First American Art Magazine No. 37, Winter 2023

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

FırstAmericanArt MAGAZINE

KARIN WALKINGSTICK LIZ WALLACE DAVID GARNEAU VENANCIO ARAGON

TALKING EARTH TULE DUCK DECOYS SALMON CULTURE & MUSEUM SOVEREIGNTY ART GALLERIES LEADING THE WAY

NO. 37, WINTER 2023

DISPLAY UNTIL APRIL 4, 2023

10

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issue no. 37, winter 2023

FEATURES Galleries’ Roles in the Native Art World: Educating and Advocating for Indigenous Artists

By Chadd Scott

DEPARTMENTS 18

Salmon Culture: Exploring 28 Museum Sovereignty Through an Exhibition Project

By Nadia Jackinsky-Sethi, PhD (Alutiiq) Ducks from the Deep: The Lovelock Cave Tule Ducks and the Art of the Decoy

By James G. Bland

34

Generations through Clay: Santee Smith’s Talking Earth Artwork

By Anya Montiel, PhD (Mestiza/ Tohono O'odham descent)

42

48

Recent Developments

8

Seven Directions Joe Stahlman, PhD (Tuscarora descent)

12

Collections Brooklyn Museum

By Andrea L. Ferber, PhD

72

Art+Lit Norma Dunning: Inuk Writer, Educator & Poet

By Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD

86

Erica Jacque (Inuk)

By America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

89

Calendar

By Nicole Emmons (Citizen Potawatomi)

94

54

ARTIST PROFILES Venancio Aragon: Navajo Textile Artist

By Stacy Pratt, PhD (Mvskoke)

48

David Garneau: Métis Painter, Curator & Critic

By Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD

54

Karin Walkingstick: Cherokee Nation Ceramic Artist

By America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

60

Liz Wallace: Navajo/Nisenan Maidu/Washoe Jeweler

By Staci Golar

66

REVIEWS 76

Book Review

84

MEMORIALS

60

cover Liz Wallace (Navajo/Nisenan Maidu/ Washoe), Sunset Dive, 2018, plique-à-jour dragonfly pin with stand; pin: sterling silver, 24K gold, vitreous enamel, Morenci turquoise, peridot, garnet; stand: sterling silver, garnet, South Sea pearl. Photo: The Photography Studio, Santa Fe. Image courtesy of the artist.

Exhibition Reviews

Mary Holiday Black (Navajo, 1936–2022)

By America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

90

Shirley Brauker, PhD (Little Traverse Odawa, 1950–2022)

By Kelly Church (Gun Lake Pottawatomi/Ottawa/Ojibwe)

91

Dora Tse-Pe (Zia/Jemez/ 92 San Ildefonso Pueblo, 1939–2022)

By Kenneth Williams Jr. (Northern Arapaho/Seneca)

66

Mervin Windsor (Haisla/Heiltsuk, 1964–2022)

By Christopher W. Smith

93

NO. 37, WINTER 2023 | 5

issue no. 37, winter 2023 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) Advertising Representative: Barbara Harjo Operations Manager: James G. Bland Circulation Manager: Nicole Emmons (Citizen Potawatomi) Copy Editors: Rosa Cays (Chicana) and Jo Ann Reece Proofreaders: Travis D. Day, Staci Golar, Jo Ann Reece, 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)

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: Nadia Jackinsky-Sethi, PhD (Alutiiq) Southeast: Michole Eldred (Catawba/Eastern Cherokee descent) Southwest: Holly Coonsis (Zuni) and RoseMary Diaz (Santa Clara Pueblo)

Advisory Council

come experience the

First Friday open houses the first Friday of each month Private tours available Indigenous art from regions around the world In Midtown Santa Fe No admission fees

coeartscenter.org

1590 B Pacheco Street, Santa Fe, NM 87505 Email. info@coeartscenter.org Tel. 505-983-6372

Miranda Belarde-Lewis, PhD (Zuni/Tlingit) Roy Boney Jr. (Cherokee Nation) Emily Haozous, PhD, RN (Chiricahua Fort Sill Apache) 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) Neebinnaukzhik Southall (Rama Chippewa) Mary Jo Watson, PhD (Seminole Nation) India Rael Young, PhD

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EDITOR’S GREETING

above America Meredith. Photo: Kristina James, Shine A Light Photography, Norman, Oklahoma.

O

N THIS GREY, OVERCAST WINTER MORNING on the Southern Plains, I’m daydreaming of the citrus-scented sunny weekend in Phoenix, Arizona, during the Heard Fair. A friend called about planning a road trip to Texas to see a major exhibition of Maya artwork this spring. The promise of travel, adventures, connections, and engaging with great Indigenous art lifts the dreariness of the day.

Better things are to come.

In this issue, authors and artists reflect on the movements and developments within our Indigenous art community that aren’t always immediately apparent. We are scattered across vast geographical regions. We are linked by ideas, and concepts that artists manifest whether in visual, literary, media, performing arts, or combinations of these.

While galleries are a cornerstone in the lives of mainstream artists, proportionally far fewer Native artists have gallery representation. However, galleries play an active role in the market for art by Indigenous peoples of the Americas. The more influential galleries participate in major art fairs and provide visibility for 21st-century Native art in an arena where it has often been missing. Because of longstanding taboos against discussing the economics of the art world, the influence of gallerists on museum collections and ultimately art history is often ignored. Author Chadd

Scott checked in with four galleries that represent Native artists to learn about their views on the shifting place of Indigenous art within the broader art world today.

Nadia Jackinsky-Sethi (Alutiiq) illustrates Museum Sovereignty, which is Indigenous peoples deciding how their cultures are represented in museum spaces, through the curation of Salmon Culture at the Pratt Museum in Homer, Alaska. Sparked by a poorly worded social media post, this exhibition shows how museums can listen to local communities and open their doors to Indigenous people to the benefit of everyone. The Alaska Native–led curatorial team even invited non-Native community members to curate a sister exhibition Salmon Culture: Kachemak Bay Connections, because representation is not a zero-sum game. Instead we all benefit from being able to honestly tell our own stories, no matter what our political and cultural backgrounds are.

In his introduction to the oldest known surviving duck decoys in the world, found in Lovelock Cave, and their historical and 21st-century counterparts, James G. Bland shows how the flora and fauna of a region have always played a central role in Indigenous art forms. Artists continue to create this utilitarian art form, a hunting decoy, that takes on different conceptual meanings through time and a changing environment in the Great Basin. The tule reed sculptors are a testament to the artists’ connection to their lands and waterways and ongoing commitment to sustaining cultural connections between humans, animals, plants, earth, and water.

Santee Smith (Kahnyen'kehàka) combines dance, ceramics, and multimedia images, lights, and sound in her art piece, Talking Earth (2022), which she and her dance troupe, Kaha:wi Dance Theatre, performed at the Gardiner Museum in Toronto. Anya Montiel (Mestiza/ Tohono O’odham descent) discusses the performance and its background and inspiration. Smith’s monumental public sculpture Talking Earth pays homage to her parents’ and paternal grandmother’s efforts to revive Haudenosaunee pottery. Her multimedia performance doesn’t juxtapose customary and historical art forms against electronic or conceptual art forms but rather shows the possibilities when they are combined into one. Talking Earth speaks to continuum, not categorization.

The clouds have parted, and the sun is shining through the evergreen leaves of the cedar tree in my backyard. An Eastern grey squirrel nibbles on sunflower seeds. A blank basswood panel and acrylic paints beckon. Time to get going, get out, and reconnect.

—America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

NO. 37, WINTER 2023 | 7

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS MUSEUMS The New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs hired Polly Nordstrand to serve as the executive director of the MUSEUM OF INDIAN ARTS AND CULTURE in Santa Fe, as well as manage the Laboratory of Anthropology, the Center for New Mexico Archaeology, Museum Hill Café, and other public spaces on Museum Hill.

Previously Nordstrand was the inaugural curator of Native American art at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas, and curator of Southwest art at the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center at Colorado College.

She was a curator at the Denver Art Museum, the National Park Service, and the Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum and taught at the University of Denver.

The MUSEUM OF INDIANS ARTS AND CULTURE selected Marita Hinds (Tesuque Pueblo) to serve as its educational director. Previously she served as a school administrator for the Te Tsu Geh Oweenge School at Tesuque Pueblo, New Mexico, and has worked at the Institute of American Indian Arts and the Southwestern Association for Indian Arts. She earned her AFA degree from the Institute of American Indian Arts and her bachelor’s degree from the College of Santa Fe. NATIONAL GALLERY OF CANADA (NGC) in Ottawa fired four of its senior staff members, including Greg A. Hill (Mohawk), who was the Audain senior curator of Indigenous Art. Hill was part of the NGC’s Department of Indigenous Ways and Decolonization, created in February 2022, led by the museum’s vice-president Steven Loft (Mohawk) and department director Michelle LaVallee (Neyaashiinigmiing Ojibway).

NGC’s interim CEO Angela Cassie is implementing a strategic plan created under her predecessor in 2021. Hill had worked at the gallery for 22 years.

ORGANIZATIONS The RALPH T. COE CENTER FOR THE ARTS in Santa Fe hired Alex J. Peña (Comanche/Pawnee/San Ildefonso 8 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE

Classes for the two-year residency program will begin in Fall 2023. Donations from the Walton Family Charitable Support Foundation provide full tuition waivers for all accepted students.

ART SHOWS

above Polly Nordstrand (Hopi), newly hired executive director of the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, Santa Fe. ©2022 Polly Nordstrand. Image courtesy of Polly Nordstrand and the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs.

Pueblo) as its deputy director and chief curator. Peña is a printmaker and educator who previously taught at the Santa Fe Preparatory School. Before that, he taught at the Institute of American Indian Arts and the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He earned his BFA from Cameron University and his MA and MFA degrees from the University of Wisconsin, Madison.

The TRUSTEES OF RESERVATIONS, a land conservation nonprofit organization based in Boston, hired Tess Lukey (Aquinnah Wampanoag) as its inaugural associate curator of Native American art. She will be based at the Fruitlands Museum and deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum. Lukey was the lead horticulture interpreter at Old Sturbridge Village and a curatorial research associate at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She earned her BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and her MA in art history and museum studies from the University of New Mexico.

SCHOOLS The UNIVERSITY OF ARKANSAS, Fayetteville, partnered with the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art to create a new art history master’s degree program on the arts of the Americas.

Samantha Jacobs (Seneca) and Hayden Haynes (Seneca) won best of show at the 2022 HODINÖHSÖ:NI' ART SHOW at the Ganondagan State Historic Site located in Victor, New York. Classifications winners were Ronni-Leigh Goeman (Onondaga) and Stonehorse Goeman (Tonawanda Seneca), basketry; Jessica Hernandez (Mohawk), beadwork; Luanne Redeye (Seneca), fine art 2D; Natasha Smoke Santiago (Mohawk), fine art, 3D; Hayden Haynes, photography; and Natasha Smoke Santiago, traditional art.

MARKETS NORTHERN PLAINS INDIAN ART MARKET, hosted by Sinte Gleska University, took place at the Hilton Garden Inn Downtown in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. Angela Babby (Oglala Lakota) won best of show. Janyce Trask (Oglala Lakota) won Best of Tribal Arts, while Kevin and Valerie Pourier (both Oglala Lakota) won Best of Fine Arts.

Division winners were Dwayne Wilcox (Oglala Lakota), oil and acrylic paintings; Wade Patton (Oglala Lakota), drawing; Jackie Sevier (Northern Arapaho), printmaking; Dwayne Wilcox, 3D–additional process; Alfred Decoteau (Turtle Mountain Chippewa), 3D–subtractive process; Kevin Pourier, jewelry and decorative metalwork; Henry Payer (Winnebago), mixed media, fine arts; Marlena Myles (Dakota/Mohegan/Muscogee), digital and computer-generated; Emil Her Many Horses (Oglala Lakota), traditional-style beadwork; Patricia Belgarde (Turtle Mountain Chippewa), contemporary beadwork; Carol Wilcox (Oglala Lakota), quilts; Nelda Schrupp (Pheasant Rump Nakota), textile and fabric items; Molina Jo Two Bulls (Oglala Lakota), handmade dolls; Awanigiizhik Bruce (Turtle Mountain Chippewa), traditional painting; Jackie Sevier, mixed-media, tribal arts; and Dwayne Wilcox, mixed-media, 3D.

Troy Jackson (Cherokee Nation) won best of show at the CHEROKEE ART MARKET. Hosted by the Cherokee Nation, this intertribal art market was in-person at the Hard Rock Casino and Resort in Catoosa, Oklahoma.

Classification winners were Benjamin Harjo Jr. (Absentee Shawnee/Seminole) and Kenneth Williams Jr. (Northern Arapaho/Seneca), painting, drawing, graphics, and photography; Troy Jackson, sculpture; Emil Her Many Horses (Oglala Lakota), beadwork/ quillwork; Mike Dart (Cherokee Nation), basketry; Karin Walkingstick (Cherokee Nation), pottery; Lisa Rutherford (Cherokee Nation), textiles; Matagi Sorensen (Yavapai-Apache), jewelry; and Katrina Mitten (Miami), diverse art forms. Lisa Rutherford won the Culture Keeper Award, Matagi Sorensen won the Innovator Award, and Bryan Waytula (Cherokee Nation) won the Jesse Hummingbird Award. Marcella Yepa (Jemez/Chickasaw) and Troy Jackson tied for the Anna Mitchell Award.

AWARDS & HONORS The EITELJORG MUSEUM OF AMERICAN INDIANS AND WESTERN ART in Indianapolis named its 2023 EITELJORG CONTEMPORARY ART FELLOWS. They are Natalie Ball (Klamath/Modoc), Sean Chandler (A'aninin), Ruth Cuthand (Plains Cree), Mercedes Dorame (Gabrielino Tongva), and Raven Halfmoon (Caddo/Choctaw/ Delaware). The museum provides each fellow with $50,000 and will purchase artwork to place in its collection.

In 2022, ANONYMOUS WAS A WOMAN gave out its $25,000 awards to 15 women artists over 40. These include Jaune Quick-To-See Smith (Salish/Métis/ Shoshone), the printmaker, painter, and curator, and Wendy Red Star (Crow), the photographer and mixed-media artist.

The MUSEUM OF PHOTOGRAPHIC ARTS in San Diego gave its LOU STOUMEN PRIZE IN PHOTOGRAPHY to Cara Romero (Chemehuevi).

Since its 1996 inception, seven artists have received this award. The museum provides the winner with $20,000 and acquires her photographs for its permanent collection.

The Alberta Association of Architects, the Saskatchewan Association of Architects, and the Manitoba Association of Architects awarded a 2022 PRAIRIE DESIGN AWARD OF EXCELLENCE to Qaumajuq, the Inuit Art Centre at the Winnipeg Art Gallery in its recent work category. Cibinel Architecture and Michael Maltzan Architecture designed the building, and HTFC Planning and Design was the landscape architect for the new art center.

The ANDY WARHOL FOUNDATION gave a 2022 ARTS WRITERS GRANT in short-form writing to Stacy Pratt (Mvskoke), contributing editor to First American Art Magazine and freelance writer. Pratt will write about artists from Southern Woodlands tribes as part of a larger effort to indigenize art criticism.

NO. 37, WINTER 2023 | 9

Discovery Center First Americans Museum • Oklahoma City, Oklahoma • famok.org

DONATE

PROJECTS The RECLAIMING STORIES project is a three-year collaboration between the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; the Myaamia Center at Miami University in Ohio; the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma; and the Peoria Tribe of Indians of Oklahoma. The project strives to reconnect Miami and Peoria people with their legacy of hide painting.

Professor Robert Morrissey leads a team of scholars, tribal cultural historians, and tribal members in studying four 17th- and 18th-century hide paintings in the collection of the Musée du Quai Branly-Jacques Chirac in Paris. Michael Galban (Mono Lake Paiute/Washoe) and Jamie Jacobs (Tonawanda Seneca) led a hide-painting workshop in Miami, Oklahoma, for participating tribal artists.

REPATRIATION The National Museum of Scotland is repatriating the looted NI'ISJOOHL MEMORIAL POLE back to the Nisga'a 10 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE

Nation in British Columbia. Joanna Moody (Nisga'a) commissioned Oyay Tait and his assistant Gwanes (both Nisga'a) to carve the 36-foot-tall red cedar pole in the 1860s. Anthropologist Marius Barbeau of the National Museum of Canada stole the pole in 1929 and later sold it to the National Museum of Scotland. This is the second totem pole to be repatriated from a European museum back to an Indigenous nation.

IN MEMORIAM Our community has lost a beloved educator, art collector, and arts advocate LAMBERT WILSON. He lived in Bryson City, North Carolina, with his partner Jenny S. Holland, their beloved dogs, and their vast collection of Native art that he generously loaned for art exhibitions. He encouraged emerging to established artists and worked with regional art venues to feature more Indigenous art. As a board member of the Museum of the Cherokee Indian, Wilson was instrumental in establishing

a changing gallery to highlight living artists and engage with the locals at the Qualla Boundary.

“Lambert Wilson was a great man,” shares Marcella Yepa (Jemez/Chickasaw), a ceramic artist from New Mexico. “He helped Native American artists as much as he could. I really appreciate all he has done for me. He was loved by many, and he will be missed.”

Lambert Gaines Wilson (1954– 2022) was born to Woodrow James Wilson (1918–1995) and Alda Nettie Woodard Wilson (1930–2018), both of Swain County, North Carolina. As a youth, he participated in 4-H and was even voted Mr. Swain County 4-Her in 1968. After graduating from Swain High School in 1972, he attended Western Carolina University where he studied middle grade education and earned a bachelor’s degree in 1975 and master’s in 1977. In 1980 he earned a specialist degree in school administration. He launched his teaching career in 1975 at Almond School, part

of the Swain County School system.

Whittier School chose him to serve as its principal from 1980 until its close in 1991. He then served as the principal of East Elementary School from its 1991 opening until his retirement in 2006.

He served on the board of education and the Swain Community College board of trustees.

Outgoing and hospitable, Lambert owned the Drama Inn and El Camino Motels. He played a major role in introducing Oklahoma Cherokee artists to North Carolina Cherokee artists and often hosted visiting artists in his hotels. He welcomed visiting artists and introduced them to other community members.

In college, Lambert fell in love with Eastern Cherokee art. He began collecting rivercane basketry and then expanded his scope to all media of Eastern Cherokee visual art. In 2012 he visited Santa Fe Indian Market for the first time and began collecting Pueblo ceramics, including works by Kathleen

Lambert Wilson. Image, digitally altered, courtesy of Swain County Schools.

Wall (Jemez) and Marcella Yepa. Jenny and he bought a house in Santa Fe. He judged at art competitions and fulfilled a longstanding dream when he opened Queen House Gallery in Cherokee, North Carolina, in October 2021.

“Lambert’s passion for Cherokee art was a result of many years building

relationships with artists, studying historical pieces, and his dedication to sharing this work with the public,” shares Shana Bushyhead Condill (Eastern Band Cherokee), executive director of the Museum of the Cherokee Indian (MCI).

“The news of his passing was devastating to us, and we will miss his unwavering support of our work, his dedication to Cherokee artists, and his love of this community.”

Wilson adopted Evan Mathis as his nephew. Mathis serves as the MCI director of collections and exhibitions.

Condill writes, “Lambert’s expertise, knowledge, and passion were all shared with Evan—which makes him so well suited for his role here at the museum.”

She adds, “We hold Lambert’s family in our hearts and continue the work that meant so much to him.”

In lieu of flowers, his friends and family request donations be made to the Lambert G. Wilson Scholarship Fund at Southwestern Community College, 447 College Drive, Sylva, NC 28779.

NO. 37, WINTER 2023 | 11

SEVEN DIRECTIONS

JOE STAHLMAN, PHD A curator of Tuscarora descent shares his top seven list

N

YA:WEH SGEN:O'. I am the director of the Onöhsagwë:de' Cultural Center in Salamanca, New York. I also work at Seneca Nation's Tribal Historic Preservation Office. I am of Tuscarora descent. My father is Tuscarora Beaver clan, and my mother is Pennsylvanian Dutch. How I grew up, where I lived, and societal beliefs of race and ethnicity around me have greatly influenced my life path to date. I remain intrigued by how we continue to produce narratives that blend fact, history, storytelling, and personal beliefs.

I don’t pooh-pooh any of it because of the oppression that Indigenous communities have experienced for the last several centuries. A lot of what we know comes from folk knowledge; however, our systems are more ancient and long held. My point is that I don't diminish any belief systems, because there is always something to learn from them.

I am not into popular culture, and I am not always aware of what is going on in society. I find pop life a distraction to what I’m doing now. I’m involved in many endeavors, and I need to focus on matters at hand. As such, I talk a lot to regional artists and crafters, and I also read a lot and listen to a lot of music as outlets. As a scholar, I keep up with the current research and output by and about Indigenous peoples.

With my own artistic endeavors, I like to draw in pencil, photograph, and carve soapstone. I will share one of my photographs. I hope you enjoy; however, the rest of what I do is saved for those for whom I make the gifts.

Currently, my position as director keeps me focused on the prize, so to speak. People who encounter me in this role tend to think that I am very serious. I take my job seriously. I see so many areas where our allies, friends, and colleagues don’t see the inequities, inequalities, and injustices between our communities.

Outside of work I spend a lot of my time puttering around the home, making things I put together in my mind, freelance writing, and cooking. I also think I’m funny. A bucket-list goal of mine is to do stand-up comedy. I see so much in my day-to-day life that I am always impressed by Injun-uity or by institutional

above, left Onöhsagwë:de' Cultural Center in Salamanca, New York (CC 0). above, right Joe Stahlman. Photo: Fileve Tlaloc, PhD.

12 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE

thoughts I encounter. Sometimes I feel like I should either laugh or cry. I choose to laugh.… Though, sometimes I cry. No matter what, I believe in all we do. I know sometimes we make giant forward steps, and the next day we can take a step backward. I am always happy to hear of accomplishments, creations, inventions, thoughts, publications, and additions to our Peoples. I use that to keep moving me forward. It’s my fuel. I don’t do a lot of ceremony. I’m bare-bones as a person. However, my heart fills with what other people are doing. I need it.

On October 10, 2022, I gave a talk at a conference held in Washington, DC. When I committed to it, I did not realize it was Columbus Day/Indigenous Peoples’ Day. I normally do not speak on that day. It’s too controversial and people expect me to have a position, when in fact, I think we should call it “Fall Break.” A day for all of us. A day where we take a break and appreciate the fall, each other, and the world around us. We deserve it and we don’t need to politicize everything.

Even though I’ve freely given a few opinions in this short essay, I don’t feel that I’m supposed to have an opinion on every issue. In fact, most of the time, I think engaging in those controversies keeps us from attaining basic human rights. I do focus on what fills me with what I need. I could use any of the many traditional phrases to describe our ancient philosophies, but I’m also a person of the Present. As a result, I call my take on this philosophical fusion Brawndo!

—Joe Stahlman, PhD (Tuscarora descent)

accessible it is, the more boring. I style myself as a DJ. I even have a stage name: DJ Soul Tax. In order for me to get my PhD, academia taxed my soul to get that piece of paper. Things like music saved me. There is even an anthropologist named Sol Tax (1907–1985) whose film studies with Indigenous communities continue to be of use. Lately, I have been randomly going through my jukebox of 21,111 songs. Here are three random favorites.

Mark Lanegan & UNKLE, Looking for the Rain (featuring Mark Lanegan and Eska) I like Mark Lanegan from his Seattle days and UNKLE for their trip-hop sound. Both escaped the confines of their genres and created unique music over their careers. Rest in peace, Mark Lanegan (1964–2022), who passed from COVID-19 this year.

EAST: People who embrace NONBINARY IDENTITIES. As a trained anthropologist, I always search for ways to explain fluidity and the temporality of our states of being. I have studied cultures, philosophies, histories, etc. from all over the globe. I believe we share more universally than we don’t share, but all cultures are supposed to provide for all of our needs.

Including those needs not regularly identified as “normal” by other communities. On top of it, Western culture has a lot of rules that do not bind well to natural law, so they have conflicting rules; like a separation of mind, body, and soul; or racial rules—the one-drop rule to relating to Black identity and a quarter or more blood quantum to legally possess Native identity.

As I struggled through some of the concepts of anthropology, my partner came across the Gendered Unicorn graphic for one of her classes. Instantly, I was able to explain most of the thoughts that had kept me perplexed for some time. And returning to older forms of knowledge, I also saw how our ancestors approached the world similarly. As a result, I saw less judgment and more appreciation of all life forms in their worlds. There are so many lessons that I continue to learn from our ancestors, but our children guide me there.

The most eye-opening is that we fall on the scales provided here. None of

us fit into those not-so-cozy, inflexible, hard categories. I think if we are honest with ourselves, we will lash out less and appreciate our insides more.

NORTH: MUSIC. I love all genres and styles of music. Things were not too good growing up. Music provided an escape.

It provided a space for a very shy person (me) to talk to people. I quickly consumed it. I find artists, albums, songs I like. I enjoy them for a minute and move on.

It becomes more difficult to find unique music the older I get. Genres really do sound alike, and I find that the more

above, left The Gender Unicorn, Trans Student Educational Resource, 2015, illustration by Anna Moore, graphic by Landyn Pan, Eli Erlick, and others (CC). above, right UNKLE: Redux playing James Lavelle’s Meltdown Festival in London, United Kingdom, 2014, Photo: Victor Frankowski, Southbank Centre (CC BY 2.0).

NO. 37, WINTER 2023 | 13

SEVEN DIRECTIONS

above Valerie June at the Fonda Theatre, Los Angeles, 2022. Photo: DVS Ross (CC BY 2.0). below Producer, writer, and actor Rawiri Paratene (Māori) in the opera Hōhepa at the Opera House in Wellington, Aotearoa, 2012. Photo: Marty Melville / New Zealand Opera (CC BY-SA 4.0).

Valerie June, “Look at Miss Ohio” My partner Fileve introduced me to Valerie June’s music. I love her voice and her unique take on songs. She recently covered “Look at Miss Ohio,” written by Gillian Welch. Fileve and I got to have a private dinner with Valerie and her mother before one of her concerts.

Robby Romero and Red Thunder, “Heartbeat,” Native Children’s Survival For those who listened to Red Thunder when it was new, we might think it is corny now. Some of it is. I returned to it recently, so I can relive those memories

of me dreaming out loud with my friend Rory Tendore (Eastern Shoshone) on how we were going to help our communities.

The songs continue to inspire us as we both continue to do what we always said we would. I think the corniness might be the sincerity of hearts when Robby Romero and his fellow bandmates made this album.

WEST: THE MĀORI. I struggle with coming to terms with the USA. I see several initiatives and programs over the world, but how Māori and New Zealander

1. Nature is plural for everything from under the water up to the stars.

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settlers reached an understanding on coming together and moving forward as a community is amazing. I search for ways like that for our future here on Turtle Island. As much as we march into the future, things haven’t changed too much.

Our communities work hard for peaceful solutions. We continue to have many unaddressed socioeconomic and political concerns within our communities and within the colonial governments—from sovereignty and the ongoing injustices in museums and academia to providing voices to our ancestors’ resting places and Nature’s1 rights within development. The concerns are many, and the Māori work with the New Zealand community to create a world where they both utilize and appreciate the same resources. Although not perfect and with a big difference in demographics, the Māori community works with the settler community to create a future that they can both work toward. That is something worthy of discussion and exploration.

SOUTH: CREATIVES REBUILD NEW YORK (CRNY). This year the Seneca-Iroquois National Museum’s Onöhsagwë:de' Cultural Center received a two-year award to fund ten Indigenous artists of any media to work toward a community project. The cultural center hires the artists, who receive as employees a livable salary. Our goal is to have them remain as working artists and to create a cultural heritage corridor through one of the settler-squatter communities on Seneca territory. Since June 2022, we have seen an explosion in art projects, classes, demonstrations, and events in our region.

We have seen the outside community also reaching out to us for direct representation in their events. I have never been associated with such a proactive group of Indigenous artists and innovators who are making it work on their own terms. I am continuously inspired by them.

CENTER: FAMILY/FRIENDS. Where do I begin? My all begins and ends here.

The inspiration and encouragement all originate here. The love is here. Their constant support seems like an endless wellspring of love. As much as I draw from it, I try to put back as much as I take. They are my center.

FOX SPEARS New Prints

BELOW: ANIMALS. They are the greatest teachers. All animals, from the dogs, chickens, and cats in our house to all the animals that cross my path. They continuously teach me patience, observation, camaraderie, and friendship. I see their wisdom and carry the realization that I carry a responsibility to make sure that gifts in all of their forms are appreciated.

