Denver Art Museum Benjamin Benschneider
Kate Russell/Courtesy of SITE Santa Fe
artist in residence
she said. “But it is also hard to separate blankets from living in Oregon. The weather and outdoor lifestyles that are a part of this territory beg for the use of blankets.” Her art explores human stories and rituals implicit in everyday objects such as wool blankets. Folding and stacking them, they allude to not only linen closets and architectural braces, but modernist sculpture and the great totem poles and conifers of the Northwest. When used with other materials, blankets add another layer of story that is physically and metaphorically woven into the work, such as with cedar, a sacred natural resource for Indigenous people of the Northwest, also used to make hope chests in which blankets are stored. Watt’s “Blanket Stories” are on view around the country and abroad, from PDX Contemporary Art, the Pearl District’s
“I was initially drawn to blankets as a medium in my art because of how they communicate conceptually and physically as familiar objects in my tribe and other native communities. But it is also hard to separate blankets from living in Oregon. The weather and outdoor lifestyles that are a part of this territory beg for the use of blankets.” — Marie Watt, artist
forward-thinking commercial gallery which represents her, to the U.S. Embassy in Islamabad, Pakistan and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in New York City. “It’s important to me that other Native people and people of all nationalities can go to these institutions and walk away with an expanded idea of the breadth and depth of what constitutes American Art and Native American Art,” said Watt. “Native artists have historically been kept in silos within halls of anthropology or encyclopedic collections.” Increasing, though, talented Indigenous artists of all ages are working today and more people are bound to discover their work beyond those traditional boundaries. “I’m excited to see what happens,” Watt said. JANUARY | FEBRUARY 2021
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