material will determine the quality of the garment,” she often said. She was a mentor to many. She coached and clothed at least four Miss Indian USA title holders—her youngest daughter being the first—and other tribal princesses in various leadership competitions.

Beyond the world of fashion, Ardina founded many organizations, taught Quapaw language classes, served as secretary/ treasurer for the Quapaw Business Committee, and was active as the chair of the Quapaw Cultural Committee for several years.

She championed the Quapaw Tribal Museum. In 2011 she was inducted into the Oklahoma Women’s Hall of Fame. She was instrumental in founding the Dhegiha Preservation Society, dedicated to revitalizing the Dhegiha languages, a Siouan language family that includes Quapaw, Osage, Omaha, Kaw, and Ponca. Ardina was the last first-language Quapaw speaker.

A loving mother, grandmother, and great-grandmother, Ardina was a friend and mentor to many. Her legacy will live on in her Quapaw language students and her many creations.

Wa-pa-ti. —Candice Byrd (Quapaw/Osage/Cherokee Nations) NO. 35, SUMMER 2022 | 107

MEMORIAL

OLIVIA SKENANDORE February 8, 1948–April 25, 2022

O above Olivia Skenandore with four of her handmade dolls.

Image courtesy of the author.

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N MONDAY, APRIL 25, Olivia J. Perea Skenandore (Oglala Lakota/Chicana), our Matriarch, Artist, Educator, Sister, Mother, and Grandmother, began her journey to be with the Ancestors at the age of 74.

Olivia was born in Roswell, New Mexico, to Charlie Perea and Geraldine “Gerry” (Janis) Perea. Her mother instilled a deep love for her Lakota culture. Gerry shared stories that inspired her daughter to become a Lakota dollmaker.

Olivia was primarily a self-taught artist who poured over books and catalogues as well as historical photographs to learn about Lakota dolls. She created two styles, one inspired by reservation-era dolls and the other was a form described by her mother in her stories: an old, very utilitarian doll with no arms or legs, just a body and head.

Over the decades she sold and exhibited her work at SWAIA’s Santa Fe Indian Market, the Heard Fair, and the Northern Plains Indian Art Market,

among other venues. She received numerous honors and awards at these markets and at exhibitions. Her work was not limited to the medium of dolls. She also painted and drew, and in her retirement years, she took jewelry and lapidary classes. Her work is in multiple private and public collections across the country.

Her most recent accomplishment was as an artist-in-residence at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe in 2021.

Olivia received her master of education degree from the University of New Mexico in 1983. As a postgraduate doctoral student, she had completed her coursework at the University of New Mexico—all but her dissertation. She chose to dedicate her time to the classroom, where her focus was on Native American gifted students. She served as chair of the Special Populations Network for the National Association for Gifted Children. She worked as a special education teacher for 32 years of combined service in the Albuquerque Public Schools, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and Santa Fe Public Schools.

Mom encouraged my artistic tendencies from an early age. She always supported my creativity and paved the way for me to be able to create work without limitations. Although she was very unhappy with me when I was arrested for painting in the middle of the freeway, she did come to understand how important Style Writing was for me and my work. It was an absolute honor to have been able to eventually collaborate with her on her dolls. It was the gift of a lifetime to be her son. Her legacy as an Indigenous artist and educator led the way for me and, I am sure, for countless others. Her smile, laughter, and generosity will be missed by many.

—Hoka Skenandore (Oneida/ Oglala Lakota/Luiseño/Chicano)

PRESENTS

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FAZAKAS GALLERY PRESENTS ART INSTALLATION BY JASON BAERG TWO SPECIAL EXHIBITIONS:

• VARIATIONS ON A LOOM, MASTER NAVAJO WEAVERS FROM CRYSTAL TRADING POST DURING THE J.B. MOORE ERA • LOOKING FORWARD THROUGH THE PAST: CONTEMPORARY NATIVE AMERICAN ART.

VIRTUAL SHOW AUGUST 11–31, 2022

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INDIGENOUS APPALACHIA Creative Work by 15 Contemporary Indigenous Artists Indigenous Native Nations Today Complexities

History | Discussions | Collections | Portrayals A multidisciplinary exhibit by West Virginia University Art in the Libraries & Native American Studies Program launching Fall 2022 at West Virginia University Downtown Library Proud sponsors:

CALENDAR July 1–August 13: Colorado Springs, CO Steven Yazzie: ˆˆ(Resource) at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College, 30 W. Dale Street | fac.coloradocollege.edu July 1–October 30: Kleinberg, ON Elisapee Ishulutaq: My World at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, 10365 Islington Avenue | mcmichael.com July 2–Ongoing: Santa Fe, NM Here, Now, and Always at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, 710 Camino Lejo | (505) 476-1269 | museumfoundation.org/hna July 7, 2022–May 14, 2023: Phoenix, AZ When Rez Dogs Howl: Art by Thomas Breeze Marcus at the Pueblo Grande Museum and Archaeological Park, 4619 E. Washington Street phoenix.gov/parks/arts-culture-history/pueblo-grande July 12–August 27: Portland, OR V. Maldonado at Froelick Gallery, 714 NW Davis Street (503) 222-1142 | froelickgallery.com July 16–September 29: Toronto, ON Naak Silavit Qeqqaa? at the Art Gallery of Ontario, 317 Dundas Street West | +1 (877) 225-4246 | ago.ca

