Innholdsfortegnelse for April-May 2022/ No. 38 i Native American Art Magazine

Welcome to Native American Art magazine’s April/May issue! This issue is rich with history, fashion and beadwork. Every three years we put together a special fashion section. This one is truly a showstopper! As Native American artists continue to add contemporary styling to their traditional craft, amazing art is being created, collected and universally recognized. You will see the movement in this issue, and please see executive editor Michael Clawson’s letter on our fashion special section. Some world-class designers are featured in our pages to support your passion for fashion. The wave of Indigenous art is being sought after by collectors of many genres. Our writers and art experts could not be happier and it plays out in our pages. We have five museum previews to peruse, including a major…

Note: This is an excerpt of an essay from the Abeyta | To’Hajiilee K’é catalog published by the Wheelwright Museum. I grew up in a home where projects were always at hand. There were clay vessels being worked on across the kitchen table; there was the smell of casein paint emanating from my father’s bedroom studio, there were woodworking tools, belt sanders, beads ready to be strung and books falling off of every shelf and wool ready to be carded, spun and woven on looms. I chose instead to be outdoors constructing club houses and tree dwellings where I could spend time with friends devising skylights and elevator systems and kicking it on salvaged carpeting from a recently renovated hotel. The home I grew up in was a creative place where…

Lauren Good Day is an esteemed visual artist creating vibrant and culturally relevant ledger art drawings. She is equally well known for her inclusive fashion line based on her two-dimensional visual artworks. She often depicts horses, parade riders, and geometric patterning. Her fabrics match the warm earth tones she has derived from her drawings on ledger paper. She describes both of her art forms by saying, “All of my designs are based within my culture and our teachings. It’s made with the stories I want to communicate.” Lauren Good Day (“Good Day Woman”) is an Arikara, Hidatsa, Blackfeet and Plains Cree artist. She is an enrolled member of the Three Affiliated Tribes (Mandan, Hidatsa, Arikara Nation) of the Fort Berthold Reservation in North Dakota. She is also a registered Treaty…

Throughout 2021 and 2022, we will be introducing several new Region Guides devoted to specific areas within the country. Last year we introduced our first-ever section devoted to the Northeastern Woodlands, and here in this issue, for the first time, we’re focusing some attention on the Great Plains. This region, which is so often romanticized in film and television, has a rich history of art and design, and the artists are not only exploring their past but expanding into the future. The region begins in Texas and heads up through Oklahoma, Nebraska, Missouri, Iowa, Wyoming, Montana, North and South Dakota, Minnesota and Montana. It’s a huge area, with dozens of tribes and nations, but they are often united in their love of storytelling. That quality is reflected here with our…

Few places in this country have had such a captivating hold over us the way the Great Plain have. This is the place of the majestic buffalo, of tall grasses undulating underneath prairie winds, of endless fields stretching so far they disappear behind the curvature of the earth. It’s also a place of history: Westward expansion, railroads cutting into the grassy plains and the Battle of Little Bighorn, where Sitting Bull, Crazy Horse and Gall claimed victory over 7th Cavalry leader George Armstrong Custer. It was also a diverse region: Comanche, Kiowa and Osage to the south; the Cheyenne, Arapaho, Omaha and Arikara in the central part of the country; and the Blackfeet, Assiniboine, Mandan and Crow in the Northern Plains. In Pekka Hämäläinen’s 2019 book Lakota America, the author…

TUCSON, AZ Art did not find its way into the life of Julia Arriola (Mescalero/Mayo). “I was born an artist,” she says. And although she spent much of her life making art, and bettering herself as an artist, she could not pursue it professionally until she retired two years ago from her career curating museums, specifically at the Arizona Historical Society in Tucson, Arizona. “Life took me in different places,” she says. “My job was a marriage of art and history, so aspects of that worked its way into my art.” Her newest works will be on display in a solo show opening April 22 at the Mark Sublette Medicine Man Gallery in Tucson. Arriola’s work is a playful exploration in the genre of ledger art. Drawn onto antique, century-old…

TAOS, NM Now open at the Couse-Sharp Historic Site in Taos, New Mexico, is La Luz de Taos, an exhibition that features nearly a dozen different mediums—from paintings and bronzes to weavings, pottery, jewelry, fashion and carvings—all from some of the top artists in the country. The site, which has the homes and studios of painters Eanger Irving Couse and Joseph Henry Sharp, is celebrating the opening of its Lunder Research Center, an exhibition space that also has significant storage for archives, artwork and historical objects. The center is a repository for all things Taos, including much of its early art history as artists from all around the world discovered the Taos Pueblo and surrounding area in the early 20th century. Thirty-nine artists will be featured in the exhibition, including…

