First American Art Magazine No. 43, Summer 2024

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

FırstAmericanArt MAGAZINE

NO. 43, SUMMER 2024

VENICE BIENNALE

SHONTO BEGAY

KATSINA CARVING

KARMA HENRY

ART FOR WILD HORSES BIRCHBARK ETCHING DISPLAY UNTIL SEPT. 30, 2024

SALISHA OLD BULL JJ OTERO

APPLICATION DEADLINE ADULT: AUG. 12 AT 5 P.M. YOUTH: SEPT. 20 AT 4:30 P.M. Awards for adult and youth categories including Best of Show.

Open to artists from federally recognized Southeastern Indian tribes.

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MARKET OPEN OCT. 4-5, 2024

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Visit SEASAM.net for more information and to apply.

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Join Us This Summer

E A R LY B I R D BENEFIT EVENT

B E N E F I T SA L E & A RT I S TS ’ M A R K E T

Wednesday, Aug 14 4pm – 6pm

Friday, Aug 16 8am – 4pm

Museum closes at 2pm

B E N E F I T SA L E

A RT I S TS ’ M A R K E T

Thursday, Aug 15 8am – 4pm

Saturday, Aug 17 10am – 2pm

A RT I S TS ’ M A R K E T PA RT I C I PA N TS Janice Black Elk Jim

Daniel Jim

Rosebud Lakota

Navajo

Cippy Crazyhorse

Yazzie Johnson & Gail Bird

Cochiti

Navajo & Santo Domingo/Laguna

Waddie Crazyhorse

Raynard Lalo

Cochiti

Hopi

Felicia Fragua

Shanna Lalo Patterson

Jemez

Hopi

Jonah Hill

Jackie Sevier

Hopi/Quechuan

Northern Arapaho

Kevin Honyouti

Deanna Tenorio

Hopi

Santo Domingo/Pomo

Ronald Honyouti

Robert Tenorio

Hopi

Santo Domingo

Harold Littlebird Laguna/Santo Domingo

PO Box 5153, Santa Fe, NM 87502 ∙ 704 Camino Lejo, Santa Fe, NM 87505 ∙ 505.982.4636

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CHEROKEE ART MARKET OCTOBER 12 – 13, 2024 10 AM – 5 PM

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SEQUOYAH CONVENTION CENTER Experience authentic Native art at one of the largest Native American art shows in Oklahoma.

New work by accomplished Native artists from across the country will be on display.

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“Two Realms” Demos Glass

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AUG 10 – SEPT 7

The Gallery at Cherokee Springs Plaza A V I R T UA L & I N - P E R S O N E V E N T Presenting an all-Cherokee art show in celebration of our culture and heritage.

2023 Cherokee Homecoming Art Show Best of Show “Connected” Carolyn Pallett

INDIGENOUS PEOPLES DAY CELEBRATION MONDAY, OCTOBER 14, 2024 IDYLLWILD, CALIFORNIA Join the Idyllwild Arts Community on our beautiful Southern California mountain campus for a day of programming featuring the Delbert Anderson Jazz Quartet as well as lectures, film, food, and more! All events are free and open to the public.

SAVE THE DATE!

NATIVE AMERICAN ARTS WORKSHOPS & FESTIVAL

WORKSHOPS | JUNE 9 - 27, 2025 FESTIVAL WEEK | FASHION THEME JUNE 16 -21, 2025 The Native American Arts Center at Idyllwild Arts produces and hosts the annual Native American Arts Festival Week, designed to enhance and add depth to the Summer Program workshop experience. The week-long festival provides a provocative learning experience by bringing together distinguished artists, scholars, and cultural specialists to present performances, demonstrations, films, exhibitions, showcases, and the popular Michael Kabotie Lecture Series. All events are free and open to the public!

Idyllwild Arts Campus 52500 Temecula Rd. | Idyllwild, CA Visit idyllwildarts.org/nativeamericanarts for more information, or call (951) 659 - 2171 x2327

Scan to learn more, or visit idyllwildarts.org/nativeamericanarts.

Idyllwild Arts respectfully acknowledges the Qawishpa Cahuillangnah (also known as Cahuilla Band of Indians) and all nine sovereign Bands of Cahuilla people who have stewarded this land throughout the generations and continue to steward this land for all future generations.

issue no. 43, summer 2024

DEPARTMENTS

FEATURES

Recent Developments

By Staci Golar and America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

11

Seven Directions

By Rachelle B. Pablo (Diné)

19

Art+Lit | Mona Susan Power: Yanktonai Dakota Author

By Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD

96

Art+Lit | Holly Young (Standing Rock Dakota)

By America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

99

Opinion | Originality vs. Subversion

By Matt Jarvis (Osage)

100

Spotlight | Norval Morrisseau’s Astral Guide I and II

By David J. Harris

102

Foreigners Everywhere: Indigeneity at the 60th Venice Biennale

By Andrea L. Ferber, PhD

Katsina Carving in the Art 34 World: Reflecting on a Century of Evolving Styles and Techniques

By Mark Bahti 56

Wild Horses: Ron Toahani Jackson and the Indigenous Horse Nation Protector Alliance

By Ruthanne Johnson

42

From the Skin of the Tree: New Directions in Birchbark Etching

By Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD

48

ARTIST PROFILES

Calendar 109

62

REVIEWS Exhibition Reviews

80

Film Review

94

24

MEMORIALS Norma Howard (Choctaw Nation/Mississippi Choctaw/ Chickasaw, 1958–2024)

By Stacy Pratt, PhD (Mvskoke)

105

Terrol Dew Johnson (Tohono O'odham, 1971–2024)

By America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

106

June Lee (Seminole Nation, 1933–2023)

By America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

107

Jeffrey Veregge (Port Gamble S'Klallam, 1974–2024)

By Stacy Pratt, PhD (Mvskoke)

108

68

74

Shonto Begay: Diné Painter

By Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD

56

Karma Henry: Owens Valley Paiute Painter

By Jill Ahlberg Yohe, PhD

62

Salisha Old Bull: Bitterroot Salish/Crow Beadwork Artist & Painter

By Staci Golar

68

JJ Otero: Navajo/Hopi Jeweler, Musician & Woodworker

By Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD

74

cover Salisha Old Bull (Bitterroot Salish/Crow), Salish Bitterroot Back Bag, 2022, vintage and new 13° true-cut Czech beads, smoked braintanned deer hide, nylon thread, stabilizer, paper, 6 × 6 in., collection of the Montana Museum of Arts and Culture. Image courtesy of the artist.

FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 43, SUMMER 2024 | 7

issue no. 43, summer 2024 ISSN 2333-5548 (Print) • ISSN 2333-5556 (Digital) 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) Copy Editors: Rosa Cays (Chicana) and Angela C. Villa (Chicana) Proofreaders: Christy Hanson (Diné), Staci Golar, and Angela C. Villa (Chicana) Layout and Design: America Meredith (Cherokee Nation) and Corey Yazzie (Diné) Social Media: Staci Golar, America Meredith (Cherokee Nation), and Jackie Sevier (Northern Arapaho) Interns: Liam Hart and Abby Mikalauskas

Regional Representatives

EXPERIENCE the

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

Advisory Council

®

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 (yak tityu tityu yak tiłhini 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

DISCOVER ENGAGE CONNECT

Advertising Representatives

West: Barbara Harjo, barbara@firstamericanartmagazine.com East: Deborah Fritts (Cherokee Nation)

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EDITOR’S GREETING Nadia Jackinsky (Alutiiq) takes us to Alaska to better appreciate seals and the artwork they make possible. After seals, whales, walruses, and other mammals were threatened by commercial hunters, the U.S. passed the 1972 Marine Mammal Protection Act. Understanding that Indigenous peoples have lived with and sustainably hunted these beings for millennia, the toward honoring and conserving the lands that nourish and give us life.

—America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

above America Meredith (Cherokee Nation), Pollinate!, 2007, gouache on paper, 14 × 11 in., private collection. Image courtesy of the artist.

FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 43, SUMMER 2024 | 9

In In one one place, place, visitors visitors experience experience the the collective collective histories histories of of 39 39 distinctive distinctive First First American American Nations Nations in in Oklahoma Oklahoma today. today. WINIKO: WINIKO: Life Life of of an an Object, Object, Selections Selections from from the the Smithsonian’s Smithsonian’s National National Museum Museum of of the the American American Indian Indian includes includes over over 100 100 cultural cultural materials materials collected collected from from tribes tribes in in Oklahoma Oklahoma in in the the early early 1900s.

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features features handmade handmade art art created created by by the the finest finest First First American American artists artists & & authors authors

RECENT DEVELOPMENTS

and established Wanuskewin Heritage’s contemporary art gallery.

MUSEUMS

The WEISMAN ART MUSEUM in Minneapolis hired Kendra Greendeer (Ho-Chunk) as the new Ihlenfeld Curator of Collaborative and Community Exhibition. She earned her PhD in art history from the University of Wisconsin– Madison. Previously she was an assistant professor of art history at Oklahoma State University.

The ROYAL ONTARIO MUSEUM in Toronto named Rhéanne Chartrand (Métis) as its inaugural Hatch Curator of Indigenous Art and Culture. Chartrand previously served as the curator of Indigenous art at the McMaster Museum of Art and cofounded the Shushkitew Collective.

The VIRGINIA MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS chose Siera Hyte (Cherokee Nation) as its Schiller Family Curator of Indigenous American Art. An artist and writer, she previously served as a curator at the Colby College Museum of Art.

above Rhéanne Chartrand (Métis), curator at the Royal Ontario Museum. below Siera Hyte (Cherokee Nation), curator at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

The MACKENZIE ART GALLERY in Regina has appointed Felicia Gay (Opaskwayak Cree) as curator. Gay served as curatorial fellow at the museum and University of Regina since 2019. She completed her PhD in Indigenous curatorial practice at the University of Regina.

She cofounded Red Shift Gallery in Saskatoon with Joi Arcand (Muskeg Lake Cree)

The STEWART INDIAN SCHOOL MUSEUM AND CULTURAL CENTER in Carson City, Nevada, hired Melanie Smokey (Yomba Shoshone/Washoe) as its educational curator. A basket maker, Indigenous food advocate, and cultural practitioner, Smokey earned her bachelor’s degree from Humboldt State University and served as an educator for the Washoe Tribe of Nevada and California.

Museums continue to cover or remove items on display in their exhibitions as a result of updates to NAGPRA, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Seattle

Native American jewelry and arts marketplace 207 423-8473

shop online: www.homeandaway.gallery Open by appointment in Wilton, Maine

Ring with purple spiny oyster shell Jacob D. Morgan, Navajo

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Art Museum; American Museum of Natural History; Metropolitan Museum of Art; Denver Museum of Art; and Harvard University’s Peabody Museum of Archaeology and Ethnology.

ART FAIRS The inaugural BOSTON PUBLIC ART TRIENNIAL features 15 commissioned works throughout the city and was curated

by Tess Lukey (Aquinnah Wampanoag). Participating artists include Nicholas Galanin (Tlingit/Unangax̂), New Red Order (Sault Ste. Marie Ojibway and Tlingit), Cannupa Hanska Luger (Mandan/Hidatsa/Arikara/Lakota), and Delcy Morelos (Emberá).

Ledger drawings from books sold at a 2022 Bonhams auction resurfaced in a New York exhibition co-organized by Donald Ellis Gallery and at the gallery’s booth at EXPO CHICAGO. The Kiowa and Cheyenne-Arapaho tribes had unsuccessfully tried to halt the sale of four ledger books, but Bonhams sold them for more than $900,000. At least three intact ledger books were unbound, and their pages were framed as individual artworks including drawings by Nokkoist (Southern Cheyenne, ca. 1851–1882) and Ohettoint (Kiowa, 1852–1934).

NAGPRA does not apply to private sales.

ART SHOWS

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crowsshadow.org Táaqo (Spicy Táaqo), 2023, monoprint, 28 ¼” x 22 ½” Collaborating Printer, Maggie Middleton 12 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 43, SUMMER 2024

The Heritage Center at Maȟpíya Lúta hosted the 56th annual RED CLOUD INDIAN ART SHOW in Pine Ridge, South Dakota. Gene Swallow (Oglala Lakota) won the Brother C.M. Simon SJ Purchase Award. Other special award winners were Delanea Uses Knife (Cheyenne River Lakota), Founder’s Award; Amé Myles (Spirit Lake Dakota), Judge’s Choice Award; Joe Pulliam (Oglala Lakota), Oscar Howe Award; Hattie Lee Mendoza (Cherokee Nation), Abstract Award; Martha Bad Warrior (Cheyenne River Lakota), Continuum Award; Nathaniel Ruleaux (Oglala Lakota), Humor Award; Brandon Young (Turtle Mountain Chippewa/Hunkpapa Lakota), Representation Award; and Sheldon Starr (Oglala Lakota), New Artist Award.

Division award winners were Richard Red Owl (Oglala Lakota), painting; Donald Montileaux (Oglala Lakota), drawing; Gordon Coons (Lac Courte Oreilles Ojibwe/Ottawa), graphics; Ray “Rocky Boy” Janis (Oglala Lakota), photography and digital art; Chris Pappan (Kaw/Osage/Cheyenne River Lakota), mixed media; Karen Sixkiller (Cherokee Nation), three-dimensional; Carol Wilcox (Oglala Lakota), cultural art forms; and Alexandra Romero-Frederick (Oglala Lakota), adornment.

ART MARKETS Leith Mahkewa (Thames Oneida/Hopi/Tewa) won Best of Show at the inaugural OHI:YO’ ART MARKET, sponsored by the Seneca Nation of Indians, in Salamanca, New York, with her beaded cradleboard. Classification winners were Leith Mahkewa, cultural items; David Martin (Pokagon

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Potawatomi), paintings, drawings, photography; Leroy Henry (Grand River Cayuga), sculpture; Brennen Johns (Seneca Nation), pottery; Ronnie-Leigh and Stonehorse Goeman (both Onondaga), basketry; Faye Lone (Tonawanda

Seneca), weavings and textiles; Jaycee Custer (Diné), jewelry; Kierra Pyke (Akwesasne Mohawk), beadwork/quillwork; and Ronnie-Leigh and Stonehorse Goeman, innovative arts. David Martin won the Jurors Award.

above Leith Mahkewa (Thames Oneida/Hopi/Tewa), Cradleboard #1– Inaugural, 2024, basswood, white ash, velvet, glass seed beads, sterling silver, wampum. Image courtesy of the Seneca-Iroquois National Museum.

Bryan Waytula (Cherokee Nation) won Best of Show at the third annual MVSKOKE ART MARKET hosted by the Muscogee Nation in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Classification winners were Johnnie Diacon (Thlopthlocco Muscogee), diverse arts; Michael Dart (Cherokee Nation), basketry; Benjamin West (Otoe/Southern Cheyenne/ Muscogee), drawing/graphic art/photography; Starr Hardridge (Muscogee), painting; Danny Beaver (Muscogee), sculpture; Nelson Garcia (Santo Domingo Pueblo), jewelry, stone/silver; Tama Roberts (Cherokee Nation), pottery; Leslie Deer (Muscogee), textiles, wearable; Randi Narcomey-Watson (Seminole/Muscogee) and Cathy Abercrombie (Cherokee Nation), textiles, non-wearable; Deana Ward (Choctaw Nation), beadwork/quillwork; Raven Kemp (Muscogee/Euchee/Choctaw/ Diné), digital art; and Tony Tiger (Sac & Fox/Muscogee/Seminole), innovation.

Kenneth Johnson (Seminole) won the Mvskoke Heritage Award.

FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 43, SUMMER 2024 | 13

Best of Show at the 11th annual ARTESIAN ARTS FESTIVAL in Tishomingo, Oklahoma, hosted by the Chickasaw Nation, went to Bryan Waytula (Cherokee Nation).

Skylar Blackbull and Lyndon Tsosie won Best of Show at the AUTRY MUSEUM AMERICAN INDIAN ARTS FESTIVAL in Los Angeles. The Autry Purchase Award went to Rain Scott. Classification winners were Rain Scott, basketry; Dallin Maybee and Naomi Bebo, beadwork and quillwork; Victoria J. Yazzie, clothing and personal attire; Skylar Blackbull and Lyndon Tsosie, diverse cultural art forms; Ernest Benally, jewelry; Richard L. Dawavendewa, painting and mixed media; Peggy Fontenot, photography; Rowan Harrison, pottery; Greyshoes (Upton Ethelbah Jr.), sculpture; Mona Laughing, textiles; and Peter Boome, woodcarving. Youth winners were EllaRose Bednorz, Mary Helen Brown, Mya Edaakie, Fiona Henry, and RaeAnn Kayquoptewa. left Bryan Waytula (Cherokee Nation), The Grass Dancer, 2024, colored pencil on paper, 39 × 31 in.

Best of Show winner at 2024 Mvskoke Art Market and Artesian Arts Festival. Image courtesy of the artist.

14 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 43, SUMMER 2024

Peter Boome (Upper Skagit) received Best of Show at the 32nd annual EITELJORG MUSEUM INDIAN MARKET AND FESTIVAL. Division award winners were Benjamin West (Otoe/Southern Cheyenne/Muscogee), paintings; Peter Boome, sculpture; Penelope S. Minner (Seneca), carvings and dolls; Ernest Benally (Navajo), jewelry; Karin Walkingstick (Cherokee Nation), pottery; Carrie Hill (Akwesasne Mohawk), basketry; Gloria Fain (Navajo), weavings and textiles; Robert Johnson (Navajo), cultural items; Della BigHair-Stump (Crow), beadwork and quillwork; and Rain Scott (Acoma/Navajo), innovative arts.

Tsionenhariio Swamp (Kanien'kehá:ka Mohawk) and Noelle Collins-Ziviski (Gun Lake Potawatomi) won Margot L. Eccles Youth Awards. Benjamin West, Samantha Jacobs (Seneca), Beth Bush (Pokagon Potawatomi/Odawa), and Rain Scott won Harrison Eiteljorg Purchase Awards. Ernest Benally (Navajo) won the Helen Cox Kersting Award.

ORGANIZATIONS The FORGE PROJECT, based in Mahicannituck (Hudson River) Valley, New York, has restructured as a nonprofit organization with an Indigenous steering council, a collective of seven regionally diverse Indigenous leaders who will articulate and help steer the high-level priorities of the organization.

AWARDS & HONORS The 2024 FORGE PROJECT FELLOWS are Delbert Anderson (Diné), Schon Matthew Duncan (United Keetoowah Cherokee), Donna Hogerhuis (Stockbridge-Munsee), Lindsay McIntyre (Inuit), Mikayla Patton (Oglala Lakota), and Sterling Anthony Schreiber II (Stockbridge-Munsee). Each fellow receives a $25,000 grant and is invited to spend up to three weeks in residence at the Forge Project in New York.

The Sacred Pipe Resource Center and North Dakota Council on the Arts, both in Bismarck, North Dakota, awarded the INDIGENOUS ARTIST GROWTH & DEVELOPMENT FELLOWSHIP to five Indigenous artists living in North Dakota. Bill Brien (Turtle Mountain Chippewa/Lakota/ Dakota/Métis), Maria Cree (Turtle Mountain Chippewa), Stuart James (Spirit Lake Dakota), Frankie Jo Morin (Turtle Mountain Chippewa), and Melanie Schwab (Standing Rock Lakota) received $5,000 for professional development support.

Two HERB ALPERT AWARDS IN THE ARTS went to Native artists this year: Marie Watt (Seneca) for visual art and Cannupa Hanska Luger (Mandan/Hidatsa/Arikara/Lakota) for theater. The award of $75,000 is given annually to ten mid-career artists.

The Monument Lab, based in Philadelphia, selected Cannupa Hanska Luger (Mandan/Hidatsa/Arikara/Lakota) as one of its four 2024 MONUMENT LAB FELLOWS. He will use the fellowship to design a war memorial to the millions of bison who American mercenaries slaughtered to facilitate U.S. westward expansion.

FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 43, SUMMER 2024 | 15

SPECIALIZING IN THE SALE OF ESTATE & PRIVATE COLLECTIONS

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16 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 43, SUMMER 2024

The John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation gave GUGGENHEIM FELLOWSHIPS to Dyani White Hawk (Sicangu Lakota), Nicholas Galanin (Tlingit/Unangax̂), and Lewis deSoto (Cahuilla descent) in the fine art category. The fellowships allow mid-career professionals to pursue a specific project and stipends range from $30,000 to $45,000.

PRECONTACT SITES The Zuni Youth Enrichment Project (ZYEP) provided cultural demonstrations at the DESERT WATCHTOWER in the Grand Canyon National Park, funded by the National Park Foundation. ZYEP arts coordinator Elroy Natachu Jr. (Zuni) advised art apprentices Keely Bobelu (Zuni) and Chasady Simplicio (Zuni), who demonstrated Pueblo sewing, and Breyden Othole (Zuni), who demonstrated two-dimensional arts. Coordinator Brittny Seowtewa (Zuni) and intern Kailin Quam (Zuni) presented about Indigenous food sovereignty.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation’s 37th annual list of America’s Most Endangered Historic Places includes the SITKA TLINGIT CLAN HOUSES of Sitka, Alaska. Only 8 of the original 43 clan houses remain, and even fewer serve their original purpose.

AUCTIONS Art by Indigenous peoples of the Americas is selling well at art auctions. PHILLIPS tripled the record for work by Kent Monkman (Fisher River Cree) with a $381,000 sale of a 2020 painting. SOTHEBY’S sold a 1984 painting by Emmi Whitehorse (Diné), estimated at $15,000 to $20,000, for $127,000.

CRIME & LEGAL ISSUES Artemis Gallery in Louisville, Colorado, recently sold several Maya artifacts, including a jadeite pendant with the head of the god K'inich Ajaw, a large polychrome pottery jar dating back to 1200 to 1450 CE, and more, despite demands from Mexican officials to stop. According to reporting by the Denver Post, Artemis Gallery has sold work, including two Egyptian pieces, later determined to have been looted.

Over the last 25 years First Peoples Fund has uplifted a network of more than 4,000 culture bearers,

Thieves stole a collection of First Nations art and Inuit carvings worth Can$60,000 from a house in the Gordon Head neighborhood of Saanich, Vancouver Island, British Columbia. The collection includes several artworks by Calvin Morberg (Tlingit) and antique Inuit carvings.

artists, mentors, organizational partners

NOTE

Peoples Fund to ensure that the lifeways

Tressa Berman, writer and creative coach, shares that Suzanne Newman Fricke discusses Bob Haozous’s Cultural Crossroads in her essay “Stop Sign at the Cultural Crossroads: Public Art at the University of New Mexico,” published in No Deal!: Indigenous Arts and the Politics of Possession (School for Advanced Research Press, 2012).

of our ancestors are carried forward for

and youth and supported essential community development in tribal communities in 32 states. Support First

future generations.

Learn more and contribute today.

FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 43, SUMMER 2024 | 17

18 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 43, SUMMER 2024

SEVEN DIRECTIONS

Seven Directions

RACHELLE B. PABLO A Diné curator, artist, and museum professional shares their top seven list

R

ACHELLE B. PABLO (Diné, she/they) is an enrolled tribal citizen of the Navajo Nation and a U.S. Army veteran. Pablo is of the Táchii'nii, Red Running into the Water People clan, born for the Tó'aheedlíinii, Water Flows Together clan. Their maternal grandfather is Tséńjíkiní, Cliff Dwellers People/Honeycombed Rock People clan, and their paternal grandfather is Tł'ááshchí'í, Red Bottom People clan.

Pablo is a museum specialist for the National Native American Veterans Memorial at the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, DC. She is also a board member of IndigenousWays in Santa Fe, a proud descendant of Diné matriarchal weavers, and a lover of New Mexican chile.

Pablo earned their MA in art history from the University of Delaware and a BFA in studio arts with a minor in museum studies at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), where she studied sculpture and painting. Previously they served as curator at 516 ARTS. Her passions include highlighting the significance of Indigenous expression in creative settings and calling attention to Indigenous voices through ceremonies, community engagement, curating exhibitions, relationship building with regional partners, and her art.

EAST. CANDICE HOPKINS (Carcross/Tagish, she/her) is the executive director and chief curator for the Forge Project in upstate New York on the unceded lands of the Moh-He-Con-Nuck.

Hopkins possesses a spiritual awareness as she engages communities with heightened professionalism and respect. Her presentations, with their distinct Indigenous interpretation, engage audiences with a poetic cadence as she speaks about history and how art’s role is relevant in the everyday human experience, revealing the creative intellect behind her process.

I initially encountered Hopkins during the inaugural 2019 Toronto Biennial of Art. As a green master’s candidate in the University of Delaware’s art history department, I had entered an intimidating arena of competitive

above Rachelle B. Pablo. Photo: Daniel Ulibarri. Image courtesy of the author. below Candice Hopkins. Photo: Olaf Kosinsky (CC BY-SA 3.0).

academics. My cohort included groupies of Hopkins’s scholarship bursting with excitement. Their shrieking baffled me.

Then the memories of Professor AmberDawn Bear Robe’s (Siksika) lectures about documenta 14 and SITE Santa Fe’s 2018 Biennial, curated by Hopkins, flooded back. Another noteworthy impact is Hopkins’s curation of the Canadian Pavilion for the 2019 Venice Biennale. By my cohort’s response, she was their “rock star” of Indigenous arts and beyond! After our group shared coffee with her, I joined my colleagues as an unofficial groupie.

While leading the Forge Project team, Candice Hopkins influences the contemporary Indigenous art realm, from grassroots organizations like Albuquerque’s Sanitary Tortilla Factory to premier international stages. She sets FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 43, SUMMER 2024 | 19

Joe Feddersen, Stripes, 2021. Blown glass, 11 ½ x 9 ½ x 9 ½ in. (29.2 x 24.1 x 24.1 cm).

Courtesy of the artist and studio e gallery, Seattle, WA. Photograph by Dean Davis.

RETROSPECTIVE September 28, 2024 – January 5, 2025

2316 2316 West West First First Avenue Avenue Spokane, Spokane, Washington Washington 99201 99201 United United States States 509-456-3931 509-456-3931

below Povi Kaa (Flower Leaf) Shawl, by Khohay Apparel, David Naranjo (Santa Clara Pueblo). Model: Makayla Duran (Pojoaque). Photo: Jacob Shije (Santa Clara Pueblo/Ohkay Owingeh/Cochiti) and Aaron Gonzales (San Ildefonso Pueblo). Image courtesy of the designer.

an exceptional standard in opening new entries of access for Indigenous creatives. She demonstrates what it takes to lead in the contemporary era with empowerment, intellect, and humility, which manifests a rippling effect on the world.

SOUTH. DAVID NARANJO is from Santa Clara, Ohkay Owingeh, and Cochiti Pueblos. His entrepreneurial endeavors expand his creative art, from acrylic paintings to wearable art, and create access for his supporters. His broad range of work includes silk shawls, tote bags, engraved acrylics, and composite skateboards. At the same time, his creative, conceptual methodology draws inspiration from Ancestral Pueblo pottery design and reimagines the abstracted geometrics with a contemporary flair.

His designs go beyond the aesthetic qualities, and express that “to the Pueblo people, we see a story, we see a prayer.” Making art is “my way of connecting to the divine, my way of extending my breath to something much more … greater, something much more loving.”1 Naranjo and I first met in Santa Fe in 2016. Immediately his designs’ impeccable line work captured my creative lens, and curiosity about his expressive interpretation whetted my artistic appetite. In November 2016 I witnessed Naranjo’s compassion, love for our earth, and unweathered support for Indigenous people when we traveled to Očhéthi Šakówiŋ driven by our responsibility for clean water. His work can be seen and purchased at Gallery Hózhó in Albuquerque.

1. Faith Perez, director/producer, “Reimagining Pueblo Art, David Naranjo,” ¡Colores!, PBS, season 30, episode 5, March 2, 2024, 26:43, video, web.

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SEVEN DIRECTIONS

above Lehuauakea (Kānaka Maoli), Nā Maka Pō (The Night Eyes), 2024, ochre earth pigments, wildfire charcoal hand-painted on kapa, 48 × 24 in. All images courtesy of the artists. left Lehuauakea. Photo: Leah Rose. below Golga Oscar modeling thigh-high piluguuk, or mukluks, that he made.

WEST. The artist LEHUAUAKEA (they/them) is Kānaka Maoli, a Native Hawaiian, from Pāpa'ikou, Hawai'i. They make kapa, a Pacific Island cloth of bast, or inner bark, that is beaten and then felted.

Lehua breathes new life into patterns and symbols and explains that “in the past, beating kapa was reserved for the women, while the painting of the finished cloth, as well as the toolmaking required for the process, was completed by the men.”

Being māhū (third gender) allows Lehua “to move throughout spaces that were otherwise under spiritual restrictions to non-māhū.” These acts of resilience forge deeper relationships with 'āina, meaning “land and that which feeds us.”

I became familiar with Lehua’s work while curating Fluid Gaze (2023) at 516 ARTS in Albuquerque. The natural materials layered in design, earthen pigments, kapa, and methodology spoke to me as a queer Indigenous woman going beyond my notions of fluidity. Everyone is invited to view these two kapa works, Kūmauna in the Slow Water group exhibition at the Cara Romero Gallery and Nā Maka Pō in Wai Ulana at the Hecho a Mano Gallery in Santa Fe this August.

NORTH. GOLGA OSCAR (Yup'ik, he/they) is a culture bearer, Central Yup'ik language teacher, and self-taught, cultural artist from Kasigluk, Alaska. He earned his BFA in photography from IAIA in 2020 and master of education degree from the University of Alaska– Fairbanks in 2023. Oscar is dedicated to sustaining his culture and language by teaching the upcoming generation while pursuing an active art practice.

Oscar links his making of ancestral attire with his trained, photographic eye.

We first met in May 2016 when he arrived at IAIA with a Yup'ik beaded headdress made of wolf, wolverine, and beaver pelts.

Recently Christian Allaire (Nipissing Ojibwe) featured Oscar’s Indigenous attire in a Vogue article, “For Indigenous Artists, Fur is a Way of Life.” Oscar has been an artist in residence at IAIA and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art. His work is receiving deserved recognition, and it’s been a journey to witness his artistic evolution since I was a student worker, giving him his school tour at IAIA. Oscar will have a booth at this summer’s Santa Fe Indian Market.

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SEVEN DIRECTIONS

right Marlena Myles (Spirit Lake Dakota/Mohegan/ Muscogee), Wohpe and the Four Winds, 2023, augmented reality, Sacred Hoop Walk at Minnesota Landscape Arboretum, Chaska, Minnesota. below Suni Sonqo Vizcarra Wood. Both images courtesy of the artists.

ABOVE. MARLENA MYLES (Spirit Lake Dakota/Mohegan/Muscogee, she/ her) resides in St. Paul, Minnesota.

During the summer of 2021 while a fellow in the Peabody Essex Museum’s Native American Fellowship, our cohort met Myles in a Zoom meeting. Her many talents include, but are not limited to, digital arts, filmmaking, design, language

revitalization, public art, illustration, and land reclamation.

Myles is a multidisciplinary creative who reimagines Dakota sacred storytelling through augmented reality, which implements digital arts, language, history, and an alternate approach to land reclamation. “Using augmented reality,” she shares, “I can teach about these histories and the significance of the land anywhere, even here in Minneapolis, where there are many sacred Dakota places and historical locations that many people don’t know about. These sacred sites have been waiting to be acknowledged once again.”2 You can view her recent public projects, The Dakota Spirit Walk and The Dakota Sacred Hoop Walk, in the short documentary Realm of Resilience. Myles’s experimental creative process reimagines Indigenous storytelling utilizing new technological tools.

BELOW. A multidisciplinary artist, SUNI SONQO VIZCARRA WOOD (Quechua) speaks Quechua fluently.

Suni Sonqo is Quechua for “great heart.”

His father is Indigenous Peruvian, and his mother is New Mexican. Wood was born in Taos, New Mexico, and raised in the Urubamba Valley, the Sacred Valley of

2. Marlena Myles, “Realms of Resilience,” All Arts, WNET, video, April 9, 2024, 26:46, web.

3. Walker Hull, producer, “Suni Sonqo Art | Brand Story Film,” Suni Sonqo Art, October 26, 2021, video, 6:01, web.

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the Incas, north of Cusco in the Peruvian Andes. These experiences connecting his Quechua community and engagement with Pueblo communities continuously influence his creative style.

Much like how I met Oscar, I first met Wood at an IAIA campus tour as a student worker. His artworks consist of wood, bronze, and stone sculptures, while his expressions encompass film, digital arts, music, and cultural exchange. Wood flexes his agency, addressing decolonization with self-reflective inquiries of what’s imposed upon us while also focusing on the present generation. He explains that the main focus of his art, filled with metaphors, is “an awakening of ourselves and very important to reunite as Indigenous nations and youth to see beyond our differences and beyond those borders” defined by colonizers. “They did the same thing in our minds, making us think that we are all so different,” he says. “It’s realizing and focusing on the importance of coming back together in reuniting our nations and our cultures on this whole continent.”3 Suni is now attending the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and is in the labor-intensive process of creating monumental bronze sculptures.

