OKMULGEE, Oklahoma – There is an underground music scene throughout the Mvskoke Reservation and the state that is being invaded by a Mvskoke rap group built under the self-made label, 400 Waves.

The label consists of Mason McClellan (Frisco Zane), HV (Dillion Rudd), and MadMatt (Matthew Tabbytite). McClellan is the Chief Executive Officer of the label.

“400 is the block we grew up on,” McClellan said about the label name. “Waves come from, we don’t ever try to steal or ride anyone’s wave, we make our own waves.”

With the opening of New Prosper Studios the group has been dropping music individually and as a group. They serve the rap and hip hop industry a taste of Mvskoke culture in their work.

Recently McClellan dropped a new single, “Karma” on July 18. It was produced by HV. McClellan and HV will also drop a new album on Aug. 30. It will feature multiple artists that are Native American and non Native.

McClellan calls the collaborative group a team, referring to Rudd and Tabbytite as his brothers and partners.

“Me and my brothers came up with the name,” McClellan said.,“We have been investing in ourselves, with merchandise and our studio, New Prosper Studios.”

McClellan claims his major role is promotion, it is a role he has been in for over three years now. Promotion includes booking shows, a clothing line, the recording studio, collaborating with other local artists and much more.

“I’m a Native artist who helps not just Native artists but all artists,” McClellan said.

As long as McClellan can see the passion for music within the artist, he will work with them.

“Not everybody has the same passion for it as I do,” McClellan said. “So I can’t just hop on a song with just anybody.”

Now McClellan claims many of his bookings are requested from 21 and over clubs from Oklahoma City, Shawnee, Tulsa, and the Muskogee area. He tries to perform at shows at least once a month, if not twice.

“I have done over 20 shows and even opened up for big name artists such as Gorilla Zoe , Mr. Pookie and the Murphy Lee,” McClellan said.

McClellan claims the clothing line has taken off globally. Packages of 400 Waves merchandise have been sent as far as South Africa.

McClellan and his brothers feel a lot of support from the local community. All three grew up in Okmulgee, and have made it through rough childhoods as reservation kids growing up in single parent homes, some affected by drugs and alcohol.

So far the journey has been good, McClellan claims. “It has been fun, not all fun, I mean definitely hard work and a lot of late nights working.”

Most of this part of his life is done outside of his daily job. According to McClellan, his most important role is being a father.

“I know how it is to be a single dad,” McClellan said. “My daughter is my biggest supporter and my biggest motivation.”

At just four years old, McClellan’s daughter has already taken an interest in her father’s artistic career by asking him questions and giving him words of encouragement.

McClellan also takes time to give back to the community during holiday celebrations like Halloween, dedicating time and money to hand out candy.

The best place to follow McClellan for updates on shows, music drops and inquiries is his Facebook page, Mason McClellan. The other group members can also be found on Facebook at Hv Hv Hv, and Matthew Hawk Tabbytite.

For those interested in listening to the group’s work they can find music from the three artists on all major platforms including Apple Music, Spotify, and SoundCloud.

Art Briefs: Theater in Chester and Easthampton, a Native American celebration in Turner Falls, and more

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  Kala Ross makes her debut at Chester Theatre Company as Genesis in “The Light,” which takes place Aug. 3 through 6. Image courtesy Chester Theatre Company

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  Kayodé Soyemi returns to Chester Theater Company to play Rashad in “The Light,” which will be staged Aug. 3 through 6. Photo by ARIELLE GRAY/Kayodé Soyemi website

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  “Pussy Sludge,” by award-winning playwright Gracie Gardner, opens Friday, Aug. 4, in The Blue Room in CitySpace in Easthampton.  Image courtesy Real Live Theater

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  Photography by Sally Greenbaum is part of a group exhibit this month at Forbes Library in Northampton. Image courtesy Forbes Library

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  Photography by Rob Weir – this image of the Gullfoss waterfall in Iceland – is part of a group exhibit this month at Forbes Library in Northampton. Image courtesy Forbes Library

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  Photography by Richard Gettler is part of a group exhibit this month at Forbes Library in Northampton. Image courtesy Forbes Library

Published: 8/3/2023 1:56:50 PM

Seeing the light

CHESTER – The summer season at the Chester Theatre Company (CTC) continues through this weekend with the final performances of Loy A. Webb’s “The Light,” a production that looks at how a young African-American couple navigate complicated issues raised by the #MeToo movement.

“The Light,” which was nominated in 2019 for Outstanding New Off-Broadway Play by the Outer Critics Circle, runs Aug. 3 through 6, with tickets available at chestertheater.org.

In the play, set in Chicago, Rashad and Genesis, who have just gotten engaged, are looking to celebrate. Among Rashad’s gifts to his fiancée are tickets to see a show by a popular rapper, Kashif, who Rashad sees as a champion of Black men. But Genesis refuses to go: Kashif, she says, once raped one of her friends.

The couple’s “celebration” soon breaks down into a heated argument, exposing more secrets that threaten to overshadow their future in what Stage Left calls “a story of revelation, redress, and hopeful reconciliation cued at the intersection of #MeToo and Black Lives Matter.”

The CTC Production stars Kayodé Soyemi as Rashad and Kala Ross as Genesis; Ross previously made her Broadway debut in the Tony-nominated production of “For Colored Girls…” directed by Camille A. Brown. Direction of “The Light” is by Christina Franklin.

