- Sheri Castelnuovo: We are so
delighted to welcome Jeffrey Gibson
to MMoCA this evening,
and thank him for his willingnes
s to travel to Madison
to join in tonight's celebration.
Originally from Colorado and now
residing
in New York's Hudson Valley,
Jeffrey Gibson has garnered inte
rnational attention
for multifaceted works that combi
ne traditional
Native American techniques and m
aterials
with popular culture imagery and
modernist abstraction.
His works speak eloquently of com
plex exchanges
amongst personal, social, and po
litical domains.
Between acknowledgement and
resistance,
art and craft, and past and pre
sent.
He has said that he quote, "wants
to create work
"that makes the marginalized fee
l central,
"and that brings together variou
s cultures,
"histories and identities."
Jeffrey earned a Bachelor of Fine
Arts
from the School of the Art Instit
ute of Chicago in 1995
and a Master of Arts from the Ro
yal College of Art
in London in 1998.
His work has been exhibited in n
umerous solo
and group exhibitions, at intuit
ions and galleries
throughout the United States, as
well as in Canada,
France, New Zealand, and the
United Kingdom.
The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston,
Denver Art Museum,
National Gallery of Canada, Ontar
io,
Nasher Museum of Art in Durh
am, South Carolina,
and the Smithsonian Institution
in Washington, D.C.
are among the distinguished inst
itutions that have acquired
his work for their permanent
collections.
Among his awards and distinct
ions are recent grants
from the Joan Mitchell Foundatio
n,
the Smithsonian Institution's
National Museum of the American I
ndian,
and the Jerome Foundation,
as well as the TED Foundation
Fellowship.
Jeffrey also holds an honorary do
ctorate
from Claremont Graduate Universit
y
in Claremont, California.
In addition to these accomplishme
nts,
Jeffrey is on the faculty of Bar
d College,
where he has taught in the
Studio Arts Department since 201
2
and it's really a great pleasure
to welcome Jeffrey Gibson to the
stage.
[audience applauding]
- Thank you very much for being
here,
sorry it is hot in here. [audienc
e laughing]
I think we can all agree on that.
So, we all just breathe it o
ut for a minute.
Also I lost my voice a few weeks
ago,
so I'm just about 90% right now,
so I've got my cough drops here
to help me get through,
but thank you so much for having
me here,
of course I want to thank Lill
ian White, White Eagle
for dancing tonight, that was
really stunning and beautiful,
and you'll see, there's lots of j
ingles in the exhibition
and I think that was a great way
to start learning
about them and incredibly importa
nt
and I thank you for what you do.
[audience applauding]
Thank you.
I'd also like to thank Eric Logan
and the Ho-Chunk Gaming Commissio
n,
of course Stephen Fleischman
, Leah Kolb,
John Lukavic, and Sheri,
I have to get your name corr
ectly, Castelnuovo,
Did I get that correct?
Sorry, where's Sheri?
Sorry, I apologize if I mi
spronounce your name.
So the exhibition upstairs, John
Lukavic and I started
planning this exhibition nearly s
ix years ago
and at the time, John and I reall
y,
John is the Native Arts Curator
at the Denver Art Museum
and we spoke a lot about my frus
trations as an artist,
being a Native artist, I thin
k it's important
for me to identify as a Native ar
tist,
it's an area that I have felt,
kind of people bring a lot of ver
y narrow perceptions
to what Native art is, excuse
me. [coughs]
So John and I talked about, how
could we work with
my work and practice to kind
of broaden that.
I'm going to take my jacket off.
So, sometimes what I like to sta
rt with is some of
the inspirations behind the
work,
and certainly Southwestern weavin
g has been a big part
visually of what I've grown up l
ooking at.
And the weavings I realized, as a
n adult when I look back
and do some research,
I'm really drawn to this, these
particular weavings where,
new modern dyes are introduced,
patterns are getting increasi
ngly more complicated,
Eye Dazzler patterns, but really
where,
in terms of the phases of weavin
g,
we go from, woven garments and b
lankets
and chief's blankets made for sp
ecific individuals,
to heading into a modern market,
so we go into the 20th century,
and people are really using
color and pattern
to excel as individuals at t
heir own designs.
You'll see this kind of patt
ern shows up a lot,
including on myself.
