- Sheri Castelnuovo: We are so delighted to welcome Jeffrey Gibson
to MMoCA this evening,
and thank him for his willingness 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 international attention
for multifaceted works that combine traditional
Native American techniques and materials
with popular culture imagery and modernist abstraction.
His works speak eloquently of complex exchanges
amongst personal, social, and political domains.
Between acknowledgement and resistance,
art and craft, and past and present.
He has said that he quote, "wants to create work
"that makes the marginalized feel central,
"and that brings together various cultures,
"histories and identities."
Jeffrey earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts
from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1995
and a Master of Arts from the Royal College of Art
in London in 1998.
His work has been exhibited in numerous solo
and group exhibitions, at intuitions 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, Ontario,
Nasher Museum of Art in Durham, South Carolina,
and the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
are among the distinguished institutions that have acquired
his work for their permanent collections.
Among his awards and distinctions are recent grants
from the Joan Mitchell Foundation,
the Smithsonian Institution's
National Museum of the American Indian,
and the Jerome Foundation,
as well as the TED Foundation Fellowship.
Jeffrey also holds an honorary doctorate
from Claremont Graduate University
in Claremont, California.
In addition to these accomplishments,
Jeffrey is on the faculty of Bard College,
where he has taught in the
Studio Arts Department since 2012
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. [audience laughing]
I think we can all agree on that.
So, we all just breathe it out 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 Lillian White, White Eagle
for dancing tonight, that was really stunning and beautiful,
and you'll see, there's lots of jingles in the exhibition
and I think that was a great way to start learning
about them and incredibly important
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 Commission,
of course Stephen Fleischman, Leah Kolb,
John Lukavic, and Sheri,
I have to get your name correctly, Castelnuovo,
Did I get that correct?
Sorry, where's Sheri?
Sorry, I apologize if I mispronounce your name.
So the exhibition upstairs, John Lukavic and I started
planning this exhibition nearly six years ago
and at the time, John and I really,
John is the Native Arts Curator at the Denver Art Museum
and we spoke a lot about my frustrations as an artist,
being a Native artist, I think it's important
for me to identify as a Native artist,
it's an area that I have felt,
kind of people bring a lot of very 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 start with is some of
the inspirations behind the work,
and certainly Southwestern weaving has been a big part
visually of what I've grown up looking at.
And the weavings I realized, as an 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 increasingly more complicated,
Eye Dazzler patterns, but really where,
in terms of the phases of weaving,
we go from, woven garments and blankets
and chief's blankets made for specific 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 their own designs.
You'll see this kind of pattern shows up a lot,
including on myself.
And patterns are nothing, I never copy patterns,
I'm not someone who goes and looks in museums
for things to copy and to bring into my own work,
I look at it very much as maybe an art historian
looks at the history of painting.
And look for ways of kind of pushing this history forward.
Here are some early paintings of mine,
that are oil paint, spray paint, on canvas.
So these are some of the last paintings that I made,
I'm trained as a painter, working on canvas,
but you'll begin to see how this has even morphed,
parts of these paintings which were,
cut apart, they were put through the washer,
they were dried, you'll see showing up in collages upstairs
and in wall hangings and on some of the punching bags.
Another inspiration, so in my studio,
this is going back to maybe 2004 through 6,
I had lots of auction catalogs around my studio,
these parfleche bags which are generally full size hides
that have been painted, generally by women,
using prayer and song as they're painting,
and these patterns are very specific
towards certain individuals,
but they're always photographed like this,
so very similar to a painting, right?
So I was always surprised that nobody had ever done,
an abstraction exhibition in combination
with these parfleche paintings because,
American, Western, European abstraction
tends to kind of reject content,
whereas these are entirely about content,
so for me as an artist,
that was something that was always of interest.
So my first kind of stabs at this 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 garments,
pattern, texture, that I've seen in things like
pattern decoration painting, op art painting,
all of those influences,
so I also love in addition to looking 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 frustration,
and just came to my studio one day
and wanted to take back what was beginning to feel
like a failure, when your paintings are shown
and they always return back to your studio,
and they leave with such high hopes and aspirations,
and they come back, like, y'know the day after.
[audience laughing]
And so I, they sat in my studio for years, literally,
and I was trying to figure out what to do with them.
So inside of these,
rawhide envelopes that have been painted,
are folded up remnants from those paintings
that had been cut off, and so in my mind,
if you own this artwork, it is your painting,
you're welcome to open it up and you can have the painting
that's inside, but for the most part,
I think you see them through these holes
that are in these envelopes,
and they hang directly on the wall.