UP: THE HAUDENOSAUNEE. I am amazed by the thought that in the distant past a community of people got together and discussed the idea of creating family, a place for all, and solutions to our ongoing concerns. As much as we move forward into the future, we must realize our ancestors encountered the same dilemmas we struggle with in our present. I return to their lessons for solutions, possibilities, and considerations that might need to be factored in before deciding anything. In some of my photography, I focus on how their views might be seen in our present.

48004 St. Andrew’s Road | Pendleton, OR 97801 | 541-276-3954

Visit our new website: crowsshadow.org above, top Joe Stahlman, family, and canine friends. ahove, bottom Joe Stahlman, PhD (Tuscarora descent), Jikonsaseh, Peacemaker, and Hiawatha Work Together to Ensure Peace, 2020, digital photograph. Image courtesy of the artist.

High Country Medicine I series (4), 2022, monoprint, series of 8, 30” x 22 ½” Collaborating Master Printer Judith Baumann NO. 37, WINTER 2023 | 15

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

ON DISPLAY FEB. 11, 2023 — JAN. 14, 2024

Frank LaPena, 1937–2019 (Nomtipom Wintu) Untitled, 1975; Oil on board; Detail; Photo by David Clapp Mary Morez, 1946–2004 (Navajo) Study of a Navajo Woman, 1968–69 (Detail); Charcoal on paper; Heard Museum Collection Gift of Mr. Byron Harvey III, IAC904; Photo courtesy of the Heard Museum, Phoenix, Arizona

ON DISPLAY THROUGH APR. 15, 2023

Wheelwright Museum

OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN 704 Camino Lejo, Santa Fe NM • wheelwright.org

GALLERIES’ ROLES IN THE NATIVE ART WORLD Educating & Advocating for Indigenous Artists

By Chadd Scott

W

HEN K ART GALLERY participated in the 2022 Armory Show in New York City, eyebrows raised. Here was a Native American– owned gallery that represents exclusively contemporary Native American artists playing on one of the most prestigious stages offered by the broader contemporary art world. Not unprecedented, but still unusual in 2022.

K Art Gallery featured the work of G. Peter Jemison (Seneca), Edgar Heap of 18 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE

Birds (Southern Cheyenne), and Luzene Hill (Eastern Band Cherokee), among others. ARTnews ranked it one of the “10 Best Booths,” and the Art Newspaper featured K Art Gallery in a story about the fair.

Among hundreds of exhibitors that included the top art galleries from around the world, K Art Gallery and its roster of Indigenous artists stood out. Gallery owner Dave Kimelberg (Seneca) says the motivation for attending the Armory Show went beyond simply selling art.

“Our gallery is located at the Seneca Nation in Buffalo, New York, so it’s hard for us to reach the general art market, and that’s really our mission at the end of the day: to elevate contemporary Indigenous artists and bring them to the forefront of the contemporary art market,” he says.

“Fairs like the Armory allow us to bring our artists and their work to collectors and institutions who wouldn’t otherwise see them.”

After its success in 2022, Kimelberg says K Art would definitely return to

the Armory Show in 2023. The gallery also participated in Art Basel Miami in December 2022 and has an application in to show at Art Basel in Switzerland in 2023. The annual Art Basel shows are two of the most high-profile, glamorous presentations of contemporary art for sale.

Garth Greenan Gallery in New York City doesn’t exclusively represent contemporary Native American artists but does show many Native artists including Julie Buffalohead (Ponca), Melissa Cody (Navajo), Yatika Starr Fields (Osage/ Muscogee/Cherokee), and Cannupa Hanska Luger (Mandan/Hidatsa/Arikara/ Lakota). For years, Garth Greenan Gallery has used the top contemporary art fairs to promote its Indigenous artists.

The gallery showed works by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Salish/Métis/ Shoshone) at Frieze Masters in London in 2022, alongside heavyweight AfricanAmerican abstract artists Al Loving and Howardena Pindell. Smith also had a solo booth at Art Basel in Switzerland last year. Brad Kahlhamer was given a solo booth at the Armory Show in 2021.

Emmi Whitehorse (Navajo) was featured

at Art Basel Miami at the end of 2022, the gallery’s first public showing of her work.

Participation in such high-profile fairs remains a rarity for all galleries, not just those representing contemporary Indigenous artwork. Booth fees range from pricey to exorbitant. Add the cost of staging the booth, crating and shipping the artwork, and hosting staff for a handful of days in some of the most expensive cities in the world, and it doesn’t take long for a gallery to find itself financially drowning in fair costs. Still, to the mainstream glitterati of the contemporary art world, be they collectors, museum curators, or the media, nothing makes the statement of association with the top of the market like participation and representation at international fairs.

With Native American artists making inroads into the global art fair circuit, what about the wider contemporary art world where the other 99 percent of work exists? Native American artists and galleries have been trying for decades to break down the walls that separate them from that realm. What progress has been made on that front?

Native American artists and galleries have been trying for decades to break down the walls that separate them from that realm.

above Installation view of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Woman in Landscape (2021) at Garth Greenan Gallery. Image courtesy of Garth Greenan Gallery. opposite Installation view of Cannupa Hanska Luger: New Myth (2021) at Garth Greenan Gallery. Image courtesy of Garth Greenan Gallery, New York.

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At what rate? Who is leading the way?

Conversations with gallery owners who represent contemporary Indigenous artists across the country revealed several distinct trends.

RECENT UPTICK FOLLOWS LONG, SLOW CLIMB “FOR A LONG TIME, Native art and [mainstream] contemporary art have been very divided, and I think in the last five or six years, what the contemporary Native artists have been doing has connected to what’s going on in the contemporary movement,” says Charles King, owner of King Galleries in Santa Fe and Scottsdale, Arizona. He has represented both Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists for nearly three decades. The timeline he put forward of a noticeable increase in attention paid to contemporary Native artists by the broader contemporary art world was consistent with the opinion of others.

“It’s relatively new, not in what [Native art] is but in making inroads into the general art market,” says Kimelberg.

“Some artists have really been successful in that regard the last five, six, seven years, and more [mainstream] museums and institutions have started to acquire that type of work, but I think there’s still a lot of work to do. There’s still a lot of educating that needs to be done and understanding the perspectives of Indigenous contemporary artists. There’s still a view of Indigenous art through a historical lens, not as contemporary art.”

King agrees. “It’s taken a long time for Native art to move out of that ethnographic [framework]. There’s still a lot to do,” he says, for contemporary Native artwork “to be fully realized, where Native art isn’t separated out as something different. I think people are starting to realize that Native art is really great American art, but there’s still a ways to go with that.”

Garth Greenan Gallery staff see this daily from their offices in Chelsea, the epicenter of New York’s and, from some perspectives, the contemporary art universe. Garth Greenan Gallery is located in between and less than a block 20 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE

from megagalleries David Zwirner and Hauser and Wirth, two influential leaders in the commercial art world.

“I don’t think it’s quite there yet,” former gallery director Gilles Heno-Coe says of the wider embrace of contemporary Indigenous art. “There’s been some broader interest in Wendy Red Star, Athena LaTocha, obviously Jeffrey Gibson. Especially Jeffrey Gibson. I feel like a lot of people might not even know he’s an Indigenous artist.”

A wide cross-section of post-war American painters is on exhibit less than a mile from the entrance to the Whitney Museum of American Art, host to the most prestigious institutional presentation of contemporary art offered in the United States, the Whitney Biennial.

Heno-Coe possesses unique insight into the status of Indigenous artwork in the field. “African-American artists have had almost a decade of intensive reappraisal, but never mind reappraisal— there’s never been an appraisal to begin with of Indigenous artists,” he says of mainstream institutional, gallery, and collector interest. “For example, there was just the first major show for Oscar Howe [Yanktonai Dakota] in New York City. A major modernist artist who’s not even known in the circles of ‘in the know’ people.” The retrospective exhibition, Dakota Modern: The Art of Oscar Howe, ran from March 11 through September 11, 2022, at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian George Gustav Heye Center in New York before it traveled to Brookings, South Dakota, and Portland, Oregon.

“It’s grown incrementally,” says Charles Froelick of the contemporary Native American art market. The owner of Portland’s Froelick Gallery, he represents Indigenous and non-Indigenous artists and has observed this about the art market since opening his gallery in 1995. “I’d say every few years, there’s been a new threshold, a new door open.”

Froelick and the other gallerists credit museums in large measure for spurring the contemporary Indigenous art market forward. He remembers the specific impact of the opening of the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Overland Park, Kansas.

“When they opened up, all of a sudden there was a little flurry of activity, and it’s like, ‘Wow, a new public institution that’s buying and eagerly looking at who we show,’ but there have been years where it’s like, ‘Oh my God, nobody’s buying.

Nobody’s showing,’” Froelick says. “There have been many hard years where we’re like, ‘Well, that was a promotion year.’”

MUSEUMS LEAD, BUT GALLERIES MATTER THE OPENING of the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian on the National Mall in 2004 could be seen as marking the before and after of this current epoch of institutional consideration of contemporary Native American art across America. Such milestones are coming more surely and with more regularity in museums than they have been at auction or in galleries.

In 2018 the Metropolitan Museum of Art (MoMA) in New York, the country’s most popular art space, began showing Native American artwork in its American Wing for the first time.

Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists was the first coast-to-coast survey of work by Indigenous women from the United States and Canada that spans a

above, top Installation of works on paper by Jeffrey Gibson (Mississippi Choctaw/Cherokee) at K Art. Image courtesy of K Art. above, bottom Dave Kimelberg (Seneca), founder and owner of K Art, Buffalo, New York. Image courtesy of K Art. opposite, top K Art Gallery exterior and Buffalo skyline. Image courtesy of K Art. opposite, bottom Ceramic sculptures by G. Peter Jemison (Seneca). Image courtesy of K Art.

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above, top Installation view of Gail Tremblay: Shattering Images (2021–22). Photo: Rebekah Johnson. Image courtesy of Froelick Gallery. opposite, top Installation view of V. Maldonado: Un Rinconcito en el Cielo (2022). Photo: Rebekah Johnson. Image courtesy of Froelick Gallery. opposite, bot tom Charles Froelick, founder and owner of Froelick Gallery, Portland, O re g o n . P h o to : R e b e k a h Johnson.

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millennium. The presentation proved to be a popular sensation and garnered widespread media attention, even outside the art world, and exhibited from 2019 through 2021 at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Smithsonian’s Renwick Gallery in Washington, DC, the Frist Art Museum in Nashville, and the Philbrook Museum of Art in Tulsa, all mainstream art museums.

Other milestones include the opening of First Americans Museum in Oklahoma City in 2021. Chicago’s Field Museum renovated Native North American Hall, which debuted in the spring of 2022. The Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art unveiled Expressions of Life: Native Art in North America in its reenvisioned Native American Galleries in the summer of 2022. The Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth launched the ambitious exhibition Speaking with Light: Contemporary Indigenous Photography, which opened October 30 this past fall. A full-blown promotional campaign heralded this show, the largest major museum survey of Native photography.

When the Whitney Museum opens Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map on April 19, 2023, it will represent another major institutional breakthrough for contemporary Indigenous art. The display of nearly 50 years of Smith’s drawings, prints, paintings, and sculptures will be the largest and most comprehensive showing of her career to date, the first solo retrospective for a female Native American artist at the Whitney.

With MoMA finally catching on to the Native art scene in the last several years, Jemison, known for his paper bag series, is finally getting well-deserved attention after decades of creating art.

“Over the past two or three years, G. Peter Jemison has really made a big splash; MoMA just acquired five pieces of his,” Kimelberg says of the renowned ceramic sculptor he represents. “His visuals and his stories are all about Seneca and Haudenosaunee cultures. He’s in his mid-70s, so it’s about time.”

From the Whitney and the Met to New York’s Museum of Modern Art, there is no greater barometer of passage into the wider US art world, even beyond contemporary art, than inclusion in these

… Collectors and even mainstream museums realized they didn’t have any contemporary Indigenous artists in their collection. They only had historic work. institutions. Across the country in 2022 alone, major presentations of contemporary Indigenous art were routinely seen in locations once shut off to these artists: Rose Simpson (Santa Clara Pueblo) at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston; Duane Slick (Meskwaki/Ho-Chunk) at the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut; Jean LaMarr (Northern Paiute/Pit River) at the Nevada Museum of Art in Reno.

“I think collectors and even mainstream museums realized they didn’t have any contemporary Indigenous artists in their collection. They only had historic work,” Froelick says. “Many of them realized they’ve got some making up to do, and they better move fast for some of the work from the past couple of decades.”

With pieces from popular Native contemporary artists of earlier generations like T.C. Cannon (Kiowa/ Caddo, 1946–1978) or Fritz Scholder (Luiseño, 1937–2005) gone from the

primary market and still purchased on the secondary market, institutions are hurrying to collect living Indigenous artists.

Froelick says museums with curators who specialize in American art are now realizing Indigenous American art is a critical piece of the canon they’re

missing. “There has been a lot of hot activity going on and a lot of hot artwork being made that they need to now really pay attention to,” says Froelick. “It’s exciting that there are some retrospectives like the Bartow retrospective that traveled to non-Indigenous museums.

That was just fantastic. And it was organized by a non-Indigenous museum.”

The Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at the University of Oregon organized Rick Bartow: Things You Know But Cannot Explain, which traveled to the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in Santa Fe, the Heard Museum in Phoenix, the Washington State University Museum of Art in Pullman, and the Autry Museum in Los Angeles between 2015 and 2019. Froelick Gallery represents Bartow (Wiyot, 1946–2016).

Historically, museums have rarely paced art markets, which makes this development unusual. In the 19th century, French museums were notoriously slow NO. 37, WINTER 2023 | 23

story would take credit for that fact, it seems clear institutions are sourcing the living Native artists they’re acquiring from galleries.

COLLECTORS COMING FROM MAINSTREAM CONTEMPORARY ART

above, top King Galleries, Scottsdale, Arizona. Image courtesy of King Galleries. above, bottom Ceramic artist Nathan Youngblood (Santa Clara Pueblo) and Charles King, founder and owner of King Galleries. Image courtesy of King Galleries.

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to acknowledge and acquire paintings by the Impressionists, which is why so many of their best paintings are in American collections. Similarly, American museums were slow to recognize the significance of street art and graffiti-influenced artists in the 1980s and were subsequently priced out of the market for Jean-Michel Basquiat’s works of art. That’s why so few of his works belong to public collections.

With contemporary Indigenous artists, however, the museums are ahead of the market. Not coincidentally, the artists finding their way into museum collections and exhibitions overwhelmingly do have representation by one or more major galleries. While none of the gallery professionals interviewed for this

WHO IS BUYING contemporary Indigenous artwork among collectors? Were they previously collecting historic material and have now come to contemporary, or were they collecting contemporary art and have now found Indigenous art?

“I think it’s the latter,” Kimelberg says. “It’s people interested in contemporary art in general and collectors. This is an area they didn’t even know existed.

They come in and they see the art, and not only is it visually very appealing and very thoughtful, but then they learn about the narratives behind it, and it makes it that much better.”

Heno-C oe shares the same experience. “There’s increasingly less of a difference between those who collect Indigenous art and those who collect broadly, and that’s been a great thing to see here at the gallery: people buying Howardena Pindell or buying Jaune Quick-to-See Smith,” he says. “Contemporary collectors understand the work, and they respond to it like they would any other work, but they do understand its implications. They aren’t just buying good-looking art. It’s impossible to buy a painting by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith and not attend to its political or social ramifications. Our experience is that these are major collectors who buy across the market, blue chip collectors.”

While this may be the situation in New York where contemporary art is king, what about in Santa Fe where historic Native American artwork and art-making legacies run generations deep? “In the ’90s and early 2000s, it was a more conservative group,” King says.

“Today the collectors are younger, and I think they desire for artists to experiment, try new things, and be more creative.”

In Scottsdale’s Old Town and two blocks off the Santa Fe Plaza, King Galleries receives a volume of foot traffic and browsers atypical for most art

galleries. Millions of people visit Scottsdale and Santa Fe every year; only a small percentage of them are serious collectors.

“I have had so many people who walk in, and they just look at [Native art] like, ‘This is not what I expected,’” King says. “Their expectation is a Route 66 sort of thing, this sort of trinkety thing, and they walk around and think, This is great. They see great art and are blown away. I’m amazed even, almost 30 years later, that people still don’t get the impact and the amazing artwork that the artists are doing. So it feels like there’s still this education boundary to keep on pushing.”

Expectations and education remain hurdles for contemporary Indigenous art, not just in the Southwest.

“When [non-Native] people think of Indigenous art, they think of craft, if you will, and not conceptual contemporary art that is speaking to more contemporary issues and more of a contemporary perspective from Indigenous people and their communities,” Kimelberg says. “When people come into our gallery, I often hear, ‘Wow, I was really surprised, this isn’t what I expected,’ but in a good way. They expect Indigenous art from a historical lens, not through a contemporary lens. ‘Wow, I didn’t even know there’s this type of art, that Indigenous artists are producing contemporary and conceptional work that speaks to current issues.’”

BREAKTHROUGH ARTISTS THE INCREASING ATTENTION paid to contemporary Indigenous artists by the broader mainstream contemporary art world—which no one denies is happening—has not occurred as a widespread, sweeping wave. Those historic walls of separation have been pierced by a relative few. Gibson. Simpson.

Red Star. Hanska Luger. Cara Romero (Chemehuevi).

Heno-Coe credits Jaune QuickTo-See Smith, her personal network, and her introductions to a robust assembly of Native artists. Same goes for Froelick Gallery and Bartow.

Kimelberg points to Marie Watt (Seneca). “She’s really broken through, but there are so many other artists like

her speaking in the same language [with] different stories to tell,” he says. “It’s great that the Marie Watts and Jeffrey Gibsons of the world are breaking through. It’s terrific to see, but there are a lot more artists and a lot more work to be moved forward.”

How might that happen? While there has never been a shortage of Native American artists, there has always been a shortage of Native American curators and

above, top Opening reception during Santa Fe Indian Market 2022 at King Galleries, Santa Fe. Image courtesy of King Galleries. above, bottom Les Namingha (Hopi-Tewa/Zuni), Elliptical Illusion, ceramics, pigment, 111/2 × 11 in. Image courtesy of King Galleries.

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It would be great to have more galleries representing Native American and Indigenous artists, and the whole range of it, not just stars.

above Installation view of Yatika Starr Fields: Fear Not (2022) at Garth Greenan Gallery. Image courtesy of Garth Greenan Gallery.

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gallerists, the tastemakers who determine who and what is shown. As uncommon as it is to step into a contemporary art gallery anywhere outside of Indian Country in America and see an Indigenous artist represented, it is even more uncommon to see an Indigenous person behind the desk.

“It would be great to have more galleries representing Native American and Indigenous artists, and the whole range of it, not just stars,” Froelick says.

He would like to see more people “taking their chance on young artists or artists who are not known, because there are so many good Indigenous contemporary artists out there who really would benefit from gallery exhibition.”

Many mainstream art museums have been no better for Indigenous representation. Not until 2020 did the Met hire its first full-time curator of Native American art. The museum was founded in 1870. One year later, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, another of the nation’s top art museums, hired its first curator of Native American art. It also opened in 1870. Staff representation of Native people at American museums has lagged behind collection representation, which itself has been shamefully slow.

Froelick’s point is a good one, and perhaps the marker of contemporary Indigenous art fully incorporated into

the broader contemporary art market: when museums and galleries freely take chances on Indigenous artists. It takes no special skill to tab Gibson, Smith, Watt, Bartow, or Virgil Ortiz (Cochiti), all established artists, for recognition.

What does take skill, nerve, and stroke is to call on promising, early-career Indigenous artists and give them opportunities at galleries or other venues to shoot up the ranks without having to slog through decades of an underappreciated career and go hungry as they wait for the art world to slowly bend in their direction.

An industry populated with advocates for contemporary Native American art can take risks and provide opportunities for Native artists, the same opportunities that white, male artists have been given for centuries, even if those risks don’t always work out. The archives at MoMA, the Met, and the Whitney are bursting with now unknown, irrelevant artists who former curators and directors were betting might be the next big thing.

When a megagallery or museum shows a 20-something Indigenous artist and backs the presentation with a major publicity campaign, only for the art world to wonder ten years later, “Whatever happened to so-and-so?” then contemporary Indigenous art will exist on something approaching equal footing with the mainstream contemporary art world.

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Heard Fair, Phoenix, AZ March 4 & 5, 2023

The artist made this mask to reflect the Yup'ik understanding of the importance of mutual respect between human, animal/plant, and spirit worlds. Coastal and river Native peoples advocate for proper care of salmon and other wildlife populations so that they remain healthy and can continue to nourish our communities.

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Jennifer Woods (Yup'ik), Ataucikun All Together, 2022, wooden salmon sculpture mask form, made for the Salmon Culture exhibition in the summer of 2022.

Image courtesy of the artist.

SALMON CULTURE Exploring Museum Sovereignty Through an Exhibition Project

By Nadia Jackinsky-Sethi, PhD (Alutiiq)

I

N ALASKA salmon connect all of us.

They are part of our diet and part of our seasonal rhythm. Families spend summer months putting up fish for subsistence that will sustain us all year long. Telling salmon stories passes on knowledge about the importance of caring for this resource, so that it will remain healthy far into the future.

One story repeated across several cultural groups in Alaska, with some variation, tells about a child who transforms into a salmon and lives among the salmon-people underwater before transforming back into a human to teach future generations how to be respectful towards salmon: do not take more than you need; keep the oceans, rivers, and beaches clean and healthy; treat the salmon that nourish us respectfully. It is not surprising that salmon play a prominent role in our arts practices. Their skins are made into clothing, their likeness is rendered into sculptures, paintings, and prints, and on occasion, their bones are used for jewelry.

During a nine-month period in 2022, five Alaska Native salmon supporters formed a curatorial circle to develop the exhibition Salmon Culture at the Pratt Museum in Homer, Alaska. We were Anna Hoover (Unangax̂), Erin Gingrich (Koyukon Athabascan/Iñupiaq), Rochelle Adams (Gwich'in), Drew Michael (Yup'ik), Ilgavak Peter Williams (Yup'ik) and me, Nadia Jackinsky-Sethi (Alutiiq).

The goal of this exhibition was to highlight the importance of salmon across all our cultures and to create visibility

ABOVE Local elementary students admire Koyukon Athabascan/Iñupiaq artist Erin Gingrich’s salmon sculpture series Iqalukpik from Ggasilat for My Friends (2022) during a school visit to the exhibition.

Image courtesy of the author.

around salmon issues within our communities. A secondary aim was to make space for and offer hands-on experience to Alaska Native people in museum work. This project was supported as part of an initiative focused on the concept of Museum Sovereignty that I have been working on developing with The CIRI Foundation during the past three years.1 In this article, I would like to share ideas behind the Museum Sovereignty initiative using the Salmon Culture exhibition as an example of how the concept can be addressed. So, what exactly is Museum Sovereignty? Museum Sovereignty can be many things, but it is built on the idea that we, as Indigenous people, have the right to decide how our cultures are depicted within museum spaces, how our material belongings are cared for within these spaces, and how our stories are told within these spaces.

Museum Sovereignty prioritizes Indigenous ideas and ways of being within museum spaces. It encourages Indigenous interventions and Indigenous presence. In practice, Museum Sovereignty looks like museums inviting Indigenous people in to be recognized as experts in our own cultural histories (or sometimes simply inserting ourselves into these spaces whether invited or not).

It also looks like prioritizing Indigenous aesthetic systems and ways of doing.

Salmon Culture developed as a Museum Sovereignty project following a social media post from the Pratt Museum in the summer of 2021. In

1. “Alaska Native Cultural Heritage and Artistic Sovereignty in Museums,” The Ciri Foundation, web.

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The approach of being guided by cultural values was welcoming, refreshing, healing, and revolutionary.

above Preston Singletary (Tlingit), Salmon, lead crystal, 12¼ × 14 × 4 in. including stand, private collection.

This glass salmon was made in the summer of 2022 in response to the call for art for the exhibition using a lost wax casting technique. Image courtesy of the artist. opposite Salmon Culture curatorial circle members on opening night, left to right: Rochelle Adams (Gwich'in), Anna Hoover (Unangax̂), Nadia Jackinsky-Sethi (Alutiiq), and Erin Gingrich (Koyukon Athabascan/Iñupiaq). Image courtesy of the author.

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this post a stone oil lamp held in the museum was described as coming from an ancient “Eskimo” culture “whose name for themselves was in a language that has been lost.” For a bit of context, the Pratt Museum is a small community museum located within the homelands of the Alutiiq/Sugpiaq and Dena'ina peoples who have been living here for thousands of years. We have culture. We have names for ourselves. Yet our cultural history has been overlaid by other histories as waves of newcomers arrived in our area beginning in the late 19th century. This poorly worded social media post provoked offense by the larger Alaska Native community, who saw it as evidence of a lack of collaboration with local Indigenous people and an erasure of our living Indigenous population in the area. Individuals asked the Pratt Museum to do better.

As a local Homer resident and someone who works in Indigenous philanthropy, I saw this misstep by the museum as an opportunity to actively engage the museum in a partnership to do just that. The CIRI Foundation (an Alaska Native nonprofit education foundation and also my employer) seeded $10,000 to fund the Pratt Museum to develop a visiting Indigenous curator opportunity as a one-year project to try to mend relationships. This was a small step to make space for Indigenous representational sovereignty.

Anna Hoover joined our project as a visiting Indigenous curator. To build a more inclusive project, we decided to add a larger circle of supportive Alaska Native co-curators and gained an additional $10,000 for this purpose from the Alaska State Council on the Arts. During

our planning stage, our curatorial circle met over Zoom to work through the curatorial process. We decided upon salmon as an exhibition theme that could unite all of us, as this resource is one that nearly everyone in Alaska (both Indigenous and non-Indigenous) can relate to. The circle immediately brought forward a few ideas as to how we would create an exhibition built on Indigenous values: the importance of thought partners collaborating to share the labor of developing the project, the importance of incorporating Native Alaska words and place-names into the space, when possible, the importance of physically including salmon as part of the project, and the importance of making space for ancestral knowledge of salmon culture from a local perspective.

None of these above-mentioned practices are particularly new or inventive, but they felt like the right way to proceed and drew inspiration from many other Indigenous-led projects that have built a foundation for Indigenous curatorial practices: Be inclusive, use the resources that are available to you, learn by doing, show up, and bring others along.2 We created a public call over social media to invite artists to submit their work responding to the salmon culture theme. Some artists brought forward pieces from their personal collections to lend for the exhibition. Seven artists chose to create new pieces responding to the theme. To incorporate deeper histories of salmon culture, we visited a local collector of archaeological materials and asked to borrow pieces that he had found in our historic village sites. We reached out to museums directly to ask if we could borrow from their collections. Though some loan requests were declined, we were amazed by the generosity of those who responded to share their collections (including works from the Anchorage Museum, the Alaska Native Heritage Center, and the University of Alaska Museum of the North).

The resulting Salmon Culture includes the work of 31 Alaska Native artists from seven cultural groups. It includes sculptures in wood and glass; salmon-skin regalia such as parkas and

boots; salmon-themed prints, paintings, and photographs; salmon-skin dolls; salmon-skin baskets; and salmon-skin jewelry. Some works of art respond to historical stories of salmon-people, some draw attention to the dwindling number of king salmon along the Yukon River and the fight to keep our salmon streams clean from mining pollution, and some celebrate the rich connections between salmon subsistence and family.

In the month leading up to the exhibition, we decided that to be more inclusive we should invite the museum to include a local non-Native artist-curator, Carla Klinker Cope, to create a separate but related exhibition in the gallery adjoining Salmon Culture. This resulted in the exhibition Salmon Culture: Kachemak Bay Connections, which included the work of twelve non-Native artists sharing their salmon connections

from non-Native perspectives. This last-minute addition of the adjoining sister exhibition added to the visibility of both our exhibitions and brought additional audience members into the space.

On the exhibitions’ opening night we had a large number of visitors from Alaska Native communities coming in support of Salmon Culture, in addition to visitors to the Salmon Culture: Kachemak Bay Connections community. Our communities came together to share our collective experience with salmon.

Our project budget had very few funds to pay for transportation costs for pieces loaned to the exhibition, and no funds to purchase exhibition supplies.

While this was a challenge, it also made it necessary for us to think creatively about how to make do with what we had. A volunteer army of community members became our art couriers, transporting

2. Some examples of Indigenous curators who inspire our work include Heather Igloliorte (Inuk, Nunatsiavut), Julie Nagam (Métis), heather ahtone (Choctaw Nation/ Chickasaw), and many others who are actively engaging in Indigenous curatorial practice.

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above, top Display of salmon skin dolls by Rose Kanrilak (Cup'iq) and salmon skin hood made by Lalla Williams (Alutiiq). Museums in Alaska loaned collections for Salmon Culture and donated shipping costs to help make this project a success. Image courtesy of the author. above, bottom Archaeological materials from Halibut Cove including fishing hooks and tools. The Salmon Culture team borrowed archaeological materials from a local collector in Halibut Cove. Putting these archaeological materials on display near the entrance of the exhibition created public recognition of the deep roots of Indigenous fishing practices in the Kachemak Bay area.