B O L U K TA MISSISSIPPIAN DESIGNS, MEDALLIONS, A ND MODER N CHOC TAW A R T COME SEE THE NEW EXHIBIT BEFORE IT ENDS ON OCTOBER 19TH

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

CENTER. My current focus is on my role as the museum specialist for the NATIONAL NATIVE AMERICAN VETERANS MEMORIAL at the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, in Washington, DC. This public monument, designed by Marine Corps and Vietnam War veteran Harvey Pratt (Southern Cheyenne-Arapaho), is a gathering place to honor Native veterans of all branches of the military.

In addition, I am co-curating an up c om i ng e x h i bit i on w it h IAIA’s collections curator, Tatiana Lomahaftewa-Singer (Hopi/Choctaw) at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts. This exhibition will highlight the history of ceramics and clay and how the influence of IAIA ceramic professor Otellie Pasivaya Loloma (Hopi, 1921–1993) is still living and breathing in various artworks of today’s Indigenous artists.

Our exhibition CLAY, THE SKIN OF OUR MOTHER (working title)

will highlight the ceramics and other media of IAIA alumni from 1962 to the present. This exhibition is tentatively scheduled for November 2026. Conversations about this exhibition have been ongoing since 2021 and are an extension of my master’s paper on Otellie Pasivaya Loloma’s converging talents of poetry, clay, and Hopi performance.

above National Native American Veterans Memorial designed

by Harvey Pratt (Southern Cheyenne-Arapaho). Photo: Ron Cogswell (CC BY 2.0).

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MAHKU collective (Huni Kuin), kapewë pukeni (the alligator bridge), 2024, mural, Central Pavilion. Photo: Giuseppe Anello, Alamy.

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FOREIGNERS EVERYWHERE Indigeneity at the 60th Venice Biennale

By Andrea L. Ferber, PhD

L

A BIENNALE DI VENEZIA, or the Venice Biennale, is the oldest and most prestigious international art exhibition anywhere. Established in 1895, this iteration titled Stranieri Ovunque (Foreigners Everywhere) was organized for the first time by a South American curator: Brazilian Adriano Pedrosa. The sprawling event centers around the Giardini, a 44-acre green space with a large exhibition hall and 30 smaller pavilions, and the Arsenale, a complex of shipyards built in 1104 CE. Like kudzu, the biennale takes over more spaces every year, testing the limits of even the most passionate art pilgrims.

This year, 90 national pavilions are scattered throughout the city, including the Holy See and Venice itself, as well as 30 “collateral events.” It is an inaugural year for Ethiopia, Nicaragua, the Republic of Panama, Senegal, and Tanzania, and a milestone for Indigenous representation. Jeffrey Gibson (Mississippi Choctaw/Cherokee) represents the United States in a solo exhibition, the first Native American artist to do so.1 Tracking down Indigenous artists proves to be challenging as not all identify as such, and Indigenous identity varies from nation to nation. Some artists prefer not to be pigeonholed. The overview of Native art in this year’s Venice Biennale is in celebration of more inclusive and global snapshots of contemporary art, starting with the main exhibition (331 artists in two locations), followed by the national pavilions.

IN THE GIARDINI’S CENTRAL PAVILION, five landscape paintings by Kay WalkingStick (Cherokee Nation) depict 1. Native American artists were included in a group exhibition in the U.S. Pavilion at the 1932 Venice Biennale. Meanwhile the Canadian Pavilion has featured several Indigenous artists including Isuma (Inuk) in 2019, Rebecca Belmore (Lac Seul Ojibwe) in 2005, and Edward Poitras (Métis) in 1995.

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… this year’s Venice Biennale is in celebration of more inclusive and global snapshots of contemporary art …

above Arsenale installation with ceramics by Juana Marta Rodas and Julia Isídrez (both Guaraní) at right and mixed-media paintings by Emmi Whitehorse (Diné) on the wall. Photo: A. Ferber. opposite Santiago Yahuarcani (Uitoto), Aquí está caliente (Here it’s hot), 2023, natural pigments, acrylic on llanchama, part of Nucleo Contemporaneo.

Photo: A. Ferber.

panoramas of the Western United States partially overlaid with geometric patterns derived from textiles. These are smartly exhibited with small yet haunting drawings by Austrian artist Leopold Strobl and stone carvings by Kim Yun Shin, a Korean artist who lives in Argentina.

Similarly in the Arsenale, a suite of large-scale mixed-media works by Emmi Whitehorse (Diné) converse poetically with ceramics by Paraguayan artists Juana Marta Rodas (Guaraní, 1925–2013) and her daughter Julia Isídrez (Guaraní) and subtle drawings by Austrian artist Greta Schödl. In Whitehorse’s quiet aesthetic, one discovers leaves, clusters of bubbles, spirals, and seed pods floating in amorphous nebulae.

ANDRÉS CURRUCHICH CÚMEZ (Kaqchikel Maya, 1891–1969) became internationally known in his lifetime and is credited with inspiring generations of painters in the small community of

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Comalapa, Guatemala. His painting Procesión: patrón de San Juan está en su trono (1966) shows how Catholicism is integrated into the daily lives of his people.

Twenty miniature genre paintings

by Rosa Elena Curruchich (Kaqchikel Maya, 1958–2005) depict life in her community. Paula Nicho Cúmez (Kaqchikel Maya) applies her knowledge of Maya weavings to paintings of women with skin patterned like textiles. The artist was prohibited from wearing Indigenous clothes when she attended school; these surreal figures celebrate ethnicity as an inseparable part of one’s body.

In a strong curatorial move, two father-son duos evince how art begets art. Colombian painters Mogaje Guihu, or Abel Rodríguez, and his son Aycoobo (both Nonuya) have a gallery for their individual and collaborative works.

Guihu is an established artist who brings botanical expertise to his detailed paintings of flora and fauna in the Amazon.

Aycoobo applies the same meticulous approach but with a more fluorescent palette and a focus on Nonuya cosmology.

Santiago Yahuarcani and Rember Yahuarcani (both Uitoto, Aimeni clan) from Peru share a gallery in the Arsenale.

Santiago exhibited three mural-sized paintings on llanchama (bark paper).

Aquí está caliente (Here it’s hot) (2023) reveals a human-like spirit feasting on a leg over a massive barbacoa. Politicians, guerrilla fighters, and soldiers flail on the grill surrounded by spirits of the jungle: anthropomorphized caiman, jaguars, dolphins, and piranhas. Like an Amazonian Hieronymus Bosch, his images are truly sublime—simultaneously exquisite and terrifying.

Santiago’s son Rember also paints on llanchama, but his works in this biennale are acrylic on canvas. He often incorporates references from Christian paintings: El territorio de los abuelos (2023) lifts the descent of the damned and the ascent of the saved from Michelangelo’s Last Judgment (1535–41). El río (2024) honors a St. Sebastian–like figure pierced by flags of exploitative, international powers. In an interview, Rember

shared that his grandmother Martha audited his paintings, verifying narratives from oral history. Since her passing, his father has taken this role through conversations during the night. Uitoto elders are vigilant to protect their families between 11 p.m. and 3 a.m. when evil spirits are active.2 An Andean painter from Peru addresses current politics. The meticulous paintings by Violeta Quispe Yupari (Quechua), in the style of tablas de sarhua, present epic historical and spiritual narratives and call for social justice. El matrimonio de la chola (Marriage of the chola) (2022) depicts the blending of Peruvian and Venezuelan cultures with corrupt politicians, democratic revolutionaries, and immigrants. Apu Suyos (Offering to the gods) (2024) shows links in the cosmos: the spirits of seven mountains receiving offerings from the people and Pachamama (Mother Earth), including human-animal hybrids and babies growing in the earth.

As a trans woman and mestiza, La Chola Poblete expresses her fluid identity and experiences navigating life in a deeply Catholic, patriarchal, and

often violent social context through her art. Her large-scale paintings on paper appear a cacophony of dissonance that include references to pop bands like Nirvana, images of the Virgin Mary, sexual encounters, and Andean textiles.

Claudia Alarcón (Wichí) is part of Silät, an artist collective of 14 Wichí women based in northern Salta, Argentina. Silät members weave textiles made from the chaguar plant, a succulent akin to yucca. They use the yica stitch, handed down through generations, to make clothing and bags, and recently began making larger-scale abstractions based on dreams shared by elders.

THE WORK OF RIVER CLAURE (Mestizo) from Bolivia might be described as magical realism. Eight photographs from the series Warawar Wawa (Son of the Stars) (2019–20) imagine an Aymara version of Antoine de Saint Exupéry’s Le Petit Prince. The images hang on a wall scattered with silver stars. Another body of work titled Mita (2022–present) considers centuries of exploitative mining in the Bolivian Andes. Both of the artist’s grandfathers

2. Rember Yahuarcani, “Amazonart Project: Rember Yahuarcani,” University of Essex, January 28, 2021, Vimeo video, 12:17, web.

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above Violeta Quispe Yupari (Quechua), El matrimonio de la chola (Marriage of the chola), 2022, paint, natural pigments, gold leaf on fiberboard panel, 59 x 67 in., collection of the Pérez Art Museum Miami. Both photos: A. Ferber. opposite Sandra Gamarra Heshiki (Peruvian mestiza/ Japanese descent), Pinacoteca migrante (Migrant garden), 2024, installation with painted figures, stones, books, seagrass mats, Spanish Pavilion.

worked in silver mines that have since become decaying industrial sites.

The typically all-white facade of the Central Pavilion in the Giardini was transformed with a brilliant ancestral narrative from the Huni Kuin people entitled kapewë pukeni (the alligator bridge). Figures carrying baskets full of food traverse an alligator bridge over an ocean full of fish and turtles, while snakes twist around two columns. The mural was created by MAHKU (Movimento dos Artistas Huni Kuin), a collective of Huni Kuin painters from the Brazilian Amazon.

Two more Brazilian painters are included inside. Joseca Mokahesi (Yanomami) draws xapiri, “spirits left by

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Omama—the Yanomami creation deity— to aid shamans in their tasks,” as the wall text explains. Xapiri manifest in a shaman’s body and are most often portrayed in human form, but also appear as trees and animals. André Taniki (Yanomami) is a medicine man who worked with an anthropologist in the 1970s to translate his visions onto paper, of which more than 25 are included here. Many appear like organized diagrams or charts of dozens of images, both representational and abstract. Mokahesi and Taniki’s works are shown alongside photographs of daily life among the Yanomami by Claudia Andujar, a Swiss-born artist and activist for Indigenous rights living in Brazil.

NATIONAL PAVILIONS AS MANY CRITICS have noted, the organization of the Venice Biennale by nation-states imposes an oversimplified colonial framework onto disputed geographies. Sometimes the complex histories are obvious: Serbia affirms its pavilion with a sign, though “Yugoslavia” remains part of the building’s architecture.

Recent efforts to acknowledge colonial violence have prompted some colonial powers to cede space to colonized people, whose artists often work through profound intergenerational traumas. However, colonial guilt is not driving this selection—as revealed by the art itself—which is conceptually and aesthetically profound.

Indigenous artists from the Americas were featured in the pavilions of

Spain, the United States, Chile, Denmark (temporarily renamed Kalaallit Nunaat), Bolivia, and Brazil (temporarily renamed Hãhãwpuá).

SPAIN Sandra Gamarra Heshiki (Peruvian mestiza/Japanese descent) transformed Spain’s pavilion into the Migrant Art Gallery. The artist was born in Lima, Peru, and moved to Madrid as an adult, making her the first immigrant to represent Spain. Gamarra Heshiki appropriates and recreates colonial-era landscapes, portraits, still life paintings, and scientific illustrations to critique and upend European assumptions about the world.

In some works, quotes by ecofeminists and postcolonial theorists overlay images of tropical vistas. Drawing from revered Spanish painters such as Francisco de Zurbarán and Diego Velázquez, her

paintings often appear unfinished in an allusion to the continuous revision of historical narratives.

In one gallery, several series visualize how the ongoing extraction of resources is intertwined with the displacement of people. Enlightened Racism (Murdered Indigenous Leaders) consists of 24 facsimiles of botanical illustrations onto which the artist painted portraits of assassinated activists. The dark rooms of Migrant Art Gallery culminate in Migrant Garden, a bright white gallery with 15 life-size images of Indigenous people and plants painted on glass. The figures suggest monuments and are set into large stones placed onto wonderfully aromatic seagrass mats. While admittedly reading-intensive, Gamarra Heshiki’s exhibition provides an invaluable critique of seemingly impartial images that parallels increased efforts by museums to present nuanced historical narratives.

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Inuit name for the place that became known as Greenland.

Rise of the Sunken Sun, the exhibition inside, offers glimpses into the personal lives of the artist’s family, friends, and ancestors in six series of photographs. One notes elements from Inuit and colonial cultures inside people’s homes: oil lamps and crucifixes, walrus skulls and microwaves. Storch’s personal reflections in text run along most walls.

One reads, Why would we call ourselves inuit—humans—if we never had to explain what kind of creatures we were?

THE UNITED STATES

above Jeffrey Gibson (Mississippi Choctaw/Cherokee), WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF-EVIDENT, 2024, glass beads, plastic beads, nylon thread, fringe, acrylic felt, found punching bag, U.S. pavilion. Both photos: A. Ferber. opposite Jeffrey Gibson (Mississippi Choctaw/Cherokee), The Enforcer and WE WANT TO BE FREE, both ceramic, glass beads, plastic beads, nylon grosgrain ribbon, tin jingles, nylon thread, canvas, acrylic felt, cold-rolled mild steel, steel plate, 2024; mural: WE ARE MADE BY HISTORY, acrylic on Polytab, 2024, U.S. pavilion.

KALAALLIT NUNAAT THE DANISH ARTS FOUNDATION invited Greenlandic artist Inuuteq Storch (Kalaaleq) to exhibit in the Danish Pavilion. Greenland was a Danish colony from 1721 to 1953, though its Indigenous people have been exploited and forcibly assimilated for much longer. Greenland is now an autonomous country within the Kingdom of Denmark. For his exhibition Storch obscured the stone-etched frontispiece on the pavilion’s exterior facade with Kalaallit Nunaat—reclaiming the

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MISSISSIPPI CHOCTAW/CHEROKEE artist Jeffrey Gibson utilized every inch of the U.S. Pavilion: even its exterior is painted bright red with a rainbow of geometric shapes. Giant red pedestals in the front courtyard provided a dynamic stage for dancers on opening weekend.

The exhibition’s title wraps around the left frieze in colorful block lettering: THE SPACE IN WHICH TO PLACE ME. On the right is a recontextualized line from the U.S. Declaration of Independence: WE HOLD THESE TRUTHS TO BE SELF-EVIDENT. A bold and celebratory atmosphere continues inside, with thumping electronic music from a nine-channel video that pervades the whole pavilion.

Playing in the last gallery, Gibson’s She Never Dances Alone (2019) provides the soundtrack “Sisters” by Halluci Nation, the First Nations electronica group. The video features jingle dress dancer Sarah Ortegon HighWalking (Wind River Shoshone/Arapaho) alongside mesmerizing kaleidoscopic patterns. Only the most committed stoic could prevent their body from moving to the beat.

Vibrant murals, paintings, and sculptures fill the galleries with joyful energy. Text is integrated into almost all works, with references to U.S. laws (i.e., the 1866 Civil Rights Act), declarations (“We are made by history,” a quote from Martin Luther King, Jr.), and propositions (“If not now, when”). Three large busts on marble pedestals suggest an evolved

species: genderless royalty, not wearing regalia but made from it. Gibson’s pavilion is an electrifying cross between a powwow and a pride parade. Portland Art Museum and SITE Santa Fe presented the space in which to place me. This exhibition is the first at the U.S. Pavilion to be curated by a Native American: Kathleen Ash-Milby (Navajo) with Abigail Winograd.

BOLIVIA THE BOLIVIAN MINISTRY of Cultures, Decolonization, and Depatriarchalization organized an exhibition in Russia’s pavilion, a reflection of recent lucrative, economic deals between the two countries. With some exceptions, the result appears rushed and inadequate.

Many artists’ names appear in guides that have no presence in the exhibition. And while the Aymara live in parts of Bolivia, Peru, and Chile, it is unclear why artists

from Brazil, Panama, and El Salvador are shown. Explanatory texts are sparse.

The star of this pavilion is Elvira Espejo Ayca (Aymara) and her installation titled Jiwasan Amayusa (The Thinking of Our Philosophers) (2024). Dozens of spindles used for making thread from wool stand upright in ceramic bowls. A two-channel video projects footage of women wearing huipiles processing wool.

The spindle scratches and squeaks in the ceramic bowl. The work pays homage to the multisensory knowledge passed down from generation to generation, which emphasizes a focused, meditative spinning practice.

The irony of a decolonization ministry organizing an exhibition in the pavilion of an actively hostile imperial war machine is a paradox but results in international exposure for artists who continue to be marginalized.

HÃHÃWPUÁ A FRESH, EARTHY SMELL permeates the Brazilian pavilion, renamed Hãhãwpuá, meaning “great land” in Pataxó. Arissana Pataxó (Pataxó), Denilson Baniwa (Baniwa), and Gustavo Caboco (Wapichana) curated Ka'a Pûera: we are walking birds, which consists of four installations. All derive from communal living: agriculture, fishing, shared spiritual beliefs, and collective governance. In Cardume (School of Fish) (2023–24), maracas and replicas of bullets seem to charge toward each other like aggressive, oppositional species. Two colorful handmade fishing nets (tarrafas) hang from the ceiling and provide a kind of stage for the frozen drama. A soundtrack brings together chanting (torés), gunfire, and water. This work

by Ziel Karapotó (Karapotó) represents Indigenous and colonial forces fighting for resources, which continues today even after five centuries.

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community to make a red-and-black feather mantle worn by leaders during listening sessions. Encircled by forms suggesting people made from fishing nets, the mantle creates an Okará: a listening session at the heart of Tupinambá self-governance. These mantles were prized as exotic curiosities by colonists, and nearly all historical pieces remain in European museums. Alongside this installation are documents that request repatriation of the mantles, which most museums have denied. The final gallery in this pavilion plays documentary recordings of fishnet-weaving workshops in which elder experts passed knowledge to younger generations.

CHILE

above Glicéria Tupinambá (Tupinambá) in collaboration with fellow Tupinambá artists, Okará Assojaba, 2024, installation composed of tarrafa nets, feather mantles, and letters, Hāhāwpuá Pavilion. Photo: A. Ferber.

For Equilibrio (Balance) (2020–24), artist Olinda Muniz Silva Wanderley (Tupinambá/Pataxó Hãhãhãe) placed a television atop a mound of soil. Root vegetables create a decorative pattern around the small hill, and red seeds arranged in root-like lines seem to creep toward the viewer.

Glicéria Tupinambá (Tupinambá) collaborated with her own Indigenous

THE L ABYRINTHINE ROU TE to Chile’s pavilion is well worth the effort, even if its existence is mired in controversy.3 Those who successfully navigate the maze of Venetian streets arrive in an eerily quiet area of the Arsenale overseen by the Italian Navy.

Signs warn visitors not to trespass in a military zone (I was reprimanded for walking too close to the canal). But upon entering the massive brick building, an explosion of color arrests one’s attention: Mamita Montaña (Mother Mountain), an imposing 20-foot-tall figure by Valeria Montti Colque (Aymara descent).

Reams of fabric, paper, and plastic create a giant hoop skirt decorated with an array of materials, including dishes and utensils. Strands of beads from her chupalla (a broad-brimmed straw hat) shroud a lavender face painted with yellow and red flowers. She is visually demanding, yet the space also features a mural, a two-channel video, and five smaller ceramic sculptures.

The exhibition is titled Cosmonation, a term “from anthropologist Michel S. Laguerre to acknowledge that diasporic communities do not break off relations with their places of origin but remain transgenerationally connected to them,” as wall text explains. Montti Colque was born in Sweden to Chilean parents who fled Pinochet’s coup d’état. She is the first artist born outside Chile to represent the country at the biennale.

3. Juan José Santos Mateo, “Chile’s Venice Biennale Pavilion Faces a Troubled Selection Process, Resulting in Resignations,” ARTnews, November 17, 2023, web.

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GLOBAL INDIGENEITY THIS BIENNALE also includes Indigenous artists from outside the Americas, such as the unsettling installation

by Archie Moore (Kamilaroi/Bigambul) in the Australian Pavilion. kith and kin is an enormous table with stacks of redacted photocopies—government inquiries into Indigenous deaths—surrounded by a handwritten family tree that covers all four walls and the ceiling of the pavilion. The biennale jury gave this installation the Golden Lion award.

Paintings by Marlene Gilson (Wathaurung/Wadawurrung) and Naminapu Maymuru-White (Yolŋu) demonstrate diverse approaches in Australian Aboriginal art: greyscale abstractions inspired by celestial patterns by Gibson and narrative representations that insert the Yolŋu people into historical events by Maymuru-White.

Mataaho Collective is a group of four Māori women— Bridget Reweti (Ngāti Ranginui/Ngāi Te Rangi), Erena Baker Arapere (Te Atiawa ki Whakarongotai/Ngāti Toa Rangātira), Sarah Hudson (Ngāti Awa/Ngāi Tūhoe/Ngāti Pūkeko), and Terri Te Tau (Rangitāne ki Wairarapa)—from Aotearoa, New Zealand. They created Takapau (2022), a vaulted ceiling made from woven industrial straps that casts streams of light and shadow on the walls and ceiling of a gallery in the Arsenale.

Takapau are mats used during ceremonies, especially childbirth. This work was also awarded a Golden Lion.

Other Māori artists are interspersed throughout the main exhibition: Fred Graham and his son Brett Graham (both Ngāti Koroki Kahukura/Tainui); Selwyn Wilson (Ngāti Manu/Ngāti Hine), and Sandy Adsett (Ngāti Pahauwera).

Finally, one work by a non-Indigenous artist warrants mention. Descanso by Iván Argote might be overlooked as detritus, as indeed it is. A deliberately broken replica of a statue of the infamous explorer Christopher Columbus appears to rot as plants from the Americas, Africa, and Asia swallow him back into the earth. On his Instagram account @ivan_argote, the artist shared, “As a Colombian (Colombia literally means ‘the land of Columbus’), it is a pride to return this anti-hero.

Here he is back, we don’t need him anymore.” In this and other works, Argote presents an alternative to simply removing colonial monuments. Like Fred Wilson’s Mining the Museum and recent interventions by Nicholas Galanin (Tlingit/Unangax̂), Argote utilizes the residue of colonialism to create poignant (anti-)monuments that reflect histories more critically.

If viewed as a litmus test of current contemporary art, this year’s Venice Biennale reflects diversity more accurately, with higher representation of the global south. Far surpassing past inclusion, Indigenous art has been the focus of many reviews. It is especially affirming to see a blend of historically overlooked paintings alongside the most current art of our time.

A 552-page “short” guide as well as a two-volume exhibition catalogue is available from La Biennale di Venezia. This year’s Venice Biennale runs through November 24, 2024.

Andrea L. Ferber, PhD, is an arts writer and educator currently based in Barcelona, Spain. Many thanks to Guillermo Pino Cruz for his assistance with this article.

SouthDakotaArtMuseum.com | SDSU | Brookings, SD

The Prairie is My Garden May 25 - September 15, 2024 The title of Harvey Dunn’s quintessential prairie painting, The Prairie is My Garden, serves as a springboard for this exhibition which considers the human connection to the land that we now know as South Dakota. Featuring works from the South Dakota Art Museum Collections, including: Top: Oscar Howe, Deer, gouache on paper, n.d. © Oscar Howe Family Bottom left: Rosebud Sioux Tribe of the Rosebud Indian Reservation, Cradleboard, hide, bead, fabric, jingle bell, silk, sinew, thread, n.d.

Bottom right: Jhon Goes in Center, Tatanka Hanwi Cheskipasise, hand hammered and engraved with custom lapidary work, 2023.

EXPLORE The South Dakota Art Museum Online Collection

Featuring works by Oscar Howe, Arthur Amiotte, Herman Red Elk, Robert Lee Penn, Andrew Standing Solider, Calvin Tyndall, Dwayne Wilcox, Jim Yellowhawk, and more.

KATSINA CARVING IN THE ART WORLD Reflecting on a Century of Evolving Styles and Techniques

By Mark Bahti

T

HE KATSINA DANCES held at Hopi between winter and midJuly are arguably the most varied, powerful, and compelling of all their ceremonies that are still open to the non-Indian public.1 They survive in part because the Hopi were far from the center of Spanish colonial and later Mexican control, powers which found little on the remote and arid Hopi land to covet.

The ceremonies also survived attempts in the early 20th century by American authorities to bring an end to them under the Code of Indian Offenses, an oppressive measure designed to hasten the end of customary American Indian lifeways in the drive toward assimilation.

During many of the ceremonies, Hopi katsinam give out katsina dolls (katsina tithut2) that they have carved to the young girls so that the girls can begin to learn about the many different katsinam and their part in Hopi religious life. The tithu are carved from the root of the cottonwood tree, not the branches, for two reasons: cottonwoods grow only in those rare places in the high arid lands of the Hopi where there is a reliable source of water, and the trees are sustained by their roots which reach down into the earth seeking the life-giving moisture.

What is a katsina doll? What is an “authentic” one? Are some made just “for sale”? Are those less authentic? And, while we’re at it, what is a katsina? All questions that shops—whether on the Hopi mesas or many hundreds of miles away—have attempted to answer for over one hundred years in the effort to sell Hopi katsina dolls.

The answer can be a little complex, as religion always is, especially when discussed in a language other than Hopi, but briefly: A katsina is a powerful spirit being that may represent a person, place, bird, plant, animal, force of nature, or even another tribe. In Hopi theology a katsina is not a deity but an immortal spirit who can relay the prayers of the Hopi people to the deities. Contrary to a recent and growing myth, the dolls themselves are not prayed to and they are not sacred. They represent sacred beings, but that is not the same as being a sacred object. Carvers from one clan may be told that they should not carve a certain katsina, but that would not hold true for all other carvers. Apart from the lack of a signature, it is also important to note that there are no differences between a katsina carved to be given out by a katsina versus one “made to sell” (Hopis sell dolls

1. I use the word katsina instead of kachina. Both names/pronunciations are acceptable, the former being the Hopi word and the latter being the English word.

2. In Hopi, tihu is nominative singular, tihut is accusative singular and nominative dual, tihuty(uy) is accusative dual, tithu is nominative plural, and tithut is accusative plural.

Jürgen Weissenborn, Wolfgang Klein, eds., Here and There: Cross-linguistic Studies on Deixis and Demonstration (Amsterdam: John Benjamins Publishing, 1982), 237.

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dolls by the katsinam. These help the girls learn about the different katsinam and their role in Hopi religious life.

Hopi children are told that the katsinam themselves carve the dolls. This means that most fathers and uncles who carve dolls to be given by the katsinam to the children must trade their work for that of carvers from another village, even another mesa, so that the child does not recognize the work as being by someone they know. It also means that they are never signed. This was not an issue until the 1970s as almost no one signed them before then.

The issue of being able to identify the carver began in the 1970s when a renewed and especially high cycle of interest in Indians and Indian art hit. Before then, a carver’s individual identity had not been particularly important to this community. Some early Southwest artists gained individual fame, notably, potters Maria Martinez (San Ildefonso Pueblo, 1887–1980) and Nampeyo (Hopi-Tewa, 1859–1942). But in the 1970s suddenly collectors wanted to know who the individual carver was. Prior to then few artists signed their work. Jimmy Kewanwytewa (Hopi, 1889–1966) was the first to sign his artwork in his capacity as a Museum of Northern Arizona employee.

BECOMING AN ART FORM

above Jimmy Kewanwytewa (Hopi, 1889–1966), Nata'aska (Black Ogre), 1930s–1940s, cottonwood root, paint, dyed leather, fur, shell, hematite, feathers, 18¾ × 13½ × 7 in., collection of the Heard Museum, NA-SW-Ho-F-750. Photo: Craig Smith. Image courtesy of the Heard Museum. opposite Ramson Lomatewama (Hopi), Crow Mother, cottonwood root, pigment, fur, 11 ½ in. high, private collection. Image courtesy of Bahti Indian Arts.

Example of a Revival Flat style.

between each other as well as to some other Pueblo peoples too.) Variations can occur for a variety of reasons: differences in appearance from one mesa or village to another, to stylistic differences reflective of the artist.

The earliest style was the putsqatihu (literally: flat doll). These were not often seen for sale until recent decades simply because collectors and casual buyers were not especially interested in them, but they were of vital importance to the Hopi.

Twenty days after a child is born, the child is presented to the Sun, given one or more Hopi names, and presented with a putsqatihu representing Hahay’iwúuti, the katsina grandmother. After that, girls—and only girls —are gifted katsina

COLLECTING BY NON-HOPIS was sporadic, starting in the late 19th century. Some of those early carvings found their way into a few museum collections and private collections, including those of newspaper magnate William Randolph Hearst and the French Surrealist André Breton. Later Senator Barry Goldwater assembled a very large collection, one that now rests at the Heard Museum in Phoenix.

A boost to the marketing of Hopi katsina figures began in 1933 with the first annual Hopi Show at the Museum of Northern Arizona in Flagstaff, an event that continues to this day as part of their Hopi Festival of Arts and Culture. Over time, judged categories for katsina carving were added to the Gallup Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial arts judging. Santa Fe

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The most important and valuable book in katsina publications came in 1995 with the publication of Following the Sun and Moon: Hopi Kachina Tradition. For the first time ever, there was a book on katsina figures written by a knowledgeable Hopi elder: Alph Secakuku (Hopi, Snake clan, 1939–2022). More importantly, it set katsina dolls within the context of Hopi religion.

STYLISTIC CHANGES

above Brian Honyouti (Hopi, 1947–2016), Nata'aska (Black Ogre), 1998, cottonwood root, paint, 32¼ × 23⅛ × 10 in., collection of the Heard Museum, 3373-1. Photo: Craig Smith. Image courtesy of the Heard Museum.

Indian Market, Scottsdale National, and a host of other Indian art competitions later followed suit. Through these the public gained more exposure to katsina figures but now with the added context of what constituted (in the minds of the judges) a good, better, or best katsina doll.

Two books helped grow interest and understanding of Hopi katsina dolls. The first was in 1949 when Harold S. Colton, the founder of the Museum of Northern Arizona, wrote Hopi Kachina Dolls: With a Key to Their Identification. His guidebook helped non-Hopi buyers identify individual katsina carvings, making the book a huge and continuing success.

Then in 1973 Barton Wright collaborated with the painter Clifford Bahnimptewa (Hopi, 1938–1984) on a lushly illustrated volume Hopi Kachinas: An Artist’s Documentary. The impact went further than either Wright or Bahnimptewa could have anticipated. For collectors, it became a catalogue from which they ordered dolls. Prior to then, a carver receiving a request to carve a certain katsina might pass on it if he was unfamiliar with that particular one. (There are around 300 different katsinam depending upon how you count them.) Now carvers could accept an order for any, using this book as a reference.

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STYLES HAVE CHANGED over the years, in part due to better tools but also in response to the outside market, as well as changing preferences within the Hopi extended community.

While the nature and extent of katsina doll collecting evolved and grew, so did the styles and techniques, but the changes were always mediated by the Hopi carvers themselves. Though traditionally katsina tithu hung in Hopi homes, in the 1920s non-Hopi buyers and dealers often glued or nailed carvings to wooden bases so they could be displayed on a shelf. The Hopis eventually adapted to this new style by making it their own, often painting images on the underside of the base or carving bas-reliefs of katsina faces and village scenes along the side of the base. Buyer complaints about natural mineral paints rubbing off led artists to adopt acrylic paints, and collector fascination with highly detailed representations of the dancers led to some truly tour de force examples of intricate carving.

The oldest dolls were carved with flint or obsidian blades, sanded with sandstone, coated with tuuma, a white clay, and then painted with mineral and vegetal paints. Paint sources included beeweed and lignite for black, hematite for red, azurite for blue, ochre for yellow, and copper oxide for green. And the katsina figures were, due to the tools available, not highly detailed. The face contained the vital elements, and the body was stylized, often not even suggesting arms or legs, as in the putsqatihu, flat dolls. Hopi artist and noted glassblower, Ramson Lomatewama, revived this earliest style in early 2000.

In the early 20th century, pocketknives and sandpaper made carving easier, so arms were carved in bas-relief in the so-called “belly-ache” style with feet and even legs carved separately. By the 1920s some katsina figures were being carved with the arms separate and attached so that they protruded from the body, holding rattles or bows or yucca whips out from the body, but this style did not become common until well into the 1950s and ’60s when Action-style dolls made their appearance.