So the work that's upstairs is really an evolution.
I think I oftentimes tell people what I do is,
I'm not really inventing new things, it's really,
I've been looking at a lot of things,
I used to work in ethnographic collections
at the Field Museum in Chicago while I was studying
at The Art Institute.
I was handling objects every day for about three, four years
and so over time, it really just sort of entered
into my psyche, my visual library 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 begins, in 2011,
I was trying to bring that information
into traditional painting.
And ultimately, what I found was that
people were not familiar with the references
so it really just came across like,
shapes and color, without content.
So ultimately that's what led to me to start
kind of reducing the distance between
my references and my work,
and I started working with textiles,
I started treating the paintings like textiles,
and also I decided to bring in bead 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 century beaded whimsy,
from the Niagara Falls region.
And so when I worked at the Field Museum
there was always this shelf that had these
amazing objects on it that were never shown.
So when I asked the curators why these weren't shown
they said, "Oh, those are just these,
"kitsch, novelty items from Niagara Falls."
And they kind of didn't really fit a Native aesthetic,
nor did they really fit a Western aesthetic.
What happened was, of the, bead workers were trying to
make an income to support themselves and their families,
they used a traditional form of raised bead work
to try to mimic floral and paisley patterns
of Victorian fabrics, and this is what was produced.
So, for me this was like, this is a real kind of,
representation of modernity within Indigenous cultures.
And oftentimes we're unaware of what those look like,
or really how the innovation kind of takes these leaps,
and so I kind of fell in love with these
'cause I feel like they represented,
kind of who I felt to be, somewhere in between many things.
This was the beginning of me teaching myself bead work,
I also had worked with a Menominee woman
at the Field Museum who did teach me,
Mavis Neconish taught me my first run at bead work
in my 20s, and so this piece is titled,
Misfit Flag and it's made from
those cut up pieces from the paintings
that I took off of the stretchers,
it also is the first time that I intentionally
decided to bead things.
Also, many times in museum collections, you come across
fragments of things, so you're not getting the whole object,
you're getting these parts of things,
and you don't really know the whole story,
you don't know where things have come from,
also many things have been repaired numerous times,
so my idea to collage and to mend
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 bag.
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 every now and again
but it was really not a very gratifying experience.
And so I guess I had a lot of anger,
and somebody suggested I go and talk to a therapist and,
like every New Yorker, you go and you get your therapist
and I walked in there feeling really super confident
that there was nothing wrong with me,
I was totally functional and everything 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 world
and how I didn't feel represented in the art world.
And so, that therapist introduced me to,
well we talked about,
a kind of disconnect between mind and body,
and he's the one who introduced me to
a physical trainer to try to reconnect things,
and she's the one who introduced me to boxing.
And so, boxing,
she would hold the bag and she 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 individual,
it's really like this kind of condition.
But at the same time I was using,
a grant from the Durham Foundation
to travel around the country and to meet with
traditional makers who were making things
for their communities for cultural use,
and it was really meeting them
and seeing their weaving, their drumming,
their dancing, their regalia, their jewelry,
as really forms of resistance,
and really ways of commanding respect 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 rosettes that are on the side
are really directly taken from the whimsies.
So I mean, in other ways the blanket is a reference
to Jackson Pollock who,
at the same time as he was being celebrated,
for getting in touch with his inner anima,
and his alcoholism,
my grandfather was a recovering alcoholic
and was being institutionalized because of his,
what was deemed crazy at the time,
and this is when he finds God
and he establishes a Cherokee church
in Briggs Community, Oklahoma.
Very similar story with my other grandfather,
who established the Conehatta Baptist Church
in Conehatta, Mississippi.
So, I'm kind of making my way back,
really questioning if I want to be an artist,
I go France, I was a visiting artist 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 first time I showed
a full exhibition of works that really
used the materiality of these Indigenous
aesthetic histories and material histories,
so there's drums, there's blankets,
there's abstraction, there's bead work, there's masks,
there's also some silverwork in here
and also the beginning of me working with rawhide.
This piece here is titled Quiver
and so this neon pink tube inside of a rawhide sheath,
you know many times people ask about music,
because there's a lot of references to music,
and for me, music really starts with pop music
being an American living abroad,
pop music was kind of a connection to, American culture.
When I returned to the United States,
I spent the better part of my high school years
and college years going to gay night clubs,
and so there's that relationship to music.