Image courtesy of the author.

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works of art for the exhibition by water taxi, small plane, and car. The majority of the pieces in the exhibition were driven more than 250 miles to get to Homer. To find mannequins for the regalia in the exhibition, we used community connections to borrow from a local peony farmers’ association that happened to have some. Other community organizations lent pedestals to share for exhibition displays. In the end, our shoestring budget made us all feel more connected because community members became partners in the success of our project.

Most of the work for the exhibition arrived a few days before the opening.

A few members of our curatorial team

worked to install the exhibition over a very busy three days in October. During the opening we feasted on smoked salmon and other foods brought by community members. We hosted a small artist panel where artists shared their connections to salmon and explained why we should all work together to protect this fish. As the exhibition’s run continued, we developed a pop-up store to sell art reflective of salmon culture and invited school groups to visit the exhibition. We organized weekly social media posts celebrating the artists in the exhibition. We added a partnership with another local organization to host a fish skin–sewing workshop.

Although the exhibition was far from perfect, it felt like a significant project. It strengthened our community. It created a welcoming space for Indigenous people and non-Indigenous people alike to convene and celebrate our shared connections around salmon.

We gained funding support for Indigenous art, we gained exposure, and we gained an opportunity to consider what Museum Sovereignty looks like in practice. We built our capacity to engage in future museum work. I asked the curatorial circle members what they thought is significant about this project. Artist and fashion designer Ilgavak Peter Williams shared: “The approach of being guided by cultural values was welcoming, refreshing, healing, and revolutionary. Because we worked together in this way, I think it was something that our ancestors would be proud of, and it also opened the door for future generations and projects to build upon the ongoing work of decolonization and Indigenization. All non-Native institutions need to support Indigenous people in similar ways by providing access and resources and stepping back, so we can have space to exist and be listened to.”

I do not know what is in store next at the Pratt Museum, but hopefully this museum has learned what respectful collaboration can look like, even if just during a one-year process. Hopefully, we have managed to address and correct the erasure that occurred as a result of the unfortunate social media post and future opportunities will continue this work in new formats with additional partners.

As we move forward with new Museum

Sovereignty projects, I continue to ask myself and my partners in this work how can we help museums perform differently to be more inclusive. How do we create stronger support networks for Indigenous curators? What else can we do to assert our sovereignty in museums?

The Museum Sovereignty initiative has developed other opportunities to engage museums in work with Alaska Native communities. We supported visiting curatorial fellow programs with the University of Alaska Museum of the North, the Anchorage branch of the

Smithsonian Arctic Studies Center, and the Alaska State Museum. Recently we launched a new partnership with the Anchorage Museum to fund three curatorial fellows next year. We are actively looking for new project partners (within Alaska, nationally, and abroad) to work with. If you work in a museum that holds Alaska Native collections, I encourage you to get in touch and find out how you can join our initiative to help support and recognize Indigenous sovereignty within museum spaces.

above Linda Infante-Lyons (Alutiiq /Sugpiaq), Kal'ut Madonna, 2022, oil on panel, 3 0 × 3 0 i n . , co l l e c t i o n o f the Anchorage Museum 2022.001.001. Image courtesy of the artist.

The painting, Kal'ut Madonna, is a centerpiece in Salmon Culture.

As shared by the artist, this painting is dedicated to Lyons’s Alutiiq ancestors and the sacred salmon that has sustained them for more than 4,000 years.

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DUCKS FROM THE DEEP The Lovelock Cave Tule Ducks & the Art of the Decoy

By James G. Bland

D

UCKS DO NOT TYPICALLY seize the imagination. They help control insect populations, nest quietly on marshy shores, and provide nature’s laugh track with their quacks. But after eleven duck decoys were found submerged under a floor of guano deposits, they rose so high in notoriety that they now perch next to the flag as a state symbol for Nevada. The discovery of these duck decoys was just one step in a story of geologic change, archaeological (mis)adventures, and the endurance of one resilient tribe in the grandeur of the Great Basin.

These are the Lovelock Cave duck decoys, a set of two-thousand-year-old hunting lures crafted to resemble waterfowl. In 1924, archaeologist Mark Harrington unearthed a bulrush mat bundle that contained eleven duck decoys, pihidiʔaa, finished and unfinished. These would prove to be the oldest surviving duck decoys in the world.1 A duck decoy is created to look like the real thing—with paint, feathers, or both. Floating on the water, decoys act as lures to attract real ducks for the hunter to catch. For maximum buoyancy, decoys are typically woven out of light plant fibers or carved from light woods like balsa, pine, or cedar. Some are more

artistic than functional, and decoys are a common handicraft genre throughout the world.

The story of these not-so-simple ducks begins thousands of years ago, in a cave outside of Lovelock in the dry plateau of the Great Basin in Western Nevada, about fifty miles east of Pyramid Lake Paiute Reservation. A hunter cached them in the cave, when the Great Basin was not a desert like today but instead was a giant freshwater lake full of islands covered in tule reeds.

These duck decoys, and others found in Ocala Cave and Humboldt Cave, were made in two styles. In one style, tule reeds form the body of the duck embellished with black and russet paint and feathers tied down with hemp dogbane. The second style also had a body sculpted from tule reeds and a stuffed duck’s head attached.

Similar to bulrushes or cattails, tule reeds are tough stalks that grow in bunches a yard or more tall, sometimes stretching to almost twice a man’s height with good soil and regular water. Similar reeds are found all across the world wherever there are swamps or wetlands.

When other food is scarce, humans can digest the baked roots of a tule reed like a tuber. One can even boil the stalks for a light amount of sugary carbohydrates.

When bundled together en masse, tule bushels can float steadily enough to form a wide, lumbering raft.

The tule plant is central to the Great Basin. It has many namesakes, from the dense and muggy tule fog veil to the stocky, shaggy tule elk. Tule feeds, hides, and houses all manner of animals: elk, bison, coyotes, egrets, beavers, and ducks.

Even the roots of the tule reed have their own special part to play. In mucky soil, they spread out in cross-hatched webs that mutually reinforce whole tule groves.

1. Christopher E. Drover and Franklin F. Fenega, “A Previously Undescribed Great Basin Goose Decoy,” Pacific Coast Archaeology Society Quarterly 49, nos. 3 & 4 (2013): 37–45.

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In arid basins where water comes from seasonal runoff, tule-assisted retention is vital to stop soil loss and floods.

In ancient times, the Great Basin was home to Lake Lahontan, now vanished into the sands. Before it began shrinking around 8000 BCE, the super lake covered much of northwestern Nevada and extended into Oregon and California. One study estimated the lake’s greatest extent was over 8,100 square miles, or enough to fit Massachusetts with room to spare. As the climate dried and glaciers permanently retreated, much of the water that fed Lahontan evaporated. Lake Lahontan became Great Basin; islands became mountain peaks.

The massive lake dissipated into lonely bodies of water at the deepest points of the floor, such as Pyramid Lake and

Walker Lake. Features that had once sat at the shore became crowns on the skyline. Over a mile to the southeast of Humboldt Lake sat one such feature called Lovelock Cave. In 1911, Lovelock was about to share its secrets.

LOVELOCK CAVE MINERS BEGAN EXCAVATING Lovelock cave for guano, the nitrate-rich product bats deposit after a good meal.

Guano was in high demand as a fertilizer and as an ingredient in the explosive saltpeter. In five months, the mine extracted more than 250 tons of guano from the cave. In the process, the miners inadvertently destroyed the first cache of a massive collection of Native artifacts. The Nevada State Historical Society learned

In 1911, Lovelock was about to share its secrets. above Western Archaic artists once known, Pihidiʔaa (Duck Decoys), 400 BCE–1 CE, rushes, feathers, cordage, paint, grass, 111/2 × 51/8 × 61/8 in., Lovelock Cave, Churchill County, Nevada, collection of the National Museum of the American Indian, 13/4312. Image courtesy of the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution. opposite Love l o c k C ave entrance, Churchill County.

Photo: Ken Lund (CC BY-SA 2.0).

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above, top Lovelock Cave interior. Photo: Bureau of Land Management, Nevada (CC BY-SA 2.0). above, bottom Tule growing in Nevada. Photo: Joey Allen (Fallon Paiute).

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about the discovery, but unprepared for a full excavation, they called for experts.

Their man of choice was Alfred Kroeber, an anthropologist with extensive Indigenous experience at the University of California, Berkeley. Instead, Kroeber

sent the university museum’s security guard, Llewellyn Loud. When Loud began the Lovelock excavation in 1912, he had no assistants and could only access part of the cave due to a property rights dispute. Consequently, the first survey’s excavation was messy, and useful documentation was limited.2 Fortunately the cave’s conditions were miraculously forgiving, thanks to the guano. The nitrate and other chemicals in bat guano usually accelerate decomposition, and typically organic artifacts would decay faster buried in guano. However, several recent studies have demonstrated that guano in warm and humid conditions can actually slow decomposition. The humid, swampy air of Lake Lahontan helped preserve the perishable items.3 More than a decade later, Loud returned to Lovelock with Mark Harrington, a veteran archaeologist. The 1924 excavation included the manpower and licenses to adequately catalogue

2. Robert L. Kelly and David Hurst Thomas, Archaeology: Down to Earth (Boston: Cengage Learning, 2016), 69–71.

3. Ruth Shahack-Gross, et al., “Bat guano and preservation of archaeological remains in cave sites,” Journal of Archaeological Science 31, no. 9 (September 2004): 1259–72, web.

findings. The team unearthed more than 10,000 artifacts including twined nets, baskets, mats, awls, sandals, atlatls, darts, fishhooks, and the now-famous duck decoys.

The dig was esp ecially successful thanks to help and consultation from local Northern Paiutes.

Indigenous peoples of the Great Basin have long understood the geological changes that had shaped their homelands. Accounts of Indian traders in the Great Basin and Rocky Mountains show that several tribes used trilobite fossils as protective medicine with the name “little water beetles in stone.”4 Tribal histories and ceremonies kept these geological transformations committed to memory over generations.

T he s e c ond e xc av at i on embraced this expertise. Loud employed Paiutes to work on-site and regularly shared discoveries with local experts for consultation. Loud wrote that Northern Paiutes passing by could identify which handcrafted objects were recent creations and which “were not of them” but instead from the cave.5 Loud even credited Sarah Winnemucca (Northern Paiute/ Shoshone, 1844–1891) as an oral historian in his book. Sarah was the daughter of Chief Winnemucca (Nor t her n Paiute/Shoshone, ca. 1820–1882). As a scout and a teacher in Nevada and a writer, speaker, and performer on the urban East Coast, Winnemucca championed Native education, sovereignty, legal rights, and Northern Paiute culture.

In 1884, Winnemucca’s book, Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims, told the history of her tribe, was her autobiography, and advocated for a dignified Indian policy from Washington. She

included the story of a war the Paiutes fought with a rival people on Lake Humboldt. The tribe, whom Winnemucca called the Si-Te-Cah, or “Tule Eaters,” were cannibals that attacked Winnemucca’s ancestors.

After a three-year war, the last of the rivals were driven into Lovelock Cave.6 Loud included Sarah’s full account in an appendix of the archaeological report.7 The project’s respect for Native experts was more progressive than the norm for European-Americans; so were the professionalism and ethical standards Harrington brought to the reports. Loud made genuine steps forward by networking with Natives and including their knowledge in his work.

The Lovelock discoveries disproved many of the crackpot white supremacist theories held by many European-Americans.

The artifacts were clearly part of a lineage that Great Basin Indigenous peoples had practiced for centuries.

Furthermore, the layers of guano showed incontrovertibly that the newest of the Lovelock caches were 2,000 years old and many even older. This significantly predated racist fantasies of Viking or Celtic mariners.

Nat ive Amer ic an input debunked the contemporary myths in Nevada. Sensational reports had warped the Paiute story of Lovelock into giant red-headed, cannibal monsters. Jumbled paleontology and stereotypes about Natives muddied reports further: mammoth and dinosaur fossils had been regularly dug up during the mining boom.

Through Harrington’s procedural analytics and respect for Indian consultation, the Lovelock story not only debunked race pseudoscience, but it also told a truly Nevadan story.

4. Adrienne Mayor, Fossil Legends of the First Americans (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 152–54.

5. Llewellyn L. Loud and Mark R. Harrington, Lovelock Cave (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1929).

6. Sarah Winnemucca, Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims, ed. Mrs. Horace Mann.

(Boston: Cupples, Upham & Co., 1883).

7. Loud and Harrington, Lovelock Cave, 165.

“I was a very small child when the first white people came into our country. They came like a lion, yes, like a roaring lion, and have continued so ever since ....”

—Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins

above Norval H. Busey (1845–1928), Sarah Winnemucca, 1883, albumen silver print, 615/16 × 4 in., collection of the National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution, NPG.82.137.

Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins (Northern Paiute/Shoshone, ca. 1844–1891) used her Western education for the benefit of her tribe and all Native peoples. She wrote Life Among the Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims (1883), the first published memoir by a Native American woman. An orator, activist, interpreter, and educator, she advocated for Native rights nationwide before returning to Lovelock, Nevada, where she founded a school for Native American children.

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CULTURAL CONTINUITY NEVADA LEGISLATORS officially commemorated that story and its living descendants in 1995. A state resolution declared the Lovelock Cave Tule Duck Decoys collectively to be the official state artifact. The same assembly resolved in favor of “commending Wuzzie Dick George and her family for preserving the traditions of the Northern Paiute people of the Stillwater Marsh.”8 Wuzzie Dick George, Wiziʔi (Fallon Paiute, ca.

1888–1984) learned how to make decoys from her grandmother Mattie (Northern Paiute) and how to hunt with them.

Her half-brother Sam Dick (Northern Paiute, ca. 1883–ca. 1933) also made lifelike decoys. Several, collected by Mark Harrington, are in the collection of the National Museum of the American Indian. Northern Paiute people hunted geese and mud hens as well as ducks with the decoys. Wuzzie’s husband, Jimmie

George (Fallon Paiute, ca. 1865–1969), a prominent medicine man, also made them, and the couple published their techniques. They constructed the body and wings with tule reeds bound with cattail cordage, then covered the structure with a fresh duck pelt and inserted greasewood sticks to hold the form.9 Wuzzie George taught her children and grandchildren the decoy craft.

Her son Ivan George (Fallon Paiute, 1929–1995) made elegant tule decoys, now in public collections such as the National Museum of the American Indian and the Penn Museum. Ivan taught his sons Martin and Davin George (Fallon Paiute), whose work is also in museum collections.

Other Northern Paiute people also craft decoys. Wesley Dick (Fallon Paiute) and Mike Williams (Fallon Paiute/ Washoe) make decoys and demonstrate, lecture, and teach workshops about them, so the art form will keep growing. The Washoe and Indigenous Californian

8. Assembly Concurrent Resolution No. 30, 68th Session of Nevada Legislature (May 3, 1995).

9. Margaret M. Wheat, Survival Arts of the Primitive Paiutes (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1967), 163–76.

10. Drover and Fenega, “A Previously Undescribed Great Basin Goose Decoy,” 37.

11. All quotes from Joey Allen (Fallon Paiute) in discussion with the author, November 10, 2022.

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peoples also created waterfowl decoys into the 20th century.10 Joey Allen (Fallon Paiute), greatgrandson of Wuzzie and Jimmy, carries this legacy forward in the 21st century.

Allen explains to me that Paiute historically used reeds for everything from sandals to shelter and hunting decoys— even food. “Us Cattail-Eaters, Toi-Ticutta, are keepers of the area. Each craft, tool, and art came from their own ecosystem, and they would all share the spirit of that ecosystem in a bigger circle.”11 The Toi-Ticutta, or “Cattail Eaters,” are the historical Northern Paiute band that make up the Fallon Paiute-Shoshone Tribe of the Fallon Reservation and Colony today.

The Toi-Ticutta have adapted to the many changes in western Nevada over the many centuries they have lived there. “Our history comes from the top down,” Allen says. “We were born on these islands, and the water slowly came down. Nevada’s comprised of more peaks than any other state. It’s a big accordion of

mountain ranges until you hit Utah. Our valley is a former lake, with a high water table. We have a thick layer of clay from the thousands of years of prolific life.”

In lake beds all over the Fallon area, Allen has found artifacts from ancestral Paiutes. “These [deceased] artists’ collections only seem to have value after they’re dead. But the mastery isn’t dead; the people aren’t dead. We’re still connected to them, living on top of where they passed, underneath the clay of the lake.

Crack open the bed, you can still smell the tule and the cattails—and you know people were there.”

Allen has been making decoy ducks for more than three decades. “I was just a teenager,” he says of when he began. “I had to walk across the field and around the drainage ditch carrying the reeds.

When you’re cutting—being quick, safe, efficient—you learn those things along the way.” The earlier generations of decoy makers, Allen believes, “didn’t have a direct apprenticeship, but they were wards of that information. They would share information as they went from one place to another, showing how the circle works for every discipline. It worked because all these ecosystems of craft methods were compatible.”

Historically, local marshes and seasonal lake beds brimmed with tule groves. Now irrigation has taken over ditches, sloughs, overruns, and drains all through Lahontan Valley. Harvesting tule reeds is now a lot harder for Allen. “We had small marshes … all over Nevada, all the way to Pyramid Lake. Now a lot of them have dried up and blown away, developed over. Now we can’t really gather anywhere other than irrigation lines.”

Still, Allen undergoes the same labor-intensive processes of harvesting, wetting, flattening, drying, and tying bundles of the tule and greasewood together. “You have to wash it, re-wet it, wash it,” he explains. “Get it to the right consistency before you can start bending it. I use my mouth to flatten and hold the tule, gathering the stuff together to twist.”

Allen’s art and his public demonstrations are part of a larger Toi-Ticutta campaign for social and environmental justice. Telling his patrons the story of his decoys is the beginning of a much bigger

story. “It’s hard to relate the concepts of a whole people and what they endured through 2,200 years. People would never understand that just by looking at a duck.”

The spirit behind Allen’s craftsmanship involves respecting the past and connecting historical artifacts and sites to living Indigenous communities. “If people don’t understand where they live,” he says, then “it’s our responsibility to tell the world, ‘Here’s what the world was, and here’s how it’s changed.’ Sometimes objects are discovered and get attention, and it adds to our continuity. It erases the erasure.” For Allen, creating decoys is part of the continuation of Northern Paiute

above, top Joey Allen (Fallon Paiute) speaking at Pacific Flyway Decoy Association Wildfowl Art Festival, Sacramento, California, 2017.

Tule duck decoys by Joey Allen (Fallon Paiute). Image courtesy of the artist. above, bottom

opposite Sam Dick (Northern Paiute, ca. 1883–ca. 1933), Pihidiʔaa (Duck Decoy), ca.

1920, tule rush, duck skin, 143/4 × 7 × 7 in., Stillwater, Fallon Reservation, Nevada, collection of the National Museum of the American Indian, 13/4189.

Image courtesy of the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution (CC 0).

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The people are the place. There’s no separating us.

above, top Demonstrating the buoyancy of two tule reed decoys by Joey Allen (Fallon Paiute) at Pacific Flyway Decoy Association Wildfowl Art Festival, Sacramento, 2017. above, bottom Joey Allen (Fallon Paiute) crafting a duck decoy with a tule form covered by duck pelt. Both images courtesy of the artist.

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land and history and the stewardship of that inheritance.

The obstacles to good stewardship remain daunting for the Toi-Ticutta people, the neighboring tribes, and the whole Lahontan Valley. Southeast of the Fallon Reservation sits Naval Air Station Fallon. Ongoing bombing drills and proving trials damage sacred and historical sites and generate ongoing noise and pollution. “We’re showing the contaminations that the earth is showing,” he says. “The people are the place. There’s no separating us.”

The Northern Paiute and Shoshone of the region take this seriously. Allen, who

runs tours and conducts demonstrations that show the long historical connection between the tribes and the Great Basin, is collaborating with tribal educators on a K–12 heritage curriculum. Tribal attorneys fight to maintain the area’s water table and prevent regional lakes from drying out. The geographically distant reservations struggle to guarantee voting stations on tribal land. Activists fight to protect ancestral sites from bombing trials out of the Naval Air Station Fallon.

While cautiously optimistic, Allen observes that the area will continue to change, much as it did between the era of the Lovelock Cave and now. “No matter what you do, the Basin’s going to claim you,” Allen says calmly. But for him, that’s not a futile message of resignation; it’s a challenge to live life fully and responsibly.

“You do right by the basin, it’ll do right by the people who come after you.”

For archaeologists, the 1920s was a decade of learning to adapt with humility to the ethical responsibilities of working with Native people, treating the land and its artifacts with respect, and listening to the histories carried through generations of storytellers. Generations today wrestle with environmental mistakes that continue to plague the Great Basin. For Allen, his decoy ducks are a small lesson in a much bigger story about adaptation, respect for the land, and survival. “I hope people learn.”

16TH ANNUAL

Love of Ledger Art Show

2 locations: 512 W. Main + 331 W. Boyd St. | 3-day opening: February 10–12, 2023

405.329.4442 | Norman, OK | tribes131.com

NO. 37, WINTER 2023 | 41

GENERATIONS THROUGH CLAY Santee Smith’s Talking Earth Artwork

By Anya Montiel, PhD (Mestiza/Tohono O'odham descent)

S

HE MAY BE BEST KNOWN as a dancer, choreographer, and producer, but Kahnyen'kehàka Mohawk artist Santee Smith also has been a professional ceramicist since the age of 14. In June 2022 Toronto’s Gardiner Museum installed her permanent public artwork, Talking Earth, at its entrance. The large-scale ceramic artwork is deeply connected to her family’s history with clay and to her worldview as a Kahnyen'kehàka woman. As Smith announced online from the pottery studio, “This work is in 42 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE

my DNA, my bones, and blood.” During Talking Earth’s opening weekend, Smith activated the ceramic artwork through three nights of a live performance accompanied by digital projection mapping on the museum’s façade.

Sm it h i s a c it i z e n of t h e Kahnyen'kehàka Nation, Turtle clan, from Ohswé:ken (Six Nations of the Grand River), and her family has been creating pottery for four generations.

Her grandmother, Elda “Bun” Smith (Kahnyen'kehàka, 1919–1976) helped to revitalize Kahnyen'kehàka pottery at

the Six Nations reserve in Southeastern Ontario. Bun Smith always noticed broken potsherds around her home which prompted her to study historic Haudenosaunee ceramic works and learn pottery-making techniques. She, along with Kahnyen'kehàka citizens Oliver Smith, Darlene Smith, Dee Martin, and Karen Williams, opened the studio and shop Mohawk Pottery in the 1960s. Then Santee’s parents, Steve T. and Leigh Smith (both Kahnyen'kehàka), ran the studio Talking Earth Pottery on Six Nations.

The youngest generation includes Santee’s

Moving toward intactness, the vessel evokes the process of reassembling culture, memory, and ancestral knowledge. daughter Semiah (Kahnyen'kehàka), who is also a singer and songwriter.

When the Gardiner announced that Smith was awarded the artwork commission, she issued a statement saying: “It is a tremendous honour to be selected for the Gardiner Museum’s public art commission. My family lineage is grounded in the reclamation of Kahnyen'kehàka pottery, initiated by my grandmother Elda ‘Bun’ Smith, contemporized by my parents Steve T. and Leigh Smith at Talking Earth Pottery, and passed on to me through my pottery design and interdisciplinary works with clay. Talking Earth shares my rich Kahnyen'kehàka ancestral story.”

One of the few museums in the world focused on ceramic arts, the Gardiner Museum has a collection numbering 4,000 works. In November 2020, the museum announced a call for proposals for a permanent public artwork “to honour the ongoing Indigenous presence on Turtle Island.” An advisory group chaired by Gardiner board member and artist Kent Monkman (Fisher River Cree) reviewed the proposals and selected the winner. Smith learned about the proposal call from actor, playwright, and friend Monique Mojica (Guna/Rappahannock descent). For Smith, the commission would mark a return to pottery. Smith remarked: “I hadn’t done pottery since my father got ill in 2018. I applied to [the call] and felt it would be a way to get back to pottery. I was missing it in my life.” Her father suffers from a severe case of West Nile virus, which rendered him unable to make pottery. He closed Talking Earth Pottery in 2018.

The title of Smith’s artwork, Talking Earth, pays tribute to her parents’ studio and her family lineage. The final work is a large ceramic sculpture inspired

by Rotinonshónni (“They who make the house”, Haudenosaunee) four-cornered cooking vessels. The vessels have a pointed base which would allow them to hang over a fire. The finished work is purposely fractured and then reassembled. Smith told a reporter, “The fractured

and reconstructed vessel symbolizes the disruption and trauma caused by colonization, including the legacy of the residential school system, assimilative politics imposed on womxn, and the crisis of Missing & Murdered Indigenous Womxn and Girls.” She continued, “Moving toward intactness, the vessel evokes the process of reassembling culture, memory, and ancestral knowledge.”1 Smith communicated to the Gardiner that she intended that the artwork be placed

1. Kaleigh Wisman, “‘Talking Earth’ performance launches Chancellor Santee Smith’s public artwork,” Daily News, McMaster University, June 16, 2022, web.

above Santee Smith (Kahnyen'kehàka) with Jordi Alfaro, Carmela Laganse, and Steve T. Smith (Kahnyen'kehàka), Talking Earth, 2022, earthenware with LED lighting, 72 in. high with base (48 in. high without base) × 34 in. diam., collection of the Gardiner Museum, Toronto, Ontario. All images, unless otherwise noted, courtesy of the artist. opposite Santee Smith/Kaha:wi Dance Theatre activate the ceramic sculpture Talking Earth through a multimedia performance. Photo: Vladimir Kanic.

NO. 37, WINTER 2023 | 43

While Talking Earth speaks to Smith’s family and being Kahnyen'kehàka, the artwork and its performance are timely and universal as well.

above, top Santee Smith/Kaha:wi Dance Theatre activate the ceramic sculpture Talking Earth through a multimedia performance. Photo: Vladimir Kanic. above, bottom Detail of Talking Earth, 2022, earthenware with LED lighting. opposite Santee Smith/Kaha:wi Dance Theatre in Talking Earth performance with ceramic pot by Steve T. Smith. Photo: Ian R. Maracle.

44 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE

at the museum’s entrance, because as an Indigenous artwork, “it provides the context for pottery in this land.”

Talking Earth is a massive artwork that required collaboration and a sizable studio. Smith worked in the art studio spaces at McMaster University, where she is chancellor. In 2019 McMaster appointed Smith as its 19th chancellor, the first time an Indigenous person has

held that position at the university. In the studio, Smith worked alongside School of the Arts professor Carmela AlfaroLaganse and ceramicist Jordi Alfaro, who specializes in large-scale pottery. Smith’s father supplied the clay slip and helped design the pottery tools.

In the beginning Smith drew a paper cutout of the vessel to find the right size and proportions. She also needed to map out a larger vessel since the actual one would shrink when the clay dried. Once she found the correct dimensions, Smith then hand-built not one but three clay vessels. She built multiple vessels in case any broke in the firing or one split into too many pieces during the fracturing. When the vessel was reassembled, studio assistants helped position the pieces in place. The final vessel is held together with a metal armature and clamps, which also gives the appearance of the work suspended in air. At night, Talking Earth glows; it is installed with an interior light emanating through the cracks.

Smith activated her artwork through a series of public performances. Such a process is in line with Smith’s artistic practice and training. She graduated from McMaster University with degrees in physical education and psychology. Smith also has a master’s degree in dance from York University and trained for six years at Canada’s National Ballet School. In 2005, Smith founded the Kaha:wi Dance Theatre, an Indigenous dance company that tours nationally and internationally. She has created 14 productions and more than 30 short works.

The multimedia performances for Talking Earth occurred over three nights, beginning at 9:00 p.m. Crowds gathered on the sidewalk and on the steps of the Gardiner Museum. Semiah began by singing while Smith worked with clay. Then Smith and Semiah danced while a digital projection played overhead on the façade of the museum. The projection mapping included videos of Smith (as Claywomxn) etching, breaking, and dancing with sherds, as well as photographs of the Smith family and their pottery. Smith collaborated with AVA Animation & Visual Arts, a Toronto-based animation company on animation vision and content. James Kendal provided the lighting and A/V production support.

While Talking Earth speaks to Smith’s family and being Kahnyen'kehàka, the artwork and its performance are timely and universal as well. Smith explained: “Now is a time for listening.

Listening to the story of the land and what is cradled and buried within Yethi'nihsténha tsyonhwentsyà:te / Mother Earth. It is my

hope that the work will creatively interweave community and public activation, offering a public space for dialogue, teaching, and reinvigorating our connection with the earth.”

