First American Art Magazine No. 41, Winter 2024

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

FırstAmericanArt MAGAZINE

NO. 41, WINTER 2024

HOPI OVERLAY SILVERWORK CULTURAL CROSSROADS

DISPLAY UNTIL MAR. 31, 2024

JAMES FENDENHEIM DAVID MARTIN

MARCO TEMPORAL IN BRAZIL

RAINY NAHA

SPIRIT OF THE CORN

AMBER WEBB

baca.ca

66TH ANNUAL HEARD MUSEUM GUILD

INDIAN FAIR + MARKET FEAT.

MAR

2-3

FEBRUARY 10, 2024 — JANUARY 11, 2025

Pathfinder: 40 Years of Marcus Amerman

Tue—Sat, 10 am—5 pm • wheelwright.org

FEBRUARY 10, 2024 — JUNE 9, 2024

Masterglass: The Collaborative Spirit of Tony Jojola

Wheelwright Museum

OF THE AMERICAN INDIAN Marcus Amerman, b. 1959 (Choctaw) and Preston Singletary, b.1963 (Tlingit) Buffalo Man, 2010; Blown and sand carved glass; Photography by Addison Doty

704 Camino Lejo, Santa Fe NM 87505

issue no. 41, winter 2024

DEPARTMENTS

FEATURES

Recent Developments

By Staci Golar and America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

9

Seven Directions

By Lisa LaRue-Baker (Cherokee Nation)

15

Art+Lit Boderra Joe: Diné Poet, Journalist & Photographer

By Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD

86

Calendar

By Abby Mikalauskas

94

Textures and Seasons: 20 The History and Art of Hopi Silver Overlay A relatively recent development, silver overlay has become a vehicle for Hopi artistic expression

By A.M. Palmer 48

Marco Temporal : Indigenous 32 Art & Activism in Brazil A legal thesis threatens Indigenous claims to their ancestral lands. Brazilian Indigenous use art to alert the world

By Mariana Brazão

REVIEWS Exhibition Reviews

72

MEMORIALS Sam English (Turtle Mountain/Red Lake Chippewa, 1942–2023)

By Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD

90

54

Hal Homer (Oneida Indian 91 Nation, 1973–2023)

By Frank Buffalo Hyde (Onondaga) Watson Honanie 92 (Hopi, 1953–2023)

By America Meredith (Cherokee Nation) with advice from Gloria Lomahaftewa (Hopi/Choctaw) Baje Whitethorne Sr. (Navajo, 1950–2023)

By Nanette Kelley (Osage/Cherokee Nations)

Spirit of the Corn 40 A photo series exploring the Seneca’s relation to corn with model Morgan Huff, modeling regalia by Karlene Familo and Alexia Stevens (all Seneca Nation)

By Hayden Haynes (Seneca Nation)

ARTIST PROFILES

60

93

cover Rainy Naha (Hopi-Tewa), Interlocking Parrot Jar, natural clay, earth pigments, beeweed slip. Photo: Charles King. Image courtesy of King Galleries.

Looking Back:

28 Bob Haozous’s Cultural Crossroads of the Americas Controversy around a public sculpture reverberates today

By Suzanne Newman Fricke, PhD

66

James Fendenheim: Tohono O'odham Jeweler & Sculptor

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

48

David Martin: Pokagon Potawatomi Tattoo Artist, Painter & Regalia Maker

By Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD

54

Rainy Naha: Hopi-Tewa Ceramic Artist

By RoseMary Diaz (Santa Clara Pueblo)

60

Amber Webb: Yup'ik Visual Storyteller

By Nadia Jackinsky-Sethi, PhD (Alutiiq)

66

FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 41, WINTER 2024 | 5

issue no. 41, winter 2024 ISSN 2333-5548 (Print) • ISSN 2333-5556 (Digital)

EXPERIENCE the

Publishing Editor: America Meredith (Cherokee Nation) Literary Editor: Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD (Euro-Canadian) Contributing Editor: Stacy Pratt, PhD (Mvskoke) Advertising Representatives: Barbara Harjo and Deborah Fritts (Cherokee Nation) Circulation Manager: Nicole Emmons (Citizen Potawatomi) Copy Editors: Rosa Cays (Chicana) and Peter Letzelter-Smith Proofreaders: Lisa LaRue-Baker (Cherokee Nation), Staci Golar, and Angela C. Villa (Chicana) Layout and Design: America Meredith (Cherokee Nation) and Corey Yazzie (Navajo) Content Advisor: Gloria Lomahaftewa (Hopi/Choctaw) Social Media: Staci Golar, America Meredith (Cherokee Nation), and Jackie Sevier (Northern Arapaho) Intern: Abby Mikalauskas

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)

DISCOVER ENGAGE CONNECT

Advisory Council

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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FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 41, WINTER 2024 | 7

S PECIALIZING IN T HE SALE OF ESTATE AND PRIVATE COLLECTIONS

Eagle Totem by Perry LaFortune, Coast Salish Nation From the Beckman Collection of Northwest Coast Art

Contact director@quintanagalleries.com

Q UINTANA G ALLERIES

for consignment and purchase inquiries.

quintanagalleries.com 503-810-7525

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS MUSEUMS The Museum of the Cherokee Indian in Cherokee, North Carolina, has changed its name to ᏣᎳᎩ ᎢᏗᏴᏫᏯᎯ ᎢᎦᏤᎵ ᎤᏪᏘ ᎠᏍᏆᏂᎪᏙᏗ, or the MUSEUM OF THE CHEROKEE PEOPLE. Founded in 1948, the museum serves the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians and the many visitors to the Qualla Boundary. Museum graphic designer Tyra Maney (Eastern Band Cherokee/Navajo) redesigned the museum’s water spider logo. The museum also launched its new website, MotCP.org.

KATUAQ CULTURAL CENTRE in Nuuk, Greenland, hired Ivaaq Kriegel (Kalaaleq) as its new executive director.

An artist, hunter, and educator, Kriegel earned his master’s degree from Aalborg Universitet in Denmark. He serves on the Nordic Council of Ministers’ committee for culture and art. Kriegel previously worked as a study assistant in Ilisimatusarfik.

The MUSEUM OF INDIAN ARTS AND CULTURES (MIAC) in Santa Fe has named Danyelle Means (Oglala Lakota) as its interim director. Means previously served as executive director and head curator of the Center for Contemporary Arts, director of advancement at the Institute of American Indian Arts, and executive director of the IAIA Foundation. She earned a BA degree from the University of South Dakota and MA and MPA degrees from Marist College. In November MIAC’s executive director, Polly Nordstrand (Hopi), left her position and moved to California.

MIAC also hired Elisabeth Stone as its deputy director in October. She earned her doctoral degree in anthropology and her master’s degree in anthropology and museum studies, both from the University of New Mexico. She previously worked at the Spurlock Museum at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign.

The EITELJORG MUSEUM OF AMERICAN INDIANS AND WESTERN ART, based in Indianapolis, hired Monica Jo Raphael (Grand Traverse Odawa-Ojibwe/Sicangu Lakota) to serve as its new Thomas G. and Susan C.

below Cherokee Art Market best of show winner Demos Glass (Cherokee Nation) with his winning steel sculpture, Two Realms (2023). Photo: Stacy Pratt, PhD (Mvskoke).

The MCMICHAEL CANADIAN ART COLLECTION in Vaughn, Ontario, hired Emily Laurent Henderson (Kalaaleq) as its associate curator of Indigenous art and culture. Previously she was a curatorial assistant at the Art Gallery of Ontario, executive assistant at the Indigenous Curatorial Collective, and profiles editor of Inuit Art Quarterly. She earned her bachelor’s degree in anthropology at the University of British Columbia.

The ARIZONA STATE UNIVERSITY ART MUSEUM in Tucson, Arizona, has appointed Erin Joyce as its curator at large and advisor on curatorial initiatives. Joyce previously served as a creative director and fine arts curator at the Heard Museum in Phoenix. She earned her museum studies master’s degree from John Hopkins University and her art history bachelor’s degree from the University of North Texas.

Hoback Curator of Great Lakes Native Cultures and Community Engagement.

Raphael is a quillwork and beadwork artist who has worked with tribal communities and in education, human services, and cultural programs in Oklahoma and throughout the Upper Midwest.

The INDIAN PUEBLO CULTURAL CENTER in Albuquerque, New Mexico, hired Michelle J. Lanteri as head curator of its museum and rotating galleries. She previously served as curator of collections at the Albuquerque Museum and curator of collections and exhibitions at the Millicent Rogers Museum. Lanteri earned her doctoral degree in Native American art history from the University of Oklahoma and her master’s degree from New Mexico State University.

CRYSTAL BRIDGES MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART in Bentonville, Arkansas, hired Jordan Poorman Cocker (Kiowa/Tongan) as its new curator of Indigenous art. Cocker earned her master’s degree in museology from the Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand and is in the doctoral program at the Auckland University of Technology.

She also served as the collections manager at the Osage Nation Museum.

T he Sm it hs on i an’s NAT IONA L MUSEUM OF NATURAL HISTORY hired archaeologist Dorothy Lippert (Choctaw Nation) as its repatriation program manager. Lippert will be the first woman and first Native person to hold this position. Lippert previously served as the tribal liaison for the museum’s repatriation office.

ART MARKETS Demos Glass (Cherokee Nation) won best of show at the Cherokee Nation’s 18th Annual CHEROKEE ART MARKET at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino Tulsa in Catoosa, Oklahoma. Classification winners were Bryan Waytula (Cherokee Nation), two-dimensional; Demos Glass, sculpture; Pati Belgarde (Turtle Mountain Chippewa), beadwork/quillwork; Michael Dart (Cherokee Nation), basketry; Troy Jackson (Cherokee Nation), pottery; Alberta Henderson (Navajo), textiles; Abraham Begay (Navajo), jewelry; and General B. Grant (Eastern Band Cherokee), diverse art forms. Special award winners included Hollis Chitto (Mississippi Choctaw/Laguna/Isleta Pueblo), Culture Keeper Award; Monica Silva Lovato (San Felipe Pueblo/Kewa), Innovator Award; Michael Toya (San Felipe Pueblo), Jesse Hummingbird Legacy Award; and Tama Roberts (Cherokee Nation) and Troy Jackson, who both won the Anna Mitchell Award.

FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 41, WINTER 2024 | 9

LISA JARRETT Prints

Bryan Waytula (Cherokee Nation) won best of show at the SOUTHEASTERN ART SHOW AND MARKET (SEASAM), hosted by the Chickasaw Nation, at the Chickasaw National Capitol in Tishomingo, Oklahoma. Classification winners were Wayne Earles (Caddo), culture; Regina Free (Chickasaw), 3D; and Daniel HorseChief (Cherokee Nation/Pawnee), 2D. In the youth art market, Keegan Bellefeuille (Chickasaw) won best of show. Youth classification winners were Natalie Lawson (Chickasaw), culture; Brody McElhannon (Chickasaw), 3D; and Anita Ashley Mitchell (Cherokee Nation), 2D.

SCHOOLS The UNIVERSITY OF VICTORIA named Heather Igloliorte (Nunatsiavummiut Inuk) as its Canada Excellence Research Chair in Decolonial and Transformational Indigenous Art Practices. Currently a professor at the University of Victoria’s Department of Visual Arts, Igloliorte will lead research and advance Indigenization efforts. Prior to this appointment, Igloliorte served as an associate professor in Concordia University’s Department of Art History and research chair in circumpolar Indigenous arts.

ORGANIZATIONS Phinney Brown (Coeur d’Alene descent) has been named executive director of CROW’S SHADOW INSTITUTE OF THE ARTS in Pendleton, Oregon. Brown is a beadwork artist and previously served as the executive director of the Arts Center Task Force in Richland, Washington.

The NATIVE ARTS AND CULTURES FOUNDATION, a nonprofit foundation based in Portland, Oregon, hired Shyla Spicer (Yakama/Wanapum) as its executive director. Spicer earned her MBA in strategy and entrepreneurial studies at the University of Portland and her BS from Portland State University. Previously she served as the chief operating officer of the Indigenous Collective, executive director of the Suquamish Tribe, and interim executive director of the Portland All Nations Canoe Family after working at Nike for twelve years.

AWARDS & HONORS Kablusiak, an Inuvialuk artist and curator based in Calgary, Alberta, received the 2023 SOBEY ART AWARD, Canada’s top art prize. Known for their wide-ranging, interdisciplinary approach that reimagines Inuk cultural practices, Kablusiak was shortlisted for the same prize in 2019. Kablusiak will receive Can$100,000 as part of this year’s award.

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

crowsshadow.org Transformer, 2022, lithograph, 30” x 22½”, edition of 12 Collaborating Master Printer, Judith Baumann 10 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 41, WINTER 2024

The MACARTHUR FOUNDATION named Dyani White Hawk (Sicangu Lakota) and Raven Chacon (Navajo) among its 2023 MACARTHUR FELLOWSHIPS. The “Genius” grants include $800,000 disbursed over five years. White Hawk is a painter, sculptor, and curator based in Minneapolis.

Chacon is a composer and musician based in Albuquerque and Red Hook.

The AUDAIN ART MUSEUM FOUNDATION awarded its 2023 AUDAIN PRIZE FOR VISUAL ARTS to Dana Claxton (Wood Mountain Lakota).

Based in Vancouver, she is a filmmaker, photographer, and installation, performance, and video artist. She is also a professor and department head at the University of British Columbia. The Can$100,000 prize recognizes senior artists based in Canada.

The OPEN SOCIETY FOUNDATIONS gave three of its 2023 SOROS ARTS FELLOWSHIPS to Cannupa Hanska Luger (Mandan/Hidatsa/Arikara/ Lakota), Ixchel Tonāntzin Xōchitlzihuatl (Mestiza/Mexican-American), and Carolina Caycedo (Mestiza/Colombian-American). The Manhattan-based organization awards mid-career, socially engaged artists with $100,000 to pursue large-scale art projects.

BEST IN HERITAGE, a nongovernmental organization based in Zagreb, Croatia, gave the Winnipeg Art

Gallery–Qaumajuq its PROJECT OF INFLUENCE BEST IN HERITAGE AWARD. This annual, international award recognizes Qaumajuq as a groundbreaking, innovative project that provides inspiration in the global field of cultural heritage.

the 2023 MARIE DARLIN PRIZE. This $5,000 award recognizes notable artists, writers, and performers from southeast Alaska, northern British Columbia, and the Yukon. Hope is a Chilkat and Ravenstail weaver who teaches at the University of Alaska Southeast.

The ARTISTS’ LEGACY FOUNDATION gave Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Salish-Kootenai/Métis/Shoshone) its 2023 ARTIST AWARD. The Oaklandbased organization provides one unrestricted, merit award of $25,000 to a painter or sculptor each year.

The MUSEUM OF INDIAN ARTS AND CULTURE gave fashion designer Patricia Michaels (Taos) its 2024 LIVING TREASURE AWARD and ceramic sculptor Martha Arquero (Cochiti Pueblo) its NATIVE TREASURES LEGACY AWARD. They will be honored at the museum’s 20th Annual Native Treasures Art Market in Santa Fe on Memorial Day weekend.

The 2023 KENOJUAK ASHEVAK MEMORIAL AWARD goes to Ningiukulu Teevee (Inuk), a draftsperson and writer. The award, now in its third year, includes a Can$20,000 stipend, residency, art acquisition, and solo exhibition with a catalogue in 2025.

The JUNEAU-DOUGL AS CITY MUSEUM in Juneau, Alaska, gave textile artist and educator Lily Hope (Tlingit)

MEDIA Wanda Nanibush (Beausoleil Ojibwe) and Georgiana Uhlyarik won the 2023 Toronto Book Award for their book MOVING THE MUSEUM: INDIGENOUS + CANADIAN ART at the AGO.

FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 41, WINTER 2024 | 11

IDYLLWILD, CALIFORNIA REGISTRATION OPENS FEBRUARY 1, 2024 WORKSHOPS

June 10 - 28, 2024 Class offerings include Cahuilla Basketry, Cahuilla-Style Pottery, Hopi Jewelry, Hopi-Tewa Pottery, Navajo Weaving, Beadwork, California Native Plants, Hopi Glassblowing, and more!

FESTIVAL WEEK

June 15 - 22, 2024 A full week of free programming open to the public! Join us for performances, exhibitions, food tastings, film screenings, lectures, and more!

SCAN FOR MORE INFO, OR VISIT: idyllwildarts.org/nativeamericanarts

Scholarships are available for Native American adult and teen students!

The winners will receive Can$10,000 as part of this prize. Nanibush recently left her position as the inaugural curator of Indigenous art and co-head of the Indigenous and Canadian art department at the Art Gallery of Ontario (AGO).

PRECONTACT SITES Angel Acosta-Colon of the University of Puerto Rico–Arecibo and Reniel Rodríguez of the University of Puerto Rico–Utuado reported that cave art on LA ISLE GRANDE dates from 700 to 400 BCE, pushing back estimates for human settlement of Puerto Rico. They used carbon-14 dating on trace amounts of 61 pigments from pictographs in eleven caves.

CRIME & LEGAL ISSUES In July 2021, Pedro Huertas, a US doctor, crossed the Canada–United States border with three tupilait, or carvings of monsters from East Greenland,

made from sperm whale teeth, that he had purchased from Images Boréales, a Montreal gallery of Inuit art. US border guards seized these sculptures because their importation violated the CONVENTION ON INTERNATIONAL TRADE IN ENDANGERED SPECIES OF WILD FAUNA AND FLORA (CITES). CITES provides exceptions for subsistence by Indigenous peoples; however, they find it difficult to obtain the permits that allow buyers to export carvings made from whale bones, whale teeth, or related items.

Huertas pleaded guilty to the misdemeanor charge and paid a fine of $50,000. Matthew Namour, owner of Images Boréales, and a gallery employee, Imene Mansour, were tried for violating the Wild Animal and Plant Protection and Regulation of International and Interprovincial Trade Act (WAPPRIITA) and in falsifying documents. Inuit have criticized CITES for being too restrictive on materials, especially walrus and

12 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 41, WINTER 2024

narwhal ivory, that they legally obtain through subsistence hunting.

ERRATA For FAAM No. 40, Lily Hope (Tlingit) informed us that 22 new Chilkat and Chilkat-style robes were woven in the Dancing of the Robes project, not 30 robes as the caption on page 5 stated.

Deborah Yepa-Pappan (Jemez/Korean) pointed out that on page 34 in “Native Artists Lead the Way at the Center for Native Futures,” we mistakenly stated that her father is Korean, and her mother is Jemez, when, in fact, her father is Jemez, and her mother is Korean.

Jean SmilingCoyote alerted us that page 41 of “The Diquís Spheres of Costa Rica: A Recently Recognized National Symbol” incorrectly stated that the Puerto Nuevo Formation was created during the Miocene Era. It should have said Miocene Epoch, which falls within the Neogene Period of the Cenozoic Era.

14 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 41, WINTER 2024

SEVEN DIRECTIONS

Seven Directions

LISA LARUE-BAKER A Cherokee Nation gallerist, artist, musician, and cultural bearer shares her top seven list

A

GALLERIST AND TEACHING ARTIST at 785 Arts in Topeka, Kansas, Lisa LaRue-Baker is also a basket maker, textile artist, musician, author, and mobiographer. Mobiography is the capture and refinement of photographs with a smartphone. She grew up between Kansas and Oklahoma where she worked with tribes for nearly 30 years.

She served as the tribal historic preservation officer, museum director, and director of language, history, and culture for the United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians in Oklahoma. She was an exhibition designer for the Cherokee Heritage Center.

Lisa serves her community as a teaching artist, historian, curator, culture bearer, and advocate, and is also a board member of ArtsConnect in Topeka and a facilitator for the Mid-America Arts Alliance in Kansas City.

785arts.com right Lisa LaRue-Baker (Cherokee Nation) weaving a double-wall basket.

Photo: Morgan Long. Image courtesy of the author. below Entrance to DoPiKa: A Land Acknowledgment, featuring Power and Place, a photograph by Robert Hicks (Pyramid Lake Paiute), with graphic design by the Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library and Alice C. Sabatini Gallery in Topeka, Kansas. Image courtesy of the Topeka and Shawnee County Public Library (CC BY-SA 2.0).

CENTER. Elders teach that Center represents not only the Sacred Fire but also yourself, similar to the old adage, “Wherever you go, there you are.” At the center of this column are the artists whose work I have become intimate with in the curation of the DOPIKA PROJECT, a land acknowledgment program that honors the six tribes who ceded land to make way for Topeka and Shawnee County, Kansas. These exhibitions featured artists from those tribes as well as Native artists who live in the area today. This twelve-week-long public exhibition, which included a Land Back ceremony to the Kaw Nation, has been one of the most meaningful projects in my career.

Three venues participated, each with a different theme. The Alice C. Sabatini Gallery at the Topeka and Shawnee County Public Librar y FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 41, WINTER 2024 | 15

Native American jewelry and arts marketplace open by appointment in Farmington, Maine shop online: www.homeandaway.gallery

The artistry of Earl Plummer, Navajo Sculpture | Prints | Jewelry |Beadwork |Baskets Entertainment District hosted Three Sisters at the Morris Art Gallery. This exhibition challenged local artists to research various tribal stories about Julia, Josephine, and Victoria Gonville-Pappan, the 19th-century Kaw sisters whose treaty lands became Topeka, or the Three Sisters crops of beans, squash, and corn, and then create a piece of work showing their interpretation. Mona Cliff (Aaniiih/ Nakota), painted Three Sisters of NOTO, a mural that celebrates the Three Sisters. facebook.com/dopikaproject

above Konrad Pumpkin Seed (Oglala Lakota) surrounds himself with some of his work.

Photo: Natasha Cross (Oglala Lakota). Image courtesy of the author. opposite, top Lydia Cheshewalla (Osage), collage on paper. opposite, bottom Mona Cliff (Aaniiih/Nakota), Past/Presence/Future II, 2021, gas mask, seed beads, beeswax, 8 × 11 × 7 in. Photo: Aaron Paden. Image courtesy of the author.

combined art with history in DoPiKa: A Land Acknowledgment. ArtsConnect, a local nonprofit arts organization, hosted We Are the Keepers, a series of murals along the Shunganunga Creek that explore themes of water protection and environmental justice. In a different but related project, the NOTO Arts and

16 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 41, WINTER 2024

NORTH. A rising artist to watch for is KONRAD PUMPKIN SEED (Oglala Lakota). This young Neo-Expressionist painter is not only talented, but poignant, creative, educational, prolific, and passionate. A joy to work with, he is open to advice from Elders and peers alike and meets deadlines. He is both respectful and respected. Before graduating from high school, Konrad participated in invitational and juried exhibitions, won awards, and had a solo gallery show.

SEVEN DIRECTIONS

During his recent artist talk at the Alice C. Sabatini Gallery, Konrad said, “When I create a piece based on a theme, I am not just educating the viewer but educating myself and learning too.” He currently attends Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kansas. His presence in our community made him an integral part of the DoPiKa Project, with work in all three exhibitions. facebook.com/KonradTicesArt EAST. Origin of the rising sun, the East is powerful and sacred. Whoever earns this position on the art compass is special, so I designate LYDIA CHESHEWALLA (Osage). A conceptual and cultural transdisciplinary artist who advocates for the environment, she mindfully explores many genres of the arts including ceramics, painting, weaving, installation art, and photography. Her works—some archival, some ephemeral—tell our stories and postulate the future. She writes in her artist statement: “My life and art resist settler narratives telling us all Natives are dead. We artists, scientists, and healers are still here. Beautifully and exuberantly alive, we continue walking our ancestors’ path of resistance—living, creating, and telling the truths of our existence.” lydia-cheshewalla.com

WEST. MONA CLIFF (Aaniiih/Nakota) caught my attention with one of her early beaded gas masks (yes, you read that right) titled Past/Presence/Future II. An enrolled citizen of the Fort Belknap Indian Community, she is a sculptor, painter, beadwork artist, and textile artist.

Mona will participate in Future Imaginaries: Art, Fashion, Technology, which will be shown at the Autry Museum of the American West in Los Angeles from September 15, 2024, to June 2026. The exhibition and publication will explore the roles of Indigenous art and technology in actively shaping and reshaping colonial narratives of the past, Native agency in the present, and visions of a sovereign future. monacliff.com

SOUTH. In the spirit of peace and healing comes the work of KENT MILLER (Iowa/Assiniboine/Sioux) who surprisingly has never exhibited his work until recently. He creates art for his own enjoyment and as gifts for those close to him, and truly exudes the Native spirit of generosity. When ArtsConnect invited Kent to show in the exhibition We Are the Keepers, he was pleasantly surprised at the accolades and admirers. For more than a decade he has served as an advocate for Native American victims of violent crime and collaborated with Rebekah Jones (Iowa) to create a program on the Prairie Band Potawatomi Reservation to help survivors heal through art making. I hope to see his work appear in more shows.

Miller is a true example of a humble, Native man who accepts his talents and gifts as part of his life and inspires younger artists to never say never.

ABOVE. Cited as the most awarded female Indian artist at work in the United States during her lifetime, JOAN HILL (Muscogee/Cherokee, 1930–2020) continues, posthumously, to set the standard. Under the tutorship of the legendary Dick West (Southern Cheyenne, 1912–1996), she mastered Flatstyle painting and brought it to the foreground from the annals of history and artifact.