Arms and legs were carved to suggest the motion of the katsina figures. By the 1970s, X-ACTO knives became commonplace, and a few carvers began to experiment with handheld, electric carving and wood-burning tools for detailing. The Action-style carvings evolved into what is generally, if erroneously, called “one piece” dolls. A few carvers have even taken to using band saws to quickly rough out the very basic shape and size of the katsina doll before settling down to the actual carving and filing.

Paints and painting styles evolved as well. Mineral paints gave way to poster paints (even occasionally house paints) as far back as the beginning of the 20th century for customers who wanted more vibrant colors. Some carvers preferred the convenience of poster paints while others preferred the natural mineral pigments which were free for the gathering. Poster

above Ryon Polequaptewa (Hopi), Tewaquaptewa-style Katsina, cottonwood root, pigment, feathers, 11½ in. tall, private collection. Image courtesy of Bahti Indian Arts. left Sandra Suhu (Hopi), Alosaka (Two-Horn Katsina), cottonwood root, pigment, quail feathers, macaw feather, wool, 11½ in. tall. Image courtesy of Bahti Indian Arts.

paints were in turn replaced by acrylic paints. As the carving style became more detailed and “realistic,” some carvers chose to let the wood show through using wood stains. Though mineral paints over a white clay base disappeared in the 1950s because they rubbed off easily, they made a comeback (often using acrylic fixatives) in the mid-1990s along with a revival of the earlier carving style.

Through it all cottonwood root has remained the only material used for carving. Any other part of the cottonwood tree or any other wood is deemed

inappropriate to the extent that dolls carved of other wood are not regarded as true katsina dolls by the Hopi. Demand has grown such that Hopis have had to look further away for cottonwood root.

Colorado is currently the primary source.

Through the 1960s Hopi katsina doll carvers used feathers, added (and painted) hide, used fur, and in a few instances, improvised with whatever materials were at hand, as did Logan Dallas (Hopi, 1903–ca. 1990), who often used thumbtacks as concha belts for the finished doll.

The focus on more detailed carving began in the 1970s and coincided with and was propelled by the 1972 expansion of the Migratory Bird Treaty Act. Suddenly even the feathers of birds that could be legally hunted could no longer be legally used on katsina tithu that were sold. With identifying the feathers too daunting a task even for the agency tasked with enforcing it, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, many shops were suddenly ready to quit carrying katsina dolls. Hopi carvers, their very livelihood threatened,

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above Arthur Holmes Jr. (Hopi), Talavi Morning Katsina, 2023, cottonwood root, oil paint, 18½ x 9½ in. Photo: Tira Howard, SWAIA. Image courtesy of SWAIA. opposite, left Clark Tenakhongva (Hopi), Hemis-Hu, cottonwood root, paint. Image courtesy of Bahti Indian Arts. opposite, right Nick Brokes h o u l d e r ( H o p i /A b s e n t e e Shawnee) with one of his katsina carvings. Image courtesy of Bahti Indian Arts.

quickly responded by substituting carved and painted wooden feathers.

The so-called “one piece” carvings were begun by Brian Honyouti (Hopi, Greasewood clan, 1947–2016) from Bacavi village. Though Brian would never accept credit, it was he who pioneered the highly detailed “one piece” dolls. His brothers Lauren and Ronald Honyouti are also masters of this style, winning many awards for their skill and imagination.

Cottonwood root is a soft wood with a distinct grain so carved elements that cut

across the grain can be quite delicate. It is not uncommon to find one or more elements on a “one piece” doll that have been added, but this in no way detracts from the value or workmanship.

Arthur Holmes Jr. (Hopi) of Tuba City trained as an ironworker and came to katsina carving later in life. Now a carver for some 20 years, his work is highly detailed. Besides files, sandpaper, and carving knives, he also uses wood-burning tools and a Foredom flex shaft. If the latter sounds like a time-saving device, forget it. It has to be used with extreme control and caution as one false move can destroy hours of work. He paints with acrylics, and the results are award-winning carvings. He has won Best of Classification at Santa Fe Indian Market and Best of Show at the 2022 Heard Fair.

In the past decade, the genre has shifted away from the highly detailed, intricately carved style (still made, but less frequently) to Old-style, generally painted with mineral and vegetal paints in the style that their grandfathers and great-grandfathers used until well into the 1950s. This style virtually disappeared at one point, with Manfred Susunkewa (Hopi, Spider clan) keeping it alive until its recent revival.3 One of Manfred’s earliest and biggest supporters was famed artist Charles Loloma (Hopi, 1921–1991), who purchased numerous dolls from him.

Susunkewa was named an Arizona Indian Living Treasure in 2002.

Another Old-style carver, Raynard Lalo (Hopi, Spider clan) was initiated into the Katsina Society at age 9 but did not begin carving until age 13 as it is only after you have been initiated that you can carve a katsina doll. From the village of Hotvela, Lalo started carving in the Action-style known for the sense of motion the artists tried to capture in their work. He began to carve the Old-style revival dolls in the last 15 years. Lalo digs his own mineral pigments. Like many carvers, he works in other artistic media; he also makes necklaces of turquoise, sugilite, and lapis beads. Other carvers also work in silver, some weave, and many paint.

Historically katsina dolls are carved by the men, but, when necessary, women have on occasion finished them for more

3. Walter Howato (Hopi, 1921–2003) also continued Old-style work, but he did not always use mineral paints.

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than a half century. When a doll, intended as a gift was not quite finished when the man was called to the kiva, it often fell to an adult woman relative to finish it as the uninitiated young men may never carve.

Women carving a katsina from start to finish is somewhat more recent, perhaps the past 40 or so years.

Sandra Suhu (Hopi, Rabbit/Tobacco clan) from Hotvela began carving because as a single mom of twin girls, she couldn’t afford to keep buying the dolls needed for her daughters. That was over 25 years ago.

She is now a full-time artist and has been recognized as a very fine carver.

Randy Brokeshoulder (Absentee Shawnee/Hopi/Navajo, Tobacco clan) from Hotvela first started carving at 17.

Like most carvers, he began with making flat dolls. Within a few years, he was carving fully in the round, and his work has since continued to evolve, winning ribbons along the way. His late brother, Brent, also carved and his father, Nick, continues to find time to carve—all in the revived Old-style.

Since the late 1970s some carvers have gravitated toward a sculptural style

meant more to embody the particular katsina spirit as opposed to the katsina dancer. A notable artist in this field is Gerry Quotskuyva (Hopi, Bear Strap clan) from Songòopavi. Quotskuyva writes: “I chose to pursue the creation of a body of work interpreting the Katsinum as a fine art form.… As my creations continue to evolve, more of the cultural way of life and my environmental concerns are being incorporated into my sculptures.

As a result, I am feeling an even stronger desire to create with a message.”

Another unconventional carver, Ryon Polequaptewa (Hopi, Sun clan) from Songòopavi. His brother Tayron Polequaptewa (Hopi) taught him how to carve, and Ryon began to carve in the style of his great-grandfather Tewaquaptewa (Hopi, ca. 1872–1960). Tewaquaptewa is the earliest carver we know by name as his style was very distinctive: at one point in his life, he decided to no longer carve

katsina dolls but instead to carve figures in an idiosyncratic style that blended features of two or more katsinam.

Katsina doll carving is not necessarily a solitary activity. It can be a social event where several Hopi come together to work and share tips and innovations.

Music often plays in the background— perhaps music from the Hopi reggae band, Ed Kabotie and the ’Yoties or one of the many albums by Clark Tenakhongva (Hopi, Rabbit/Tobacco clan), a musician who is one of the first katsina carvers to revive the Old-style work. Great places to find a wide selection of katsina dolls and meet the artists include Santa Fe Indian Market, Pathways Indigenous Arts Festival, Free Indian Market, Wheelwright, Museum of Northern Arizona, and Heard Museum, which hosts the Heard Fair every March and Katsina Doll Marketplace every April.

Mark Bahti, a longstanding advocate for Southwestern Native arts, has written many books including Silver and Stone: Profiles of American Indian Jewelers. He owns Bahti Indian Arts in Santa Fe and Tucson and serves on the boards of Tucson Indian Center, Institute of American Indian Arts Foundation, and Amerind Foundation.

FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 43, SUMMER 2024 | 39

Join Keshi in Celebrating Zuni Artists during Market in Santa Fe. August 16–18, 2024 MEET THE ARTISTS:

August 16, 3–5: Kateri Quandelacy Sanchez and Sandra Quandelacy

August 17, 10–5: Anthony Gchachu and Hudson Sandy

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August 18, 10–5: Anthony Gchachu and The Hustito Family

Turquoise Corn Maiden, by Kateri Quandelacy Sanchez, Zuni/Acoma

40 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 43, SUMMER 2024

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

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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.

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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. 43, SUMMER 2024 | 41

WILD HORSES Ron Toahani Jackson and the Indigenous Horse Nation Protector Alliance Wild horses have long captured America’s imagination, but how can their herds be managed and what is their place today?

One Navajo man speaks up for them through his art.

By Ruthanne Johnson

F

OR PRINTMAKER, PAINTER, AND PHOTOGRAPHER Ron Toahani Jackson (Diné), hózhó is the way of life. It is the essence of Diné philosophy, a life imbued with beauty and balance. Hózhó connects him to his art. And it moves him to help animals—especially wild horses in the American Southwest.

Wild horses, also called mustangs, have been at the heart of longstanding, heated controversy. Relegated to public lands and Native reservation lands in the Western United States, they compete for forage with livestock and wildlife such as elk, deer, and bighorn sheep. Some people believe they are an introduced species and therefore invasive and problematic for the often-fragile landscapes where they still roam. The dispute over whether or not they deserve a place in the ecosystem often leads to inhumane solutions.

But whatever the dispute, Jackson believes they should be treated with respect. Horses are sacred to the Diné people, he says, and to many other tribes.

“The Plains tribes—their whole culture centered around the horse. That’s how they hunted buffalo.”

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In a short video on his website, Hózhó: Nahasdlii; In Beauty I Walk, Jackson juxtaposes landscape photos with images of his Prismacolor line drawings, monoprints, collages, and clay masks.

Drum and flute play softly in the background as slides convey hózhó through the artist’s work and photos of the surrounding Southwestern landscape. His video feels humble yet defiant. His message is ancestral yet present, connected to the earth, sky, and the Diné.

Throughout the 20th century, mustangs in the U.S. have been the target of ruthless roundup and killing campaigns.

Ranchers, hunters, and “mustangers” would wrangle wild horses unchecked in the mid-1950s for commercial purposes, such as pet food slaughterhouses—until Velma B. Johnston became aware of the practice. Later known as Wild Horse Annie, Johnston witnessed mustangs crammed in a trailer, blood oozing from inside from a yearling trampled to death.

Her grassroots campaign brought media attention and outrage from the public, ultimately inspiring passage of the 1971 Wild Free-Roaming Horse and Burro Act, nicknamed the Wild Horse Annie Act, which brought federal protections.

Despite this popular law, wild horses and burros continue to be a contentious issue. The U.S. Bureau of Land Management oversees the Wild Horse and Burro Program, managing their herds on public lands in ten Western states. But on public and reservation lands the animals are often subjected to periodic roundups.

In 2013, after being gone for more than 25 years, Ron Toahani Jackson moved back to the Navajo Nation to help his aging parents take care of the family ranch near Window Rock. “The land around my great-grandmother’s home site is called Valley of Thundering Water,” he says. “It’s really beautiful, with mountains and creeks, lakes, springs, and towering red, sandstone cliffs.”

Wild horses also live in this valley.

Jackson spotted them just after he returned home while hiking in the mountains around the ranch. He also remembers seeing them there when he was a kid.

Jackson began taking photos from a distance, sitting in nature and quietly watching. The horses became accustomed

to him and one day came close enough to sniff and rub his head. Eventually they trusted him enough to go about their business while he snapped photos. “I was accepted as part of the herd and became pretty attached to the horses after following them around our family land,” he says.

He posted the photos on his website and social media page, often garnering hundreds of likes.

While photographing the horses, he began to notice some missing from the small bands with which he had become familiar. “They were just gone,” he says. One herd he’d been following vanished entirely. He later found out from a neighbor that the horses were being rounded up.

Jackson soon discovered the Navajo Nation Department of Fish and Wildlife (NNDFW) had been offering a $50 bounty for each horse. In 2018 the Navajo Nation Department of Agriculture, which oversees the NNDFW, introduced a “voluntary horse sale and equine reward program” for unbranded horses, which

“I was accepted as part of the herd and became pretty attached to the horses after following them around our family land.”

above Ron Toahani Jackson (Diné), Horses, 2019, digital photograph. opposite Ron Toahani Jackson (Diné), detail of Untitled, monotype on paper. All images courtesy of the artist.

FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 43, SUMMER 2024 | 43

The treatment of America’s wild horses, specifically on the Navajo Nation, feel to him akin to the forced assimilation and destruction of Indigenous people’s spiritual and cultural way of life.

above Ron Toahani Jackson (Diné), Todilto Park, New Mexico, 2014, digital photograph.

made the horses available to the public through auctions.1 The policy was in response to increasing wild horse populations coupled with drought conditions that brought diminished water sources and forage for the horses. In an attempt to curb wild horse populations, the Navajo Nation also sterilizes horses and holds annual horse sales. Buyers typically adopt, resell, or export the horses to slaughterhouses in Canada or Mexico.2 In 2023 the bounties rose to $100 for unbranded mares and $350 for unbranded stallions three years or older.3 Though Jackson’s experience in animal advocacy was previously limited to rescuing stray dogs and helping to stop an illegal trapping operation on the reservation, he felt compelled to act.

Animals were a part of life growing up on the family ranch: sheep, stray dogs, and horses, among others. “My father raised horses for riding and rodeo, so I have been around them all my life,” he says. “I learned to ride before I could walk.” His father and uncle were involved in the beginnings of the All Indian Rodeo Cowboys Association and

the Indian National Finals Rodeo. “My dad taught me to respect horses—and all animals, really.”

In 2017 Jackson started the Indigenous Horse Nation Protector Alliance (IHNPA) and created a Facebook group to raise awareness about the roundups.

The following year, the alliance began laying plans to stop a wild horse hunt aimed at further thinning the reservation’s herds.

Jackson caught wind of it from a whistleblower and began posting information about it on his Facebook page, gleaning responses from all over the world. He also organized a rally in Window Rock to protest the hunt, with speakers such as friend and actor Moses Brings Plenty (Oglala Lakota) and his father, Jack Chee Jackson Sr. (Diné), who served nearly 20 years in the Arizona State Legislature. Due to public outcry, the hunt was canceled.4 Jackson maintains a strong conviction to his Diné culture. The treatment of America’s wild horses, specifically on the Navajo Nation, feels to him akin to the forced assimilation and destruction of Indigenous people’s spiritual and cultural way of life. “That’s why it’s important to stand up for our horses and habitats,” he

1. Noel Lyn Smith, “Navajo agency rolls out program to manage feral horse population,” Farmington Daily Times, August 6, 2018, web.

2. Kim Baca, “The Navajo Nation has a wild horse problem,” High Country News, October 6, 2017, web.

3. “Equine Reward Program,” Navajo Nation Department of Agriculture, January 2023, PDF, web.

4. Hannah Grover, “Navajo Nation cancels plans for wild horse hunt,” Farmington Daily Times, February 26, 2018, web.

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says. “Their struggle is our struggle. They are part of hózhó.”

Today’s research shows that the genus horses belong to, Equus, first evolved in North America. In 2009 horse remains dating from approximately 8550 to 5650 BCE were discovered in the Alaska interior.5 The late scientist Jay F. Kirkpatrick and research fellow Patricia M. Fazio of the Science and Conservation Center in Billings, Montana, published a paper in 2008 with evidence that Equus and likely the modern horse species, Equus caballus, originated in North America and migrated to Asia across the Bering Land Bridge.6 Though horses in the Americas disappeared thousands of years ago, they flourished elsewhere.

In the 16th century, Spanish colonists reintroduced horses to the deserts and grasslands of western North America.

The horses thrived in North America, filling the same ecological niche as its ancient forebearers.

Modern horses dispersed across their ancient homelands and gained a significant place in many Indigenous societies. During the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, the Pueblo people seized hundreds of Spanish horses during their victory, ensuring the horse’s future in Indigenous cultures in the West.

A different vein of thought is that horses never went fully extinct in North America but continued to live on this continent between the last Ice Age and when

above, left Ron Toahani Jackson (Diné), Untitled, monotype on paper. above, right Ron Toahani Jackson (Diné), Untitled, monotype on paper, private collection.

5. James Haile, et al., “Ancient DNA reveals late survival of mammoth and horse in interior Alaska,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 106, no. 52 (December 29, 2009): 22352, PDF, web.

6. Jay F. Kirkpatrick and Patricia M. Fazio, “Wild Horses as Native North American Wildlife,” Animal Welfare Institute, January 2010, web.

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He believes a different strategy for dealing with wild horse populations is worth exploring.

above Ron Toahani Jackson (Diné), Horse and Dog, 2019, digital photograph.

Toahani takes his dogs on wild horse photo shoots. There always seemed to be a mutual respect between dog and horse, he says.

European settlers arrived. Native scholar and evolutionary geneticist Yvette Running Horse Collin (Oglala Lakota) has been collecting fossil evidence, historical documents, and oral histories for years that may, in time, present an argument for a more substantive existence of horses in North America than previously thought.

Jackson ascribes to this belief. “Tribes like the Nez Perce, Shoshone, Utes, Comanches—they were already horsemen before the 1600s,” he says with conviction.

Native histories also speak to the horses’ longevity on this continent. “The tribes all have oral histories and creation stories that include horses,” says Jackson.

“The Navajo, for example, have elaborate stories about horses …” and are often portrayed in sand paintings.

These days Jackson continues with his art, helps stray dogs, and posts on Facebook about animal welfare and social issues on the reservation. Whenever he drives through the Navajo Nation, he keeps an eye out for mustangs. But sightings have become few, he says. Based on his observations, he doesn’t believe there is an overabundance of wild horses on the reservation or that they are destroying the range. He believes a different strategy for dealing with wild horse populations is worth exploring. “The tribe could have discussions to see how the horses can be dealt with humanely, like using them to grow tourism on the reservation,” he says. “To see these horses grazing against the red rocks on the reservation—it’s a photographer’s dream. That would bring in money.” A wild horse sanctuary on the reservation might be another humane option. “It could be a place where we take the wild horses and use them to help misguided youth and veterans with PTSD. Horse therapy can help people with autism and all kinds of other disabilities.”

Jackson celebrates wild horses through his painting and photography.

The Coconino Center for the Arts in Flagstaff featured Jackson’s work in the 2023 exhibition Equus: The Horse Rendered in Contemporary Art. He also exhibits at Santa Fe Indian Market. Using visual arts as catalysts for conversation, Jackson tries to spread awareness about the issues facing wild horses today in the hopes of reaching better solutions for their management and care that allow them to remain free. His photographs of wild horses on the reservation are a testament to their beauty and freedom.

FACEBOOK.COM/GROUPS/ INDIGENOUSHORSENATIONPROTECTORALLIANCE Ruthanne Johnson is an award-winning journalist based in Southern Colorado.

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from here to there June 11 - September 7, 2024 RECEPTION | September 6, 5-7 PM Experience the work of renowned visual artist and Oklahoma State University alumnus, Benjamin Harjo Jr. The exhibition spans over four decades and features over 80 works from private collections rarely seen together.

In partnership with the First Americans Museum, the closing reception will feature the debut of a monograph featuring over 125 illustrations, essays, remembrances, and poetry.

720 S. Husband St., Stillwater, OK 74074 | museum.okstate.edu Tuesday – Saturday, 11 AM – 4 PM | FREE admission Funding for the 2023/24 season of exhibitions and programs is provided by Malinda & Richard Fischer, Riccarda de Eccher & Bill Goldston, Caroline & John Linehan, Suzanne Sugg, and the OSU Museum of Art Advocates.

Benjamin Harjo Jr. (Absentee Shawnee/Seminole, 1945-2023) without reservations, n.d., gouache on paper. OSU Museum of Art, Anonymous Gift, 2018.007.005. Photo by Phil Shockley.

“Two American Modernists: Nampeyo and Fannie, the Mother-Daughter Connection” On Display Now Through Labor Day, September 2, 2024

STEVE ELMORE INDIAN ART 839 Paseo de Peralta, Ste. M, Santa Fe, NM (505) 995-9677 | elmoreindianart.com FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 43, SUMMER 2024 | 47

FROM THE SKIN OF THE TREE New Directions in Birchbark Etching

By Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD

I

T’S TUESDAY and I’m sitting in my car outside the Hamilton Art Gallery.

I call artist Christal Ratt (Barriere Lake Algonquin) and no answer; she and I have been playing phone tag. I try calling her again and she picks up. We chat about hockey (she dutifully drives her nephews to and from the rink for practice) and I tell her of my old life as a competitive ice dancer.

Eventually we get around to our interview. I ask her how she learned to etch birchbark, and she refers to her family and community in Western Quebec.

“It’s something that we’ve always done.

Something that everyone back home has done,” she tells me. “It’s something that’s been a part of our ways.”1 Ratt affirms that birchbark etching has been practiced for aeons among Indigenous nations in North America. What’s new, however, is its reemergence into the cultural zeitgeist.

This isn’t a happy accident either.

Meaningful efforts to revitalize birchbark

above, top Early etching on a birchbark canoe at the Canadian Canoe Museum.

Photo: Andrew Rivett (CC BY 2.0). above, bot tom Jonathon Paul (Wolastoqiyik), Detail of Rose, birchbark etching. Image courtesy of the artist. opposite Helen Pelletier (Fort Williams Ojibway), Mooz Caller, 2021, winter birchbark, spruce root. Photo: Patrick Chondon, Chondon Photography. Image courtesy of the artist.

1. Christal Ratt in discussion with the author, March 12, 2024.

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etching among community leaders and organizations, together with the serious labor and experimentation by artists, have launched something of an etching renaissance. In recent years it has gained popularity and visibility, most notably through workshops, markets, social media, and exhibitions.

Anishinaabe and Wabanaki artists such as Ratt, Jonathon Paul, Sandra Peterson, Helen Pelletier, Barry Dana, Awanigiizhik Bruce, and Jillian Waterman, to name a few, are actively reintroducing birchbark etching to diverse audiences while developing its aesthetic boundaries. For instance, Ratt’s unorthodox entry into the 2022 Heard Fair was Shemaginish, or “warrior,” an etched birchbark suit of armor based on Disney’s The Mandalorian television series. How etching got to this place so quickly and the new directions it’s headed have made it one of the most unpredictable Indigenous cultural practices today.

Birchbark has served an instrumental function among Indigenous nations for millennia. The outer skin of the birch creates an ideal fire starter, a vessel to transport food or water, a storage device, the skin of a canoe, or a shelter against the elements. But there’s another side to it. The Anishinaabeg, for example, view wiigwaas (birchbark) with reverence as a sacred entity, as medicine, as “the tree of life.”2 And birchbark scrolls are engraved by members of the Midewiwin, the Ojibwa’s Grand Medicine Society, to share ceremonial knowledge and sacred stories with the initiated.3 Similarly, the birch tree is said to date back to the days of Koluskap, the Passamaquoddy hero, who created the tree and assigned it with the task of taking care of the people.4 Having once supported the very survival of Indigenous nations, birch and the cultural and spiritual significance of its bark continue to unfold through artists’ creations.

In the Northeastern Woodlands, the winter bark preferred for etching tends to be harvested during a tight window of time around April or May. However, more recently, unseasonably warm temperatures have pushed the harvest earlier in the year, making it increasingly unstable. When the bark is cut and peeled away from the base, the inner layer contains a thin deep red or dark brown cellular tissue called cambium. Dampening this layer with water helps to sgraffito or scrape away the cambium surface, exposing the contrasting lighter bark underneath. Likewise, the roots or fiber of spruce, dogwood, or cedar are also collected during a specific time, then cleaned, dried, and threaded into the bark to reinforce the rim or affix decoration.

This ancient method, from entering the woods and gathering materials to actually etching the bark, is not taken lightly. As Jonathon Paul (Wolastoqiyik) 2. “Wiigwaasabak: The Tree of Life; How basketmaking feeds the spirit,” CBC Gem, March 19, 2024, video, 1:56, web.

3. Richard Nelson, “Inscribed Birch Bark Scrolls and Other Objects of the Midewiwin,” Archives of the Papers Algonquin Conference, vol. 14, ed. William Cowan (Ottawa: Carleton University, 1983), 219.

4. Joan A. Lester, “History on Birchbark: The Art of Tomah Joseph, Passamaquoddy: A Retrospective Study” (PhD diss., The Union Institute, April 1998), 7.

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“I had to build a relationship with the birchbark tree and learn its cycles.”

above Installation view of Helen Pelletier: Wiigwas Manidoog, Descendants at the Thunder Bay Art Gallery, a 2023 solo exhibition of birchbark artwork

by Helen Pelletier (Fort Williams Ojibway). Photo: Patrick Chondon, Chondon Photography, Thunder Bay, Ontario.

Image courtesy of the artist.

explained to me, “When I go get my material, I always give an offering of tobacco.

Always. Every time. I give thanks and a prayer. And I take my bark.”

For Sandra Peterson (Lac du Flambeau Ojibwe), harvesting bark prompts ancestral memories: “You are reminded of those [who] went before you to gather this material. It makes you think about and appreciate how these people had to live and survive.”5 Other artists like Helen Pelletier (Fort Williams Ojibway) from Thunder Bay, Ontario, spent decades learning from others and educating herself on the physical characteristics and spiritual dimensions involved in gathering bark before she collected her own.

“I had to build a relationship with the birchbark tree and learn its cycles,” she recalls.6 Contrary to the cardinal fallacy

of harvesting bark, removing it from the tree does not ensure that the tree will die. Instead, the birch’s vulnerability is largely dependent upon its dormant state and the amount of bark removed at one time. More than it can handle, and the tree might dry out or attract infestations from insects or dangerous pathogens, but carefully harvesting can allow the tree to heal and continue to grow.

20TH CENTURY SELLING BASKETS to European settlers and tourists helped to sustain the Wabanaki people economically during the 19th century, so much so that by the year 1900 there was at least one basket maker in every Passamaquoddy or Penobscot family.7 Perhaps the most

5. Sandra Peterson quoted in “Northwoods ‘Boomers and Beyond: Birch bark baskets embody an ancient tradition,” Northwoods Star Journal, February 1, 2012, web.

6. Helen Pelletier, “Helen Pelletier: Wiigwas Manidoog, Descendants,” Thunder Bay Art Gallery, July 13, 2023, YouTube video, 33:10, web.

7. Suzanne Greenlaw, “Mobilizing Indigenous Research Methodologies and Wabanaki Knowledge in Biophysical Research to Restore Wabanaki Sweetgrass Harvesting in Acadia National Park and Identify Basket Quality Black Ash Habitat for Emerald Ash Borer (Agrilus planipennis) Preparedness,” (PhD diss., University of Maine, 2023), 4.

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celebrated early practitioner from this era is Tomah Joseph (Passamaquoddy, 1837– 1914). Governor of the Passamaquoddy Tribe, artist, and guide, he is renowned for etching idiosyncratic imagery and tribal stories onto a variety of objects including canoe backrests, wastebaskets, picture frames, letter holders, and collar boxes. Today Joseph’s work resides in museum and gallery collections, yet around the turn of the 20th century, he sold these and other objects as souvenirs and mementos to wealthy clients after guiding them on fishing or hunting excursions through Maine. Although he is recognized for his tribal leadership and friendship with U.S. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Joseph should also be remembered for transitioning birchbark etching from its rudimentary depictions of flora and fauna to narrative-driven storytelling. The consequences of Joseph’s innovations cannot be overstated, which is precisely why there is a renewed interest in his life and work more than 100 years after his passing.

As the 20th century proceeded, birchbark etching slowly and gradually declined, the combined result of boarding and residential schools, prohibition of cultural customs, economic suffering, two world wars, and more. Barry Dana (Penobscot), former chief of the Penobscot Nation, told me, “The bark tradition really went in the cellar for a long time.

Generations. Nobody was really doing it. Maybe you’d see in a museum an old moose call, an old basket, and they were old.” This is not to say that etching was entirely lost among artists or within communities, but rather, like so much pottery, beading, quillwork, and tufting of its time, its presence was nearly invisible. But, according to Awanigiizhik Bruce (Turtle Mountain Chippewa), a paradigmatic shift in thinking and motivation led to the reemergence of birchbark etching, which can also be correlated to the revitalization of cultural and ceremonial practices in reservation communities. As the 21st century approached, an increase in grassroots initiatives supplied funding for etching workshops, classes, and oneon-one teachings often aimed at younger generations and facilitated by brilliant artists like canoe maker David Moses

Bridges (Passamaquoddy, 1962–2017).

Dana suggests that working with birch now, after such long periods of absence, holds weight because “you are physically reconnecting with what your ancestors actually did, forcing your brain to think as they thought.”

NEW ERA OF BIRCHBARK NEARLY A CENTURY after the inventive, narrative etchings of Joseph came the work of artist and writer ssípsis, otherwise known as Eugenia Theresa Thomas (Penobscot, 1941–2015). ssípsis was one of the first among a new generation of birchbark artists to explicitly represent political themes in their work. After 20 years of watercolor painting, she swapped paper for bark while developing school curriculum on the Penobscot Indian Island Reservation community near Bangor, Maine.

Her unforgettable work, The Turtle Shield (ca. 2004), is one of the largest etched birchbark sculptural installations

above, top Awanigiizhik Bruce (Turtle Mountain Chippewa), Ronnie’s Cap with Thunderbirds, Gichi-apitendaagwad!, 2021, etched birchbark on mortarboard, ca. 22⅛ × 23 in.

Both images courtesy of the artist. above, bottom Awanigiizhik Bruce (Turtle Mountain Chippewa), Gimooshoomisinaan gaa-nitaa-mashkikike-makwad, 2018, winter birchbark.

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above Jillian Waterman (Saginaw Chippewa/Potawatomi/Odawa) embellishing her functional birchbark canoe. Both images courtesy of the artist. below Jillian Waterman (Saginaw Chippewa/Potawatomi/ Odawa), Death Moth Medallion, ca. 2020, etched winter birchbark, cut crystal beads, 24-karat gold beads, brass cones, gold findings.

ever created. Unfortunately knowledge of its existence remains obscure. Composed of 13 individual bark shields trimmed with sweetgrass to resemble the carapace of a turtle, it measures a formidable eight-by-four feet in size. Photographs of it reveal the crying eyes of a Wabanaki man, a canoe, women dancing, idyllic landscapes, a wigwam, animals posed in water, and caduceus snakes (the Greek symbol for medicine). “The snakes are associated with Western medicine,” she said, “but to us, the black-and-white snake roots are healing roots.… They become the river and wind through the shield, like streams of energy.”8 Still, there’s an alternative understanding behind the caduceus snakes, one that holds an ugly, sinister backstory. Lurking within The Turtle Shield is a damning critique of University of Vermont zoologist and eugenics enthusiast Dr. Henry Perkins, accused of sterilizing an untold number of Native people and other marginalized groups throughout the 1920s and ’30s. Incited by the prospect of state-sponsored sterilization and without communication or the rites to sustain them, local Native cultures acutely deteriorated.9 ssípsis passed away in 2015 and, after some investigation, the current whereabouts of The Turtle Shield are unknown. Nevertheless, she left this world one of the most urgent and impressive birchbark etchings in art history, one fitting of a cultural practice once in peril and now renewed.

Similar to ssípsis, Barry Dana, a former Penobscot chief, painted, drew, and created functional birchbark baskets and bowls for several years. By applying his painting and drawing background to etchings, he evolved his approach to geometrical, floral, and other Penobscot designs, including the iconic double curve motif.10 As he 8. Nance Ackerman, “Birchbark: ssípsis,” National Museum of the American Indian, Spring 2003, 20, PDF. 9. Ackerman, “Birchbark,” 20.

10. Frank G. Speck, The Double-Curve Motive in Northeastern Algonkian Art (Washington, DC: U.S. Government Printing Office, 1914), 4–5.

Ethnographer Frank G. Speck wrote: “The primary significance of the double-curve and scroll figures among the Penobscot was a sort of political symbolism. The double curves represented the bonds uniting the different members of the chief ’s family, the subdivisions of the tribe, or the officers of the council.”

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sculpted increasingly larger baskets, he introduced more elaborate subject matter, designs, and narrative devices.