When I lived in Chicago it was house music,
specifically Latino and African American
house music and DJs,
and then when I moved to London it was jungle
and the African communities in London.
So, when you're looking at my work 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 titling comes from.
This is a musical reference,
even though it's titled Quiver .
If anyone's familiar with the cover
of Fleetwood Mac's Rumours ,
so it's Mick Fleetwood has these two balls hanging down,
and they're set exactly like that,
so if you ever look at that album 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 punching bag it was amazing,
people actually really connected to it,
people really felt like they could inject
their personal narrative into the punching bag
and understand relationships about power
and that was really great,
again that frustration began to leave me
because I stared feeling like I had a voice,
people wanted to hear more,
this was an exhibition that followed very shortly
titled Love Song at the ICA in Boston.
And these pieces around the corner are,
screen printed onto rawhide on these 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 them to see
shape and color in a particular way,
and it was really an uphill battle.
Putting it on rawhide, really adjusts the viewer
immediately so that I didn't have to fight for that
anymore, I could just focus on painting,
and when a viewer looks at it,
you can't think about shape and color
without thinking about other histories of painting
beyond this history of painting 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 scratches,
something to remind you that this is not just
ubiquitous canvas that I'm painting 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 multiplicity,
and you know, you layer one color over another,
you get three or four colors instantly,
and just build from there.
So the punching bags continued,
and have continued to this day,
I think right now there's probably about 50
that exist in the world.
This does have one of the very first paintings I made
when I first moved to New York.
I moved to New York in 2000,
and this painting is probably from about 2003.
And you can see the jingles here.
I do want to say, one thing about my use of jingles,
I absolutely understand and respect
the source that they come from.
They're gendered within pow wow context,
they hold a ceremonial purpose, they are healing,
for me what I was really impressed 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 ourselves
as we move forward, and really that's what
the jingle symbolizes to me.
The sound and the kind of, the ability of,
these were originally
the lids of tobacco and snuff containers,
so to take something that would be thrown away
to turn it into something that adorns a garment,
to turn it into something ceremonial,
for cultural continuance and for healing,
that's a pretty radical narrative of something
so kind of simple.
So, I've always been someone who has titled my work,
and so here you see I'm still using pieces
from the original paintings,
sometimes I'll paint back on top of them,
and then beginning to put the text
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 Native audiences,
people can inject other things in here,
including just formal, the formality of color,
but really also people like us,
comes form a print that I own in my home
by Sister Corita Kent, who was someone who used
found text and appropriated text, she was nun
and that print hangs over my dining table,
People Like Us and it's really about,
the celebration of community, effort, and labor.
But it was something that has very much inspired me,
so all the words that I use, I keep a running list,
and ultimately they find their way into the work.
So this is also what I consider the red bag,
there are times when I use, every crayon in the crayon box,
and there's other times when I really scale back.
So this is the red bag.
This piece here, is titled White Power ,
and I went to school where people often talked about
how color couldn't carry a narrative in and of itself
so this was sort of me saying, "Oh 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 about church burnings
and code, and hand signals to let people know
what road not to go down, stories of lynchings
and general physical abuse and so,
the term white power, I knew when 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 white 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 quickly.
["Cups" by Anna Kendrick]
? I got my ticket for the long way 'round ?
? Two bottle a whiskey for the way ?
? And I sure would like some sweet company ?
? And I'm leaving tomorrow, whadda ya say? ?
? When I'm gone ?
? You're gonna miss me when I'm gone ?
Okay, so like millions of other people,
Pitch Perfect came out and I thought,
"Oh, it's a cute song,"
and then someone posted this video, on YouTube,
of Nikki Shawana singing a version of it,
where she altered the words
to reflect the pow wow experience,
and again, this is an amazing way that Native people
transform something that exists out in the world
to support ourselves, so I'll play you this version.
? When I'm gone ?
? You're gonna miss me when I'm gone ?
? You're gonna miss the ways I care ?
? Now who's gonna braid your hair ?
? 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 women's dance regalia,
and this really made me think about how throughout
the 20th century, and 19th and 18th century,
the general idea was that we wouldn'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 made me think of,
and so that's why those words were important to me
and they found their way into this bag
which is You're Gonna Miss Me When I'm Gone .
[audience murmuring]
This bag is titled Manifest Destiny .
There are a number of professional 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 different to them.
[audience chuckling]
And really how they have entered the world of fighting
as a way of really going from poverty
and a lack of opportunities to really shifting
their entire kind of life and,
so anyhow I wanted to kind of find another way to use
these words, manifest destiny
outside of the colonial narrative.