We have a stellar issue for you this month, and I can’t wait for you to dig into it. In addition to our first-ever Region Guide: Great Plains, we also are returning to the world of fashion. When we first started covering fashion in 2019, we were worried about stepping into a strange world that we were unfamiliar with. Pottery, weavings, baskets, paintings… we had covered those materials for so long it was, and still is, almost second nature. But fashion?!? Let me tell you, we learned something back 2019, and it was reinforced again here in 2022: the fashion designers are not these far-away artists working away from the art market, in places like Milan, Paris and New York City. They are here, closer than you think and they…

We are excited to bring you our newest fashion special section, where we take a deep dive into the hottest Native American designers working today. Fashion can be a very personal aspect of our lives. What a person wears not only helps define who they are, but it also meets them at their most vulnerable points—other art forms may hang from a wall or sit on a shelf, but fashion literally touches our bodies from head to toe. So what a person wears matters. Our newest fashion section will highlight designers, brands, trends and some history as we explore this exciting art form. We hope you enjoy!…

“The OGs have a lot of stories.”—Virgil Ortiz The year 2022 marks Santa Fe’s Southwestern Association for Indian Arts (SWAIA) centennial celebration: 100 years of Indigenous artists, designers, arts and, more recently, fashion! This year is also SWAIA’s ninth-annual fashion show, which has exponentially grown since its inception in 2014. Despite the increased interest in Indigenous fashion and apparel, Native designers are neither new nor an anomaly, showing their collections on alternative and innovative platforms for decades. Many exciting narratives of Native fashion have yet to be written and published from the Indigenous perspective to help expand the canon of fashion history. Over the course of SWAIA’s centennial year—in addition to the 50th year at the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (MocNA), and the 60th for the Institute of American…

ACONAV Loren Aragon is a former engineer turned fashion designer from the Acoma Pueblo, New Mexico. Aragon is now CEO and designer of ACONAV, a Native American-owned fashion brand celebrating the empowerment of women worldwide. Aragon’s work is the result of a combination of artistic vision and technological discipline. The application of traditional with modern ideas has allowed him to discover an avenue in which he is able to express his artistic talents, while preserving culture. Pe’eh’cha (Let it Rain) is the most recent collection that combines ancient Acoma pottery design elements and inspiration from the monsoon rains. In summer 2021, a collaboration with Santa Fe-based Samsville Gallery ignited an exclusive collection for the gallery, titled Harmony, which revisits bold traditional pottery designs on classic silhouettes. www.aconav.com @aconav /ACONAV @aconav_fashion…

(Fort Peck Dakota/Nakoda (Wahpetunwan/Sisitunwan/Hohe)) In northern Montana, sitting below the U.S.-Canadian border, Highway 2 stretches across the flat terrain towards the western mountains. The remoteness of this northern landscape, otherwise known as the Hi-Line, named after the infamous trail in Montana, holds a beautiful history of its people and what is arguably some of the most unique historic beadwork aesthetics of the Northern Plains. The northern Montana territory is traditional homeland of Piikani (Blackfeet) and Nakoda (Assiniboine) people, but migration and reservation establishments have shifted the landscape. Current day reservations that sit along the Hi-Line include, Fort Peck, Fort Belknap, Rocky Boy and the Blackfeet reservation. Each community holds rich, unique tribal histories and cultures that are not only tied to the landscape and natural environments but are also connected…

TUCSON, AZ Brad Kahlhamer views himself as “tribally ambiguous.” Born in Tucson, Arizona, to one and possibly two Indigenous parents (his birth certificate omits his ethnic background) he was adopted and brought up by a German-American couple, living in Wisconsin and Arizona. As a young man he was a traveling musician living on the road and, eventually, in New York City. He had wanted to be an artist from an early age. Julie Sasse, chief curator at the Tucson Museum of Art, writes, “Over time, Kahlhamer began to develop an awareness of three distinct realms of his own identity that together form a hybrid reality. He sees the ‘first place’ as his conventional American upbringing by his adoptive parents, the ‘second place’ as his Indigenous heritage, and the ‘third place’…