What is particularly remarkable about Dana’s basketry is how closely his sgraffito technique mimics the cross-hatching of a pencil or the layered strokes of a brush. His foundational background in drawing and painting is now enacted on birch cambium, forging unprecedented levels of verisimilitude for which he is now celebrated. In one of these baskets, Connections, Dana incorporates Penobscot motifs alongside extraordinary representational etchings of tribal elders, animals, and historical territory. “What I realized at the time was that I’m bringing back the ancestors through this bark,” he explained to me. “We’re looking at our ancestors through these etchings.” The images of the ancestors may appear on the exterior of the basket, but he also suggests that the very act of etching can stimulate remembrance and feelings of connection to the past, as if time and space melt away into the ether.

“Birchbark work is my heart’s work,” says Jillian Waterman (Saginaw Chippewa/Potawatomi/Odawa), a fashion designer, jeweler, and sculptor from Michigan. She sculpts birchbark into masks and functional canoes and shares her knowledge with Anishinaabe communities in Canada and the United States. Among her many creations, she shares intricately etched birchbark tobacco containers, earrings, bolo ties, and medallions. Waterman has shown at Free Indian Market and will have a booth in downtown Santa Fe this August.

Artists like ssípsis and Dana prepared new paths for contemporary etching: they augmented the narrative potential of the medium; expanded the scope of conventional subject matter within protocols of Wabanaki and Anishinaabe aesthetics; and propelled bark beyond its union with functional objects.

In doing so, the material of birchbark has spilled over into other media such as clothing design, jewelry, and even headwear, further bending its scope and scale until it has now infiltrated the performative world of cosplay.

Ratt’s Shemaginish stands as a striking examples. Life-size and wearable, the costume includes a birchbark helmet, armor plate, moose call, and cuffs adorned with meticulous quillwork, tufting, sweetgrass, and hide accents.

Her personal interest in the franchise was sparked by how The Mandalorian saga echoes the everyday realities of her ancestors and the desire to honor their accomplishments: “When I watch The Mandalorian or Star Wars, I always think, How would our people dress? How would our people be in this setting? Who are our superheroes? For me, it’s those people who are at the front lines, protecting the water, protecting the land, protecting our rights.”

The characters and scenarios pictured in these and other live-action franchises, including Andor and The Book of Boba Fett, resonate with Indigenous audiences partly because of their troubled relationship with the mechanisms

above Christal Ratt (Barriere Lake Algonquin), Shemaginish (2021), birchbark armor: breastplate, helmet, armbands, cuffs, moose call, and garters with moose hide, fur, sweet grass, seed beads, brass, sequins, shell, ribbons. Image courtesy of the artist. below Christal Ratt at the Heard Fair, 2019. Photo: FAAM.

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The army of good ultimately prevails but at high cost.…

above Helen Pelletier (Fort Williams Ojibway), Nimaama, 2023, birchbark basket, black spruce root stitching, cedar rim, moose hide home-tanned

by Denise Baxter (Marten Falls Ojibway). Photo: Patrick Chondon, Chondon Photography, Thunder Bay, ON. Image courtesy of the artist.

of empire. There are certainly comparisons with how the Indigenous peoples featured in Star Wars, say the Jawa or Sand People, draw energy from the land and its resources, resist the intrusions of ill-willed outsiders, and wield sacred powers like the Force against maniacal tyrants. 11 In the final episode of The Mandalorian, imperial stormtroopers and a ragtag band of Mandalorians on their home planet fight a decisive battle.

The army of good ultimately prevails but at high cost, and the Mandalorians are finally able to resettle their broken home.

It’s a harrowing story, yet one that repeats itself time and time again in the trials of North American history.

LOOKING FORWARD SO WHAT DOES THE FUTURE HOLD? While innovations in etching persist, daunting problems hinder the art form’s well-being. Almost without fail, artists raise the question of temperature fluctuation, pollution, and human activity as existential threats to the birch trees and future of etching. In her territory in Quebec, Ratt observes that deforestation by logging has led to a marked decrease in the quality of trees. “We don’t have the bigger trees anymore but it’s also because of the forestry industry,” she says. “In our territory, they go after the

11. See: Matthew Ryan Smith, “A Long Time Ago in the Final Frontier: Picturing Indigenous Futurism through Star Trek and Star Wars” in Future Imaginaries: Indigenous Art, Fashion, Technology, ed. Amy Scott (Los Angeles: Autry Museum of the American West, forthcoming).

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old ones, the big, thicker ones, so we don’t get that much anymore.” Precipitation in southern Canada has increased from the mid-1970s onward, escalating flooding events and related damages.12 Paul agrees: “When we get a lot of bad rain, it floods out areas and it drowns trees. Ash trees love water, but birch trees don’t love water so much.” In Dana’s home state of Maine, he finds that water and soil pollution, accompanied by spikes in seasonal temperatures, affect tree health and the limited time frame when bark can be harvested. He says, “I can’t get bark anymore if the acid rain from Midwestern coal-burning plants keeps the trees in a weak state. I can’t get bark anymore if it gets too hot too quick. Climate change is changing our climate to the point where people who do traditional stuff are being affected first.” All this, coupled with the devastating impact of invasive species such as the emerald ash borer, tree poaching, industrial farming, urban development, pesticides, and more, have made artists more than skeptical about the continuance of their customs, ceremonies, and livelihood. The future appears precarious.

CONCLUSION THE POPULARITY OF BIRCHBARK ETCHING is on the rise. In previous decades, community-based art programs reintroduced this almost-dormant art expression to new generations of Indigenous artists. But others working outside this system took up the practice when they were asked about it by family members or friends and agreed to pass down its teachings. Now etching is rapidly expanding beyond functional objects with

historical motifs to artworks with increasingly complex designs, ornamentation, and naturalistic figures—sculpture, installation, fashion, and much more. And these are, in fact, the early days. What is destined to come will honor the legacy set forth by artists such as Joseph and ssípsis:

artists who experiment with forms and techniques that push etching toward new and dynamic frontiers. However, the state of the birch tree will forever dictate the trajectory of the medium. If the tree is in decline, so too is the practice. Everything rests on its continuance.

Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD, is a curator, writer, and editor. He is the curator and head of collections at Glenhyrst Art Gallery and literary editor of First American Art Magazine. above Christal Ratt (Barriere Lake Algonquin), Cuffs from Shemaginish (2021), winter birchbark embellished with moose hide, fur, caribou tufting, sweetgrass, seed beads, brass, sequins, shell, ribbons. Image courtesy of the artist.

12. “Precipitation change in Canada,” Government of Canada, May 2016, PDF.

left Detail of winter birchbark etching with lynx skull and botanical designs by Jillian Waterman (Saginaw Chippewa/Potawatomi/ Odawa). Image courtesy of the artist.

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PROFILE

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SHONTO BEGAY

Diné Painter

SHONTO BEGAY

By Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD their collections, as do the Phoenix Art Museum and the Museum of Northern Arizona. Begay has earned many awards and honors, including the Reading Rainbow Award (1988) and the Viola Legacy Award (2020), and several awards for The Water Lady (2021–22).

above Shonto Begay. Photo: Dawn Kish Photography. All images courtesy of the artist. opposite Rooted in Prayers, 2023, acrylic on canvas. Photo: Tom Alexander Photography.

O

NE OF 16 SIBLINGS, Shonto Begay is of the Tódich'ii'nii, Bitter Water clan, and born for Àshįįhí, Salt clan. The acclaimed artist was born in a hogan on the Navajo Nation in 1954. His mother was a weaver, and his father was a medicine man. As a child, Begay herded sheep in the Kletha Valley in Shonto, Arizona, and was forced to attend boarding school.

After graduating high school in Kayenta, Arizona, Begay earned an associate of fine arts degree from the Institute of American Indian Arts and, in 1976, a bachelor of fine arts degree from the California College of Arts and Crafts. During the 1980s he was a national park ranger at the Grand Teton National Park in Wyoming and Navajo National Monument in Arizona.

In 1983 he began to paint professionally as well as illustrate and write books.

His work was quickly recognized for the way he portrayed daily life and the beauty of his tribal homelands. Begay illustrated The Mud Pony: A Traditional Skidi Pawnee

Tale (1988), The Magic of Spider Woman (2000), and The Water Lady: How Darlene Arviso Helps a Thirsty Navajo Nation (2021). He wrote and illustrated Ma'ii and Cousin Horned Toad: A Traditional Navajo Story (1992), Navajo: Visions and Voices Across the Mesa (1995), and Strawberry Pop and Soda Crackers (1996).

In 2016 Begay made his acting debut as the character Cowboy in Monster Slayer, an Indigenous-produced short film about a historical Diné story. He also appeared in Alex & Jaime (2017) and the documentary Stewart Udall: The Politics of Beauty (2022).

Begay’s paintings, with their characteristic, painterly brushstrokes, have been exhibited throughout the Southwest, nationally, and in Europe. He’s shown in major exhibitions at the Arizona State Museum, Utah Museum of Fine Arts, San Francisco’s American Indian Contemporary Arts, Tucson Art Museum, and the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian. Several of these hold his work in

MRS: It’s an honor to speak with you about your life and work, Shonto.

How has your relationship to painting changed since you started in 1983?

SB: I think I have a more conscious relationship with it now. More background information. When I first started out, it was spontaneous and experimental. It was an extension of how I grew up, just re-creating what I know and see and feel.

And of course, after that, it just became more professional, doing shows. I’ve broadened my view of how people see my work from all walks of life. It was a big change. One thing that never changed is my love of doing art.

MRS: Why is painting everyday scenes from the rez so important?

SB: Well, we are kind of a threatened, endangered culture in this fast-moving, ever-changing world, technologically advancing by leaps and bounds. People are involved in saving aspects of culture: ceremonial, literature, whatever. My contribution is saving my own vision, the vision of every boy, every Navajo kid growing up on the reservation on the Navajo Nation in the 1960s and experiencing the beauty of the land as well as the brutality and harshness of the new world, government-imposed boarding school. It’s a longing for that time of transitional changes, longing for that time of innocence for when you still held onto everything that you were taught or grew up with before television, before cell phones, before anything. I grew up camping so that’s what my whole worldview is.

For years, my world was just my horizon,

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PROFILE

“Art gave me a new reality that I create myself where I can be the director of my psyche, where I can be the hero, where I can be the villain.”

above With Ancestors, 2021, acrylic on canvas. Photo: Tom Alexander Photography. opposite Mountain Chant, 2023, acrylic on canvas. Photo: Tom Alexander Photography.

which was the only thing I’d see for miles.

It’s important for me to keep doing this, keep sharing the vision that we are still here, that we’ve always been here, and this is what we think and what we believe and what we see.

MRS: Not many other painters’ lines dance and fall and ebb like yours. They may be everyday scenes, but your painting style and colors electrify them with activity. This is what makes a painting of Navajo people watching TV on a couch or selling jewelry by the roadside almost magnetic. You breathe life into takenfor-granted moments.

SB: Yes. Images and feelings that are supporting and cast the wholeness. I would say it’s giving grace to everyday moments.

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MRS: Your lines remind me of thread.

Your mother was a weaver. Do you see a connection between the lines in your paintings and your mother’s weaving?

SB: Yes, it will always be there, growing up with the sound of the weaving tools.

But it comes from the healing ceremonies, from the sand paintings, from the energy of calling spirits of the healing Gods. I grew up among the Navajo. My father was a great medicine man so always another ceremony, a very esoteric Navajo healing event, protection ceremony, comingof-age ceremony. So all these lines are a visual chant—the prayers, the words, the syllables to each one of these prayers. I try to keep my consciousness in every dab, every stroke, every circle, and every curve, twirls, and swirls. I try to place a syllable on each one of these. From the Navajo

SHONTO BEGAY

prayer circle. That’s what I’ve been doing: re-creating the healing path ceremonies.

MRS: How does the color and light in your paintings reflect those found in Navajo territory?

SB: Very much so. Very much so. They’re very unique colors of Northern Arizona and Southern Utah. That whole area— growing up before the contrails in the sky, before light pollution. That’s what I hang onto. To keep the light burning. To keep the brightness and keep the luminosity in my life. Of course, my name Shonto translates to the Navajo word meaning “light on the water,” “light reflecting the ripples.” There is some association there as well.

MRS: How has working as a national park ranger in the 1980s help you understand the land? Do you carry that experience into your painting?

SB: Yes, very much so. My landscape painting, my vision, was already there, which made me an effective ranger.

Having that title, interpreting the land, studying the land, and giving language and narrative to spaces is very important.

It’s significant in an artist’s life. It’s not only to fill space with color but to give it voice,

to give it narrative, to give it a dialogue, something that can establish that sense of intimacy. I tried to do just that, giving stories to images. I’m not painting in a vacuum. It’s the story of the land, how I remember it, the mythologies, the dreams.

MRS: Your subject matter isn’t limited to everyday life on the rez. There’s far more. Some are old trees set against beautiful vistas, others depict lightning storms in the distance. There is a spiritual element to them. Do you see painting as a spiritual practice? What does it teach you?

SB: I believe so. In fact, that is why I do what I do. It’s not only a form of meditation, being in a state of mediation, of worship, and dream. It’s very much ceremonial. It’s healing. It’s externalizing your vision to the world, images that mean something, that come from a space, that come from a place of deep understanding of the land, people, and language. Of course, harmony. In Navajo culture we say hózhó, which is everything that is associated with harmony and blessing.

It is very much a ceremony. I don’t know how everybody else feels about their work, but I feel like my work has always been in practice since the very beginning

in the hogan to the chants of the medicine man prayers. And me, hunched over with some elders creating sand paintings, an ancient mandala healing ceremony where I can’t take any liberty. That’s how I began, the very first line, the very first drawing that I did in great consciousness was hunched over to the sound of prayers and chants. That’s how it began.

I try to keep that energy and keep that consciousness in it all.

MRS: You’ve often spoken about how art saved your life. The late Anishinaabe painter Sam English felt the same way: that art was a way of surviving. Art, as an externalization of pain, helps to make sense of that pain while casting it away from the body and mind. How is art still helping you after 40 years?

SB: Art is still very much sustaining. I feel that it does save my life. Art gave me a new reality that I create myself where I can be the director of my psyche, where I can be the hero, where I can be the villain. It placed me in my own constructed world.

Safe. And it still does. I still feel that it is still a safe place for me and a blessing place and a place of sustaining.

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above Tumbleweed Crossing, 2020, acrylic on canvas. Photo: Tom Alexander Photography. opposite Peace of Heaven & Earth, 2022, acrylic on canvas. Photo: Tom Alexander Photography.

MRS: What do people get wrong about your work? What is consistently misrepresented or misunderstood?

SB: Well, people think that I’m a Vincent van Gogh clone or something like that, but I love art history. We just kind of tap into the same stream of energy. In the very beginning, when I was doing paintings depicting ceremonies—we have rules for our people, certain things you can do, certain things you can replicate, certain things you can’t or at least not without thinking. In the beginning, I took from my people taboos about painting things that are unknown to me, things that I haven’t seen but have always been there, Navajo sorcery. I depicted that in my own imagination the way it would be for me.

It’s okay for creators to give tangibility to their fears and mysteries.

There was a collective sigh, there was a collective healing, a journey toward

healing, and also a lot of people who came forth and said, “You should not be doing this, this is calling in the bad energy.”

There was mostly that context, never about the technique or anything else. That was the kind of comment I got when I first began, but people are much more open-minded and know what’s going on.

MRS: What is most difficult about painting for you?

SB: I don’t have any difficulty here. For inspiration, as far as coming to the studio and having a blank space, never.

I was blessed to have never been beset with that—having a block. Other artists do come to me and ask me if I’ve ever had that, and I said no. There’s enough to work with. Dreams give us enough to work with. Stories give us enough to work

with. There’s always a healing, always a prayer that we speak. No, I don’t think I’ve ever really had difficulties approaching my artwork. In fact it’s where I have the most joy, the most peace, the most unobstructed way to be involved in society.

MRS: From what I’ve heard, you’re rarely away from your studio. What are you painting right now?

SB: I just finished a big commission of a tree, and now I’m doing a piece for an upcoming show here in Flagstaff. I’m doing work on the rain, on calling the rain, the monsoon, the storm clouds, cumulus. It’s a group show, a juried show nationwide. So I’m doing my piece for that. A beautiful desert scene with a little bit of water, with a child, with a sky.

SHONTOBEGAY.NET

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

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SHONTO BEGAY

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Owens Valley Paiute Painter

KARMA HENRY

By Jill Ahlberg Yohe, PhD

F

ORT INDEPENDENCE PAIUTE artist Karma Henry describes herself as a landscape painter of multiscapes that create several visual conversations at once. To the mind’s eye they coalesce, yet each layer, visual and metaphorical, can stand on its own. Take for instance her work Tongo-kaagwa Maboa-Ti (On the Edge of the Cloud Cover). The viewer sees a landscape. They may see a design of a woven basket on top of the landscape. They certainly see a round, abstract sphere orbiting the landscape in full view. And they see the entire composition as one.

To place yourself within the physical landscape, imagine yourself in Northern New Mexico on a summer day that begins without a cloud in the vast, blue sky. Mid-afternoon, billowy clouds appear almost instantaneously. These clouds then shift, and by later in the day they all come together and unite with darker-hued mountains in the distance. While the atmosphere changes, the landscape of cedar and juniper trees, velvety red dirt, and jagged red rocks remain unphased to climatic conditions, always steady.

If you arrive at the painting with some familiarity with Native North American basketry, you recognize the large orbiting sphere at the center of the landscape as a design found on woven Owens Valley Paiute baskets. Geometric and exact, the patterns offer a sense of order that is more soothing than static, an invitation into visual planes that says, “Enter into this landscape from my point of view.” The invitation comes from the baskets themselves and of the basket makers who created the designs—a generous offering of knowledge, aesthetics, ecological relationships, and cosmologies.

In this work and many others, Karma Henry’s evocative layerings of figurations and abstractions evoke movement in landscape paintings. Motion and activity seem to appear infrequently in the landscape painting genre. For Henry, movement is key to rendering the landscape itself, and abstraction found in Native women’s art, particularly basketry, fuels the canvas with kinetic energy.

Take for instance the work entitled Tongo-neika Wünu’aa-ti Yashibu (The Clouds Are Moving Over Quickly), a layered landscape full of dynamic energy and movement.

I started painting this image from a photograph I took in a car as a passenger, watching the weather come in on a windy day. The clouds were really coming in. I do an inordinate amount of picture taking. I’ll take a picture of sunrise, sunset, a windy day.… I come back and paint. This particular 62 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 43, SUMMER 2024

painting is a square format and not a traditional horizontal landscape, and I thought about the symmetry for the overlay.

I started thinking back to when I took the photograph and the conversation we were having in the car: “I wonder if it’s going to rain?” and “The clouds are moving fast.” As I was watching the fast clouds move, I noticed they spin a little bit.

Sometimes they go from being tiny and far away, and when they’re getting closer, you’re like, “Holy smokes, those are really going to do their thing.”

I never really know until I paint the landscape what I’m going to use on top. I might have an idea in my head, but it’s usually not until I complete the landscape and I see the movement in it. For this painting, I just remember thinking the clouds are moving quick. They are in constant movement. And then I thought about an overlay of a simple basket form and how it’s always moving. And I think when I choose the overlay and the title, there’s movement. You’re seeing

KARMA HENRY

movement in the landscape, movement in the overlay, and movement implied by the title.

While the layering of geometric basketry designs depicts the active New Mexico skies in Tongo-kaagwa Maboa-Ti (On the Edge of the Cloud Cover) and Tongo-neika Wünu’aa-ti Yashibu (The Clouds Are Moving Over Quickly), placing abstractions onto the landscape can also be vessels for articulating the atmosphere’s stillness. In Nawaetugu Kima-ti (Coming

Together), Henry’s horizontal canvas attends to the atmospheric relationships at dawn or dusk between the mountains and the skies, times of the day that emit a peaceful calm in the Southwest. Pastelhued and horizontally layered cloud formations coalesce with mountains in the distance, and Henry visually connects the landscape with soft, vertical zigzag designs, an homage to the brilliance of basket makers who pair elongated, vertically oriented designs to balance their more horizontally oriented ones.

above Tongo-neika Wünu’aa-ti Yashibu (The Clouds Are Moving Over Quickly), 2023, acrylic on canvas, 12 × 12 in. opposite Karma Henry. All images courtesy of the artist.

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Henry’s paintings generate concurrent visual and metaphorical stories and conversations, conversations that flow effortlessly back and forth. Her own artistic and personal journeys seem to happen through dialogue within artistic and familial communities, her language learning, and her relationship to landscape and the Native American and mainstream landscape genres.

PRACTICE SOMETIMES, the car is my studio.

The window is open. Music is loud enough to hear over the wind. A little dust. A little laughter. Sun in your eyes. And then, out of the corner of your eye, you’ll see something worth a second look. Or it’s the horizon laid out before you. I would venture to say some of my favorite skyscapes and landscapes are from these moments.

All those images I use. They're from my day-to-day life, from something I

have seen myself. Whether in my own backyard, someone else’s, or driving down the road, I see potential everywhere. Sometimes shape and color help me choose my landscapes. Sometimes it’s just an emotional response to that image. Sometimes the skyscape element wins over. Creation. It’s not always simple. All those off-hours thinking about images and geometry and brushstrokes. Even when I am not in the studio, I still am.

Reflecting on her journey, Henry says, “I came to art later in life. I’ve always been an artist and did art on my own.

In my younger years, in my high school years, I wanted to go to school to be an artist. But I followed down the path of the medical field career for a while. I took the safe road. Art is not how anyone in my family had a profession or made a living.”

But her passion persisted. “In my thirties, with the help of my family, I decided to go back to my first love, art.

I took a leap of faith and went back to school and enjoyed every minute of it.

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And then in my senior year of my undergrad, several of my professors asked, ‘Where are you applying to grad school?’”

Henry went on to earn her MFA at the Otis College of Art and Design, where she was the only Native student in her program. “Halfway through my first year, I found out I was pregnant. That was an experience, and I managed to have my daughter in the summer and really hit the ground running my final year. Being a mother changed the way I looked at stuff too … I just kept trying different things and experimenting a little with my practice.”

After graduation, Henry created art from her studio in Frazier Park, a small mountain community in Los Padres National Forest in Southern California.

In 2022 she moved to Santa Fe. There, she says, “My day-to-day studio time is punctuated by chatting with my loyal studio dog, Rez. He reminds me to work hard, but not take myself too seriously.

He does this by sleeping on my feet. It is a good system on those cold New Mexico mornings … Every day I get up and can’t wait to get into the studio. This is what I am supposed to be doing. Not everyone gets to say that.”

As a studio artist, Henry spends many hours painting by herself, where she draws from her interior scapes in her mind’s eye. While Tongo-neika Wünu’aa-ti Yashibu (The Clouds Are Moving Over Quickly) drew inspiration from a conversation on a car ride, other works by Henry evoke the often-solitary world of the artist, where inner conversations take center stage. Tabewano Nüü Sua’ (By Myself Today) immerses the viewer within enveloped mountains on all sides, as if they serve to wrap you inside a warm blanket. Comforting, billowy clouds give way to thick and wispy clouds above them. The cream-colored line on top of the landscape becomes another horizon line. On each side of the center line, muted circular formations gently anchor the landscape in place. Henry places the gentle and calm overlay—what she calls a visual idea beyond its design—into a physical space as company.

KARMA HENRY

THE VISUALITIES IN PAIUTE LANGUAGES PAIUTE IS A BROAD TERM that includes the Northern, Southern, and Owens Valley Paiute peoples. Henry’s tribe speaks the Owen Valley Paiute language, also known as Eastern Mono, a critically endangered language that belongs to the Numic branch of the Uto-Aztecan language family. She recalls, “My father’s mom and grandma were born in the Owens Valley. They spent their formative years on and off the reservation. My grandma told me stories of her grandma making baskets while she sat in her lap learning Paiute words. Somehow those words didn’t get passed down.”

Henry was able to reclaim some of her language. “During the pandemic, I finally had the opportunity to take a language class three times a week online,” she says. “I have gotten to know people who I now consider friends, learning and listening to the language and speaking it.

We still meet once a week.”

Now Henry uses her language in her painting titles. “In my art, if there is even a tiny bit of language and a tiny little bit of a design element, and they go, ‘Oh, that’s Paiute,’ then that’s a good thing.

Because if we don’t own that language a little bit, and we don’t get it out into the world, it can’t keep going. Yes, there are some things not to be shared, obviously, but little things like that you want out in the world, you want it to continue on.”

As Henry listens to recordings, absorbs Paiute words, incorporates the Owens Valley Paiute language into observations of the landscape and in her studio work, and pairs creative visual work with Paiute titles, she adds yet another layer into her art that had until recently been unavailable to her. Owens Valley Paiute cosmology and ways of seeing the world through language learning and sharing are marvelous sources of inspiration for a Native landscape painter, as Indigenous languages often carry sophisticated, complex understandings of land and sky based on keen observation. Henry’s incorporation of Owens Valley Paiute

above, top Nawaetugu Kima-ti (Coming Together), 2024, acrylic on canvas, 12 × 36 in. above, bottom Tabewano Nüü Sua’ (By myself today), 2023, acrylic on canvas, 12 × 16 in. opp o si t e To n g o - k a a g wa Maboa-ti (On the Edge of the Cloud Cover), 2023, acrylic on canvas, 20 × 20 in.

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large group of people. And we are known for our basketwork more than other things. Yes, we have beaders and painters, but primarily basketry is something we’re known for in the Great Basin.”

When she envisions basketry patterns like those created by her grandmother, Henry says, “I imagine this person had to go down this creek and cut that willow and strip it. You have to have that inner narrative while you’re looking at everything. And if you don’t know how something’s made, then you’re not fully engaged in what that person had to do to create that.”

THE AMERICAN LANDSCAPE

Her paintings center Owens Valley Paiute visual languages …, particularly the designs, forms, and patterns found in basketry and Paiute women’s art.

above Pasabonogi Suda’a Aka Tongobi (Puffy Pink Clouds), 2024, acrylic on canvas, 12 × 16 in. opposite Pabitünawa (Wind Blowing Rain Clouds), 2024, acrylic on canvas, 12 × 16 in.

linguistic descriptions of movement in the atmosphere, such as Pabitünawa (Wind blowing Rain Clouds), Tongo-neika Wünu’aa-ti Yashibu (The Clouds Are Moving Over Quickly), and Pasabonogi Suda’a Akatongobi (Puffy Pink Clouds) connect Henry’s art making as a vessel to carry forward the language and the knowledge within it.

Her paintings center Owens Valley Paiute visual languages as well, particularly the designs, forms, and patterns found in basketry and Paiute women’s art.

Drawing upon these geometric abstractions, Henry twists checkerboard patterns into whirls of wind; anchors the sky with the earth by placing arrowhead designs on a vertical axis; and places lively triangle forms that dance, bend, sway, dissolve, and recombine.

Many overlays in Henry’s paintings evoke Owens Valley Paiute and other basketry: “the form of the basket, how it’s made, the shape, its use, designs elements, materials. I could talk about baskets forever,” she laughs. She says much of the public isn’t familiar with Paiutes, “because we were the last standing, so to speak.”

Some Great Basin tribes didn’t have first contact with Euro-Americans until the late 19th century. “I take a little bit of pride in knowing that I’m representing a

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“OBVIOUSLY I’M NOT THE FIRST woman painter that’s used a little bit of geometry with a landscape,” says Henry.

“Look at Kay WalkingStick. And even Emmi Whitehorse. Hers are even more flowing and organic, right?” Henry acknowledges artists have their own unique approaches to subjects, “but in the end, somebody’s always done a version of it before.”

As a Native American woman painter, Henry observes, “There’s less of a pool to be a part of because, let’s face it, there are more male than female painters out there—or at least they get the recognition. Knowing and appreciating all the women painters before me and trying to pull something out of my own style and representation means a lot. And I forget sometimes that I have been doing this a while. I am a woman Native painter and taking ownership of that.”

Henry is keenly aware that her work is often linked to other artists and is proud to follow in the footsteps of vanguard Native women artists like WalkingStick and Whitehorse. Henry’s lineage follows these female landscape painters who bring fresh energy and new perspectives to the genre. For centuries, American landscape paintings have been awash with like-minded artists. Most well-known male artists of the 19th and 20th centuries have been placed within

KARMA HENRY

particular schools of landscape painting—think Hudson River School or the Taos Society of Artists—to secure their place in art history. Yet contemporary Native women landscape painters, especially younger artists, find themselves in constant comparison in the Western art world. Why is this so?

As more and more American public art museums begin to grapple with their colonialist histories—perhaps no more evident than in American landscape painting galleries—curators and scholars recognize the necessity to problematize the insidious and pervasive myths that reside within these works of art and what kinds of stories of America they want to tell. I was curious what a female Paiute landscape painter thought about this.

“So in art school, you have all these survey classes of different periods, and in studio classes you have all these reference

materials,” Henry acknowledged. “What did I think of [Albert] Bierstadt and others’ romanticized landscapes? Well, the light shines down, the sun rays beam down, and the storm is off in the distance, or it’s sunrise and things are golden.

And you say, ‘Ooh.’ They wanted you to just think that idyllic is the way it all is, right? No, people, it’s all up for grabs.

That romanticization of the wide-open spaces is that myth of the West that got everything going that displaced all of us as Native people.”

Yet Henry also paints landscapes without people. “This idea is: this place is just for you,” she says. “American landscape as a whole, not only does it have its history of ‘come hither, all these lands are

yours,’ but also this is a place that doesn’t exist anymore. But wouldn’t you like to be there?’” Henry wants the viewer to ask questions. “As a Native woman painter, painting the landscape isn’t just about looking out the window. It’s about, ‘Well, what happened in that landscape?”

She concludes: “I’m a Paiute lady painter in New Mexico, far from my homeland, but I’m still trying to say I’m here too.”

Karma Henry will exhibit her work at the Santa Fe Indian Market, booth LIN W 784, and at the Reno Tahoe International Art Show in September 2024.

KARMAHENRY.COM

Jill Ahlberg Yohe is a consulting art curator, scholar, and advocate for artists. She has written extensively about historic and contemporary art and has co-curated many large and small exhibitions, including Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists.

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Bitterroot Salish/Crow Beadwork Artist & Painter

SALISHA OLD BULL

By Staci Golar

I

N MANY WAYS, Salisha Old Bull’s present artistic journey is one of making up for lost time.

Old Bull, a citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes of the Flathead Reservation and a Crow descendant, grew up in the expansive landscape of Montana, nurtured by family with a deep knowledge of their ancestral homelands. She was always surrounded by art-making of some kind, whether it was watching her Crow father sketch or seeing her Salish aunties and uncles paint, sew, and sew beadwork

after relocating to the Flathead Indian Reservation. Moving to Western Montana also brought her closer to her maternal grandmother, Rachel Arlee Bowers (Salish), who taught her how to bead.

Old Bull fondly remembers summers spent at the camp of Agnes Vanderburg (Salish, 1901–1989) near Arlee, Montana, where Salish culture keepers like Vanderburg and Old Bull’s grandmother passed on their knowledge to the next generation.

“The people there all had these really important skill sets,” Old Bull recalls. “Some were hide tanners. Some knew how to make things that would have been useful hundreds of years ago.” Old Bull was enlisted to help her grandma at camp and remembers how the experience gave them the gift of time—allowing them to sit together beading, perfecting two-needle, flat-stitch techniques. “Grandma used to pack around a big case of patterns, so people could pick something, and then she’d guide them on how to bead that thing. I remember I picked something about the size of a belt buckle,” Old Bull says, laughing. “And she said, ‘I believe in you.’ I never finished it. I think she knew it was such a big thing for a little kid to do.”1 Arlee Bowers is an “old school beader who is super cool and talented,” according to Old Bull. A photo essay about powwows in The New York Times reflects this and shows Arlee Bowers arena-side with a chihuahua and a purse she beaded with an indigenized Betty Boop design sitting on her lap.2 Growing up, Old Bull and her grandma would talk about going to college together since Arlee Bowers was just a few credits short of a degree at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) in Santa Fe. After years of having those conversations, Old Bull dreamed of packing up and moving to New Mexico with her grandma right after high school, immersing herself in the creative environment of the nation’s only college dedicated to contemporary Native arts.

As the saying goes, life—or in this case, parents and school administrators—had other plans. As a way to remove her daughter from a challenging environment in high school, Old Bull’s mother had worked out a deal with the school so that Old Bull could graduate early. Looking back, she realizes that she didn’t really want to skip a year, she “just wanted to leave that particular school.” As part of the arrangement, though, they needed to write an academic plan that included declaring a major and applying to college. Old Bull’s mother didn’t think the school board would approve a path that led to IAIA, so with no guidance on how to pursue a creative education elsewhere, Old

1. Unless otherwise noted, all quotes by Salisha Old Bull in discussion with the author, May 6, 2024.

2. Tailyr Irvine, “Powwow Season in Full Bloom,” The New York Times, July 30, 2022, web.

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Bull said that she would study architecture, thinking it would be a parallel pursuit to studio art. The academic track she outlined was accepted, and she indeed finished high school early. She stayed in state to attend the University of Montana.