She also delved into expressionism and nonobjective abstraction. Her strong ties to both her Cherokee and Muscogee families and impressive memory of stories told by her grandfather motivated

FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 41, WINTER 2024 | 17

SEVEN DIRECTIONS

Joan to put the history and culture of the Southeastern tribes before Indian Removal onto paper and canvas.

BELOW. I chose REUBEN IRONHORSE-KENT (Iowa/ Otoe/Kickapoo) for this direction, as he uses clay from below the ground that we walk and live on. A man with a multitude of talents, from flute making and playing to writing, sculpting, and storytelling, his approach to ceramics is not only artistic but one of profound respect. In our discussions, he explained many different tribal protocols for gathering and processing clay, different styles of sculpting, as well as firing. His work is beautiful, and my admiration for his artistry is best summed up by his quote: “I don’t believe anyone should create their own boundaries just because society tells you to.” facebook.com/AxwehuCreations

above, top Joan Hill (Muscogee/Cherokee, 1930–2020) drawing in her studio, ca. 1970s. Image courtesy of the Estate of Joan Hill. above, bottom Reuben Ironhorse-Kent (Iowa/Otoe/Kickapoo), Wahglixaxaje, 2021, clay, glaze. Image courtesy of the artist.

18 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 41, WINTER 2024

HEAR THEIR VOICES For 90 years, the Stewart Indian School operated as a federal boarding school for Native children. Today, the Stewart story is told through the belongings, artwork, and voices of its former students. Explore exhibits, changing galleries, the research library, reflection room, and educational spaces.

10am–5pm | Monday–Friday Closed Weekends, State and Federal Holidays 1 Jacobsen Way, Carson City, Nevada

(775) 687-7608 StewartIndianSchool.com

TEXTURES & SEASONS The History & Art of Hopi Silver Overlay

By A.M. Palmer

T

HE PASSION of Hopi silversmiths spans generations and, in compelling fashion, speaks to the influences of their religion and culture. The poignance of life in the American Southwest attends each piece as artists create compositions with silver, local gemstones, and a wealth of ancestral customs. As caretakers of the environment, laboring to cultivate and rest according to the seasons, the Hopi have developed a rich aesthetic, with Hopi jewelers rising to prominence worldwide. From the historical insights to the magnificent silver overlay of many

Hopi jewelers including Roy Talahaftewa, Lucion Koinva, and Jason Takala, the Hopi style celebrates their enduring culture and suggests a promising future.

To best understand the significance of Hopi art, specifically silver overlay jewelry, the subject can be approached aesthetically as well as historically, explored through Hopi culture and the intricate beauty of their craftsmanship.

Hopi art reflects the texture and seasons of human experience and their holistic approach to daily life and artistic work.

The Hopi have a matrilineal with a wealth of clans and kinship groups

who live in eleven ancestral villages.1 The Hopi Tribe’s government is headquartered in Northeastern Arizona, and their language belongs to the Northern Uto-Aztecan language family. With 18,321 enrolled citizens, and 8,284 living on the Hopi Reservation.2 Hopi artists produce beautiful works inspired by a reverence for nature and a deep cultural belief system. Many aspects of their culture are exemplified by art including silver overlay jewelry. From sacred symbols to depictions of daily life, Hopi art expresses interconnectedness and harmony. As the jeweler’s hand shapes new

1. Wesley Bernardini, “Identity as History: Hopi Clans and the Curation of Oral Tradition,” Journal of Anthropological Research, 64, no. 4 (Winter 2008), 486.

2. “The Hopi Tribe,” Red Feather Development Group, web.

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creations, so the progress of life unfolds according to the seasons.

ORIGINS HOPI SILVER OVERLAY only came to prominence during the 20th century.

In her book, Hopi Silver: The History and Hallmarks of Hopi Silversmithing, Margaret Nickelson Wright chronicles the modern development of the art, which began to take shape during the late 19th century.3 During this time, a key figure emerged who transformed the craft with his skill and willingness to teach.

At some point after 1890, the Zuni trader and silversmith Lanyade instructed Sikyatala (Yellow Light), a Hopi artist with Zuni ancestry of the Hopi Mustard clan, in the ways of silversmithing.

Lanyade likely taught Sikyatala how to solder, who, over time, equipped his own workshop with a permanent forge, crucibles, ladles, and balances. From there, Sikyatala would go on to instruct other Hopis.4 By 1906 men from all three Hopi mesas were creating silverwork with various decorative elements, some originating from Hopi beliefs and practices. Other early Hopi jewelry reflected the styles of neighboring tribes and the influence

above The Hopi Veterans class of the Hopi Arts & Crafts Guild, 1949. Thirteen veterans enrolled under the GI Bill of Rights.

Fred Kabotie, art instructor, front left; Paul Saufkie, silversmith instructor, front, second to the left (all Hopi). Photo: Milton Snow. Northern Arizona University, Colorado Plateau Digital Collections, Hopi Cultural Preservation Office HCPO. PH.2003.1.HC5.31. opposite Roy Talahaftewa (Hopi), three views of Bear Bracelet, sterling silver overlay cuff. Image courtesy of the artist and Southwest Traditions.

3. Margaret Nickelson Wright, Hopi Silver: The History and Hallmarks of Hopi Silversmithing (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2003), 6.

4. Wright, Hopi Silver, 9.

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regardless of commercial pressure, Hopi silversmiths developed extraordinary techniques for jewelry making.

With support from the Indian Arts and Crafts Board, Hopi artists Paul Saufkie and Fred Kabotie obtained funding to create an 18-month-long silversmithing class for Hopi World War II veterans in 1946. They specialized in overlay, as recommended by MaryRussell Ferrell Colton from the Museum of Northern Arizona, who worked with Saukfie and Kabotie to develop the style.

In 1949 they established the Hopi Silvercraft Cooperative Guild.5 With Saufkie’s skill in metalwork and Kabotie’s design acumen, the program was created to provide returning servicemen with a profession. As the students hammered silver bars into sheets and applied their designs, the modern overlay technique was born.

WORKMANSHIP & METHODS

above, top Silver overlay pins, concha belt, necklaces, and more made by the Hopi Arts and Crafts Guild, Oraibi High School, December 1948. Photo: Milton Snow. Northern Arizona University, Colorado Plateau Digital Collections, Hopi Cultural Preservation Office, HCPO.PH.2003.1.HC5.18. above, bottom Paul Saufkie, silverwork instructor, and student soldering at the Hopi Arts and Crafts Guild, 1949. Photo: Milton Snow. Northern Arizona University, Colorado Plateau Digital Collections, Hopi Cultural Preservation Office, HCPO.PH.2003.1.HC5.46.

of Spanish leatherwork, but all possessing the unique character of the makers.

Interestingly, along with the necessary skills of craftsmanship, time was also of importance. Jewelry produced for members of the Hopi community rather than visitors was generally of a more refined quality since the artists were unhurried and could aim for perfection. However, when demand for tourist items increased, speed of production sometimes overshadowed quality and innovation. And yet,

THE TOOLS OF HOPI SILVERSMITHS allow them to craft delicate designs while stamping and shaping pieces of metal with precision—no easy task. To execute the work, they use a variety of files, hammers, and saws, the implements necessary to transform silver into art. Over the years, advancements in soldering materials and the advent of acetylene torches have made the work easier. In contrast, early silversmiths had to make use of blowpipes and flux for their soldering.6 Creating silver overlay is a fairly straightforward process, but precision is essential. Utilizing two layers of metal, the artist cuts a design on the top layer and then solders the two pieces together.

This enables the maker to create the contrasting negative and positive spaces that characterize the art form. When the design is drawn during the etching phase, the artist is careful to create clear lines with no overlap. From there, a jeweler’s saw is used to cut the outer lines of the drawing. After the cutting process, pieces are removed to reveal the design.

5. Wright, Hopi Silver, 6–8.

6. “Flux is a soldering compound that keeps the soldering joints clean by blocking oxygen, which causes oxidation. Flux cleans, coats, and protects the piece and enables the solder to flow easily between the joints when heated.” Megan Coward, “How is Flux Used in Jewelry Making?,” International Gem Society, web.

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Although the work can be painstaking and requires rigor, great freedom of expression is granted by delicate techniques. For example, the angles of the drawing can be softened or hardened by subtle movements of the thread saw. Then the inside surface of the design is polished with honed files, allowing light and shadow to further accent the work. The fit of the silver pieces is of key importance.

When the second plate is slightly larger than the first, the soldering process is a bit easier. As the pieces are joined, flux is applied to the surface being welded, along with brazing material.

The methods of workmanship involve numerous steps, so each artist must master a variety of skills. However, storytelling imbued with symbolic images breathes life into the metal.

CREATING NARRATIVES ROY TALAHAFTEWA, born in the Second Mesa village of Shungopavi in 1955, has mastered silversmith techniques as well as storytelling. He builds on the rich history of Hopi silverwork and has developed new techniques to convey his narratives. He combines tufa cast with overlay methods to create unique pieces with contrasting porous and smooth textures. One example of his work is an exquisite pendant that features the shape of a Hopi maiden’s butterfly whorl hairstyle and symbolic elements to describe her journey. Turquoise represents purity while a combination of minerals symbolizes her shift from childhood to adulthood. Building on this theme, Talahaftewa placed a circular piece of turquoise in the center of ironwood, further emphasizing the purity of the maiden’s heart. He also included designs that represent clouds, lightning, and prayers. The theme of life seasons offers a focal point as the artist illustrates harmony between humans and the natural world. The rough texture of silver created by tufa casting contrasts beautifully with Talahaftewa’s divisions of space. Brightly colored stones accent the ironwood without overshadowing it as the maiden’s hairstyle creates the overall theme.

above, top Roy Talahaftewa (Hopi),

two views of Sunface Belt Buckle, tufa-cast sterling silver overlay, turquoise, spiny oyster, jet, lapis lazuli, 21/4 × 37/8 in. Image courtesy of the artist and Southwest Traditions.

above, bottom Roy Talahaftewa (Hopi), Belt Buckle, sterling silver overlay. Image courtesy of the artist and Southwest Traditions.

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MAN IN THE MAZE above, top Lucion Koinva (Hopi), Rings, sterling silver.

Image courtesy of Morning Star Traders. above, bottom Lucion Koinva (Hopi), Man in the Maze Ring, sterling silver. Image courtesy of Morning Star Traders. opposite, top Jason Takala (Hopi), Bear and Eagle Feathers, 2023, large double overlay silver seed pot, 2 in. high × 5 in. diameter with lid. Photo: King Galleries. Image courtesy of King Galleries, private collection. opposite, bottom Jason Takala (Hopi), Gold Bears and Feathers, 2022, large double overlay silver seed pot with 14-karat gold, 5 in. diameter. Photo: King Galleries.

Image courtesy of King Galleries, private collection.

ALSO FROM SHUNGOPAVI and born in 1970, Lucion Koinva draws inspiration from the region’s most ancient symbols.

A member of the Sun Forehead clan, Koinva created his Man in the Maze series to depict an ancestral design found in Southwestern petroglyphs known to Arizona tribes. Considered a representation of life’s journey, the motif fits beautifully into the practice of Hopi silver overlay.

However, Koinva is certainly not alone in his appreciation of maze imagery.

Artist Jason Takala, known for the precision of his cutting and his mastery of double overlay, enjoys “making pottery” as a silversmith and also works with gold.

Takala has created his own interpretations of the Man in the Maze theme, often utilizing the abstract forms of pottery design. His oeuvre encompasses a variety

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of elements. Bears, eagle feathers, and moon phases figure prominently into his compositions. Whereas Koinva’s designs often contain a single, stylized element, Takala favors interlocking patterns, designs more common to textiles than silver. The works of Talahaftewa, Koinva, and Takala represent a useful overview of styles and techniques.

In the highest expressions of the art, Hopi silverwork fuses prosaic and sacred themes into rich patterns, making use of metal as well as stones and shells. In Arizona, artists find turquoise, peridot, geodes, petrified wood, and amethyst in relative abundance, so the embellishments of silverwork can be quite ornate.

As for the subject matter of the art, transitions from youth to maturity, living in harmony with the land, corn, wildlife, celestial beings, and celebration of the seasons are prevalent themes.

CURATORIAL SPACES AS HOPI ART MOVES through stages of appropriation, change, and repatriation, how to curate the work can be a challenge. In the gallery setting, custom pieces are presented in display cases for sale, with lighting and props used accordingly. Sometimes historical elements are included to remind buyers of the work’s authenticity. I asked a gallery owner in Arizona about creating displays for custom silver jewelry. Specifically, I wanted to understand how he cultivates authenticity, conveying the beauty and

power of Hopi life to his customers. The answer was simple. In most cases, his wife experiments with display elements and photo shoots, following the lead of her intuition. Over the years, her approach has been very successful, representing a variety of Indigenous artists and selling their work across the world. However, for the complexities of museum work, curators must focus on the details of history and culture much more carefully.

And, happily, the task often inspires innovation.

The work of early Hopi silversmiths gradually developed into the ornate creations we see today. The work is communal as well as solitary, as we see at the Museum of Northern Arizona (MNA), where artists gather to study their craft and develop new forms of expression.

Such collaborative efforts began decades ago. During the 1930s and 1940s, MNA founder, Mary-Russell Ferrell Colton, worked with curator Virgil Hubert for the advancement of Hopi silversmithing and supported the founding of the FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 41, WINTER 2024 | 25

through 2022. Visitors witnessed the development of technical and aesthetic methods in a powerful narrative, comprised of pieces from the John and Carol Krena Collection, among others. A blend of art and utilitarian practicality, the silver boxes offer an interesting contrast to the pendants, rings, and bracelets for which most Hopi silversmiths are known. The Heard Museum also champions Hopi overlay silverwork through its museum store and annual fair.

THE FUTURE A LEVEL OF TENSION will likely remain between the commercial aspects of the art and its analysis, and challenges related to the changing needs of the silversmiths and their protégés. As historian Paula Baxter noted back in 1994:

Hopi silverwork is continually enriched by emerging artists who augment the canon by adding their own narratives.

above Jason Takala (Hopi), Dragonfly and Cattail Jar, double overlay silver seed pot with turquoise, coral. Photo: King Galleries. Image courtesy of King Galleries.

Hopi Silvercraft Cooperative Guild.

The museum supports craftsmanship by hosting exhibitions, annual art markets, and academic research, attracting experts worldwide. Atsunori Ito of the National Museum of Ethnology (Minpaku) in Japan collaborates with Hopi silversmiths to review and interpret the MNA’s collection.

It is important to note that jewelry is not the only form of silverwork that carries a wealth of Hopi designs. At the Heard Museum in Phoenix, utilitarian pieces were given their time in the spotlight. The exhibition Elegant Vessels: A Century of Southwest Silver Boxes (2023) highlighted Indigenous silverwork and included Hopi artists Paul Saufkie and Morris Robinson. The exhibition included 75 boxes dating from 1914

The making and selling of Southwestern Native American jewellery is a thriving business throughout the United States of America, and in the past two decades it has begun to have an international impact on contemporary jewellery design.… Over the last twenty years, there have been some stabs at formalist evaluation, mainly in the form of museum exhibition catalogue essays. Increasingly, shifts between anthropological and art historical explanations are the product of varied approaches adopted by scholarly investigators.7 With so many interests involved, the years following Baxter’s observations have witnessed a flowering of creativity as well as the growth of business.

However, in the final analysis, perhaps the core issues remain straightforward.

Hopi silverwork is continually enriched by emerging artists who augment the canon by adding their own narratives.

With each new creation, a story unfolds about seasons of change and cultivation of the land, or the memories of an elder, carefully commemorated in silver.

A.M. Palmer is a nonfiction author and retired City of San Diego park ranger with work published in Adelaide Literary Magazine, Decolonial Passage, Belle Ombre, and other publications. A member of the National Association of Independent Writers and Editors, Palmer’s second book, Workman’s Orthodoxy: Collected Essays & Poems, was published this year.

7. Paula Baxter, “Cross-Cultural Controversies in the Design History of Southwestern American Indian Jewellery,” Journal of Design History, 7, no. 4 (1994), 233.

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HIRAM PEYNETSA

is an award-winning artist from the Bremette Epaloose family of Zuni fetish carvers. Well known and respected for his fine renderings of medicine bears, fierce badgers, and high flying eagles, he typically uses polished marble, high quality lapis, and brilliant turquoise among other beautiful stones.

Hiram's collectable carvings are detailed with incised fur or defined feathers often featuring fine inlay work and decorative etching.

Soaring Eagle Hiram Peynetsa, Zuni Pueblo

Since 1981 Fetishes Jewelry Pottery 227 Don Gaspar, Santa Fe Keshi.com 505.989.8728

Black marble, inlaid Zuni sun face, turquoise eyes, 4 ½˝ wide, 2˝ deep, ¾˝ tall

Spark of the Eagle Dancer The Collecting Legacy of Lambert Wilson Join us in celebrating the life and legacy of Lambert Wilson in this exhibition featuring over 140 works of contemporary Native American art from the collection of one of Western North Carolina’s most notable art enthusiasts. Baskets, pottery, carvings, and more tell the story of Wilson’s impact on countless lives over the fifty years he spent building his collection and forging relationships with Native artists from the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, Cherokee Nation, and sovereign nations of the Southwest. from left: Lottie Queen Stamper (Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians), Woven Rivercane Mat with Chief’s Daughter Design (detail), 1965. John Julius Wilnoty (Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians), Eagle Dancer (small version), n.d. Tammy Garcia (Santa Clara Pueblo), Harvest Time, 2019. Photographs by Tim Burleson.

JANUARY 16 – JUNE 28, 2024

| WESTERN CAROLINA UNIVERSITY FINE ART MUSEUM

Free and Open to the Public | Tues–Fri 10–4 | Thurs 10–7 | 828.277.ARTS | bardoartscenter.wcu.edu | @bardoartscenter |

FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 41, WINTER 2024 | 27

LOOKING BACK Bob Haozous’s Cultural Crossroads of the Americas

By Suzanne Newman Fricke, PhD

O

N SEPTEMBER 18, 1996, Warm Springs Chiricahua Apache sculptor Bob Haozous unveiled Cultural Crossroads of the Americas on the University of New Mexico (UNM) campus. The response was unexpected. The university, which had commissioned the piece and supported the artist during design and construction, revoked their approval and demanded major changes to the work. Though the sculpture reflected the approved maquette, the addition of a coil of steel barbed wire across the top led to a lengthy argument between the artist and the university, which culminated in multiple legal charges.

This public artwork was part of the university’s beautification of the south

side of campus, a project that included several other sculptures, a remodeled park, and a new bookstore. As a centerpiece for the park, the UNM Board of Regents authorized a competition for a sculpture on the theme of New Mexico at the cultural crossroads based on Albuquerque’s location at the intersection of two historic roads, Route 66 and the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro.

The Camino Real, the Royal Road of the Interior Land, was the north– south trade route that linked Mexico City with Spain’s northernmost colony in Santa Fe from the 16th through 19th centuries. Route 66, as memorialized in the eponymous song, was the first almost transcontinental road connecting Santa Monica, California, with Chicago, Illinois.

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The location chosen for the sculpture marked both roads. Central Avenue south of the UNM campus follows what had been Route 66, while nearby I-25 follows the Camino Real.

The selection committee, which included representatives from the UNM Public Art Committee, the Albuquerque Arts Board, and UNM faculty, set up a competition for a large-scale sculpture.

Not only did the piece need to reflect the chosen theme, but it also needed to be large and tall, so it could be seen by bus riders along Central, and the design needed to be distinct and accessible. To make the process more open and inclusive, the committee invited six New Mexican artists to create maquettes, which were then displayed inside the

UNM Art Museum so the general public could vote on their favorite.

Of all the submissions, Haozous’s maquette was a clear favorite with both the committee and the general public.

His design captured the duality of Albuquerque, a modern city built on ancient Indigenous lands. The composition embodied the theme literally, juxtaposing historic and contemporary America. To represent the Indigenous cultures of the Americas, he depicted three Aztec women standing on Quetzalcoatl, the plumed serpent deity of the Olmec, Mayan, Toltec, and Aztec peoples.

Inspired by images from Mesoamerican codices, these figures wear garments and adornments of precontact societies, including embroidered skirts, headbands, and earspools. One carries a bundle of reeds, a symbol of the passage of time, and an ear of corn, a symbol of a good harvest.

On the other side, Haozous represented urban US life with skyscrapers, the Statue of Liberty, the McDonald’s arches, a dollar sign, and other symbols of capitalistic greed, including a line of cars and trucks spewing smoke that runs across the bottom of the piece while planes fly overhead. The two halves of the sculpture are linked by a smokestack billowing smog into the skies. Haozous contrasted sharp angles and geometric shapes for the urban side and flowing curved lines for the precontact Indigenous side.

Haozous’s entry received the most votes from the general public and the committee. As Peter Walch, then the director of the UNM Art Museum and chair of the Art in Public Places Committee, observed, “The nature of the Haozous, far from requiring us to bend our conception of what this art might be, was the most appropriate in terms of creating something that would be dramatically available to people driving along Central.”1 With the support of the university and the public, the artist received initial partial payment and proceeded to construct the piece.

Haozous constructed the sculpture with Cor-Ten steel, an alloy with a high tensile strength. The material weathers to a rich rusted color and does not require much maintenance, even when placed

outside in the harsh desert environment.

Installed on steel pillars, the sculpture was the desired height and easily seen from buses and cars traveling along Central Avenue. Following Haozous’s design, two intersecting walkways were placed underneath, providing a footpath to suggest how cultures, even two with a divisive relationship, can come together.

During construction, engineers requested Haozous use a thinner sheet of metal than he had originally planned so the sculpture would be lighter and less likely to fall over and possibly cause injury or damage. The shift from ¾-inch to ⅜-inch steel necessitated more structural support, namely, adding a frame on all four sides. Where the edges had been open and lacy in the maquette, the full-sized work was encased in a box with smooth edges. The artist did not want the sculpture to look too much like a billboard, so Haozous placed a coil of steel barbed wire across the top, attached to brackets at either side to add depth and interest. The artist used barbed

above Bob Haozous and friend. Image courtesy of the Allan Houser Foundation. opposite Bob Haozous (Warm Springs Chiricahua Apache), Cultural Crossroads of the Americas, 1996, Cor-Ten steel (wire removed in 2000), 29 × 25 feet, commissioned by the University of New Mexico.

Photo: Elizabeth Silva. Image courtesy of the University of New Mexico.

wire in many other pieces, usually added across the top since the material was both visually striking and historically significant. Invented by the 1860s, barbed wire provided affordable fencing for ranchers, allowing them to contain more land in the West for cattle grazing. Yet a darker side of barbed wire was its use to mark the boundary between the United States and Mexico, a symbol of division and hostility to others in the world.

The contract between UNM and Haozous anticipated the possible need for adjustments to the sculpture as he expanded the 6-inch maquette to 29 feet by 25 feet, allowing for nonconceptual changes and minor adjustments as deemed aesthetically and structurally necessary. For the artist, the addition of the razor wire was aesthetically necessary and, far from changing the meaning, enhanced the message of the divisiveness already in the work. But for the planning committee, led by Peter Walch, the wire constituted a major modification of the style and introduced new themes to the piece, which they believed constituted a violation of the contract. Walch stated that “the wire on top is totally a new element … [that] goes contrary to the spirit and letter of the contract.”2 The committee insisted that Haozous remove the wire and the brackets and threatened to withhold final payment until he did so. Though the sculpture was on the campus of the University of New Mexico, and it was the owner, they could not unilaterally remove the wire without the artist’s permission due to the 1990 Visual Artists Rights Act (VARA), which gives visual artists the same rights over their creations as writers. On December 31, 1996, UNM President Richard Peck sent an official letter to Haozous insisting that he either remove the wire or the entire sculpture. When Haozous declined to take off the wire, he received a second ultimatum: remove the wire or return the first payment.

For Haozous, this was a case of censorship. He argued that to change the sculpture once it had been completed would deny the artist his voice. For the university, this was a contractual disagreement. Walch argued that, since the public had been

1. Anthony DellaFlora, “Art with Visibility,” Albuquerque Journal, July 2, 1995, D1.

2. Lynn Pyne, “Like Father, Unlike Son: Sculptor Breaks Away from Artistic Legacy,” Phoenix Gazette, January 20, 1993, D1.

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brought in as part of the decision-making process, significantly altering the piece would lower the public’s trust.

With no settlement in sight, the UNM Native American Kiva Club, the Albuquerque Arts Alliance, and the Morning Star Foundation organized a public forum for an open discussion on the issue. On January 22, 1997, Haozous and Walch attended along with scholars on both sides and more than 150 members of the community. Edwin Wade from the Museum of Northern Arizona was on the panel and asked: “Are we treating this artist as we treat other university people? Are you going to ask that a professor’s entire lecture series be subject to approval by an arbitration board and, if found to digress, be accused of a breach of contract? Is this not a double standard? Is an artist less of an intellectual contribution and property than a professor?”