And patterns are nothing, I neve
r copy patterns,
I'm not someone who goes and look
s in museums
for things to copy and to bring
into my own work,
I look at it very much as maybe a
n art historian
looks at the history of painting.
And look for ways of kind of push
ing this history forward.
Here are some early paintings of
mine,
that are oil paint, spray pa
int, on canvas.
So these are some of the last pai
ntings that I made,
I'm trained as a painter, workin
g on canvas,
but you'll begin to see how this
has even morphed,
parts of these paintings which we
re,
cut apart, they were put thro
ugh the washer,
they were dried, you'll see show
ing up in collages upstairs
and in wall hangings and on some
of the punching bags.
Another inspiration, so in my stu
dio,
this is going back to maybe 2004
through 6,
I had lots of auction catalogs a
round my studio,
these parfleche bags which are ge
nerally full size hides
that have been painted, gene
rally by women,
using prayer and song as they're
painting,
and these patterns are very spe
cific
towards certain individuals,
but they're always photograph
ed like this,
so very similar to a painting, ri
ght?
So I was always surprised that
nobody had ever done,
an abstraction exhibition in comb
ination
with these parfleche paintings be
cause,
American, Western, European abstr
action
tends to kind of reject content,
whereas these are entirely a
bout content,
so for me as an artist,
that was something that was
always of interest.
So my first kind of stabs at thi
s were these
irregular shaped panels,
so these are from, I want to say
2008, 9,
and these are colored pencil
, acrylic paint,
spray paint on rawhide stretched
over wood panels and,
so this idea of mixing in, kind
of fluorescent color
that I would see in pow wow garm
ents,
pattern, texture, that I've seen
in things like
pattern decoration painting, op a
rt painting,
all of those influences,
so I also love in addition to loo
king at parfleche.
Here's some smaller, so,
the infamous story of me cutting
the paintings
off of the canvas stretchers, is
true,
it was totally intuitive,
and it came from a place of frust
ration,
and just came to my studio one da
y
and wanted to take back what was
beginning to feel
like a failure, when your paintin
gs are shown
and they always return back t
o your studio,
and they leave with such high hop
es and aspirations,
and they come back, like, y'know
the day after.
[audience laughing]
And so I, they sat in my studio f
or years, literally,
and I was trying to figure out
what to do with them.
So inside of these,
rawhide envelopes that have b
een painted,
are folded up remnants from t
hose paintings
that had been cut off, and so
in my mind,
if you own this artwork, it is yo
ur painting,
you're welcome to open it up and
you can have the painting
that's inside, but for the most p
art,
I think you see them through th
ese holes
that are in these envelopes,
and they hang directly on the wa
ll.
So the work that's upstairs is r
eally an evolution.
I think I oftentimes tell people
what I do is,
I'm not really inventing new thin
gs, it's really,
I've been looking at a lot of th
ings,
I used to work in ethnographic c
ollections
at the Field Museum in Chicago wh
ile I was studying
at The Art Institute.
I was handling objects every da
y for about three, four years
and so over time, it really just
sort of entered
into my psyche, my visual librar
y of what I pull upon
when I'm making work.
You can see here, there's cones,
applique, and patchwork, sewing,
textiles,
and originally before the shift,
which is where this exhibition b
egins, in 2011,
I was trying to bring that infor
mation
into traditional painting.
And ultimately, what I found was
that
people were not familiar with the
references
so it really just came across li
ke,
shapes and color, without conten
t.
So ultimately that's what led
to me to start
kind of reducing the distance bet
ween
my references and my work,
and I started working with texti
les,
I started treating the paintings
like textiles,
and also I decided to bring in b
ead work.
[audience murmuring]
So this is a, this is not my work
.
[audience laughing]
Thank you, but, glad you like it
.
This is a turn of the centur
y beaded whimsy,
from the Niagara Falls region.
And so when I worked at the Fie
ld Museum
there was always this shelf that
had these
amazing objects on it that w
ere never shown.
So when I asked the curators why
these weren't shown
they said, "Oh, those are just t
hese,
"kitsch, novelty items from N
iagara Falls."
And they kind of didn't real
ly fit a Native aesthetic,
nor did they really fit a We
stern aesthetic.
What happened was, of the, bead w
orkers were trying to
make an income to support th
emselves and their families,
they used a traditional form o
f raised bead work
to try to mimic floral and pa
isley patterns
of Victorian fabrics, and this
is what was produced.