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PROFILE

Navajo Textile Artist

VENANCIO ARAGON

By Stacy Pratt, PhD (Mvskoke)

“M

Y QUEST TO LEARN and preserve my peoples’ textile traditions has led to an ongoing journey of piecing together fragments of memory, oral histories, and archaeological material into my work,” writes Venancio Aragon (Navajo) in his artist statement. Throughout that ongoing quest, Aragon’s vision, innovation, and daring continue to attract the attention of collectors and admirers.

Carol Ann Mackay, a lifetime trustee of the Heard Museum and long-time collector of Navajo weaving, writes, “He has burst onto the Navajo weaving scene with some of the most gorgeous visual and optically tantalizing textiles I have ever seen … I do believe that Venancio will ultimately take a unique place in the world of Navajo weaving and in the broader world of American modern art.”

In 2009, Aragon earned his bachelor’s degree in anthropology from the University of New Mexico. Then in 2010, he earned his bachelor’s degree in Native American and Indigenous studies from Fort Lewis College in Colorado. As the 2020 Rollin and Mary Ella King Native artist fellow at the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe, he researched historical Navajo weavings in the Indian Arts Research Center. Museums in Arizona and throughout the United States are taking notice of his work through exhibitions and collections. He has earned accolades at several Native art markets, including the Heard Fair, Santa Fe Indian Market, and Bernalillo Indian Arts Market.

SP: You began weaving at a young age. Who taught you?

VA: I come from a long line of weavers, but when I was a child, my mother [the weaver Irveta Aragon (Navajo)] didn’t actively weave. She was doing wage labor to support the family, so I had no idea that I had this great heritage of weaving in my family. I was in fifth or sixth grade in a border town public education system where we had bilingual education to teach us about our culture and language throughout the day. During that time the Navajo teachers taught us about weaving. They made these simple cardboard looms. When I took mine home for homework, my mom says, “Oh, well, let me show you how to put a design in there.” And I said, “You know how to weave?

Cool.” She showed me what she knew, and I asked if she would teach me. By that time, my maternal grandmother had died, so we went around to all my aunts. My grandmother’s weaving toolkit was divided among them. They wove in their youth, but they didn’t continue, so they had those tools stashed away in closets and drawers.

48 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE

My mom went around, and we asked them, and they were very supportive. From chests and drawers and closets, we reassembled my grandmother’s weaving toolkit. That’s how she started teaching me.

SP: It is somewhat unusual to see a male Navajo weaver. You have previously talked about how colonialism impacts gender roles. How did that affect you as a young weaver?

VA: When I started out, I still had some of those frameworks of thinking internalized a little bit. Back then, you were shy as a male weaver. You didn’t want to just be seen with the spindle, but now wherever I go I’m spinning wool! Back then, it was a little embarrassing or something to hide a little bit, but as I’ve come into my own and as I’ve matured, I’ve decolonized my thinking, and I look to the roots of why we had those notions of gender rules and saw weaving as a feminine occupation. When I look to the old people in our creation stories, I learned that it was a different way in the past, so now I’m quite comfortable being a weaver.

VENANCIO ARAGON.

These Western subjectivities were applied to us through colonization and Christianization. Speaking about them and bringing them into the light is a powerful thing. Retelling history and referencing the creation stories and our older culture is a very powerful way for people to have a reflective moment where we look to ourselves and wonder how we came to this way of thinking.

SP: I read that your brother made one of your looms, and you have several. Do you have a main loom that you work on?

VA: Yes, my brother is a toolmaker, and I do have several looms. They’re not all up at once, but I have different looms, different sizes, different purposes. Many weavers in the past were more minimalist than we are today. Being part of a capitalist, material-driven society, we have a lot more stuff than our ancestors needed.

Their looms were simple, and they could put them up under trees and move around easily, but I have a lot of frames today that take up a lot of space! [Laughs.]

But I do have a main loom. It is a big metal loom I inherited from one of my distant aunts. Her mom was a very well-known weaver, and the loom was made especially for her. With age and health, she had to put her loom away, and she eventually passed on. Her daughter weaves too, but she only weaves small little things, so I was able to acquire the big loom. That’s the one I’ve been using the most for the past eight years or so.

Weaving tools have their own stories. My grandmother’s weaving tools were degraded and pretty old and mostly unusable, but there’s a particular shuttle of hers that I use on every piece I make.

SP: Those of us who follow you on Instagram know that you grow a lot of plants and collect a lot of materials to dye your own wool. How does that process impact you as an artist?

VA: As an artist and a Native person in particular, that process makes you respect the knowledge that our ancestors had of the ecology, the knowledge that they transmitted through time, and the experiments in science and chemistry that they

From chests and drawers and closets, we reassembled my grandmother’s weaving toolkit. conducted to be able to extract the colors that we know today. You always have to be aware of what season it is and how the area you’re collecting is going to be impacted. We’re always taught not to just rip plants out of the ground, for example.

You might just take a few leaves or twigs and leave the plant to grow. You always put offerings down, take what you need, use it, and don’t waste it.

It makes me very conscious of the environment. Since I’ve been dyeing and collecting, I’ve noticed from season to season different changes in patterns in weather. For example, we’ve been undergoing this severe drought here in the Southwest, and some of the usual plants

above Rainbow Interrupted, 2022, wool/mohair weft, wool warp, synthetic dyes, natural dyes (including indigo, cochineal, madder root, turmeric, marigolds, and various local New Mexican plants), 22 × 29 in. opposite Venancio Aragon dropping off competition pieces for the 2019 Santa Fe Indian Market.

Photo: Kitty Leaken.

NO. 37, WINTER 2023 | 49

PROFILE

invited to a show featuring some of your work. I know a lot of artists who say, “I can go look at those pieces, and I can remember where I was in life, what I was going through,” because you have such a familiarity with each of your works. I had that experience too. I got invited to the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey to see one of my pieces in the exhibition Color Riot when it was there, and it was surreal. It got to see more of the world than I did!

SP: What was the inspiration for the expanded rainbow aesthetic?

that I’d be gathering didn’t all come up or were hard to find. The human ecological knowledge associated with textile arts and things that we do is so profound. It’s a little scary at the same time because it makes those changes in the environment much more visible to someone who’s more intimately acquainted with them.

SP: Speaking of dyes, you consider yourself a collector of colors. Can you explain what you mean?

VA: In my work, I use upwards of 200 colors. I don’t dye all my colors, but I do a big majority of them. A lot of people dye a whole lot of yarn in one color so they can have enough of it for a piece, whereas I might dye as many skeins in different colors as I can because that’s how my work is, even if it’s just experiments or mixing of materials. It’s an unorthodox methodology. I do it 50 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE

because whatever colors come out, I have a place for them on my loom. I collect whatever colors I can.

That comes from when I was living in Albuquerque for my undergraduate degree. I was far from the landscape that I knew, far from the plants that I knew, so I would go into grocery stores and look at things like Kool-Aid or Rit dye or things that are at the grocery store—onion skins or turmeric powder. I collect what I can from my surroundings wherever I am.

SP: When a person buys or a museum displays your weaving, the y ’re displaying literally where you physically were at the time you made it, even if that was in Albuquerque buying Kool-Aid. VA: Really! And as weavers, we don’t always get to see our pieces when they leave us. They go out into the world, and they may end up in another country. But if you’re in the art world, you might get

VA: A few years back, before I was doing this color work, I was starting to experiment with dyeing. I was starting to learn from my mom what she knew of the local plants, but we had lost so much of our dye heritage. We lost the chemistry behind it. A lot of people think it’s just about boiling plants, but there’s additives and things that change or alter the color chemically that we used to harvest and collect from the earth. Even knowing where they are is difficult. But from what my mom knew, I began my experimentation with natural dyeing.

At some point in my weaving career, I was only making all hand-spun, only naturally dyed pieces. Then I started to expand my range with natural dyes from beyond the Southwest. Eventually I had collected so many, but there is a limited palette in natural dye, so I started experimenting with synthetics, and I got a whole new range of colors.

I was getting so many that I needed to find a way of ordering them, so I looked to the natural world, and I thought of the rainbow because it captures most of the colors in the human visible spectrum. I started weaving all of these colors into rainbow sequences in my work, and as I kept collecting colors, I started adding more and more and more until I finally came to this expanded rainbow aesthetic.

It challenges conventions about what Navajo weavings are supposed to look like, not only to my own people but to the outside world. It challenges how Western people view the things we make. I know a lot of non-Native, or non-Navajo, people who look at my work and say, “Oh, this design is not Navajo.”

They’re trying to lock you in this state of

VENANCIO ARAGON.

temporal stagnation, as if somehow our culture doesn’t evolve and change over time. They want to see things that were made 100 or 200 years ago as if that is somehow more authentic.

SP: The expanded rainbow aesthetic has been received so well by so many people.

Why do you think that is?

VA: I get so much good reception from the LGBTQ+ community [who have historically been represented by the rainbow design]. These pieces show the brightness and the boldness, the vitality of my culture and who we are.

People in the LGBTQ+ community really resonate with and respect that.

The LGBTQ+ is also a culture that hasn’t been supported, by and large, in our Native communities because of colonialism, among other things.

Another thing about the rainbow: Being Navajo and being from the desert, I know that all things associated with water are sacred and have a place in our creation story. There are rainbows in our sand paintings that people make for healing ceremonies. They’re short sequences of color, and those rainbows are protection symbols. Rainbows are also referenced in how the Hero Twins traveled to visit their father, so they’re very sacred things in the desert because they are associated with water. In fact, a lot of my pieces deal with the subject matter of water.

SP: How did your formal education impact you as an artist?

VA: Studying cultural anthropology and Native studies helps center the mind by having us look backward to see how we’ve come to be in our current material

… whatever colors come out, I have a place for them on my loom.

above Waiting for the Rain, 2022, wool/mohair weft, wool warp, synthetic dyes, natural dyes, 46 × 67 in. Model: Venancio Aragon. opposite Acid Rain, 2021, wool/mohair weft, wool warp, synthetic dyes, natural dyes, 24 × 32 in.

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PROFILE

As we go forward through time, Navajo weavers can share our opinions and histories or our own life stories about what weaving means to us. was probably the most powerful thing about my formal education: It helps me understand more about how our current Native nations have undergone a lot of changes and how we might not even realize that we’ve internalized a lot of those normative frameworks of thinking from our colonial experiences.

SP: In 2020, you had a fellowship with the School for Advanced Research (SAR). That was quite a year to do anything. How did it go?

VA: It was a two-part fellowship. One part involved reviewing the Indian Arts Research Center’s collections of Southwest textiles. I was there to look for examples of rare techniques of Navajo weaving that come from our utilitarian past when people were making saddle blankets and different articles for use.

A lot of them have been catalogued already or identified by ethnographers and weaving historians, but I was looking for anything that I didn’t know about and that I didn’t think was named yet. I found one piece that fell into that category, and I was making all of these drafts and conventions so that other weavers could recreate it. I was writing down what I was doing and weaving my own series based on the techniques that I identified in the collection.

It was a really great time, and SAR was very supportive. This was during the pandemic, before there was a vaccine, so we were all isolated. I worked every day in the studio, and I didn’t see many of the people except when I visited the collections. It was a nice, quiet time to get things done. A little lonely, but a quiet time.

above Rainbow Twill, 2022, wool/mohair weft, wool warp, synthetic dyes, natural dyes, 28 × 34 in. opposite Rainbow Lightning, 2022, wool/mohair weft, wool warp, synthetic dyes, natural dyes, 43 × 60 in.

52 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE

conditions. For example, it made me more aware of the changing gender roles of weavers. I wouldn’t have that ability or knowledge if I didn’t understand the anthropological gaze, critical Indigenous studies, or how Native scholars critique Western writers, academics, and institutions to illuminate the power relationships of colonial historiography and colonial writing. My formal education helped me develop this frame of weaving for a purpose with the narrative in mind. That

SP: Speaking of utilitarian weaving, what changed for weaving when it began to be seen as art outside the community?

VA: Even today, Navajo weavings are often called rugs. That comes from our history when trading posts came in and tried to rebrand our blankets or saddle blankets or whatever we made for another use so that they could sell them in markets. We started to transition from making mostly

VENANCIO ARAGON.

utilitarian items that we wore and used to making “rugs.” We didn’t have rugs before that time.

Today, the price of most weavings is very high, and there is a shifting of collective consciousness about our work as not just rugs for the floor but as a true American art. They are made by the first people of the land. They’re quite detailed and wonderfully done. A lot of times people hang them on walls, so they have another purpose today: to beautify a home instead of to walk on or wear. So in some sense, the utilitarian aspect is still there, but it just changed over time.

In a lot of other countries, weavings have been viewed as a high art form for a long time, but in the United States, it has been seen as more of a craft. In the seventies, there was a revival of interest in arts and crafts and handmade things, but weaving was still viewed as a “primitive” craft. As we go forward through time, Navajo weavers can share our opinions and histories or our own life stories about what weaving means to us. We can tie together the impacts of colonialism, our oral histories, and our cultural perspectives. Once you understand that, you can understand our weaving as an art form that has somehow survived these horrible experiences of our colonial past to emerge as a brilliant American art form.

Things are shifting today, but there are still a lot of old people who sell their [weavings] to trading posts for super cheap because that’s the only economic world they’ve ever known. It’s hard for those who aren’t tech-savvy to go online and start websites or use platforms like ArtSpan or Etsy or eBay, so there’s a divide between people who have access to those things and education and people who don’t.

SP: What are your hopes for Navajo weaving?

VA: A lot of people view Navajo weaving as something super endangered. Western people have this view that somehow we’re always on the edge of extinction, but when you look at the Navajo Nation, we probably have the largest majority

of textile fiber artists anywhere. There are so many weavers here. It’s an active part of our culture. Not every family has weavers, but it’s still a very practiced thing. I think most Navajo weavers would speak against the idea that it is disappearing any time soon.

When we look at preserving our culture for the future generations, we have new technologies and tools available to us, so we can record a lot of our techniques. We can make dye book recipes and publish how-to videos online. As long as there are people in every generation who have the knowledge of how to weave, it’s going to continue.

As weavers, my family is an example of revitalization rather than continuation.

We had to revitalize our weaving history through fragments of memory and the oral history of our family. We can give anyone hope because we have shown that though things may become rare or may be forgotten by some, there are always others who remember. Weavers are cultural bearers of our history and our techniques, so weaving has an important place in Navajo people’s future because it is a great vessel for people to have knowledge associated with our traditional culture, our ecology, our creation stories, and our philosophical worldview of what it means to be Navajo. All of that is encompassed within this ancient art of weaving that deserves protection and preservation.

VENANCIOARAGON.COM NO. 37, WINTER 2023 | 53

PROFILE

Métis Painter, Curator & Critic

DAVID GARNEAU

By Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD

B

ORN IN EDMONTON, Alberta, David Garneau currently lives in Regina, Saskatchewan. He earned his bachelor of fine arts degree in painting and drawing from the University of Calgary where he also received his master’s degree in American literature.

He then taught studio art and art theory courses at the Alberta University of the Arts for five years before accepting a tenure-track position at the University of Regina, where he is a professor and head of the department of visual arts.

Garneau’s critical art writing appears in numerous books, academic journals, exhibition catalogues, and art magazines.

He tackles a variety of issues, from Indigenous display politics at Expo ’67 and methodologies of Indigenous art criticism to contemporary creative expressions of indigeneity. He cofounded Artichoke, a visual arts magazine that circulated in western Canada from 1989 to 2005.

Garneau’s curatorial work spans several decades and includes major exhibitions in Australia, the United States, and Canada. He co-curated the Contemporary Native Art Biennial, Kahwatsiretátie: Teionkwariwaienna Tekariwaiennawahkòntie / Honoring Kinship (2020) in Montreal with Faye Mullen and rudi aker (Wolastoqiyik) and Transformer: Native Art in Light and Sound (2017–19) with Kathleen Ash-Milby (Navajo) at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian George Gustav Heye Center in New York City.

Garneau’s visual art is influenced

by Indigenous artists including Alex Janvier (Denesuline/Saulteaux), Joane Cardinal-Schubert (Kainai, 1942–2009), and Bob Boyer (Métis, 1948–2004), as well as numerous Western styles from Pop Art to 17th-century Dutch still-life painting. Recognized for examining Métis heritage and visual culture, he has

guys since my early teens. I listened to their stories. They were rough but sincere sculptures inspired by Joe Fafard.1 I lived and worked in that area and wanted to record these folks and present them to themselves and others.

While I made some seemingly non-objective paintings for the Tawatinâ Bridge, all refer to the natural world, Indigenous textiles, or maps. While I work in numerous styles, I am always re-presenting the world, not just as it appears but with an explicit or implied point of view.

participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions across Canada and internationally, including at the National Gallery of Canada (Ottawa, Ontario) and Canada House (London, United Kingdom). His performance, Dear John, Louis David Riel, featuring the spirit of Louis Riel meeting with John A. MacDonald statues, was enacted in Regina, Kingston, and Ottawa. Recently, Garneau organized a public art installation featuring more than 550 individual paintings affixed to the Tawatinâ Bridge in Edmonton.

MRS: For those unfamiliar with your work, can you briefly outline how you arrived at painting?

DG: I have always been a representational artist. I began as a figure sculptor. My first exhibition, at the Bearclaw Gallery in Edmonton (1980), showed small ceramic sculptures of men I knew from the street.

I played chess and cards in the park and at a downtown soup kitchen with these

MRS: You’ve written, “I want to make work that is legible, rather than something that’s merely for pleasure, escape, or is in a code known only to the community it rises from. My compromise is this new body of work: realist, still-life paintings coded with Indigenous meanings.”2 Can you unpack the idea of coded meanings further?

DG: I distrust pleasure. I am hyper-aware of how our desires and fears are harnessed and we are manipulated by commercial images. I prefer meaning—something I can have a dialogue with rather than be overwhelmed by. I am less interested in non-objective visual art that attempts to evade the world, our implication in the present. That said, I have swooned before a powerful Anish Kapoor, Rita Letendre, James Turrell, or Alex Janvier.

Please take everything I say with a grain of salt. While I want to be consistent, I can think of examples in my own art, writing, and delights that contradict nearly every point I’m making. I have strong convictions but am routinely humbled and undone by great art whose form is the opposite of what I intellectually prefer. Artists must be open to truth

1. Métis artist (1942–2019) who portrayed domestic animals. See Gloria Bell, “Joe Fafard, OC, SOM,” First American Art Magazine no. 23 (Summer 2019), 106.

2. See David Garneau, “Necessary Objects,” Canadian Art, November 25, 2019, web.

54 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE

DAVID GARNEAU

revealed through their art-making and seeing, especially to truths that undo their cherished beliefs and preferences. This is doubly so for art critics and teachers.

Conceptual art that is devoid of craft and beauty can be equally frustrating. Much conceptual art requires extensive art history and theory knowledge to understand it. In my teens, I was affected by Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game. I read it as critique of ivory tower thinkers who expend their time and intellectual and financial resources on a complex game that had no material results and could not be engaged by those with less time and intellectual and financial resources. While, as a viewer, as a pleasure, I can enjoy art for art’s sake, as a practice I prefer making art that is both visually seductive, conceptually interesting, and in some way contributes to the issues of the day. I want to make

Artists must be open to truth revealed through their art-making and seeing, especially to truths that undo their cherished beliefs and preferences. art that is a form of playful, elegant, and provocative thinking.

MRS: You mention Alex Janvier, and I’ll add Bob Boyer as a significant influence.

The former is known for curvilinear abstract paintings while the latter for geometric abstraction. How does your work respond to these artists?

DG: They were later influences. My first influences were comics and Pop Art from the 1960s, [Giorgio] Morandi, John Hall, and the rest of conventional art history you get in a BFA. Alex Janvier, Bob Boyer, Joane Cardinal-Schubert, and Edward Poitras came when I was in my thirties

above Careful Reader, 2022, acrylic on panel, 30 × 361/4 in.

All images, unless otherwise specified, courtesy of the artist. opposite David Garneau. Photo: Mika Abbott. Image courtesy of Mika Abbott Photography, Regina, Saskatchewan.

NO. 37, WINTER 2023 | 55

PROFILE

dancing powwow in 2004. He encouraged me to make work that was more visibly Indigenous and with Indigenous content.

Bob’s paintings reflect his research into numerous First Nations cultures, but he rarely engaged Métis life specifically. He was expressing historical and metaphysical truths shared by numerous Native peoples. I especially enjoy his titles (Huey, Dewey, and Louie Wannabee).

Alex, too, had witty titles in the 1970s (The Insurance on the Teepee). My stilllife paintings owe a debt to Alex and Bob and the idea that a seemingly innocuous image can pack a conceptual wallop when paired with an evocative title.

MRS: To this end, why is still life a strong vehicle for expressing Métis meaning and knowledge? Some people may think of beadwork or embroidery before they would still life.

Still-life painting, because it is accessible and represents the home, echoes Métis modes of doing and knowing.

above An Indigenous Education, 2021, acrylic on panel, 20 × 16 in. opposite A Lesson, 2022, acrylic on panel, 18 × 24 in.

56 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE

and finally ready to bring Indigenous art and content into my practice. I love these artists for the inventive way they engaged with dark histories and conceptual and emotional content.

In the early ’90s, I attended the opening of Alex Janvier: His First Thirty Years, 1960–1990, curated by Lee-Ann Martin. Alex toured a dwindling group through the show, painting by painting.

It lasted more than an hour and a half. He said that many of the works that looked non-objective were in fact maps of his Cold Lake territory. As we got closer to the 1990s, representations emerged from the abstractions. He explained that when it came to recounting his experience of Indian residential schools, he could not afford to be unclear.

I met Bob Boyer a few years before I moved to Regina in 1999. He was a friend and mentor until his death, while

DG: That’s true. The great thing about still-life painting is that I can bead, sew, and weave without doing so. I include Métis emblems such as beading, embroidery, sashes, flags, ropes to allude to Riel’s execution, etc., when I want to especially engage Métis lived experience and Métis people. Often Métis are woven into the larger Indigenous loom, which is important, but there is much Métis-specific experience that is less known and celebrated. Still-life painting, because it is accessible and represents the home, echoes Métis modes of doing and knowing. Métis artists, curators, and thinkers Sherry Farrell Racette, Cathy Mattes, and Dylan Miner write about Métis culture occurring in modest settings; knowledge is shared and generated around the kitchen table while cooking, sewing, beading, etc.

MRS: Your work deconstructs Western epistemology from its principal sources—books, paint brushes, Christian crosses, and other visual material. Can you talk about the collisions between Western epistemology and Indigenous knowledge that your paintings address?

DG: The Canadian constitution recognizes Métis as Indigenous people. While we are our own people (Otipemisiwak: the people who own themselves), we were and are aligned with First Nations people and are perpetually entangled with settler

DAVID GARNEAU

society. Many of my paintings express the complexity of these dual lineages.

Like many Métis, I was raised Catholic.

What was seen as the church’s betrayal of Riel during the 1885 Resistance, the church’s active participation in bringing non-Métis, French Catholic settlers into Métis territories, the Catholic role in Indian residential schools—which included many Métis—have all tested Métis’ faith. Some leaders, such as Maria Campbell, favor Cree spirituality. Others practice a syncretism—best seen at Catholic/Cree ceremonies every summer at Lac Ste. Anne. Indigenous Christian Paradox shows an eagle feather and a crucifix. Both are things I care for and that reflect indelible aspects of my history.

An Indigenous Christian is a paradox when both ideologies struggle within one mind/body. Neither the Indigenous nor the Christian is unchanged by the encounter.

MRS: The painting A Lesson (2022) is a strong example of this. It appears to be a work about ontology itself, about the state of being of different objects. Is this an accurate description?

DG: A Lesson features a book and three rocks on a shelf or shallow table in a white space with the light streaming from a window on the right. If you block out the book, the rocks look like rocks. But when placed beside the book, they look like they are “facing” the book, leaning toward it. Add the title, and the rocks seem to be children attending to a book.

Mimetoliths are natural rock formations that appear to be figures, usually human faces and bodies.

I am fascinated by how and why we project meanings onto nature and when the land is pressing its meanings onto us. I am interested in how rocks become stones, how nature becomes culture, and people become denaturalized. What does it do to their indigeneity for First Nations, Inuit, and Métis children to be taught by settler teachers and indoors? Can Indigenous knowledge be rendered into texts?

On the other hand, as a teacher, I see this painting as also being about light.

The teacher/book seems to be keeping the rock/children safe from the darkness.

Or the teacher seems to have a strong source of light behind them but offers

a less intense light and age-appropriate level of truth. While some of the paintings are didactic and straightforward, others are like mimetoliths—mysterious—and evoke the readings the viewer requires.

MRS: How do you go about selecting the materials and objects in your work? I’ve seen paper, string, rock, chains, animal skeletons, and more.

DG: My process is compartmentalized.

During my teaching and heavy workload season, I draw ideas in little sketchbooks.

Some images come to me while reading.

Some are fully formed; others are vague intuitions. Many come in day or night dreams. Most come through play. I keep a cast of characters in my studio. Every few months, I sit and play with the stones, bones, books, twine, and other items for hours, even days. I move them around on a shelf or table and wait for relations and narratives to emerge. I’ll refer to the sketchbooks when I’m at a loss. When a scene makes sense, I photograph it. At the end of several sessions, I review the images. About one in five ideas make the cut. There are usually a few months between composing and painting, but if a painting is inspired by something in the news, I’ll get to it right away. Each step is different. The first stages are the most creative and inventive. The rest is hard work and problem-solving. When choosing the items, I don’t worry about how or if I can paint them—much to

the consternation of my later self who wonders how I am going to paint a sash in convincing detail.

MRS: The dichotomies between oral histories and written histories are something that appears to surface in many of your recent paintings. How are they picturing different teachings and knowledge systems through rock and book? I think of Wisdom, Knowledge, Balance (2020), for instance.

DG: You’ve nailed it. Blackfoot, Cree, and other Elders I’ve asked about this explain that they would prefer if things were like they were. Young people would hunger for knowledge and come to Elders and other Knowledge Keepers to learn language, spirituality, philosophy, ethics, traditional skills, everything. If that demand were in place, they would not allow their teachings to be put into books or otherwise recorded. The knowledge is no longer living if in a book. It is separated from the language, human being, land, seasons, and other meaningful contexts/contents.

On the other hand, they say the knowledge is true and useful to those living on a particular territory, and they have a duty to share it with those who need it. But their anxiety remains. If the knowledge can be stored in a book, who needs the source? Will these devices save aspects of culture at the cost of their living carriers? Similarly, Elders recognize that NO. 37, WINTER 2023 | 57

Death is a constant theme in my art and thoughts.

in order to become contemporary people, their children need to know the ways and technology of settlers and others. How to do this without abandoning useful traditional ways of knowing and being?

MRS: Can you discuss the subject of balance, of harmony? Many of your paintings literally picture objects on the brink of collapse if it weren’t for string or other objects supporting their weight.

above Winter Kill, 2022, acrylic on panel, 14 × 18 in. Image courtesy of Assiniboia Gallery, Regina, Saskatchewan. opposite Vanitas (with Trout), 2020, acrylic on canvas, 30 x 36 in.

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DG: I take great delight in composing formal elements and reinforcing meaning through implied sensation. I use symmetry to suggest stability and to encourage anthropomorphism: the object, say a rock, is in dialogue with the viewer’s symmetrical head and body. I also like to play with the illusion of weight and potential imbalance. Indigenous Academics shows a group of five upright and unsupported books teetering on the edge of a table. It expresses the anxiety

many Indigenous professors and students feel: neither academic nor Indigenous enough. Only supporting each other will help them avoid collapse. I love the artificial conceit of still-life painting. Like the vanitas paintings where apples and fish will never rot and the tulips will never be fully consumed by insects, these books will never fall.

MRS: Then there are paintings like Winter Kill (2022), a beautifully delicate and fragile flower squeezed of life when autumn transformed to winter. The only object in the painting is a dead one.

DG: Last winter I noticed that, with few exceptions, my paintings were of things made by people, and a few inorganic natural things brought inside. In his great book on still-life painting, Looking at the Overlooked, Norman Bryson describes two types of Christian still-life painting: the raw and the cooked. The raw

DAVID GARNEAU

shows God’s natural bounty ripe for the eating. The cooked shows human effort to transform nature’s raw materials into something palatable and beautiful. Each presents a very different theology.

I decided that instead of showing fruit and flowers that will never rot, I would show already dead things. They echo my roadkill paintings of the late 2000s. I took pictures of dead birds and deer during my many Prairie road trips and then made paintings from the photos in my studio. I never showed blood or faces. They were not sensationalist but neither did they show animals as if they could wake up. They were ruined bodies offered to show our fate.