Walch asserted that the barbed wire on the artwork changed “the tone and basic statement of the piece, turning it into something ‘divisive’ and ‘alienating.’”3

He underscored his view that this was only a legal matter, stating: “We wanted the piece to represent the corridor of the Americas, the Camino Real for the Central Avenue area, the image of Route 66, the meeting of diverse cultures and values. Any substantial change must be approved in writing. This is a necessary protection to protect the rights of not only the university but the public as well.”4 He even acknowledged that the sculpture was stronger with the wire, but he reiterated his stance that he could not allow it due to the judging process.

The audience was overwhelmingly in favor of keeping the Cultural Crossroads as it was, noting that it was better than the maquette and more meaningful for the state. Though a few voices in the audience countered that everyone has to follow the specifics of a contract and artistic process was not an excuse for going against an agreement, support for the artist and his vision dominated.

Despite the outpouring of public support for Haozous and his artwork, the university maintained its position.

By March 1997, the legal showdown had escalated. Both sides brought a range of charges against each other.

The school accused the artist of a breach of contract and noncompliance.

Haozous sued for nonpayment, breach of contract, infringement of civil rights, and violation of his First Amendment right to freedom of expression and his Fourteenth Amendment right of due process, arguing that he was the victim of censorship. Unfortunately for Haozous, New Mexico First Judicial District Court Judge Stephen Pfeffer took the university’s side, ruling that the addition of the wire constituted a major change to the sculpture and that it needed proper approval. In the end, the judge dismissed all of Haozous’s claims, arguing that it was not censorship.

In 2000, Haozous faced a legal ultimatum: repay the $47,500 advance payment or take off the barbed wire and receive the final payment. The university agreed to pay the remaining $32,500 owed if Haozous removed the wire by June 1, 2000. That summer, the artist—despite a

3. El Lobo Rojo, “Barbed Wire and Public Art: Reflections on the Controversy of ‘Cultural Crossroads of the Americas’ by Bob Haozous,” Notes From A New Mexico Diaspora, July 3, 2013, web.

4. El Lobo Rojo, “Barbed Wire and Public Art.”

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above Bob Haozous (Warm Springs Chiricahua Apache), Cultural Crossroads of the Americas, 1996, Cor-Ten steel (wire removed in 2000), 29 × 25 feet, commissioned by the University of New Mexico. Photo: Elizabeth Silva. Image courtesy of the University of New Mexico. opposite Installation of Cultural Crossroads of the Americas, 1996, with concertina wire intact. Image courtesy of Bob Haozous, Allan Houser Foundation.

cast on his arm—climbed a ladder and removed the wire and brackets. The court demanded that the public and the press not be alerted to lower the risk of any protest.

Cultural Crossroads of the Americas is still on display in its shorn state. In the aftermath of the lawsuit, Haozous feared for his career and worried that other public institutions would hesitate to hire him. UNM found its reputation tarnished. It had hired a noted Native American sculptor to demonstrate its open, democratic approach to art and ideas but, in the end, looked like a bully.

When Walch retired in 2001, and later died in 2014, he was better remembered for this controversy than for his accomplishments during his two decades of teaching and his 16 years as the director of the UNM Art Museum. Through to the end, Walch maintained that his objections stemmed from the artist circumventing the process, not from the style, subject, or meaning of the piece.

For Haozous, the experience left him wary of the public art process. “I

learned a lot about censorship and control and especially about the forced Western aesthetic that places Indigenous ‘art’ as a craft and a product,” he said. “The UNM issue was enlightening and a positive experience in many ways other than economic, which condemned me as an angry iconoclast. I use the experience as an educational tool.”5 Looking back at these events, the argument boils down to product versus process, with the artist focusing on the final result and the university concerned with the letter of the law. For Haozous, it was about respecting the creative process and the artist, while, for the university, it was about following the contract in its most literal sense. The University of New Mexico displayed an officiousness and an obstinance that was baffling and disrespectful to the artist. One question

remains: would the university have treated a non-Native artist the same way? The university has sponsored many artworks by non-Native artists that might be considered controversial in design and message—and always supported the projects. Its determination to force Haozous to conform to certain expectations verged on obsessive, possibly even racist. Haozous was punished for trying to uphold his artistic process and vision, perhaps as a warning to other BIPOC artists not to disrespect the existing power structures.

Whatever the case, the repercussions of the controversy between the artist and the university damaged both parties, adding to, rather than simply memorializing, the divisive history described in Cultural Crossroads of the Americas.

After 30 years teaching art history and curating, Suzanne Newman Fricke, PhD, is now the owner of Gallery Hózhó at Hotel Chaco in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Her current projects include a Getty PST–sponsored exhibition at the Autry Museum of the American West focusing on Indigenous Futurisms.

5. Bob Haozous in discussion with the author, February 27, 2023.

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MARCO TEMPORAL Indigenous Art & Activism in Brazil Contemporary Indigenous Brazilian artists respond to a precedentsetting legal thesis designed to restrict Indigenous territorial rights

By Mariana Brazão

O

N SEPTEMBER 21, 2023, Brazil’s Supreme Federal Court (Supremo Tribunal Federal, STF) delivered a landmark decision when nine of the eleven justices voted against the heavily debated Marco Temporal, or Time Frame Thesis. This legal framework creates a cut-off date for land claims that states Indigenous peoples only have legal claim to ancestral lands they physically occupied on October 5, 1988, the date

of the promulgation of Brazil’s current constitution.1 Just days earlier, Brazilian Indigenous artists and activists filled Times Square in New York City as part of Banco do Brasil’s All Amazônia campaign, which coincided with the 78th United Nations General Assembly and New York Climate Week. The campaign raises awareness about the importance of protecting the Amazon. The Times Square intervention lit up the digital screens and billboards in

vibrant colors that showcased digitized art by Brazilian contemporary Indigenous artists such as Moara Tupinambá (Tupinambá) and included excerpts by Indigenous writer and philosopher Ailton Krenak (Krenak).

Shortly after, Indigenous singer and songwriter Djuena Tikuna (Tikuna) took the stage on the famous Red Steps to sing in her Native language. Occupying what she called the “showcase of capitalism,” she denounced the “unsustainable

1. Mariana Muniz, “STF derruba marco temporal para demarcação de terras indígenas,” O Globo, September 21, 2023, web.

1. Footnote with a rule.

2. Footnote sans rule.

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above Marco Temporal protest in the Tuba Tuba village of the Yudjá people in the Baixo Xingu region of the Xingu Indigenous Park, 2023. Photo: Mariana Brazão. opposite Jaider Esbell (Macuxi, 1979–2021), Entidades (Entities), 2021, inflatable sculpture, 17 meters long, installed at the 34th São Paulo Biennial. Photo: Mariana Brazão.

systems of destruction” that have systematically exploited Indigenous bodies and land.2 Behind her and the dancers who performed with her, supporters held up a large black-and-yellow sign that read, “Marco Temporal Não” (No to Marco Temporal).

Indigenous activism and art in Brazil are synergistic forces characteristic of Indigenous resistance in the country.

When called up to testify in front of the Constitutional Assembly of the National Congress in 1987 before a vote on Indigenous rights, Ailton Krenak covered himself in jagua, black paint made of Brazilian jenipapo fruit. This historic and televised public performance, which symbolized “both grief and war,” was when Krenak realized the “power of art as a platform for activism.”3

As Djuena Tikuna puts it, “The fight against Marco Temporal is a fight for life.”4 Marco Temporal represents century-long tactics instituted by settler systems—in this case, the Brazilian government’s court system—to legitimize the colonial occupation and destruction of ancestral Indigenous land.

Without proper demarcation practices, Indigenous peoples’ existence is at risk, and that of living beings across the planet. While the STF decision is an outstanding victory, Indigenous resistance won’t stop until their lands are unequivocally safeguarded and respected. As Marco Temporal and other similar measures are debated, Indigenous communities will continue to share their voices through their art.

SPI, FUNAI & THE 1988 CONSTITUTION INDIGENOUS PEOPLES and their rights to their land have been delegitimized from the first encounter with Portuguese colonial settlers in 1500 to the founding of the Brazilian nation into the present. International delegates at the XVI Congress of Americanists in Vienna in 1908 accused Brazil of fostering genocide against the Indigenous peoples.

In response, Brazil established its first federal agency to oversee Indigenous issues in 1910. Named the Indian Protection and National Worker Location Service (Serviço de Proteção aos Índios

2. Djuena Tikuna, “Numagüe! Ontem, na Times Square, ocupamos a vitrine do capitalismo, mostramos ao mundo que resistimos e não aceitamos mais os projetos de destruição em nossos quintais.…,” Instagram @djuenatikuna, video caption, September 20, 2023, web. Translated from Portuguese by the author.

3. Naine Terena and Claudia Mattos Avolese, Véxoa: We know (Nós sabemos), wall text, Tufts University Art Galleries, Aidekman Arts Center, Medford, MA, September 5–December 10, 2023.

4. Djuena Tikuna, “Numagüe!,” Instagram @djuenatikuna, September 20, 2023, web. Translation by author.

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e Localização de Trabalhadores Nacionais, SPILTN), it later became the Indian Protection Service (Serviço de Proteção aos Índios, SPI). Tasked to protect Indigenous lands and cultures, the SPI also sought to relocate Indigenous groups to new lands, forcing their inclusion and assimilation into Brazilian society.

More than 50 years after its creation, the SPI was denounced for genocide, corruption, and inefficiency. In 1967 the organization was dissolved and replaced by the National Foundation for the Indian (Fundação Nacional do Índio, FUNAI).

Another governmental agency, FUNAI oversees the protection and promotion of Indigenous peoples throughout Brazil.

Like any governmental organization, the efficacy of FUNAI is extremely susceptible to changing political administrations and budgets given that the president appoints its leadership. Its mandate includes the identification and protection of Indigenous lands and territories.

The end of Brazil’s military dictatorship in 1985 led to the institution of a new establishment. The 1988 Federal Constitution marked a new approach to recognizing Indigenous peoples in Brazil.

The constitutional rights of Indigenous peoples, outlined in Title VII, “Of the Social Order,” and Chapter VIII, “Of the Indigenous peoples,” overrides the 1973 Indian Statute and pushes a conservationist policy of Indigenous heritage and culture over an integrationist one.

In other words, through Article 231 of the Constitution, Indigenous persons are recognized as having the right to be different and to preserve their customs and cultural practices indefinitely rather than being forced to assimilate into broader Brazilian society.5 In addition, Indigenous rights over their lands are defined as having the “concept of original rights that are prior to the creation of the State itself.”6 The Constitution clearly defines the rights of Indigenous peoples to their ancestral lands and even goes so far as to stipulate

the process of demarcating these lands.

While a five-year timeline was put in place for the demarcation processes of all Indigenous lands, many remain under review today.

ORIGINS OF THE MARCO TEMPORAL LEGAL FRAMEWORK & LEGISLATIVE BILL AT THE CORE OF THE DEBATE over Marco Temporal is the desire by nonIndigenous institutions to undermine the original rights that the 1988 Constitution granted Indigenous peoples over their lands. To adopt a time frame that sets the cutoff date for land claims as the date of the ratification of the Brazilian Constitution erases thousands of years of history while disregarding centuries

5. “Constitutional rights of the Indigenous peoples,” Povos Indígenas no Brasil, Instituto Socioambiental, January 24, 2018, web.

6. “Constitutional rights of the Indigenous peoples,” Povos Indígenas no Brasil, web.

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of exploitative practices that have moved Indigenous peoples off their ancestral lands.

A 2009 court ruling that involved the Raposa Serra do Sol Indigenous Territory in the state of Roraima introduced the institution of Marco Temporal, which was invoked as standard practice in a 2017 repossession suit between the State of Santa Catarina and the Ibirama Laklaño Indigenous Territory, the ancestral lands of the Xokleng people. In 2019 the STF, or Supreme Court, heard the case’s appeal and gave it the status of general repercussion, meaning that the ruling of this case would be precedent setting. Years after the repossession suit was filed, the STF ruled Marco Temporal as unconstitutional in September 2023 and struck down the judicial application of such a framework.

Inspired by the Marco Temporal framework, Bill 490/2007 and Bill 2 9 0 3 / 2 0 2 3 — du b b e d t h e In d i g enous Genocide Bill by Indigenous movements—was drafted by Brazil’s agribusiness caucus. This bill called for the demarcation of Indigenous lands to be transferred from the executive branch to the legislative branch and for the framework of Marco Temporal to be adopted into law. It would allow formerly illegal and industrial mining on Indigenous lands, among many other detrimental policies. The text was approved in 2023 by both Brazil’s Lower Congress and the Senate but vetoed shortly after by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. The veto is now up for review by Brazil’s National Congress.

ART FOR INDIGENOUS ACTIVISM THE PAST THREE AND A HALF DECADES saw new advocacy groups form to advance Indigenous rights and demands throughout Brazil. These include but are not limited to the Coordination of the Indigenous Organizations of the Brazilian Amazon (Coordenação das Organizações Indígenas da

above, top Daiara Tukano (Tukano), Kahtiri Ēõrõ (Mirror of Life), 2020, silk feathers, mirrors, dimensions variable, installed at the 34th São Paulo Biennial. Photo: Mariana Brazão. above, bottom Daiara Tukano (Tukano) at the Museu de Arte de Rua de São Paulo. Photo: Dimitrie, MAR (CC BY-SA 4.0). opposite Installation view of MAHKU: Visions (Mirações) at the Museum of Art of São Paulo.

Photo: Mariana Brazão.

Amazônia Brasileira, COIAB), the Social-Environmental Institute (Instituto Socioambiental, ISA), the yearly national Free Land Camp mobilization (Acampamento Terra Livre, ATL), and the Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (Articulação dos Povos Indígenas do Brasil, APIB).

While Indigenous activism and art are intrinsically intertwined, it isn’t until recently that this activism has gained global visibility in the artistic sphere and challenged the Western canon. The 2022 inclusion of The Milk of Dreams by the late Jaider Esbell (Macuxi, 1979–2021) in the 59th Venice Biennale epitomizes the insertion of Indigenous aesthetics into historically Eurocentric spaces.

Despite this momentum and newfound global interest in contemporary Indigenous art, it has always existed. Art cannot be separated from everyday life in Indigenous society; it encompasses and portrays more than just the object at hand. As Jaider Esbell stated, “Contemporary Indigenous art is a trap to catch good, curious people. It is not a painting, arrow, or pottery; it is a spell to talk about a serious subject that is the ecological urgency.”7 At the core of this sentiment is the understanding that there is no separating Indigenous art from Indigenous resistance and survival.

Marginalized and siloed by outsiders for centuries under the labels of “artisanship” and “handicrafts,” only in the past five years has the aesthetics of Brazilian Indigenous art been deemed categorically worthy for major Western art institutions. Due in part to dialogues about the relationships between humans and nature emerging out of the pandemic and the ongoing environmental emergency that we find ourselves in, Indigenous artists have taken center stage. While ignored for centuries by mainstream museums, galleries, and art fairs, these artists and their art are now impossible to dismiss.

Often depicting ancestral symbols with cultural significance that transcends the glance of the ordinary eye and with references to the physical and natural world that compose their cosmology, contemporary Indigenous artists have been featured at some of Brazil’s most

7. Beta Germano, “MAM de São Paulo abre coletiva de arte indígena contemporânea,” Artequeacontece, September 13, 2021, web. Translation by author.

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famous museums and exhibitions. In 2018 Indigenous contemporary artist Denilson Baniwa (Baniwa) presented the Chief-Jaguar Hacking (Pajé-Onça Hackeando) performance at the 33rd São Paulo Biennial: Wearing a jaguar mask and an animal print cap, [Denilson Baniwa] moved through the space to not only pay homage to all Indigenous peoples [who] were represented and exhibited through the eyes of the white man but to silently denounce the absence of contemporary Indigenous aesthetic manifestations in the biennial.8 Three years later, 16 Indigenous artists were invited to participate in the 34th São Paulo Biennial Though It’s Dark, Still I Sing (Faz escuro mas eu canto) in the biennial’s largest representation of Indigenous artists from Brazil and around the world.

The following years saw the momentum continue with Moquém_Surarî: Contemporary Indigenous Art (Arte indígena contemporânea) at the São Paulo Museum of Modern Art (MAM). Featuring 34 different artists living in both urban and village environments and curated by Jaider Esbell, Moquém_Surarî sought to challenge the mainstream canonical narrative of art through a diverse representation of Indigenous artistic production.

The Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo showcased the first iteration of Terena curator Naine Terena’s Véxoa: We Know (Nós sabemos) exhibition from October 2020 to March 2021 and Denilson Baniwa’s Escola Panapaná in the spring of 2023, a pedagogical public programming experiment in bringing Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples together through dialogue. The Huni Kuin Artists Movement or MAHKU had its exhibition MAHKU: Visions (Mirações) at the Museum of Art of São Paulo (MASP) this past summer, while photography and film were featured May 2022 through September 2023 at the Moreira Salles Institute in São Paulo (IMS) with the exhibition Xingu: Contacts (Contatos) curated in part by filmmaker Takumã Kuikuro (Kuikuro).

In October 2023 the Museum of Art of São Paulo (MASP) opened its doors to Indigenous Histories (Histórias Indígenas).

These exhibitions, among others not mentioned, educate audiences about 8. Naine Terena and Claudia Mattos Avolese, Véxoa: We know (Nós sabemos), wall text.

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Indigenous thought and life through art, and create spaces for dialogue that can spur political change. When asked about the tie between art and politics, Naine Terena notes: “Life is political, but we don’t realize it. For Indigenous people, perhaps this political power of the arts has to be more visible because it is one of the ways to talk about our socio-territorial demands and social conflicts.”9 While the inclusion of these artists and art in mainstream institutions is a step forward, it cannot be the end.

Art museums and institutions alike must go beyond the exhibit space to radically center Indigenous voices and, in effect, their fight for the legitimization of their existence by the state.

At the height of the debate over Marco Temporal, Indigenous artist Daiara Tukano (Tukano) partnered with multimedia light artist Paulo Fluxuz_ and Projetemos, a national network dedicated

to projection-based demonstrations, to light up the sides of the capital in Brasilia to denounce Marco Temporal. These words illuminated the night sky: Marco temporal é golpe: Antes do Brasil da coroa Existe o Brasil do Cocar Respeita a floresta Respeita os rios Respeita os povos indígenas!

(Marco Temporal is a scam: Before the time of the Brazilian crown There existed the Brazilian Headdress Respect the forest Respect the rivers Respect the Indigenous peoples!)10

Art museums and institutions alike must go beyond the exhibit space to radically center Indigenous voices.… above Edgar Kanaykõ Xakriabá (Xakriabá), The Struggle for Territory Is the Mother of All Struggles, 2017, digital photograph. Image courtesy of the artist.

In a poetic moment of defiance, the message of Indigenous resistance laid juxtaposed onto the Brazilian capital, which, just a year before, was the epicenter of attacks on Indigenous peoples under the Bolsonaro administration. This

opposite, top Denilson Baniwa (Baniwa), Escola Panapaná (2023), installation at the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo (State Gallery of São Paulo).

Language, culture, art, and music classes took place in the space. Photo: Mariana Brazão.

9. Claudia Mattos Avolese, “Claudia Mattos Avolese Interviews Naine Terena,” Véxoa: We Know (Nós Sabemos) (Medford, MA: Tufts University Art Galleries, 2023), PDF, 7.

10. Daiara Tukano, “Marco temporal é golpe,” Instagram @daiaratukano, photo caption, May 30, 2023, web.

Translation by author.

opposite, bottom Installation view of Xingu: Contacts (Contatos) at the Instituto Moreira Salles (IMS) in São Paulo. Photo: Mariana Brazão.

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DEMARCAÇÃO JÁ!

above Daiara Tukano (Tukano), Projetemos, and Paulo Fluxuz_’s laser light installation over the Museu Nacional da República in Brazil's capital of Brasilia, May 30, 2023. Image courtesy of the artists.

Marco Temporal é golpe translates as "Marco Temporal is a scam." Respeita os povos Indígenas translates as "Respect Indigenous people."

creative manifestation embodies the essence of the contemporary Indigenous art movement—to take up space in institutions that have systematically sought to exclude and oppress Indigenous people through a resounding affirmation of Native ancestral knowledge and culture.

IN JUNE OF 2023, I spent a week with the Yudjá people of the Tuba Tuba village in the Baixo Xingu region of the Xingu Indigenous Park to learn more about their ancestral art. The day I arrived coincided with the end of their planting season. The village gathered to celebrate with a two-day-long festival featuring caxiri, a fermented cassava-based drink.

As I was invited to join them in their warrior dance, I noticed the melodic chants in their Native Juruna language switch in and out to denouncements against Marco Temporal in the Portuguese language. As I was submerged in the marching steps of the warrior dance and painted with ancestral Yudjá corporal symbols, I felt the transcendent power of these distinct artistic expressions.

Through a different lens, the exhibition of Indigenous art on a national and now global stage intends to encapsulate this feeling. In showing the rich diversity of Indigenous art forms, we can understand the original people’s integral connections to the forests and land of what is now known as Brazil. While the STF decision and President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s veto are outstanding victories against Marco Temporal on both the judicial and legislative fronts, threats to Indigenous rights and their control over their land will persist. Not until state and corporate actors adopt proper demarcation practices while denouncing the illegal exploitation of these lands will Indigenous sovereignty and existence be honored. Until that sovereignty is reached, Indigenous art will continue to serve as a transmitter of this message. It is now up to the world to listen.

In the words of the Indigenous movement’s emblematic chant: Demarcation Now! No to Marco Temporal (Demarcação Ja! Marco Temporal Não).

Mariana Brazão is a curator, researcher, and Fulbright Scholar with expertise in Indigenous art from Brazil, especially wooden benches. She works in the artistic programming department at the Lincoln Center and has worked with independent art spaces, museums, and performing arts centers such as Coleção BEĨ, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the Fralin Museum of Art at the University of Virginia, and the National Women’s History Museum.

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Photo Essay

SPIRIT OF THE CORN Photography and artistic concept by Negwë:nö'döh (By My Voice), Hayden Haynes (Seneca Nation of Indians, Deer clan).

Beadwork outfit created by Go-Gei-Sas (She Moves Something), Karlene Familo (Seneca Nation of Indians, Hawk clan).

Materials used to make the purse and blouse with beaded collar and cuffs: black satin, size 8° and 10° glass beads, white corn kernels, annuity cloth, bias tape.

Black skirt with ribbons made by Awëönyë' (Flowers in Full Bloom), Alexia Stevens (Seneca Nation of Indians, Turtle clan). Black skirt with corn kernels and ribbon made by Karlene Familo. Pucker-toe moccasins by Karlene Familo.

Photographs shot with Sony Alpha 7 IV. Location: Gakwi:yo:h Farms in the Seneca-Cattaraugus Territory.

Model: Gaëndi:yosgeh (In the Beautiful Garden), Morgan Huff (Seneca Nation of Indians, Turtle clan).

F

OR ALMOST A YEAR I’ve had this idea to create a series of photographs about the Spirit of the Corn. In the beginning, I talked with Karlene in the hopes that she would create a beaded, flat-stitched, old Seneca-style bag for the photos. Over the course of this year, the concept grew from the purse to the entire outfit that you see here.

In our oral history, many stories are about or refer to the Spirit of the Corn. What I wanted to capture in these photos are what could be viewed as glimpses of the Spirit of the Corn.

Thank you to Karlene for creating the beautiful beadwork seen here and Alexia for her design skills. Thank you to Morgan Huff and to her mother, Marta Kettle.

—Hayden Haynes (Seneca Nation) haydensantlercreations.com

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Hayden Haynes (Seneca), Spirit of the Corn, 2023, digital photography, in collaboration with Karlene Familo (Seneca) and Alexia Stevens (Seneca). Model: Morgan Huff (Seneca).

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Hayden Haynes (Seneca Nation), Spirit of the Corn, 2023, digital photography, in collaboration with Karlene Familo (Seneca Nation) and Alexia Stevens (Seneca Nation). Model: Morgan Huff (Seneca Nation).

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PROFILE

Tohono O'odham Jeweler & Sculptor

JAMES FENDENHEIM

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

T

HE SILVERWORK of James L. Fendenheim is instantly recognizable with its desert imagery of saguaro cacti, galloping horses, and the I'itoi ki: (Man in the Maze) in the overlay technique.

Known by his nickname “Cactus Kidd,” Fendenheim also incorporates gold and precious stones in his necklaces, rings, earrings, and bracelets, and creates bridles, spurs, goblets, silver boxes, and crowns. He works in printmaking and metal, stone, and cactus-rib sculptures as well.

Fendenheim’s art style has been compared to Baroque and Rococo, two bold art and architectural styles from Europe. The 17th-century Roman style of Baroque is often thought of as

masculine, and the 18th-century French style of Rococo as feminine. Baroque is a style that is bold and monumental, and Rococo is known for being playful and richly decorated. Fendenheim’s art merges both styles with his eye-catching statement pieces and curvilinear silhouettes of desert plants, animals, and the Sonoran sky.

Fendenheim is a citizen of the Tohono O'odham Nation, Schuk Toak District. He is the son of James R. Fendenheim and Juanita Dorothy Manuel (Tohono O'odham). His mother was the eldest daughter of Frances Blaine Manuel (Tohono O'odham, 1912–2006), the renowned basket maker and storyteller.