TONY ABEYTA (NAVAJO) Tony Abeyta is a Navajo contemporary artist working in mixed media paintings. A graduate of New York University with an honorary doctorate from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, Tony was the 2012 recipient of the New Mexico Governor’s Excellence in the Arts award, and recognized as a Native treasure by the Museum of Indian Arts & Culture. Tony currently works in both Santa Fe, New Mexico, and Berkeley, California. His work is included in numerous museums around the country, including the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian, Boston Fine Arts Museum, the Heard Museum and the Denver Art Museum, as well as in many other public and private collections. PAULA A. BAXTER Paula A. Baxter, a former curator and adjunct professor from…

SUBSCRIBE TODAY AND GET ALL 18 MAGAZINES EVERY YEAR 6 Issues of (Bimonthly) Native American Art PLUS 12 Issues (Monthly) Western Art Collector Discover New Art Available For Sale The art of major historic and contemporary Native artists is in demand, and if you’re serious about acquiring new works, you need to know when they become available. When you subscribe to Native American Art magazine you’ll be the first to know about new works because each month we’ll email you the link to the latest issue online. You’ll have instant access to the latest issue when it is published. You’ll see art coming available for sale before the shows even open. Coast-To-Coast Coverage See new art being created by major Native artists coast to coast. Many readers travel across the…

Storytelling is an art form, a methodology in Indigenous sciences, a gift, and an absolutely essential component of the strength, success and sustainability of Native American cultures. For Native people, it can be said that our most trusted storytellers are the keepers of our origins, the carriers of our memories and the superheroes of our communities. Storytellers are essential to survivance. Our ancestors, the people of this place, created meticulous methodologies in which to remember and retain their lifeways and protect their world. It is even without a sheet of paper, book, or computer, a gifted storyteller can recall creation stories, histories and narratives with ease and genetic intention. Their accounts are how we remember ourselves, why we are here, and provide roadmaps of hope for the most precarious parts…

Delina White of the Minnesota Chippewa Tribe (Anishinaabe), Leech Lake Reservation, is a woman of many talents. She’s a jewelry and beadwork artist, Native fashion designer and activist, and is now putting efforts into the fashion production side of the industry; providing more opportunity for Native American artists. White is also gearing up for her newest fashion collection under her label ‘IamAnishinaabe’ for Fashion Week Minnesota, that will include their Native American fashion segment titled Native Star Light. “The theme overall this year is ‘shine,’” White says, “We’re going to talk about the connection Native people have to the celestial universe and the stars as part of our culture.” White will also be helping with the production of the show including lighting, hair, makeup and modeling; and showing the models…

She smiles as she opens the door, slightly apprehensive about the coming interview. Wanesia Misquadace is a Native artist, educator, scholar and supporter of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) movement for justice. She is an enrolled citizen of the Minnesota Lake Superior Chippewa Tribe, one of the various bands of Anishinaabe peoples who populate large stretches of the Great Lakes into the Northern Plains. In Canada, they are also known as Ojibwe. She currently lives and works in the American Southwest. She describes her life since childhood as one where she used art as a way to connect to her spirituality. Misquadace also credits her inventiveness and abilities in multiple media to a DNA memory of her Native ancestors. She is naturally following her own path, one that…

ALEXANDRIA, VA Beginning May 6, Blue Rain Gallery will present a three-day pop-up show presenting the work of Preston Singletary. The show will celebrate the recent opening of the glass artist’s traveling museum exhibition, Raven and the Box of Daylight, now open at the National Museum of the American Indian in nearby Washington, D.C. The exhibition “tells the Tlingit origin story of Raven and his transformation of the world—bringing light to people via the stars, moon and sun,” Singletary writes. “Raven leads visitors on a fantastical journey through the transformation of darkness into light. The story unfolds as visitors move through the exhibition’s four environments, while listening to recordings of storytellers paired with layers of original music and coastal Pacific Northwest soundscapes. The exhibition has been praised for its theatrical…

RENO, NV 1945—in Susanville, California, an hour and a half northwest of Reno, Nevada—marked the beginnings of renowned Native American artist and activist Jean LaMarr. Her northern Paiute/Pit River ancestry, with ties to both northern Nevada and California, greatly inspired her artistic career, along with her experiences with racism, assimilation and bias. She channeled these obstacles and love for her heritage into paintings, sculpture and prints, now displayed as a retrospective at the Nevada Museum of Art. The exhibition titled The Art of Jean LaMarr, spans 50 years of LaMarr’s production in more than 100 pieces of work, including newly made installations. “The museum has been working with artists of the Great Basin for over a decade,” says chief curator and associate director Ann Wolfe. “LaMarr has been recognized by…