So, for me this was like, this i
s a real kind of,
representation of modernity with
in Indigenous cultures.
And oftentimes we're unaware of w
hat those look like,
or really how the innovation kind
of takes these leaps,
and so I kind of fell in love wi
th these
'cause I feel like they represe
nted,
kind of who I felt to be, somewhe
re in between many things.
This was the beginning of me teac
hing myself bead work,
I also had worked with a Men
ominee woman
at the Field Museum who did teac
h me,
Mavis Neconish taught me my first
run at bead work
in my 20s, and so this piece
is titled,
Misfit Flagand it's made fr
om
those cut up pieces from the pai
ntings
that I took off of the stretcher
s,
it also is the first time that I
intentionally
decided to bead things.
Also, many times in museum coll
ections, you come across
fragments of things, so you're
not getting the whole object,
you're getting these parts of thi
ngs,
and you don't really know the who
le story,
you don't know where things h
ave come from,
also many things have been repair
ed numerous times,
so my idea to collage and to men
d
and to put things back together
or to present them as fragments,
really was this particular series
was about.
This is the very first punching b
ag.
And again I was like thousands of
artists
living in New York, frustrated,
trying to establish myself as an
artist, and I was working
literally seven to nine jobs
to support myself.
I was making work,
I was selling some work ever
y now and again
but it was really not a very gra
tifying experience.
And so I guess I had a lot of ang
er,
and somebody suggested I go an
d talk to a therapist and,
like every New Yorker, you go and
you get your therapist
and I walked in there feeling re
ally super confident
that there was nothing wrong
with me,
I was totally functional and ever
ything was great.
And really quickly all of these
issues around homophobia,
classism, racism, started coming
up very specific
to how I felt about the art worl
d
and how I didn't feel represente
d in the art world.
And so, that therapist introd
uced me to,
well we talked about,
a kind of disconnect between mi
nd and body,
and he's the one who introduced m
e to
a physical trainer to try to rec
onnect things,
and she's the one who introduced
me to boxing.
And so, boxing,
she would hold the bag and sh
e would say,
"Who are you angry at, who is it
you want to hit,
"who is it you want to kick?"
And with kind of societal issues,
like there's not really one i
ndividual,
it's really like this kind of co
ndition.
But at the same time I was using
,
a grant from the Durham Foundatio
n
to travel around the country and
to meet with
traditional makers who were m
aking things
for their communities for cultur
al use,
and it was really meeting them
and seeing their weaving, their d
rumming,
their dancing, their regalia,
their jewelry,
as really forms of resistance,
and really ways of commanding re
spect for themselves.
And it was just also the way that
I responded to them
that I just immediately had
a sense of respect
for who they were.
And so it was that combination
of wanting to shift
my relationship to these issues
and also to power in general
and to try and take things back.
You can see here, the kind of ro
settes that are on the side
are really directly taken from t
he whimsies.
So I mean, in other ways the blan
ket is a reference
to Jackson Pollock who,
at the same time as he was be
ing celebrated,
for getting in touch with his inn
er anima,
and his alcoholism,
my grandfather was a recovering a
lcoholic
and was being institutionalized
because of his,
what was deemed crazy at the tim
e,
and this is when he finds God
and he establishes a Cherokee c
hurch
in Briggs Community, Oklahoma.
Very similar story with my o
ther grandfather,
who established the Conehatta Ba
ptist Church
in Conehatta, Mississippi.
So, I'm kind of making my way ba
ck,
really questioning if I want
to be an artist,
I go France, I was a visiting ar
tist with a school there
in Pont-Aven, and I start making
works
that are collapsible that I can
kind of come back,
I had a show scheduled in 2012,
and this was really the firs
t time I showed
a full exhibition of works that
really
used the materiality of these I
ndigenous
aesthetic histories and mate
rial histories,
so there's drums, there's blanke
ts,
there's abstraction, there's bead
work, there's masks,
there's also some silverwork i
n here
and also the beginning of me wor
king with rawhide.
This piece here is titledQuiv
er
and so this neon pink tube inside
of a rawhide sheath,
you know many times people a
sk about music,
because there's a lot of ref
erences to music,
and for me, music really starts w
ith pop music
being an American living abroad,
pop music was kind of a connecti
on to, American culture.