Frances’s life story and her O'odham worldview were the subject of a book

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she co-authored, Desert Indian Woman: Stories and Dreams (University of Arizona Press, 2001).

Fendenheim’s parents met in Los Angeles in 1954. His mother was a University of Arizona student who had traveled to California for a summer program, and his German-American father was a Marine stationed at Camp Pendleton. They met at an Indian bar where his father’s best friend had taken him. They married in Tucson, and Fendenheim was born in 1957. When the artist was a year old, his parents moved to Ohio where his father’s family lived and operated a dairy farm. Soon after, his brothers, José and John, were born.

The family also had horses, so Fendenheim says, “I grew up in a rodeo arena. I also would shoe horses.” Often Fendenheim’s art incorporates equestrian imagery, and he has made horse bridles and spurs. His father was a calf roper, and his family traveled along the rodeo circuit. They would compete in various Indian rodeos, including White Mountain Apache, San Carlos Apache, the Casa Grande Cowboy Days and O'odham Tash, and the Gila River Indian Community Mul-Chu-Tha Fair and Rodeo.

Fendenheim fondly remembers riding a horse bareback for eight seconds at the 1976 Flagstaff All-Indian Powwow and Rodeo. “My chaps were turquoise with yellow trim,” he says. “It was totally disco. This was 1976.” Both maternal and paternal sides of his family worked with horses and cattle, and he assumed he would be a rodeo cowboy one day.

When he was a student, however, Fendenheim excelled at art. He attended

JAMES FENDENHEIM

Haskell Indian Junior College (now called Haskell Indian Nations University) in Kansas, did well in his art courses, and served as the art club president. Fendenheim took his first jewelry class with instructor Clinton Leon at Haskell.

“Haskell was famous for having the jewelry students go to gem and mineral shows,” says Fendenheim, “and demonstrate around the state as Indian jewelers.”

The students shared their techniques, took questions, and appreciate audiences collected their work. This gave the students practice and the opportunity to make money while meeting people.

Fendenheim remembers that Beat writer William S. Burroughs bought a piece from him.

When Fendenheim was 18, he says an older man bought one of his pieces at a show and then offered him some advice.

“He said to me, ‘You should stay with [jewelry making]. Keep it going. I worked in a factory until my sixties, and now I am getting into this world of gems and minerals. It’s such an incredible, ancient art, and you are learning it at a young age.’”

The man’s advice stayed with him.

Fendenheim experienced another memorable moment when he met famed Hopi artist Charles Loloma (1921–1991).

The Haskell students had traveled to the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri, where Loloma was demonstrating jewelry techniques.

Fendenheim had the opportunity to sit next to Loloma and demonstrate as well.

He recalls, “Right away I dropped my stone [on the floor]. I can’t believe I did that. I’m sitting there, comatose. Charles noticed and asked me, ‘What’s wrong?

What’s the matter?’ I answered, ‘I dropped my stone.’ He said, ‘Oh really, where is it?’

Then Charles pulls his chair back and gets on the floor. We are both looking for it on the ground. Charles finds it and hands it back to me. He told me, ‘James, that happens to me all the time.’ Suddenly I could exhale and relax.”

After Haskell, Fendenheim attended the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA). He took a sculpture course

with Allan Houser (Chiricahua Apache, 1914–1994) and a jewelry course with Skip Holbrook. He fondly remembered ceramics instructor Otellie Loloma (Hopi, 1921–1993) who acted like a campus “mom” towards the students. He loved being around her, and she would encourage his art making. When Fendenheim attended IAIA, his fellow students were Marcus Amerman (Choctaw Nation), Marian Denipah (Diné/Ohkay Owingeh), Presley LaFountain (Turtle Mountain Chippewa, 1956–2023), Maynard White Owl Lavadour (Cayuse/ Nez Perce/Palouse), and George Rivera (Pojoaque), to name a few.

After he graduated from IAIA, in 1984 Fendenheim traveled to southern California with his grandmother Frances to participate in the Idyllwild Arts summer program. Frances taught basketry, and Fendenheim assisted jeweler

“My chaps were turquoise with yellow trim. It was totally disco. This was 1976.”

above Pony Pendant and Cross Pendant, 2023, sterling silver, gold. Photo: Anya Montiel, PhD (Mestiza/Tohono O'odham descent). opposite James Fendenheim at the Heard Museum Guild Indian Fair and Market, Heard Museum, Phoenix Arizona. Photo: FAAM.

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PROFILE

above Desert Law, Papago Ponies Necklace, ca. 2000, sterling silver, Kingman turquoise, Morenci turquoise, rutilated quartz, collection of the Arizona State Museum, 2007-495-1ab.

Photo: Natalia Gabrielsen. Image courtesy of the Arizona State Museum, University of Arizona.

Michael Kabotie (Hopi, 1942–2009). He also met Native arts faculty members Lucy Lewis (Acoma Pueblo, ca. 1898– 1992), Blue Corn (San Ildefonso Pueblo, 1921–1999), and Juan Quezada (Mexican, 1940–2022). Fendenheim appreciated being able to watch and learn from them.

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In the beginning of his jewelry career, Fendenheim worked primarily in silver and turquoise and would look for places to sell and market his work.

He credits artists Gibson Nez (Jicarilla Apache/Diné, 1947–2007) and Lori Arviso (Diné) with taking him under their wings. They taught him the Santa Fe art business and selling techniques.

Fendenheim also spent years participating in art shows and markets across the country, such as the Santa Fe Indian Art Market and shows at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, the former Southwest Museum of the American Indian in Los Angeles, the Montclair Art Museum in New Jersey, and the American Indian Community House in New York. For some years he traveled in a Winnebago camper with Comanche artist Wilford Woosypiti (1935–1996) who showed him how to promote and sell his work along the art market trail. After the release of the movie Dances with Wolves in 1990, the demand for Native jewelry boomed, and Fendenheim was ready for it.

Fendenheim apprenticed with the jeweler Rick Manuel (Akimel O'odham/ Tohono O'odham), who specializes in the silver overlay technique, and Manuel continues to be an influence. Manuel is a self-taught artist known for his work depicting desert animals and scenery, especially horned lizards (Phrynosoma), ants, and spiders.

Both artists’ jewelry is included in an exhibition in Tucson at the Arizona State Museum, Ancient—Modern: Continuity and Innovation in Southwest Native Jewelry, which highlights examples from the permanent collection and is on view through February 10, 2024.

Fendenheim has two works on display: Serpent Highway, a silver, gold, and garnet bracelet that depicts a snake slithering across State Route 86, or the Ajo Highway, which cuts through the Tohono O'odham Nation. That stretch of highway has a high rate of vehicular crashes and fatalities, and according to Fendenheim, “the stones represent different colors you see when

JAMES FENDENHEIM

you crash, and the crosses on the serpent represent the crosses along the highway that mark where people have died.” The bracelet received a curator’s choice award at the 1999 Arizona State Museum Indian Art Fair. The second work is a silver overlay letter opener. The handle features a desert mountain scene of saguaro and barrel cacti with a thunderstorm cloud approaching. The blade includes various desert animals such as vultures, tortoises, ants, and bighorn sheep.

As someone who has been in the Native art world for several decades, Fendenheim has experienced some discrimination due to his unfamiliar last name. He says that people would assume that he wasn’t Native, or they would tell him to change his last name to become more marketable. Fendenheim is proud of his Tohono O'odham and German-American background and stays true to himself. He is known for his gregarious personality, and his ability to talk with anyone.

Along with his cowboy days and art career, Fendenheim has acted in some films. He returned to Tucson in 1975 and saw want ads for Native actors posted at the Tucson Indian Center. He had roles in The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) and an episode of Little House on the Prairie, among others. He enjoyed being on set and meeting Native actors like Chief Dan George (Tsleil-Waututh Nation, 1899–1981) and Will Sampson (Muscogee, 1933–1987).

Fendenheim lives and works in an adobe house with his partner, Magdalena Velasco (Mestiza), in the historic section of Tucson called Barrio Libre. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the area was a mixed neighborhood of working-class Tohono O'odham, Yaqui, Mexican, Black, and white families. For about 40 years, his maternal grandparents lived on the same property. His grandmother Frances, who was born in the O'odham village of Ko:m Wawhai and grew up in S-koksonagk (Many Pack Rats), moved to Tucson in 1941. When severe drought spread across the state, some of his grandparents’ cattle

died and the remaining had to be sold.

Without other ways to make money and support their family, it was necessary for Frances and her husband José to move to Tucson. In her book, Frances recalled, “José was washing dishes at El Presidio [Inn], and two days later, I worked at the Pioneer Hotel as a chambermaid.” Frances would continue to do domestic work, make tortillas to sell, watch other people’s children, and make baskets for sale. She lived in the barrio of Tucson until 1981, when she returned to the reservation.

Along with Frances, Fendenheim learned himdag (O'odham way of life) and O'odham history from culture bearer, storyteller, and singer Danny Lopez (Tohono O'odham, 1936–2008), who married Frances’s daughter Florence. Lopez taught many generations of O'odham children and was an O'odham language instructor at the tribal college.

Fendenheim has artwork in the permanent collections of the Arizona State Museum, the Heard Museum, the

…according to Fendenheim, “the stones represent different colors you see when you crash.…”

above Serpent Highway, 1999, silver, gold, garnets, 11/8 in. wide, collection of the Arizona State Museum, ASM purchase, Wilma Kaemlein Memorial Choice Award, 1999-38-1. Photo: Michelle Dillon. Image courtesy of the Arizona State Museum, University of Arizona.

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above, top Letter Opener, ca.

2000, sterling silver overlay, 82/3 in. long, collection of the Arizona State Museum, gift of Mark Bahti, 2001-190-16. Photo: Michelle Dillon.

Image courtesy of the Arizona State Museum, University of Arizona.

above, bottom Saguaro Cactus Seed Jar, sterling silver overlay seed jar, turquoise, spiny oyster shell, jet, white mother of pearl, collection of Heard Museum, gift of Norman L. Sanfield, 4593-11. Photo: Craig Smith. Image courtesy of the Heard Museum.

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IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, and numerous private collections. In August, he travels to Santa Fe to exhibit at SWAIA or the Pathways Indigenous Arts Festival. Fendenheim has shown at the Heard Museum Indian Fair and Market since 2010. He received the judges’ choice award for The Lady Picking Saguaro Fruit at the Heard Market. The Heard Museum has also featured his artwork in Old Traditions in New Pots: Silver Seed Pots from the Norman L. Sandfield Collection (2007), Personal Journeys: American Indian Landscapes (2016), and Small Wonders (2021).

Last year Fendenheim shared his Santa Fe Indian Market booth with his nephew Quinton Antone (Tohono O’odham), lending support to the up-andcoming jeweler, just as established artists gave Fendenheim support years ago. Look for Fendenheim’s stately crowns, prancing horses, saguaro cacti, and other bold iconography from the Sonoran Desert wrought in gleaming silver at the Heard Fair and Santa Fe’s Native Art Week.

INSTAGRAM @JAMESFENDENHEIM

Take Home a Treasure from Indian Country Buy from members of federally recognized Tribes

The Indian Arts and Crafts Board offers a Source Directory of American Indian and Alaska Native Businesses that sell authentic Indian art and craftwork, available at www.doi.gov/iacb.

Under the Indian Arts and Crafts Act, it is unlawful to offer or display for sale, or sell, any art or craftwork in a manner that falsely suggests it is Indian made.

For a free brochure on the Indian Arts and Crafts Act, including how to file a complaint, please contact: U.S. Department of the Interior Indian Arts and Crafts Board Toll Free: 1-888-ART-FAKE or 1-888-278-3253 Email: iacb@ios.doi.gov Web: www.doi.gov/iacb

Tessa Robledo, Comanche, beadwork, Southern Plains Song Purse, ©2022 FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 41, WINTER 2024 | 53

PROFILE

Pokagon Potawatomi Tattoo Artist, Painter & Regalia Maker

DAVID MARTIN

By Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD How important was family in your development as an artist?

My family has always been integral to the development of my art. In the late ’70s, my dad picked up two Frank Frazetta books and an extremely large version of The Hobbit that was illustrated with stills and production designs of the ’70s cartoon. Those books completely changed me. My poor dad watched me flip through those books and copy the images until they fell apart.

When I was in my teenage years, my mom made a point to make sure I was exposed to the local Native art scene and encouraged my beadwork. They were always doing their best to push me and give me access to anything that would develop my interest in art.

A

N ENROLLED CITIZEN of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians, David “Half Pint” Martin lives in Zenba Odan, or South Bend, Indiana.

Self-taught, he has worked in oil painting, tattooing, beadwork, ribbon appliqué, and digital art for nearly three decades.

Influenced by Potawatomi aesthetics and, more generally, aesthetics of the Great Lakes region, Martin also draws inspiration from popular culture—especially science fiction and fantasy storytelling.

Martin’s portrait depicting his tribe’s designated pipe carrier, Clarence White (Pokagon Potawatomi, 1934–

2023), won best of division at the Eiteljorg Museum Indian Market and Festival in Indianapolis. In August 2023 the University of Notre Dame named Martin the 2023–24 Initiative on Race and Resilience Artist-in-Residence. The Corvilla Community Art Gallery in Granger, Indiana, hosted a solo exhibition, and South Bend Museum of Art is hosting a solo exhibition in early 2024. He is currently preparing paintings for the 66th Annual Heard Museum Guild Indian Fair and Market in Phoenix.

In addition to art making, Martin is a father, grandfather, husband, powwow singer, dancer, and paintball enthusiast.

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You started tattooing. How did you turn to it and how has it resonated with you?

In 1996, I was working in a factory. At that point in my life, I had actually forgotten about art. I was focused on supporting my family. One day, I just realized I hadn’t drawn anything in over a year; not even sketched on an envelope while on the phone. My immediate response was to start getting my illustration portfolio together. I started to send it out to various publishers: TSR, Marvel, Palladium [Books], and a few others. I got some bites, but back then the industry standard was about $25 for a black-and-white illustration. After not being able to land anything serious, I was about to hang it up and just stick to working at the factory.

That week I was at drum practice.

My cousin John T. had just turned 18 and went up to Michigan to get a tattoo. It was a basic panther tearing out of the skin, a common design back then. I did not have any tattoos and was intrigued, so I started getting tattoo magazines and looking at the art inside. Later that summer, my other cousin Jesse turned 18 and used

DAVID MARTIN

his Chicago Treaty trust money to buy me some tattoo equipment.

I spent the next twelve months tattooing at every powwow we went to. I did that until July of ’97 when Indiana finally legalized tattooing. Back then there was no apprenticeship option, due to tattooing being illegal. Once it was legalized, I was able to get into a shop and operate on a more “legit” level.

How has body art shaped your painting, beading, ribbonwork, and so on?

Back when I started there was no internet to look up a design and no iPad to trace it on. On top of that, the client base was way smaller than how it is today. You had to spend a lot of time drawing in between tattoos. Because there were so few clients, you had to be fairly proficient in a wide variety of subject matter. This was good for me because of my early exposure to Frank Frazetta. He was big on memorizing the anatomy of animals, people, and objects from various angles.

I spent my entire middle-to-high school years trying to emulate his methods so I would not have to heavily rely on references. I doubled down on that premise.

If you go back and look at my old sketchbooks from that time you will not see a single pencil mark. I drew exclusively in ballpoint ink. This made it easy for me to adapt to the whole “got to get it right the first time” approach to tattooing.

Early on I kept my regalia and beadwork separate from my tattooing. I even kept the lifestyles separate. A lot of it was how I was treated in high school.

I am light-skinned and even though the entirety of the Great Lakes powwow community accepted me, non-Native people did not take me seriously unless I was all feathered up and covered in beads.

This was hammered home to me when I watched the movie Fish Hawk in high school. The scene where Will Sampson’s character is forced to do a dance to get his drink money—though not the same situation I was in—put me in the mindset where I was only valued as entertainment.

I didn’t want to even give them the opportunity to engage with me on my race, and I didn’t need them to validate my life. My people accepted me, and that was enough for me at the time.

I focused on photorealism for most of my career and, around 2009, I started pushing more Woodland floral work or accurate depictions of Natives. Initially, it was in response to the whole pinup girl with a headdress thing that was (and still is) a thing in tattooing. I was like, “Do you want this, or do you want a real Native tattoo?” I could no longer avoid the conversation that I was Native with my clients in good conscience. Now, I do almost exclusively florals with an occasional portrait. When I started oil painting in 2006, I already had a decent grasp of composition and color theory from tattooing, so I could focus more on learning the materials and mechanical aspects of painting.

“… I started pushing more Woodland floral work or accurate depictions of Natives.”

above David Martin in dance regalia, much of it he beaded and sewed. Image courtesy of the artist. opposite Bear with Florals, 2021, tattoo. Photo: D. Martin.

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You’re a “proudly self-taught” artist.

Can you speak to the value of self-teaching, of self-direction? What are the advantages or disadvantages?

Well, let me start off with mentioning a huge disadvantage: I have a severe lack of knowledge when it comes to art history outside of the few artists who grabbed my attention as a child. I pay more attention now, but it is a big hole in my career path.

It is important to see what came before, no matter the medium or technique.

Being self-taught is not good for everyone. A lot of what I learned was because of the industry I was in. Tattooing does not care about your education or even who you apprenticed under. It cares if you can produce. You must have real drive and constantly push your limits to better yourself. The whole industry expects to see your portfolio improve with every piece. And I know the fine art world is also like that, but with tat-

tooing, we are talking about producing multiple finished pieces a day, not working on a dozen or fewer paintings for a show or market. You are also working with a constant audience, I mean, your canvas is watching you. Their friends and family might be hanging over your shoulder watching. Not to mention the other artists in the studio seeing and judging your work—sometimes very abrasively to your face—for every tattoo you do in a day. There is no waiting to see how the public responds. You know right away.

Sometimes before the piece is finished.

Roy Boy Jr. was the first accomplished tattoo artist I met early on. One thing he told me that stuck with me was that you can do 100 good tattoos and one bad one, and everyone will talk about that one bad one. Because of my tattooing career, I could not sleep on trying to learn new things or improving techniques. I had to grind. I used to organize art fusion

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nights at my house where I and several other tattoo artists would start a drawing and pass it around and let another artist finish it. It was a creativity development exercise. And truth be told I do think I learned more in a short period of time compared to if I had gone to college. I learned on the job. But I also must admit that I may be an outlier. It does not work out for most.

How does Potawatomi iconography play into your work? Why is it important to represent Potawatomi objects, spiritual beliefs, and symbolism?

My art represents my own spiritual and cultural experiences being raised as a Potawatomi. The tricky part is not repeating something that has already been done or overusing certain subject matter. Most importantly I try to offer something that advances my people and does not simply cash in on them.

DAVID MARTIN

Like most tribes, there are always a few things that make each one stand out from another. I know Woodland art might not be understood out West, where most of the big markets are, but I want to be true to who I am and who my people are. A good example would be my Underwater Panthers. On this side of the Mississippi, these are well-known and accepted spiritual beings important to our culture. But out West, they thought I was painting Asian-style dragons. It is something from my people that I can share with Natives out West. Once I explain what the Underwater Panther is, it always leads into an interesting exchange of cultural and spiritual beliefs.

Clarence White, Pokagon Elder was recently awarded best of division at the Eiteljorg Festival. Can you talk about the idea of honoring Elders through artwork?

I am currently being pulled in two different directions with my art, and I am embracing it. I have primarily been doing more symbolic paintings that express a story or teaching—or even something that is simply pleasant to look at that has no deeper symbolism. This year I started getting into the documentation of my people. The painting I did of Clarence White started out with the idea that it was a documentation of him. When you go to the White House you will see oil portraits of the United States’ leaders. I wanted to do something similar for my people.

I grew up next to the man, traveled all over the country singing on his drum, and learned how to handle my feathers from him. He was one of the Pokagon Band’s most important modern-day leaders. I added Potawatomi florals in the background, some of which are designs from his regalia, that are older than me.

There are also turtles to represent his clan, so there is a little back story to him in there besides just doing his portrait. My only regret is that he passed several days after the Eiteljorg show and was unable to witness me presenting the painting to our band. He was aware I was working on it but never got to see the finished painting.

After I finished his portrait, I moved on to a painting of Simon Pokagon, a huge historical figure to the Pokagon Potawatomi from the 19th

century. I used a photo that was taken late in his life as a reference and added some contemporary techniques with the paint application and some abstract florals for the background. There is just something about a well-executed portrait for remembering someone important.

The best image we have of our founding chief, Leopold Pokagon, is an oil painting.

I am now driven to document my people.

Earlier this year, you submitted the painting Copper Thunderbird to the Eiteljorg Festival. This was the name given to Anishinaabay artist Norval Morrisseau, considered the “grandfather” of Indigenous Art from Canada.

Can you talk about how this painting came into being?

Up until mid-2022, I only did commissions. Because of this, I was not familiar

“I am now driven to document my people.”

above Clarence White, Pokagon Elder, 2023, oil on canvas, 48 × 26 in. opposite Copper Thunderbird #1, 2022, oil on canvas, 34 × 46 in.

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with the greater Native art world. This year was the first time I ever worked the Heard, Eiteljorg, and SWAIA markets, and I spent a lot of this year trying to get to know everyone. This goes back to earlier when I said there were disadvantages to being self-taught. It is hard not to be intimidated by all the talent that I was unaware of.

I have done three different versions of the Copper Thunderbird: the one you have seen, a larger one that is owned by the

Four Winds Casino in South Bend, and a smaller one owned by the University of Notre Dame. The idea behind them was to try to create a balance with how many Underwater Panthers I was painting. I was taught that the Thunderbird and the Underwater Panther were equal and opposite to each other and on occasion fought each other. If you depict one, you should always depict the other to maintain a balance. Thunderbirds are an almost universal belief across all of North America. Because of this, I added two elements to tie my version to the Potawatomi. One was to add florals to the body, the other was to make them look like they were made of copper. We were a copper-using people.

It had both practical and spiritual functions.

How were you introduced to beadwork and how does it feature in your powwow regalia?

I have been beading my entire life. Some styles like loom work, I don’t remember being taught, though I know my mother taught me. She was always beading. I still have pieces my mom made that I don’t dance in anymore but keep with my bundle. I was more proficient at beading as a teen than at drawing. I never got into doing small items; it was always regalia for me. I have stacks of sketchbooks full of dance regalia designs from my teen years. I still have a large loom that my dad made me when I was in high school, specifically for belts. I can’t overstate how much of a role my family played in my beadwork.

Some of the beadwork on the outfit I wear now is a little over 30 years old. My dance tie, for instance—the lightning section I finished when I was 18; I will be 50 at the time of this publication. It has part of the Potawatomi story on how we became human beings on it that I took from some Potawatomi birchbark story scrolls that I was allowed to look at by their caretaker. The outside shape, though, I tried to be experimental with—some may even say it is odd—but I like it and it fits my dance style. Nowadays you see lots of experimental shapes, but that was not a thing back then. Recently I added the floral sections to make it aesthetically more Woodland.

A lot of Woodland dancers are going back to quillwork now. And I have a huge respect for it, but I just can’t let go of beads, probably even to a fault. In the next year or so I might try to get juried in on beadwork as well as paintings. I would have done so this year, but I have been working on my own personal stuff for the last year. I have a grandbaby and another on the way who will need regalia before I can do anything that would be available to the public.

above Beaded Tie, ca. 1991, glass seed beads, buckskin, ermine. opposite Simon Pokagon, 2023, oil on canvas, 24 × 30 in.

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With powwow dancing, your beadwork becomes threedimensional, mobile, and dynamic. What does dancing mean to you—both artistically and personally?

I try to dance as often as I can. I try to wear my outfit as often as possible. You never know when it will be the last time you get to wear it and dance in it. I dance for many reasons. One would be to honor the previous generations who were not allowed to dance. The very act of dancing strengthens Native Americans as a whole. It is an act of resistance to colonization. It is an expression of how I see myself as a human being. Dancing has rebuilt communities. For many Natives who were raised away from their tribe or adopted out, it is usually their first exposure to their culture.

DAVID MARTIN

When it comes to designing my beadwork, ribbonwork, and other parts of my outfits, I consider how it will move.

Will it interfere with other parts of the outfit or certain movements? How durable will it be? Will the beadwork last so that another generation can use it? Is it easily repairable? Is it comfortable, or will parts of it cause discomfort after wearing it for a weekend? Does it properly represent my dance style? How can I honor the past without reenacting the past? I like all of that because I’m forced to think beyond just the artistic design of it.

You have a residency at the University of Notre Dame, you’re participating in art fairs, and opening several solo exhibitions. What are you working on for these projects and how do they differ from previous work?

At Notre Dame, I am taking on a passion project. I am finishing a painting

that an Indiana artist, George Winter (1809–1876), planned to do and never got past the charcoal and ink concept sketch in 1837. Pokagons own the original from 1837. It was a drawing of the last large-scale social dance the Potawatomi had in their homeland of Indiana before they were removed. He was witness to it.

There is an extensive journal entry that goes with the sketch explaining what he witnessed that day.