In college Old Bull remembers feeling lost. She switched majors and completed a psychology degree, thinking it would help her work as a counselor for her tribe, not realizing that social work was actually what she should have pursued at that time. The following year she went back to school, this time to pursue a master’s degree in interdisciplinary studies, and ended up receiving that, as well as a second bachelor’s degree in Native American studies. At the end of the MIS degree, however, she felt that she needed something that would allow her to work for the tribe in a more formal way and ended up staying in school to earn a master of public administration degree. Looking back, she said that the MPA degree enabled her “to get any job with the tribe, and that’s what I needed to do at that time to support myself.”

For several years, she worked in various academic jobs, including teaching at Salish Kootenai College. However, Old Bull never stopped yearning to find a path that included art, even though she had simultaneously been trying to remove it from her life.

“I got so resentful about the whole thing that I quit doing [creative] things in that way,” Old Bull admits. “I used to do art every day, all the time. But when the realization came that going to school for art wasn’t going to happen, I thought if I keep doing art, I’m just going to feel sad every time because that’s all I want to do.” She continues: “ I wouldn’t even go into an art museum or look at an art magazine. I would do my kids’ dance outfits, and my husband’s outfit, and every now and then someone would ask for a drawing, but I wouldn’t even call myself an artist back then. It was a hard time.”

She trudged on, working day in and day out at what she thought she was supposed to be doing to be successful until one day, she’d finally had enough. She and her daughter sat in on a session for art majors during a college visit, and when Old Bull returned to work, she had a particularly bad day. It prompted her to ask herself, What am I doing? Why am I trying so hard to be happy doing this thing I was never really happy doing? She decided to enroll in another degree program at the University of Montana, but this time, she followed her heart and completed a bachelor’s degree in art in May 2021. “I decided I was just going to do it,” she says, “and I’ve never been happier.” Along the way a whole new world—the one she’d wanted to be in her entire life—finally opened up to her.

Opportunities, exhibitions, and awards almost immediately presented themselves, as if to say, See, this is what you were meant to be doing all along! A cradleboard by Old Bull won Best of Show at the Western Montana Fair’s Native American Arts exhibition in 2019. She worked with a professor to create a 2020 public art work Nʔaycčstm. Part of a bridge project with the Montana Department of Transportation, it marks a territorial site of the Bitterroot Salish and reminds drivers of the original place name that translates to the “place of the large bull trout.”

In early 2021, Old Bull exhibited her first painting. She showed Indigenous Hillshade, acrylic on canvas, in We Are Still Here

above Bitterroot & Huckleberries, 2021, contemporary and vintage 13° true-cut seed beads, stabilizer, deer hide, wool, cotton fabric, nylon thread, Czech beads, brass bells, one plastic button, beadwork surface, not including fringe, 11 × 8½ in., private collection. opposite Salisha Old Bull. All images courtesy of the artist.

and This is Our Story, a group show bringing awareness to the Missing and Murdered Indigenous People crisis.

Three of Old Bull’s cradleboards, including two she had created for her sons Inshiyetkw and Chmtews, showed in Finding Our Place: Beading and Weaving Our Culture Together (2021).

Adele Arseneau (Métis/Cree descent) curated this exhibition for the CityScape Community ArtSpace in North Vancouver, British Columbia.

That same autumn presented another milestone: Old Bull’s first solo exhibition, Knowledge from Land, at the University of Montana in Missoula. Knowledge from Land primarily featured acrylic paintings of medicinal plants, reflecting Old Bull’s ongoing interest in Indigenous ecological knowledge across media. She created her version of hillshade maps in visible FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 43, SUMMER 2024 | 69

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above Meadowlark Will Tell You, 2023, glass seed beads, smoked braintanned deer hide, nylon thread, sinew, stabilizer. opposite Salish Bitterroot Story, 2022, vintage and contemporary 13° true-cut seed beads, deer hide, wood, cotton fabric, wool, leather, stabilizer, Czech beads, nylon and cotton thread, brass tacks and spots, 19 × 7 ¾ in., private collection.

underpaintings on most of the pieces.

Painted in a grid, they give depth and shadow to the work and show the land free from settler-created boundaries. The top layers of each painting show plants’ leaves, flowers, and roots. Rendered with thick brushstrokes in lush colors like bright pinks, deep reds, and earthy greens, the works convey a reverence for and expressionistic interpretation of these important beings.

Old Bull also included a mixed-media piece, Indigenous Bitterroot Land, in the exhibition. Created while she was still in school, the piece was inspired by

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the shadow boxes of assemblage artist Joseph Cornell. “I used this well-known picture of Bitterroot Salish people at present-day Missoula,” Old Bull writes on social media. She paired this with a recently shot photograph at the same approximate location. “The bitterroot, serviceberry, photos of bitterroot, and a leaf from the trees at the photo location are sewn onto the canvas. I created a design to represent the bitterroot and flat-stitch beaded it onto the image. I had hoped to empower our Bitterroot Salish people and show images that are representative of the land we are tied to; the bitterroot saved our lives.” The nutritious roots of bitterroot (Lewisia rediviva) sustained area tribes, and the plant has many medicinal uses. The Montana Museum of Art and Culture acquired it for their collection in yet another first for the artist.

While Old Bull studied painting, photography, and drawing in school and continues to explore those when she can, her first love is beadwork. This adoration radiates from the work. It’s as good as it gets technically, with vibrant color choices, precise designs, and textures created by contour beading, but the stories she imbues within it add a depth that is hard to replicate. Even though she beads with Indigenous audiences in mind, any viewer can understand that these creations are special.

In 2022 Old Bull hit the Native art market trail with her beadwork, applying for and being accepted at the Heard Museum Guild Indian Fair and Market in Phoenix, the Eiteljorg Indian Market and Festival in Indianapolis, and the Santa Fe Indian Market. Along the way, she achieved more milestones like an Eiteljorg best of division and purchase award for a miniature cradleboard Qwasqwi, Storm, Five Friends & the Canoe, an award that meant the museum would buy the cradleboard for their permanent collection.

“I didn’t know what the purchase award was,” Old Bull says, laughing. “But that’s when I realized it was a huge thing that they acquired it. It’s showing right now in their space. I am just mind-blown by that.”

Created with 13° seed beads, deer hide, wood, fabric, wool, leather, Czech beads, and brass tacks and spots, the

SALISHA OLD BULL

19-inch-tall Qwasqwi, Storm, Five Friends & the Canoe is the first in a series of dollsized cradleboards that Old Bull made to represent the four seasons. “I always wanted to do a series of cradleboards that represented the four seasons because these are things that our youth have stopped paying attention to,” she says. “These are special, unique signifiers of being who we are, but they also show very important measurements of our seasons.” This cradleboard honors winter while referencing a Salish story through Old Bull’s expertly beaded designs. Qwasqwi (Montana Salish for blue jay) is shown alert and perched on the top left of the headpiece. Stars show a Salish constellation that is the “five friends in the canoe” who Qwasqwi saved. Crow geometrics and designs that represent the wind can also be spotted.

The second cradleboard Old Bull made to honor one of the seasons received a second-place ribbon at the same Eiteljorg Festival. Called the Salish Bitterroot Story, the piece honors spring with dynamic pink and purple bitterroot blooms and their characteristic curling roots, along with vibrant green bitterroot buds, a redwinged blackbird, and sun symbols. Like some of her other work, it honors the plant that saved the Salish people during famine.

“The Sun sent the red-winged blackbird to help a crying old woman, who was singing her death song. Her tears turned into bitterroot growing from the ground,” Old Bull recounts. “We would have starved to death and gone extinct if this plant wasn't given to us.” Bitterroot returns to the Salish people every spring when the water runs deep.

Remember That Night at Buffalo Camp, the third cradleboard in this series, honors summer. Old Bull interprets the story of a killdeer who befriends the people, warning them about things during their buffalo camps. The piece is bursting with narrative design. One can see buffalo running from top to bottom, tipis, the Milky Way as it looks during summer season, wild roses, and mountains. It earned a second-place ribbon at Santa Fe Indian Market that summer. “I cried so much that first time I went down there because I’d never been,” she admits. After staying up all night in Santa Fe to finish the piece, she said the best part was seeing the ribbons.

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PROFILE

“I was just beside myself. I didn’t even care what kind of ribbon.”

Last year brought even more career momentum for Old Bull. She entered a beaded purse, The Roses We Know, in the virtual exhibition Stories from Bead Night.

Bright red floral designs pop against a dazzling linear, diagonal backdrop. The florals represent the wild roses that grow in Western Montana that told the Bitterroot Salish people, by way of blooming, that the buffalo were ready to hunt.

Stories from Bead Night was birthed from the virtual gathering of Indigenous bead artists called “Rock Your Beads Night” started

by Carrie Moran McCleary (Little Shell Chippewa) in 2018. In 2020 when COVID-19 hit North America, the online bead sessions grew and provided a place of support for Native artists whose communities were disproportionately affected by the pandemic.

The virtual exhibition was organized under themes of Care, Balance, Voice, and Home.

Old Bull’s piece was included in Home, “the space where we learn from our first teachers, our families, and our communities, as well as the plants, animals, mountains, and waterways we live alongside.”3 The final cradleboard in Old Bull’s four seasons series, Signs of Autumn, emerged in 2023 as well. A bull elk bugles; his visible breath alludes to the change in temperature.

This time a nighthawk, the last bird to leave for the winter, soars on the headpiece near chokecherries, the last berry to ripen for the season. Stylized cow parsnip designs reference the plant’s use in making elk calls. All but the first cradleboard, Qwasqwi, Storm, Five Friends & the Canoe, are now in private collections, having been purchased at these various markets along the way.

Old Bull continued the Native art market circuit in 2023, adding Cherokee Art Market to her roster. Among the pieces she brought to the Eiteljorg Festival and Santa Fe Indian Market shows was a newly beaded doll cradleboard called The Matriarch. On it, a female buffalo stares down the viewer from the headpiece, standing among camas, sage, and wild roses, while a magpie rests on its back. She beaded the Madison Buffalo Jump that various tribes once used to hunt bison with Salish designs in the background.

3. “Home,” Stories from Bead Night, 2023, web.

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SALISHA OLD BULL

“A lot of people talk about the matriarch now. For me, I don’t believe in romanticizing our ways. I feel like we have to be so careful these days because we are having a sort of resurgence, and our youth really listen to these things,” Old Bull says as she starts to explain more about the piece. “So, I was trying to ground the concept, just trying to bring it back to something that’s very straightforward, like this is a matriarch.” She continues: “It has to do with our similarity to the woman bison as woman in our tribes and referring to our strength. The bison run in two herds. The females have their own herd. They have a leader of the herd who is the matriarch. The males have a very small herd they run in and are considered bachelors.

These herds only come together during mating season.

I referred to the alpha female as the matriarch. In both tribes I come from we are matriarchal. Apsáalooke have a clan system, which is matriarchal. Bitterroot Salish consider the woman to be the head of the household. The house belongs to her, and she runs this household to make sure everyone is cared for.”

The cradleboard received best of division and firstplace awards at the Eiteljorg Festival and a first-place ribbon at the Santa Fe Indian Market. Emil Her Many Horses (Oglala Lakota), a Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) curator, saw her work in Santa Fe and recommended that the NMAI acquire The Matriarch for their collection, which they did. “I was so excited! That was a huge thing for me,” Old Bull says.

Old Bull, who currently lives in Vancouver, British Columbia, with her husband and children, is spending 2024 prepping for new markets, including this year’s Santa Fe Indian Market, teaching art, and working at the University of British Columbia as an Indigenous academic advisor, using her hard-fought experiences to help guide Native students. She and her family work diligently to record cultural knowledge, and Old Bull recognizes that her artwork is now another way of documenting that knowledge. Expressing stories in beadwork is also “a way to help people to be more curious and to be motivated to ask people who could be able to tell them something about those stories.” She and her husband Shandin Pete (Salish/Diné), a hydrogeologist and educator at the University of British Columbia, “are always trying to find ways to keep doing it and putting it out there so it doesn’t disappear entirely. We have to be courageous in keeping this knowledge and in sharing it in art.”

Now that Old Bull has discovered her artistic voice, the world will be waiting for the stories she has yet to tell.

SALISHAOLDBULLART.COM Staci Golar is a nonprofit arts and communications consultant and arts and culture writer based in Boise, Idaho. She loves sharing the stories of people who bring important and beautiful things to the world.

above The Matriarch, 2023, glass seed beads, deer hide, leather, brass tacks and spots, collection of the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution. opposite Signs of Autumn, 2023, vintage and contemporary true-cut 13° seed beads, deer hide, wood, cotton fabric, wool, leather, stabilizer, glass beads, nylon and cotton thread, brass tacks and spots, 19 × 7¾ in., private collection.

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PROFILE

Navajo/Hopi Jeweler, Musician & Woodworker

JJ OTERO

By Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD working as an IT professional in Albuquerque and remained in that profession for 25 years, only to start a band in 2007.

In 2016 Otero moved back to the Navajo Nation. At that time he considered how to make a living and began to experiment with metal and wood. After creating several furniture projects that he shared to social media, he was asked by his sister to construct a cradleboard for her grandson. Upon its completion, Otero recognized that he could potentially pursue a life in the arts and stay on the reservation and be close to his parents. Others urged him to enter his work into art markets and fairs throughout the Southwestern United States. As a result, in 2018, he was accepted into the Heard Fair, We Are the Seeds art market, and the Santa Fe Indian Market.

Now a familiar figure in the Southwest art scene, Otero is recognized for his precise silver stamping work that draws on Navajo and Hopi iconography. While growing his successful jewelry business, Otero also remains connected to music and his particular brand of “resistance rock.” In 2013 his band’s song “Protected (Beauty All Around),” delivered entirely in Navajo and recorded by his group, Saving Damsels, was named best rock song at the Native American Music Awards. In 2017 his renamed band, Son of Hwéeldi, received three New Mexico Music Award nominations.

T

HE LEAD SINGER and guitarist of Son of Hwéeldi, JJ Otero is also a respected jeweler who believes “resistance always includes culture, music, song, dances, ceremony, and art.”1 His heavy-gauge stamped silverwork harkens back to the early roots of Navajo jewelry making.

Clear, bold designs highlight the gleam of silver or the unique beauty of a single turquoise stone. He is venturing into other materials such as gold or opals, but his entrée into the art world came from woodworking. He crafted classical Navajo cedar cradleboards that provide protection and blessings to newborns.

Born in Crownpoint, New Mexico, on the Navajo Reservation in 1969, JJ Otero took an interest in music from an early age. As a boy, he often listened to and sang along to AM radio.

At age 17 he taught himself to play guitar as a way to accompany himself because he loved to sing. Despite that love, JJ started 1. “About the Artist,” Son of Hwéeldi, ReverbNation, web.

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MRS: What were you listening to on the radio when you were a kid on the rez?

JJO: There wasn’t any FM radio that we could catch, so AM radio was our only option out here. You heard a lot of the old classic country, Chet Atkins or Ernest Tubb, a lot of that bluegrass music. Country music and rock music as well. Occasionally Billie Holiday and R&B and soul music greats.

MRS: Music remains an undercurrent in your life to this day. What significance does it play in your life?

JJO: I think there’s a few things. I’m told by my parents and relatives that as a child I used to sing along to AM stations songs. There were KTNN and KNDN, the Navajo-operated radio stations. You got the rock and country, but you also got Ed Lee Natay, Pueblo turtle dance songs, and then Navajo skip songs— anything that was not ceremonial in nature was on the radio.

As a child, I would sing along and that’s why one of my uncles gave me the nickname “JJ Radio Station.” Music has always been important in the sense of singing. In church we sang a lot too, and sometimes we would have youth gatherings. One of the

JJ OTERO

staff members at the local mission had an acoustic guitar, and I kind of fell in love with that sound. I started pursuing—or bugging my parents actually—to get an acoustic guitar, and sure enough my dad bought me one. That’s when music really became much more meaningful to me.

MRS: How was the transition from 25 years in IT in the city to life back in the Navajo Nation? And how did you get started in metalwork and woodwork?

JJO: I was in between two major points in my life, so I decided to unplug from everything in Albuquerque. I moved away and said, “I’m going to take this time to reset and reacquaint myself with my parents.” I’d been away since I was 17.

I came back, but there were no IT jobs out here where I live. My parents could use the help so that all kind of dovetailed together to help me understand that maybe my purpose in life is to stay here and help them with the house and the various things they need. But, at the same time, I still have bills.

I started putting things together with wood that was laying around, [like] furniture using two-by-fours, etc. I was already savvy with social media … so I was posting progress photos throughout, and lo and behold, the woodworking started to take off. The transition was very tough. I remember how rough it was having my cellphone turned off every month because I didn’t quite have enough money. It was a crazy time, but I honestly wouldn’t change it for anything. I realized so many things about the reservation that I was missing: the pure skies, hardly any light pollution, the quietness, and then of course relatives—seeing brown faces everywhere.

MRS: Can you talk specifically about your work and how you incorporate historical Navajo and Hopi patterns and motifs?

JJO: My sister’s daughter, my niece, was expecting her son, so I made her a cradleboard. I was posting the cradleboard on social media, and orders started to come in for them. That took off for a little while and became a means to support myself.

I was grateful for a bit of cash flow. In making one of those cradleboards, I decided to do some corn inlays on the back panels. [They were] well accepted on social media too. Soon after the first cradleboard, a friend of mine said, “JJ, we need to get you into the art fairs.” I said, “I don’t even have the $35 for the Heard Museum show application,” and he said, “Don’t worry about that. I’ll pay for you.”

Then he said, “Do you have any photos?” and what I had were photos of tools lying everywhere [laughs]. They weren’t presented in a way that you would expect to enter an art market. But I sent those

above Bolo, 2024, Nacozari turquoise, sterling silver, leather. opposite JJ Otero wearing a bolo tie he made. All images courtesy of the artist.

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“This needed to work because I wanted to stay on the rez. I was done with living in the city.” to him, and he decided on a few. He said, “I doubt you’re going to get in because the photos aren’t what they need to be for submitting artwork.” I said, “That’s fine, we’ll see.”

Two months later, I got the letter saying that I was accepted. That’s how the woodworking took off, all because of me making a cultural item to submit. A lot of people say it’s really hard. People try for years to get into these art shows, and the first year I submitted to the Heard Museum and the Santa Fe Indian Market, I got into both of those. It was all because of cradleboards. I’m grateful to my friend for pushing that and also grateful for it being a cultural item that is rarely made anymore.

MRS: It’s so important to have that support, especially from a friend like that who helps.

JJO: Yeah, he sure did, and he still does.

MRS: How did you get started in silverwork?

JJO: Again, that was largely due to my friend. I was kind of musing on Facebook like I do and posted that the newness of my being an artist was starting to fade a little bit because not everyone was having babies, which makes it hard to make a living off cradleboards.… My friend commented and said, “Why don’t you try silversmithing?” as a kind of matter-offact [suggestion]. And I said, “Why don’t I try?” So I bugged him and said, “Hey, I need your help, what do I need?” and he gave me a list of tools to get. I took the $40 or $50 that I had left and went down to Albuquerque. The first thing I wanted to get was a ball-peen hammer and then some stamps. I went to a couple of local jewelry stores.

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I didn’t have a stump, so at the time we had a wood stove, and I asked my dad, “Can I take a log and use it as my stump?” With his permission, I went out, and there’s a longer log in the pile, which I brought inside. And there was an old railroad track, a section of it that I’d see here and there through the years. Sometimes it would be outside in the dirt, other times it would be inside somewhere. It was an inanimate thing that had its own life because I would see it all the time as a child growing up and as I got older. So I went to look for it and I found it. I was so happy that I started cleaning it up. I have pictures of that first time I used it.

I set up a rickety lamp and started working on my very first pieces of copper bracelets for my friend Kenneth Johnson [Seminole/Muscogee] to review. He was the one who encouraged me to go get these tools, a stump, an anvil, etc. He said, “Go get twelve pieces of copper and take them home, stamp them, and bring them to me and we’ll see what they look like.”

I went and bought 24.

This needed to work because I wanted to stay on the rez. I was done with living in the city. In fact, while I was still living in the city, I coined this motivator in words: “I don’t want to labor anymore; I want my creations to sustain me.” That’s always been in the back of my head while I did music, while I painted for a while, and now out here on the rez. I sat there and I said, “This has to work because I don’t want to work for anybody anymore.”

MRS: Almost like a mantra. Can you talk about the physicality of working with metal and precious stones? The alchemy of shaping materials from the earth into aesthetic objects is demanding work.

JJO: The first thing I thought about when making jewelry was that part of my aesthetic will be heavy gauge work, back to when [Navajo] silversmiths were first learning to make jewelry. They had to make everything from coin silver, which they would melt and cold forge into sheets. If you can imagine, forging that silver into a sheet is a brutal process on your elbows, wrists, and shoulders.

I opted not to do ingot silverwork, so

JJ OTERO

I just bought thicker gauge sheet silver understanding that the major repetition is going to be stamping and then forming bracelets or heavy gauge work. I immediately thought about tools that would give me a mechanical advantage to bend things. I got a hydraulic press, which was one of the very first things I got in year one of my work. The stamping and all that was just a matter of proper posture, proper positioning of stamps, and good lighting.

Just recently, about two or three weeks ago I had a bout of carpal tunnel in my elbows so now I’m starting to use an elbow brace while I stamp. The physicality is very much there. The aesthetic of heavier gauge work was important to me, so I understood that I’d have to find easier ways to form and to forge.

I’ve been able to find a happy balance of that. As far as the stones are concerned, having the turquoise in your hands and seeing the beauty in what Mother Earth produces in so many different colors and shades—it’s amazing that came into existence and that we’re able to use it as adornment, as protection.

MRS: What about the repetition of metalwork? The repetitive movement and repetitive sounds must be somewhat meditative. Does it help you get into that flow state?

JJO: I think creative processes are generally conducive to that meditative state, where you’re very mindful of what’s coming into the five senses. Flashback a little bit to 2005 when I started my journey into sobriety. I went through counseling, I went through acupuncture, AA meetings, etc., but what really made sobriety meaningful to me was when I started meditation. That allowed me to slow down what they call the “monkey mind” or all the noise that comes into our heads. I started understanding that the creative process is super conducive to those moments of being present. I bring that presence. It’s not the activity necessarily that brings presence but your being present in those moments.

MRS: Do the rhythmic sounds of your work make you think of music

at all? Or help get you to that present, meditative state?

JJO: Absolutely. I’ll give you a very specific example. When I’m stamping, I will know when my stamping isn’t good by the sound. If I hit the punch or the stamp at the tip at a weird angle, I will

above, top Ring, 2023, Ethiopian opal, sterling silver. above, bottom Corn Motif Cuff, 2024, heavy-gauge sterling silver, stamped. opposite Sampler Cuff, 2023, heavy-gauge sterling silver, stamped exterior, overlay interior.

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JJO: Yeah! I didn’t make the correlation until I heard your question.

“There are unsolicited critics, then there are critiques by people you respect. There’s a big difference there.”

above Pendant, 2023, Sleeping Beauty turquoise, sterling silver.

get a higher pitch noise, and I know that I need to adjust my hit. If I hit it correctly, there’s no better sound in my ears, when the stamp goes into the silver to make the impression. It’s a real satisfying thud.

[Laughs]. The other one is filing a piece.

If it’s screeching, that means my work is loosely held, and I need to grab the silver piece tighter or even flatten it out, and then you can almost hear the metal being removed by the file. There’s a certain flame temperature that I need to have for the solder to flow, so I’ll listen to a little hiss that my torch makes to know I’m at the right temperature. I’m not using a heat gun. When I hear that hiss, I know it’s the right mixture of oxygen and propane to get the heat that I need to solder.

MRS: It’s like you need to have a really good ear to be a jeweler.

MRS: What are you finding to be the most difficult aspect of being an artist or maker? What is most challenging?

JJO: Sometimes my excitement and joy and social media posting become points of criticism by other people. At least for Navajo, the social norm is not to draw attention to ourselves, and I totally understand that. At the same time, to make a living, and because we need money in the systems that we live in, I have to talk about my work, to talk about everything that goes along with it. Sometimes that gets misconstrued as “he’s being overly proud” or “bragging.” It’s not, I’m just really happy. I’m excited about doing what I do. The thing they forget is that I also share the parts that are tough. I received some criticism when I was first starting out, which reinforced the idea that I’m not going to be that way to new artists. In fact, I raise them up. I have a platform. If someone is starting out and they need a little social media push, I’ll do that for them, and they don’t have to ask me. There are unsolicited critics, then there are critiques by people you respect.

There’s a big difference there.

MRS: What are you working on these days? Any exhibitions, markets, or other projects?

JJO: Currently I’m working on inventory for the Eiteljorg Museum’s annual show.

I also have a few things in the works that are a departure from the things I do currently. I haven’t worked out the details yet. A lot of times, for smaller projects, I’ll just sit down and start making something. For the larger projects, I’ll spend time drawing things out and getting an idea, thinking where I want to go. That’s a very vague blueprint. The Santa Fe Indian Market is the next show that I’m juried into and will be attending in August.

That’s mostly what I’m working on … and trying to get my truck fixed [laughs].

FACEBOOK @JJ.OTERO.ART INSTAGRAM @JJ.OTERO.ART Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD, is the curator and head of collections at Glenhyrst Art Gallery in Brantford, Ontario.

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Jackie Sevier

Chessney Sevier

Cowgirl Artists of America Women’s Work

A.R. A.R. Mitchell Mitchell Museum Museum of of Western Western Art, Art, Trinidad, Trinidad, CO CO August August 2–Sept.

2–Sept. 30, 30, 2024 2024 (Both (Both Jackie Jackie & & Chessney) Chessney)

Wheelwright Artist’s Market

Wheelwright Wheelwright Museum, Museum, Santa Santa Fe, Fe, NM NM August August 16–17, 16–17, 2024 2024

Jackson Indigenous Art Market Jackson, Jackson, WY WY Sept.

Sept. 21 21 & & 22, 22, 2024 2024

Trappings of Texas

Museum Museum of of the the Big Big Bend, Bend, Sul Sul Ross Ross State State University, University, Alpine, Alpine, TX, TX, Sept.

Sept. 14–Nov. 14–Nov. 1, 1, 2024 2024

northernplainsstudio.com

Western Visions

National National Museum Museum of of Wildlife Wildlife Art, Art, Jackson, Jackson, WY, WY, Sept.

Sept. 7–29, 7–29, 2024, 2024, Reception: Reception: Sept.

Sept. 12, 12, 2024 2024

chessneysevier.com

JACK SABON Handmade Drums

www.sabonart.com nerak194@gmail.com

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REVIEWS

EXHIBITION REVIEWS

BURLINGTON, VT

Margaret Jacobs: Kinship BCA Center

D

RIVING PAST the dandelions springing forth in northern Vermont was a good warm-up for viewing the art of Margaret Jacobs (Akwesasne Mohawk). Her Burlington exhibition revels in the vegetation of the Great North Woods, which runs across northern New England into upstate New York, where Jacobs grew up.

Her work, which encompasses a variety of metals, has a touch of whimsy.

There are large, unpainted, sculpted still lifes of subjects like maple leaves, cattails, blueberries, and mint. Smaller powder-coated jewelry pieces—including bolo ties—are playful and bright. All capture the feathery aspect of nature, the parts of plants light enough to sway in the wind.

But there is often a toughness beneath delicate surfaces, especially apparent in Jacobs’s larger-scale Old Growth series pieces. As with dandelions—which shout “yellow!” after the long northern winter and before going whimsically white and airborne—anyone who has dug them up (to use their roots or just get rid of them) knows that their wispiness is stubbornly entrenched in the Earth. Dandelion roots are lengthy, tapered, and relentless.

Which brings us to spud wrenches (of all things), which serve as the anchors of the pieces comprising the two Old Growth series collections. A tool of the ironworking trade—some more than a foot long—they sport a wrench at one end with an extended handle that ends with a rather fierce point at the other (definitely what an ironworker would likely bring to the zombie apocalypse). The spiked end is slipped into the respective holes of steel girders, I-beams, and plates, then used as a pry bar to align them before nuts and bolts bind them, a process that enables the construction of modern bridges and rigid-frame buildings.

This brings us to the skyline of New York City, which may seem far afield from the botany of the St. Lawrence River region—but ironworking is part of Jacobs’s heritage. The Mohawk Akwesasne territory, which includes three distinct jurisdictions on either side of the Canadian and US borders, has for more than a century included members who went “booming out” to walk steel for wages. They continue to be crucial to the construction of, among many other major projects, the skyscrapers of the world’s most iconic skyline.

“With the Old Growth pieces, I’m using the spud wrenches. Those have a direct visual reference to the Mohawk ironworkers who built the skyscrapers,” Jacobs explains in a companion YouTube video to the exhibition. “And then combining that with plants and botanicals and just looking at ancestral knowledge as well as familial knowledge. So, other plants that are related to medicine, to healing, to nutrition. I’m really interested in exploring kinship relationships with the natural world.”1 That Jacobs’s work shares the same medium—the shaping of metals—as Mohawk ancestors is another kinship relationship. The fact that a tool whose origins lie in the Industrial Revolution has become a Mohawk cultural artifact is part of what Jacobs describes in the exhibition video as “trying to talk about historical narrative as well as cultural narrative.”

The exhibition’s two Old Growth series groupings, each consisting of four pieces, are substantial. The largest, Cattail, measures nearly five feet long. The tapered end of the spud wrenches—where rings, hooks, and sometimes links of chain have been added from which the sculpted portions hang—point down, pulling the eye towards Jacobs’s handiwork. These are surprisingly elegant for objects made via a myriad of techniques—including the primal act of hammering—that she uses to shape her metals.

Jacobs values transforming a metal “in a way that you don’t normally see it used,” she explains in the exhibition video.

1. “Margaret Jacobs: Kinship at Burlington City Arts,” Burlington City Arts, March 25, 2024, YouTube video, 4:01, web.

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REVIEWS

While audiences are likely familiar with blacksmithing and welding, they might not readily distinguish between “what’s fabricated and what’s found.” She says that encouraging viewers “to look at it really closely to develop a relationship with a piece is important to me.”

The effect of individually crafted sculptures hanging from industrial-designed tools is one of elongation, a capturing of the realization that plants continue beneath the soil and, if pulled from it and seen with roots at full length, would seem out of context and gargantuan. The lack of color—they all encompass a shade of metal—makes the intricate, detailed fashioning of leaves, berries, and stalks all the more focused and impressive.

In contrast, Jacobs’s jewelry and small-scale works—many in a five-part Partner Pieces jewelry series that pair bolo ties with pins—are exuberant and polychromatic, with a rich color scheme spanning green (mint), red (strawberry), yellow (corn), and off-white (garlic) that makes a counterpoint to the greys and browns of the Old Growth series. A dandelion-like explosion of color on a sunny spring day—as opposed to the recently passed part of the steel circle, like the brown of last season’s foliage covering the forest’s floor on a late-winter afternoon.

One piece stands apart from the exhibition’s two groupings. Subtle and Strong is a ring of interwoven leaves expanding atop a 32-inch diameter piece of unknown industrial origin (possibly something to do with a large pipe or machinery). It is a manifestation of nature reclaiming its place, circling and extending to absorb a piece of mechanical detritus, the kind of process that can be found at any roadside embankment long used as an off-grid dump or on the set of post-apocalyptic shows or movies like The Last of Us or 12 Monkeys.

This kind of free association is, I believe, what Jacobs is shooting for. As she said at the artist talk for the Kinship opening: “I’m interested in using a visual vocabulary that can create layers of my work, so the viewer has the potential to relate to the piece in different ways.”

—Peter Letzelter-Smith

CHEROKEE, NC

sov·er·eign·ty: Expressions in Sovereignty of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians Museum of the Cherokee People

I

above Margaret Jacobs (Akwesasne Mohawk), Plantain, from the Old Growth series, 2023, steel, 281/2 × 3 × 2 in. diameter. opposite Margaret Jacobs (Akwesasne Mohawk), Subtle and Strong, 2022–23, steel, 32 in. diameter.

N MY YEARS of working with tribal communities, I’ve encountered the term “tribal sovereignty” used as an expression to affirm the existence of tribal nations and rights. The definition explains certain tribal rights, such as gaming on tribal land, tribal citizen enrollment, tribal courts, and tribal law enforcement. I’ve witnessed non-tribal citizens responding to the term with a range of emotions, including disbelief, confusion, and anger. Tribal sovereignty is a complex concept with many adaptations, encompassing the inherent right of Indigenous peoples to self-governance and self-determination within their territories. Because sovereignty is so complex and multifaceted, people often misunderstand the truth of the term.