exhibits.lib.wvu.edu/exhibits/indigenous-appalachia

July 23 & 24: Victor, NY Indigenous Music & Arts Festival at the Seneca Art & Cultural Center, 7000 County Road 41. 10:00 am–5:00 pm, free | ganondagan.org July 23 & 24: Tiverton, RI Cultural Survival Bazaar at Tiverton Four Corners Arts Center, 3852 Main Road, free | (617) 441-5400 x15 | bazaar.culturalsurvival.org July 23–October 9: West Bend, WI Tom Jones: Where We Stand at the Museum of Wisconsin Art, 205 Veterans Avenue | (262) 334-9638 | wisconsinart.org July 23–December 31: Calera, OK Chiefs, Clans & Kin: Art of the Five Civilized Tribes at the Choctaw Cultural Center, 1919 Hina Hanta Way | choctawculturalcenter.com July 28, 2022–February 22, 2023: Fargo, ND Waŋna niš niyepi: Continuity of Culture, Crow’s Shadow at the Plains Art Museum, 704 First Avenue North | plainsart.org/exhibitions July 29, 2022–January 7, 2023: Colorado Springs, CO Action | Abstraction Redefined at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center, Colorado College, 30 W. Dale Street | fac.coloradocollege.edu July 29, 2022–January 15, 2023: Santa Fe, NM Matrilineal: Legacies of Our Mothers at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, 108 Cathedral Place | iaia.edu/event

RAVEN CHACON

PENNY KAGIGEBI

July 30, 2022–January 15, 2023: Albuquerque, NM Between Two Worlds: The Photography of Lee Marmon at the Albuquerque Museum, 2000 Mountain Road NW | (505) 243-7255 albuquerquemuseum.org July 31, 2022–May 28, 2023: Santa Fe, NM Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, 710 Camino Lejo | groundedinclay.org August 2–December 31: Missoula, MT Raven Halfmoon: New Monuments at the Missoula Art Museum, Missoula Art Museum, 335 N. Pattee Street | missoulaartmuseum.org August 4–15: Gallup, NM 100th annual Gallup Inter-tribal Indian Ceremonial in Red Rock Park, 825 Outlaw Road, and other locations | gallupceremonial.com

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August 5 & 6: Norman, OK 9th annual Central Oklahoma Native American Art Sale at the Cleveland County Fairgrounds, 615 E. Robinson Street (405) 321-8961 | okcindianart.wordpress.com August 5–September 24: Winnipeg, MB Alakkaajut (Many Things Appear) at the Urban Shaman Contemporary Aboriginal Art Gallery, 203–290 McDermont Avenue +1 (204) 942-2674 | urbanshaman.org

NativeAmerican Americanjewelry jewelry Native and arts marketplace and arts marketplace

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ChristensenLane Lane 22Christensen Kennebunk,Maine Maine Kennebunk, 207423-8473 423-8473 207

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August 6: Tacoma, WA In the Spirit Northwest Native Festival at the Washington State Historical Society, 1911 Pacific Avenue | washingtonhistory.org August 6–October 29: Vancouver, BC For Love, Loss & Land at Open Space, 510 Fort Street, 2nd floor +1 (250) 383-8833 | openspacearts.ca August TBA: Vancouver, BC Tide Lines: Elder Artists/Activists 1967–1977 at Open Space, 510 Fort Street, 2nd floor | +1 (250) 383-8833 | openspacearts.ca August 7, 2022–August 2023 Honoring Tradition and Innovation: 100 Years of Santa Fe’s Indian Market 1922–2022 at the New Mexico History Museum, 113 Lincoln Avenue | (505) 476-5200 | museumfoundation.org August 11–14: Santa Fe, NM Objects of Art & American Indian/Tribal Santa Fe at Museo Cultural de Santa Fe, 555 Camino de la Familia | objectsofartshows.com August 12–14: Green Bay, WI Woodland Indian Art Show & Market at the Radisson Hotel and Conference Center, 2040 Airport Drive | woodlandindianart.com

Emil Her Many Horses Emil Her Many Horses

Jewelry | Baskets | Prints |Beadwork |Sculpture Jewelry | Baskets | Prints |Beadwork |Sculpture

August 12–14: Panama City, Panama 10th annual Festival de Arte Dule at various locations facebook.com/FestivalArteDule August 12–15: Santa Fe, NM Whitehawk Antique Indian & Ethnographic Art Show at the Santa Fe Convention Center, 201 W. Marcy Street | (505) 988-9544 whitehawkshows.wordpress.com August 12–September 10: Tahlequah, OK 27th annual Cherokee Homecoming Art Show at Cherokee Springs Plaza, 3377 Cherokee Springs Road | visitcherokeenation.com

Native American jewelry and arts marketplace 2 Christensen Lane Kennebunk, Maine 207 423-8473