I am not just duplicating his work though. I am changing it to show how we are now, and I am going to try and express in the painting how, when he sketched us, a lot of people believed our way of life was going extinct. But the very act of dancing and singing shown in the sketch is one of the very acts that helped rebuild us from what would be the darkest and lowest time in Potawatomi history. There

is a lot more to it but there is not enough room in this interview to cover it all. I plan on doing it 72 inches tall and 144 inches wide. I won’t have time to finish the whole painting before my residency is over in May, so I am already trying to plan where I will move it to finish.

For the Corvilla Gallery exhibition, I will be bringing a lot of my digital drawings printed on canvas and some original tattoo-oriented art. I am waiting for the show to post pictures of this art; hopefully, it ends up working. At the South Bend Museum of Art, I’m mainly showing oil paintings and beadwork.

The beadwork will be large regalia pieces and the oil paintings a mix of cultural and spiritual expressions, along with a selection of portraits of important Potawatomi both historical and current.

INSTAGRAM @ARTBYHALFPINT FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 41, WINTER 2024 | 59

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Hopi-Tewa Ceramic Artist

RAINY NAHA

By RoseMary Diaz (Santa Clara Pueblo)

B

ORN IN PONGSIKYA, or Ke ams C anyon , Ar i z ona , Rainelle “Rainy” Naha grew up in Talahogan Valley, about 15 miles south of her ancestral home at Tewa on First Mesa. Pongsikya is a narrow, three-mile-long box canyon named for an edible plant that grows along the banks of a seasonal stream that swims from Antelope Mesa. Rich in natural beauty, wind- and watersculpted cliffs and buttes in shades of red and orange rise above deep, twisting canyons. Juniper, sagebrush, and yucca push through rolling hillsides, while wildflowers and cacti of great variety bloom across vast expanses of high-desert

plain. Ash-throated flycatchers, Gila woodpeckers, and red-tailed hawks raise their young in springtime. Bobcats, deer, elk, and mountain lions roam parts of this storied place, where earth meets sky.

Known as Hopi Tutskwa, these sacred lands hold an abundance of one of Mother Earth’s most cherished gifts to her Pueblo people: mineral-rich clay deposits.

These have sustained more than a hundred generations of Indigenous craftsmanship, artistry, and creative expression, including many on both sides of Rainy’s family. As the daughter of renowned Hopi-Tewa potter Helen Naha (Navasie, the first Feather Woman) and the paternal great-granddaughter of Paqua Naha (the

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first Frog Woman), Rainy’s connection to the clay came most naturally and, like many Pueblo children, she began learning about the pottery-making process when she was very young. “I’ve been around pottery almost all my life,” she says. “As kids, we helped my mom harvest clay and gathered manure for firing and different kinds of vegetation for paint. We weren’t allowed to do the sanding or polishing; my mom was very particular about that.”

But Rainy, who belongs to the Spider/Stick clan, did not embrace the art form until years later when she returned home after being away at university. “I didn’t start at my mother’s knees,” she explains. Rainy studied archaeology at Brigham Young University. “I went off to school and came back home when I was in my [twenties]. I started with my grandmother’s and my mom’s designs, then started doing my own.”

From this deep wellspring of Native art heritage, the younger Rainy drew creative nourishment and practical guidance.

Over time, her work evolved technically and flourished creatively. Rainy developed the highly recognizable aesthetic that distinguishes her work from that of her many gifted contemporaries. “While she uses the same clay as her mother, her work has its own distinctive style,” says Charles King, owner of King Galleries in Santa Fe and Scottsdale. “It’s dramatic and engaging, and she has created her own color palette using clay and beeweed on a white, polished surface, and a whole new world of design and story in Hopi-Tewa pottery. And the technical side of her work is always nearly perfect.”

Today Rainy lives near Polacca, Arizona, and works from her mother’s old home about 20 miles south of there.

She has been active as a potter for more than four decades. In contradistinction to the Sikyátki Revival yellowware

RAINY NAHA

style—honey-colored pottery with bold polychrome designs inspired by the 14th– to 17th-century ceramics at Sikyátki village—much of her work is more similar to Walpi polychrome. Named for Walpi village, this style steadily evolved from the 14th century to 1915 before being revived. Some of her pieces feature five different slips to produce the spectrum of colors that define this particular school of Hopi clay work.

Rainy is perhaps best known for her precisely formed and exquisitely thin-walled whiteware jars with finishes

that range in color from eggshell to light caramel to peach tones and display intricate renderings of various katsina forms, dancers, dragonflies, bear paws, birds, butterflies, clouds, cornstalks, stars, and other important elements of Hopi-Tewa culture and spirituality. Her interlocking “tumbling birds” designs are of her own conception. The designs are painted onto the vessels (and an occasional plate) in pigments derived from natural sources including beeweed, wild mustard, and hematite. She handgathers and processes these slips, which

above “Solstice” Jar, natural clay, earth pigments, beeweed slip.

Photo: King Galleries. All images courtesy of King Galleries. opposite Rainy Naha with her large Butterfly Katsina Maiden Jar and Solstice Jar. Photo: King Galleries.

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“…she talks about her mother and how this design honors her work as an artist and an innovator.”

above Hummingbird and Butterfly Maiden Jar, Bird Jar, Awatovi Star Jar, and Solstice Jar, natural clay, earth pigments, beeweed slip. Photo: King Galleries. opposite Awatovi Star Plate, natural clay, beeweed slip.

Photo: King Galleries.

she paints with a very thin strip of yucca stalk. This is the only material Rainy uses to achieve the ultra-thin lines and eye-dazzling cosmic-geometric patterns that are signatures of her work, along with the hallmark feather design that accompanies her name on the bottom of each piece. When properly cared for, one stalk can provide countless hours of use: “I’ve been using this one for a year now,” she says of her present, desert-born paintbrush.

Most of Rainy’s creations follow classical sensibilities in technique and design, like those made by her mother and grandmother. Many of her designs, including those on her black-and-white Awatovi Star and polychrome Solstice jars, draw inspiration from the ancient pottery sherds that lie scattered amongst the sands of Awatovi Ruins, an ancestral Hopi village located on Antelope Mesa, close to where the artist lives. Other designs come from the ancient iconography of the

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Hopi and the other Pueblo tribes, based on abstract representations of animals, birds, clouds, feathers, plants, rain, and other features of the natural world.

“Her choice of designs, both her own and those from the recent past, are so fascinating,” says King. “Every now and then Rainy will do a piece with the Awatovi Star design, a black-and-white pattern [reintroduced and] made famous by her mother. Each time, she talks about her mother and how this design honors her work as an artist and an innovator.”

PROCESS THOUGH POTTERY STYLES and designs vary from pueblo to pueblo and variations in clays gathered from the local sources of each produce distinctive results, the process of making Pueblo pottery is virtually the same among the Hopi and Hopi-Tewa villages in Arizona and the Keres, Tewa, Tiwa, Towa, and

RAINY NAHA

Zuni villages of New Mexico and has stayed consistent for more than two millennia. Save for a few minor departures from the time-honored template (sandpaper replacing bark or dry corn cobs for sanding, for example), Rainy and like-minded potters hold true to materials and methods perfected over the centuries.

The process begins with harvesting and processing of the requisite raw materials from which to make solid clay and liquid slips. Once an artist locates a clay deposit, a pickax works best for cleaving large, dry chunks of earth from their protective hillsides. The chunks are placed in a tin tub (in old times, probably a resin-coated clay vessel or water-shaped hide), covered with water, and left to soak until the liquid has been absorbed and the clay has semi-liquefied to a thick velvety

and viscous consistency. Volcanic ash, also locally mined, is added as a temper to stabilize the various mineral properties present in the raw earth, increasing the odds of the work surviving the soonto-come firing process. The ash is worked into the clay under the bare feet of willing family members, who take turns stepping into the mixture until both materials are completely blended.

Jars, bowls, vases, and plates are built from the earth-scented clay using a coiling technique that has been central to this process for millennia. The first coil is placed upon a puki, a disc made of solid clay that serves as a foundational support to begin sculpting the body of the respective piece. Subsequent coils are placed atop one another and smoothed into each other with a piece of dry

gourd. Once the desired shape and size are achieved, the vessel is allowed to air dry before being scraped and sanded to a smooth finish, free of any bumps, pits, or other imperfections. A slip—a thin wash of clay—is then applied to the outer surface, which is burnished to a glasslike finish with a polishing stone that was likely handed down through several generations of the potter’s family. Ceremonial pieces are sometimes also polished or painted on the inside.

Finally comes the firing, which involves covering the pottery, often with sheep dung, to produce a smoldering, oxygen-deprived environment whose thick, dense smoke diffuses through the porous clay and sets the painted-on pigments in their final colors. This is the breath-holding moment of truth,

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above “Hero Twins” Jar, natural clay, earth pigments, beeweed slip. Photo: King Galleries. opposite Tumbling Parrot Jar, natural clay, earth pigments, beeweed slip. Photo: King Galleries.

for removing the wares from their stillsmoking firing enclosure will reveal either their intact perfection or the shattered remains of many weeks of hard work.

From the first step to the last, the pottery-making process is a laborintensive artistic undertaking that requires balancing its physical demands with those of the always-a-few-stepsahead and often impatient creative mind.

“It’s hard work,” says Rainy, “but it’s not a hardship. It becomes a love after a while.

I’ve always been a solitary person and spent a lot of time by myself. Pottery is

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my friend and my companion, and I’m relaxed doing each step. I’m not in a hurry, I take my time.”

THE MEDIUM IS THE MESSAGE IN RECENT YEARS, Rainy’s work has included a powerful visual discourse on some of Native America’s most urgent social issues. “Her portrayals of women or female katsina figures have been an

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important continuation [of ] her art,” says King. “These later pieces tell the story of the importance of women, water, and even touch on the issue of MMIW [Murdered and Missing Indigenous Women]. There is care and compassion about the world around her [reflected] in her art.”

With the clay, “I can work through all those emotions,” says the artist. “I’m proud of how much it has kept me emotionally balanced.”

Rainy’s decades-long commitment to the clay has also brought to vision some of the most splendid works ever created from this earth-given medium, and she is recognized among the matriarchs of Hopi-Tewa pottery. Among her numerous accolades, she counts top awards from the Heard Museum Guild

Indian Fair and Market and the Southwestern Association for Indian Art’s Santa Fe Indian Market, including winning best of classification in pottery at the latter in 2007. “I’ve had my time,” she says of these accomplishments. “Now it’s time for the younger ones to have theirs.”

“I admire Rainy’s commitment to her work,” reflects Steve Elmore, owner of Elmore Indian Art in Santa Fe. “Her art is unique and expands the reach of Nampeyo’s Sikyátki Revival.

Her [Navasie] family is similar to the Nampeyos, in the passing down of their talents through the generations.”

A bout of COVID-19 in the fall of 2022 interrupted Rainy’s ability to work.

“I couldn’t walk after I got out of the hospital,” she recalls. “And I had tremors in my hands so I couldn’t paint for about

eight months.” But a full recovery ensured that her commitment to her work and to passing her knowledge on to her family will continue. Rainy’s daughter, Tyra Naha Tewawina, represents the third generation of potters in her immediate family. Tyra’s son now is a fourth. Rainy’s brother Burel Naha is also an accomplished ceramic artist, as was her sister Sylvia Naha Humphry (Hopi-Tewa, 1951–1999). Elmore says, “Her saya [grandmother] would be proud of Rainy’s contribution to the arts.”

To sustain a life as a Pueblo potter is a journey that requires an investment of time that can stretch out over many years—entire lifetimes even, if the clay deems it so. But, advises Rainy, “Don’t take shortcuts, stay as close to Indigenous as possible, and love your work.”

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PROFILE

Yup'ik Visual Storyteller

AMBER WEBB

By Nadia Jackinsky-Sethi, PhD (Alutiiq)

So many of the stories Yup'ik people used to tell aren’t told anymore. When I learn a new story, more of who I am makes sense to me. More of the world makes sense to me and helps me understand why I keep drawing certain things, like birds, or big ladies, or little people. I also learn why my grandparents did certain things. Those moments are really exciting, and they make everything else come alive—like subsistence, how and where we go to get foods, and how we named places.

We need to tell these stories to know who we are.

—Amber Webb, 2023

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MBER WEBB lives in a small community, Aleknagik, in the Bristol Bay region of Western Alaska. A mother, artist, and activist, she also serves as a peer recovery support coordinator at the Bristol Bay Area Health Corporation. She conveys stories of Yup'ik culture and Indigenous femineity and advocates through drawing, painting, and wellness work.

Through this work, she uses art making as a form of healing and a way to connect with others. Webb has recently focused on visual storytelling through symbolism.

As she explained to me, “It is our birthright to understand the symbols from our culture.” Many of the symbols in her

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work are present on historic Yup'ik bowls, jewelry, and petroglyphs, as are designs and patterns used in storyknifing.

Storyknifing is an activity once common among Yup'ik young women and girls who would draw abstract picture-stories in mud, snow, or sand.

Storytelling lies at the heart of Alaska Native culture. We tell stories for entertainment, to convey lessons about how to care for the world around us, and to share our cultural values. Much of Webb’s work reclaims stories from long ago—tales about supernatural creatures that live in lakes and tundra, stories of human–animal transformations, and accounts from her family’s personal

AMBER WEBB

history. She also draws attention to issues that are relevant in contemporary Alaska Native life such as opioid addiction, domestic abuse, intergenerational trauma, the impact of pandemics, and the ongoing crisis of murdered and missing Indigenous women (MMIW) in our communities. Art making, Webb explains, can be a way to process and confront trauma, and she tries to balance these intense subjects with imagery that sparks joy and celebrates Indigenous culture and beauty.

SYMBOLS & STORYTELLING IN OCTOBER 2023 I had the chance to meet up with Webb while she was an artist-in-residence at Bunnell Street Art Center in Homer, Alaska. During her two-week residency, Webb created a series of ink drawings on wood panels

that depict a range of subjects such as coming-of-age ceremonies, interpretations of dreams, and images of flowered salmon. She also led a storytelling workshop to express her understanding of Yup'ik symbolism. “An important part of my work,” Webb shares, “is about connection and community building.”

Workshops like the one in Homer contribute to this.

To begin her storytelling workshop, Webb smudged the room with sage before instructing participants to find something to hold in their hands and join her in a welcoming dance.1 A recording of the Inuit and Yup'ik music group Pamyua played in the background as a handful of women formed a circle and followed Webb in dance to clear their minds and prepare for the workshop. Starting with dance, Webb explains, is her way of

“It is our birthright to understand the symbols from our culture.”

above Amber Webb holding Pelatuq Fish #17 on Lake Aleknagik. Photo: Howdice L. Brown III (Iñupiaq). opposite Installation view of Yup'ik Storytelling Symbols, ink on paper, at Amber Webb’s 2023 Bunnell Street Art Center Artist Residency. Photo: Nadia Jackinsky-Sethi, PhD (Alutiiq).

1. Webb learned from Yup'ik Elder Theresa John that wearing dance gloves or holding dance fans is a way to protect oneself. As shared by John, dancing is such a powerful activity, that if a dancer is not prepared they could “tear a hole in the universe.”

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PROFILE

“welcoming people in, anchoring in the present and in our bodies. I have been trying to implement spiritually oriented practices into everything I do,” she shares, “and yuraq [dance] is a way to do this.” We spent the next hour learning about visual storytelling and the connections between language, environment, and visual culture.

When starting her work, Webb often begins with a prayer. She does not always have a clear idea of where her work will take her, but the concept will come to her as she creates.

She notes that much of her artistic practice is rooted in place. Webb said, “Everywhere I go, different stories surface that exist in these places.” She notes that she has come to understand the symbols in Yup'ik art by closely observing the world around her. She recognizes that many symbols have been developed over time through close observation of land and water features and animal behavior. “Our art,” she explains, “comes from the land. If you want to understand our art, you have to experience the place and the subsistence practices.”

Webb incorporates symbols that allow her to express both “the seen and the unseen.” For example, a V-shape shows up frequently in her work and can be considered an abstract representation of prayer. Another recurring symbol is a circle with a dot in the center, which represents the “eye of awareness” or a “fish-eye.”

This motif illustrates a fundamental concept in Yup'ik philosophy.

According to anthropologist Ann Fienup-Riordan, “The circle and dot is a concrete metaphor for and means to achieve a dynamic movement between worlds, be it spiritual cycling, supernatural vision, or social transformation.”2 For Webb, this motif might also be considered as a symbol of connection between human and 2. Ann Fienup-Riordan, “The Mask: Eye of the Dance,” Arctic Anthropology, 24, no. 2 (1987), 55.

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AMBER WEBB

animal worlds or a symbol of protection.

Look closely at Webb’s work and you will see these symbols in the negative space.

Spirit and Power of Lateral Oppression, an ink drawing on wood panel, provides a good example. The center of the image shows a tattooed nude woman with her arms outstretched, hair wild and flowing, and mouth agape, with figures pulling at her limbs that seem to have handles. The figure is surrounded by prayer marks. Webb says of this artwork, “This is my offering to the spirit of lateral oppression. With all of myself, I call the land, water, moon, and helpers to stop lateral oppression from gnawing at our people. I see the spirit and power of lateral oppression and tell it to leave my family and community so that we can live our biggest dreams in right relationships with each other, the land, the animals, and the unseen.”

KEEPERS OF STORIES WOMEN ARE OFTEN the central figures in Webb’s work. They appear as mothers, caretakers, keepers of stories, and powerful beings. One of her recent works, Carayak (2023), shows a woman in mid-transformation between a bear and a human. Many stories from a long time ago share that people once had the ability to change between human and animal forms and to speak the same language. A story repeated in many communities in Alaska is about a woman who transformed into a bear.

In one version of the story, when a woman learns that her husband has been unfaithful, in a rage she transforms into a bear and tears him apart but is not able to transform back into a woman.

Webb’s pictorial version of this story expresses this raw emotion. For Webb, the image provides a lesson. “The just anger of women can be protective and necessary,” she writes. “Anger is a part of natural laws, but if we live in it, it can trap us.”

Webb makes a conscious choice to use materials like cardboard since rural

communities do not have local access to art supplies. People use what material is available and affordable. This follows a Yup'ik value to be resourceful and make use of what you have. One of my favorite examples of Webb’s storytelling work is a drawing on cardboard that depicts a woman with a berry-picking pail standing near a bear. She raises her garment to expose her breasts. Webb comments, “One of the things my great-grandma passed on is that if you see a bear when you are berry picking, speak Yup'ik to it and lift your shirt so it sees your amaqs [breasts], and it will think you are a bigger animal.” I grew up hearing this story too and have often imagined what the encounter might look like. Webb’s illustration keeps this story alive and reminds me how we should strive to live

“Anger is a part of natural laws, but if we live in it, it can trap us.”

above Woman Scaring Away a Bear, 2019, ink on cardboard, 12 × 12 in. Image courtesy of Melissa Shaginoff (Ahtna Athabascan/Pyramid Lake Paiute). opposite Carayak, 2023, ink on wood panel, 36 × 18 in. Image courtesy Bunnell Street Art Center.

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She hopes the images articulate a future that she can imagine where all women can be safe in their bodies.

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in harmony with the animals that share our ecosystems.

Perhaps Webb’s most well-known work is the Qaspeq project, a series of large-scale qaspeqs made from handstitched bedsheets illustrated with portraits of women and girls who have gone missing or were murdered. A qaspeq is a hooded cloth parka that is common in many Alaska Native communities. Webb started this project in 2017 in response to the disappearance of a family friend, Valerie Sifsof (Yup'ik/Inupiaq), from Granite Creek campground on the Kenai Peninsula in 2012. The series honors and humanizes the many women who have been taken from our communities and has been shared widely through exhibitions and in advocacy work for MMIW. In a previous interview Webb said, “I would look up names, and I’d look at photos and I would read everything I could find about these women. And then I would spend about maybe like two to six hours drawing their portrait with Sharpie on the garment. Sometimes I didn’t feel anything. You know, I would be sad, but I wouldn’t feel super intensely, like, nauseous, but then sometimes I would get physically ill. And I

AMBER WEBB

never really knew which portraits would do that.”3 Her most recent piece in this series, Memorial Qaspeq, includes portraits of some 250 Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women from Alaska, Canada, and the contiguous United States. It is in the Bunnell Street Arts Center's exhibition Protection: Adaptation and Resistance (2022–24), which has been on a national tour and is on display at the Museum of International Folk Art in Santa Fe through April 7, 2024. It will be shown at the Alaska State Museum in Juneau this summer. Webb notes that the project is not complete and hopes that eventually it will travel to communities in Canada.

FINDING HOPE TO COUNTER THE SOMBERNESS that came out of the Qaspeq series, much of Webb’s recent art illustrates large-scale, nude female bodies. Webb shared with me that this body of work came out of her desire “to express big joy after focusing on heavy topics.” She notes that these nudes are not meant to be provocative.

Instead, she wants these images to cast off the shame that so many women have carried around body image. She hopes the images articulate a future that she can imagine where all women can be safe in their bodies. Webb says: “Women are basically portals. We carry the past and the future in our bodies no matter what they look like or where they are. If you think of women that way, it changes how women are imagined. I want to make art to heal from the way that women are treated in the world.”

Webb is looking ahead to the future.

In addition to continuing her storywork, she plans to branch out into threedimensional projects, build a studio, make regalia, and focus on reconstructing ceremonies that are no longer practiced in our communities such as coming-of-age

“I want to make art to heal from the way that women are treated in the world.” observances. A dream of hers is to create an organization to bring Indigenous artists to Bristol Bay. “I would like to build an artist residency program with cabins on Lake Alegnagik to give artists a chance to connect to homelands, especially those who did not have the opportunity to grow up on this land,” she says. “My work will go where the energy takes me.”

INSTAGRAM @IMARPIKYAARUIQ 3. Izzy Ross, “Bristol Bay artist's qaspeq continues to document the toll of MMIP by lifting up their stories,” KDLG, May 10, 2022, web.

above A’la Creek, 2022, ink on wood panel. Image courtesy of the artist.

This drawing is in solidarity with sixth graders Alora, Harmony, and Trista from Dillingham and their quest to change the name of a creek, road, and the signs they drive by daily away from a racial slur about Native women. opposite, top People holding Memorial Qaspeq, 2018–22, Sharpie on cotton muslin, 144 in. wide. Photo: Emma Shaffer. Image courtesy of Amber Webb. opposite, bottom Detail of White Qaspeq in progress, 2018, Sharpie on cotton muslin. Image courtesy of Amber Webb.

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REVIEWS ARCATA, CALIFORNIA

Tintah: Amongst the Trails Goudi'ni Native American Gallery

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CALIFORNIA TOURISM organization is identifying key Indigenous sacred spaces throughout the state and urging the public to visit them. Land with sacred attributes must be protected, yet to publicly document or advertise sites as “sacred” may be as hazardous as to not identify them at all. So, the question remains: How do Indigenous people interpret the sacredness of spaces, including land, water, air, and nature, without risking a steady stream of disrespectful tourists and academics who could easily overwhelm the trails and pollute these sacred spaces?

One of these sacred spaces is atop a hill on the Cal Poly Humboldt campus: the Wiyot Plaza, adjacent to the new Rou Dalagurr Food Sovereignty Lab and Traditional Ecological Knowledges Institute and the distinctive Goudi'ni Native American Arts Gallery. Rou Dalagurr is a Wiyot phrase meaning “everyone works”

or “work together,” while Goudi'ni is the Wiyot name for the Arcata area (home to the Humboldt campus). The gallery space, with its wooden floors and two full walls of windows, overlooks Wigi (Humboldt Bay) through redwood treetops. The combined facilities on Wiyot Plaza assert an awareness to any visitor that they are not only situated in a forest but in a forest on Native land.

Robert Benson (Tsnungwe1) has reimagined the sacred and extended his knowledge into a space where all are welcome to explore his culture and beyond in Tintah: Amongst the Trails.

A Hupa word that translates literally as “among the trails,” Tintah means “in the forest,” and whether literal or metaphorical, Tintah represents the chaotic, fractal paths in life that bring challenges and resolutions along the way. An example is the continuous work on the revival of ceremony. “We continue to maintain the ceremonial house grounds for the Flower Dance at our village site of Hlel-din at the mouth of the South Fork of the Trinity River,” Benson told me. The construction of a house for a woman’s coming-of-age dance was the first time anything like that had been built in that place for 150 years.

Tintah: Amongst the Trails functions as an extension of Benson’s culture in relation to place. The exhibition situates the viewer on a trail among trees, water, and ceremony and into a position

of both unintrusive, cultural immersion and self-exploration. During the Tintah exhibition opening, I walked along a trail of reclaimed and carved madrone, alder, and redwood distressed by natural forces and upright in their previous incarnation of members of a forest. Works on paper in watercolor and natural dye and acrylic paintings on wood panels enhanced my perception of an accompanying landscape.

I wondered if the ceremonial items crafted of feather, hide, and shell were intended for use by the suggestion of humans in the piece Dancers, crafted in old-growth redwood woodgrain and acrylic.

Gallery director and curator Brittany Britton (Hupa) commented on the interactive quality of the exhibition.

“I had wanted Bob to bring in a series of verticals. We hadn’t had that in the Goudi'ni space before and wanted to see what it could look like. In arranging the exhibition, we wanted to guide the visitor through the space and had strategically placed ‘obstacles’ in some of the sculptures that viewers would have to move past in different paths through the gallery.”