The Museum of the Cherokee People on the Qualla Boundary in North Carolina has developed an exhibition, with input from Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians (EBCI) citizens, to educate visitors about what sovereignty means to them. sov·er·eign·ty: Expressions in Sovereignty of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians explores the complex journey of self-governance and autonomy.

At the center of the exhibition experience lies the definition of tribal sovereignty. Each aspect of Eastern Band Cherokee autonomy is depicted in detail, allowing visitors to delve into the tribe’s history, culture, and resilience. Engaging displays and interactive components provide insight into how the nation’s sovereignty has shaped its identity, governance, economy, and struggles for recognition and self-determination.

Instead of presenting a linear timeline, the exhibition allows visitors to move freely from one illustration of EBCI sovereignty to another. An effortless transition

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above, top Installation view of sov·er·eign·ty: Expressions in Sovereignty of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians with the wrestling outfit of Chief Osley Bird Saunooke (Eastern Band Cherokee, 1906–1965) on the right. Both images courtesy of the Museum of the Cherokee People. above, bottom Sovereignty in Motion, interactive installation in sov·er·eign·ty: Expressions in Sovereignty of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians.

is created between the various examples of Eastern Cherokee history and culture. Tribal sovereignty empowers a tribe to tell its own story. The histories recounted by tribal communities carries more significance than narratives offered by outsiders. This prerogative to portray history, culture, language, and art as determined by the community is embodied by tribal museums, art created by tribal members, oral histories, songs, dances, and ceremonies. Notably featured within the exhibition lies the soapstone carving Life of Tsali by Lloyd Carl Owle (Eastern Band Cherokee, 1943–2023). This abstract artwork portraying the life of Cherokee removal resistance leader Tsali offers a fresh interpretation of his legacy. Unlike the narrow perspective often found in

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history books, the sculpture delves into Tsali’s multifaceted existence, broadening our understanding of his impact and significance.

The right to self-govern is key to tribal sovereignty. The exhibition text clarifies the differences between the three federally recognized Cherokee tribes: the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians, Cherokee Nation, and United Keetoowah Band of Cherokee Indians in Oklahoma.

Each tribe maintains its own government, citizens, and landholdings. The current structure of the EBCI government, comprising executive, legislative, and judicial branches, is explained. Additionally, the exhibition discusses the distinctions between the present-day government and the historical Cherokee government.

As part of self-governance, tribal members have the right to vote in all tribal elections. Citizens do not always agree with all candidates. Just as in state and federal elections, citizens campaign for their favored candidate. Bumper stickers and magnets from various political candidates can be seen on vehicles all around Qualla Boundary. Museum of the Cherokee People staff Evan Mathis, director of collections and exhibitions, and Dakota Brown (Eastern Band Cherokee), director of education, decided to have some fun with an interactive component of the exhibit. Citizens of all three Cherokee tribes are invited to send electoral and political bumper stickers and magnets to the museum. The political stickers are displayed on hanging bumpers from trucks and SUVs. If you are a citizen of one of the three federally recognized tribes and would like to donate a political bumper sticker, please email the museum at collections@motcp.org. The museum will provide instructions on how to mail your sticker and/or magnet and become a part of the exhibition.

Another component of the exhibition delves into the distinction between tribal citizenship and Cherokee ancestry. This aspect can pose challenges for visitors to grasp. Tribes hold the right to determine the criteria for citizenship. Merely speculating descent from a Cherokee person does not automatically grant one membership in the tribe. The requirement of citizenship is a decision made by the tribe itself. Illustrating this concept is a collection of historical

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baskets crafted by the Davis family (Cherokee descent). These baskets exemplify exquisite craftsmanship and beauty. The baskets have a slanted design emblematic of the Davis family. Through treaties in 1817 and 1819, the Davis family secured their own 640-acre private family “reservation” in Georgia, relinquished their Cherokee citizenship, and became citizens of the United States.1 Although of Cherokee ancestry, this family does not meet the Eastern Band Cherokee citizenship qualifications. The realization that tribal citizenship is defined by tribal sovereignty may prove frustrating for visitors who believe they are connected to the Cherokee tribe through ancestry.

The exhibition aims clarify distinctions between ancestry and citizenship.

A tribe’s economic strategy can serve as a testament to its sovereignty. Before the 1940s, the Eastern Band Cherokee reservation, correctly known as the Qualla Boundary, languished as a profoundly impoverished community. In the 1930s, the United States federal government

established the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. Recognizing an economic opportunity, the EBCI seized upon the chance to establish an entrance into the park through the Qualla Boundary.

Tourists, many of whom had money to spend, were guided through the Qualla Boundary before entering the park. The tourist dollars infused life into the tribe’s economy. The tribe embraced Hollywood stereotypes by capitalizing on non-Native perceptions of Indigenous identity. This resulted in Cherokee individuals donning headdresses and erecting tipis. Embodying this era, the robe of world heavyweight wrestling champion Principal Chief Osley Bird Saunooke (Eastern Band Cherokee, 1906–1965) is displayed. Saunooke adopted an image of a Native American man wearing a Plains-style headdress as his wrestling logo. The logo is a wool patch sewn to the back of his wrestling robe. The robe illustrates an EBCI citizen choosing his own marketing strategy. These stereotypes propelled a tourist-based economy.

Many Eastern Cherokee families depended

on this economic model for generations.

Even today, remnants of this historical economic approach persist within the Qualla Boundary. The display of dream catchers and Plains-style tipis illustrate the tribe’s deliberate pursuit of economic survival.

EBCI has since developed sophisticated economic strategies that incorporate casinos, hotels, high-end biking trails, and showcasing cultural interests as a means of economic self-determination.

The Museum of the Cherokee People presents a comprehensive exploration of tribal sovereignty, covering aspects such as government, culture, economy, and history. Engaging displays allow visitors to gain insight into the EBCI historical and current demonstrations of sovereignty as well as portrayals of Cherokee identity. On view through February 18, 2025, this immersive experience deepens understanding of Cherokee sovereignty and leaves a lasting impression of the resilience of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians.

—Michole Eldred (Catawba/Eastern Cherokee descent)

1. John H. Reagan, “Treaties of 1817 and 1819 with the Cherokee Indians,” University of Oklahoma College of Law (May 18, 1860), 1, PDF. FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 43, SUMMER 2024 | 83

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KARMA HENRY OWENS VALLEY PAIUTE Santa Fe Indian Market Booth LIN W 784 Downtown Santa Fe, NM August 17 & 18, 2024

Reno Tahoe International Art Show

Reno-Sparks Convention Center, Reno, NV September 12–15, 2024

KarmaHenry.com Hubia Mua (Moon Song), 2024, acrylic on canvas, 24 × 36 inches 84 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 43, SUMMER 2024

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NEW YORK

Melissa Cody: Webbed Skies MoMA PS1

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OURTH-GENERATION WEAVER Melissa Cody (Diné) invigorates the realms of Diné weaving and contemporary art.

Her energization is a through line in her first major solo museum presentation, Melissa Cody: Webbed Skies, on view at MoMA PS1 in Queens, New York City, until September 9, 2024. Cody is known for her masterful weaving techniques, vibrant color palette, and bold designs.

MoMA PS1 maintains a reputation for championing innovative contemporary art. The institution co-organized the show with Museu de arte de São Paulo Assis Chateaubriand (MASP), where Melissa Cody: Webbed Skies was first exhibited last year at MASP in São Paulo, Brazil. The presentation at MoMA PS1 features 32 of Cody’s textiles spanning more than 35 years—her earliest made when she was five years old, and her newest works made in 2023. Entering the exhibition is like walking into Melissa’s world, where multigenerational cultural practices dance with innovation.

In the exhibition’s opening text, viewers read that Cody’s primary weaving style is Germantown Revival. This Diné weaving style, using fine, brightly colored, synthetic-dyed commercial wool yarn, originated from the Long Walk (1863– 1868) when the U.S. military forced 10,000 Diné to walk hundreds of miles to an internment camp. On the way, weavers unraveled supplied blankets and used the yarn for weaving. These supplied blankets came from Germantown, Pennsylvania, and the text states that “the introduction of synthetic colors opened new horizons of experimentation within the context of confinement, a method crucial to the Navajo cultural resistance.” This and other important contextual information about Diné history, art, and culture are embedded throughout the exhibition’s text. This context is crucial for viewers to fully understand Cody’s artistic practice.

In Cody’s distinct weaving practice within the broader Germantown Revival style, she revitalizes not only using a specific

above Installation view of Melissa Cody: Webbed Skies, on view at MoMA PS1 through September 2, 2024, with Banded Blanket (1988) in case at right. Photo: Kris Graves. Image courtesy of MoMA PS1.

type of wool, but also revives Diné persistence, strength, and creativity.

Isabella Rjeille, curator at MASP, and Ruba Katrib, curator and director of curatorial affairs at MoMA PS1, co-curated the exhibition. Katrib and Rjeille are not Diné, but their curatorial framework for the exhibition pays homage to Diné histories, spirituality, and weaving technology. For example, photographs of Cody at her loom, with weaving tools, raw and dyed wool, and a diagram of a Diné loom are tastefully displayed in a vitrine alongside Banded Blanket (1988).

This is the earliest work included in the show, woven when Cody was five years old. She tightly wove the textile with straight bands in hues of orange, grey, and brown. Banded Blanket testifies to Cody’s advanced childhood technical weaving competency as well as the weaving mentorship she received from her award-winning mother, Lola S. Cody (Diné), and accomplished grandmother, Martha Schultz (Diné).

While firmly rooted in a lineage of distinguished female weavers, Cody’s work speaks to universal themes of heritage, creativity, and the human experience. Besides Banded Blanket, the other 31 of Cody’s textiles hang in three rooms. The main space presents her larger and more recent works against walls painted olive green. Each textile vibrates with energy, inviting viewers to immerse themselves in a kaleidoscope of vivid hues and intricate patterns. World Traveler (2014) is featured here and placed within a white-walled enclave. It is the

focal point of the room and perhaps the most celebrated work of Cody’s career. This year the National Gallery of Art featured the weaving for The Land Carries Our Ancestors: Contemporary Art by Native Americans, an exhibition curated by artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Salish-Kootenai/Métis/Shoshone). World Traveler features layering of designs, a technique that Cody frequently implements, and reminds viewers of the layered history of Diné weaving. Melissa’s brother and father built her upright vertical loom, and these Diné looms favor woven geometric patterns. Incredibly, the center section of World Traveler features a panel with 16 concentric circles—an extraordinary technical weaving feat. The other sections of the textile are Melissa’s interpretations of historic Diné patterns and are arranged into a mesmerizing composition. The precision of World Traveler is astonishing, with every string contributing to the composition’s overall harmony. The title of the work is fitting as this selection of Cody’s 32 textiles traveled from São Paulo to New York City for the MoMA PS1 presentation.

A standout work on a wall adjacent to World Traveler is Into the Depths, She Rappels (2023). In this weaving the serrated purple gradient at the top evolves into an encompassing fuchsia background. One’s eye is drawn to the middle where a small triangular hourglass form represents Na'ashjé'íí Asdzáá (Spider Woman), the sacred figure who taught Diné to weave. The abstract figure lowers herself into the fuchsia by a thread.

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above Melissa Cody, Into the Depths, She Rappels, 2023, wool warp, weft, and selvage cords, aniline dyes, 87 × 519/16 in. Image courtesy the artist and Garth Greenan Gallery, New York.

She enters a video game–like scene where multicolored square pixels on the right contrast rainbow Eyedazzler designs on the lower left. This scene is a balanced confrontation of geometric designs. Into the Depths, She Rappels (2023), on loan from the Gochman Family Collection, a private lending collection, alludes to the concept of Indigenous futurity and how future generations of Diné weavers will continue to create and innovate. In contrast to the green wall where it hangs, the work demands viewers’ attention. Zach

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Feuer, collection director told me, “Diné weaving is an important and radical part of contemporary art that has yet to be fully acknowledged by modern colonial museums.” Melissa Cody: Webbed Skies is not only a triumph for Cody and the overall practice of Diné weaving but also for the visitors fortunate enough to experience her storytelling through the exhibition.

The two white-walled rooms feature textiles from throughout Cody’s career. Cody’s textiles have lives of their own, telling intimate stories of resilience and identity. One cannot help but be captivated by Cody's technical skill and attention to detail. Yet, amid this technical prowess, a sense of vulnerability and strength infuses her work with a dynamic energy. In one room Us Lust Dust (2013), Sweet Lovable ... You (2016), and Only Love Can Break Your Heart (Dust) (2013) are presented on one singular wall. The set references Cody’s grief when her fiancé suddenly passed away. All three works feature bold and poetic text on top of colorful multilayered geometric designs.

Scaling the Caverns (2023) and Power Up (2023) are massive and hung alongside one another. Cody designed both textiles, but they were outsourced and made overseas with a jacquard loom.

Her use of this technology allows for incredibly hypnotic layered designs that are impossible to create on the Diné loom that she used to create the other 30 textiles.

This experimentation is in response to the demands for Cody to quickly produce new works. But it is also representative of her daring exploration as an artist, a theme consistent throughout her career.

What makes Melissa Cody: Webbed Skies remarkable is it highlights Cody’s ability to transcend boundaries—both cultural and artistic. The exhibition challenges preconceived notions of what Diné weaving and more broadly Native American art should be, offering a fresh perspective that is at once timeless and contemporary. The exhibition demonstrates the enduring power of Diné weaving practices and the limitless possibilities of individual artistic expression within this artistic genre. The exhibition is a powerful celebration of Cody’s masterful ability to weave worlds that connect the past, present, and future.

—Sháńdíín Brown (Diné)

NELDA SCHRUPP

NAKOTA JEWELER, SILVERSMITH, SCULPTOR & TEXTILE ARTIST

SANTA FE INDIAN MARKET BOOTH PAL 219-S, SANTA FE, NM AUGUST 17 & 18, 2024 CHEROKEE ART MARKET HARD ROCK HOTEL & CASINO, CATOOSA, OK OCTOBER 12 & 13, 2024 Left: SISTERS BOLO, sterling silver, chrysoprase, green aventurine eyes, yellow citrine in flower with leather rope.

Middle: HALO BRACELET, sterling silver, 6 carnelian bullets on sterling silver halo, carnelian cabochon.

Right: TURTLE ISLAND BELT, sterling silver, chrysoprase, garnet eyes, 2-inch leather belt.

(701) 740-0775 Commissions welcome!

NeldaDBANakotaArts.com

Lillie Vann

Cherokee Nation ceramic artist | lillievannclay.com

Santa Fe Indian Market booth CAT 912 (539) 525-2740 | lillievannclay@gmail.com | Instagram @lillievannclay FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 43, SUMMER 2024 | 87

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PORTLAND, ME

Jeremy Frey: Woven Portland Museum of Art

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EATED ATOP A PLINTH, a basket burns. At first just a trace of smoke creeps outward from between the spaces in the basket’s intricately woven ash walls. Then flames erupt. The basket’s once-meticulous patterning—rhythmic undulations of black, copper, and ash’s natural tan—begin to darken as the basket appears to twist and writhe, mangling under the flame.

This is the final scene of Ash, a ten-minute video by Jeremy Frey (Passamaquoddy), a seventh-generation ash basket weaver and knowledge keeper. Ash forms the centerpiece of Woven, on view at the Portland Museum of Art (through September 15, 2024, before moving to the Art Institute of Chicago). It is the artist’s first major museum retrospective and the first solo exhibition of a Wabanaki artist at the Portland Museum of Art (PMA).

Woven brings together nearly 50 of Frey’s ethereal baskets that span more than two decades, along with new and experimental works in other media. The exhibition emerged from years of conversations between Frey and chief curator Jaime DeSimone, who organized the exhibition with Ramey Mize, the PMA’s associate curator of American art. Throughout, they reference Passamaquoddy terms for materials and weave structure and emphasize how basketry is embedded in Wabanaki language and culture.

Having already received many of the highest honors reserved for Native American artists including Best of Show at both the Heard Fair and Santa Fe Indian Market, Frey was adamant that the exhibition position his work as contemporary art. “I didn’t want to do a basket show,” he stated at the show’s opening. As he told Atlas Obscura, “I’ve spent my whole career trying to redefine what ash can be.”1 Woven, therefore, represents basket weaving in an expanded sense. Rather than a retrospective display of finished works, it frames Frey’s longstanding weaving practice as a jumping-off point for explorations of new techniques and media.

Ash is one such “non-basket” work, to borrow a term from DeSimone.

Tracing Frey’s journey from felling a tree to the destruction of the basket, the film immerses a viewer in the sounds and the kinetics of basket making, invisible in the final product. Indeed, Frey’s baskets seem immaculate. Passamaquoddy creation stories explain how people and animals first emerged from the basket tree, and Frey’s baskets, in their otherworldly precision, recall that act of divine creation.

Ash, by contrast, thrusts a viewer into the thwack of Frey’s axe as he separates the bark; the swish of the splitter as he creates splints; the grinding of the lathe as he creates custom molds; and the rotations of his hands as he begins weaving the basket’s circular base.

By using the term “non-basket,” DeSimone doesn’t mean a departure from basket weaving; instead, she emphasizes how Frey has taken the techniques, methods, and lessons from baskets and extended them to new media. Caesura, a framed and wall-mounted work in ash and cedar, at first appears two-dimensional. Further observation reveals that the work actually extends backward, bringing a viewer into the oft-unseen interior space of the basket and into the wall of the museum itself.

Basketry, in this case, becomes a vehicle for Frey to think about formal and technical issues of optics and space.

A series of relief prints, all from 2023, represent some of Frey’s most recent experiments in new media. To make the prints, Frey runs flat pieces of woven ash, sometimes inked, through the press. In some, the prints reveal the otherwise unseen internal structure of the splints from having unevenly absorbed the ink. A viewer is made acutely aware

of the difficulties in translating the threedimensional structure of weaving onto paper; in others, the baskets leave only an embossing, a ghostly impression where the basket has deformed the paper.

There is a practical urgency to Frey’s “non-basket” explorations. The emerald ash borer, an invasive insect moving east across the continent, finally arrived in Maine in 2018 and now stands to decimate the tree so essential for Frey’s weaving. Finding new artistic outlets is therefore essential to Frey’s continued practice. At the same time, new media have enabled him to consider basket weaving in an expanded sense, as a set of conceptual and formal problems.

Of course, Frey is best known for his baskets, and those featured in the exhibition are astounding. The earliest baskets in the exhibition showcase the work of a young weaver, already experimenting with material and texture: Basket with Cover (2003), of undyed ash, juxtaposes the pointed “porcupine weave” with a quillwork lid, forging an echo between material and weave structure. First Fine Weave (2003), in the collection of Frey’s mother and teacher, Frances “Gal” Frey (Passamaquoddy), is his first attempt at the technique that would come to dominate his practice: breaking splints down into thread-like thicknesses. A stark contrast to the utilitarian fish-scale baskets that Frey’s grandfather Fred Moore Sr. (Passamaquoddy, 1933–2014) and other Wabanaki men had sold to Maine fishermen, fine weave and fancy baskets with bold colors, sinuous shapes, and textured over-weaves interested Frey most.

Frey first studied at home with his mother and then continued to study with the Maine Indian Basketmakers Alliance (MIBA), an all-Indigenous organization that promotes the vitality of Wabanaki basketry through marketing, workshops, and a formal apprenticeship program. Yet he was determined to advance his practice beyond “our grandparents’ baskets,” as Theresa Secord (Penobscot), basket maker and MIBA’s founding director, wrote in the catalogue. When Frey started weaving fancy baskets, historically a women’s style, only one other man was working in that style, recalls Secord. Few practiced fine weave—too intricate to be lucrative in a souvenir market, and Secord says Frey was

1. Farhod Family and Andrew Lampard, producers, “In Maine, the Art of Basketry Hangs on By a Thread,” Atlas Obscura x Visit Maine, October 24, 2023, video, 5:22, web.

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the first to begin braiding ash and cedar wood, as others had done with coastal sweetgrass. He was—and is—one of the few Maine ash weavers to harvest his own materials, which mobilizes knowledge of the basket trees imparted by Moose (Fred Moore Jr., Passamaquoddy), his uncle.

Meanwhile, Frey also began experimenting with scale, weave structure, and color. Building his own custom puzzle molds (and later, hollow molds suited to larger baskets), Frey found himself drawn to both historical Wabanaki forms such as the squat and rounded “sea urchin” and taller vase-like forms. Influenced by his wife, Ganessa Frey (Penobscot), a weaver known for her miniature and fruit-shaped baskets, Jeremy Frey began incorporating synthetic dyes, creating rhythmic interplays of color that would highlight his innovative weave structures. Lulled into meditation through the repetitive act of weaving, Frey was consistently ruminating on how to push his practice further: “If I’ve spent a month [weaving] a basket,” he said at the exhibition’s opening, “I’ve also spent a month thinking about baskets.”

Throughout the exhibition, one can see how Frey uses baskets as a vehicle to think broadly about formal and technical issues like space and structure. Vase Basket (2008), a gourd-shaped vessel in which the basket’s lid forms a basket and lid of its own, marks the beginning of Frey’s experimentation with illusion. By 2012 he had started creating baskets with multiple rims, one seeming to grow out of another, with a distinct lack of clarity on what elements were structural and which were grafted onto the original form. He also began creating double-walled baskets where the inside of the basket had its own distinct weave structure, invisible from the outside.

Works like Caged (2018), in which a spiked lattice overlay is woven into the basket’s weave, represent entirely new structures.

Several works combine lustrous quillwork in animal portraits and landscapes that simultaneously depict and embody the forest ecosystem. He draws inspiration from other Indigenous art forms. “I like to engineer new things, and I like to complicate a weave,” he says. “Sometimes my technical challenges … you’ll never see them. I did it to see if it would work.”

Perhaps more pertinent is that the exhibition—and Frey himself—probe at what it means to “innovate” a customary

above Jeremy Frey (Passamaquoddy), Cathedral, 2018, black ash, sweetgrass, dye, 211/4 × 10 × 10 in., collection of the Portland Museum of Art, 2018.15 a, b. Photo: Luc Demers. Image courtesy of the Portland Museum of Art and the artist. opposite Jeremy Frey (Passamaquoddy), Detail of Basket within a Basket, 2012, black ash, sweetgrass, dye, 9 × 13 × 13 in., collection of Dr. and Mrs. Ari and Lea Plosker.

Photo: Eric Stoner. Image courtesy of the Portland Museum of Art and the artist.

art form. In press about Frey, it’s become a truism that Frey is an “innovator” or “elevator” of Wabanaki basketry. But often, such language can unfairly conflate recognition by a “contemporary art world” with the quality of the artwork, dismissing the many chains of innovation necessary to sustain any practice.

As Frey notes, there was a first person to create a curl over-weave and to braid sweetgrass. “The changes that I’ve made, while they’re contemporary now, I’m still Passamaquoddy, and I’m still making baskets.” In Navigating Tradition (2023), Frey uses basketry to ruminate on this question directly. The basket’s exterior is humble by Frey’s standards, the undyed weaves vary in thickness, a reference to the utility baskets his ancestors wove to make a living.

Tucked inside, however, is a hidden fine weave saturated with rich reds and purples of a Dawnland sunset. To innovate, as this basket seems to suggest, is not to ignore the “traditional” but to treat it as an interlocutor and source of inspiration.

So, with this context, what does one make of Ash’s burning basket? Is it a commentary on the art world? Does it jab at how museums fetishize objects while ignoring the cultural knowledge necessary to create them? Frey doesn’t give an answer. But just as ashes nourish the soil and enable new growth, one can imagine that the burned basket, for Frey, represents a site of emergence for ongoing methods and modes of artistic experimentation.

—Julia Silverman

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SANTA FE

Painted by Hand: The Textiles of Patricia Michaels Museum of Indian Arts and Culture

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ATRICIA MICHAELS (Taos Pueblo), the 2024 recipient of the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture (MIAC) Living Treasure Artist Award, transforms hand-painted landscapes on fabric into couture. Known professionally as Waterlily Designs in honor of her Native name, her methods of making sculptural fashion form the basis of MIAC’s annual exhibition that spotlights the unique art practices of the Native Treasure honorees. Seven of her ensembles are on view for the next year in Painted by Hand: The Textiles of Patricia Michaels, which opened on May 5, 2024.

Michaels is an alumna of the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago

above PM Waterlily (Taos), Change of Seasons, wrap dress, silk, wool, dyes, Summer/Fall 2020. Image courtesy of PM Waterlily and the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs.

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(SAIC). From her time at IAIA, she learned to integrate Indigenous cultural representation into fashion. This approach comes from the long-lasting influence of Lloyd Kiva New (Cherokee Nation, 1916–2002) at IAIA where he was art director (1961– 1967) and director (1967–1978). New encouraged IAIA students to incorporate patterns and symbols of their cultures into their artistic expressions. He emphasized screen-printed fabrics and leather handbags and collaborated with Native jewelers to create tufa-cast silver buckles shown in his Scottsdale fashion showroom. Like Michaels, New also attended SAIC. Michaels’ approach to fashion was at first questioned in Native American circles—Indian Market organizers said she was “taking away from tradition”1—since the materials and patterns were not familiar to jurors who accepted and rejected artists for these shows. Michaels relies on abstraction rather than naturalistic representation to tell visual narratives of the Southwest that respect tribal protocols. She primarily uses high-end, handpainted silk to reflect the richness of Taos Pueblo culture. But she also makes digitally printed fabric from her originals to make her work accessible. While she’s maintained her studios in Santa Fe and Taos for many years, she’s forged global connections that grew considerably after she appeared on the reality television series Project Runway in 2013.

Michaels’ artwork offers site-specific narratives, memories of a particular locale that embody her deep love of landscapes: reflections on beloved places of home and the Southwest. Her fashion ensembles emerge from her complex, labor-intensive process where she brings together abstract, visual elements of the land that give depth to her designs and patterns.

Periods of observation lead to many days of creation.

Michaels paints abstract landscapes on silk and then reshapes and steams each roll of fabric. The two-dimensional medium then becomes three-dimensional as the artist drapes it into inventive, wearable clothing. Her ensembles move between details of the land, like a visual slideshow that flashes an image of one texture and then flows into the next ripple or stepped pattern.

Golden Chamisa Dress (ca. 2019), made of silks, silk/rayon velvet, satin ribbon, and mica, evokes a sense of the annual bloom of this iconic flower along the northern Rio Grande. In full length with elbow-length sleeves, the dress communicates femininity in the textures of long, extending stems and full flowers. The gold fabric alludes to the chamisa’s pollen. It’s placed adjacent to blue accents, reminiscent of a night sky, at the top, midline, and lowest sections of the dress. The dress suggests the transition from daytime to nighttime, with the chamisa shifting from awake to restful states. For this artwork, Michaels “danced 800 times in four directions” on the fabric so the different textures would adhere to each other.2 Michaels includes mica to refer to her home in the shadow of Pueblo Peak at Taos Pueblo. The copper, sparkling mannequins in this exhibition also underline the centrality of micaceous clay to the Northern Pueblo tribes. Michaels stated, “Being from Taos Pueblo, I love to use mica since we’re known for our micaceous pottery and interior whitewash.”

Pottery Shards Dress (ca. 2023), a beige gown in silk and leather, speaks to the trade routes of Northern New Mexico and the many ancestral tribes of the Southwest that produced 1. All quotes Patricia Michaels in discussion with the author, April 29, 2024.

black-on-white pottery vessels. A silk dress in full-length with appliquéd leather “sherds,” Michaels’ choice of beige as the unifying color relates directly to the brown clay for pottery. The sherds follow a curved pattern on the dress—from the upper bodice, down the left leg, and across the bottom edge. The positioning of the sherds indicates a wearing of culture and a visual exchange as pottery passed between the hands of many women of Southwestern tribes. Michaels’ use of silk and leather conveys the ongoing legacy of intertribal trade at Taos Pueblo.

MMIW&R Gown (ca. 2024), a full-length dress in silk, features a high neck and flowing bodice appliquéd with numerous white silk moccasins with red outer soles. The dense cascade of shoes in their varied sizes foregrounds the Missing and Murdered Women and Relatives (MMIW&R) crisis as a devastating struggle across Native communities. This design also visualizes the many connections between families and friends in Indigenous cultures, while the dress’s elegance represents the grace of Native

women in remembering loved ones. The dress as social commentary calls for a wider acknowledgment of the MMIW&R crisis, as the many moccasins demonstrate how many people are affected by this violence each year. Michaels explains, “Something so beautiful walking on this earth, as a Native American, and then going missing. It’s only one side of the moccasins; the other side is missing.”

The strength and versatility of Native women, as learned from Mother Earth, resonates as a common thread between all seven ensembles on view. The remaining artworks focus on narratives of Sedona, embroidery, florals, and golden eagle feathers. These themes provide an ongoing, visual conversation of maternal resilience in relationship with the land.

Irrepressible in her artistry, Michael has led by taking chances in her fashion designs. The in-gallery video provides key insights into the everyday contexts of the artist’s work. It places her in dialogue with the cadres of painters, of both pottery and canvases, in and around Taos Pueblo and Northern New Mexico. Her relationship

to past and present Southwest landscape artists becomes clear in a scene where Michaels paints her silk fabric in plein air against a tree in Taos Pueblo. Her connections to the future come to fruition as she enters the process of draping these landscape paintings into wearable art forms. The exhibition situates her in the past, present, and future of the area’s renowned art history.

About her art practice, Michaels said, “It doesn’t hurt to be soft or nurturing. Our world really needs that. I wanted to have women celebrate that more. As a Taos Pueblo woman, the reason I love to do women’s couture is because we’re appreciated during the time of ceremonies where we’re celebrated for our ability to be strong women.”

Michaels’ position as a Taos Pueblo female storyteller in fashion makes history. Her narratives in couture come to life and engage people in intimate ways.

These feminine memories of the land carry on as they’re worn well into the future.

—Michelle J. Lanteri, PhD

2. David Saiz, “Native-Inspired Haute Couture [sic] Fashion Prepares for a Big Year,” Hyperallergic, March 22, 2022, web.

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REVIEWS

WEST BEND, WI

ukwé·tase (newcomer/stranger) Museum of Wisconsin Art

R

EGULAR VISITORS to the Museum of Wisconsin Art (MOWA) are used to seeing impressive, sometimes startling works by artists with Wisconsin connections. From the looks on faces of those approaching ukwé·tase (newcomer/ stranger), a massive installation by artist and architect Chris T Cornelius (Oneida Nation), it’s clear that those expectations have just risen to new levels.

The single piece by Cornelius, originally designed for and first displayed at the 2023 Chicago Architectural Biennial, is breathtaking both in concept and execution. It dominates the MOWA gallery it occupies and is flanked by 16 prints of related images by Cornelius from the museum’s permanent collection.

A highly stylized “residence,” the piece measures 12 by 20 feet for most of its nonrectangular construction and reaches 14 feet at its highest point. Built primarily of painted plywood, its exterior

style extends from sleek minimalism at one end to more Indigenous influences at the other, with surfaces covered by stitched deer hides and metallic jingles similar to those worn on the dresses of Indigenous women designed to make sound when they walk or dance.

Visitors approach the architectural construct cautiously at first, apparently appraising its structure and purpose. But ukwé·tase (newcomer/stranger) is meant to be participative. The plain white interior space features a bench that allows one to sit and gaze at a video screen of the changing sky above Albuquerque where Cornelius, who was born in Milwaukee and raised on an Oneida Nation Reservation in Northern Wisconsin, now serves as chair of the University of New Mexico’s department of architecture.

The brilliant, often cerulean blue of the New Mexico firmament stands in stark contrast to Wisconsin’s normal grey, cloudy overhang, which suggests that it’s possible to rise above what has come before. It’s even true for those like the artist himself who become strangers in a strange land, a land that reflects complex histories of occupation and ownership. ukwé·tase (newcomer/stranger) contains elements of sculpture and

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architecture, Cornelius told me. The installation also plays a critical role in its interpretation and presentation of Indigenous cultural values.

“Art is intended to be experiential like architecture,” the artist said. He wants the installation to advance discussion about Indigenous architecture. “The images are new and of my authorship, but the values are about our nonhuman relatives, Indigenous regalia, the sky, and so forth. We should not be separated from those things, but still be in dialogue with them.”

Cornelius founded studio:indigenous, an Albuquerque-based design firm that focuses on art and architectural designs for Indigenous clients nationwide. His installation work has earned numerous awards, including the Architect’s Newspaper Best of Design Award in 2018 and 2022, and he was a 2003 artist in residence at the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, DC. “I’m not trying to replicate Indigenous forms, but I keep Indigenous values as the core of what is important to me,” Cornelius told me. “They are intended to push the dialogue.” ukwé·tase (newcomer/ stranger) will be on display through January 2025.

