Jean LaMarr’s colorful and seductive yet hard-hitting satirical artworks challenging long-held cultural stereotypes and preconceptions about Native American people and cultures will be on view in the exhibition The Art of Jean LaMarr at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts from August 18, 2023, through January 7, 2024. The Art of Jean LaMarr, organized by the Nevada Museum of Art (NMA), features more than 60 artworks including paintings, prints, and sculptures spanning from the 1970s to the present. Jean LaMarr (Susanville Indian Rancheria), an internationally recognized artist, educator, and Native American advocate with ancestral ties to Pyramid Lake, Nevada, and Susanville, California, sparks powerful and important conversations about racist imagery, representations of Native women, legacies of colonization, and environmental justice.

“The Nevada Museum of Art is proud to present this major exhibition of work by Jean LaMarr, who has been a respected artist involved in the Great Basin arts community for decades,” says NMA Andrea and John C. Deane Family Senior Curator and Deputy Director Ann M. Wolfe. “While Jean lives and works in the relatively secluded rural community of Susanville, she has exhibited her work widely and is highly regarded by scholars, curators, and artists around the world.” MoCNA Chief Curator Dr. Manuela Well-Off-Man adds, “We are excited to host this exhibition at MoCNA, especially since Jean LaMarr taught at IAIA for several years and contributed to advancing contemporary Native art through works that powerfully blend Indigenous cultural elements with Modern art and paved the way for many female Native artists.”

LaMarr (born 1945) is descended from Wada Tukadu Numu (Northern Paiute) and Illmowi, Aporige, and Atsugewi (Pit River) ancestry, with strong family ties to Northern Nevada and Northern California. She was born and raised in Susanville, California, and is now an enrolled member of the Susanville Indian Rancheria in Susanville, California, where she lives. In 1964, LaMarr relocated to San Jose, California as part of the Indian Relocation Act, and in 1976 she graduated from UC Berkeley, where she became involved in activist politics and participated in protests including the American Indian Occupation of Alcatraz (1969) and the Pit River Occupation in Shasta County (1970).

LaMarr founded the Native American Graphic Workshop in Susanville in 1994 to help engage Native American youth, elders, and community members in artmaking. LaMarr largely built her artistic reputation as a skilled printmaker while teaching and practicing as an artist in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1970s and 80s. She went on to teach at IAIA in Santa Fe for many years before returning to Susanville.

LaMarr believes “that one painting would be in one home or museum, but a print or video or mural would reach everyone… One painting might be worth a million dollars, but prints will reach millions of people.” For nearly a decade, LaMarr designed the popular Bear Dance posters for the annual Maidu gathering held in the mountain community of Janesville, California, just an hour north of Reno, Nevada. Many of LaMarr’s screenprints feature bold graphics and bright colors that communicate a direct political message to viewers.

My art is a “rejection of the idea of the vanished American Indian,” LaMarr says, explaining that contemporary Native American people are part of vibrant and living cultures. While her paintings, prints, and installations celebrate and honor ancestors and cultural traditions, they also confront racist stereotypes of Native American people, such as those perpetuated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his epic 1855 poem “Song of Hiawatha,” or Slim Whitman’s popular 1924 song “Indian Love Call.” In her Cover Girl series and in many other artworks, LaMarr has worked tirelessly to reclaim the dignity of Native American women, whose bodies were often exploited by early twentieth-century non-Native anthropologists and photographers and later appropriated for use on consumer product packaging. Another strand of LaMarr’s work tackles the legacies of colonialism, including the impacts of ongoing environmental trauma on Native American tribal communities in the American West.

“Jean LaMarr speaks from a place of fierce pride in her indigeneity, and a willingness to challenge the erasure and structural racism that Indigenous Peoples face in their lives. Her work has that razor-sharp political commentary, yet can transmit the softness and beauty of our cultures, particularly of Indigenous women,” says Dr. Debra Harry (Kooyooe Tukadu Numu from Pyramid Lake), Associate Professor of Indigenous Studies in the Department of Gender, Race, and Identity at the University of Nevada, Reno.