This May I had a bad fall and was in hospital for nearly a month in another city and spent the summer at home recovering from double knee surgery. It had me reconsider my body and mortality. I spent August in our backyard arranging the rotting harvest. I have still-life photos of bowls of bruised fruit infested with flies and wasps. Like Dutch vanitas painting, they look beautiful, from a distance.

MRS: Is there a connection between paintings like Winter Kill and definitions of still life as nature morte in French and natura morta in Italian, both meaning “dead nature”? Does your work engage with death?

DG: As I write you, below my screen are 27 small skulls rendered in stone, bone, metal, and wood. Behind them are wolf, beaver, and cougar skulls. Behind me are more bones. Death is a constant theme in my art and thoughts. When a colleague of mine, the art historian Gail Chin, saw my roadkill paintings, she said they reminded her of the scrolls depicting a human body in increasing states of decrepitude. Young Buddhist monks were to contemplate the scenes and the fates of their own bodies.

Some of my still-life paintings fulfill that function for me. They are reminders both of death and the possibility of extended lives—at least through works of art.

MRS: Another prominent motif in these paintings is fish. For instance, trout and mackerel are represented in paintings

such as Vanitas (with Trout) (2020), Surrender (2021), and Desire Caught by the Tail (2021). Trout, in particular, have been the subject of still-life paintings by Charles Cahoon, Henry Rolfe, and many others. Are fish an art historical nod, a metaphor on natural resources, or something else entirely?

DG: I fished obsessively as a kid. It was my first experience of death. The fish in my paintings are locally caught trout and mackerel. They remind me of childhood and were chosen because they were a challenge to paint. Some are nods to [Édouard] Manet’s and other still-life paintings. In historical art, fish sometimes represent Christ, but mostly they are just dead fish. I love the tension between the secular and the sacred. Several are nods to my roadkill paintings and that idea of a dead body there for our contemplation if not consumption. They also echo Bryson’s raw and cooked. They are raw but soon to be cooked. Some are on or in books suggesting that our scholarship may one day be fit only to wrap fish.

MRS: You have painted nearly 200 still lifes. Can you talk about your prolificacy and why these paintings resonate with you? I assume that the pandemic opened time to delve deeply into them.

DG: Indeed, the pandemic helped. I shifted from my university studio to a cramped home space, from large paintings to small ones. From working on a single idea for many months to many ideas in the same period. I post a new painting on Facebook each week. I appreciate the discipline and the feedback. I love when people not only appreciate the work but offer readings. I am especially thrilled when fellow Indigenous folks unveil a layer of meaning. They might recognize some of the books and surmise that all the authors in one painting are Indigenous, which creates a different meaning. Indigenous Academic Solidarity, for example, features books by authors who don’t always agree or get along. They are held together by a vise.

MRS: Where are you moving from here?

DG: I am working with a curator to tour the still-life paintings starting in 2025.

If all goes well, the exhibition, Dark Chapters, will be accompanied by a book in which poets and other writers respond to their favorite paintings. I used to make “beaded” paintings with small swirls of paint standing in for beads. The beads have been appearing in the backgrounds of recent paintings. I have the feeling that they may soon swirl into the foreground.

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PROFILE

Cherokee Nation Ceramic Artist

KARIN WALKINGSTICK

By America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

I

N THE SUMMER OF 2013, Karin Walkingstick’s friend Bud Brady suggested she join him in a ceramics workshop.

“There were about maybe eight of us or so at the Cherokee Art Center in Tahlequah.”1 Jane Osti (Cherokee Nation) led this introductory workshop in a series of ceramic classes. “She let us take some of the clay home, and of course I’m not going to just leave it sitting on my table. I pulled it out and started playing with it,” says Walkingstick, who is soft-spoken and modest but has a lively sense of humor. “I was trying to put what she taught us in the class into action and do it on my own. And then she saw my interest in it and that I wasn’t going away,” she laughs.

She didn’t go away. For the next eight months, Walkingstick apprenticed with Osti, a Cherokee National Treasure based in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. “Karin is a talented artist,” says Osti. “She is very devoted and passionate about her work. She is one of the few students that I’ve had who quickly developed their own style.”

The two became fast friends, and Osti encouraged Walkingstick to exhibit in art shows and markets. “She fearlessly ventured into and was accepted in very prestigious shows such the Heard Museum Fair and Santa Fe Indian Market,” says Osti.

“Early in her career, she won top awards in these shows.”

By 2014, Walkingstick began showing her work, first at the Trail of Tears Art Show at the Cherokee Heritage Center in Park Hill, Oklahoma, where she won third place in contemporary pottery, first place for emerging artists, and the People’s Choice award. That same year, she won awards at the Red Earth Festival, Cherokee Homecoming Art Show, and Southeastern Art Show and Market.

In the first introductory workshop, “Jane was talking about going to Santa Fe Indian Market,” Walkingstick recalls. “I thought, What is she talking about?” Her curiosity piqued, Walkingstick entered Indian Market in 2015, was accepted, and even earned an honorable mention. She continues to show in Santa Fe, at the Heard Fair in Phoenix, and throughout Oklahoma, while building a nationwide audience for her unique approach to Cherokee ceramics.

Osti also launched Walkingstick into teaching early on.

“One of our first trips together was to Maryland. Jane was teaching a class at Common Ground on the Hill, which is at McDaniel College in Westminster, Maryland,” recalls Walkingstick. At Common Ground, Jane was teaching a youth pottery class, and she told Karin to teach the two 18-year-old students.

“On our way back from Maryland, we were able to stop

by Cherokee, North Carolina, and visit with Lambert and Jennie.” Lambert Wilson, who just walked on, and his partner

Jennie Holland were major collectors and supporters of the arts in western North Carolina. “We stayed with them. And then we went on a tour” of the Museum of the Cherokee Indian, says Walkingstick. “Bo Taylor took us through, and Ethan Clapsaddle took us through the collections at the museum. We just got to point at whatever we liked, and they got it down for us and showed it to us, and we could take pictures.” Walkingstick had learned early Cherokee forms from Osti, “But it didn’t really make sense until I laid my eyes on the old pottery, and then I understood what she was talking about.”

To better understand current Native ceramic art, Walkingstick pored over catalogues and magazines. “Early on I could tell Tammy Garcia’s pots from Richard Zane Smith’s pots. They all have a certain style.” Walkingstick was able to study under Richard Zane Smith (Wyandotte Nation, tribally designated artisan), a master ceramicist known for his fine corrugated coils and subtle color fades with Mason stains. He planned a weeklong workshop at his home for several artists, but one by one, they dropped out. “I’d made reservations to stay at the casino nearest

1. All quotes from Karin Walkingstick in discussion with the author, November 11, 2022.

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KARIN WALKINGSTICK

him, and I was so excited to get to study with him. Then it just so happened that everybody had something else come up, so I asked Richard, ‘Please don’t cancel.

Please don’t cancel. I’ll show up; I’ll do whatever.’”

Smith agreed to continue with the workshop. “I worked a week with him.

I’d go to his place, and we’d work until lunchtime. Then we’d go back to the hotel, have lunch, then come back, and work some more. He just let me work in the evenings as long as I wanted to. He showed me how to use black glaze,” says Walkingstick. “He used Mason stains. He showed me how to weigh out to change colors from red to black and eleven colors in between.”

Smith and Walkingstick have also stayed in touch ever since. He says, “Karin is fearless. She's not afraid to push boundaries or barriers, combining ceramic and non-ceramic elements within her clay works.” He continues, “Karin creates vibrant expressions while exploring her own unique path.”

While some of her early pottery loosely resembles Osti and Smith’s styles as she was learning, Walkingstick pays her respects to her mentors by pushing herself to develop her own style. “I concentrated on making everything different,” says the artist. “I would think, What am I not seeing? What can I make that I don’t already see?”

ROOTS WHEN SHE TOOK that first workshop, Walkingstick had no idea that pottery would become her vocation. She had taken some art classes in elementary school but no formal art classes as an adult. When she was in kindergarten, she says: “My dad worked in a machine shop, and he would bring home the old invoices instead of throwing them in the trash. My dad would bring me all the scrap paper.”

She drew on the backs with “markers, crayons, whatever. My favorite thing to do was to just free form. Just draw a doodle, and then fill it in with my own colors.”

Her Cherokee father grew up in the Honey Hill community outside of Stilwell, on the far eastern edge of the Cherokee

Nation, near the Arkansas border. He was one of eleven children. “We just did what everybody else did in the community. I didn’t know that some things that we did were Cherokee things to do. I just thought that that’s what everybody did,” Walkingstick says. Her family moved to Claremore, on the far western side of the Cherokee Nation, near where she lives today. “We had close family, but the rest of the family was in Stilwell, so we would go visit at least once a month. We’d stay with my uncle Bob and aunt Kay. I remember my uncle Bob going out and shooting a squirrel for dinner, and my aunt Kay going to the creek and picking watercress.”

She reflects: “I didn’t realize how special it was when I was hearing Cherokee spoken. I knew it sounded like the prettiest thing, but I didn’t know what was going on because everybody was speaking English.” Her paternal grandparents were fluent speakers but didn’t want their children to endure the prejudice they experienced in the 20th century. “The whole generation was lost of speakers.” Instead her parents’ generation and her generation learned from

Karin is fearless.

above Midnight in the Dogwoods, red earthenware clay, Mason stains, 15 × 15 × 15 in., collection of the Cherokee Nation. opposite Karin Walkingstick.

All images courtesy of the artist.

NO. 37, WINTER 2023 | 61

PROFILE

their peers. “Some of them picked it up, like Sue Thompson. She’s a Cherokee National Treasure for Language. She’s in our family.”

SQUASH POTS & SPIRALS AFTER REMOVAL to Indian Territory, the Western Cherokee lost their potterymaking legacy, until Anna Belle Sixkiller Mitchell (Cherokee Nation, 1926–2012) taught herself how to make pottery. She first began experimenting with ceramics in 1969 because she wanted to make a clay pipe for her husband like the pipe that Sequoyah used.2 Determination over decades led her to master the craft, and she became an inaugural Cherokee National Treasure in 1988. She had three primary apprentices: her daughter Victoria Mitchell Vazquez, Crystal Hanna, and Jane Osti (all Cherokee Nation). Osti,

a Cherokee National Treasure in her own right, has taught pottery-making workshops for years, and now Western Cherokee pottery is thriving as a vibrant art form among a third generation of Western Cherokee ceramics artists.

Anna Mitchell studied Caddoan and Dhegiha Siouan pottery, but over time, with knowledge shared by Joel Queen (Eastern Band Cherokee) and Tammy Bean, Mitchell and Osti learned more about specifically Cherokee styles and iconography. Queen introduced Osti to stamping designs into the unfired clay, a common practice among precontact potters, not only to prevent slipping and improve heat distribution but to beautify pottery. The general consensus among many Cherokee artists, from Lloyd Kiva New in the 1940s to Knokovtee Scott in the 2000s to Osti and Walkingstick today, is that one honors the ancestors by studying their techniques and designs, but not by exactly replicating their creations.

You have to add your own voice. “Don’t make your pots somebody else’s, if you want to be recognized,” she advises. “Be recognized for what you do, not for what you copy.”

Informed by the ancient and historical pots and sherds she saw in museum collections and books, Walkingstick occasionally creates “cooking pots” based on Qualla phase pottery from the 14th to 17th centuries. She learned how to harvest and process clay by hand, how to burnish surfaces to a fine sheen with stones, and how to pit-fire pottery outdoors. However, she prefers to kiln-fire pottery. Typically, she uses warm reddish-orange commercial clay. “After the firing, the pot is kind of orange,” she says, “so I take it outside. I put it in a nest of dried pine needles, and I covered it up with pine needles, sometimes with leaves, or whatever in it. And then I light it on fire. It’s called a flash fire. It doesn’t take very long, just a couple minutes.”

2. Anna Mitchell, “Oral History Interview with Anna Mitchell,” interview by Julie Pearson-Little Thunder, Oklahoma State University Digital Collections, November 11, 2011, PDF, 9. Not long after Mitchell began creating ceramics, Mel Cornshucker (Keetoowah Cherokee) began creating pottery in 1975; however, he works in his own style, using slab construction and pottery wheels, as opposed to reviving customary Cherokee techniques or styles.

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Her construction technique remains the same one used by Cherokees for centuries. “I’ve always coil-built or slab on everything I’ve ever done. I think that’s a challenge. And I don’t care to do it any differently. That feels good for me.”

Walkingstick’s pottery is bold. She freely experiments with different elements of pottery: the clay body, the form, rims, incising, appliqué, burnishing, flash-firing, textures such as stamps or corncobs, sgraffito, and glazes, stains, or paints. Her subjects come from abstract forms, the natural world, Cherokee and Eastern Woodland iconography, and her own boundless imagination. Through working in several series, she can fully explore and flesh out ideas.

Her effigy pots draw inspiration from precontact Eastern Woodlands forms. Effigy Bowl pays homage to the Moundville Duck Bowl (ca. 1200–1300), a carved stone bowl of a crested duck, which Rebecca Youngbird (Eastern Band Cherokee, 1890–1984), followed by countless others, rendered in clay. While the original crested duck demurely faces down, Walkingstick’s duck has attitude.

It looks upward and its crest resembles a pompadour going wild—giving it a rockabilly vibe. Her other effigies feature birds, turtles, frogs, and rabbits. Rabbit, ᏥᏍᏚ (Jisdu) in Cherokee, is the Trickster for many Southern Tribes, and Walkingstick has immortalized him in several forms, including ceramic rattles, that blend elegance with whimsy.

Another series showcases fragments of Eastern Woodlands iconography from ceramic, stone, and shell carvings.

Her pots, like S.E. Symbology and Places of the Past, show symbols from what is now Ohio to Texas, spanning thousands of years and thousands of cultures. She includes her own motifs to show cultural continuity. Indigenous peoples are reclaiming their past histories and contributing to their living, evolving cultures.

She is cautious with interpreting precontact iconography. “The biggest thing I don’t want to do was put out bad information,” she says. “I don’t want anybody to get bad information from me because there’s always somebody who knows more than you do.”

… One honors the ancestors by studying their techniques and designs, but not by exactly replicating their creations.

above Cherry Blossom, white earthenware clay, acrylic paint and sealer, 12 × 14½ × 14½ in., private collection. opposite Squash 215, red earthenware clay, kiln and pine fired, private collection.

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PROFILE

I was just experimenting with something that looked organic but might not be of this world.

above Dewdrops, 2020, red earthenware clay, black glaze with sgraffito, 12 × 9 × 9 in., private collection. opposite Grandmother's Garden, 2017, red earthenware clay, 12 × 15 × 15 in., private collection.

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An early series are her barnacle pots, which featured rounded pots encrusted with small bowl-like forms that indeed resemble barnacles. Softly colored in monochromatic pastels of varying values, the organic, irregular placement of the clay forms sometimes triggered trypophobia, the fear of cluster patterns of holes. This instinct for irregular holes lives on in later depictions of rabbit fur and daisy carpels.

Her squash series grew out of what began as faithful renderings of the plants, a pottery form used in the Southeastern Woodlands for centuries, paying homage to one of the first domesticated plants in the region. “I love to make squash pots,” Walkingstick says. “They have evolved.

They used to look a little more like squash and pumpkins.” Over time, they grew less and less like Cucurbita plants. “I was just experimenting with something that looked organic but might not be of this world,” Walkingstick explains.

“There was a fly in my room when I was building a squash pot. The sides were just straight up at the time. This fly was

dive-bombing my head. He was landing on everything,” Walkingstick recounts as she laughs. “I’d been after him for a while and I thought, I don’t care what happens.

I’m going to get him. He lands on my pot—somebody’s got to take one for the team. So I swatted this thing, I killed the fly, but when I swatted it, that clay just laid over like that [laughs]. I stood back, looked at it, and I thought, Wait a minute!

I started making these flat shoulder pots.”

The designs went from being squash, the noun, to squash, the verb.

The spiral motif, associated with water, winds, and human migration, is ubiquitous in precontact Eastern Woodlands ceramics. Walkingstick places a unique spin on this spiral motif in Dewdrops. On the graceful tall jar, she coats the burnished red earthenware clay with a matte black glaze, then uses the sgraffito technique, in which the glaze is etched away to reveal the contrasting plain clay underneath. This creates a bold, sleek— almost Art Deco—spiral chain across the jar’s neck, which appears to float over parallel vertical lines ending in scallops.

Using unpigmented white clay also allows Walkingstick to focus on pure form, extenuated by cast shadows. White Textured Swirl is an almost perfect sphere with large, incised swirls and different stamped patterns across its surface. From plain white, she experiments with graphic black-on-white pots. Then, in a more delicate approach, she sculpts gleaming white jars in which she lightly outlines and then paints blossoms in varying pinks and greens. Her Magnolia rounded olla won the Best of Pottery classification in the 2022 Cherokee Art Market. Also in this series, loosely but delicately painted pink buds and flowers dance across the surface of a gleaming white, wide-mouthed jar in Cherry Blossom.

While many of her pots focus on form and a juxtaposition of clean geometries and the unpredictable designs of the flash-firing process, the Garden series focuses on color. Instead of saturated blasts of color, flowers have tints of a hue creating harmony. Incised, black outlines provide a graphic, Peter Max–esque flair.

While these floral designs have a buoyant, 1960s psychedelic feel, closer inspection

KARIN WALKINGSTICK

reveals Mississippian designs like scrolls and sun circles and pre-removal Cherokee beadwork designs such as fiddlehead ferns. This series is a playful echo of the botanical designs of the highly botanical pre-removal Cherokee work that showcased medicine plants. The pottery forms are rounded, in the style of seed pots, but the flowers’ edges create intriguing rims.

ON THE HORIZON WHEN ASKED about the new directions she hopes to take her art, Walkingstick says she is interested in possible collaborations. Kathleen Wall (Jemez) and Karin have discussed potential collaborative projects. She has also talked to Bill and Demos Glass (both Cherokee Nation) about public art projects.

Currently, she’s putting the finishing touches on a new 1,500-square-foot studio. “I am looking to teach,” says

Walkingstick. “I have been teaching people, but I can only teach them one at a time because I don’t have room. One lady from Iowa stayed here, and I taught her for a week.” The new studio will give her space for group classes: “I’m set up for everything I need and then some! I have a kiln room that I built with a vent out the top so it’s safe. I put concrete stuff on the bottom, so it won’t catch fire. Jane helped me plan it.”

She has amassed an extraordinary collection of clay that she'd like to put to good use. “When the Cherokee Nation was building the Anna Mitchell Center, they hit a clay vein, and they said, ‘Hey, come get the clay.’ I went up there and got twelve buckets of clay from Vinita.” She has clay she’s harvested from Hulbert, a small community in Cherokee County.

“I’ve got clay from all over. Hand-dug clay

from Iowa that is almost blue. I’ve just got a ton of buckets stored and ready to go.

It’s all labeled.”

After this winter, Walkingstick will show at the Heard Museum Guild Fair and Market in Phoenix. “The Heard Fair is very organized. It’s the first show of the year, and you’re stepping out with your best foot forward—your best pieces, things that you’ve had time to work on since you weren’t rushed. And that’s where I show most of my painted pieces—my weird stuff,” she laughs.

In her first decade, Walkingstick has found her artistic voice and garnered many accolades. With space to stretch her imagination further and exchanges with her fellow ceramic artists and sculptors, her fearless spirit will carry her into the next decade. We can’t wait to see her latest weird stuff.

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PROFILE

Navajo/Nisenan Maidu/Washoe Jeweler

LIZ WALLACE

By Staci Golar

T

HE SHEER VARIETY of styles and techniques found in Liz Wallace’s jewelry are a testament to her vast skill set and desire to experiment. Perhaps mirroring her approach to life, her body of work constantly evolves as she tackles the next challenge. From the silver shapes and turquoise stones associated with the Native jewelry of the Southwest to the sensual forms and rich colors inspired

by Art Nouveau, endless surprises have unfolded over the past two decades of this artist’s work.

Born in Sacramento, California, Wallace comes from a family of creators, culture keepers, and survivors. She’s named after her great-great-grandmother Lizzie Enos (Nisenan Maidu, 1881–1968), a renowned basket maker who tragically, along with her brother, became the sole survivors of their family after settlers gave the family blankets that were purposely infected with smallpox in the 19th century.

Lizzie’s remarkable life and stories about Maidu lifeways are documented in the book Ooti: A Maidu Legacy.

Wallace’s grandmother Nina Wallace (Nisenan Maidu/Washoe, 1924– 1987), provided stability and love in what the jeweler describes as a difficult childhood environment. In fact, Wallace says her Grandma Nina was “the most important person in my life.”1 Nina is the reason she’s here now and first introduced Wallace to working with her hands by encouraging Wallace to draw, sew, and generally learn how to make things.

Wallace accompanied her jeweler parents to the Santa Fe Indian Market several times as a child, and she would occasionally look through their reference books around the house. And while she created and sold wire necklaces and loom beadwork as a kid (“I remember selling

bracelets for $5. Oh, I thought I was so rich!” she laughs), it wasn’t until she was in her twenties that she really learned her way around a jewelry studio.

Wallace chuckles when she recounts the time she signed up for a metalsmithing class at the Santa Fe Community College, thinking she would learn to weld, only to arrive and discover she would be making jewelry. The four-week course provided a solid foundation for her, however. She made connections and slowly began selling her own pieces. She also repaired jewelry for art and antique dealers in Santa Fe but felt exploited. The dealers didn’t always pay fairly (or pay at all), and she experienced the racism that exists in a market that profits off Native work but is controlled by non-Native

1. All quotes, unless otherwise noted, are from Liz Wallace in discussion with the author, October 5, 2022.

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Adornment ties humanity together.

above Liz Wallace. Photo: Milton Reiss. All images courtesy of the artist. opposite Plique-à-jour Butterfly Pin, 2016, sterling silver, 24-karat gold, garnets, emeralds, yellow sapphires, vitreous enamel. All jewelry photos: The Photography Studio, Santa Fe.

LIZ WALLACE

power brokers. “Some people were cool, and I still keep in touch with a few of them from that time,” Wallace says, “But I just felt like there was a gross sense of ownership over me and over Native people in general going on in that world.”

While jewelry was the reason Wallace was in that scene, she also credits jewelry for helping her to get out of it.

Eventually it provided a way for her to earn a living without depending upon repairing pieces for dealers. “It was the jewelry that saved me. I really started working hard and buying turquoise to use later,” she says. “I remember first buying some gem-grade Kingman that I got for about $100, which is unheard of now. When I worked for the antique dealers, [what] I saw sell over and over again, often before the show was even open, were the beautiful, all-turquoise Zuni butterfly pins. People couldn’t get enough of them. I thought, Okay I’m going to make one of those.”

Wallace’s observation was astute, and making her own version of butterflies with turquoise cabochon wings proved

to be popular and established her name as an artist. Soon after, a pivotal moment shifted her career trajectory when she was accepted into the Santa Fe Indian Market.

“I felt like I could finally stand on my own two feet,” the artist recalls.

Martha Hopkins Struever (1931– 2017), a longtime dealer in Native art, had already been selling Wallace’s work. Struever encouraged her loyal cadre of clients to support the jeweler’s first market. “Marti, bless her heart.

When she found out I got in [to Indian Market],” Wallace recalls, “She told all of her customers to come see me. Saturday morning, I just got swarmed. I have never had a show with sales like that since.”

Wallace’s “featured artist” profile remains on the archived Martha Hopkins Struever gallery website and captures a moment in time. It notes that Wallace’s “work is so good that she’s now a 2009 Southwestern Association for Indian Arts (SWAIA) Fellowship winner,” and that a highlight of Wallace’s work is her “continual experimentation with new forms and with new jewelry manufacturing techniques.”2

WHAT PUSHES WALLACE to keep trying new jewelry-making methods?

“Mostly I just get bored,” Wallace admits. She says that for a while she felt like a machine cranking out the classic silver-and-turquoise butterfly pins, earrings, and bracelets while she was getting established—but it was a start and it honed her skills. “I was looking at jewelry from all over the world, especially the Art Nouveau jewelry in Europe, and Japanese chasing and repoussé,” she says.

“I always try to look at jewelry from all over. Adornment ties humanity together.

How do humans wear stones and shell and metal if it’s available to them where they are? So I was looking at things beyond Native jewelry. I could do something like inlay, but it never really spoke to me.… So many people who do love it are so amazing at it. I just thought, There is no reason for me to do inlay, I’ll do something else.”

As it turns out, focusing on what she loved led her to become a master of a distinct enameling technique, and one

2. “Liz Wallace,” Martha Hopkins Struever, accessed November 3, 2022, web.

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that she’s now known for, called pliqueà-jour. It’s something she first learned when “given a crash course” on it from Massachusetts-based jeweler and art dealer Bob Bauver. Meaning something along the lines of “a braid letting in daylight,” plique-à-jour is one of the more challenging enameling techniques.

Developed centuries ago, then lost and rediscovered in different eras due to the fragility of the work, plique-à-jour was most famously revived in the late 19th century during the start of the Art Nouveau movement, when references to nature and myth worked seamlessly with materials to create a complete work of art. The translucency of finished pliqueà-jour lends itself perfectly to rendering delicate elements from nature like insect wings, leaves, and flowers.

Art Nouveau–era artisans like Louis Comfort Tiffany and René Lalique used plique-à-jour to embellish fine jewelry.

Lalique is widely considered to be the master of Art Nouveau glass and jewelry design. To see his dragonfly pins adorned with brightly colored gemstones that complement the translucent enameled wings, 68 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE

it’s evident they inspire Wallace’s work.

Indeed, she acknowledges that Lalique is one of her favorite jewelers and that Art Nouveau is one of her favorite styles.

“Art Nouveau designs are just very peaceful to me,” Wallace says. “I have really fond memories of my grandma Nina taking me on drives to places like Lake Tahoe, which is Washoe homeland.

Nature has always been very medicinal for me, and Art Nouveau is literally plant and insect imagery. The swooping lines— some call it ‘noodle style’—something about that is very soothing to my eye.

It’s soothing, but also harmonious and rhythmic, like visual, classical music.”

As she studied Art Nouveau jewelry, Wallace says, “I loved the color, and it was so different than what I’d grown up with.

I wanted to indigenize it and make it my own.” And so she did, using plique-à-jour to create extraordinary dragonflies, moths, butterflies, flowers, and even fish.

“Plique-à-jour was an obsession for a long time, about a good ten years,” she says.

It’s easy to see why it could become all-consuming. This vitreous enameling technique is similar to cloisonné, but

with plique-à-jour, there is no permanent backing for the enamel to sit on. This means that the final product appears more translucent, with light coming through, much like stained glass.

To achieve this look, different colors of wet enamel are applied layer by layer, either on top of a material like mica or copper that can be peeled off later, or without a temporary backing material and instead using capillary action fill where surface tension between the enamel and the metal frame keeps the enamel within the cells. In either approach, the enamel must be adequately dried before firing, otherwise it can burst, vitrifying on the kiln walls and piece. Multiple firings might be needed too, depending on the outcome of the first, but firing certain enamels too many times can change the resulting colors. Keep in mind that all of this must be completed before the enameled pieces can be assembled into a final form. This assembly can be tenuous since heat can ruin finished plique-à-jour, so instead of soldering components together, jewelers must often engineer what are called cold connections.

LIZ WALLACE

Once she perfected the techniques, Wallace’s plique-à-jour masterpieces quickly took flight and were scooped up by collectors and museums around the country. Some appeared in the 2021 Heard Museum’s exhibition, Small Wonders.

Curator Diana Pardue wrote: “Wallace’s cicada brooches with outstretched enameled wings are dazzling simply for their inclusion of the colorful enamels.

But, if you look closely at the cicada brooch included here, it is possible to see that the body of the cicada is carefully carved of black mother-of-pearl, which has its own gleaming qualities. Wallace made this brooch in 2005, adding rubies for the eyes and fashioning the legs of silver.”3 The back-and-forth between Wallace’s fluid and organic plique-à-jour and beautifully chunky, abstracted turquoise insects was fun to see in an early solo exhibition, Nature Nurtures: Jewelry by Liz Wallace (2011) at the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian in Santa Fe. A catalogue by the same name accompanied the exhibition. “Thankfully, the Wheelwright Museum—especially the director at the time, Jonathan Batkin— and Robb Lucas, who ran the trading post downstairs, were so incredibly supportive of the plique-à-jour work. The Wheelwright was so, so incredible,” Wallace says. “They’d buy work for the permanent collection and for the shop. Even my big, weird, obscure pieces.”

Museums and collectors don't only support the plique-à-jour pieces, however.