One of the taller vertical pieces is Big Rumble and Roar. After Benson carved the sculpture, he chained it to willows and submerged it in the Trinity River where it suffered flood stages over an entire winter.

To look at the piece, one can imagine the rumble and roar of the river as the sculpture survived an onslaught of debris in the turbulent water. The sculpture indicates powerful medicine.

Immersed in the representation of the sacred spaces of trees, water, and ceremony, I attempted to decipher the aspects unique to his culture that Benson may want me as the viewer to experience versus those I saw through my own cultural lens. His works enable the viewer to experience his culture through hints of sacred spaces and ceremony without intrusion and simultaneously provide a catalyst for personal exploration.

“Going around,” explained Benson, is a phrase among the local Indigenous peoples. “Some people think of a trail as you go from here to there to reach a destination, but for my people and friends, you don’t ever reach a destination; you are always someplace.”

1. Danny Ammon, ed., “Previous Recognition by the United States Government of the Tsnungwe Tribe,” September 2001, Davis Community Network, web. The Tsnungwe Tribe is not federally recognized; however, they work with the California Native American Commission and neighboring tribes. They are one of the California tribes who signed treaties with the US federal government in 1851 and 1852, which the United States failed to ratify.

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Benson described his long search to make his people’s geometric aesthetics his own contemporary art as a “journey of the imagination” and hopes viewers recognize the Northern California tribal patterns and see his work as distinctively Tsnungwe.

The greater community, including many elders and representatives of several tribes, attended the opening reception.

“Good thing this is for the winter issue [of FAAM] as an elder told me we don’t say the name (Tintah) until after the first frost,” said Benson.

—Nanette Kelley (Osage/Cherokee Nations)

above Robert Benson (Tsnungwe), Big Rumble and Roar, found wood sculpture. opposite Installation view of Tintah: Amongst the Trails. Both photos: N. Kelley.

CALERA, OKLAHOMA

Bok Abaiya: Practiced Hands and the Arts of Choctaw Basketry Choctaw Cultural Center

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ASKET WEAVING is one of the most widespread art forms across the globe, and Choctaw basket weavers are renowned for their complex patterns, diverse forms, and tight weaves. Bok Abaiya: Practiced Hands and the Arts of Choctaw Basketry addresses Choctaw basketry in relation to generational teaching, use of rivercane, evolution, adaptability, and basketry’s influence on other contemporary art forms. Bok Abaiya is a Chahta anumpa (Choctaw language) phrase that roughly translates to “alongside the river.” The title pays homage to Choctaw basket makers’ use of rivercane (Arundinaria gigantea), a bamboo native to the South Central and Southeastern regions of the United States.

The exhibition is produced by the, which opened in 2021 with the vision “to offer an immersive experience that unites all generations with the Chahta journey.”1 The center's many components including stewardship of an art collection that is curated into two rotating exhibition spaces.

Bok Abaiya is the first curatorial project by the center’s curator, Claire Green Young (Choctaw Nation), with assistance from Megan Baker (Choctaw Nation) and Jennifer Byram (Choctaw Nation).

The artwork in the exhibition spans across time. At the entrance of the room is a case with the oldest baskets in the exhibition, Sifter (Ishshoha) Basket (ca.

1880–1900) and Fanner (Ufko) Basket (ca. 1880–1900), made from rivercane by a “Maker Once Known.” The baskets are visually distinct in shape and technique.

Sifter (Ishshoha) Basket is open work, while Fanner (Ufko) Basket is tightly woven. The label reveals they serve different functions in processing food and were owned by Anna Shoney Wilson (Choctaw Nation, 1853–1941), whose family does not believe that she wove them but

rather used and repaired them. These two works root the exhibition in the past and acknowledge the functionality of basketry. The case included a photograph of Wilson, individualizing her relationship to the works. This is just one example of how the exhibition presents not only the art but also the people, a methodology not commonly practiced in museums that display Native American art made before the 20th century.

While many of the baskets in the exhibition are from the cultural center’s collection, some are on loan from the broader Choctaw community as well as the Philbrook Museum of Art. One example from the Philbrook is 3-Sided Basket (ca. 1937) made from rivercane and commercial dye by a maker once known. The basket separates itself from others in the exhibition with its rounded pyramid form created from both twill weave and plain weave. The basket was probably made to hang on the wall. The label states that few baskets like this are known and if any visitors have more information, they should contact Green Young. Not only an object to be perceived, 3-Sided Basket also serves as a research tool as the label beckons for more information.

Baskets with known makers in Bok Abaiya are organized by artists in singular vitrines as well as groups of artists collectively displayed on walls. The exhibition emphasizes that the current Choctaw weaving generation has been formed by grandmothers like Ruth Meshaya (Choctaw Nation, 1914–1995) and Fannie Battiest Wesley (Choctaw Nation, 1877– 1969). Wesley’s baskets are displayed near those made by her granddaughters Eveline Steele (Choctaw Nation) and Rose Billy (Choctaw Nation). While the exhibition presents the baskets themselves, it also highlights the Choctaw women who made them. Meshaya made Egg/Carrying Basket (ca. 1970s) with rivercane and commercial dye. Visually appealing with its red-and-black patterning and curved shape, it sits in a case alongside a 1991 photograph of Meshaya, posed with her hands overlapped. The basket in concert with the photograph encourages viewers to consider the skillful hands that wove Egg/Carrying Basket. The label text shares that Meshaya’s great grandson, Kaleb

1. “About Us,” Choctaw Cultural Center, web.

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above Yasmine Austin Sapulpa (Choctaw Nation/Mvskoke/ Cherokee), cultural education coordinator at the Choctaw Cultural Center, weaving a commercial reed basket. Media for Bok Abaiya. Image courtesy of Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma Photography Team. opposite Jessie Kleemann (Kalaaleq), Kamiit (detail), 2023, installation with cloth and coffee grounds. Photo: Frida Gregersen. Image courtesy of Jessie Kleemann and the National Gallery of Denmark.

Standridge (Choctaw Nation), works at the cultural center and weaves baskets from commercial reed.

The exhibition includes several artworks in diverse media by Choctaw Cultural Center staff, including Aliyah Sapulpa-Myers (Choctaw Nation/ Mvskoke/Cherokee), Yasmine Austin Sapulpa (Choctaw Nation/Mvskoke/ Cherokee), Demetrius Williams (Mississippi Choctaw), as well as Ashton Willis, Debbie Damron, Beckah Pisachubbee Boykin, and Brenner Billy (all Choctaw Nation). Their work includes baskets, regalia, and arrows. Brenner Billy, the center’s public programs coordinator, told me that the exhibition “has not only brought life to the cultural center but a

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spotlight perspective for our communities who are continuing tradition and culture.”

The exhibition is animated by striking photographs, notably Amber Morningstar (2019) by photographer Cara Romero (Chemehuevi). The photograph captures artist Amber Morningstar (Choctaw Nation) standing in a life-size doll box adorned with Choctaw beadwork designs. Morningstar wears her Choctaw regalia and is surrounded by Choctaw cultural items including different forms of rivercane baskets. Morningstar notably holds an elbow basket filled with sunflowers, which highlights the relationship between Choctaw women and baskets.

Another photograph included in the exhibition is Hinushi 1 (2023) by Sarah Sense (Chitimacha/Choctaw).

Sense printed, cut, and wove archival prints of allotment maps (courtesy of the Choctaw Cultural Center), journal entries from Lewis and Clark, and photographs of Oklahoma and California landscapes.

The result is a large image woven in the pattern of a Choctaw basket that Sense’s grandmother gave her. The piece reckons with the relocation of Choctaw people from the Southeastern Woodlands to Oklahoma on the Trail of Tears and, later, the urbanization of contemporary Choctaw families (Sense lives in California). In Hinushi 1 Sense illustrates how, despite geographical distance, connections to community prevail through the generations.

While Amber Morningstar and Hinushi 1 are not baskets, they relay how Choctaw basketry is interwoven in contemporary Choctaw women’s lives.

Combining utilitarian art and photography in the exhibition prompts audiences to think about the evolution of Choctaw art practices and lived experiences.

When I visited Bok Abaiya, Green Young gave a tour to artist Linda Lomahaftewa (Hopi/Choctaw), curator Tatiana Lomahaftewa-Singer (Choctaw/Hopi), museum professional Evan Mathis, and me. The tour exemplified Green Young’s curatorial practice in Bok Abaiya, which was to accommodate and animate both Choctaw and non-Choctaw audiences.

The exhibition testifies to the interconnectedness of basketry within the Choctaw community. As Green Young wrote in a text panel, “This exhibit could not have been created without our

REVIEWS

community. It depended on their trust.

Basketry is not a practice of the past; it has been a functional aspect of everyday life in our communities for thousands of years. While we see it displayed in museums across the United States and abroad today, people still use it as part of their daily life.”

Bok Abaiya is a remarkable example of a tribal institution hosting an exhibition of artists from the tribe and curated by a fellow tribal citizen. Austin Sapulpa told me, “Being a community member, Claire has an inherent respect and appreciation for our tribal artists. Her respect for every artist, new or well known, is touching.” Bok Abaiya: Practiced Hands and the Arts of Choctaw Basketry will be on view until March 30, 2024.

Bok Abaiya prompts one to consider how tribal sovereignty influences exhibition development and curation.

As more tribal nations like the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma create their own exhibitions, the future is glimmering with possibilities. —Sháńdíín Brown (Diné)

COPENHAGEN

Jessie Kleemann: Running Time National Gallery of Denmark

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CANNOT TELL EXACTLY WHEN I was first impacted by the art of Jessie Kleemann (Kalaaleq). What I remember is how Jessie’s work made me realize that art was more than paintings, and that the body was as much the artist’s tool as the brush is for the painter. The first time I saw Jessie perform, I felt as if all the hurt of our ancestors opened. Even though I was young, I understood how misunderstood she was by our [Kalaallit] community. She has always been far ahead and is in line with the international contemporary art scene because she possesses the courage and feels the necessity to do her work in order to be true to herself.

I don’t live in Denmark and have not read all the reviews on Jessie’s show.

What I heard is that one of the critics felt the show was too tame, as if Jessie’s power wasn’t allowed to be shown. I didn’t

have the opportunity to see Jessie’s performances in person, but my experience of the show was grand! Entering the National Art Gallery of Denmark—for me, the Greenlander, and seeing Jessie’s art in the spaces that used to give me peace during my time as an art student in a noisy city—was utterly amazing! I have difficulty understanding what power the critic felt was missing because I felt so connected to all the works.

Her video works moved me to my core, and I felt all the sorrow and pain being transmitted to myself. Jessie’s messages are clear for the Greenlandic audience. She views Greenland from the outside and shows us aspects that have become unclear to those of us who live in Greenland—how we ignore and don’t discuss the immense pain of the nature around us, which defines who we are as

Greenlanders, just to avoid conflict in our midst.

Our values are changing, and we are becoming more globally aware. But we still live in small communities, in bubbles, where global matters or climate change issues don’t dominate everyday life. Jessie’s artwork clearly shows the immense strength we possess as an Arctic people living in extreme conditions—in our physique and mind. We are special, and seeing an exhibition like Jessie’s in a country that is not ours is very powerful. It clearly shows our identity and uniqueness. It would have been more powerful if the National Gallery had hung up a banner of Jessie’s exhibition at the entrance façade instead of one for the European Baroque exhibition. We Greenlanders will keep our pride indoors.

—Arnajaraq Stoevlbaek (Kalaaleq)

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MEDFORD, MASSACHUSETTS

Véxoa: We Know (Nós sabemos) Aidekman Arts Center, Tufts University Art Galleries

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RIGINALLY PRESENTED in 2020 at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo, Véxoa: We Know (Nós sabemos) is the exhibition’s second iteration at Tufts University Art Galleries (TUAG). The exhibition is organized by lead curator Naine Terena (Terena), director of education and artistic training in Brazil’s Ministry of Culture; guest co-curator Claudia Mattos Avolese, senior lecturer in visual and material studies at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University; and Dina Deitsch, TUAG director and chief curator.

The first exhibition of its kind to be featured in the United States, Véxoa showcases the works of 22 Indigenous artists and collectives from various Indigenous communities across Brazil. The title and byline steer the viewer towards its core message. Véxoa, which means “we know” in the Terena language, is as much a celebration of the rich, artistic production of Indigenous peoples as it is a call to action—to preserve Native heritage and existence in light of current attacks against Indigenous rights in Brazil and the ongoing climate emergency. By presenting Indigenous Brazil through a survey of its artists, the exhibition promises a space to experience, explore, and learn about the original peoples of Brazil through an analysis of the various meanings of their art.

Curated on the principles of Indigenous thought as it relates to time, space, and territory, Véxoa flows freely between two floors without strict thematic or temporal divisions. As Naine puts it, “Véxoa

operates with the idea that there are other chronologies, organizations, and ways of being in the world and in the arts.”1 One of the most striking pieces in the show stands in the entryway of the gallery space. Ēpry vēnkhāpóv (Crossroads) is a shopping cart lined with vibrant blue, red, and yellow woven graphisms. Inspired by the braided baskets of the Kaingang people, the designs represent Kaingang cosmology, passed down through generations of oral history and material culture. The patterns are undoubtedly compelling. Each line is woven seamlessly and displays a geometric intricacy that exudes harmony and balance. Created by the Kókir Collective, comprised of artists Tadeu dos Santos Kaingang (Kaingang) and Sheilla Souza, Ēpry vēnkhāpóv (Crossroads) embodies the essence of Indigenous contemporary art. Combining ancestral design and practice in the braided plant fiber with a symbol of modern-day consumption, the shopping cart is a testament to the

1. Claudia Mattos Avolese, “Claudia Mattos Avolese Interviews Naine Terena,” Véxoa: We Know (Nós sabemos) (Medford, MA: Tufts University Art Galleries, 2023), PDF, 7.

above Installation view of Véxoa: We Know (Nós sabemos) at the Aidekman Arts Center, Tufts University Art Galleries. opposite Denilson Baniwa (Baniwa), Yawareté maku tetama (Jaguar in Ancestral Land), 2023, mural. Both photos: Mariana Brazão.

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resistance of Indigenous culture in the face of centuries of exploitative and extractive practices. It signals resistance of colonization narratives and the continuity of Indigenous being and expression.

The idea of continuity is important to Naine. When working on Véxoa for the Pinacoteca de São Paulo, she focused on the long-term impacts of the exhibition.

For her, the most important work does not exist within the official start and end dates of an art show. Rather, it is best seen in the inclusion of Indigenous peoples and cultures following the exhibition’s close through further acquisitions and communications. This iteration at Tufts University Art Galleries is a continuation of that mission.

Véxoa emerges within the context of an increased interest in contemporary Indigenous art both in Brazil and around the world. The exhibition features a series of pieces by the late Jaider Esbell of the Macuxi people. A highlight is his Árvore de todos os saberes (Tree of All Knowledge), a collaborative piece worked on by peoples across the Americas to emphasize the power of transnational unity and ancestral force. The canvas painting portrays the expansion of a tree decorated with circles that represent nature, symbols, and people, and that creates a sort of web of shared knowledge and connections. While I took my time to analyze each circle, what struck me the most were those left blank, perhaps for the continuation of the work and collaboration.

Also included are the captivating neon, geometric works by Daiara Tukano (Tukano): Yiki Mahsã Pâti (World of the Forest Spirits) and Muhipu Saãrô (Sunset).

These two pieces are characteristic of her vivid Hori paintings inspired by visions that appear in her dreams.

Denilson Baniwa (Baniwa) makes an appearance through two commissioned murals, a treat to see firsthand.

The first one, Sopro do pagé (The Shaman’s Blow), depicts a shaman-jaguar blowing animal petroglyphs. The piece scales the entire side wall on the bottom floor of the gallery space and emits a sense of riverlike movement. The second, Yawareté maku tetama (Jaguar in Ancestral Land), is an outdoor mural that covers the side of the building in green vegetation and a giant jaguar (one of Denilson’s favorite motifs).

Juxtaposed as the backdrop of a parking lot, the lively jaguar signals Indigenous resistance while poetically positioning two worlds together—that of mundane capitalism and vibrant Indigenous expression.

For most visiting the art center, this will be their first exposure to the art of the original peoples of Brazil, a reality not lost on the curators and organizers. The exhibition is as aesthetically rich as it is educationally comprehensive. A map of Brazil pinpoints the geographic localities of the Indigenous artists in the exhibition.

This gives viewers an idea of the expanse of communities represented.

The diversity of cultures included is also felt by the series of different art forms and styles that make up the gallery space.

Included are the digital drawings and illustrations by Yacunã Tuxá (Tuxá), the black-and-white photographic collection of Edgar Kanaykõ of the Xakriabá people, and a set of pottery pieces by Taperida Juruna and Pirrum Juruna of the Yudjá people. A pair of ten-foot Waujá masks are presented in the same space as the miniature animal clay sculptures by Tamikuã Txihi of the Pataxó people. The Indigenous Film in Brazil movie room features works by the Cultural Association of Indigenous Filmmakers/Makers (ASCURI).

While it can feel like a flurry of information at first, the curatorial choice

of such diverse and numerous selections is paired with the inclusion of a myriad of informational resources to turn to.

Included are a mini booklet where visitors can write their responses to the exhibition; a listening station featuring Indigenous musical artists such as Brisa Flow (Mapuche) and Edivan Fulni-ô (Fulni-ô); and a sampling of children’s books by Indigenous educator Daniel Munduruku (Munduruku) and Werá Jeguaka Mirim (Guarani). The last piece is an informational timeline that spans the area of two walls responding to the question, “What are traditional territories?” and a brief history of artists and activism in Brazil. Highlighted is the recent election of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and his reversal of Bolsonaro’s anti-Indigenous policies.

Véxoa offers a portal into Indigenous being and sociality and sets a model on how to simultaneously empower the voices of Indigenous peoples and educate viewers on the different modes of ancestral knowledge and Native artistic production. Ultimately the exhibition demonstrates the power of art in the communication and advocacy of the original peoples of Brazil within the country and now abroad.

—Mariana Brazão

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MINNEAPOLIS

In Our Hands: Native Photography, 1890 to Now Minneapolis Institute of Art

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HE LATEST COLLABORATION with Indigenous artists and communities by the Minneapolis Institute of Art (Mia), In Our Hands, Native Photography, 1890 to Now, centers Native expression and visual sovereignty as its own art canon.

Created with, by, and for Indigenous people, the exhibition illuminates their important contributions to the medium of photography, past and present, through the lens of First Nations, Métis, Inuit, and Native American photographers hailing from the Arctic Circle to the Rio Grande.

The exhibition also holds space for the future of Indigenous photographers and image-makers.

A meeting of three Mia curators began the process of exploring the

question, “What does Indigenous photography look like?” Photographer Jaida Grey Eagle (Oglala Lakota), chair of Mia’s global contemporary art department and curator of photography and new media Casey Riley, and associate curator of Native American art Jill Ahlberg Yohe then shared their question with 14 mostly Native artists, academic scholars, and knowledge-sharers from across the United States and Canada. Guided by Indigenous community methodologies of relationship, respect, responsibility, and reciprocity, this council developed a thematic checklist for curating the exhibition.

“The process of consensus takes away the individuality that is very present in American [museum] standards of what is called leadership”, explains Grey Eagle.

“Native leadership as expressed through a collectivity is more powerful than one person. What makes this show so striking is that it is many people coming together, democratically, to say this is what Native photography is.”

Each artwork is rooted in narrative and centers Indigenous voices on a specific

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conversation that reflects on the exhibition’s themes—A World of Relations, Always Leaders, and Always Present.

The first section, A World of Relations, reveals how Native people hold the world holistically as a web of interconnecting relationships and communities in all its forms of life, particularly in relation to nature.

Sharon M. Day’s (Bois Forte Ojibwe) digital print Walking for the Water foreshadows, for me, the conceptual depth of Indigenous storytelling that is present throughout In Our Hands.

In what seems like a cell phone image of an innocuous activity—the artist walking down the side of a paved and foggy road, pail in hand—Day is recognizing water as a relative in need of care by carrying clean water from the headwaters of a river to its mouth. The photograph is a record of an action of empathy and gratitude that acknowledges water’s resilience in providing sustenance to all living beings, as well as its vulnerability to continue nurturing life in the wake of environmental and social injustices.

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Zoë Marieh Urness’s (Tlingit) sepia-tone photograph, Raven Tells His Story in the Fog, and Meryl McMaster’s (Plains Cree) dreamlike and performative self-portrait, On the Edge of This Immensity, link the past with the present in visual stories depicting Native identity through connection to ancestral lands.

Nadya Kwandibens (Animakee Wa Zhing Ojibwe) takes a slightly different approach in Tee Lyn Duke (née Copenance), in which a figure dressed in Jingle Dress dance regalia stands in the middle of an urban train station during rush hour with dull blurs of people speeding by on either side of her. The visual erasure caused by the rushing people poses a reverse narrative of the “vanishing Indian,” the notion that Native people only exist in the past.

Indigenous people “are present and alive culturally,” explains Kwandibens. Native photographers are resisting harmful past narratives through present visual representation to define their own stories.

The earliest photographs in the exhibition show that Native photographers have historically contended with erasure and reclamation in documenting their cultural presence. For example, Richard Throssel (Cree, 1882–1933) reveals the conflicted space in which two worlds are colliding with Interior of the Best Indian Kitchen on the Crow Reservation, a 1910 photograph depicting an Apsáalooke family wearing customary clothing seated at a dinner table with china place settings. In his Self-Portrait in Studio in Metlakatla, Benjamin Alfred Haldane (Tsimshian, 1874–1941) proudly leans on an object of his Tsimshian heritage in a room otherwise surrounded by artifacts of the Western material culture of the time. There are also several Horace Poolaw (Kiowa, 1906–1984) photographs highlighted in the exhibition that depict family life and a love for community.

“Indigenous storytelling is always about community,” says Tom Jones (Ho-Chunk), whose photographic essays, including Choka Watching Oprah and Pendalton Price, are ongoing documentation of Ho-Chunk identity, with the latter image featuring beadwork sewn directly onto the photographic paper. Amnía (Echo) by Wendy Red Star (Apsáalooke) and War Shirt #1 by Bently Spang (Northern Cheyenne/Suhtai) use

above Benjamin Alfred Haldane (Tsimshian, 1974–1941), Self-Portrait in Studio in Metlakatla, ca. 1919–1920, photograph, 11 × 14 in., collection of the Ketchikan Museums, KM 89.2.14.21. opposite Nadya Kwandibens (Animakee Wa Zhing Ojibwe), Tee Lyn Duke (née Copenance), 2010, photograph. ©2010 Red Works Photography. Both images courtesy of Minneapolis Institute of Art.

multiple photographs in sculptural narratives to address family and community.

Diverse photographic processes and art media—from ledger art, tintypes, portraiture, collages, collaborations, image transfers, video projections, photographic sculptures, beadwork, and installations—illuminate how Native photographers have innovated the medium to document presence.

The exhibition’s second section, Always Leaders, considers opportunities for consensus building around different critical systems in a world of relations that revolve around political, cultural, environmental, social justice, identity, and self-expression issues. This section also raises the profile of women leaders who are building accountable and inclusive institutions—including museums.

These photographers are rematriating colonial imager y into new narratives that are supported by Indigenous knowledge and perspectives and in accordance with Indigenous cultural practices. Two examples are Matika Wilbur’s (Tulalip/Swinomish) portrait of a pioneer in Native American studies and education, Dr. Henrietta Mann (Cheyenne), and Jolene Rickard’s (Tuscarora, Turtle clan) Fighting for the Line, which highlights the US government’s Morrill Act that created a process to steal

Indigenous land and deed it to land-grant institutions.

Several artworks in this section address two-spirit and Black Lives communities. Hulleah Tsinhnahjinnie’s (Navajo/Seminole/Muscogee) We'wha, The Beloved is a digital collage depicting a two-spirit Zuni leader that reflects an expanding world of relations and allyship within communities that are pushing against the current culture-war rhetoric created by US extremist ideologies. The indigenizing of photography, a term used

by Cara Romero (Chemehuevi) and many other artists in this exhibition, transforms the camera into a tool for healing.

The third section, Always Present, continues stewardship of Native culture and visual sovereignty centered in this moment in time. The photographs that inspired me most depicted reasons for celebration. For example, Dancing in the Sunlight by Tom Fields (Muscogee/ Cherokee) inspired me to dance as well because it reminded me of family picnics and the powwows I attended as a child.

The innocence and joy in Throssel’s photograph Baby Stuart (An Indian Girl with Dog) prompted me to later dig out a photograph of my mother smelling flowers in a garden when she was about two years old.

Zig Jackson’s (Mandan/Hidatsa/Arikara) photograph, Indian Photographing

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Tourist Photographing Indians, Crow Agency, Montana (1991) confounded me, while Leah Rose Kolakowski’s (Keweenaw Bay Ojibwa) Bring Her Home moved me to whisper a prayer. Marie Rexford of Kaktovik, Alaska Preparing Maktak for the Village’s Thanksgiving Day Feast by Brian Adams (Inupiaq) reminded me to feel grateful and share the fruits of my garden with others.