In conjunction with this exhibition, the Nevada Museum of Art has published a hardcover book, The Art of Jean LaMarr, which will be available for purchase in the MoCNA Museum Store. The Art of Jean LaMarr includes an essay by Ann M. Wolfe, the NMA Andrea and John C. Deane Family Chief Curator and Associate Director, with contributions from Allan L. Edmunds, Mary Lee Fulkerson, Debra Harry, Ph.D., Archana Hortsing, Lucy Lippard, Judith Lowry, Susan Lobo, Ph.D., Malcolm Margolin, Raymond Patlan, Jan Rindfleisch, and Peter Selz. The exhibition will also be accompanied by Purple Flower Girl (2022), a short video about LaMarr produced and directed by Tsanavi Spoonhunter, who is a descendant of the Northern Paiute, Lakota and Northern Arapaho nations, and who received her master’s degree from the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, with a focus in documentary filmmaking.

The Art of Jean LaMarr is sponsored by Kristi Overgaard; Sandy Raffealli|Bill Pearce Motors; The Phil and Jennifer Satre Family Fund at the Community Foundation of Western Nevada; with supporting sponsorship from Kathie Bartlett, and with additional support from Nevada Humanities and in memory of Bernadette Kaye. The MocNA presentation of The Art of Jean LaMarr is supported by the Ford Foundation.

This story comes to you from MPR News through a partnership with Sahan Journal.

The Reclaiming Our Identities powwow celebrated the two-spirit community during Pride weekend in Minneapolis.

Singers, dancers, and community gathered for the powwow at South High in Minneapolis. Fringed with rainbow colors, the gymnasium was transformed from a basketball court to a dance arena. Just down the hall in the open-air lunchroom, Indigenous artists and vendors covered folding tables with beaded jewelry, hats and ribbon work.

The next row over, community organizations set up tables with pamphlets and flyers, and paper powwow fans—much needed for a hot June day.

Volunteers wore bright pastel tee shirts with the progress pride and gender fluid flag, everyone celebrating Indigenous queer identities.

Two-spirit refers to an Indigenous person who has both a masculine and feminine spirit, a way people from across many tribal nations identify their spiritual and gender identity.

New Native Theatre, a company in Minneapolis hosts the annual social dance. This was the second year that organizers welcomed people to the gathering.

Charli Fool Bear, who is Dakota from the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, is an artistic producer with New Native Theatre. She said the event began to honor two-spirit theater artists and art-makers.

“Theater itself is built on the work of two-spirit people. A part of Indigenous theater’s history starts with two-spirit folks,” said Fool Bear. “People who put it all on the line for our community, for storytelling, for … everything.”

Two-spirit Sisseton Dakota elder and lifelong Minneapolis resident Reva D’Nova said she arrived from another event to spend the day with her two-spirit relatives.

“The recognition of the two-spirit community is long overdue,” said D’Nova.

As a two-spirit elder, D’Nova said her role is to providing guidance to the younger people.

“If I’m able to help them and guide them than I am happy to do it,” she said.

Longtime Minneapolis resident Mo Mike helped lead the day’s events as one of two head dancers. Cree from Beardy’s and Okemasis First Nation, Saskatchewan, Mike identifies as two-spirit transmasculine. He said the event’s organizers work hard to make the space welcoming for people who may not have grown up going to Indigenous social gatherings.

“This will be safe space for them to be who we are as two-spirit trans people, gender non-conforming. We’re making it as safe as possible for all of us to be there.”

Brian Heart, a citizen of the Yankton Sioux tribe and a longtime resident of Minneapolis was asked by the event’s organizers to offer welcoming remarks.

“It’s time that we’re able to come out, be who we are, share a part of our knowledge and our wisdom,” said Heart. “It’s never too late to learn who you are as a person.”

Deanna StandingCloud, citizen of Red Lake Nation, has been emceeing powwows for the past several years. She said the powwow is important to her as a parent.

“I am the mother of a two-spirit daughter. it’s really taught me a lot about being an Anishinaabe person, and also being a mother,” said StandingCloud. “A powwow for the two-spirit community needs to be a safe place because we’re reclaiming a lot of those teachings and a lot about being in community with each other.”

The event made history as the first powwow to have two women as emcees. Deanna StandingCloud was joined by her longtime friend—who also just happens to share her first name. Deanna Beaulieu, citizen of White Earth Nation, joined StandingCloud at the emcee stand. For Beaulieu it was her first time emceeing.

Beaulieu said she was a bundle of nerves on her way to the powwow.

She credits her own two-spirit family members with helping to instill within her and other young family members a sense of acceptance. She said it helped her to remember to just be herself as she stepped into the new role.

“Raising us with that sense of like, ‘We are accepting people and we’re generous with the spirit of giving and sharing, and inclusion’—I think that’s super important,” she said.