They regularly seek out Wallace's other work too, including her chased silver cuffs with seahorses, sifted enamel-and pearl flower pendants, enameled beetle pins, hammered copper koi bracelets, haiku-emblazoned earrings, undulating serpent bracelets, heavy gauge stamped and chased buckles, raised silver cups, wire-stitched hearts, anticlastic diorama cuffs, an all-silver belly dancing outfit (belly dancing is a hobby of Wallace’s), baskets woven from metal wire, and so much more. In an Indian Country Today photo essay, “Eight Mind-Blowing Artists at the SWAIA 96th Santa Fe Indian Market,” collector Janie Kasarjian had this to say about Wallace’s jewelry: “No matter

what she creates, it is always innovative, beyond beautiful, and completely recognizable as her own work. I have missed out on a couple of her pieces in the past, but I was not going to let it happen this year. I feel so fortunate that luck was with me this time!” 4 WHEN ASKED what has surprised her most about a life spent immersed in jewelry, Wallace pauses for a moment

3. Diana Pardue, “Small Wonders: A Beautiful Tradition of Change,” Ornament Magazine, August 23, 2021, web.

4. Frances Madeson, “Photos: Eight Mind-Blowing Artists at the SWAIA 96th Santa Fe Indian Market,” Indian Country Today, September 13, 2018, web.

above Plique-à-jour Dragonfly Earrings with Stand, 2017, earrings: vitreous enamel, opal, sterling silver, 24-karat gold, garnets, and fresh water pearls; stand: copper, 24-karat gold, jade, enamel on leaves, volcanic rock. opposite Wild Rose Repose, 2022, anticlastic copper, fine silver, black spinels, vitreous enamel, oil paint, varnish.

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It doesn’t matter how good your skills are, you need to have good tools too.

above Silver Butterfly Necklace, 2022, fine silver, sterling, garnet, coral, natural turquoise, knitted silver chain. opposite Sunset Spin, 2019, collar: netted glass seed beads, freshwater pearl; spider: natural turquoise, sterling silver.

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and then says, “How obsessed I can get with tools. I had this Sicilian jeweler tell me one time, ‘Tools make you half a master,’ which means it doesn’t matter how good your skills are, you need to have good tools too.” She continues, “I have this selection of Swiss files that are such a pleasure to work with. They are so high quality. Just the feeling of highquality files eating off the silver—it’s really pleasant somehow, almost gives me a scalp tingle, maybe it’s like ASMR,” she laughs. (ASMR stands for autonomous sensory meridian response and is a relaxing sensation triggered by certain sounds). “I also have a hammer handpiece made by Badeco, and it just made life so much easier when I got it.”

Hearing Wallace describe them, it’s almost like the tools become self-actualized in her skilled hands. “They become this companion. They become like your work partners,” she says. “After a while, it feels like they do have a consciousness.

My favorite hammer is one that was

dressed by blacksmith Frank Turley.

When I put it in my hand, it almost becomes an extension of my arm. It has a name, and my anvil has a name. I have a solid oak watchmaker’s bench from my step-grandfather. Stuff like that is really special. I never realized how much good tools add to your life. It’s something I impress upon younger jewelers,” she says.

Wallace studied chasing and repoussé with Valentin Yotkov. “He has a saying: ‘I’m not rich enough to afford cheap tools.’ Cheap tools will break, you have to buy replacements,” she says. “Anything that touches your work will leave a signature, so you need good-quality things to leave those imprints. Realizing this has taught me a lot, and it has carried over into other areas of my life as well. Quality is more important than quantity, and if it’s work you’re going to be doing a lot of, you need to invest your money in a good tool as it will save you in the long run.”

When she’s not thinking about perfectly fabricated tools or using them

LIZ WALLACE

to create a new piece, Wallace educates the public about the fakes that flood the Native American jewelry market. She’s made it one of her life’s missions. She got started after seeing a Council for Indigenous Arts and Culture presentation at the Heard Museum’s Indian Fair and Market. Founder Tony Eriacho Jr. (Zuni, 1955–2016) would set out displays of stones and jewelry and ask people to guess which were authentic and which were knockoffs. But, as Alicia Inez Guzmán writes in New Mexico Magazine, “Wallace had already intuited that a fakes market existed years before meeting Eriacho.

When walking the streets of downtown Santa Fe, she encountered certain shops advertising Native-made jewelry and suspiciously selling it en masse for impossibly low prices.”

Native American artists who make jewelry by hand cannot compete against these dishonest shops. The market in fake “Native” jewelry is so massive, it has created an international circle of organized crime. “It was Tony who really opened my eyes,” she says in Guzmán’s article. “It’s not a big, rich

Fortune 500 company being ripped off. It’s impoverished and marginalized Native communities who are experiencing the greatest effects. It’s economic colonization.”5 In 2018 Wallace served as a point of contact for the US attorney who prosecuted the largest criminal case involving counterfeits of Native American artwork.6 The case was against Mohammad Manasra and Nael Ali, both of Albuquerque, who imported jewelry made in the Philippines and then fraudulently resold it as Navajo or Zuni work to a variety of customers in the United States. Manasra was sentenced to only two days in prison and a year of supervised release. He was also ordered to forfeit 5,268 pieces of Native American-style jewelry and to pay a $500 money judgment. His codefendant Ali was sentenced to six months in prison and $9,048.78 in restitution. To sell work fraudulently as Native American made is a felony under the 1990 Indian Arts and Craft Act, a truth-in-advertising law.7 While this case was undoubtedly important, it was also the first time someone selling fake Native jewelry

received a prison sentence. Alexandra Mondalek of Vox writes: “I couldn’t help but think about Wallace’s insistence that there should be a public awareness campaign aimed at educating shoppers about the impact of purchasing counterfeit goods. There were no warning signs about purchasing fake jewelry at Indian Market or elsewhere down old Route 66.”8 Clearly there is so much more that could be done, so Wallace soldiers on and enlightens people about the issue whenever she can.

What’s next for this talented artisan, Native art advocate, and lifelong learner?

“I’ve been taking acting classes and I’ve always been interested in film,” Wallace explains. She completed a short film Shiwi-verse as her capstone at Santa Fe Community College. “Now I’m working on part two.”

Whatever happens, it’s clear that both Wallace’s devoted jewelry collectors and new film fans alike will be watching, eagerly waiting to see how the next phase of Wallace’s creative expression plays out.

Find Liz Wallace and her art on Facebook @lizwallacejewelry and on Instagram @lizwallaceofficial.

5. Alicia Inez Guzmán, “How to Buy Authentic Native Jewelry,” New Mexico Magazine, June 18, 2019, web.

6. Alexandra Mondalek, “Fake turquoise jewelry is hurting Native Americans economically,” Vox, October 24, 2018, web.

7. Staff report, “Old Town store owner gets jail for selling fake Indian jewelry,” Albuquerque Journal, August 29, 2018, web.

8. Mondalek, “Fake turquoise jewelry,” web.

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Collections

BROOKLYN MUSEUM

By Andrea L. Ferber, PhD

O

N THE FIRST FLOOR of the Brooklyn Museum, five video shorts play in a loop. One of these is Ixsixán ax t'ukanéiyi (I love you, my baby) by Nicholas Galanin (Tlingit/Unangax̂), in which a voice (presumably the artist’s) praises and affirms a beaming toddler with phrases in Tlingit. “You’re the sweetest,” he says, and “You’re doing such a good job.” The videos were commissioned by the Brooklyn Museum in partnership with MTV in 2021. The commission is one of the most recent examples of the museum’s work to support contemporary Indigenous artists and present inclusive narratives of art history.

The Brooklyn Museum has long set precedents for similar institutions in the United States. A library established in 1823 quickly became part of the Brooklyn Institute, a forum for science and culture that organized exhibitions. By 1855 the institute created a department 72 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE

above, top Delaware artist once known, Bowl, early 19th century, wood, brass, 71/4 × 14 × 14 in., collection of the Brooklyn Museum, Henry L. Batterman Fund and the Frank Sherman Benson Fund, 50.67.161.

All images courtesy of the Brooklyn Museum. above, bottom Brooklyn Museum, view of the completed West Wing from the northwest, showing north and west facades and surrounding fields, 1897, Brooklyn Museum Photograph Collection, S-06, folder: Exterior Views 01, Brooklyn Museum Libraries and Archives.

devoted to American art, a visionary move in a time when settler-colonial intelligentsia and collectors believed “real” culture came from Europe. (The Metropolitan Museum of Art founded its American Art department in 1870.)

Though its focus was Euro-American art for several decades, the Brooklyn Institute benefited from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s disinterest in precontact cultures of the Americas when the latter rejected Peruvian antiquities, which Brooklyn acquired. And the Brooklyn Museum became one of the first museums to collect Native art strategically in 1903 when the autodidactic Stewart Culin became the inaugural curator of ethnology.

On expeditions over a period of eight years, Culin amassed more than 9,000 objects. Influenced by his friend George Dorsey at the Field Museum, he directed his attention to Southwest and Northwest cultures. Anthropologists

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and ethnologists at the time were frantic to acquire as much material culture from Indigenous peoples as possible because they believed the tribes would soon be extinct. As Culin stated: “If our museums are ever to have good collections of Indian things they must waste no time in setting out after them, for none will be left ten years from now. There are … no real Indians among the young.”1 Rather than researching objects in context, Culin set out with an established historical narrative and chose items to illustrate it. Brooklyn curator emeritus Diana Fane described his methods: In each community he looked for things that appeared old and used, or rare and unusual, and purchased them regardless of whether he found them in an Indian’s house, a missionary’s basement, or a curio shop. Often very little was known about these objects, and Culin had to rely on his own judgment in making his selections.2 While Culin’s efforts created the core of one of the most important national collections, his approach created many problems that remain challenges today.

Curator Nancy Rosoff met with me to discuss the collection’s fraught history, how approaches to exhibition and interpretation have changed in recent decades, and her current priorities. Trained as an anthropologist, Rosoff has been working with Indigenous collections since the early 1980s. She joined the Brooklyn Museum just after 9/11. Coincidentally, newly reinstalled galleries of American art opened the week of those horrific terrorist attacks. While there was no media attention due to the national tragedy, the cross-cultural displays were quite innovative at the time. As Rosoff explains, “American Identities: A New Look started the whole shift in how American art is presented in institutions nationwide.”3 In an astute review of the “adventurous” revamping, art historian Elizabeth Hutchinson concluded that, while acknowledging its progressive objectives, the experiment did not go far enough to integrate Indigenous voices.4 Indeed, the project spawned conference panels and scholarship.5 The current installation was completed in 2016 with additions in 2021. Visitors entering the American galleries are welcomed to Lenapehoking, the historic Delaware (Lenape) homeland, in a printed wall text and audibly in two Delaware dialects (Unami and Munsee). Maps and additional texts describe the forced removal of Delaware people and the museum’s recent efforts to engage the citizens and descendants of these nations. Two 19th-century objects offer a preview of the cross-cultural dialogues established by thoughtful curatorial placement: an elegant wooden bowl carved by a Delaware artist once known and a romantic landscape titled The Peaceable Kingdom (ca. 1833–34) by Edward Hicks. The painting depicts 1. Quoted in Diane Fane, “The Language of Things: Stewart Culin as Collector,” in Objects of Myth and Mystery: American Indian Art at the Brooklyn Museum, Diana Fane, Ira Jacknis, and Lisa M. Breen (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1991), 19.

2. Fane, 25.

3. Nancy Rosoff in discussion with the author, May 13, 2022.

4. Elizabeth Hutchinson, “American Identities: A New Look,” caa.reviews (April 11, 2003), web.

5. For example, Anna Mecugni, “A New Look at American Identities: The Case of the Brooklyn Museum of Art,” International Journal of the Humanities 3, no. 11 (July 2006): 23–44.

above, top Preston Singletary (Tlingit), Guardian of the Sea, 2004, blown and sand-carved glass, 18 × 6 × 18 in., collection of Brooklyn Museum, gift of Fairfield-Maxwell, Ltd., by exchange, 2004.2. ©Preston Singletary.

Photo: Russell Johnson. Image courtesy of Preston Singletary Inc. above, bottom Kellypalik Mangitak (Inuk, 1940–2014), Man Carried to the Moon, 1959, stonecut print on paper, 24 × 18 in., collection of the Brooklyn Museum, Dick S. Ramsay Fund, 60.58.3. ©Estate of Kellypalik Mangitak.

Reproduced with the permission of Dorset Fine Arts.

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above, top Installation of hide painting by Cotsiogo (Eastern Shoshone, 1866–1912) and Mount Hood, Oregon (1881–83) by William Keith. Photo: A. Ferber. above, bottom Rainbow House, Gallery of Ethnology, floor 1, 1930, Brooklyn Museum Photograph Collection, S-06, folder: AON: Gallery of Ethnology: Rainbow House, Brooklyn Museum Libraries and Archives. opposite, top Wari artist once known, Tunic, 600–1000 CE, cotton, camelid fiber, 39 × 4115/16 in., collection of the Brooklyn Museum, gift of the Ernest Erickson Foundation, Inc., 86.224.144 (CC-BY). opposite, bottom Installation view, Climate in Crisis: Environmental Change in the Indigenous Americas, Brooklyn Museum (2020–23).

Photo: Jonathan Dorado, Brooklyn Museum.

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a fictional utopia wherein a group of Indigenous men confer and trade with colonists. Explanatory labels describe the expulsion of Delaware people and how images like Hicks’s help perpetuate false constructions of history.

Artworks from more than 20 cultures populate the following gallery, from Aztec to Woodland and Mississippian to settler-colonial art. Most striking is the juxtaposition of a Great Basin elk hide painting next to a European-style representational, academic landscape.

The hide painting by Cotsiogo, Cadzi Cody (Eastern Shoshone, 1866–1912),

highlights pre-reservation life. At the center is a Sun Dance with four pairs of dancers in synchronized movements around two poles cradling a bison head.

In the foreground two high-ranking veterans, indicated by extraordinarily long headdresses, ride horseback between tipis.

Nearly 20 hunters on vibrantly colored horses chase plentiful bison around the perimeter. Several hunters process their spoils. For the artist, the vignettes represent memories of a lifestyle that settler-colonists had made impossible through mass slaughter of bison and imposition of the reservation system.

The painting also acted as a kind of postcard—a prized souvenir for a tourist.

Cotsiogo created this work around 1900 while living on the Wind River reservation in Wyoming.

Alongside Cotsiogo’s work hangs Mount Hood, Oregon (1881–83) by Scottish-American artist William Keith. A snow-covered mountain appears almost like a ghost in the distance. Tree-packed bluffs lead to the Columbia River, which divides Oregon and what became the state of Washington. Nestled into an alcove of towering evergreens, a small group of Indigenous people, possibly Molalla, rest around a temporary shelter.

The label brings attention to precontact knowledge systems and residual colonialism vis-à-vis place names: “Called nífti yángint (meaning Big Mountain) by the Molalla tribe, the mountain-volcano was renamed Mount Hood in 1792 by a British explorer after the naval officer Alexander Arthur Hood, who never saw it.” In their proximity, the two paintings represent a slow but seismic shift in how mainstream museums present culture and in current constructions of history.

These kinds of dialogues continue throughout the galleries. John Singleton Copley’s stately portrait of Mrs. Sylvester (Abigail Pickman) Gardiner (1772) appears to gaze at Alaxchiiaahush / Many War Achievements / Plenty Coups (2014), in reproductions of photographs annotated by Wendy Red Star (Apsáalooke).

Ideally, the placement prompts viewers to consider how various cultures signified social status, as well as how these images emerged in different circumstances. Who

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is painting or photographing whom, and for what purpose? How did these images circulate, and who benefited from the visibility?

Nearby, a Yanktonai warrior’s shirt meticulously embellished with beads, quills, and pigment is displayed among large portraits of individuals whose identity and status are similarly marked by their clothing.

Another marker of institutional change is reflected in professional titles. Rosoff ’s position has changed many times over the past century, from curator of primitive art and New World cultures to curator of the arts of the Americas. Her research focus is on precontact cultures of Mexico and South America, so while she knows the collection of 30,000 objects intimately, she is very excited to hire a curator of Indigenous North American art. After the former curator retired in 2016, the position was frozen for several years.

During her tenure Rosoff has organized several exhibitions including Living Legacies: The Arts of the Americas (2004–08); Tipi: Heritage of the Great Plains (2011, with Susan Kennedy Zeller); Life, Death, and Transformation in the Americas (2013– 19); and most recently Climate in Crisis: Environmental Change in the Indigenous Americas (2020–23), which places historical objects in a contemporary framework.

Collaboration among the museum’s 15 curators, who manage 150,000 artworks divided into twelve departments, has increased under the directorship of Anne Pasternak, who has led the institution since 2015.6 In 2018, Rosoff co-curated Cecilia Vicuña: Disappeared Quipu with Catherine Morris. The following year she curated ancient Mesoamerican works in the exhibition Frida Kahlo: Appearances Can Be Deceiving. She is currently collaborating with the Hopi Cultural Preservation

Office and elders from twelve communities to organize an exhibition on katsina figures from a Hopi women’s perspective.

Rosoff ’s most pressing concern is finalizing repatriations delayed by the pandemic. The Brooklyn Museum has repatriated 134 items since NAGPRA was enacted in 1990. Protests in recent years have convinced the highest levels of administration to prioritize this process.

Increased transparency is also a priority. Soon the public will have easier access to past repatriations, NAGPRA compliance, and object provenance on the museum’s website. More accessible information leads to more engagement, hopefully with Indigenous communities.

6. The Brooklyn Museum’s libraries and special collections hold an additional 350,000 items.

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Valdivia figurines from western Ecuador.

“There was a mastodon bone and a larger replica of a mastodon bone in the case where I put the goddess,” Hill explained.

Hill continued:

CHEROKEE, NORTH CAROLINA

Disruption Museum of the Cherokee Indian

T

HE STORIES OF INDIGENOUS COMMUNITIES have been told by non-Native historians, archaeologists, anthropologists, and other professionals for many years. Their museum narrative has shaped the non-Native perception of Indigenous peoples. Colonial ideology has guided museums in the presentation of Indigenous stories, which often do not align with the reality of Indigenous truth.

However, times are changing, and Native people demand to present history and culture through their own perspectives.

The Cherokee community on the Qualla Boundary in North Carolina is taking back its right to present history and culture in the way they determine it should be depicted. The Museum of the Cherokee Indian (MCI) is undergoing changes to the permanent exhibition.

One of the newest modifications includes an art exhibition that is embedded into the existing historical timeline. The exhibition Disruption (2022) intends to shake up the idea of a linear account of Cherokee culture.

Spanning the Archaic period to the 1920s, non-Cherokee professionals 76 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE

researched and designed the timeline and surrounding exhibition more than 20 years ago. The MCI removed sensitive cultural and funerary objects and photographs from public display in the longstanding permanent timeline exhibition. The removal of sensitive objects left a void in space but created an opportunity to present items and images from the true culture of the Cherokee people.

The museum replaced the removed objects with artwork from 36 enrolled members of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (Eastern Band Cherokee) and the Cherokee Nation. The newly exhibited artwork in Disruption does what the exhibition is titled. It disrupts the stagnant timeline. It disrupts the preconceived ideas that a non-Native person may have. The inclusion of art by living artists returns the ability to tell the Cherokee story to community members. Dakota Brown (Eastern Band Cherokee), MCI director of education, explains that by showcasing art, “We’re telling stories instead of following an archaeological timeline.”

One of the most recognizable artists to participate is multidisciplinary artist Luzene Hill (Eastern Band Cherokee).

Hill explains the process she used to create her piece: “No parameters were given, except that the original plan was to select a case/vitrine where something had been removed.” She specifically wanted to work in the precontact section. She sculpted a goddess figure inspired in part by ancient

I also added the silver cord originating from her loins—then moving throughout the exhibition, not always visible or obvious, but a continuing presence.… The display of silver cords spreading across the wall at the end of the exhibit, with the triangles, silk dipped in beeswax, name plates (plus the little “vulva” beeswax discs that anchor the end of the cords) is meant to tie Cherokee women together and especially to obliterate the colonial linear timeline basis of the old exhibit.

I wrote Cherokee female names on the triangles with silver marker.

An unintentional yet welcoming outcome of the exhibition is the inclusion of work by many female artists. An underlying theme is the strength and importance that women have in Cherokee society. Hill elaborates further on her decision to focus on the topic of female importance: “My response, and I believe the response of so many other artists for this show, was to counter the dearth of female representation in the old exhibit.

I think the other female artists were delighted to finally have a chance to express that as well.”

Lori Reed (Eastern Band Cherokee) is an accomplished woman sculptor who holds several degrees in art. Her sculpture Matriarch, with coil-built and kiln-fired clay, includes elements of commercially tanned buckskin, sinew, wire ear hooks, and dyed porcupine quills. The sculpture presents the head and torso of a Cherokee woman which emphasizes the importance of women in the Cherokee story. ᎨᎳᏗ, Keli Gonzales (Cherokee Nation) often merges pop culture with historical and cultural Cherokee images.

She incorporates the Cherokee syllabary into her work with the hope that it will inspire people to learn to read the syllabary and learn the language. Her hand-built and kiln-fired clay sculpture, ᎦᏚᏩ (Gadugi, 2022), is the abdominal form of a pregnant figure, stretch marks

REVIEWS

Without Cherokee women, the culture would not continue. included. The utilitarian sculpture forms a bowl filled with dried White Eagle corn.

It stands as a reminder that Cherokee life begins with Cherokee women. Without Cherokee women, the culture would not continue.

Dr. Adrienne Keene (Cherokee Nation) is an outspoken advocate against the misrepresentation of Native peoples.

She aims to present counternarratives that showcase true Native cultures and identities.1 Keene designed and created a detailed beadwork which she titled, SE/4 of NW/4 of SW/4 of section 11, township 16 N, Range 19E. She created the work with seed beads, fabric stabilizer, embossed faux leather, brass flat-drawn cable chain, and a brass clasp.

The beadwork is made to be worn around the neck. Closer examination reveals that the piece is a map. The map is of the exact location of her grandmother’s allotment land in Oklahoma. Keene has never been able to step foot on the land, because it was flooded and remains underwater. The map leads the viewer to the underlying story of the importance that Cherokee women have always held within tribal communities and families by linking Keene’s grandmother to the land.

Kindra Swafford’s (Cherokee Nation) use of bold colors and ahistorical media sets her work apart from the historical items often seen in timeline-based exhibitions. Her watercolor painting, ᎣᏪᏅᏒ o-we-nv-sv/Home is a layered image of stickball sticks. Swafford’s painting replaces historical ceremonial photographs that are not appropriate to display. Stickball is typically seen as a male-dominated activity.2 However, Cherokee girls and women have openly participated in stickball for decades.

Swafford’s choice to utilize the stickball image provides another link for Cherokee women to claim their heritage.

Many of the historical objects and images that were previously displayed in the permanent exhibition are 1. “Adrienne Keene: Biography,” Speak Out, web.

2. Historically Cherokee women have played stickball at ceremonial grounds but not used sticks. —Ed.

objects that were stolen from the graves of Cherokee individuals. The Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act (NAGPRA) was created as a step to help combat the display of these items in museums. Staff at the Museum of the Cherokee Indian have taken on the responsibility of treating these objects with respect. By treating the objects with respect, they are honoring the ancestors who put their energy into creating these objects. Many of the funerary objects will be returned to the earth. Disruption allows the museum staff to educate visitors about the issues surrounding these objects.

Disruption begins the momentum necessary to tell the Cherokee story the way the Cherokee community demands it to be told. Next steps include expanding the chronological history of the permanent exhibition. One of the changes that will occur is the expansion of the timeline to include Cherokee culture as it exists today. Objects that have been removed as well as other invaluable objects, images, and documents, will be moved to an off-site collections and archives facility. Ceremonial items and historical images will be made available to Cherokee tribal citizens.

Disruption is organized by the Museum of the Cherokee Indian. It is curated by Dakota Brown and Evan Mathis, director of collections and exhibition. Exhibiting artists include Shennelle Feather (Eastern Band Cherokee/Diné/ Lakota), John Henry Gloyne (Eastern Band Cherokee/Osage/Pawnee), Keli Gonzales (Cherokee Nation), Adrienne Keene (Cherokee Nation), Tyra Maney (Eastern Band Cherokee/Diné), Kindra Swafford (Cherokee Nation), Kevin Tafoya (Eastern Band Cherokee/Santa Clara Pueblo), Skye Tafoya (Eastern Band Cherokee/Santa Clara Pueblo); as well as Joshua Adams, Atsei Cooper, Louise Goings, Luzene Hill, Darius Lambert, Michelle Long, Tara McCoy, Toby McCoy, Lou Montelongo, Dylan Morgan, Gina Myers, Lori Reed, Isabella Saunooke, Chi Myriah Shipman, Jakeli Swimmer, Mikhail Swimmer, Emma Taylor, Nola Teesatuskie, Billy Joe Welch, Tovah Welch, Levi West, Jarrett Wildcatt, and Jennifer Wilson (all Eastern Band Cherokee).

Disruption will remain on view until September 11, 2023.

—Michole Eldred (Catawba/ Eastern Cherokee descent)

above Kindra Swafford (Cherokee Nation), ᎣᏪᏅᏒ o-we-nv-sv/Home, 2022, watercolor on paper. opposite Luzene Hill (Eastern Band Cherokee), detail of Matrilineage, 2022, sculptural installation, cordage, silk taffeta, beeswax. Image courtesy of the Museum of the Cherokee Indian.

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MADISON

Apsáalooke: Children of the Large-Beaked Bird Madison Museum of Contemporary Art

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OMPELLING FIGURES and faces look out through broad windows of the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art (MMoCA) State Street Gallery. The institution’s showcase space fronts the mile-long pedestrian mall connecting the Wisconsin State Capitol in the east to the University of Wisconsin campus in the west. Passers-by invariably stop and stare back at the historic faces staring out at them.

The oversize images and life-size cutouts are the work of multimedia artist Wendy Red Star (Apsáalooke), who worked with late 19th–century photos taken of the Apsáalooke people.

The tribe, literally “Children of the Large-Beaked Bird,” acquired the name Crow through misunderstandings with the white government. Many of the photos resulted from an 1880 invitation to nine Crow chiefs and four of their wives to travel from their home in Montana to Washington, DC, for land treaty negotiations with the federal government.

Red Star, an avid researcher, who was raised on the Crow Reservation, has created a gallery of individuals to tell the story 78 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE

of her people, including Iron Bull’s wife, Sits in the Middle of the Land’s wife, Chief Sees With His Ears, and a half dozen more.

All the faces peer at the viewer with expressions of curiosity and concern, drawing observers more effectively into their world and creating an almost personal connection that spans both cultures and centuries.

One of the best aspects of the exhibition, originally organized by the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, is its emphasis on youth and education. The educational component, in fact, stretches the exhibition’s reach, and MMoCA’s museum store, adjacent to the gallery, has been cleared and converted into an art workshop through which children can interact with Red Star’s art and its concepts.

Other significant components to Apsáalooke include the half dozen annotated portraits of various Crow chiefs involved in the 1880 mission. Handwritten commentary by the artist on portraits like that of Déaxitchish (Pretty Eagle) explains clearly how aspects of his clothing related to his history and achievements. Ermine pelts, for example, indicated that Déaxitchish captured a gun during battle. The annotated comments also tell his story in the artist’s words: “My body sold to a collector for $500 and kept for 72 years at the American Museum of Natural History. My people brought my remains back to Crow Country on June 4, 1994. My remains are now at Pretty Eagle Point, Bighorn Canyon.”

The educational aspect does more to connect the show’s component parts than first might be expected, and there is significant crossover among the overlapping aspects. For example, Red Star has taken four of her daughter’s fanciful drawings of animals and turned them into stuffed toys, all of which are displayed in Plexiglas cases. The historic portraits are prominently placed in the children’s workshop, along with the opportunity for young viewers to create their own annotated portraits.

The exhibition also includes an educational guide that prompts younger viewers to consider various issues related to the subject matter, which includes learning tolerance of other people and an appreciation for their cultures. In the case of Déaxitchish, the guide discusses what it takes to become a Crow chief and prompts younger viewers to identify aspects of his wardrobe that illustrate these characteristics. It then suggests transferring that same exercise to the viewers’ personal family photos and identifying what aspects of their wardrobes tell the most about their personalities and professions. The guide even suggests annotating those photos in red just like Red Star did on the photos of her ancestors. The lesson may seem obvious, but it likely goes a long way to helping those younger viewers see the connection between people and cultures.

Showcasing such a visually effective exhibition in its premier space also says a lot about MMoCA’s commitment to diversity. Perhaps that has something to do with Madison’s educational culture as a university town, or the fact that its downtown and university campus occupy the ancestral lands of the local Ho-Chunk people. In any event, Red Star’s exhibition brings issues and lives to light in arresting and impressive ways.

Apsáalooke: Children of the Large-Beaked Bird will be on display through February 26, 2023.

—Michael Muckian

REVIEWS

MILWAUKEE

Strange Lands MOWA | DTN

All three artists engage in topics of conflicts within the landscape

above Chris T. Cornelius (Oneida Nation), detail of Domicile_02: Maple Syrup Moon, 2018, mixed media on paper.