When I returned to the United Sta
tes,
I spent the better part of m
y high school years
and college years going to g
ay night clubs,
and so there's that relation
ship to music.
When I lived in Chicago it w
as house music,
specifically Latino and Afri
can American
house music and DJs,
and then when I moved to Lon
don it was jungle
and the African communities
in London.
So, when you're looking at my wor
k and you see titles,
and then of course tracing that
back
both to gospel, to Motown, to
spirituals,
you'll see all of that,
that's where a lot of the ti
tling comes from.
This is a musical reference,
even though it's titledQuiver
.
If anyone's familiar with the cov
er
of Fleetwood Mac'sRumours,
so it's Mick Fleetwood has these
two balls hanging down,
and they're set exactly like tha
t,
so if you ever look at that al
bum cover,
this will resonate.
[audience chuckling]
But these beaded balls were made
by Frankie Skyhawk
in Red Shirt, South Dakota.
So, when I showed the first pu
nching bag it was amazing,
people actually really connec
ted to it,
people really felt like they
could inject
their personal narrative into the
punching bag
and understand relationships abou
t power
and that was really great,
again that frustration began
to leave me
because I stared feeling like I h
ad a voice,
people wanted to hear more,
this was an exhibition that follo
wed very shortly
titledLove Song at the ICA in
Boston.
And these pieces around the c
orner are,
screen printed onto rawhide on t
hese parallelogram shapes
that move around.
So it's all transparent color,
and painting on rawhide was such
a lifesaver for me
because painting on canvas I felt
like I was always
fighting with the viewer to get t
hem to see
shape and color in a particular
way,
and it was really an uphill batt
le.
Putting it on rawhide, really adj
usts the viewer
immediately so that I didn't have
to fight for that
anymore, I could just focus on p
ainting,
and when a viewer looks at it,
you can't think about shape and
color
without thinking about other hist
ories of painting
beyond this history of paint
ing on canvas.
And also each time, these are
goat hides
but the marks in the skin, you'll
see hair follicles,
you'll see bruises, you'll see s
cratches,
something to remind you that
this is not just
ubiquitous canvas that I'm paint
ing on.
And this is also really how I
continue painting,
I do a lot of flat color now, but
I really still do
a lot of glazing, on transparent
color to build color,
and think about ideas about mult
iplicity,
and you know, you layer one
color over another,
you get three or four colors ins
tantly,
and just build from there.
So the punching bags continued,
and have continued to this day,
I think right now there's probab
ly about 50
that exist in the world.
This does have one of the very f
irst paintings I made
when I first moved to New York.
I moved to New York in 2000,
and this painting is probably fro
m about 2003.
And you can see the jingles here
.
I do want to say, one thing abou
t my use of jingles,
I absolutely understand and r
espect
the source that they come from.
They're gendered within pow w
ow context,
they hold a ceremonial purpose, t
hey are healing,
for me what I was really imp
ressed with,
was how the jingle really evolved
to become,
a new ceremony within traditional
Native cultures and communities,
and that makes me very excited
to see Indigenous people
authoring new ways to support our
selves
as we move forward, and real
ly that's what
the jingle symbolizes to me.
The sound and the kind of, th
e ability of,
these were originally
the lids of tobacco and snuff co
ntainers,
so to take something that would b
e thrown away
to turn it into something that a
dorns a garment,
to turn it into something ceremo
nial,
for cultural continuance and for
healing,
that's a pretty radical narr
ative of something
so kind of simple.
So, I've always been someone who
has titled my work,
and so here you see I'm stil
l using pieces
from the original paintings,
sometimes I'll paint back on top
of them,
and then beginning to put the tex
t
directly into the bead work.
So this, the text on here says "
People like us,"
and of course I chose the color
red,
because I feel like I'm speaking
to other
Native people with this piece,
so when I say people like us,
I'm trying to talk to, not just N
ative audiences,
people can inject other things i
n here,
including just formal, the fo
rmality of color,
but really also people like us,
comes form a print that I own in
my home
by Sister Corita Kent, who was so
meone who used
found text and appropriated text
, she was nun
and that print hangs over my dini
ng table,
People Like Usand it's reall
y about,
the celebration of community, eff
ort, and labor.
But it was something that has
very much inspired me,
so all the words that I use, I k
eep a running list,
and ultimately they find their wa
y into the work.