Other artworks, like I Tan To Look More Native by Erica Lord (Athabascan/Inupiaq), triggered self-reflection and an understanding of my own history, a sense of belonging, and the cultural displacement I feel straddling two worlds.

The exhibition also holds ground for rising Native creatives. Inner Strength by Dyana DeCoteau-Dyess (Turtle Mountain Ojibwe) powerfully acknowledges the impact of generational trauma and the possibility that it will carry forward to the next generation.

Trauma must be represented and heard in order to heal, reverse the erasure, shift the narrative, and lead, as Lord says, “to new and accurate and identifiable representation of Indigenous people.”

And Ungelbah Dávila’s (Navajo) tender family portrait, Roxanne, Rose & Cedar, portrays knowledge being passed down through generations.

In Our Hands builds off the tremendous momentum of another collaborative exhibition Mia hosted, Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists (2019–21). Also groundbreaking, Hearts of Our People paid tribute to Indigenous women’s contributions to American and Canadian art and was organized through a similar collaborative Native and non-Native advisory structure. Museums across the country should take note of the power of Native art professionals convening such exhibitions, and particularly the staff of the Mia understanding they do not have all the answers. Listening is leadership—and when you listen together, you can make something beautiful.

Indigenous or not, there is something relatable for everyone in In Our Hands as the language of storytelling is universal.

—Cedar Marie (Standing Rock Lakota descent)

OKLAHOMA CITY

this universe is you Oklahoma Hall of Fame, Gaylord-Pickens Museum

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UCKED AWAY on the third floor of the Oklahoma Hall of Fame Museum, this universe is you, running from September 27 to November 25, 2023, serves as a testament to the lives, cultures, and identities of five Native American women and how they are actively making a name for themselves in the art world. Curated by Mattie Barlow, the exhibition showcases work by Amber DuBoise-Shepherd (Navajo/Sac & Fox/Prairie Band Potawatomi), Kristin Gentry (Choctaw Nation), Shelby Rowe (Chickasaw), Kindra Swafford (Cherokee Nation), and Jarica Walsh (Osage).

Evoking the poem “Remember” (1983) by three-time US Poet Laureate Joy Harjo (Mvskoke), the exhibition memorializes stories embedded into each artist’s life. Their works remind viewers of the importance of self-discovery, our experiences within the natural world, and maintaining connections with ancestors and kin.

With its classical Greek architecture and fine materials, the Oklahoma Hall of Fame Museum evokes a sense of opulence and achievement. Looming over visitors are the formal portraits of Oklahoma Hall of Fame inductees that line the walls of almost every floor and stairwell. Despite

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the celebratory nature of the building, it is difficult to not feel inferior when meeting the gazes of quintessential Oklahoma icons and heroes. However, when entering the Josephine Freede West Wing on the third floor, this feeling changes.

The breathable, well-lit, and interactive gallery provides a welcome reprieve. Directly across from the main entryway when entering the exhibition is Oka' (Water), a beaded piece by Rowe, that is flanked by five pieces by DuBoiseShepherd and Walsh. The central positioning of Oka' (Water), along with the opposing walls, delineates the entire gallery space while not domineering it. This allows visitors to self-direct their encounters with the exhibition’s pieces without an imposed method of experience, with viewers learning more about the artworks and artists, as well as information about purchasing works, from accompanying QR codes.

The exhibition doesn’t sequester pieces, providing a fluid experience for viewers. Interspersing the work of five artists creates a conversation about their combined life stories and non-linear Indigenous epistemologies. For example, even though each of these women drew inspiration from their memories, identities, and communities, the exhibition’s collaborative format underscores their collective experiences. Such deliberate blending touches on the fact that the artists’ lives—as well as those of viewers— are not linear. All of our feelings are based

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above and opposite Installation view of this universe is you. Photo: Abby Mikalauskas.

on a fluid cycling of memories, events, and interactions that, when combined, underscore our experience within the world.

Despite the lack of physical segregation of each artist’s work, each woman’s media choice and thematic and subject specificity make her art visually explicit and identifiable to the viewer.

For example, with I long to pray before the mountain…, DuBoise-Shepherd—the only artist in the exhibition who utilizes text—combines typography, watercolor, and mixed media to illustrate tribally specific symbolisms and practices.

Gentry similarly utilizes watercolors, though her work focuses on symbolic rather than realistic representations of the natural world. Her incredibly bold, bright watercolors and innovative use of negative space in pieces like Homma Lakna 2023 honor Choctaw culture and worldviews that are based upon the natural world.

Arguably the focal point of the exhibition due to the central positionality of her Oka' (Water), Rowe’s work combines multicolored glass beads, 24-karat gold beads, nylon thread, ribbon, leather, and human hair to create pieces that dance between the boundaries of sculpture, fashion, jewelry, and painting. With her brick-stitched beadwork, she creates a gambit of realistic representations of

people, animals, and insects. For example, 21st Century Chickasaw Hatchet Woman reveals not only skill in her chosen medium but also her commitment to Chickasaw heritage.

In contrast, Swafford’s acrylics, a series of numbered Uktena and Ladybugs, are arguably more cohesive in terms of imagery and formal qualities. It is apparent upon entering the exhibition that this series is in conversation with the other pieces, individually and collectively.

However, due to the physical positioning of its segments, it is sometimes difficult to appreciate their holistic goal—to bring into the space a water monster intertwining between the other works that surfaces occasionally and leaving it up to the viewers to fill the negative space—that leaves them to wonder what the pieces would look like when put together.

A floral series of cyanotype photograms of ceramics on paper, for example, Seeds of Change, document Walsh’s dedication to capturing and expanding relationships between nature, the universe, and all of us. She also highlights the importance of a reciprocal, respectful relationship between plants and humans in her work.

Narratives run throughout the exhibition. According to Rowe: “Each piece of beadwork that I create becomes a story of power that exists in deliberate and gentle love, patience, persistence,

and focus. That power transforms what was broken into luminous symbols of strength and healing.” With one of her most breathtaking works, Sacred Bond Between Friends, she uses metallic and brilliantly hued Delica beadwork to create a highly realistic depiction of the entrenched bond, commitment, and trust between a man and his horse. From afar, the piece reads as a painting. Upon closer inspection, the viewer appreciates the intricate configuration of multicolored glass beads that compose this incredible piece that is imbued with such dramatic qualities of light and shadow.

Ultimately, each artwork in this universe is you stands on its own, all of them beautifully evoking their creators’ experiences, identities, and memories. Each can be appreciated for its formal and technical qualities, aesthetic presence, and symbolic meaning. However, when understood as a collective, especially in response to the poem “Remember” and the artists’ statements that are part of the exhibition, a larger meaning can be unraveled.

Yes, this universe is you, but it is also me. It is the ground beneath our feet and the cars driven on the street.

Perhaps most importantly, it is how we connect with everybody and everything, animate and inanimate, in an ever-changing environment to create an inclusive community that can grow, learn, and adapt. This exhibition serves as a step toward just that. —Abby Mikalauskas

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SANTA FE

Horizons: Weaving Between the Lines with Diné Textiles Museum of Indian Arts and Culture

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U R AT E D B Y D I N É WEAVERS as a tribute to Diné weavers of past, present, and future generations, Horizons: Weaving Between the Lines with Diné Textiles features carefully selected woven works. These provide depth and nuance without overwhelming audiences. Born of community grounding, the exhibition emerged from a team of voices, with Rapheal Begay (Diné) and Hadley Jensen as the primary co-curators and a Diné advisory committee made up of weaving artists Lynda Teller Pete, Kevin Aspaas, and Tyrrell Tapaha, scholar Larissa Nez, and digital artist Darby RaymondOverstreet. Through sound, photography, and textiles, Horizons envelops one’s experience with a layered environment that honors the relationships between processes, places, ancestors, and artistic journeys.

The exhibition begins with a foundation for the team’s process of curation.

A small video touchscreen shows the group giving feedback on the Germantown red pictorial textile (Pictorial Blanket, ca. 1885) displayed adjacent to the touchscreen near the entrance of the gallery. Hearing the group’s interpretations of this weaving that features imagery of farm life, train cars, and the railroad demonstrates the wide variety of perspectives incorporated into the project. The weaving records one of many changing moments in time for the Diné people, and, with a few more steps into the exhibition, one begins to hear a soft soundtrack. Sounds of weavers patting down yarns onto the loom and bells ringing from sheep’s necks alternate with more audio of the weaving process.

These movements are heard throughout Horizons.

The title wall bears a photograph of Spider Rock in Canyon de Chelly to offer gratitude to Spider Woman for her gift of weaving and Spider Man for his gift of the loom and other weaving tools to the Diné.

From here, two dresses hold space in the same sightline, both woven by two members of the advisory committee, Kevin Aspaas and Tyrrell Tapaha. These two works underscore the deep connections between weavers and particular places.

above Darby Raymond-Overstreet (Diné), Woven Landscape: Monument Valley, 2022, digital photo collage, 24½ × 32¾ × 1¼ in. Image courtesy of the artist and the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture.

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Aspaas’s Dress (2021) features Spider Woman’s crosses in light blue at the top and bottom, surrounded by red and navy yarns. Like other works of his in the exhibition, Tapaha’s Child of the Natural World, Two Panel Dress (2020) features an epic storytelling approach—a cloud pattern at the top, with a mountain scene at the bottom, and a large black area at center that suggests a portrayal of Mother Earth and Father Sky. Through allusions to landscapes, both weavers give respect to their homelands that support all aspects of the weaving process.

In another display, Lynda Teller Pete offers an analysis of Dress (ca.

1890–95) woven in red and black. She calls attention to a Diné practice of not weaving one’s own dress. She also interprets the tassels as female rain or umbilical cords. Teller Pete’s voice in the exhibition’s labels reveals how valuable her many years of weaving experience is to the research process.

With this weaving placed adjacent to Rapheal Begay’s 2021 photographic image of Spider Rock (Tséyi' – Canyon de Chelly, AZ), the exhibition’s theme of horizons exemplifies its crossing of media boundaries and sense of place. The theme is visible in the dialogue between the featured artists’ journeys of building materiality in digital and woven art forms. Their deep relationships with Diné landscapes anchor the exhibition through the many angles of Diné horizons presented to visitors.

Something else Horizons acknowledges is Diné men’s role as critical contributors in carrying on the arts of Diné weaving, which contrasts with 20th-century Southwest tourism promotional imagery and contributes to the tribe’s ongoing history of male weavers.

An historical weaving, “Átł'óhí” Storm Weaving (1936), pays homage to a male weaver, The One Who Weaves (Diné, fl. early 20th century). The symmetrical storm pattern suggests an honoring of water as a necessity for all life. The weaving features red, white, grey, and black yarns and offers an exacting implementation of detail and clean lines in its design.

Two wedge weavings also hold critical space in the exhibition: an historical

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panel and a contemporary panel. Wedge Weave Blanket (ca.

1895), in a grey, red, and black palette, demonstrates a sculptural approach to the art form. Its wavy edges bend in an uneven rhythm. Certain areas throughout the panel provide an almost bas-relief effect with some areas of the overall zigzag design protruding more than others.

Kevin Aspaas, who wrote the interpretation for this work, comments that the weaving leaves one with many questions while affirming his own practice. His 2022 Untitled (wedge weave) work relies heavily on indigo-dyed yarns to produce a palette of blues with grey and white in an overall zigzag pattern. In the accompanying wall label, he recognizes the healing properties of weaving and attributes his color palette choice to a trying moment for him.

In another emphasis on color, Teller Pete features one of her weavings, Migration of Dragonflies (2015), a child’s blanket in red. In her wall label, she describes a landscape of mountains and frozen ponds, as articulated in a varied palette of red, brown, blue, yellow, and grey commercial yarns that her sister Barbara Teller Ornelas (Diné) unraveled and re-spun. This collaboration reminds viewers of the community and familial aspects of weaving and the transformative relationships and processes that emerge.

Weaving in this 19th-century revival style marks a departure by Teller Pete from the Two Grey Hills style for which she and her sister Barbara are renowned. So, to provide a fuller picture of their family practice, Barbara Teller Ornelas’s Rug (1996) is featured. This Two Grey Hills weaving, with its palette of grey, black, brown, and white and a double-diamond pattern, shows the precision that she gives this art form. It honors the family’s deep connection to the Two Grey Hills Trading Post and weaving style while looking toward future generations in the family. With this knowledge, the younger weavers are creating more individualized patterns outside of the Two Grey Hills style.

The exhibition’s parallel emphasis on photography comes through in Begay’s large-scale landscape prints and 360-degree digital video, as well as a series of Darby Raymond-Overstreet’s composite images of weaving designs overlaid onto landscape photography. Begay’s camera moves viewers through many different places of Diné lands. To see a variety of significant locales creates place-based associations with the motifs of the Diné weavings. The photography also provides a visual record of geographic sites that inspire weaving creativity and influence Diné artistic practices. This is where it all begins.

In Raymond-Overstreet’s Woven Landscapes series (2022), she places the horizon lines atop each other so that the interconnectedness between land and weaving speaks as one through digital artworks in printed form. Perhaps her works function as a synthesis for the exhibition’s premise: that horizons move from land to weaving and back again. And through photography, these horizons become remembered as visual birthplaces of weaving, always for the future.

Horizons will be on view through June 2, 2024.

—Michelle J. Lanteri, PhD

PULSE Weavings and Paintings

by Marlowe Katoney

Marlowe Katoney, Memento-Tucson (Axis Radius #3 ), 2020, Wool, aniline dyes, and vegetal dyes, Courtesy of Roger and Caroline Ford

October 14, 2023 – March 23, 2024 Details at artmuseum.arizona.edu

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WASHINGTON, DC

Smith is the first artist to curate an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, signaling a shift in authority.

above Installation view of The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans. Foreground ceramic sculptor by Raven Halfmoon (Caddo). Photo: A. Ferber.

The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans National Gallery of Art

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HE NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART invited renowned artist Jaune Quick-To-See Smith (Salish-Kootenai/Métis/ Shoshone) to curate a long-overdue exhibition featuring contemporary work by Indigenous artists from Turtle Island.

Laid out over three galleries, The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art

by Native Americans integrates seamlessly in galleries of contemporary non-Native painting, sculpture, and video, and simultaneously asserts kincentric worldviews.

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With a simple sign, Edgar Heap of Birds (Southern Cheyenne) reminds guests with that they are visiting not just a museum or an exhibition, but the homeland of the Piscataway people who were violently “disappeared” from the place now called Washington, DC. In the first gallery, documentation of Cannupa Hanska Luger’s (Mandan/ Hidatsa/Arikara/Lakota) Mirror Shield Project–River (The Water Serpent) and a painting on paper by Julie Buffalohead (Ponca) bring land rights into the present moment. Both respond to the 2016 confrontation at the Standing Rock reservation over water rights.

Bang Bang (2019) by Natalie Ball (Klamath/Modoc) is an assemblage wall hanging made from sections of vintage quilts and elk hide cut into the shape of wings. The ambiguous creature appears to have descended from a supernatural place. Nearby, Tlingit artist Preston Singletary’s exquisite glass Raven Steals

the Sun (2017) and Santa Clara Pueblo artist Rose Simpson’s Tonantzin (2021)—a figure that suggests a religious icon—carry a transcendental thread through the gallery.

Jim Denomie’s (Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe, 1955–2022) portrayal of Edward Curtis on a moped chasing warriors on horseback provides comic relief.

Of the 49 artists, eight are Diné. One can trace the concept of hózhó through the galleries from a print by Demian DinéYazhi' to Eric-Paul Riege’s ten-foot-long fiber dentalium earrings and Steven Yazzie’s painting, Orchestrating a Blooming Desert (2003). Marwin Begaye’s Columbia River Custodian depicts a condor deity haloed by a woven medallion. The vibrant lithograph is part of the artist’s ongoing series centered around Diné spirituality.

A bison and a tank appear to face off in John Hitchcock’s (Comanche/Kiowa) wall installation. Birds and butterflies swarm among helicopters and drones in a visualization of opposing forces: natural versus industrial, Indigenous versus colonial, reciprocity versus hierarchy.

Similar juxtapositions manifest in the material choices of artists Nicholas Galanin (Tlingit/Unangax̂) and Merritt Johnson in their assemblage, Creation with her children (2017).1 This figure wears a large skirt made from a plastic tarp extended by panniers and draped with floral Jacobean fabric—signs of colonial cultures. She carves her own wooden face in a Northwest Coast style, and her veil features dentalium shell accents, denoting the living world.

Through her curatorial choices, Smith centers a holistic understanding of landscape that challenges the definition of the genre as defined by Western art history.

Kay WalkingStick (Cherokee Nation) and G. Peter Jemison (Seneca) paint views of earth and sky, while many other works remind viewers that built environments and human experience are also part of our landscape. Smith illustrates the history of landscape in her layout of 21 framed prints and photographs arranged in a checkerboard, which refers to the theft and division of land into plots by the 1887 Dawes Allotment Act. Inclusion of Native American artists in the country’s national museum is delinquent; however, this exhibition aspires to ignite continued engagement with Indigenous communities. Smith is the first artist to curate an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, which signals a shift in authority. Integral to her Indigenous approach, labels relay quotes from the artists rather than institutional explanations.

The Land Carries Our Ancestors is on view until January 15, 2024. Emmi Whitehorse’s (Diné) ephemeral painting Fog Bank (2020) graces the cover of a catalogue from Princeton University Press, which includes essays and artist biographies.

—Andrea L. Ferber, PhD 1. The artists ultimately removed their artwork from the exhibition in protest of a US House of Representatives’ bill to provide military funding to Israel.

The Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe, NM, is the only college in the world dedicated to the study of contemporary Native American and Alaska Native arts and serves both Native and non-Native American students. IAIA’s low residency model provides professional degrees while allowing graduate students to live at home and continue participating in work, family, and community.

Interested in Museum Studies?

Explore our undergraduate and certificate programs!

MFA in Cultural Administration (MFACA) Focused on social equity and the support of cultural community growth, MFACA integrates administrative tools and techniques with socially engaged leadership by blending institutional skills and community outreach programming. The two tracks are Tribal Museum and Cultural Center Administration or Arts Administration.

MFA in Creative Writing (MFACW) MFACW is unique in that we emphasize the importance of Indigenous writers speaking to the Indigenous experience.

The literature used in the program carries a distinct Native American and First Nations emphasis. MFACW offers four areas of emphasis: poetry, fiction, creative nonfiction, and screenwriting.

MFA in Studio Arts (MFASA) By engaging with complex histories and examining art’s function in contemporary multicultural societies, MFASA supports students in pursuing critical lines of inquiry and developing their individual art practices.

Learn more and apply today at www.iaia.edu FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 41, WINTER 2024 | 85

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Diné Poet, Journalist & Photographer

BODERRA JOE

By Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD Redondo Memorial selected her as an artist-in-residence. Indigenous Nations Poet (In-Na-Po) named her a 2022 fellow.

Joe holds an MFA and BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts.

Her poetry has appeared in the New Mexico Poetry Anthology 2023, Green Linden Press: Indigenous Ecopoetry, Academy of American Poets, Yellow Medicine Review, Mass Poetry, among other publications. She is a reporter and photojournalist for the Navajo Times. Her art photography is represented by Gallery Hózhó in Albuquerque.

above Boderra Joe (Diné), Self-Portrait, 2023, digital photograph, Twin Lakes, Arizona. All images courtesy of the artist. opposite Desert Teeth (Abalone Mountain Press, 2022).

A

uthor of the poetry collection Desert Teeth (Abalone Mountain Press, 2022), Boderra Joe is a Diné poet, journalist, and photographer. She is Bit'ahnii (Folded Arms clan), born for Tábąąhá (Water’s Edge clan), and hails from Bááhaztł'ah (Twin Lakes), New Mexico, in the Navajo Nation. Willapa Bay AiR and Bosque

What is the story behind your interest in poetry?

My interest in poetry has various curves.

The interest has always been there, but it wasn’t awakened until I started college majoring in creative writing. Poetry is its own language, and what I love about it is I can write freely, meaning there is no right or wrong way to approach an idea.

What is important is the thought process behind it. As I’ve learned of many poets and their work, I thought, Ah, what a line, what an image, or I never looked at it that way. Having those intonational moments, I became aware and listened thoughtfully to my surroundings. From there, poetry became natural to me, and the interest became a passion. When you read poetry, there are different levels of emotion, tone, and values, and you take in all that by words. Being creative with letters, sounds, and images.1 What can poetry teach us about the world and ourselves that other forms of literature cannot?

Poetry has its way of pulling apart language to recreate or reshape it to where we, as writers, understand it best.

It’s allowing ourselves to be thinkers and outlookers all in one. The world doesn’t

1. Responses have been edited for brevity and clarity.—Ed.

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of poetry that unfolds the wakening shift of scarred violence affecting Native people and land for centuries, where alcohol and uranium, two of many elements, continue to take the lives of our relatives.” How is the synopsis reflected by your accompanying poems?

When a handful of tough topics are written about, no one cares because it’s redundant, right? But not for those who have experienced the same ordeal even to this day. As Indigenous writers and artists, we cannot avoid our past because it’s our story. [We need to] share what we see, what we hear, what we were taught, what we experienced, what our family, people, and nation have experienced. People cannot erase Native history, what has been done to us, and what continues.

The poems in Desert Teeth are conversations that no one wants Can you walk me through how to talk about. There’s mention Desert Teeth came to be? of alcoholism, uranium, racism, Desert Teeth was truly a hard “… we cradle a thought that and identity because those all collection. I was unsure of every affected not only me but every eventually turns into a poem.” poem due to the fact each was single family in the Diné nation. profoundly personal. Every reviWe have stories of these experision became heavy because the poems were hard conversations I ences, and it ultimately comes down to asking ourselves, Well, was having with myself. The poems talk about grief, heartbreak, how do we heal? We see the problem, but how are we coping and identity … utterly vulnerable. A few of the poems were with it as Indigenous people? I feel the synopsis is confronting part of my thesis for grad school at the Institute of American and facing our existence because most people don’t even know Indian Arts. Going back to my thesis [Paper Tongue, 2018], I we still exist. And in one poem, I mentioned people still think handpicked a few that I thought were decent enough to revise. we, as Natives, are “dumb, drunks, stupid,” when we are more Through that process, I also explored other realms, like form. than that. We are now sharing our stories, and we are exhausted The form sets the tone or emotion, so I made sure each poem from people mangling our existence. see poetry as a game winner, but it is a game winner with words and how they are woven together. Poets are attached to their words. We are attached to a point. We try to move on, but we always come back to restore or rebuild literature because our words mean more than a phrase.

There’s a reason behind every poet’s approach and why they chose specific words, punctuation, form, image, sound, and so forth. It all comes from within and how we cradle a thought that eventually turns into a poem.

Poetry has its way of teaching us to be creators, thinkers, and fearful human beings because all we have are our words, knowledge, and inspiration to write about what it is that calls us. All forms of literature teach us to acknowledge those interactions, and it’s up to us to recognize that.

had some sort of placement. The approach allowed some space to step back and breathe.

I spent so many years with those words and images that I soon became lost in what the purpose was anymore—until I met Layli Long Soldier through a collaborative project. I always admired her work, thought process, and head-on approach to topics. It was an honor to work with her for the first time, and thereafter we stayed in touch. I asked her if she could read my manuscript because I felt that we write about similar things and that she would have more wisdom and experience of how to approach topics. I’ll never forget the conversation I had with her, and from there, I revised, revised, and out came Desert Teeth.

The synopsis for the collection reads, “Landscape and perspective flood Boderra Joe’s Desert Teeth, a collection

The collection is now a year old. How do you view its release now?

Desert Teeth is still making its way to bookstores, bookshelves, or personal collections. I’m thankful for the currents it’s making across the nation. It’s always a beautiful moment when people reach out and share their thoughts and support for the book.

The book changed how I view the writing world. The book is still on its historical journey, and I cannot wait to see where it goes and how far it travels.

How important is editing in the process of writing poetry?

Is it the same as writing, say, nonfiction?

I try not to edit so much when writing poetry. I freewrite and take notes and write down lines that describe what I am feeling or seeing. It’s not the same as writing any other genre because FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 41, WINTER 2024 | 87

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above Boderra Joe (Diné), Desert Train, 2023, digital photograph, Gallup, Arizona. opposite Boderra Joe (Diné), Bones in the Desert, 2023, typograph. below Boderra Joe (Diné), Tumbleweed, 2023, digital photograph, Twin Lakes, Arizona.

poetry is its own language. You need to be bold and willing to bend the rules and spend a lot of time arranging words, listening to them, and acknowledging them.

What do you consistently struggle with when writing?

The challenge is not spending enough time on writing or even reading, so I’m

definitely going to create a routine to get in rhythm.

Whose books are you reading?

I’ve been alternating between books, but currently I’m reading Burying the Mountain by Shangyang Fang, Obit

by Victoria Chang, and Lighthead by Terrance Hayes.

What does the near future hold? Are you working on another collection?

Yes, I am beginning my second collection, however, I am not sure where it will take me. I’m also seeking more opportunities in artist-in-residencies to grow and expand my writing and experiences.

Thank you for speaking with me, Boderra.

Thank you so much, Matthew, for allowing me to share some insight with you regarding my artistic background.