—Michael Muckian

On view through August 11, 2024

The Heritage Center at Maȟpíya Lúta Detail of “Music Sounds Better with You” by Amé Myles (Spirit Lake Dakota)

100 Mission Dr. Pine Ridge, SD 605.867.8257 more info at

redcloudart.show Ame Myles (Spirit Lake Dakota) Ame Myles (Spirit LakeWith Dakota) Music Sounds Better You Music Sounds Better With You 2022. Mixed Media 2022. Mixed Media FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 43, SUMMER 2024 | 93

REVIEWS

FILM Hey, Viktor!

Directed by Cody Lightning (Samson Cree), 2023

W

HEN THE FILM Smoke Signals was released 25 years ago, it shifted how we saw ourselves on the big screen. A product of New

York University–educated Chris Eyre (Southern Cheyenne) and author Sherman Alexie (Spokane/Coeur d’Alene), it was “billed as the first feature written, directed, co-produced and acted

by American Indians,” as Roger Ebert summarized.1 For those who are new to Turtle Island, Smoke Signals is a 1998 film about rez teens Victor Joseph and Thomas Builds-the-Fire, their friendship, and a road trip to pick up the remains of Victor’s father, Arnold Joseph. It features some of the rezziest wigs in cinematic history, and notable appearances by Irene

Bedard, Michael Greyeyes, Tantoo Cardinal, Elaine Miles, John Trudell, and many more famous actors.

In flashback scenes with Arnold Joseph, played by Gary Farmer (Cayuga), Alberta-based actor Cody Lightning (Samson Cree) gained immediate recognition in Indian Country as young Victor Joseph, with Simon Baker (Cree/ Haida/Squamish) cast as young Thomas Builds-the-Fire.

Flash forward 25 years to a nowadult Cody attempting to reclaim his childhood fame by creating a sequel to Smoke Signals by any means possible.

In this directing debut mockumentary film, Hey, Viktor!, Lightning brings his gross-out comedy to the big screen, featuring many of the original stars of Smoke Signals, most notably Simon Baker, who joins Cody in the quest for a sequel. Hey, Viktor! was written by Lightning and Samuel Miller, and is executive produced

by Miller and Blackhorse Lowe (Navajo).

It premiered at Tribeca Film Festival in the United States and the Toronto International Film Festival in Canada before hitting the festival circuit in the U.S., including imagineNATIVE, deadCenter, the Native Cinema Showcase, and more.

With this simple premise, Lightning embarks on a drug- and alcohol-fueled quest to regain his fame and escape from the drug- and alcohol-fueled wreck of a life he currently is living. The film opens with Cody teaching a poorly attended acting class at a tribal center where he bores the students with his scenes from Smoke Signals and cusses them out during scene work. We then meet his longsuffering agent Kate (played by Hannah Cheesman), who books her client in some alternative projects just to help keep the lights on. In a scene many filmmakers will appreciate, Kate walks viewers through the volumes of scripts she and Cody have written throughout the years, only to realize they are all the same plot in different settings.

1. Roger Ebert, “Smoke Signals,” RogerEbert.com, July 3, 1998.

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35TH ANNUAL

… Cody visits each of the former stars of Smoke Signals, trying to get them to join the cast.

We eventually learn more about Cody’s failed relationships, his poor parenting, his addictions, and bad decisions, including an infusion of cash by a German mobster promptly lost in a celebratory night of partying.

As the story marches toward the actual shooting of the sequel, Cody visits each of the former stars of Smoke Signals, trying to get them to join the cast. Needless to say, he has no takers until he cons Simon by promising him a partnership in the profits. The film does get finished, but only after Cody comes to terms with his addiction, straightens up his act, and completes the project.

A slew of scenes are laugh-out-loud funny, many rooted in nostalgia for the original film, along with outlandish scenarios that Cody gets himself into through his bad decisions. At times it feels like Cody is trying to pick up the nekkid-NDN mantle from Gary Farmer, so viewers should be prepared for several full moons. The director made interesting choices in what to show and what to leave to the imagination, such as the failure of the first screening of the sequel and the resolution with the financier.

While entertaining and original, the continuous antics tend to slow down the story, and Cody never seems to really hit rock bottom before making the decision to turn his life around. Things speed up again once he begins making amends, especially with Simon. This leads to a new edit of the sequel and to Cody trying to rebuild relationships with his kids and his manager whom he had alienated during his journey through addiction. These decisions eventually bring a form of success to Cody that viewers will appreciate.

While the mockumentary focuses mainly on shooting Cody’s dream film, it glosses over several issues facing Natives, including DNA tests and religious residential schools. When Kate’s heritage comes up, was her DNA test really necessary? While the writers and producers are known for their irreverent works such as Reservation Dogs and Echo, including this subject in the story didn’t make a lot of sense. Conversely, the inclusion of the religious residential schools was very satisfying. Without giving too much away, let’s just say the audience reacted much more favorably to the version of the film with nuns and priests than the original edit of the sequel.

On our podcast, Reel Indigenous, we lament writers and directors focusing solely on our trauma in their media.

This film turns all of that on its head. It’s irreverent, overthe-top, full of bathroom humor, and a joy to watch. It’s the genre film we didn’t know we needed.

—Angela Startz (Iñupiaq), Reel Indigenous

REVIEWS

OSCAR HOWE MEMORIAL LECTURE

Oscar Howe, Singer with Dancers, 1971, © The Howe Family

Thursday, Sept. 19, 2024 7-8 p.m.

Colton Recital Hall Warren M. Lee Center for the Fine Arts University of South Dakota

Public Reception Native American Cultural Center | 5:30–6:30 p.m.

Light refreshments will be served.

Lecturer: Talon Bazille Ducheneaux Rap artist, producer and sound designer from the Cheyenne River Lakota and Crow Creek Dakota tribes in South Dakota Hearing Ancestors: Self-Actualization through Sound Art Performance by Bazille following the lecture at the AV Lounge, Downtown Vermillion, start 8:30pm

Prayer and song by Damon Leader Charge

Sponsored by the Oscar Howe Memorial Association, the Native American Cultural Center, the Native Student Services, the Institute of American Indian Studies, University Art Galleries and the College of Fine Arts at theMAGAZINE University of South Dakota. 2024 | 95 FIRST AMERICAN ART NO. 43, SUMMER

ART+LIT

Yanktonai Dakota Author

MONA SUSAN POWER

By Matthew Ryan Smith, PhD of Dolls, was long-listed for the National Book Award and the Carol Shields Prize in Fiction. Her short stories and personal essays have been published in journals and magazines such as the Atlantic, the Paris Review, and Granta.

Power lives in St. Paul, Minnesota.

MRS: When did your interest in writing first develop?

MSP: My parents met in the world of publishing, so I was born into a family of readers. Books were our mutual obsession! I was granted my first library card when I was two years old because librarians noted how reverently I treated books. So the love of story and language was there from my earliest memory. My mother had a wonderful imagination and could create stories as easily as drawing breath. She encouraged my own wild imaginings. I yearned to read and write when I was still too young to attend school.

M

ONA SUSAN POWER is an enrolled citizen of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe and is an author of four books of fiction: The Grass Dancer (1994), Roofwalker (2002), Sacred Wilderness (2014), and A Council of Dolls (2023). Power was born in 1961 in Chicago, Illinois. Her father, Carleton G. Power (1915–1973), worked in publishing, and her mother, Susan Kelly Power (Standing Rock Dakota, 1925–2022), was an activist and one of the founders of the American Indian Center of Chicago. As a child, Mona Susan Power was a member of the Chicago Indian Village (CIV) movement, which advocated for those Indigenous people who had been coerced into moving to major cities in the Relocation Era through promises of good jobs and housing, which never materialized. She appeared in the Oscar-nominated documentary film about the CIV, The Divided Trail: A Native American Odyssey (1977), and attended Oscar ceremonies with director Jerry Aronson.

Upon graduating from high school in Chicago, Power entered Harvard College and later earned a juris doctor degree from Harvard Law School. After law school, she turned to writing and earned an MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. She received numerous fellowships and her national bestselling novel, The Grass Dancer, won a PEN/Hemingway Prize. More recently, her bestselling novel, A Council 96 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 43, SUMMER 2024

MRS: Did you journal or keep a diary during your early years? Do you keep one now?

MSP: Oh, yes! I began journaling at the age of seven, and would also set myself essays to write, just for fun. It’s hilarious reading the rants of my younger self! To be honest, my journals aren’t remarkable in any way, not well written. They’ve offered a much-needed personal safe space where I can download concerns and record my dreams (both literal dreams that come as I sleep, which are sometimes predictive of future events, and also life goals).

MRS: What was the impulse to study law and to attend Harvard? What drove your transition from law to writing fiction?

MSP: I responded to the place itself: Cambridge, Massachusetts.

I was raised knowing about my Iháŋktȟuŋwaŋna Dakhóta heritage and was immersed in the activities and culture of our urban Indian community. My father wasn’t Native American, but he had zero interest in his own background and didn’t share family stories with me. So I didn’t know much about his experience or ancestry. That’s not to say he wasn’t generous with me; he would read to me each night before I could read for myself. I was enthralled with his dramatic flair for making the characters come so vividly alive! Tragically he died in 1973 when I was eleven years old.

My mother wanted to make sure that I knew something about my father’s heritage, which fascinated her, so when I was 13 we took a trip to places on the East Coast where his people were from—Massachusetts being one of them. I’ll never forget our nighttime taxi ride from Logan Airport to our hotel in Cambridge. We passed through Harvard Square, which was alive with

ART+LIT

people playing music. So much activity! I felt an instant connection to the place and thought to myself, “I’m going to live here someday.” And I did. I lived in that area for a total of 14 years.

As far as attending law school, I was really attempting to live my mother’s dream. She would have made a stellar attorney and often helped folks in our community when they needed legal advice. I, on the other hand, have always been an arts person.

From earliest memory, I was passionate about singing, dancing, acting, and writing. But Mom did her best to steer me away from trying to make a living at any of these things. So I got my degree and tried my hand at law jobs during summers between school years, but by the time I graduated, I realized that being a lawyer would never suit me. I could have a nine-to-five job, but not one that would consume my entire waking life, so I immediately made the shift. I got a job that wasn’t in law, that was strictly a “job job” that allowed me the time and focus I needed to get serious about developing my craft as a writer. Four years after earning my law degree, I moved to Iowa City to earn my MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop.

MRS: Has the meaning of writing changed for you over 30 years? Do you now approach it differently? Has your attitude toward it changed? Do you appreciate it more?

MSP: Writing—the rhythms of language and the challenge of discovering story—has always been integral to my very being. It’s like an extra set of lungs, without which I cannot fully breathe.

The only change I see after all these years, a significant one, is that I no longer carry shame and a sense of unworthiness in my pockets. I’ve learned to clear out all the noise of sabotage.

So my mental health diseases no longer stand between me and my favorite art form. I give myself permission to write, to fail, to delight myself with story.

MRS: Can you talk about your process of research? Before undertaking a serious project like A Council of Dolls, can you offer some insight into the steps taken before the physical act of writing takes place?

MSP: Each project has different requirements. I began writing A Council of Dolls in February of 2021 when the pandemic was raging. I was healing from a broken arm. Once the doctor said I could begin using the arm again, I started typing. I did the least amount of research with this novel because so much of the information was available to me in my own memory via the stories I was told since childhood. My mother spoke often about her Indian boarding school experiences and also that of her parents. Years earlier I’d started collecting books on this history, so I already had a dozen or more at hand. Once I’d completed the novel, I reached out to an expert on the history of the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, which both my maternal grandparents attended, asking if she might be willing to read the chapter set at Carlisle. Turns out she is a fan of my first novel, so she was most generous in spending time with the manuscript and offering her notes. I have a vast library of books on Native American history—some of them given to me by my mother,

above A Council of Dolls (Mariner Books, 2023). The cover art is beadwork by Holly Young (Standing Rock Dakota). opposite Mona Susan Power. Photo: Ted Hall. Both images courtesy of the artist.

and many of them my own finds I’ve collected. So I’m lucky to own an abundance of reference materials.

MRS: A Council of Dolls is a book of girls in three parts: Sissy, Lillian, and Cora, each born in 1961, 1925, and 1888 respectively. Several themes are mapped in the book, but Indian boarding schools are perhaps the most prominent.

Though it is fictional, this story has autobiographical elements. Can you discuss your mother’s presence in the novel and the importance of narrating the boarding school experience?

MSP: Initially I wrote a short story titled “Naming Ceremony” in the fall of 2019. I submitted it to a contest offered by the Missouri Review. The piece was selected as a runner-up and published in 2021. I sent a copy of the story to a dear writer friend in advance of publication. She wrote back to me that she could see the piece developed into an entire novel about the doll character, Ethel, who is a Black Tiny Thumbelina doll—inspired by one I loved so well in childhood. So in October of 2020, the idea of turning FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 43, SUMMER 2024 | 97

ART+LIT

U

NLIKE MY FATHER and most of my schoolteachers, I believe in magic. I believe the Universe speaks to me in ways that others will miss if they haven’t learned to pay attention. The Universe isn’t always noisy and obvious, sky-writing what it wants us to know in large cursive loops like the Wicked Witch’s message in The Wizard of Oz. Sometimes the voice is quiet and subtle, seeming to rise from our innermost depths.

The Universe offers me visions, short films that play in my head without dialogue. An older woman dances in a buckskin dress on the moon. A young woman descends from the sky as if riding an invisible escalator, a wampum belt slung across one shoulder. I am given these mysteries to solve, these characters who arrive like strangers and end up relatives.

My first paragraphs of solution, of story, are a leap of faith. I trust the visions have come from a place that is true, that will ultimately reveal what I need to know when I’m ready to listen. I work with my characters as if I’m their confessor, their therapist. I’m grateful when they begin to reveal their lives and secrets. I cannot say I am their Creator because they don’t arrive in pieces, even if pieces are all I see in the beginning. They are whole.

They are separate. They come from deep places I don’t fully understand. They are my teachers.

—Mona Susan Power (Standing Rock Dakota) Excerpted from the essay “Spirit Talk” by Mona Susan Power.

Reprinted with permission of the author.

Sissy’s tale into a book-length manuscript began to roll around in my imagination.

Then I broke my arm near the shoulder and couldn’t write for a time. But I kept musing on this potential project.…

By the time I was allowed to use the arm again, I had figured out this could be a multi-generational story. The reason for this is that I didn’t want the mother character, Lillian, to be seen as a villain by readers. Sissy adores this mother, as I adored mine, even though the mother’s woundedness can sometimes become a danger to the young girl. I thought that by moving backward in time, offering readers a chance to see what the parental figures had gone through when they were children, would ultimately make them more sympathetic characters, harmed by the system of colonization. Some of the descriptions of Lillian’s experience, as well as Cora’s and Jack’s, were drawn from family episodes. However, to turn this work into fiction, I made choices here and there that changed the specifics enough to help me leap into the realm of imagination. Also, even when I’d been given a brief outline of a family event that

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happened before I was born, the details were sparse enough to create a sketch, as opposed to a full-blown scene where I’m imagining my way into the heads and hearts of my characters.

It was inevitable that the Indian boarding school experience would feature in the book given how much it impacted generations of my family. From the anecdotes Mom shared with me about that history, I felt she’d had shame drilled into her by the teachers and administrators and by the very concept and purpose of these schools. I knew from my mother that my grandfather loathed the Carlisle Indian Industrial School and ran away from there several times. That place left a mark on him that never healed.

What I found chilling was that I’d felt such an urgency to write this particular novel in 2021, ahead of other books that were already cooking, and less than a week after completing it, the news broke that a burial site containing the remains of Indigenous children who attended the Kamloops Residential School in Canada had been discovered. So many people in Canada and the United States had no idea

ART+LIT

about this horrific history. I keep hearing from readers: “Why don’t I know this? Why weren’t we taught this in school?”

Because nations tend to whitewash the past and hide their awful secrets.…

MRS: You’re writing a new novel, The Year of Fury. I’m a little worried about your posture! Do you still write on the couch with your feet up? Can you describe what this new book is about?

MSP: Ha! I know, it’s terrible to work on the couch, though I make sure to get outside for exercise each day. Even in winter. I’ve never been able to write at a desk. I’m currently working to complete a novel I started longer ago than the Fury book. Its working title is Harvard Indian Séance at the Lizzie Borden Bed & Breakfast. I began writing it in 2014, but then A Council of Dolls demanded I drop everything else and write it instead in 2021. I always follow my inner guidance, even when I don’t yet understand

the reason for its demands. Now the Harvard novel is poking at me to finally wrap it up! The story focuses on five Native American students at Harvard, class of 2013, each from different tribal nations.

During their senior year, the only one of their group who comes from money decides to rent out the Lizzie Borden House for a night so they can have a final adventure together! However, it turns out to be a much more dangerous situation than they expected.

I’ve long been a fan of truelife ghost stories and have had some hair-raising experiences myself, but this novel also explores the academic lives of these characters. Thanks to a Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Fellowship that was generously granted to me in 2016, I was able to rent out the infamous Lizzie Borden House bed and breakfast in Fall River, Massachusetts, for a night, sharing the experience with two dear friends.

We were not disappointed!

MONASUSANPOWER.COM

above Holly Young (Standing Rock Dakota), Detail of We Adorn Our Children, 2023, color pencil, ink on antique ledger paper. Both images courtesy of the artist. opposite Holly Young (Standing Rock Dakota), Moccasins with Yuhaha Design, 2024, braintanned deer hide, cotton fabric, 13° seed beads, Nymo thread, 9 in. long.

HOLLY YOUNG

T

HIZÁPTAŊNA/WIČHÍYENA DAKOTA artist Holly Young creates exquisite beadwork, quillwork, and ledger art. She is an enrolled citizen of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, who lives in Bismarck, North Dakota, with her daughter.

Images of her beadwork grace the cover of two books by Mona Susan Power (Standing Rock Dakota): A Council of Dolls and the newest edition of The Grass Dancer.

Both of Young’s grandmothers were beadwork artists. She honed her skills during a residency at the Minnesota Historical Society and later taught herself quillwork. Through research of historical Dakota beadwork, she creates new works such as moccasins, umbilical amulets, and even cradleboards firmly grounded in Dakota aesthetics.

Dakota beadwork encodes botanical knowledge in seemingly decorative designs.

Young highlights the medicinal and cultural significance of native plants through her floral beadwork but also through plant imagery in her ledger art. She highlights plants integral to Dakota lifeways, such as thíŋpsiŋna or prairie turnip (Psoralea esculenta), an important staple with curative powers and showy blue flowers. Raised by her grandmother outside of Fort Yates on the Standing Rock Reservation, Young’s knowledge of flora and fauna comes from her lived experiences on the land.

Her ledger art shares details of camp life with detailed tipis and parfleches. She highlights women’s work of making homes, processing hides, and caring for their families. Faceless, timeless women wear highly detailed regalia, from dentalium earrings and yokes to brass-studded belts. She shares enduring hide painting and quillwork motifs.

Her elegant images juxtapose the gridlines of antique ledger art with its flowery script.

Young also brightens public spaces through her painted murals. She regularly shows at tribal museums in the Upper Midwest. Her work is in the collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Art and numerous private collections.

—America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

HYOUNG.ARTSPAN.COM

FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 43, SUMMER 2024 | 99

OPINION

ORIGINALITY VS. SUBVERSION How can image reproduction uphold cultural protocols?

By Matt Jarvis (Osage)

A

S AN INDIGENOUS PHOTOGRAPHER, I change color images into black-and-white photographs and then add other media to color the environment back into them. Through this process, I raise questions about the veracity of black-and-white documentary photography.

The question of original versus subversion is of extreme interest to me. I have only altered and manipulated my own photographs, shot with the plan of adding to them later. I have shown these artworks that incorporate old family photographs

in only one exhibition, but I made no changes to the original scanned images that I had the right to use for the exhibition.

Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) law has many tricky questions, but the questions all ignore cultural contextualization of an image of a person, place, object, or even a reproduced object. IPR invents ownership in a market economy and ignores the Indigenous peoples’ principle of making art to build up, fit into, or question one’s culture. Each photographer or media artist makes creative and compositional choices.

Even (or especially) if they are an “outsider,” their art is an original, creative thought process even if from an ignorant or prejudiced, outsider’s perspective. The alteration or manipulation of their original, creative conception is not another person’s sketch used by another painter to create something new. The alteration or manipulation is literally a subversion and should be noted as such.

Let me explain my take on this subject. When I was a graduate student I went to Cahokia Mounds,1 and because I am Osage, a Dhegiha Siouan person, I was allowed to photograph in the museum’s collections. I photographed a mortuary head pot in color and used it in my Midway exhibition. A Ponca (another Dhegiha Siouan tribe) elder/friend viewed the exhibition, but he was aghast I had included the mortuary head pot. My photo was unaltered and basically a document of the object. We could both read it and knew the person portrayed in the pot was Quapaw (another Dhegiha Siouan tribe) with representations of the title and honors he had earned during his life.

Yes, I had done the wrong thing by exhibiting this image to the public. I destroyed the digital file. No, I did not destroy the original slide, because as long as I do not show the image to the public, there is nothing wrong with having the image to help inspire other artwork that does not publicize knowledge that wasn’t created to be public.

A few years ago another Indigenous artist created an exhibition of “modern” representations of a head pot. He has no heritage going back to Cahokia and he had a Northwest Coast artist help make the glass objects he designed from photographs. He said he did not want to offend the descendants of Cahokia but wanted to contemporize their artwork. Lo and behold, the signature piece used for exhibition publicity derived

1. Cahokia Mounds, located in Collinsville, Illinois, are the site of the largest precontact city in North America north of the Rio Grande. Likely a multilingual, multiethnic center, Cahokia Mounds flourished between 800 and 1350. The city is associated with Dhegiha Siouan–speaking peoples which include the Kaw, Osage, Omaha, Ponca, and Quapaw peoples. —Ed.

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OPINION

from the same mortuary head pot I had photographed and exhibited. So as not to offend his fellow Indigenous peoples, the Indigenous artist removed and altered some of the markings on the head pot.

This uneducated gesture offended not only the cremated person’s descendants but also the person whose ashes were inside, doing spiritual harm to him. He might as well have gone back in time and buried him face down in the ground 800 years ago.

Among Dhegiha Siouan peoples, cremation was reserved only for those who earned our highest esteem. Mortuary head pots were extremely individualized objects to encapsulate the soul of that person here on earth in hopes it was strong enough and would influence those still alive on this plane. Most Dhegiha Siouan people were buried sitting up, facing the sun so an eagle could be sent to gather up their soul and take it back to the Creator. The redesign of the head pot unwittingly caused catastrophic spiritual harm. Mortuary head pots weren’t made for later artists to redesign and profit from whether they were altered or not.

There is always the option for an individual to creatively rephotograph or alter an object/person/place, for instance with color. Depending on the artist’s cultural knowledge and technical abilities, this process can be educational instead of offensive. Postmodern photography has many examples of this process. The best re-photographers study the journals and notes of previous photographers so that they may replicate the view that was seen previously but also show how geography, human habitation, and technology have changed since the original photograph.

They also illustrate geological strata that were excavated or left in their natural state to make them more recognizable with color photography. This can also be done with cultural objects to document and study how objects were made if it is done with careful attention to cultural significance of such objects.

I imagine the issue will be brought up with 3D printing from old photographs. Does NAGPRA extend to reproductions of buried grave objects

Yes, I had done the wrong thing by exhibiting this image to the public. I destroyed the digital file. that were photographed? Legally speaking, does a polymer object derived from a photograph then become a new object that was never in a grave and not made by a Native American?

People should want to only take credit for the artwork they actually create instead of other’s artwork. When pushing a button on a machine to colorize or actually make a 3D object, why should the button pusher get the credit instead of the software designer or machine?

The public rejected Ted Turner’s 1988 colorized version of Casablanca and rightly so. We Indigenous people want our cultures to have dignity and to help build it up, fit into it, or question it—not subvert it.

above Matt Jarvis (Osage), Eagle Fan, platinum photograph on fiber paper, 10 × 8 in., exhibited in Red + White = Blue: A Grad Student's Midway Exhibit (2002), Norman, OK. opposite Matt Jarvis (Osage), The Mad Hatter, hand-tinted photograph, 18 × 12 in., and projected photograph, dimensions variable, exhibited in Rez-AVision (2006–07), Shanghai, China. Both images courtesy of the artist.

FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 43, SUMMER 2024 | 101

SPOTLIGHT

NORVAL MORRISSEAU’S ASTRAL GUIDE I AND II

By David J. Harris Cosmological interpretation and cultural wisdom provided by Philip Cote (Moose Deer Point Anishinaabe/Shawnee/Lakota/Mohawk)

N

ORVAL MORRISSEAU (Bingwi Neyaashi Ojibwa, 1932–2007), often hailed as the “Picasso of the North,” occupies a distinguished place in the realm of Indigenous artistry. Born in 1932 on the Sand Point Reserve near Beardmore, Ontario, Morrisseau emerged as a pioneering force in the Indigenous art movement that challenged Eurocentric narratives and revitalized Indigenous artistic practices. His bold use of lines, vibrant colors, and symbolism rooted in Ojibwe culture distinguish his work and underscore his profound connection to his heritage.

Among his extensive body of work, Astral Guide I and II stand out as seminal pieces, epitomizing Morrisseau’s visionary prowess and profound connection to the spiritual realm.

Painted in 1978, this diptych is inspired by his experiences with Ojibwe spiritual teachings and shamanic visions. Through intricate brushstrokes and vivid colors, Morrisseau transports viewers into a transformative odyssey and weaves together humanity, nature, and the divine within the sacred framework of Ojibwe cosmology.

Morrisseau’s artistic techniques reflect his vibrant, spiritually deep Indigenous heritage. His use of bold outlines, reminiscent of classical Ojibwe art, guides the viewer’s eye and imbues the artwork with movement and vitality. In Astral Guide I and II, dynamic outlines define the figures, pulsating with energy and inviting viewers into the mystical realms depicted within the diptychs.

The vibrant color palette of Astral Guide I and II evokes the richness of Indigenous cultural expression, with each hue carrying profound symbolic significance. Greens, blues, oranges, and reds symbolize the interconnectedness of all life forms and the cyclical rhythms of nature. Morrisseau’s intuitive color choices emanate from a heightened state of consciousness and explore the depths of Indigenous worldviews.

Morrisseau’s creative process was deeply spiritual, guided by his connection to the ancestral realm and Ojibwe shamanism. He described his artistic journey as a “vision quest,” during which he communed with ancestral spirits for guidance. This mystical dimension infuses his paintings with authenticity and depth and elevates them to embodiments of Indigenous spirituality.

PHILIP COTE’S COSMOLOGICAL & SACRED WISDOM INTERPRETATION IN THE RADIANT PRESENCE of Elder Philip Cote, Morrisseau’s Astral Guide I and II take on deeper significance, resonating with the timeless wisdom of Ojibwe cosmology.

102 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 43, SUMMER 2024

SPOTLIGHT

Cote’s insights as an artist, activist, and traditional knowledge keeper offer a profound lens through which to understand the intricate layers of symbolism within the artworks.

“In Morrisseau’s Astral Guide I and II, the colors act as a language of the soul, speaking about the connections of all existence within the universe,” Elder Cote begins, his voice resonant, awestruck. “The vibrant greens, blues, oranges, and reds that saturate the canvas are not merely pigments on a surface; they are portals to the astral plane, channels for spiritual energy and enlightenment.”

Elder Cote continues: “These cosmic symbols in Astral Guide I—the sun and stars—show the path of spiritual growth, guiding us toward a deeper understanding of our place within the universe. They remind us that we are not separate from the universe but are part of the web of life.

“The aura field that surrounds the youthful figure in Astral Guide I represents more than just decoration,” Elder Cote explains. “It symbolizes the journey of spiritual awakening, a gradual unfolding of consciousness guided by ancestral wisdom and the rhythms of nature. Through Morrisseau’s paintings, we can join on this transformation journey, leaving behind the material world to join with the divine.” Elder Cote reflects that with each brushstroke, “Morrisseau invites us to contemplate the mysteries of existence and how all life is connected.”

Astral Guide I, he explains, also represents “spiritual apprenticeship.” Of Morrisseau’s palette, he says, “These colors reflect the vibrancy of the natural world, inviting us to explore the depths of the astral plane.

“In essence,” Elder Cote concludes, “Morrisseau’s Astral Guide I is more than just an artwork; it is a sacred portal to the heart of our Ojibwe cosmology and the timeless wisdom of our traditions.”

As our gazes shift to Astral Guide II, Elder Cote’s demeanor takes on a reverent quality. “Here,” he shares, “we face the height of spiritual evolution—a merging of ancestral knowledge and sacred insight.” The absence of yellow in the color palette shows a departure from earthly concerns, transcending our existence to join with the spiritual. “Morrisseau’s use of color and symbolism,” Cote observes, “invites viewers to begin a journey of exploration and discovery, going deep into our spirituality and cosmic wisdom.”

Elder Cote delves into the symbolism embedded within the artworks. “The background, split into sections of solid colors, represents the interconnectedness of all existence,” he explains. “The abstract shapes and forms, including birds, leaves, and flowers, contribute to this beyond-this-world scene.”

“As we pour ourselves into these paintings,” Cote continues, “we are transported to a dimension where time and space collide, and the boundaries between the known and unknown fade. Each brushstroke pulses with energy, bringing us deeper into our sacred stories.”

Through Cote’s guidance, viewers gain a deeper appreciation for the profound messages conveyed by Morrisseau’s artworks, which foster a sense of veneration for the mysteries of existence and the interconnectedness of all life forms.

In parallel with Morrisseau’s exploration of celestial spheres in Astral Guide I and II, this diptych offers a profound glimpse into Ojibwe cosmology and spirituality and elevates

opposite Norval Morrisseau (Bingwi Neyaashi Ojibwa, 1932–2007), Astral Guide I, 1978, acrylic on canvas, 119 × 54 in. Image courtesy of the Estate of Norval Morrisseau. © Estate of Norval Morrisseau. below Norval Morrisseau (Bingwi Neyaashi Ojibwa, 1932–2007), Astral Guide II, 1978, acrylic on canvas, 119 × 54 in. Image courtesy of the Estate of Norval Morrisseau. © Estate of Norval Morrisseau.

FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 43, SUMMER 2024 | 103

Morrisseau’s artistry to the forefront of contemporary discourse. Through meticulous interplay of imagery and symbolism, Morrisseau masterfully intertwines elements of archetypes, oral history, and cultural heritage. Viewers are beckoned into a transcendent realm where the boundaries between the physical and spiritual blur.

Morrisseau’s portrayal of a same-sex union within the astral plane challenges societal norms and underscores the fluidity of human experience. By celebrating diversity and inclusivity, Morrisseau empowers marginalized voices and reclaims Indigenous narratives, paving the way for greater representation and acceptance within the artistic community and beyond.

Cote’s interpretation underscores art’s transformative potential in activism

and showcases Morrisseau as a cultural catalyst. Morrisseau’s audacious vision and commitment to Indigenous sovereignty has inspired artists and activists for generations, sparking discourse on social justice and cultural revitalization. Astral Guide I and II became rallying points for Indigenous rights and in turn fostered discussions on land stewardship, cultural preservation, and colonial legacies.

Norval Morrisseau’s Astral Guide I and II, along with Philip Cote’s insights, delve into the nexus of art, spirituality, and cultural identity. Through vivid imagery, intricate symbolism, and profound analysis, these works transcend boundaries and take viewers on a journey of self-discovery and cultural understanding. In today’s complex world, Morrisseau’s visionary art shines as a beacon, guiding us toward reconciliation, justice, and collective healing.

David J. Harris is the global partnership director of the Estate of Norval Morrisseau.

He founded the Museum of Inuit Art in Toronto. above Norval Morrisseau (Bingwi Neyaashi Ojibwa, 1932–2007), Detail of Astral Guide I. Image courtesy of the Estate of Norval Morrisseau. © Estate of Norval Morrisseau.

Philip Cote (Moose Deer Point Anishinaabe/Shawnee/Lakota/Mohawk) is an artist, activist, historian, wisdom keeper, Sun dancer, Pipe Carrier, and sweat ceremony leader who earned his MFA degree from OCAD University.

104 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 43, SUMMER 2024

MEMORIAL

NORMA HOWARD December 19, 1958–April 30, 2024

N

ORMA HOWARD (Choctaw Nation/Mississippi Choctaw/ Chickasaw) invented an instantly recognizable watercolor technique. Her pastoral scenes of Choctaw life and history were executed with a precise method often compared to pointillism. This self-taught artist dropped out of her small-town high school. She didn’t learn about pointillism until she was already a professional artist.

Her technique, which she called “basketweave stroke,” came about organically.