Image courtesy of the Museum of Wisconsin Art. opposite Wendy Red Star (Apsáalooke), Peelatchiwaaxpáash / Medicine Crow (Raven), 2014, inkjet print and ink on archival paper, 25 × 17 in.

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HE CHAOS OF NATURE— and for that matter, of the human heart—has long been something to which mankind has sought to bring order and meaning.

Sometimes the effort works, while other times the result leads to a conceptual and visual synthesis far greater than the mere execution of its intentions.

That same ethos applies to Strange Lands, an exhibition mounted from October 7, 2022, through January 8, 2023, by the Museum of Wisconsin Art at MOWA | DTN. The museum’s satellite gallery is located in Saint Kate—The Arts Hotel in downtown Milwaukee.

The exhibition of 40-some items features the work of Indigenous artists Tom Antell (White Earth Ojibwe), Chris T. Cornelius (Oneida Nation), and Sky Hopinka (Ho-Chunk/Pechanga).

Hopinka, arguably the best-known of the three artists, last year received a 2022 MacArthur Foundation Fellowship, better known as a “Genius Grant.”

The orderliness of the exhibition, curated by artist, educator, and MOWA board member Rafael Francisco Salas, arrives in a uniform grid-like pattern

of its imagery displayed on the gallery’s stark white walls. The emotional and visual chaos, in turn, comes within the content of its imagery, which examines the American landscape as seen through an astute and unforgiving Indigenous lens.

“All three artists engage in topics of conflicts within the landscape,” Salas told me. “As Native Americans, they have viewpoints that are complementary in the imagined worlds they create and the cultural traditions they share, but they also serve as foils for each other in their various interpretations.”

Tom Antell’s imagery opens the exhibition and marks the first time his work has been publicly exhibited anywhere. Its cartoonish, surrealistic nature exhibits a playfulness that is not without its dark side. Landscape and seascape dominate the visual context of his works, with a seeming desperation in the antics of his fantastical characters. “There’s something happening here,” as the old Buffalo Springfield song goes, “but what it is ain’t exactly clear.” But it is fascinating in both its sweep and its detail.

Artist Chris T. Cornelius, founder of studio:indigenous, is an architect by training and trade. His role as chair of the University of New Mexico’s department of architecture bleeds heavily into his art, giving a linear style and substance to his series Oneida Moon Domiciles.

NO. 37, WINTER 2023 | 79

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The eight images duplicate each other in basic concept and construction, yet represent eight different months, or moons, in the Oneida calendar. From the Harvest Moon (#1) to the Hunting Moon (#5) to the Green Corn Moon (#8)—each features four fanciful structures on stilts representing a draftsman’s precision and an artist’s creative vision abstractly displaying the changes of the seasons, with each stark canvas filled with seasonal details.

But it’s the work of Sky Hopinka, assistant professor of film and electronic arts at New York’s Bard College, that is the exhibition’s crown jewel. Hopinka’s film Fainting Spells (2018) is an expressionistic film running not quite eleven minutes concurrently on three screens in the back of the gallery that immediately captures viewers’ attention.

The film tells the story of the imagined myth behind xąwįska, also known as the Indian pipe plant or ghost plant, which the Ho-Chunk used to revive tribal members who had fainted. The loosely woven narrative uses recollections of youth, learning, and lore to tell its tale, set against a smoking, charred landscape scorched by wildfires and vivid skyscapes perhaps meant to replicate a journey through the spirit world.

The first minute of the video appears to be broadcast on a television but then switches to an abstract, almost hallucinatory full-screen environment.

The landscape moves vertically within the frame while the narrative rolls slowly across the screen in cursive script. The effect of the visually stimulating film is both compelling and profound.

80 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE

Hopinka’s film is accompanied by his 2020 artist’s book Perfidia, which translates from Spanish to “perfidy,” an act of treachery or betrayal. The artist’s atmospheric poetry subtly communicates the betrayal theme and, in combination with his film, voices his continued lonely search for freedom and fulfillment throughout what indeed have become strange lands.

—Michael Muckian

NORTHFIELD, MINNESOTA

Julie Buffalohead Perlman Teaching Museum

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SOLO EXHIBITION featuring mixed-media works by Julie Buffalohead (Ponca Tribe of Oklahoma) at the Perlman Teaching Museum at Carleton College in Minnesota showcased the artist’s explicit critical voice revealed through symbolism, nuanced character expression, and sly humor. Opening on September 29, 2022, and closing on November 16, 2022, the exhibition brought together works made between 2008 and 2022.

Using a mix of delicate, often brightly colored paper, including several works made with the wildcrafted, handmade Lokta paper indigenous to Nepal, the show featured prints, and mixed-media works with materials that included acrylic, ink, graphite, and collage.

The exhibition showcased Buffalohead’s versatility as an artist. Her work with paint is subtle and rich, using layers and a sensitive understanding of color to

bring her worlds into three dimensions.

She also demonstrates exploration with line work in her drawings and prints.

In some cases, this results in ghostly creatures, like the effervescent coyote in Trickster Showdown (2015). A similarly phantasmic animal appears in Exile (2019), where a white shadow hides behind the main animal figure.

Mother Superior (2010) ranks among the most fearless pieces shown in the exhibition. Like many of the works, Buffalohead constructs a complex scene.

On one side of the dark green Lokta paper sits a girl in a white swimsuit surrounded by a group of babies. Both the girl and the babies wear white mouse ears. Two of the children play with a fetus—still inside its amniotic sac—that has been ripped out of an animal-masked woman at the other side of the room, kneeling in front of a crib. The woman’s gaping wound at her womb drips with blood, and the umbilical cord still dangles between the fetus and woman. Also in this story, a raccoon feeds a bottle to a baby doll, a bird of prey holds a stuffed animal under its foot, and several other toys are strewn about in the room.

The gruesome scene depicts motherhood as a practice of brutality. It reminds the viewer—or perhaps informs viewers who didn’t know it already—of the trauma involved in giving birth. There’s also an empowerment message underlying the piece. The masked woman holds a stance of power, despite being on her knees. The character enacts her power to choose not to bring a child to term, despite seemingly already having children. The raccoon character symbolically recognizes that more than one kind of motherhood exists—including adoption. While Buffalohead created the work before the 2022 Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization Supreme Court Decision, it offers a fierce pro-abortion sentiment that strongly calls for people with wombs to have autonomy over their bodies.

The most recent piece in the exhibition and the only work unframed, Stolen Land (2022), strikes at current discourses around the Land Back movement. In the mixed-media work on watercolor paper, canine and feline animals face off in a depiction of the theft of Native lands conducted by the United States.

The cat—perhaps a bobcat—dons a pirate eye patch and holds a turtle in

REVIEWS

its mouth, which in turn holds a map of North America. What appears to be a wolf reclines on a blanket with Native patterns, holding a sign: “Stolen Land.”

Between the two animals, a crow looks to the bobcat and holds another smaller sign: “Free Snakes for Fine Lands in the West.” There are dozens of snakes slithering throughout the scene.

Buffalohead’s use of character, emotion, and expression paint layered, intriguing stories. Is the bobcat bowing its head as if chagrined, or is it getting ready to pounce? Is the wolf as indifferent as it appears, or is it ready to jump to its own defense? Buffalohead alludes to 21st-century “reconciliation”

by American institutions. Attempts to acknowledge atrocities of the past aren’t coupled with the return of land or of resources. The artist’s work suggests a mistrust of half-hearted apologies. It’s also personal. Buffalohead’s own ancestors were forcibly removed from Nebraska to Oklahoma at gunpoint.

Buffalohead populates her work with a cast of humans, anthropomorphic animals, and toys that figure in a narrative approach. Often her characters wear

costumes like tutus, bonnets, stiletto high heels, and masks as a way of exploring identity and how the tools of a trickster archetype come into play in navigating life’s challenges.

In The Standoff (2012), a human woman figure sits around a table with three live animals and a stuffed teddy bear. All of the characters wear masks.

On the white tablecloth among them, tea is served along with a bowl of berries.

One can read these different characters as all parts of one identity, negotiating the experience of the artist’s biracial heritage. The piece grapples with lost cultural knowledge as it butts up against other aspects of identity.

Whether she’s tackling issues of white supremacy, colonization, and appropriation or exploring themes of motherhood, feminism, and relationships, Buffalohead is skilled at bringing a raw vulnerability to her work even as she lends her voice to broader discourses around American culture. The resonance at micro and macro levels comes to fruition through metaphor and her particular narrative style. —Sheila Regan

Buffalohead’s use of character, emotion, and expression paint layered, intriguing stories.

above Julie Buffalohead (Ponca), Exile, 2019, ink, graphite, collage on Lokta paper mounted on paper, 301/4 × 451/4 in., private collection. opposite Sky Hopinka (HoChunk/Pechanga), still from Fainting Spells (2018), HD video, stereo, color, 10:45 minutes.

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SANTA FE

Self-Determined: A Contemporary Survey of Native and Indigenous Artists Center for Contemporary Arts

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N VIEW from August 18 through November 27, 2022, Self-Determined: A Contemporary Survey of Native and Indigenous Artists presented a web of intersecting pathways to visitors seeking to learn more about Indigenous self-representation. Co-curated by Danyelle Means (Oglala Lakota), Center for Contemporary Arts (CCA) executive director, and Kiersten Fellrath, CCA programs coordinator, the exhibition features works by artists who are Indigenous to Turtle Island, with project support from the Institute of American Indian Arts. Self-Determined layers a mosaic of stories through visual and oral narratives to convey both the diversity and sovereignty of the featured Indigenous artists and their related cultures.

The first stop is two acrylicon-canvas paintings by Jordan Craig (Northern Cheyenne). The colors and compositions of Craig’s hard-edge abstractions offer intense vibration. Her Favorite Color is Pink (2022) resounds as a play with depth of field, with the tints of pink rising to the foreground and the saturated navy blue receding to the background. Sharp Tongue II (2022), as a black-and-white monochrome, hinges on contrast and shadow with two connecting columns of black triangles creating a powerful tension. Craig creates paintings with an impact that teaches viewers the potential of this medium, all with a decided nod to abstraction of the 1960s and ’70s.

Around the corner, SHATTER/// (2022), is an installation by Demian DinéYazhi’ (Diné) with Kevin Holden.

Shelves of mass-made ceramics shown under red lighting demonstrate the perpetuation of stereotypes of Native peoples. The artists destroyed this 82 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE

installation during a performance on Indigenous Peoples’ Day (October 10, 2022). The tension in this work arises from its impending impermanence.

Adjacent to SHATTER///, viewers encounter works by Dyani White Hawk (Sicangu Lakota), RYAN! Feddersen, and Carly Feddersen (both Okanogan/Arrow Lakes). White Hawk’s LISTEN (2020), a video installation produced in collaboration with Razelle Benally (Oglala Lakota/Diné), features Native women sharing knowledge in their Indigenous languages. The series centers the sovereignty of language through the leadership of Native women as culture bearers.

As a juxtaposition of storytelling, RYAN! Feddersen’s Coyote and the Monsters Yet to Slay I (2022), a relief print on paper, gives viewers a visual interpretation of the narrative of Coyote clearing the land of monsters to protect the twoleggeds. As a tandem piece, Coyote and The Monster That Ate Everyone (2022), a linen basketry work by Carly Feddersen, RYAN!’s sister, tells a related story. Akin to a zoetrope (a rounded pre-film device), the basket depicts Coyote visiting the lands where a monster had eaten all of the other beings. Coyote successfully rescues many beings from inside the

monster through slaying the heart of the beast. Together, the works portray multiple angles of two Trickster tales, showing dual perspectives through the imagery of these characters, and an effect of traveling emerges.

From here, an installation of Erica Lord’s (Athabascan/Iñupiaq) beaded burden belts holds presence. Two brightly-colored belts on shelves flank a mannequin wearing one of these works in pastel beads as a shoulder strap in an ensemble of cold climate wear. The mannequin reads as female, and her position at center implies a woman’s care for her family. The source material for Lord’s belts comes from RNA/DNA microarray testing results that the artist translates from digital to analog grids. Each belt brings together an array of colors that exudes beauty while communicating the spread of disease. Her methodology, rooted in Athabascan burden straps as transport devices, bridges the burdens that Indigenous peoples carried in the past with what these communities carry into the future. While calling attention to the disproportionate effects of disease on Indigenous populations, she names the diseases shown, but does not disclose the stages of illness.

above Hoka Skenandore (Oneida/Oglala Lakota/Luiseño/Chicano), detail of O'ga Pogeh (White Shell Water Place, Tewa Land), 2022, aerosol mural. Photo: FAAM. opposite Carly Feddersen (Okanogan/Arrow Lakes), Coyote and the Monster That Ate Everyone, 2022, waxed linen, 8 × 6 in. Photo: FAAM.

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The next stop includes two lensbased installations. Jeremy Dennis’ (Shinnecock) RISE photographs address mythologies through narratives of Indigenous peoples’ rising to power, where he replaces zombie characters with Native people. Dennis conveys humor, while visualizing “terror,” to address the stereotypes woven into outsider narratives of Native cultures. In these photographs, the narratives remain unable to be fully parsed through contemplation. This allows for the complexity of Native storytelling to hold presence.

Anna Hoover’s (Unangax̂) video, Salmon Reflection (2021), focuses on the centrality of salmon to Indigenous cultures in the Pacific Northwest. She provides a variety of views of the salmon in situ as well as their role as both cultural sustenance and the way forward for future generations. Hoover documents these lifeways in relationships between Indigenous communities and their preparation of the salmon to support the longevity of their families.

A painting by the late Jeff Kahm (Plains Cree, 1968–2021), Transformation No. 1 (2018), another hard-edge abstraction in acrylic on canvas, creates a dialogue with the color grids of Lord’s burden belts and the vibrations of Craig’s paintings. The presence of Kahm’s painting reflects his role as a teacher who mentored numerous Native artists during his time as a professor at the Institute of American Indian Arts. There is a sculptural quality to his asymmetrical canvas with dark blue and lime green triangles at either edge with black stripes at the center, and an apparent influence on him was American artist Kenneth Noland (1924–2010). However, Kahm’s take on this technique allows viewers to feel the rough and raised texture of his paintings simply through looking.

An open room forms a conversation between the work of Ursala Hudson (Tlingit), Ian Kuali'i (Native Hawaiian/ Mescalero Apache descent), Chaz John (Winnebago/Choctaw), and Hoka Skenandore (Oneida/Oglala Lakota/Luiseño/ Chicano). Hudson’s wearable ensembles carry ancestral Tlingit patterns into contemporary contexts. Her installation

features two mannequins with feminine outfits that create harmony and elegance through triangular forms, fringe, and curvilinear patterns—a palette of references to Tlingit lifeways and understandings.

Skenandore’s site-specific mural, O'ga Pogeh (White Shell Water Place, Tewa Land) (2022), honors the Native communities in and near Santa Fe through a purple and yellow letter-writing of this Tewa name. It grounds the back of the exhibition, and this work creates a vernacular affinity with John’s installation—a painting and mixed-media floor sculpture, “SPIN YA PINS” (Sundance through Covid 2022) (2022). John’s painting recalls tattoo imagery and the practicalities of body piercing in relation to Native ceremony, while the sculpture evokes blood in the land. His adjacent framed work, Day 3 (2022), uses trailer material as a substrate to portray a Native woman, and the image alludes to her adjusting her breast piercings on “Day 3.”

Kuali'i’s contributions include cut paper portraits, a wall installation, and an earthwork. The four portraits, with linear forms in reddish orange, honor Native Hawaiian leaders through this medium that requires precision, with triangular abstractions surrounding each face. The large wall work carries this patterning into a portrait of intervention—that of former US President William McKinley and his involvement in the annexation of Hawai'i. Kuali'i’s outdoor installation repeats the triangular forms in red mulch as an offering to O'ga Pogeh.

Self-Determined rises from the directness of the artists’ representations of themselves. Its strength grows through the company of these artworks and the multitude of Indigenous voices.

It challenges expectations and provides new pathways for generations to come through centering Native and Indigenous knowledge systems—the basis of this gathering of artistic creations.

—Michelle J. Lanteri, PhD NO. 37, WINTER 2023 | 83

BOOK REVIEW

A New Deal for Navajo Weaving: Reform and Revival of Diné Textiles Jennifer McLerran University of Arizona Press, 2022

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EOPLE ARE NATURALLY fascinated by the creative process, the artistic spark that inspires creators, the tools they use, and the procedures they use to realize their ambitions. The ideas, techniques, and media of art are regularly scrutinized by scholars, creators, collectors, and aficionados across genres. This is doubly so with American Indian arts where an artist’s individual, familial, tribal, and professional experiences provide more layers to the creative journey.

In A New Deal for Navajo Weaving: Reform and Revival of Diné Textiles, art historian Jennifer McLerran overlooks those experiences. Instead she explores other processes that enable the artist to succeed: the financial and practical access to materials and training, finding a distributor and advertising network, and the rising and falling tides of purchasers’ interests. These challenges—while not as romantic and intimate as the personal story of an artist’s journey—are as relevant to 20th-century Navajo artists as they were to Leonardo da Vinci, who had to secure a commission for the Mona 84 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE

Lisa based on references and sustain himself as he secured his own materials to ensure his work got as much positive exposure as possible.

This underexplored side of art is what makes McLerran’s new book so interesting. A New Deal for Navajo Weaving ostensibly covers one of the most renowned Native art formats, Navajo textiles, which have been broadly known to mainstream America for more than a century and a half.

However, McLerran’s book is unique in its approach. Rather than emphasizing detailed biographies of weavers, and their intricate techniques, or symbolic meaning, McLerran examines larger influences beyond the workers at the loom that began upon the commodification of Navajo textiles in the first half of the 20th century.

McLerran’s introduction includes a tour of the American Indian arts and crafts market at the time. Many wellmeaning progressive leaders, including many active in the suffragist and labor movements, raised funds for tribal causes. One of their most successful fundraising methods was touring Native art with resulting sales. Particularly for the Navajo, McLerran links the pop-academia and sales of these tours with the standardization and commodification of certain textile formats in the mainstream.

The textile trade usually still went through the middlemen of the trading posts. Operators, usually white, had an encouraging hand in influencing the style, material, and color of works sold outside the Four Corners region. As the trade became an industry, trading posts increasingly supplied dyes and even high-demand patterns that replaced the hand-prepared vegetal and earth dyes or individually developed artist styles.

Even the US federal government was a factor in the commodification of Navajo textiles. In the challenges of the Dust Bowl, the Bureau of Indian Affairs

(BIA) collaborated with trading post operators to encourage shepherds to favor breeds of sheep that were more resistant to drought (McLerran addresses but does not heavily focus on the traumatic livestock reduction actions of the BIA during this same period). Simultaneously, schools like Shiprock Indian Boarding School not only educated young weavers but also sponsored art fairs to promote and fund the programs. McLerran also charts the emergence of the regulatory measures of the Indian Arts and Crafts Board, which helped combat fraud and forgery in the textile market.

McLerran shows the ultimate act of respect for an art historian and lets the creators speak for themselves.

This panoply of influences is discussed with a measured and neutral tone. As McLerran handles each outside pressure that affected Navajo weavers, she gives each actor and motivation due attention, while it is clear that many actors inadvertently had adverse impacts on the weavers’ creative development. She examines each faction, be it the environmental concerns of the BIA’s sheep selection, the marketing tactics of progressive charities, trading post operators running their businesses, or even East Coast collectors, who were in love with the artists of the Southwest.

McLerran does not villainize players in her story. She only lays out a series of cause-and-effect motivations and impacts across a country, leaving the readers to draw their own conclusions. From public and private to creator, distributor, and consumer, all of the characters and their decisions are understandably human.

McLerran’s attitude towards her historical subjects is reflected in the way she treats the still-living textile artists and elders whom she interviewed. As a part of her research for museum exhibitions and for the book, McLerran engaged in a

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loan program with the National Endowment for the Arts and Ohio University. Dozens of textiles returned home to Navajo country and were reconnected with the original weavers and their descendants.

For those still living, McLerran shows the ultimate act of respect for an art historian and lets the creators speak for themselves. In addition to this intimate look at the process of creation, this respect and attention to artists’ details provide the book’s readers with a delightful color insert of period textiles. The contrast between these works and current weaving styles visually proves McLerran’s point about the changes taking place in early 20th-century textiles.

McLerran’s study is focused: one tribal nation, one medium of art, across only a few decades. However, the story she has to tell is quite novel. In part it is because of her approach. Scrutinizing the well-meaning developments of “how the sausage was made” in an art industry is not explored nearly as often as the artistic process. Furthermore, McLerran’s accessible and calm explanations offer the clear comprehension and flow of a story, rather than a textbook.

Lovers of textile art in general will be interested in the book, but a special consideration should be given to anyone with interests laying on the business side of the art market. For an introduction to advertising, regulation, and sales, McLerran’s A New Deal for Navajo Weaving is as engaging as it is edifying.

—James G. Bland

Kelly Church Ottawa and Pottawatomi – Gun Lake Band

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

Breathe in Beauty Day and Night #2

Heard Fair March 4 & 5, 2023 | Phoenix, AZ NO. 37, WINTER 2023 | 85

ART+LIT

Inuk Writer, Educator & Poet

NORMA DUNNING

By Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD collection of poetry, Akia: The Other Side. In 2022 Douglas & McIntyre released her latest book Kinauvit?: What’s Your Name?

The Eskimo Disc System and a Daughter’s Search for her Grandmother about the Canadian Eskimo identification system.

Dunning is a mother of three sons and a grandmother of five.

MRS: Norma, would you speak about beginning your post-secondary education at age 50? What prompted this trajectory and how did it inform your literary work?

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ORN IN QUEBEC, Norma Dunning (Inuk) currently lives in Edmonton, Alberta. Dunning’s mother was originally from Tikiraqjuaq (Whale Cove), Nunavut, and her father was a member of Canada’s Armed Forces. In 2009, at the age of 50, Dunning enrolled at the University of Alberta to study Native studies, education studies, and creative writing.

There she earned a bachelor’s degree in Native studies in 2012 and a master’s degree in 2014.

Upon completing her doctoral degree in 2019, Dunning taught a semester at NorQuest College and wrote their curriculum for the Indigenous studies diploma. She also taught at the University of Alberta. Currently, she is the writer in residence for Edmonton Public Libraries and an evaluator and writer for a First Nations and Métis cancer screening project.

Dunning’s short story collection Annie Muktuk and Other Stories (2017) received the Danuta Gleed Literary Award among others. Her book Eskimo Pie: A Poetics of Inuit Identity (2020) blends autobiography and poetry. Her latest collection of short stories, Tainna: The Unseen Ones, Short Stories (2021), was awarded the Governor General’s award for English-language fiction. In September 2022, BookLand Press released her second 86 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE

ND: I started university when I was three months shy of turning 51. In nine years, I achieved a BA, MA, and PhD. What university allowed me was to read about the early explorers, anthropologists, and non-Inuit administrators who came into the North and brought colonization with them. I draw on all the many readings/academic writings that I produced during that nine-year time frame when I am writing fiction. The book Kinauvit? is an extension of all the many hours of research that went into my MA thesis. It was not easy moving an academic work into a personal story. I credit editor Peter Midgley for how he brought my story into a book that speaks to a policy that still remains silenced in Canada.

My second collection of poetry, Akia: The Other Side, is a talk back to all of those venerated early explorers who wrote such disgusting things about Inuit Canadians. University allowed me the time and space to be able to firstly learn about many things from long ago and to be able to write back and write about them in the present day.

MRS: What are the differences between writing poetry, memoir, and nonfiction? You pass through these disciplines seamlessly.

ND: With fiction writing I create and am in charge of the worlds—present-day or spiritual worlds—therefore the parameters or the degree to which the characters can behave and move around in the eras of long ago or in present-day are of my own desire. I found writing non-fiction/memoir harder, because it’s writing as a representative of all my ancestors, past, present, and future. It’s about not wanting to hurt or misrepresent those who have supported me in today’s world or in the spiritual world.

When Indigenous people research, they are researching topics/ events that are very close to our hearts, and it’s about honoring those who loved us in the past and those who love us in the present. It’s a bit of a tightrope walk when writing nonfiction.

MRS: To this end, what are the advantages (or disadvantages) of shifting between disciplines? I find that it helps a writer

ART+LIT

become more versatile, more balanced.

Others may say a writer becomes less focused.

ND: We have to be able to write in more than one form. It’s important to be able to stretch our abilities and to be able to allow ourselves the freedom to move about in different styles. I don’t think any writer wants to be locked into a specific writing form or genre. It’s letting yourself loose into different styles and, in truth, just having fun with it.

MRS: How has Inuit writing changed in your lifetime? What trends have you noticed and experienced?

ND: What I would like students of literature to do is to read outside their comfort zone. We still stick to a curriculum that is very British-based, although we have many excellent writers of many ethnicities who are publishing in Canada today. I feel that one of the most critical skills a writer has to carry is an intense skill of observation. Pay attention to the world around you. Don’t just walk by something without really looking at it. Watch how people behave in malls or at an event. Pay attention to the small movements of the everyday human body. Think about them, describe them, paint a picture with your words.

ND: What I have enjoyed is that there is less and less rewriting of legends or autobiographies. Inuit were locked into that kind of writing for so very long—that was what was published and that was what mainstream grabbed onto. It’s that whole image of Inuit being people standing in front of a seal breathing hole with a spear in their right hand. We are not people of long ago, and I think that the mainstream is beginning to understand that more.

MRS: Where is Inuit writing heading?

What stories should be told; what stories are overlooked?

ND: I think Inuit writing is heading more into present-day experience. All of our stories as Inuit peoples should be told. The federal government of Canada never took responsibility for Inuit education until 1955, and the attrition rate of high school students in Nunavut hovers around 60 percent. I am saying all this, because the writing down of anything for Inuit is relatively new. No one has ever written a book about Inuit Canadian history, and Inuit culture is an oral/ aural culture. I spend a great deal of my writing pointing out the disparities that Inuit Canadians live with still. We live in a country that ignores food scarcity and poverty in the north and in the south of Canada. I think that if I was the PM of Canada, I would be ashamed to know that Inuit children go hungry.

MRS: As a professor, what lessons are critical to instill in literature students?

to leave something for them to fall back on. My small legacy to them is leaving them a history of who their ancestors are and how to be in the world as an Inuit person. It became important to me to have something in print for them.

MRS: What is the most difficult aspect of your writing practice? Is there something that you chronically struggle with?

ND: Time. Time is always the most difficult part of it all. I get up early, and some days I can put in a couple of hours of writing before my workday begins. I do try to set aside Sundays, but that all blows apart by midweek. I will publicly say that writing is a discipline and that as writers we should be setting aside some time— even ten minutes a day where we write something. Then I follow it up by saying, “I never do that,” because I don’t. When I am writing—really writing—everything else is put on hold. I mean everything.

Sleeping, eating properly, making sure I walk or swim. When I’m really writing the writing takes over, the story takes over, and the routine of a day is tossed.

MRS: Can you talk about genesis of Kinauvit?: What’s Your Name? The Eskimo Disc System and a Daughter’s Search for her Grandmother that was just published?

above Cover of Kinauvit?: What’s Your Name?

The Eskimo Disc System and a Daughter’s Search for her Grandmother (Douglas & McIntyre, 2022). opposite Norma Dunning. Image courtesy of the artist.

MRS: What is the influence of your sons and grandchildren on your work?

Do they appear in characters? Do they surface somewhere behind your words?

ND: My sons and grandchildren have yet to appear in any of my work. For me, it became important to publish as the grandchildren were coming to me. I was so greedy for each of them. I cannot describe how much better the grandkids are in comparison to their originals. In all of my writing, I wanted

ND: Now I think that the readers should buy the book to discover the genesis of it all! What I will say is that I was asked a question by a Nunavut government employee that I could not answer. I went in search of that answer and in that search a MA thesis was created and later recreated into Kinauvit?

MRS: What is next after the release of Kinauvit??

ND: I’ve been working on two novels.

They are very different from one another.

One is based on my parents’ lives and deaths, and one is about an Inuk woman who comes south in search of being able to restart her life. How long will it take me to get these done? Well, that all goes back to time and the Sunday theory of writing all day.

NO. 37, WINTER 2023 | 87

ART+LIT

CHAPTER ONE

ILAGIIT (FAMILY) “MOM, WHAT ARE WE?” I remember the Saturday afternoon when I walked into the kitchen of our military base duplex. It was the kind of Saturday that only the prairies can give. Not one bit of a breeze anywhere. The heat penetrating through my eight-year-old body making me feel like I was a human magnifying glass. I was so loaded with the swelter of summer that I could have burned footprints into the well-worn path between the playground and my house.

The aroma of cooking oil was singing against the kitchen walls while the deep fryer bubbled a happy tune on the counter. Deep fryers can trigger the hunger inside of all of us. Mom had her back to me and was peeling potatoes. She was making home fries. A Saturday supper favourite.