Writing and creating are what keep me sane and motivated to change the literary landscape in small fragments. This is a start by talking about it.

INSTAGRAM @BOETHEPOET 88 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 41, WINTER 2024

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MEMORIAL

SAM ENGLISH June 2, 1942–November 10, 2023

S

AMUEL FRANCIS ENGLISH SR. (Turtle Mountain/ Red Lake Chippewa) dedicated much of his life to the cause of healing. His artistic practice, community building, and political work sought to improve the everyday lives of Indigenous people and engagement with their culture.

He was a respected teacher, friend, and supporter to many. Not without struggle, English doggedly persevered and achieved extraordinary things in his 81 years.

Born in 1942 in Phoenix, Arizona, to a Turtle Mountain Chippewa mother and a Red Lake Chippewa father, English grew up in Ignacio, Colorado. His father attended a Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) boarding school and later worked for the agency. He believed that the BIA’s assimilationist policies heavily affected his father, and thus he too was distanced from understanding his Anishinaabe heritage. Following high school, English studied architectural drafting at Bacone College in Muskogee, Oklahoma, and business at the University of San Francisco, California. He worked for various Indigenous health and youth organizations. By the 1960s, he became involved with Indigenous political movements and the National Indian Youth Council, which allowed him to travel nationwide to advocate for civil rights and freedom.

Around this time, English’s addiction to alcohol escalated and impaired his work and advocacy. He was candid about his failed attempts to quit alcohol at treatment facilities. Yet, at the age of 39, he quit for good, explaining, “On December 10th, 1981, I drove my lance [into the ground] and decided I was not going to drink anymore, that I was going to be a brave person and that’s what I’ve done.”1 The experience of sobriety brought forth a spiritual renaissance, and he dedicated the remainder of his life to art and altruism.

For English, painting wasn’t merely an artistic activity or passion, it was also a means of survival. “If I hadn’t continued to paint in my sobriety,” he said, “I wouldn’t be here painting. I wouldn’t be here period.”2 Using a variety of media, from oils to pastels, his paintings and drawings from this period represent a life renewed—dancers, elders, and medicine men draped in luminous colors and pictured in electric movement—almost always standing tall and looking to the sky. By making art and reading the work of Indigenous writers such as Vine Deloria Jr. (Standing Rock Dakota, 1933–2005), he proudly shared images of his Chippewa heritage with others.

English had a vision of opening his own business, an art gallery. The Sam English Studio/Gallery opened in Old Town Albuquerque in 1982. It was a remarkable achievement, opening one year after the beginning of his sobriety journey. To assist others fighting alcohol addiction, he helped found an Alcoholics Anonymous program designed specifically for Native Americans.

1. Greg Bellanger, “Sam English Biography,” Northland Visions, April 2, 2014, web.

2. Tom Kanthak, “The Previously Undiscovered Painted Treasures of Native Artist Sam English,” ICT News, September 13, 2018, web.

3. Kanthak, “The Previously Undiscovered Painted Treasures.”

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It addressed historical, physical, and spiritual wounds. Ahead of his time, English saw art as synonymous with healing. He administered several popular Healing Through the Arts workshops.

This early form of art therapy took place in several locations including Palm Springs and the San Francisco Bay Area.

English’s ultimate goal was to build the National Native American Healing Center Through the Performing Arts, an unprecedented project space that included a drop-in center, café, greenhouse, workshops, studios, and more. While groundbreaking for the center did not occur during his lifetime, provisional planning for it deserves closer attention. What English and his team envisioned was a forerunner to the holistic approaches adopted by many of today’s Indigenous galleries and museums.

Garnering many awards, his artwork appeared in numerous exhibitions and on several book covers. English traveled the world, published a coffee table book of his artwork, and was the subject of a television documentary. For his grassroots community work and political advocacy, he was recognized for his inexhaustible efforts and leadership. Through it all, he thanked the Creator for providing a wealth of spiritual gifts and guidance: “I think somebody saved my life to do this.”3 —Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD

above Sam English, 1990s. Image courtesy of Haley Greenfeather (Turtle Mountain/Red Lake Chippewa).

MEMORIAL

HAL HOMER August 25, 1973–September 17, 2023

I

N 1973 THE UNITED STATES signed the Paris Peace Accords ending their official involvement in the Vietnam War. The American Indian Movement occupied Wounded Knee to demand the US government investigate broken treaties. The World Trade Center became the site of the tallest buildings in the world, and on August 25th of that year, Hal Tiberius Homer (Oneida Indian Nation, Turtle clan) was born.

An artist is an amalgamation of their tastes and influences. Hal was by every definition a rock star: equal parts rebel, sorcerer, artist, and musician. He was a natural talent who was influenced as much by British art historian Kenneth Clark as he was by his Haudenosaunee culture. Hal was an excellent draftsman who was able to render the human form masterfully. His figures sprang to life off the canvas—every narrative he explored had gravitas. A student of the great masters like Caravaggio and Rembrandt, he explored the allegory of the cave and the hero’s journey in his complex compositions and rich choice of palette.

Initially a self-taught visual artist, Hal attended Onondaga Community College in Syracuse and later graduated from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. In First American Art Magazine, No. 30, Hal stated that he worked in acrylics and drawings when he was young but moved on to oil paintings as he grew older. “My art includes traditional concepts,” Hal explained in the same article, “as well as delving into the surrealist style—usually incorporating the female form to express moments in nature, bringing both as one entity, a celebration of life and nature.”1 A connoisseur of music and musical instruments, he had an interest in various genres. He cofounded a blues rock band, No Good Reason, made up of all Native musicians that quickly became a Central New York favorite. He listened to Hanoi Rocks, Notorious B.I.G., and everything in between. A gifted bass and guitar player, he performed with Set of Nines and Johnny Ray and the Stone Throwers.

Sadly, Hal broke on through to the other side on September 17, 2023.

Hal Homer was a great man, a great artist, and a great musician. He was also a great father, brother, uncle, nephew, cousin, and friend. I met Hal in middle school, and he was one of my best friends. We dreamt together, went to school together, and grew up together. He was magical and hilarious, and I will miss him for the rest of my life.

—Frank Buffalo Hyde (Onondaga Nation, Beaver clan) 1. Kelly Church, “Seven Directions,” First American Art Magazine, no. 30 (Spring 2021), 17.

above, top Hal Homer (Oneida Nation, Turtle clan, 1973–2023), Sky Woman, 2023, oil on canvas. above, top Hal Homer playing bass in New York, August 2023.

Both images courtesy of the author.

FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 41, WINTER 2024 | 91

MEMORIAL

WATSON HONANIE March 25, 1953–November 2023

above Watson Honanie (Hopi, 1953–2023), Bracelet, ca. 1980– 1999, silver, 14-karat gold, Heard Museum Collection, bequest of William F. and Virginia C. Waterman, 4666-2. Photo: Craig Smith. Image courtesy of the Heard Museum.

A

N INNOVATIVE JEWELER who worked in gold and silver overlay, Watson W. Honanie (Hopi) stayed true to his Hopi religion, culture, and community. He exhibited throughout the Southwest and nationwide but also coached local sports, farmed, and was civically engaged.

He is survived by his wife Sarah and their children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.

Honanie was the tenth of eleven children. He was born into the Bear clan through his mother, Geneva Pumahooya Honanie, an accomplished basket maker. After his father, George Honanie, died suddenly while working for the Santa Fe Railroad in 1959, his mother moved the family back to their home village of Songòopavi on Second Mesa on the Hopi Reservation. He began his education at Second Mesa Day School before transferring to Phoenix Indian High School. After graduating in 1973, he returned home, and his uncles Porter Timeche (Hopi, Bear clan, 1903–1985) and Fred Kabotie (Hopi, Bluebird clan, ca.

1900–1986), founding members of the Hopi Silvercraft Cooperative Guild, encouraged him in silversmithing.

That first summer, Honanie observed the Hopi jewelers who tasked him with polishing finished works. The next summer he “started out just playing with scraps of silver” that his uncles gave him, which he fashioned into earrings.1 His brother Phillip

Honanie (Hopi, 1950–2017) taught him the techniques of silver overlay. Phillip’s hallmark is the friendship symbol of two staggered crescents, and Watson Honanie’s hallmark is the friendship symbol enclosed in a bear paw. In 1973 he launched his professional jewelry career. One of his first buyers, Bruce McGee of McGee’s Indian Art Gallery in Keams Canyon, Arizona, encouraged him to work with gold.

His jewelry featured a spectrum of Hopi cultural iconography, from the abstract to highly detailed, representational images of katsinam and villages. His work includes representations of Hopi clans, such as bears, elk, deer, bison, frogs, turtles, coyotes, dragonflies, eagles, and parrots. He used Hopi symbols of water and the Hopi migration. He portrayed the flute player, the sun, stars, clouds, hands, and his clan symbol of bear paws. His elegant corn plants with stately tassels and undulating leaves reflected his respect for the sacred food of life. Following ancestral teachings, he continued the practice of dry-farming heirloom white, red, yellow, and blue corn on 21 acres of family land near Songòopavi and said, “We are children of the corn. She is our Mother. Corn is always female, and we multiply from corn.”2 Honanie exhibited and won awards throughout the Southwest, including at the Heard Museum, Museum of Northern Arizona, Santa Fe Indian Market, and beyond. For example, Tribal Expressions in Illinois gave him a solo exhibition in 1997. Gerald Lomaventema (Hopi) remembers Watson and Phillip Honanie as having “ventured on their own” to forge their own careers, “and they all did pretty well in the art scene.”3 Watson made gorgets, pendants, rings, earrings, belt buckles, concha belts, bolo ties, and bracelets, particularly cuffs with stylized fretwork. He juxtaposed gold’s warmth with silver’s coolness against dark backgrounds of oxidized silver. Sometimes he set turquoise in his works. Briefly, when silver prices skyrocketed in 1979, he melted his silver scraps to create miniature, freestanding katsina figures through lost-wax casting.

The family lived in Flagstaff but frequently returned to his wife’s village of Hotevilla on Third Mesa for ceremonies. They moved to Hotevilla in 2013. Honanie was civically active and served as chairman of the local Head Start and the president of the local school board. He coached basketball, softball, flag football, and cross-country running.

Watson Honanie taught several of his relatives and others how to make jewelry and encouraged them to create their own designs. His family includes painters, basket makers, ceramic artists, and woodcarvers who carry forth Hopi values and aesthetics that he embodied in every facet of his life.

—America Meredith (Cherokee Nation) with advice from Gloria Lomahaftewa (Hopi/Choctaw)

1. Lois Essary Jacka, Art of the Hopi: Contemporary Journeys on Ancient Pathways (Flagstaff, AZ: Northland Publishing, 1998), 155; Christine Frances Hellyer, “Transmission of Jewelry Techniques and Symbols within a Hopi Family of Jewelers” (PhD diss., University of Georgia, 2013), 151.

2. Jacka, Art of the Hopi, 115.

3. Kelley Hays-Gilpin, Atsunori Ito, and Robert Bruenig, “Decolonizing Museum Catalogs: Defining and Exploring the Problem,” Trajectoria 1 (March 31, 2020), n.p., PDF.

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MEMORIAL

BAHE WHITETHORNE SR. August 9, 1950–November 17, 2023

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A INTER , PRINTMAKER , sculptor, jeweler, illustrator, and author Baje S. Whitethorne Sr. (Navajo) was a renowned cultural storyteller. He was Lók'aa' dine'é (Reed People clan) and born for Hashk'ąą hadzohi (Yucca Fruit-Strung-Outin-a-Line clan). Baje was born on the Navajo Reservation in Shonto, Arizona, to Leonard “Lynn” Whitethorne and Alice Black Whitethorne. He graduated from Tuba City High School, attended the University of Northern Arizona and Grand Canyon College, and eventually moved to Flagstaff, Arizona.

“When I was a boy, my parents and grandparents brought home a new card table with six metallic blue chairs,” he shared in his official biography. “In the summer months, I would put my face against the cool seat of the chairs. Now, I include the chair in my artwork because it reminds me of my boyhood and because it draws people into my artwork when they try to find it.”

Other symbols and forms within Baje’s cultural landscape, such as hogans, dancers, and aspects of his family life, made their way into his artwork. As children, he and his brothers practiced storytelling on long drives to their grandmother’s home. Like the stories told on those drives, his art reflects the landscape and Navajo way of life that he grew up with around Shonto.

Inspired and taught by his grandfather, who often drew his horses to catalogue their markings for identification purposes, Baje learned to draw at the age of five. His family praised him for his work, and he particularly loved sketching horses. When he ran out of paper, he drew horses on the walls, and after he wore down his pencil, he found a nail and etched horses in everything from his mom’s pots and pans to his dad’s truck.

above Baje Whitethorne Sr. with his paintings.

The artist illustrated eight children’s books and wrote two, the first of which was Sunpainters: Eclipse of the Navajo Sun (Northland Publishing, 1994), which tells the story of a day spent with his grandfather, who always conveyed the importance of a Navajo education. Baje also wrote and illustrated for his son, Bahe Whitethorne Jr. (Navajo, 1977–2018).

Baje carried his grandfather’s lessons with him throughout his life.

As part of an interview with the Navajo Oral History Project at Winona State University and Diné College, he shared some of his grandfather’s teachings: “You have to pay attention to the little things and take your time doing things, you just don’t take it for granted, and watch, listen.

Make sure you see, make sure you think.”

As demonstrated by his use of line and color, Baje took his grandfather’s words to heart. He listened well to the stories of his people and studied the light and shadow of the Navajo cultural landscape. He built a prodigious career in visual arts, exhibiting and garnering awards for his paintings and bronze sculptures. As he shared in a Diné College interview, Baje approached art making as additionally being the act of a historian.

Shonto Begay, a Navajo painter inspired

by Baje, said, “We’re losing a library.”1 He garnered many accolades, but, however important outside recognition was, Baje explained that he and fellow Navajo artists developed their own standard of achievement: Respect, understanding, and the ability to listen and think as a unit in honoring each other.2 Their standard prioritizes thinking as a group and not just about oneself. Accordingly, Baje’s most significant artistic achievements were the contributions he made to his community, which included his visual recordings of Navajo culture and his advocacy for young emerging Indigenous artists.

To encourage, support, and mentor new generations of Indigenous artists, Baje founded two foundations, the Buddy Whitethorne Foundation (in memory of his son) and the Art of the People Foundation.

Baje Whitethorne Sr.’s stories and artworks, many featuring blue metal folding chairs, can be found in collections and museums nationwide, including the Museum of Northern Arizona, the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, the Booth Western Art Museum, and the Heard Museum. His contributions to his community and other Navajo and Indigenous artists will continue beyond his passing.

—Nanette Kelley (Osage/Cherokee Nations)

1. Adrian Skabelund, “Friends, Artists Remember Renowned Navajo Artist Baje Whitethorne Sr.,” Arizona Daily Sun, December 2, 2023, web.

2. Baje Whitethorne Sr., “T'áá awołí bee: Bahe Whitethorne (Painter),” Navajo Cultural Arts Program, October 9, 2020, YouTube video, 59:24, web.

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June 1 - August 10, 2024

Call for Entries - Due May 12, 2024

Entry Form & More Info at www.redcloudart.show The Heritage Center at Maȟȟhpíya Luta | Red Cloud, Pine Ridge, SD

CALENDAR January 5–23: New York, NY New Terrains at the Phillips, 432 Park Avenue. Curated by Tony Abeyta (Navajo), Bruce Hartman, and James Trotta-Bono (212) 940-1200 | phillips.com January 12–14: Denver, CO 42nd Annual Colorado Indian Market at the Colorado Convention Center, 700 14th Street | (972) 398-0052 | dashevents.com January 13 & 14: Litchfield Park, AZ Litchfield Park Native American Fine Arts Festival at Litchfield Park Recreation Center, 100 S. Old Litchfield Road | (623) 258-5578 litchfieldpark.gov/1466/Litchfield-Park-Gathering January 16–March 16: Minneapolis, MN Dreaming Our Futures: Ojibwe and Očhéthi Šakówiŋ Artists and Knowledge Keepers at the Katherine E. Nash Gallery, University of Minnesota, 405 21st Avenue South | (612) 624-7530 | cla.umn.edu/art January 16–June 28: Cullowhee, NC Spark of the Eagle Dancer: The Collecting Legacy of Lambert Wilson at the Bardo Arts Center, Western University Fine Art Museum, 199 Centennial Drive | (828) 277-2787 | wcu.edu/bardo-arts-center January 19–February 17: Stillwater, OK Hattie Lee Mendoza at the Gardiner Gallery, Oklahoma State University, Bartlett Center for the Visual Arts #107 (405) 744-6016 | cas.okstate.edu/department_of_art

Amé Myles (Spirit Lake Dakota), Music Sounds Better With You www.amemyles.com

January 19–March 3: South Bend, IN David Martin: Solo Exhibition at the South Bend Museum of Art, 120 Doctor Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard. Exhibition for this Pokagon Potawatomi painter | (574) 235-9102 | southbendart.org January 20–21: Apache Junction, AZ Superstition Mountain Museum Native American Arts Festival at the Superstition Mountain Museum, 4087 E. Apache Trail (480) 983-4888 | superstitionmountainlostdutchmanmuseum.org January 22–March 30: Plymouth, NH Of Borers and Baskets: The Past, Present, and Future of Indigenous Basketry in the White Mountains at the Museum of the White Mountains, Plymouth State University, 34 Highland Street (603) 535-3210 | plymouth.edu/mwm/exhibition January 24: Santa Fe, NM The Aunties: Women of the White Shell Water Place, multimedia storytelling, at the Lensic Performing Arts Center, 211 W. San Francisco Street. 7:30 pm, $25–$85 | (505) 984 -8759 | lensic.org February 2–March 23: Lubbock, TX Belonging: Contemporary Native Ceramics from the Southern Plains at the Louise Hopkins Underwood Center for the Arts, 511 Avenue K. Curated by Klinton Burgio-Ericson, presented by Landmark Arts, Texas Tech University. Ceramics symposium: Friday & Saturday, February 23 & 24 | (806) 762-8606 | depts.ttu.edu/art February 2–July 14: Santa Fe, NM Inuk Silis Høegh: Arctic Vertigo at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, 108 Cathedral Place. Solo exhibition for this Kalaaleq filmmaker and photographer | (505) 428-5912 iaia.edu/mocna/mocna-exhibitions February 3 & 4: Scottsdale, AZ Arizona Indian Festival at the Scottsdale Civic Center, 3939 N. Drinkwater Boulevard | (602) 299-9576 arizonaindiantourism.org/azindianfestival

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February 3–May 26: Minneapolis, MN Arctic Highways: Unbounded Indigenous People at the American Swedish Institute Museum, 2600 Park Avenue. Group exhibition of Sámi and North American Indigenous artists (612) 871-4907 | asimn.org February 9–September 29: Boise, ID RYAN! Feddersen: Coyote Now at the Boise Art Museum, 670 Julia Davis Drive | (208) 345-8330 | boiseartmuseum.org February 10, 2024–January 11, 2025: Santa Fe, NM Pathfinder: 40 Years of Marcus Amerman at the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, 704 Camino Lejo (505) 982-4636 | wheelwright.org February 10–March 24: Los Angeles, CA Masters of the American West at the Autry Museum of the American West, 4700 Western Heritage Way. Group exhibition including many Native American artists | (323) 667-2000 masters.theautry.org February 10–May 21: Hamilton, NY Imagining Indigeneity in a Global Future at the Colgate University, 13 Oak Drive | (315) 228-7000 | colgate.edu February 10–June 9: Santa Fe, NM Masterglass: The Collaborative Spirit of Tony Jojola at the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, 704 Camino Lejo | (505) 982-4636 | wheelwright.org February 16–18: Dragoon, AZ Mata Ortiz Show and Sale at the Amerind Museum, 2100 N. Amerind Road. 10:00 am–4:00 pm | (520) 586-3666 amerind.org February 16–April 28: Oklahoma City, OK Lighting Pathways: Matriarchs of Native American Art at the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum, 1700 NE 63rd Street. Co-curated by America Meredith (Cherokee Nation) and Tahnee Ahtone (Kiowa/Seminole/Mvskoki) (405) 478-2250 | nationalcowboymuseum.org February 16–April 28: Chapel Hill, NC Past Forward: Native American Art from Gilcrease Museum at the Ackland Art Museum, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 101 S. Columbia Street | (919) 966-5736 | ackland.org February 20–March 3: Washington, DC Reach to Forest at the REACH at the Kennedy Center, 2700 F Street NW. Curated by Alicia Adams and Gilda Almeida (202) 416-8000 | kennedy-center.org February 20–March 3: Washington, DC Indigenous Benches of Brazil at the Skylight Pavilion at the Kennedy Center, 2700 F Street NW. Organized by Coleção BEĨ with demonstrations by Michel Karaputa Mehinaku (Mehinaku) | (202) 416-8000 | kennedy-center.org February 23–July 14: St. Louis, MO Native American Art of the 20th Century: The William P. Healey Collection at the Saint Louis Art Museum, 1 Fine Arts Drive | (314) 721-0072 | slam.org/exhibitions February 28–March 2: Anchorage, AK Charlotte Jensen Native Arts Market at the Dimond Center, 800 E. Dimond Boulevard, featuring more than 150 Alaska Native artists | furrondy.net February 29–May 12: Seattle, WA Jaune Quick-To-See Smith: Memory Map at the Seattle Art Museum, 1300 First Avenue | (206) 654-3100 seattleartmuseum.org FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 41, WINTER 2024 | 95

CONTEMPORARY INDIGENEITY 2024 Call for Artists Exhibition dates: Sept. 6–Dec. 21, 2024 Submission deadline: Feb. 15, 2024 For the fifth iteration of Contemporary Indigeneity, the Great Plains Art Museum seeks Native American artists addressing any themes relevant to the contemporary Indigenous experience on the Great Plains. This exhibition is open to all Native American artists working in any medium.

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

NATIVE AMERICAN ART APPRAISALS, INC. SINCE 1936

March 2 & 3: Phoenix, AZ 65th Annual Heard Museum Guild Indian Fair and Market at the Heard Museum, 2301 N. Central Avenue. Best of show reception and dinner: Friday, March 1. Fair: Saturday & Sunday, March 2 & 3 (602) 252-8840 | heardguild.org March 2–July 28: Raleigh, NC To Take Shape and Meaning: Form and Design in Contemporary American Indian Art at the North Carolina Museum of Art, 2110 Blue Ridge Road. Curated by Nancy Strickland Fields, PhD (Lumbee) (919) 839-6262 | ncartmuseum.org March 5–June 16: NYC, NY Weaving Abstraction in Ancient and Modern Art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue. Precontact Andean textiles with non-Native textile art | (212) 570-3951 | metmuseum.org March 11–14: Las Vegas, NV Reservation Economic Summit: American Indian Art Market at Caesars Palace, 3570 S. Las Vegas Boulevard | res.ncaied.org March 13–June 16: Waltham, MA Noé Martínez: The Body Remembers at the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, 415 S. Street. Solo exhibition for this ceramic artist of Huastec descent | (781) 736-3434 | brandeis.edu/rose March TBA: Virtual 2024 Junior Indigenous Art Exhibition hosted by the Museum of Northern Arizona. Native artists aged 5 to 18 from the Colorado Plateau | (928) 774-5213 | musnaz.org/juniorart March 23–May 19: Montreal, Pointe-Claire, Sherbrooke, and Saint-Hyacinthe, QC Creation Stories | Contemporary Native Art Biennial (BACA), 7th edition, at various locations. Curated by Lori Beavis (Mississauga), Emma Hassencahl-Perley (Wolastoqiyik), Jake Kimble (Deninu Kųę́), and Teresa Vander Meer-Chassé (Upper Tanana) | baca.ca April 10–July 29: Pacific Palisades, CA Picture Worlds: Greek, Maya, Moche Pottery at the Getty Villa Museum, 17985 Pacific Coast Highway | (310) 440-7300 | getty.edu April 11–TBA: Oklahoma City, OK Marking: Indigenous Narrative at Untitled Art Space, 1 NE 3rd Street. Woodblock print group show | (405) 815-9995 | 1ne3.org April 12–14: Oklahoma City, OK IndigiPopX at First Americans Museum, 659 First Americans Boulevard. Native American comic-con | indigipopx.com April 13: Sulphur, OK 11th Annual Artesian Arts Festival in Artesian Plaza, West Muskogee Avenue, hosted by the Chickasaw Nation. 10:00 am–8:00 pm (580) 272-5520 | artesianartsfestival.com April 18–September 15: New Britain, CT The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans at New Britain Museum of American Art, 56 Lexington Street | (860) 229-0257 | nbmaa.org April 20 & 21: Tulsa, OK 3rd Annual Mvskoke Art Market at River Spirit Casino, 8320 Riverside Parkway. Award reception: Friday, April 22, 6:30 pm (918) 549-2434 | muscogeenation.com/mvskokeartmarket

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April 20–November 24: Venice, Italy La Biennale di Venezia | Jeffrey Gibson: the space in which to place me at the US Pavilion, Giardini della Biennale, C. Giazzo, 30122.

Curated by Kathleen Ash-Milby (Navajo) | portlandartmuseum.org

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