This piece is also in the exhibition,
it's titled Our Freedom is Worth 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 actually
traditionally tanned hide, so in terms of my use of hides,
I work with a commercial distributor,
I sometimes get hides from hunters,
through also this distributor,
this one in particular was by an individual in Wyoming,
who did the entire traditional process
and it was difficult to get the hide,
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 experience also when I was
at the Field Museum, coming across a bundle,
which was toys for a child, for a nomadic tribe,
and inside of that bundle,
there was a mother figure, a father figure,
some children, and then there was another figure,
that we couldn't quite place,
and eventually someone told me that this was
a berdache figure, so a third gendered figure.
And so this doll set was really meant to teach children
about the roles in society and so,
for me it's saying this kind of,
"Oh, we were progressive."
[audience laughing]
We understood that there were many different ways
of thinking about gender.
But, so that idea of dolls, these are bigger than dolls,
they're kind of anywhere
from here to five feet tall sometimes.
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 what the future
might look like, or what a kind of pushed further
kind of inter-tribal indigeneity might look like,
so I think of the figures very much as proposals,
people have also referred to them 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, thinking 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 present
but then this idea of futurism began to enter into the work,
and of course many people are familiar with Afrofuturism,
but this, I wanted to find some comparable version
of Indigenous futurism.
And so this is where some of these figures come into play.
And so this is rawhide, jingles,
beads, crystals, paint.
And this one, when I first started exhibiting
and people would ask me, "Well, who are you referencing?"
I oftentimes mentioned the performance artist Leigh Bowery
who is an Australia performance artist,
who primarily worked and lived in London.
I believe he died in 1995 or 6, from AIDS.
But he was really known for,
he was a club personality, started 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 London.
But this kind of body shape is something
that he would create, whether it was from tulle,
or he would create it from padding,
but really this is a very direct reference to that.
So it's been a thrill to work with
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 Culture Club,
"and mix it into popular culture of previous decades."
Once I was making those figures,
I decided I wanted something larger,
these actually did come to me through a dream.
I think what many people don't, aren'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 visit me
in my dreams each night,
and it lasted for about two weeks
and so these phrases came out of that.
So this is Can't Take My Eyes Off of You .
And the ceramic heads, they're really meant
to be sort of battered and bruised,
and kind of still here and present.
Also, the Mississippi tribe would have originated
out of the Mississippian culture,
and within the Mississippian culture
there are these effigy head pots which,
these are very much kind of inspired by.
I'm not sure, I'm not fully up to date,
if anyone has really studied,
what these effigy head pots were exactly for.
But, they really show people of this region,
very differently, there's lots of facial tattoos,
and piercings, and very flamboyant, personal adornment.
So that's where I originally wanted to start working
with these clay heads, and this is the back.
Here's another one, this is titled
Speak 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 just something you wear,
they're things that are made specifically for
somebody for a very specific purpose,
they're not, they're worn at very specific times,
and they enable the person to embody,
abilities beyond their day to day selves.
So I really, with these, other than 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 titled What Do You Want? When Do You Want It?
These are also recycled teepee poles.
So the, wall hangings, if anyone in here
is familiar with the way that you probably have seen
Chilkat blankets shown within museum collections,
was the shape, this is where I wanted
the shape to come from,
and those are generally woven with cedar,
fiber, and also wool,
so these also have these little amulets,
which are decommissioned arrowheads
from museum collections.
There's also, small things that I've collected
since I was probably 15 or 16 years 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 yarn,
individually, tied on, and cut.
So everything really, this is almost,
I think 11 1/2 feet wide.
So it's also quite heavy.
This piece here, you'll see people
like Nina Simone, James Baldwin,
show up in the work as a reference, many times.
James Baldwin, very early on,
in my probably late teens I discovered James Baldwin,
and I think just also him being an openly gay man,
living in Europe, writing very articularly about
the differences of being a creative, queer person,
in Europe and America,
talking about civil rights,
just really has always been a huge inspiration for me.
And then the text here, "American history,
"is longer, larger, more beautiful and more terrible
"than anything anyone has ever said about it."
This wall hanging says, "I am alive, you are alive,
"they are alive, we are living!"
And so the idea of beginning to author words
is something that over the past maybe two or three years
I've begun doing.
Rather than appropriating words,
from different texts, or music lyrics.