I asked my question a second time and my mom spun around with a paring knife in one hand and a potato balanced in the palm of her other hand. She bent toward me and asked, “Who wants to know?”

I felt like I had said a bad word. I had said the wrong thing. I had done something that I would have to take into the church confessional tomorrow. She repeated her question one more time, “Who wants to know?”

“I do,” I said in an almost-whisper. I was confused. It was a simple question. I wasn’t understanding why she had answered my question with a question.

—Norma Dunning (Inuk) Excerpt from Kinauvit?: What’s Your Name?

The Eskimo Disc System and a Daughter’s Search for her Grandmother, published by Douglas & McIntyre, 2022.

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ART+LIT

ERICA JACQUE

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ORN IN 2002, Erica Jacque (Inuk) embroiders textured earrings on stiff felt to create jewelry that marries the sublime, charming, mundane, and macabre. Her hand-stitched twins from The Shining exemplify how she balances the delightful and the disturbing. Jacque celebrates the local flora and fauna in faithful renderings. She pays homage to Inuit graphic arts throughout history and shares slices of pop culture and daily life in the North.

Jacque often portrays women with children in customary Arctic clothing.

Inspired by the dedication of the Nain Safe House staff, she wanted to support their efforts. She sold her earrings through social media to purchase muchneeded supplies for the women and children at the shelter.1 “I found my passion for embroidery in high school where I learned the basics and have evolved my skills from there,” says Jacque’s artist statement. Her family includes many artists, and other artists inspire her—from historic legends such as Kenojuak Ashevak (Inuk, 1927–2013) to living makers like beadwork and tufting artist Cheyenne Kewageshig (Saugeen Potawatomi/Ojibwe).

Jacque grew up in Postville, Newfoundland and Labrador. Postville, which cannot be reached by road, only by airplanes or ships, is within Nunatsiavut, an Inuit autonomous region in northeastern Canada. During the Nunatsiavut government’s third assembly, Jacque served as a page. In 2017 she participated in the Students on Ice Arctic Expedition, an annual journey to teach youth about “the impacts of climate change on the environment, health, culture, sovereignty and Indigenous rights” in Polar regions.2 Jacque was the Labrador regional winner in Keeping our Stories Alive, the Historical Sites Association of Newfoundland and Labrador’s contemplative art show. She joined the collaborative art project Reflections of Ourselves (2022) which showed at the Orillia Museum of Art and History in Ontario.

After recently moving to Iqaluit, Nunavut, Jacque now studies Inuit tattooing. She participated in the Ikajurniq Youth Tattooing Program, sponsored by the Ilitaqsiniq (Nunavut Literacy Council). “Since the program I have been exploring this new medium, practicing on myself and fellow Inuit searching for self-expression in the form of tattoo revitalization,” she writes. Facial tattooing has taught her to trust herself more as an artist.

Erica Jacque’s artwork is on Instagram @erica_jacque.embroidery, and she can be reached at ericajacqueart@ gmail.com.

—America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

above, top Diving Loons, 2022, embroidery floss, felt, glass seed beads. Inspired by the drawings and prints of Kananginak Pootoogook (Inuk, 1935–2010). above, bottom Observation, 2022, embroidery floss, felt, glass seed beads. Part of the collaborative art project Reflections of Ourselves, Orillia Museum of Art and History, Orillia, Ontario. opposite, top Women Wearing Amauti, 2022, embroidery floss, felt, glass seed beads. opposite, bottom Soya Sauce & Maktaaq, 2022, embroidery floss, felt, glass seed beads.

1. Leanne Inuarak-Dall, “Erica Jacque,” Inuit Art Quarterly, web.

2, “Students on Ice Expeditions,” Arctic Portal, December 2008, web.

NO. 37, WINTER 2023 | 89

MEMORIAL

MARY HOLIDAY BLACK ca. October 15, 1936–December 13, 2022

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HE THREAD OF NAVAJO BASKETRY has stretched thin—especially in the 1960s— but it never broke. Mary Holiday Black (Navajo) ensured this art form, both ceremonial and aesthetic, would thrive and continue into the future.

When many Navajos simply commissioned Ute basket makers to weave the coiled basketry plaques, ts'aa', needed for important ceremonies, Mary wove them for her community and revolutionized the art form in the 1970s so that collectors near and far sought them out.

Mary Holiday’s exact birthday remains unknown, but she was born on Douglas Mesa in San Juan County, Utah, in the northernmost part of the Navajo Nation. She was Tódích'íi'nii (Bitterwater) clan and born for the Táchii'nii (Red Running into the Water People) clan. Her maternal grandfather was Tł'ízí Łání (Many Goats) clan, and her paternal grandfather was Bit'ahnii (Folded Arms People) clan.1 Her father, Teddy Holiday (Navajo, 1919–1994) was a medicine man and a uranium miner. Her mother Betty Holiday (Navajo, 1920–1986) was a textile weaver. Mary was the oldest of their children, and Betty taught Mary how to weave and to gather, process, and use natural vegetal dyes. The family were Navajo speakers; Mary only spoke Navajo throughout her life and did attend Western schools.

A friend of her grandmother’s taught Mary how to weave coiled baskets when she was eleven years old. The classic baskets needed for ceremonial use were made with three-leaf sumac (Rhus trilobata).2 They were built around three or five-rod bundles. Also known as basket bush, this shrub grows from the Canadian prairies south to Baja California. To the customary basket colors of black and

above Mary Holiday Black and her baskets in 1995. Photo: Tom Pich, NEA.

red, Mary added natural dyes that her mother used for rugs. With tones of purples, blue, pinks, greens, and yellows, her most polychromatic baskets resemble the soft rainbow palette of glass gem corn.

In the 1970s, she broadened her oeuvre, expanding the size range of basketry jars and plaques, from two-inch miniatures to five-foot monoliths.

Also a textile weaver, Mary began incorporating geometric and pictorial designs from rugs into basketry. The baskets with representational elements from Navajo oral history became known as “story baskets,” and other Utah Navajo basket weavers also began weaving them in the mid-1980s. Yé'ii Bicheis were her favorite subject matter. These were controversial among some Navajo people, but Mary was careful to consult with spiritual practitioners including her family about the designs. She added imagery from petroglyphs, sand paintings, and the artworks of neighboring tribes.

Mar y married Jessie Black (Navajo). The couple lived in Halchita, Utah, near Mexican Hat, and had seven

sons and four daughters. Nine of her children learned basket making. From an estimated dozen Navajo basket makers in the 1960s, 400 Navajo artists wove baskets by 2008. Half of these are related to Mary Holiday Black. 3 In 1993 Utah honored Mary with a Governor’s Folk Art Award. In 1995 the National Endowment for the Arts named her a National Heritage Fellow. In 2006 she participated in the Smithsonian Folklife Festival in Washington, DC. The Southwestern Association for Indian Arts presented Black with its 2008 Lifetime Achievement Award.

In 1995 Barry Simpson of Blue Mountain Trading Post in Blanding hired graphic artist Damian Jim (Navajo) to catalogue Utah Navajo basket designs.

Jim worked with Mary and 14 other Utah Navajo basket makers to digitize basketry designs. This became the Byting Willows project, which recorded 1,550 designs and generated a book, an app, articles, and exhibitions at the Natural History Museum of Utah (2013) and 1Spot Gallery in Phoenix (2015). In 2021 Damian Jim and Interference Archives presented at the Museum of Arts and Design about Mary’s Ceremonial Basket, Black, Red, White (ca. 1998) and how this single basket reflected Mary’s connections to the greater Navajo community.

Twin Rocks Trading published numerous video interviews with Mary, with her daughter Lorraine Black (Navajo) translating, on YouTube.

“There are many basket stories,” Mary said. “If we stop making the baskets, we lose the stories.”4 Mary’s lifetime of dedicated efforts and those of her children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren help ensure that Navajo people never lose those stories.

—America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

1. Lisa Thompson, “Remembering a Revolutionary Artist,” Natural History Museum of Utah, December 19, 2022, web.

2. Kelly Church, “Sally Black: Navajo Basket Maker,” First American Art Magazine, no. 31 (Summer 2021), 50.

3. Rebecca Roybal Jones, “Honorees’ lifetime achievements ‘groundbreaking’,” Albuquerque Journal, August 17, 2008, 45, web.

4. Thompson, “Remembering a Revolutionary Artist,” web.

90 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE

MEMORIAL

SHIRLEY BRAUKER August 11, 1950–November 22, 2022

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HIRLEY MAXINE BRAUKER began her journey on November 22, 2022. She was a member of the Little River Band of Ottawa Indians, a mother, grandmother, and friend to many all over Michigan and nationwide.

Shirley was most known for Moon Bear Pottery, her unique and beautiful Woodland incised pottery. She placed best of class in pottery in the 2020 SWAIA Santa Fe Indian Market with an intricately carved pot Missing Sisters. She carved detailed images from nature and Woodland themes into her pottery as a way of retelling stories through her art to keep Anishinaabe oral history alive and delight future generations. Her pots were all sizes, and some seemed almost half her size when she held them. Incised stoneware became her trademark.

Shirley drew her stories into images on clay and then cut out the clay around her figures and shapes to allow light to shine through the pot. Other images she would carve onto the clay as if she was painting a story. She carved detailed intricate stories onto bowls that were completely covered in imagery.

Every image was an integral part of the larger story or legend she was sharing.

For more than 60 years, Shirley created art and mastered numerous media working also in bronze, drawing, painting, and block prints. She earned her master’s degree in studio art from Central Michigan University and studied at the Institute of American Indian Arts. She won numerous awards throughout her art career but sharing her talents as a teacher and mentor was equally as important to Shirley. Her son, grandchildren, and apprentices are known for their artistic talents today. She taught art at Central Michigan University, youth camps, language camps, and adult classes, and traveled extensively to share her teachings and art.

Early in her art career, Shirley shared her stories through colorful ledger art, reflecting a time when similar images were recorded by Natives who were incarcerated or taken away to boarding schools. She also self-published her book The Bear Hunt (2014). She was always smiling and excited for her next adventure, which helped shape the new stories to share. She loved nature and the outdoors. Shirley particularly enjoyed spending time around a campfire with her family and friends, playing guitar and singing—more of her many talents—and captivating her friends and audiences with her words and art.

Shirley and her art were one of a kind. She was someone you were glad you met and would always remember once you did.

Many public institutions and private collectors collected Shirley’s artwork. Her work and stories can be seen today in the newly renovated Native American galleries at the Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art in Indianapolis.

Artworks’ Batdorff Gallery in Big Rapids, Michigan, is exhibiting her work from January 30–March 3, 2023. Truly a visionary artist and innovator with a unique style, Shirley left a legacy of pottery that we can continue to enjoy and learn from today.

—Kelly Church (Gun Lake Pottawatomi/Ottawa/Ojibwe)

above, top Shirley Brauker. Photo: Kelly Church. above, bottom Shirley Brauker (Little Traverse Odawa), Sturgeon Jar, stoneware clay, iron oxide glaze. © Moon Bear Pottery.

NO. 37, WINTER 2023 | 91

MEMORIAL

DORA TSE-PE January 17, 1939–August 15, 2022

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HEODORA GACHUPIN (Zia/Jemez/San Ildefonso Pueblo) “Yellow Squash Blossom,” one of 13 children, was born to Candelaria Medina Gachupin and Antonio Gachupin on January 17, 1939, at the Zia Pueblo family home. Being born into a pottery-making family, ceramic art was an inherent gift. Her mother, a well-respected artist, made pottery for Pueblo religious use as well as a means of supporting her family. Dora learned the stages of pottery-making at an early age by assisting her mother who was a major influence on her work as well as her grandmother Rosalie Toribio.

In 1961 Dora married Tse-Pé Gonzales, who was the son of famed San Ildefonso Pueblo potter Rose Gonzales.

Dora moved to San Ildefonso and became a lifelong resident and tribal member, partaking in the daily aspects of Tewa life. Already coming from a pottery family, Dora watched her mother-in-law work and was encouraged to partake in working with mother clay. With the clay body and tempers being different than her Zia Pueblo upbringing, Dora learned to adapt and create the work for which she would be known.

In 1969 she created a plainware black bowl which she fired with Rose and sold to an unknown customer, who entered it in the New Mexico State Fair. It won a first-place blue ribbon unbeknown to Dora. She later received word, and this sparked her 40-plus-year pottery career. Winning many honors and 92 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE

more than 200 awards, she was a representative to the White House with a pottery delegation in the 1970s.

Dora and her former husband Tse-Pé collaborated on pottery for almost ten years until they parted ways. Their work is considered creative and innovative as they introduced the use of turquoise stones, sienna highlights, and finely done sgraffito designs on their pieces. Later, she began carving her pottery in the style of Rose, adding her own twist and designs. Known for her expertise in polishing, Dora’s pottery has a mirror gleam to it when completed. Some of her favorite designs are the Avanyu (Water Serpent) and bear, but she was ever experimenting with shapes and designs—portraying animals such as quail, turtles, eagles, and lizards on her pottery. She was credited for introducing the bear lid on some of her vases. Whether the pottery was black or red or had sienna highlights or micaceous accents, her work always remained culturally rooted with innovative aspects. She stressed quality, not quantity in her work.

In keeping with cultural practices, Dora prayed throughout the various stages of pottery-making as well as the final step.

When a piece would find its happy new owners, she would tell the piece goodbye and wish it a happy life with the new owners.

Dora taught each of her five daughters and later her grandchildren the art of pottery-making, exclaiming, “I don’t want to leave this earth without any of my children not knowing what to do once I’m not here. That’s a way of teaching them to respect the earth and the things of nature, which is what we have always been about.”

Not only did Dora make the best and most beautiful pottery but the tastiest red chile stew for family occasions and feast days. She also had a knack for brewing a delicious pot of coffee and had the prettiest cursive penmanship, which won her an award while she attended the Santa Fe Indian School during her youth. Her stories of the past will be missed, especially those of her parents. One that sticks out was a time Dora went to an art show at the Heard Museum and took her dad with her. She panicked when she couldn’t find him at the place they were staying, but eventually found him up in the orange trees happily picking the sweet citrus fruit. She will be remembered for attending art shows with perfectly coiffed hair and dressed impeccably in stylish clothing of the times and fine jewelry that was picked to go with each outfit. Her cheer and laugh will also be what many will miss and hold close to their memory.

Dora is survived by her daughters: Irene Tse-Pe, Gerri Tse-Pe, Candace Maxey, Andrea Pino; adopted sons Kenneth “Critter” Williams and Ride Hamilton; ten grandchildren; six great-grandchildren; many other close family members; and friends as well as her “pottery children creations” around the world. She joins the cloud people who include her daughter Jennifer as well as many relatives of the past. We will miss her physical being on this earth, but her legacy will long live on through her family and the beautiful pottery she created.

—Kenneth Williams Jr. (Northern Arapaho/Seneca)

MEMORIAL

MERVIN WINDSOR March 15, 1964–September 25, 2022

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AISL A AND HEILTSUK First Nations painter Mervin Windsor was born into a family of artists in the north coast town of Kitimat, British Columbia. Windsor credited his older brother, Ron Windsor Jr., and fellow Haisla artist, Lyle Wilson, with inspiring his early art and career. Known for playful formline designs and his long relationship with the Vancouver-based artware company Native Northwest, Windsor was among the earliest artists to work with them to ethically reproduce his original artwork on hats, stickers, T-shirts, and other accessories.

Unfortunately, Windsor’s designs were often the target of unlicensed reproductions and, according to the late Lucinda Turner, perhaps the most frequently stolen designs on the Northwest Coast. Due to this experience, Windsor was a passionate advocate for protecting the intellectual property rights of Indigenous artists. He worked with Turner and her Fraudulent Native Art Exposed and More Facebook group, a community committed to stopping the unauthorized reproduction and sale of Indigenous artwork. Almost daily, someone would post a link to a company that was using an unauthorized image of one of Windsor’s designs, most frequently his iconic, crescent-shaped design simply titled Salmon (2003). Due to the frequency of theft, Windsor formed a unique partnership with Larry Garfinkel, his long-time friend and the owner and founder of Native Northwest, to put a stop to it.

“I was honored to work with Mervin for 25 years. In the past number of years, we collaborated together to go after companies who used his Salmon design without consent. Mervin’s Salmon design became one of the more famous Northwest Coast designs in part because it was repeatedly ripped off. Fortunately, we had been successful in effectively dealing with many bad players,” shared Garfinkel via email.

“Mervin has been a source of inspiration to myself and others to stop the [theft] of Indigenous art. Native

Northwest posted this picture [see image] of Mervin and his salmon on our Facebook page to make a statement and increase public awareness. The posting received a lot of attention which enhanced the conversation,” Garfinkel added.

In addition to his advocacy for stronger copyright laws, Windsor would often lend his designs to other causes he was passionate about. In 2017, Windsor collaborated with Scene Ideas Inc. to feature several of his formline designs on pillars and signage for the Walk for Reconciliation event held in Vancouver.

Shortly before his passing, Windsor also donated his design An Eagle’s Heart (2022) to be used on orange shirts as a fundraiser for the Carnegie Community Center in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside.

“Mervin Windsor was a gentle soul with a warm smile,” Garfinkel told me, “but behind it was a warrior who repeatedly fought against cultural appropriation.” He concluded, “Mervin’s legacies will be his sense of justice and his determination to protect Indigenous art.”

—Christopher W. Smith

above Mervin Windsor holding his Salmon print. Graphic by Native Northwest. ©Native Northwest. Image courtesy of Larry Garfinkel. opposite Dora Tse-Pe. Photo: Kenneth Williams Jr. (Northern Arapaho/Seneca).

NO. 37, WINTER 2023 | 93

NATIVE AMERICAN ART APPRAISALS, INC. SINCE 1936

CALENDAR January 6–February 25: Tahlequah, OK Collective Wisdom at Cherokee Springs Plaza, 3377 Cherokee Springs Road. Hosted by the Southeastern Indian Artist Association (918) 456-7311 | seiaa.org January 6–February 26: Portland, OR Sara Siestreem: looking for the land///found the weather at Elizabeth Leach Gallery, 417 NW 9th Avenue | (503) 224-0521 | elizabethleach.com January 7–22: Sarasota, FL Rainforest Masks of Costa Rica at the Marie Selby Botanical Gardens’ Downtown Sarasota campus, 1534 Mound Street. Balsa wood masks carved by Boruca sculptors | (941) 366-5731 | selby.org/dsc January 8–March 25: Van Buren, AR Bobby C. Martin: The Ancestors Are Present at Arts on Main, 415 Main Street | (479) 474-7767 | artsonmainvb.com January 12–TBA: Evanston, IL No Rest: The Epidemic of Stolen Indigenous Women, Girls, and 2Spirits at the Mitchell Museum of the American Indian, 3001 Central Street (847) 475-1030 | mitchellmuseum.org January 12–February 4: Toronto, ON Johnny Pootoogook: Nocturne at the Feheley Fine Arts, 65 George Street +1 (416) 323-1373 | feheleyfinearts.com

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

CALL EMAIL

January 13–February 25: Winnipeg, MB Brennan Mckay: Da 4 Seasons at the Urban Shaman Contemporary Aboriginal Art Gallery, 203–290 McDermont Avenue +1 (204) 942-2674 | urbanshaman.org January 15–March 15: Casper, WY Grounded at the Nicolaysen Art Museum, 400 E. Collins Drive.

Featuring 15 Indigenous artists of the Great Plains. Opening: Saturday, January 21, 5:30 pm | (307) 235-5247 | thenic.org January TBA–April TBA: Saskatoon, SK Enclosing Some Snapshots: James Brady at the Wanuskewin Heritage Park, RR#4 Penner Road | +1 (306) 931-6767 | wanuskewin.com January 14–March 31: Toronto, ON Ningiukulu Teevee: Chronicles for the Curious at the Art Gallery of Ontario, 317 Dundas Street West | +1 (416) 979-6688 | ago.ca January 20–22: Colorado Springs, CO 41st annual Colorado Indian Market and Southwest Art Fair at the Colorado Convention Center, Mile High Ballroom, 700 14th Street (505) 273-7363 | dashevents.com January 20–22: Cave Creek, AZ Cave Creek Indian Market at Stagecoach Village, 7100 E. Cave Creek Road, 10:00 am–5:00 pm. Hosted by Vermillion Promotions (623) 734-6526 | stagecoachvillagecc.com January 20–May 22: Albuquerque, NM Clay Line of the Red Willow People: A Showcase of Three Taos Pueblo Artists at the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center, 2401 12th Street NW (505) 843-7270 | indianpueblo.org January 21–June 25: Toronto ON Radical Remembrances: The Sculpture of David Ruben Piqtoukun at the Art Gallery of Ontario, 317 Dundas Street West +1 (416) 979-6688 | ago.ca January 23–TBA: Vancouver, BC Spirit Journeys: Walking with Resilience, Wellbeing and Respect at the Museum of Vancouver, 1100 Chestnut Street. Group exhibition of YVR Art Foundation 2021 Emerging and Mid-Career Artist Scholars (604) 736-4431 | museumofvancouver.ca/spirit-journeys

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January 28–October 1: Bend, OR Creations of the Spirit at the High Desert Museum, 59800 US Highway 97 | (541) 382-4754 | highdesertmuseum.org January 30–March 3: Big Rapids, MI Discovering Tradition: Anishinaabe Art at Artworks’ Batdorff Gallery, 106 N. Michigan Avenue | (231) 796–2420 | artworksinbigrapids.org February 3–October 28: Tucson, AZ Ancient—Modern: Continuity and Innovation in Southwest Native Jewelry at the Arizona State Museum, 1013 E University Boulevard (520) 621-6302 | statemuseum.arizona.edu

Jewelry | Baskets | Prints |Beadwork |Sculpture Penobscot Butch Phillips Moose call

Native American jewelry and arts marketplace 2 Christensen Lane Kennebunk, Maine 207 423-8473

shop online: www.homeandaway.gallery

February 3–April 16: New York, NY The Yanomami Struggle at the Shed, 545 W. 30th Street. More than 80 works by Yanomami artists | (646) 455-3494 | theshed.org February 3–April 23: Nashville, TN Jeffrey Gibson: The Body Electric at the Frist Museum of Art, 919 Broadway | (615) 244-3340 | fristartmuseum.org February 4–May 28: Kleinberg, ON Meryl McMaster: Bloodline at the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, 10365 Islington Avenue | +1 (905) 893-1121 | mcmichael.com February 4 & 5: Scottsdale, AZ Arizona Indian Festival in Historic Old Town Scottsdale, First and Brown Streets | experiencescottsdale.com/event/arizona-indian-festival/368001 February 4–May 14: St. Petersburg, FL The Stories They Tell: Indigenous Art and the Photography of Edward S. Curtis at the James Museum of Western and Wildlife Art, 150 Central Avenue | (727) 892-4200 | thejamesmuseum.org February 10–July 2: Santa Fe, NM Rick Rivet: Journeys, Mounds, and the Metaphysical at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, 108 Cathedral Place (505) 983-1666 | iaia.edu/mocna/mocna-exhibitions February 10–March 25: Norman, OK 16th annual Love of Ledger Art at Tribes Gallery, 512 W. Main Street.

Opening weekend: February 10–12 | (405) 329-4442 | tribes131.com

shop online: www.homeandaway.gallery

Moose call Butch Phillips Penobscot

207 423-8473 Kennebunk, Maine 2 Christensen Lane

and arts marketplace Native American jewelry

Jewelry | Baskets | Prints |Beadwork |Sculpture Jewelry | Baskets | Prints |Beadwork |Sculpture Penobscot Butch Phillips Moose call

RICK BARTOW FROG TALK SERIOUSLY solo exhibition

February 11–May 28: Hamilton, ON Radical Stitch at the Art Gallery of Hamilton, 123 King Street West +1 (905) 527–6610 | artgalleryofhamilton.com February 11, 2023–January 4, 2024: Santa Fe, NM California Stars: Huivaniūs Pütsiv at the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, 704 Camino Lejo | (505) 982-4636 | wheelwright.org February 17–July 9: New York, NY Shaped by the Loom: Weaving Worlds in the American Southwest at Bard Graduate Center, 18 West 88th Street | (212) 501-3023 bgc.bard.edu/exhibitions/25/about February 19–May 21: Denver, CO Speaking with Light: Contemporary Indigenous Photography at the Denver Art Museum, 100 W. 14th Avenue | (720) 865-5000 denverartmuseum.org February 21–September 10: Windsor, ON Water Protectors at Art Windsor Essex, 401 Riverside Drive West +1 (519) 977-0013 | artwindsoressex.ca February 23–26: Virtual American Indian Art Show | San Francisco and the Tribal & Textile Art Show online | objectsofartshows.com March 2–6: Anchorage, AK Charlotte Jensen Native Arts Market at the Dimond Center, 800 E. Dimond Boulevard, 10:00 am–6:00 pm, Sunday: 12:00–5:00 pm | furrondy.net

shop online: www.homeandaway.gallery 207 423-8473 Kennebunk, Maine 2 Christensen Lane

and arts marketplace Native American jewelry

FROELICK GALLERY Portland, OR | 503.222.1142

GC 4, 2014, pastel, tempera on paper, 50˝x 45˝ photo: Rebekah Johnson

NO. 37, WINTER 2023 | 95

March 3–5: Phoenix, AZ 65th annual Heard Museum Guild Indian Fair and Market at the Heard Museum, 2301 N. Central Avenue. Best of Show Reception: Friday, March 3. Fair: Saturday & Sunday, March 4 & 5 (602) 252-8840 | heardguild.org

Dragonfly Pendant

by Charlotte Poblano Peina, Zuni

March 3–April 2: Santa Fe, NM Terran Last Gun at Hecho a Mano, 129 W. Palace Avenue (505) 455-6882 | hecho.gallery March 10–12: El Prado, NM 11th annual Taos Pueblo Artists Winter Show at the Millicent Rogers Museum, 1504 Millicent Rogers Road | (575) 758-2462 millicentrogers.org March 10–12: Oklahoma City, OK Indigipop X at First Americans Museum, 659 First Americans Boulevard | (405) 594-2100 | indigipopx.com March 11–July 31: Bentonville, AR Diego Rivera’s America at Crystal Bridges Art Museum, 600 Museum Way | (479) 418-5700 | crystalbridges.org March 16–August TBA: Port Alberni, BC George Clutesi at the Alberni Valley Museum, 4255 Wallace Street +1 (250) 723-1035 | playinpa.ca/exhibits March 18–September 4: Sarasota, FL Reclaiming Home: Contemporary Seminole Art at the Ringling Museum of Art, 4501 Bay Shore Road | (941) 359-5700 | ringling.org Since 1981 Fetishes Jewelry Pottery 227 Don Gaspar, Santa Fe 505.989.8728 keshi.com

March 18–September 17: Montclair, NJ Meryl McMaster: Chronologies at the Montclair Art Museum, 3 S. Mountain Avenue | (973) 746-5555 | montclairartmuseum.org March 18–September 30: Fargo, ND Gerald Cournoyer: Sending a Voice at the Plains Art Museum, 704 First Avenue North | (701) 551-6100 | plainsart.org/exhibitions March 31–April 2: Cleburne, TX 16th annual IIAmericas Celebration at the Chisholm Trail Outdoor Museum, 100 Chisholm Trail. Hosted by the Indigenous Institute of the Americas | (214) 406-3432 | iiamericas.org April 7: Phoenix, AZ Brenda Mallory: The North Star Changes at the Heard Museum, 2301 N. Central Avenue | (602) 252-8840 | heard.org/exhibits April 7: Topeka, KS Indigenize: A Native Perspective in a Mainstream World at 785 Arts, 112 SW 6th Avenue #305, Native American student show 785arts.com/events April 1, 2023–January 7, 2024: Winnipeg, MB Inuit Sanaugangit: Three Centuries of Inuit Art at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, 300 Memorial Boulevard | +1 (204) 786-6641 | wag.ca

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April 19–August TBA: New York, NY Jaune Quick-To-See Smith: Memory Map at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort Street | (212) 570-3600 | whitney.org April 22: Sulphur, OK Artesian Arts Festival in Artesian Plaza, West Muskogee Avenue.

Hosted by the Chickasaw Nation | (580) 272-5520 | chickasaw.net April 22 & 23: Tulsa, OK 2nd annual Mvskoke Art Market at River Spirit Casino, 8320 Riverside Parkway. Hosted by the Muscogee Nation | (918) 549-2434 muscogeenation.com/mvskokeartmarket For more events, visit our online calendar at

FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM/ CALENDAR 96 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE

– COMING 2023 –

PALM SPRINGS, CALIFORNIA

– Featuring – AGUA CALIENTE CULTURAL MUSEUM THE SPA AT SÉC-HE • OASIS TRAIL & GATHERING PLAZA visionaguacaliente.com