So this is also what I consid
er the red bag,
there are times when I use, ever
y crayon in the crayon box,
and there's other times when I r
eally scale back.
So this is the red bag.
This piece here, is titledWh
ite Power,
and I went to school where peop
le often talked about
how color couldn't carry a narrat
ive in and of itself
so this was sort of me saying, "O
h but it can."
[audience laughing]
Because the words white power,
and both my parents are from the
South,
Mississippi and Oklahoma,
and I've grown up with stories ab
out church burnings
and code, and hand signals to let
people know
what road not to go down, storie
s of lynchings
and general physical abuse and so
,
the term white power, I knew whe
n I made this bag,
and I look at it and I think it's
a stunning, beautiful bag,
but it's still these words of whi
te power,
trying to think about how color
does carry content with it.
So, this is a song,
well you probably know this song
but,
so I just wanted to show also how
some of the words
come about and find ways,
I'll just play this really quick
ly.
["Cups" by Anna Kendrick]
♪ I got my ticket for the long w
ay 'round ♪
♪ Two bottle a whiskey for the
way ♪
♪ And I sure would like some
sweet company ♪
♪ And I'm leaving tomorrow, whad
da ya say? ♪
♪ When I'm gone ♪
♪ You're gonna miss me when
I'm gone ♪
Okay, so like millions of oth
er people,
Pitch Perfectcame out and I
thought,
"Oh, it's a cute song,"
and then someone posted this
video, on YouTube,
of Nikki Shawana singing a versio
n of it,
where she altered the words
to reflect the pow wow experience
,
and again, this is an amazing wa
y that Native people
transform something that exists
out in the world
to support ourselves, so I'll pla
y you this version.
♪ When I'm gone ♪
♪ You're gonna miss me when
I'm gone ♪
♪ You're gonna miss the way
s I care ♪
♪ Now who's gonna braid your hai
r ♪
♪ You're gonna miss me when
I'm gone ♪
♪ Heyo, heyo, heyo ♪
So the very first video I saw of
that,
she was in her full regalia,
she was wearing a traditional wo
men's dance regalia,
and this really made me think ab
out how throughout
the 20th century, and 19th a
nd 18th century,
the general idea was that we woul
dn't exist in the future,
so the idea of us being gone
, was just like,
"Oh collect from them now,
"because they won't be around
in the future."
So that's really what that song m
ade me think of,
and so that's why those words we
re important to me
and they found their way into thi
s bag
which isYou're Gonna nMiss Me
When I'm Gone.
[audience murmuring]
This bag is titled Manifest Des
tiny.
There are a number of profession
al fighters who have,
who own bags,
and it's been interesting to get
to know some of them
and to realize that these words,
manifest destiny,
mean something completely differ
ent to them.
[audience chuckling]
And really how they have entered
the world of fighting
as a way of really going from pov
erty
and a lack of opportunities to r
eally shifting
their entire kind of life and,
so anyhow I wanted to kind of fin
d another way to use
these words, manifest destiny
outside of the colonial narrative
.
This piece is also in the exhibit
ion,
it's titledOur Freedom is nWo
rth More Than Our Pain.
And two identically beaded bags,
other than that the colors shift
.
This is a fully painted elk hide
.
And this painting, this hide is a
ctually
traditionally tanned hide, so in
terms of my use of hides,
I work with a commercial dis
tributor,
I sometimes get hides from hunte
rs,
through also this distributor,
this one in particular was by an
individual in Wyoming,
who did the entire traditional pr
ocess
and it was difficult to get the h
ide,
but really beautiful surface.
And then these figures, you know
the role of dolls
in many cultures is one thing,
so within Indigenous cultures,
this really came from an experien
ce also when I was
at the Field Museum, coming a
cross a bundle,
which was toys for a child, for a
nomadic tribe,
and inside of that bundle,
there was a mother figure, a fath
er figure,
some children, and then there wa
s another figure,
that we couldn't quite place,
and eventually someone told m
e that this was
a berdache figure, so a thir
d gendered figure.
And so this doll set was real
ly meant to teach children
about the roles in society and s
o,
for me it's saying this kind of,
"Oh, we were progressive."
[audience laughing]
We understood that there were man
y different ways
of thinking about gender.
But, so that idea of dolls, th
ese are bigger than dolls,
they're kind of anywhere
from here to five feet tall some
times.