This one is titled, The Only Way Out Is Through ,
which in fact when I made this piece I wasn't familiar,
but the person who owns this,
struggled with substance abuse for a long time,
and they said this became their kind of mantra,
in order to work through this
and I've received lots of stories from people about
how this, these words resonate with them
for a particular experience or something 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 about my personal experience,
but I try to choose words that people can really project
their own experiences into
and kind of give the content to the piece.
This one's a little bit more difficult to read.
This is The Difference Between You + Me .
And the work has always been about personal relationships,
I think I'm of the generation of the '90s of,
the personal is political and every relationship
has power imbalances, and so for a long time
I was really talking about very much,
personal relationships, but ultimately,
in our current climate, those have also begun
to reflect political relationships,
and so the work has begun to take
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 Somerville.
This is another larger beaded piece,
What Do You Want? When Do You Want It?
And so this actually is the raised bead work
so what looks like a little less tacked down,
the words are tacked down
but then the kind of black and white,
they're loops that lay on top of each other.
And this one, "I want to take you,
I'm gonna take you, higher, higher, higher."
And for these pieces,
I tend to work in a kind of serial ways,
these pieces all begin as 40 by 30 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 in 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 murals all throughout the city
of individual females who have gone missing.
So when I came back it was also,
I am an educator, I have been teaching for nearly 20 years,
and we were managing conversations around
Black Lives Matter with our students,
and so I came back and I wanted to 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 protest
from an aerial view, where you could see people
kind of coming in.
My return to painting was back on to rawhide,
these tend to be modestly scaled,
they're about 16 to 18 inch squares,
this one is titled Frequency .
And the kind if painting I do is tonal,
so again it's that transparent wash of color,
so this has like a silver under painting,
and then a grid and then
everything is literally the same,
glaze, just layered up, so when you get into the center
you've got about 21 layers of glaze.
This is a diptych that's upstairs,
entitled Thinking 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 working 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 traditional and tribal life
but used a lot of geometric abstraction to describe
wind, fire, flora, fauna,
and so looking at his paintings
was again, wanting to try to give reason to rethink
about different sorts of Native painters
throughout the 20th century.
This piece is titled Document .
And so for this piece I was looking at,
what's called winter counts,
and winter counts were full paintings
that would document somebody's year,
and they would create, sometimes symbols or images
that would really talk about specific pivotal moments
throughout that year,
being an abstract, process-based painter,
I wanted to think about how I could translate time,
so I did this over, probably a period of six months or so,
but just building up glazes and thinking about
geometric shape that could fill this organic shape
that had a completely irregular silhouette.
This is also a full hide.
That shape there, you can see the tail of the animal,
at the bottom, you can kind of see
where the four appendages would be,
and then this kind of periphery of,
steel and copper tacks that go directly into the wood.
The quote is from a Kate Bush song,
so if you're familiar with that song, the lyrics are,
"I know you have a lot of strength left,"
and then I stared realizing I could pull out words
to say "I have strength left."
These lyrics, "In time we could 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 working on now,
how are you guys feeling?
[audience murmuring]
Okay, I'll take five more minutes 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 references for works since then,
and like I said when I was taking to people earlier today,
an exhibition like what's upstairs is really great
because I get to kind of put to rest
some of the ideas that I was working with,
up to that point and I get to move on.
These are some warrior shirt, ghost dance shirts.
George Catlin painting,
the figure you see in the center is a berdache figure.
And his words about, this is 1832,
"This is one of the most unaccountable
"and disgusting customs
"that I have ever met in the Indian country.
"And so far as I have been able to learn,
"belongs only to the Sioux and the 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 the reader
"to the country where it is practiced
"and where I should wish that it might extinguished
"before it be more fully recorded."
So it was being able to move through things like that,
had begun to influence the work to go into performance.
Additional bags that I think begin to let go
of some of the Indigenous specific aesthetics
but move into other materials.
That entire surface is covered with different
charms, charms and hearts.
This bag which is just a listing of all the colors
that I work with and the word power behind it,
so pink power, blue power, red power,
black power, yellow power, blue power,
oh I said blue power, purple power.
Working with trading post weavings,
also here's one that works with a hymn,
so "Amazing Grace,"
"tis grace that has brought me thus far
"and grace will lead me home."
This one, that says, "I've got to use my imagination
"to think of good reasons to keep 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 exhibition.
And so these are paintings,
acrylic on canvas with beaded frames.
And this is from a Janet Jackson song,
"There are times when I feel you smile upon me."
And I think I'll stop there.
Thank you very much.
[audience applauding]