V. MALDONADO

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Un Rinconcito en el Cielo

July 12–August 27, 2022

August 17–19: Santa Fe, NM Wheelwright Benefit Event at the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, 704 Camino Lejo | (505) 982-4636 | wheelwright.org August 18: Santa Fe, NM Currents in Indigenous Art: Native Writers Discuss Native Art, roundtable at the Ralph T. Coe Center for the Arts, 1590-B Pacheco Street, 10:30 am–12:00 pm | firstamericanartmagazine.com/currents August 18–21: Santa Fe, NM Art Indigenous at El Museo Cultural de Santa Fe, 555 Camino de la Familia, hosted by SWAIA and Objects of Art Shows | swaia.org August 18: Santa Fe, NM Giving Growth at the Ralph T. Coe Center for the Arts, 1590-B Pacheco Street, 5:30–7:30 pm | (505) 983-6372 | coeartscenter.org August 19 & 20: Santa Fe, NM Case Trading Post Artists Market at the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, 704 Camino Lejo | wheelwright.org/artists-market August 19–21: Santa Fe, NM Pathways Indigenous Arts Festival at Buffalo Thunder Resort, 30 Buffalo Thunder Trail | (505) 455-5041 | poehcenter.org/pathways

FROELICKEmilGALLERY Her Many Horses 7 14 NW Davis, Portland, OR | 503.222.1142 Domingo Ruso 2019, acrylic on canvas, 76 x 136˝ Jewelry | (Luto), Baskets | Prints |Beadwork |Sculpture

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NATIVE AMERICAN ART APPRAISALS, INC. SINCE 1936

August 19–21: Santa Fe, NM Sovereign Santa Fe at La Fonda on the Plaza, 100 E. San Francisco Street,10:00 am–7:00 pm | Instagram @sovereignsantafe

August 19, 2022–January 8, 2023 Art of Indigenous Fashion at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, 108 Cathedral Place | (505) 428-5912 | iaia.edu August 20 & 21: Santa Fe, NM 100th annual SWAIA Santa Fe Indian Market in downtown Santa Fe (505) 983-5220 | swaia.org August 20 & 21: Santa Fe, NM Free Indian Market Show at Federal Park, Paseo de Peralta and Washington Avenue | facebook.com/FreeIndianMarketShow August 25: Phoenix, AZ NAJA 2022 National Native Media Conference at the Hyatt Regency Phoenix, 122 N. Second Street | najanewsroom.com August 26, 2022–January 8, 2023: Appleton, WI Reclaiming Identity at the Trout Museum, 111 W. College Avenue.

Curated by Dakota Mace (Diné) | (920) 733-4089 | troutmuseum.org August 27, 2022–May 1, 2023: Oklahoma City, OK Art of the Northwest Coast at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, 1700 NE 63rd Street | nationalcowboymuseum.org

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

September 3 & 4: Lawrence, KS Haskell Indian Art Market on the Haskell Indian Nations University Campus, 155 Indian Avenue | (785) 749-8467 | haskell.edu/hiam September 9–15: Sarasota, FL Sarasota Native American Film Festival at 332 Cocoanut Avenue filmfreeway.com/SarasotaNativeAmericanFilmFestival September 17 & 18: Prescott, AZ 24th annual Prescott Indian Art Market at the Sharlot Hall Museum, 415 W. Gurley Street | (928) 445-3122 | sharlothallmuseum.org September 17–December 17: Salem, OR Transformations: The George and Colleen Hoyt Collection of Northwest Coast Art at the Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Willamette University, 700 State Street | (503) 370-6855 | willamette.edu/arts/hfma September 19–21: Bentonville, AR 6th annual Native American Cultural Celebration at the Museum of Native American History, 202 SW O Street | monah.us September 23–25: Sioux Falls, SD Northern Plains Indian Art Market. Friday reception: Old Courthouse Museum, 200 W. 6th Street. Saturday & Sunday market: Hilton Garden Inn–Downtown, 201 E. 8th Street | npiam.org September 24: Gallup, NM Fall Friends of Hubbell Native American Arts Auction at Gallup Community Service Center, 410 Bataan Veterans Street.

9:00 am–5:00 pm | friendsofhubbell.org September 30, 2022–May 26, 2024 The Stories We Carry at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, 108 Cathedral Place | (505) 983-1666 | iaia.edu/museum October 7–9: Catoosa, OK 17th annual Cherokee Art Market at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino Tulsa, 777 W. Cherokee Avenue | cherokeeartmarket.com For more events, visit our online calendar at

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NORTHERN PLAINS INDIAN ART MARKET Best of Show Art Preview & Reception September 23, 2022 7:00pm to 8:30pm Old Courthouse Museum Sioux Falls, SD

Art Market September 24, 2022 10:00am to 6:00pm September 25, 2022 10:00am to 4:00pm Hilton Garden Inn Downtown Sioux Falls, SD

Artwork by Terrance Guardipee - “Blackfeet Holy Couple”

Visit Kathleen Wall at Santa Fe Indian Market August 20-21, 2022 NEW LOCATION: Booth PLZ 29 A