But I really think off them as,
having jingle pants,
you would never see.
And so, the idea of thinking,
You have them?
Oh I thought you said...
[audience laughing]
We can make you a pair.
But this idea of taking these
aesthetics and trying to think
about different proposals for wh
at the future
might look like, or what a kind o
f pushed further
kind of inter-tribal indigeneity
might look like,
so I think of the figures very m
uch as proposals,
people have also referred to the
m as aliens,
which is not horrible because I
do think of them
as like coming from another place
,
and this is really where the
idea of time
starts coming in for me, thinki
ng about,
we might feel confident what we
know about the past,
I'm trying to use my artwork for
myself
to pull myself into the present,
to be able to think about the pr
esent
but then this idea of futurism
began to enter into the work,
and of course many people are fa
miliar with Afrofuturism,
but this, I wanted to find some c
omparable version
of Indigenous futurism.
And so this is where some of thes
e figures come into play.
And so this is rawhide, jingles,
beads, crystals, paint.
And this one, when I first starte
d exhibiting
and people would ask me, "Well,
who are you referencing?"
I oftentimes mentioned the perfor
mance artist Leigh Bowery
who is an Australia performance
artist,
who primarily worked and lived in
London.
I believe he died in 1995 or 6, f
rom AIDS.
But he was really known for,
he was a club personality, starte
d a lot of club nights,
also modeled for Lucian Freud,
has been a big influence on many
fashion designers
who come out of that period of Lo
ndon.
But this kind of body shape is s
omething
that he would create, whether it
was from tulle,
or he would create it from paddin
g,
but really this is a very direct
reference to that.
So it's been a thrill to work wit
h
curators of Indigenous work who
suddenly started being
like "Okay, let's include Grace
Jones,
"let's include Leigh Bowery,
"let's include Boy George and Cul
ture Club,
"and mix it into popular culture
of previous decades."
Once I was making those figures,
I decided I wanted something la
rger,
these actually did come to m
e through a dream.
I think what many people don't, a
ren't familiar with
with Native art is that we do,
or I should speak for myself,
I do try to walk very cautiously
in terms of what I use,
how I speak about things,
there are many things I would
never speak about.
I was not raised within ceremony,
I don't consider what I make
to be ceremonial.
And these particular figures were
in this time period
where I was having these ideas of
work
that I wanted to make,
but I felt somewhat unsure
whether it was the right thing to
do,
I would ask for answers and
I would have this,
kind of spirit guide come and vis
it me
in my dreams each night,
and it lasted for about two week
s
and so these phrases came out of
that.
So this isCan't Take My E
yes Off of You.
And the ceramic heads, they'r
e really meant
to be sort of battered and bruis
ed,
and kind of still here and prese
nt.
Also, the Mississippi tribe woul
d have originated
out of the Mississippian cult
ure,
and within the Mississippian cult
ure
there are these effigy head p
ots which,
these are very much kind of in
spired by.
I'm not sure, I'm not fully up t
o date,
if anyone has really studied,
what these effigy head pots w
ere exactly for.
But, they really show people
of this region,
very differently, there's lots o
f facial tattoos,
and piercings, and very flamboya
nt, personal adornment.
So that's where I originally want
ed to start working
with these clay heads, and th
is is the back.
Here's another one, this is title
d
NSpeak To Me In Your Ways So
That I Can Understand You.
And with these, I really wanted-
-
you know, my focus on textiles,
whether it's a garment,
or a weaving, a cloak,
it's trying to make that be the
subject
in many Indigenous cultures,
the garments are, they're not ju
st something you wear,
they're things that are made
specifically for
somebody for a very specific pur
pose,
they're not, they're worn at ver
y specific times,
and they enable the person to em
body,
abilities beyond their day to
day selves.
So I really, with these, other th
an the head,
there's a simple armature made
from driftwood underneath,
but it's really the cloak draped
over the armature
that makes the body.
This one is titledWhat Do
You Want? When Do You Want It?
These are also recycled teepe
e poles.
So the, wall hangings, if any
one in here
is familiar with the way that you
probably have seen
Chilkat blankets shown within mus
eum collections,
was the shape, this is where I w
anted
the shape to come from,
and those are generally wove
n with cedar,
fiber, and also wool,
so these also have these little a
mulets,
which are decommissioned arrowhea
ds
from museum collections.