Howard discovered the technique when she painted a basket into one of her scenes. Noticing how the crosshatch strokes created a unique look, she decided to take it further. Ultimately, she began painting with up to five layers of diamond-based cross-hatching to create a distinct look imbued with meaning.

“I discovered this on my own— using tiny, diamondback strokes that come out of ancient art,” she recalled.1 “All of our clothing, our baskets, everything relates to diamondback rattlesnakes. We admire their personality, so to speak.

They mind their business, same as we Choctaw do, but if you mess with us, we’re going to strike you and that’s what we admire. We’re like that.”

Born Norma Cher Williams, she grew up in rural Southeastern Oklahoma with eight siblings. The family experienced financial hardship, but she said the happy family life depicted in her works reflected her own experience and the memories shared with her by elders.

She cherished the stories her mother told in their Choctaw language (which was her first language). Her father, a house painter, provided his children with leftover paint and wood scraps with which to create. A reader himself, he also made sure his children had books and newspapers that showed them the wider world.

Her grandmother, Lena Gibson Morris, a Choctaw basket weaver from Mississippi, lived nearby. Howard often said

above Norma Howard in her home studio. Image courtesy of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.

that her family was her greatest support and influence.

Life outside the family home was hard. Racism was rampant in her small town of Stigler, where few Native people lived. Howard dropped out of school in her freshman year due to bullying. She painted her first watercolor at the age of 15 using dime store watercolors on posterboard, but her full-time job at a sewing factory took up most of her time. In 1979, she married David Howard, and they had a son, Daniel.

Howard said she hardly painted while she worked full-time because she wanted to be fully present with her beloved son and husband in her scant free time.2 When the sewing factory closed and her unemployment compensation began to run out, she was worried. That’s when her late father came to her in a dream. “It was his voice,” she recalled. “He said, ‘You need to paint. That’s what you’re good at.

That’s what you’re meant to be.’”

When he was still alive, her father had encouraged her to sell her artwork,

and she resumed doing that, thinking it would be a good way to survive until she found another job. Then her husband and her brother Ted encouraged her to enter the 1995 Red Earth Festival in Oklahoma City. Not only did she win the watercolor division, but she sold all the paintings in her booth by that afternoon. Things happened quickly after that.

Blue Rain Gallery in Santa Fe hosted her first solo exhibition and represented her for three decades. A SWAIA Fellowship allowed her to conduct research in the Choctaw homelands in Mississippi.

On May 18, 2024, she was posthumously inducted into the Semple Family Museum of Native American Art Hall of Fame.

Upon Howard’s passing, Peter Stoessel, Blue Rain Gallery director, posted on social media: “Norma Howard was a wonderful, down-to-earth person who was very pleasant to be around.

She had a great sense of humor too! Her paintings often captured the simple, hidden beauty of the challenging life she and her family experienced.… Norma will be greatly missed, but thanks to her beautiful paintings, her spirit is always with us.”

Howard was keenly aware of the historical trauma of Choctaw people, and she was open about her own experiences with racism and isolation. She insisted on speaking the complex truth with her art, and that truth also included joy, strength, and resilience.

“I choose to portray my people as ‘We’re going to get through this; we’re going to survive,’” she told FAAM. “With their perseverance, they were going to survive.” That is what she hoped her art would convey. “My paintings will outlive me,” she said. “Sometime someone’s going to say, ‘This artist painted the way it was.’ If they can open their minds and hear how we lived and how good we lived among each other and how we survived, I think I did my job.”3 —Stacy Pratt, PhD (Mvskoke)

1. Vicki Monks, “Norma Howard: Choctaw-Chickasaw Painter,” First American Art Magazine, no. 21 (Winter 2018/19), 53.

2. Julie Pearson-Little Thunder, “Oral History Interview with Norma Howard: Oklahoma Native Artists,” Oklahoma Native Artists Oral History Project (Stillwater: Oklahoma State University Library, 2010), 11–12.

3. Vicki Monks, “Norma Howard,” FAAM, 55.

FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 43, SUMMER 2024 | 105

MEMORIAL

TERROL DEW JOHNSON April 12, 1971–May 8, 2024

I

CAN PRETTY MUCH WEAVE with anything that can bend, and if it doesn’t bend, I’ll bend to it,” Terrol Dew Johnson (Tohono O'odham) said.1 A community organizer, activist, and educator, Johnson was first and foremost an artist and visionary. With a strong foundation in O'odham basketry, he took the art form to new heights and across the globe.

Born Terrol Jose Johnson to Betty Ann Pancho and the late Roger LeRoy Johnson (both Tohono O'odham), he lived most of his life in Sells, Arizona, in the heart of the Tohono O'odham Nation.

A brief student exchange in Australia exposed him to new cultures and the mainstream art world, but he remained centered on serving his home community.

Johnson first learned basketry at age ten at a Native youth camp. “I got bit by a bug and just really loved it,” he told me.2 Soon he studied basketry with Margaret Acosta (Tohono O'odham, 1939–2016) and then with her teacher Lolita Manuel (Tohono O'odham, 1910–2003). Manuel refused to work with him the first three times he asked, but she relented on his fourth visit. Finally he studied with her cousin Clara Havier (Tohono O'odham, ca. 1906–1995) who didn’t speak English, so his parents had to translate for them.

Johnson threw himself into art and readily acknowledged the many artists who helped him on his path. He witnessed how his fellow basket makers often earned only a tenth of their artwork’s retail price and helped organize the Tohono O'odham Basketweavers Organization to secure fairer compensation.

Tristan Reader and Johnson cofounded Tohono O'odham Community Action (TOCA) in 1996. TOCA cultivated and processed Sonoran desert crops such as tepary beans, prickly pears, chollas, and mesquite. Indigenous food sovereignty is crucial to the Tohono O'odham, who have the highest rates of

above Terrol Dew Johnson. Both images courtesy of Aranda\Lasch.

type 2 diabetes in the world. Johnson was diagnosed with diabetes himself. To call attention to the diabetes crisis in Indian Country, Johnson walked 3,000 miles from Maine to Arizona in “The Walk Home: A Journey to Native Wellness” (2009–10).

TOCA established Desert Rain Café and a community art gallery in Sells. In 2013, Johnson and Mary Paganelli Votto launched Native Foodways Magazine, when I launched First American Art Magazine. I’m so grateful for their encouragement and advice. These projects may have not lasted, but they made a lasting impact. Today, the Ajo Center for Sustainable Agriculture continues the important work of O'odham food sovereignty.

TOCA also shared basketry with new generations of O'odham artists.

Johnson continued to hone his skills, experimenting and exhibiting nationwide.

He used culturally significant Tohono O'odham plants and techniques in new ways to create unique basketry sculptures, many of which are in museum collections. He co-curated several exhibitions,

including ones at the Arizona State Museum.

In 2006 Johnson began collaborating with Benjamin Aranda and Chris Lasch of Aranda\Lasch, an architectural and software design firm based in Brooklyn and Tucson. Their collaborations pushed Johnson to experiment with an increasing diversity of materials and work on a monumental scale. Most recently, the trio collaborated on a public sculpture installed in the U.S. Embassy in Asunción, Paraguay. The soaring sculpture features paper handmade from cedar bark, bear grass, and yucca harvested and processed by Johnson and his relatives.

Harrison Preston (Wa:k O'odham) first studied basketry with Johnson in 1998. Becoming friends and colleagues, Preston traveled widely with Johnson.

“Many of these experiences I hold dear to my heart, like harvesting bahidag [saguaro fruit] and yucca to traversing the Edmund Pettus bridge in Selma, Alabama, commemorating the Bloody Sunday events of 1965,” writes Preston.

“Without his generosity and teachings, I don’t know where I’d be today. Only yesterday a few others and I were discussing the immense impact his work had on our community over the years. I hope his ears were ringing as he started that journey to the East, to be reunited with those who have gone before us.”

Janeen Antoine (Sicangu Lakota) curated Johnson’s art at American Indian Contemporary Art. “I was blessed to see first-hand the important food sovereignty, diabetes, and cultural work he did within his own T.O. Nation. I will truly miss his laughter and ever-present smile, but I appreciate the times we shared together in our lives.”

As Antoine writes, “Thank you Terrol for being you and for being such a kind and generous friend.”

—America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

1. Amanda Brooks, “Art in Embassies Asunción,” U.S. Department of State, Art in Embassies, video, 6:39, web.

2. America Meredith, “Terrol Dew Johnson: Tohono O’odham Basket Weaver and Sculptor,” First American Art Magazine, no. 14 (Spring 2017), 52.

106 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 43, SUMMER 2024

MEMORIAL

JUNE LEE June 20, 1933–December 22, 2023

I

N THE 1960S when June Lee’s daughter needed a dress to compete for Seminole Nation princess, Oklahoma Seminoles didn’t wear patchwork. June Lee was determined to sew a Seminole dress despite lacking examples or instructions.

All she had was a postcard of Florida Seminole patchwork. “I just kept moving my magnifying glass [over the postcard],” she told her friend, art historian and professor Mary Jo Watson (Seminole Nation).1 Teaching herself patchwork from these minute images, Lee successfully completed a patchwork dress for her daughter, Vicky Ann Lee Reed (Seminole Nation, 1958–2005). She helped to bring patchwork to Oklahoma and taught this art form to generations of Seminoles.

“Her quiet hands stitched not just waves of Seminole patchwork but threads of identity, each stitch a whispered prayer for cultural preservation,” wrote Lee’s nephew Brian Larney (Seminole Nation).

“Her creations adorned bodies and souls, granting them a voice, a visual echo of our heritage.”2 June Larney Lee was born in the Strothers community in Seminole County, Oklahoma, to Ryder Larney (Seminole Nation, 1915–2008) and Haney Micco Larney (Seminole, 1915–1942), both fullbloods. In 1939, June’s mother died when she was only six. Her grandparents had already passed on and her father worked in Texas, so she and her younger sister were sent to Eufaula Indian Boarding School. “All I remember is crying when I got there, and I don’t even remember how we grew up until I was about ten years old,” Lee had recalled.3 She only spoke Mvskoke when she arrived but gradually learned English, and a Choctaw teacher taught her to sew. Lee chafed against the drudgery, hostility, and strict routine.

Not until Lee graduated from eighth grade did she get to visit home.

above June Lee. Both photos: Ann C. Sherman Photography, Oklahoma City. below June Lee (Seminole Nation), Detail of voile cape and patchwork skirt, ca. 1970s, handappliquéd cotton, rickrack. Skirt is 39 in. long.

After graduation she spent the summer back home before going to high school at Chilocco Indian Agricultural School.

She dropped out, then dropped out from Strother High School. She struggled as a teenager, but at age 21, she married Billy Joe Lee (1935–1994).

In the late 1950s, as a young wife and soon a mother, June Lee wanted to learn everything about her tribal culture and family history. She relearned the Mvskoke language, and the matrons of the Seminole Hitchitee United Methodist Church taught her Seminole cooking. “By her steely determination, she … reclaimed her Seminole heritage and, in the process, became a respected Seminole artist and cultural expert,” observed Watson.4 Seminole patchwork is appliqué sewing of colorful abstract geometric designs that evolved to symbolize clans and other facets of Seminole culture. Over time, Lee was finally able to study patchwork clothing and consult with Florida Seminole textile artists. Other Seminoles requested patchwork clothing from her, and she sewed dresses, men’s big shirts, jackets, skirts, purses, and other accessories.

Lee exhibited her creations at the Red Earth Festival in Oklahoma City, the Jacobson House Native Art Center in Norman, the Seminole Nation Museum in Wewoka, and throughout Oklahoma.

She spoke about patchwork at public schools and churches. The Seminole Nation of Oklahoma hired Lee to teach patchwork classes to tribal citizens. Over the decades, Lee taught dozens of Oklahoma Seminoles how to sew patchwork.

“My aunt’s Seminole patchwork wasn’t just stunning; it pulsed with the strength of her spirit.” Her nephew Brian Larney concluded, “Her voice will be missed, but I will always remember her glowing smile!”5 —America Meredith (Cherokee Nation)

1. Mary Jo Watson, “Oklahoma Indian Women Artists” (PhD diss., University of Oklahoma, 1993), 269–70.

2. Brian Larney, “Saying goodbye …,” Facebook post, December 29, 2023, web. Quoted with permission.

3. Watson, “Oklahoma Indian Women Artists,” 257.

4. Watson, “Oklahoma Indian Women Artists,” 281.

5. Larney, “Saying goodbye …,” web.

FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 43, SUMMER 2024 | 107

MEMORIAL

JEFFREY VEREGGE March 14, 1974–April 12, 2024

above Jeffrey Veregge with action figures.

“M

Y ORIGINS are not supernatural, nor have they been enhanced by radioactive spiders.

I am simply a Native American artist and writer whose creative mantra is best summed up with a word from my tribe’s own language: ‘taʔčaʔx̣ʷéʔtəŋ,’ which means ‘get into trouble,’” Jeffrey Veregge (Port Gamble S'Klallam) wrote in an artist’s statement for his mural Legacy at Seattle’s Climate Pledge Arena.1 That sense of humor was characteristic of the artist who created a stunning and beloved body of work before his untimely passing from complications of lupus. Veregge was also a designer, comic, and writer. He is survived by his wife of 32 years, Christina, whom he called his muse, and three children, Morgan, Presley, and Averee; his parents, Connie and Jeff; four sisters, Renee, Carrie, Teresa, and Leah; and many nieces, nephews, aunts, uncles, and cousins.

Veregge grew up on Port Gamble S'Klallam Reservation, a Central Salish community in northwest Washington, and graduated with honors from the Art Institute of Seattle in 2000. He then

apprenticed with woodcarver David A. Boxley (Tsimshian), who taught him more about formline. A longtime comic book fan, Veregge would eventually combine formline with classic comic drawing to create a style he called “Salish Geek.”

He was furthering the art practices of his ancestors using tools of his day. “Art evolves, tools get better, but the essence of what I do is the same as those who did it on the canvases nature provided for them to tell the stories of gods and heroes long, long ago,” as his online biography states.

His passionate fandom for superheroes, comics, and science fiction took him far. In 2015 he served as consultant and cover artist for Marvel’s revival of the Red Wolf series. Throughout his career, he created more than one hundred comic book covers for Marvel, IDW, Valiant, Dynamite, Doom!, Darkhorse Comics, and indigenized Iron Man, Black Panther, and the Hulk. He also developed his own comic series, DemiCon (Native Realities Press), inspired by Greek mythology and the lore of his own tribe.

The Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian George Gustav Heye Center in New York featured

his solo exhibition, Of Gods and Heroes: The Art of Jeffrey Veregge (2018–20). The museum then acquired two of his murals from the exhibition. Among other murals, he also painted the children’s mural at the Burke Museum on the University of Washington campus in Seattle.

In addition to his many artistic endeavors, Veregge wrote for Indian Country Today. He was a public speaker and the first guest invited to the inaugural Indigenous Comic Con in 2016 in Albuquerque. At the 2023 IndigiPopX Comic Con in Oklahoma City, artists Dale Ray Deforest (Navajo) and Jim Terry (Ho-Chunk), and IndigiPopX founder Lee Francis IV (Laguna Pueblo descent) hosted a panel celebrating Veregge’s work and announcing a benefit for his family.

During that panel, Francis recalled: “It was so rewarding for me to get [Veregge] as our first guest. He put on a great panel and was just so generous. As an artist, he was inspirational for a lot of young folks who were able to see that you can weave your culture together with a style that is really unique and pop. He opened a lot of doors for Indigenous artists.”2 Tributes to Veregge appeared from friends, fans, and the art world immediately upon news of his passing. Timothy Cheng, Marvel Comics executive director of communications, wrote, “His striking and beautiful use of formline designs celebrated both pop culture and tradition, reimagining Marvel and beyond in ways that will never fade.”3 Laura Haddad, art planner for the Climate Pledge Arena mural project, said: “We have lost an artist with a truly unique sensibility who was on the verge of becoming an art superstar. All of the stars were aligning that way when he became ill. We are fortunate to have the many works he left behind, which will inspire people for generations to come.”4 Boldly go, Jeffrey Veregge. You were a true superhero.

—Stacy Pratt, PhD (Mvskoke)

1. Jeffrey Veregge, “Legacy,” Climate Pledge Arena, 2020, web.

2. Shelley Patrick and Stacy Pratt, “IndigiPopX Returns!,” First American Art Magazine, no. 38 (Spring 2023), 29.

3. Nika Bartoo-Smith, “In Memoriam: Native Comic Artist Jeffrey Veregge,” Underscore Native News, May 7, 2024, web.

4. Kai Uyehara, “Late S’Klallam artist leaves legacy of far-reaching and celebrated ‘Geek Salish’ style,” Kitsap Sun, May 3, 2024.

108 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 43, SUMMER 2024

CALENDAR July 2, 2024–October 2026: Los Angeles, CA ReVOlt 1680/2180: Sirens & Sikas at the Autry Museum of the American West, 4700 Western Heritage Way | (323) 667-2000 | theautry.org July 5–August 30: Saskatoon, SK Piitwewetam: Making is Medicine at the Wanuskewin Heritage Park, RR#4 Penner Road | +1 (306) 931-6767 | wanuskewin.com July 5, 2024–June 30, 2025: Winnipeg, MB Winyan: Lita Fontaine at the Winnipeg Art Gallery, 300 Memorial Boulevard +1 (204) 786-6641 | wag.ca July 6, 2024–October 2025: Los Angeles, CA Stirs Up the Dust at the Autry Museum of the American West, 4700 Western Heritage Way | (323) 667-2000 | theautry.org July 17–December 8: Baltimore, MD Laura Ortman at the Baltimore Museum of Art, 10 Art Museum Drive (443) 573-1700 | artbma.org

naaainc.com | (855) NAAA-INC

July 17, 2024–January 19, 2025: Baltimore, MD Nicholas Galanin at the Baltimore Museum of Art, 10 Art Museum Drive (443) 573-1700 | artbma.org July 18, 2024–January 12, 2025: New York City, NY Mary Sully: Native Modern at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Avenue | (212) 535-7710 | metmuseum.org July 20 & 21: Newburyport, MA Cultural Survival Bazaar at Market Square at Inn Street. Free entry (617) 441-5400 x15 | bazaar.culturalsurvival.org July 20 & 21: Tiverton, RI Cultural Survival Bazaar at Tiverton Four Corners Arts Center, 3852 Main Road. Free entry | (617) 441-5400 x15 | bazaar.culturalsurvival.org July 20–September 29: Tacoma, WA In the Spirit: Contemporary Native Arts at the Washington State Historical Society, 1911 Pacific Avenue | (253) 272-9747 | tacomaartmuseum.org

Museum, Art Gallery & Texas Canyon Nature Preserve

July 26–September 27: Oklahoma City, OK Zonly Looman at the Red Earth Art Center, 100 N. Broadway Avenue #2750 (405) 427-5228 | redearth.org July 27 & 28: Victor, NY Indigenous Music & Arts Festival at the Seneca Art & Cultural Center, 7000 County Road 41 | (585) 398-6151 | ganondagan.org July 27 & 28: Tahoma, CA 2024 Waší∙šiw ɁitdéɁ Festival at Meeks Bay Resort, 7841 Emerald Bay Road (775) 265-8600 | washoetribe.us

Connecting People, Tradition, and History The Amerind Museum is a worldclass museum featuring historic and contemporary Native American Art, anthropology, and art of the American est.

July 28–November 1: Los Angeles, CA Sangre de Nopal/Blood of the Nopal: Tanya Aguiñiga and Porfirio Gutiérrez in Conversation at the Fowler Museum, UCLA, 308 Charles E. Young Drive West | (310) 825-4361 | fowler.ucla.edu August 2 & 3: Norman, OK 11th Annual Central Oklahoma Native American Art Sale at the Cleveland County Fairgrounds, 615 E. Robinson Street. Dealers and artists. Free entry (405) 321-8961 | okcindianart.wordpress.com

Matagi orensen,Devils Claw silver and turquoise ring

August 2–11: Gallup, NM 102nd Annual Gallup Intertribal Indian Ceremonial at Red Rock Park, 825 Outlaw Road, and more | (505) 863-3896 | gallupceremonial.com

Tohono O’odham Himdag in

August 2–September 2: Santa Fe, NM Rhiannon Skye Tafoya: New Work on Paper at Hecho a Mano, 129 W. Palace Avenue | (505) 916 1341 | hechoamano.org August 3 & 4: Santa Fe, NM Nakotah LaRance Memorial Youth Hoop Dance Championship at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, 710 Camino Lejo. 9:00 am–4:00 pm.

Free entry | (505) 476-1269 | indianartsandculture.org

Brush and Lens: Paintings of Michael Chiago and Photography of Bernard Siquieros

Michael Chiago

on exhibit through October 31, 2024

2100 N. Amerind Road Dragoon, AZ. 85609 | 520.586.3666 | www.amerind.org FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 43, SUMMER 2024 | 109

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August 3–September 30: Brantford, ON Indigenous Art 2024: 49th Annual Juried Exhibition at the Woodland Cultural Centre, 184 Mohawk Street | +1 (519) 759-2650 woodlandculturalcentre.ca August 3–November 10: West Bend, WI Weaving a Legacy: Ho-Chunk Black Ash Basketry at the Museum of Wisconsin Art, 205 Veterans Avenue | (262) 334-9638 | wisconsinart.org August 4, 2024–January 5, 2025: Baltimore, MD Dana Claxton at the Baltimore Museum of Art, 10 Art Museum Drive (443) 573-1700 | artbma.org August 4, 2024–January 5, 2025: Austin, TX Native America: In Translation at the Blanton Museum of Art, 200 E. Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard | (512) 471-5482 | blantonmuseum.org August 8–11: Santa Fe, NM Objects of Art & American Indian/Tribal Santa Fe at El Museo Cultural de Santa Fe, 555 Camino de la Familia | objectsofartsantafe.com August 9–11: Ignacio, CO Pino Nuche Indigenous Art Market & Juried Show at the Sky Ute Casino and Resort, 14324 Highway 172 North. Hosted by the Southern Ute Cultural Center | (970) 563-9583 | southernutemuseum.org August 9–12: Santa Fe, NM Whitehawk Antique Indian & Ethnographic Art Show at the Santa Fe Community Convention Center, 201 W. Marcy Street | whitehawkshows.com August 9–October 19: Santa Fe, NM Larry McNeil at Foto Forum Santa Fe, 1714 Paseo de Peralta. Opening: Friday, August 9, 5:00–7:00 pm | (505) 470-2582 | fotoforumsantafe.com August 10: Tacoma, WA In the Spirit Northwest Native Festival at the Washington State Historical Society, 1911 Pacific Avenue, 10:00 am–5:00 pm (253) 272-9747 | tacomaartmuseum.org August 10–September 7: Tahlequah, OK 29th Annual Cherokee Homecoming Art Show at the Cherokee Springs Plaza Gallery, 3377 Cherokee Springs Road | homecomingartshow.com August 12–16: Baraboo, WI 24th Annual National Association of Tribal Historic Preservation Officers Conference at the Ho-Chunk Gaming Resort Wisconsin Dells, S3214 County Highway BD | (202) 628-8476 | nathpo.org August 14–16: Santa Fe, NM 49th Annual Wheelwright Benefit Event at the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, 704 Camino Lejo. Free entry | (505) 982-4636 wheelwright.org/benefit August 14–October 2: Santa Fe, NM Slow Water at Cara Romero Gallery, 333 Montezuma Avenue #5. Reception: Thursday, August 15, 4:00–8:00 pm | (505) 218-6588 | cararomero.com August 15: Santa Fe, NM Indigenous Public Art Interventions discussion at the Ralph T. Coe Center for the Arts, 1590-B Pacheco Street. Cosponsored by First American Art Magazine | (505) 983-6372 | coeartscenter.org August 15–18: Santa Fe, NM Indigenous Art Fair Contemporary at El Museo Cultural de Santa Fe, 555 Camino de la Familia | iafcontemporary.com August 15–September 30: Anchorage, AK Ye’uh qach’dalts’iyi: What We Live on from the Outdoors at Alaska Native Heritage Center, 8800 Heritage Center Drive | (907) 330-8000 | bunnellarts.org August 16 & 17: Santa Fe, NM 4th Annual Case Trading Post Artists Market at the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, 704 Camino Lejo. Friday: 8:00 am–4:00 pm, Saturday: 10:00 am–2:00 pm | (505) 982-4636 | wheelwright.org August 16–18: Santa Fe, NM Meet the Artists at Keshi, 229 Don Gasper Avenue #1. Friday, 3:00–5:00 pm, Saturday and Sunday, 10:00–5:00 pm | (505) 989-8728 | keshi.com

August 16–18: Santa Fe, NM 6th Annual Sovereign Santa Fe: Keepers Of The Land at La Fonda on the Plaza, 100 E. San Francisco Street | farahnheight.com/sovereign August 16–18: Santa Fe, NM 4th Annual Pathways Indigenous Arts Festival at Buffalo Thunder Resort and Casino, 30 Buffalo Thunder Trail. Hosted by Poeh Cultural Center (505) 455-5041 | poehcenter.org/pathways August 16–18: Santa Fe, NM Kim and Krystal Obrzut Gallery Show at La Fonda on the Plaza, Lobby, 100 E. San Francisco Street | (623) 570-3398 | seyesnembronze.com August 16, 2024–January 5, 2025: Santa Fe, NM Common Thread: Female Perspectives from the Arctic at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, 108 Cathedral Place (505) 983-1666 | iaia.edu/museum August 16, 2024–March 2, 2025: Santa Fe, NM Arctic Highways: Unbounded Indigenous People at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, 108 Cathedral Place | (505) 983-1666 iaia.edu/museum August 17 & 18: Santa Fe, NM Free Indian Market Show at the Federal Park, 100 S. Federal Place 8:00 am–5:00 pm | (505) 670-5918 | freeindianmarket.org August 17 & 18: Santa Fe, NM 102nd Annual SWAIA Santa Fe Indian Market in downtown Santa Fe (505) 983-5220 | swaia.org August 24 & 25: Flagstaff, AZ Hopi Arts and Cultural Festival at the Continental Country Club Driving Range, N. Country Club Drive | (928) 522-8675 | hopifestival.com August 24, 2025–January 19, 2025: St. Petersburg, FL Icons and Symbols of the Borderland: Art From the US–Mexico Crossroads at the James Museum of Western and Wildlife Art, 150 Central Avenue.

Curated by Diana Molina | (727) 892-4200 | thejamesmuseum.org August 30–September 1: Farmington, NM 35th Annual Totah Festival & Indian Market in downtown Farmington (505) 599-1174 | totahfestival.org August 31–September 1: Howes Cave, NY 41st Annual Iroquois Arts Festival at the Iroquois Museum, 324 Caverns Road | (518) 296-8949 | iroquoismuseum.org September 1–October 20: Greenville, SC Away from Home: American Indian Boarding School Stories at the Upcountry History Museum | (864) 467-3100 | upcountryhistory.org September 1, 2024–January 5, 2025: Lawrence, KS Native Fashion at the Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, 1301 Mississippi Street | (785) 864-4710 | spencerart.ku.edu September 3–December 28: Duluth, MN Dreaming Our Futures: Ojibwe and Očhéthi Šakówiŋ Artists and Knowledge Keepers at the Tweed Museum of Art, University of Minnesota–Duluth, 1201 Ordean Court | (218) 726-8222 | tweed.d.umn.edu September 4: Gallup, NM Friends of Hubbell Auction at the Gallup Community Service Center, 410 Bataan Veterans Street. 9:00 am–6:00 pm | friendsofhubbell.org September 6–December 21: Lincoln, NE Contemporary Indigeneity, 5th Edition, at the Great Plains Art Museum, 1155 Q Street | (402) 472-6220 | unl.edu/plains/contemporary-indigeneity September 6–27: Topeka, KS Future Directions at 785 Arts, 935 N. Kansas Avenue | 785arts.com September 7 & 8: Lawrence, KS Haskell Indian Art Market on the Haskell Indian Nations University Campus, 155 Indian Avenue | (785) 749-8467 | haskell.edu/hiam

K.W. Fernstrom & Assoc.

Appraising Native American & Pacific Island Art Made for the Market PO Box 50185 Baltimore, MD 21211

410-243-2757 kwfappraising@gmail.com

kwfernstromandassociatesappraising.com

CONTEMPORARY INDIGENEITY September 6–December 21, 2024

An exhibition at the Great Plains Art Museum Lincoln, Nebraska The fifth iteration of Contemporary Indigeneity features over 25 Native American artists from across the Great Plains.

September 7, 2024–June 21, 2026: Los Angeles, CA Future Imaginaries: Indigenous Art, Fashion, and Technology at the Autry Museum of the American West, 4700 Western Heritage Way (323) 667-2000 | theautry.org FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 43, SUMMER 2024 | 111

September 13, 2024–January 5, 2025: Oklahoma City, OK Imprisoned but Empowered: Cheyenne Warrior Artists from Fort Marion at the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, 1700 NE 63rd Street (405) 478-2250 | nationalcowboymuseum.org September 14: Aztec, NM Indigenous Cultural Arts Festival at the Aztec Ruins National Monument, 725 Ruins Road | (505) 334-6174 | nps.gov/azru September 14 & 15: Macon, GA Ocmulgee Indigenous Celebration at the Ocmulgee Mounds National Historical Park, 1207 Emery Highway | (478) 752-8257 | ocmulgeemounds.org September 14–October 26: Montreal, QC Sonny Assu at Art Mûr, 5826 Rue St-Hubert | +1 (514) 933-0711 | Opening reception: Saturday, September 14, 3:00–5:00 pm | artmur.com September 14–January 26, 2025: Minneapolis, MN O'Powa O'Meng: The Art and Legacy of Jody Folwell at the Minneapolis Institute of Art, 2400 3rd Avenue South | (612) 870-3000 | new.artsmia.org September 14, 2024–January 27, 2025: Bentonville, AR Knowing the West at the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, 600 Museum Way | (479) 418-5700 | crystalbridges.org September 15, 2024–January 5, 2025: Los Angeles, CA Sovereign at the Hammer Museum, 10899 Wilshire Boulevard (310) 443-7000 | hammer.ucla.edu September 18, 2024–January 1, 2025: Davis, CA In the Absence of Instruction: Brenda Mallory at the Gorman Museum of Native American Art, 181 Old Davis Road | (530) 752-6567 gormanmuseum.ucdavis.edu September 19: Vermillion, SD 35th Annual Oscar Howe Memorial Lecture: Talon Bazille Ducheneaux at the University of South Dakota, Colton Recital Hall, 789-835 N, University Street | (605) 658-3437 | red.library.usd.edu/oscarhowe September 20, 2024–August 24, 2025: Washington, DC Sublime Light: Tapestry Art of DY Begay at the National Museum of the American Indian, 4th Street and Independence Avenue SW (202) 633-1000 | americanindian.si.edu September 21 & 22: Prescott, AZ 26th Annual Prescott Indian Art Market at the Sharlot Hall Museum, 415 W. Gurley Street. Saturday: 9:00 am–5:00 pm, Sunday: 9:00 am–4:00 pm. $5 entry (928) 445-3122 | sharlothallmuseum.org/piam

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September 22, 2024–September 2, 2025: Los Angeles, CA We Live in Painting: The Nature of Color in Mesoamerican Art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, 5905 Wilshire Boulevard (323) 857-6000 | pst.art September 28, 2024–January 5, 2025: Spokane, WA Joe Feddersen: Earth, Water, Sky at the Northwest Museum of Arts and Culture, 2316 W. First Avenue | (509) 456-3931 | northwestmuseum.org September 28–February 2, 2025: Vancouver, BC, Canada Shelley Niro: 500 Year Itch at the Vancouver Art Gallery, 750 Hornby Street +1 (604) 662-4700 | vanartgallery.bc.ca October 5 & 6: Tishomingo, OK Southeastern Art Show and Market (SEASAM), hosted by the Chickasaw Nation, at the Chickasaw National Capitol, 411 W. 9th Street | chickasaw.net October 12 & 13: Catoosa, OK 19th Annual Cherokee Art Market at the Hard Rock Hotel and Casino Tulsa, Sequoyah Convention Center, 777 W. Cherokee Avenue (877) 779-6977 | cherokeeartmarket.com

For more events, visit our online calendar at

FIRSTAMERICANARTMAGAZINE.COM/ CALENDAR 112 | FIRST AMERICAN ART MAGAZINE NO. 43, SUMMER 2024

Raven Dreamt About Light Kagán aawajoon Yéil

Larry McNeil Solo Exhibition

Foto Forum Santa Fe

Reception and artist’s presentation August 9th at 5:00 pm Exhibition dates August 9 to October 19, 2024 1714 Paseo de Peralta, Santa Fe, NM 87501 www.larrymcneil.com www.fotoforumsantafe.com

Plan Your Visit!

140 N. Indian Canyon Drive • Palm Springs, CA 92262 accmuseum.org