There's also, small things that
I've collected
since I was probably 15 or 16 y
ears old,
just kind of kept in a shoebox,
found their way into these
and then what you're looking at,
the checkerboard is all cut into,
wool and this is sort of when,
I don't hide the fact that I work
with a studio team,
I have about ten people that work
in the studio full time,
and we all work to produce these
works,
everything is my work but,
the amount of time it takes to
not only make the bead panels
but to, this is 400 skeins of ya
rn,
individually, tied on, and cut.
So everything really, this is al
most,
I think 11 1/2 feet wide.
So it's also quite heavy.
This piece here, you'll see peopl
e
like Nina Simone, James Baldwin,
show up in the work as a referenc
e, many times.
James Baldwin, very early on,
in my probably late teens I disc
overed James Baldwin,
and I think just also him being
an openly gay man,
living in Europe, writing very a
rticularly about
the differences of being a creati
ve, queer person,
in Europe and America,
talking about civil rights,
just really has always been a hu
ge inspiration for me.
And then the text here, "Ame
rican history,
"is longer, larger, more beautifu
l and more terrible
"than anything anyone has ever s
aid about it."
This wall hanging says, "I am ali
ve, you are alive,
"they are alive, we are living!"
And so the idea of beginning to a
uthor words
is something that over the past m
aybe two or three years
I've begun doing.
Rather than appropriating words,
from different texts, or music l
yrics.
This one is titled,The
Only Way Out Is Through,
which in fact when I made this p
iece I wasn't familiar,
but the person who owns this,
struggled with substance abuse fo
r a long time,
and they said this became their
kind of mantra,
in order to work through this
and I've received lots of storie
s from people about
how this, these words resonate w
ith them
for a particular experience or s
omething that they've
dealt with in their own life,
and that kind of shifted the way
that I think about text,
it's not always anymore just abou
t my personal experience,
but I try to choose words th
at people can really project
their own experiences into
and kind of give the content to t
he piece.
This one's a little bit more
difficult to read.
This isThe Difference Be
tween You + Me.
And the work has always been abou
t personal relationships,
I think I'm of the generation of
the '90s of,
the personal is political and ev
ery relationship
has power imbalances, and so
for a long time
I was really talking about very m
uch,
personal relationships, but
ultimately,
in our current climate, thos
e have also begun
to reflect political relationship
s,
and so the work has begun to tak
e
a little bit more of a political
turn
over the past couple of years.
This piece,I Never Can Say
Goodbye,
and You Make Me Feel.
Which is an homage to Jimmy Somer
ville.
This is another larger beaded pi
ece,
What Do You Want? When Do Yo
u Want It?
And so this actually is the r
aised bead work
so what looks like a little less
tacked down,
the words are tacked down
but then the kind of black and w
hite,
they're loops that lay on top
of each other.
And this one, "I want to take you
,
I'm gonna take you, higher, high
er, higher."
And for these pieces,
I tend to work in a kind of se
rial ways,
these pieces all begin as 40 by 3
0 inch panels,
and so the bead panels,
every bead panel gets a drawing
beforehand,
it's all very planned out,
and then, I think of them, also i
n terms of looking at,
the history of graphics,
thinking about graphic poster
histories.
And this piece, which obviously,
referencing Helen Reddy's "I am
woman, hear me roar."
When I was traveling I went to
Winnipeg,
and I don't think there was
a single person,
Native person that I met, who had
not been
affected by a case of a missing
or murdered
Indigenous woman, and it's really
where I learned about,
the distrust of the police there
locally in Winnipeg,
and I was actually told how
I should handle
being approached by police, what
I should say,
what I should not get into a car
,
lawyers that I could call.
And it was, and there are mu
rals all throughout the city
of individual females who ha
ve gone missing.
So when I came back it was also,
I am an educator, I have been te
aching for nearly 20 years,
and we were managing conversation
s around
Black Lives Matter with our stude
nts,
and so I came back and I wanted t
o make a piece
about this experience so,In
Numbers Too Big to Ignore,
seemed to make sense, and I
wanted to develop
a design that felt like
you were looking at kind of a pr
otest
from an aerial view, where you co
uld see people
kind of coming in.
My return to painting was ba
ck on to rawhide,
these tend to be modestly scaled,
they're about 16 to 18 inch squar
es,
this one is titledFrequency
.
And the kind if painting I d
o is tonal,
so again it's that transparent wa
sh of color,
so this has like a silver under
painting,
and then a grid and then
everything is literally the sa
me,
glaze, just layered up, so when y
ou get into the center
you've got about 21 layers of gla
ze.
This is a diptych that's upstair
s,
entitledThinking of You.
And you can see in the hide on
the right hand side,
that's a bruise that's in the
hide itself.
So, I did miss scale,
so ultimately I did go back to wo
rking on canvas.
This is a piece upstairs entitled
Horizon.
And this is a painting titled
Fire Storm
which is really also, if anyone's
familiar with
the paintings of Oscar Howe,
he's somebody who painted tradit
ional and tribal life
but used a lot of geometric abst
raction to describe
wind, fire, flora, fauna,
and so looking at his paintings
was again, wanting to try to giv
e reason to rethink
about different sorts of Native
painters
throughout the 20th century.
This piece is titledDocument
.
And so for this piece I was look
ing at,
what's called winter counts,
and winter counts were full pain
tings
that would document somebody's y
ear,
and they would create, sometimes
symbols or images
that would really talk about spec
ific pivotal moments
throughout that year,
being an abstract, process-ba
sed painter,
I wanted to think about how I co
uld translate time,
so I did this over, probably a pe
riod of six months or so,
but just building up glazes and t
hinking about
geometric shape that could fill t
his organic shape
that had a completely irregular
silhouette.
This is also a full hide.
That shape there, you can see th
e tail of the animal,
at the bottom, you can kind of se
e
where the four appendages would b
e,
and then this kind of periphery o
f,
steel and copper tacks that go d
irectly into the wood.
The quote is from a Kate Bush so
ng,
so if you're familiar with that s
ong, the lyrics are,
"I know you have a lot of str
ength left,"
and then I stared realizing I co
uld pull out words
to say "I have strength left."
These lyrics, "In time we cou
ld have been
"so much more, more, more, more"
and those lyrics are from Culture
Club's song,
"Time (Clock of My Heart)."
And I think, that's as far as we
brought tonight,
there's more to show you,
sort of like, stuff that I'm wor
king on now,
how are you guys feeling?
[audience murmuring]
Okay, I'll take five more minu
tes and kind of breeze
through this just to show you,
some of what's going on now.
I'm going to be very, very quick
.
So these are additional referenc
es for works since then,
and like I said when I was taking
to people earlier today,
an exhibition like what's upstai
rs is really great
because I get to kind of put to r
est
some of the ideas that I was
working with,
up to that point and I get to mov
e on.
These are some warrior shirt, gho
st dance shirts.
George Catlin painting,
the figure you see in the center
is a berdache figure.
And his words about, this is 183
2,
"This is one of the most unaccou
ntable
"and disgusting customs
"that I have ever met in t
he Indian country.
"And so far as I have been able
to learn,
"belongs only to the Sioux and th
e Sac and Fox,
"perhaps it is practiced by other
tribes,
"but I did not meet with it,
"and for further account of it
"I am constrained to refer to t
he reader
"to the country where it is prac
ticed
"and where I should wish that it
might extinguished
"before it be more fully recorded
."
So it was being able to move thro
ugh things like that,
had begun to influence the work t
o go into performance.
Additional bags that I think
begin to let go
of some of the Indigenous specif
ic aesthetics
but move into other materials.
That entire surface is covere
d with different
charms, charms and hearts.
This bag which is just a listin
g of all the colors
that I work with and the word pow
er behind it,
so pink power, blue power, red p
ower,
black power, yellow power, blue
power,
oh I said blue power, purple powe
r.
Working with trading post weaving
s,
also here's one that works with a
hymn,
so "Amazing Grace,"
"tis grace that has brought me t
hus far
"and grace will lead me home."
This one, that says, "I've got
to use my imagination
"to think of good reasons to kee
p on keeping on."
Gladys Knight & the Pips.
[audience chuckling]
And I'm just gonna show you these
last images
of recent, this is a recent exhib
ition.
And so these are paintings,
acrylic on canvas with beaded fr
ames.
And this is from a Janet Jackson
song,
"There are times when I feel y
ou smile upon me."
And I think I'll stop there.
Thank you very much.
[audience applauding]