Show times are 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. on Aug. 3, 7:30 p.m. on Aug. 4, 2 p.m. and 7:30 p.m. on Aug. 5, and 2 p.m. on Aug. 6.

CTC’s final production of the season, “Circle Mirror Transformation,” runs Aug. 10 through 20.

A strange oil slick

EASTHAMPTON — Real Live Theater (RLT) will stage its first full, live production following the pandemic, with “Pussy Sludge,” a work by playwright Gracie Gardner that opens Aug. 4 at 7:30 p.m. at The Blue Room in CitySpace, with additional performances Aug. 5, 6, 11, 12 and 13.

The play, which is for audiences 18 years and older, won a 2017 Relentless Award, an honor named after the late actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, and previously has been staged in New York, London and Berlin.

The story, with a cast of eight, follows a woman who calls herself Pussy Sludge because she is menstruating crude oil. She moves to a state park to deal with the problem, where various characters, including park rangers, offer suggestions and commentary, some of it designed to be helpful – or not.

Producer Ellen Morbyrne, a co-founder of Real Live Theater, says the play offers dark humor and considers adult topics like masturbation and sex, as well as patriarchal systems and power structures.

Or, as the RLT website puts it, “Pussy Sludge is a fever-dream Queer love story/adventure about how we deal with trauma; how we heal and how we do not. It’s about bodily autonomy and bodily functions… (and) the power of the erotic, pleasure, and shame.”

Show times are 7:30 p.m. for all dates, as well as 2 p.m. on Aug. 5 and 12. Visit cityspaceeasthampton.org or reallivetheatre.net for tickets and additional information.

From the private collection

EASTHAMPTON – The Oxbow Gallery has opened an unusual show this month, one that’s being staged as a tribute to a longtime volunteer with the art collective, Kathy Service, who is also an avid art collector.

“Celebrating Connections: The Collection of Kathy Service” will feature a range of paintings and sculpture, presented salon style, that Service, a lifelong Northampton resident, has acquired over the years. Among the regional artists whose work is part of the exhibit are Martha Armstrong, Liz Chalfin, Barry Moser, Scott Prior, Nanny Vonnegut and Richard Yarde.

Curator and artist Deborra Stewart-Pettengill says Oxbow Gallery members have long wanted to celebrate Service’s “generous volunteerism,” from creating monthly exhibit announcements to answering the phone.

“The obvious element that ties the pieces together is their connection to the Pioneer Valley art community,” Stewart-Pettengill said in a statement. “With so much to choose from, this format offers us the best chance of showing the depth of this connection.”

Service, a nurse practitioner, has been active in the arts community in other ways, from supporting a letterpress printing studio to serving on the Mass Cultural Council and the Northampton Council for the Arts.

An opening reception for her show takes place Aug. 4 at the gallery from 5 to 8 p.m., and artist and historian Cathy Osman will speak with Service about her collection Aug. 6 at 3 p.m.

The exhibit runs through Aug. 27. Oxbow’s smaller gallery space this month will feature “Rock, Paper, Scissors,” an exhibit by Margaret Humbert-Droz.

Hosmer Gallery calling

NORTHAMPTON – Work from three photographers, ranging from street portraits to dramatic images from nature, is featured this month at Hosmer Gallery at Forbes Library.

Meantime, the gallery has opened its application process to artists for exhibits in 2024 and early 2025.

The current exhibit, which runs through Aug. 30, features the work of Richard Getler, Sally Greenbaum and Rob Weir. Getler, who says he comes from “a family of people-watchers,” says he’s drawn to photographing strangers to capture their emotions, expressions and body language.

Greenbaum, who’s also a cellist, says she finds inspiration for her photos in unexpected patterns and reflections in everyday life; her interest in those patterns, she notes, is also spurred by her experience with musical forms and motifs.

Weir, a longtime writer and a former college and high school history teacher, says his first teaching experience was actually in darkroom techniques. His photography is inspired by “nature, travel, and the moods that images and places induce,” according to exhibit notes.

For Hosmer exhibits running from February 2024 through February 2025, artists are invited to make proposals through Sept. 8, 2023. Artists who live or work in Hampshire, Hampden, Franklin and Berkshire counties are eligible to apply, and first-time exhibitors, individuals and groups are welcome.

Applications can be made at forbeslibrary.org/gallery/info-for-artists.

Celebrating Native American art and cultures

TURNERS FALLS – The Pocumtuck Homelands Festival, held at Unity Park Aug. 5 and 6, will offer two days of Indigenous music and drumming, storytelling and history, dancing, children’s activities and more.

Presenters include artist Justin Beatty, musicians Hawk Henries and the Black Hawk Singers, dance instructor Annawon Weeden, and Hartman Deetz, who teaches eastern woodland skills.

The festival, presented by The Nolumbeka Project and Riverculture, is free and takes place 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Aug. 5 and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Aug. 6.

—Compiled by Steve Pfarrer

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Berkeley and New York — 

When theorists Amalia Mesa-Bains and bell hooks got together to write a book in 2017, they didn’t produce a collection of essays or some scholarly manifesto. Instead, the pair sat down and had a series of conversations. The book that emerged, “Homegrown: Engaged Cultural Criticism,” is marvelous for its thoughtfulness and its accessibility, exploring the roots of culture, how it is generated but also how it can be suppressed and erased.

Mesa-Bains, a mestiza Chicana from the Bay Area, and hooks, a Black woman from Kentucky, devote a chapter to memory. “Memory allows us to resist and to heal,” says hooks. She goes on to refer to a well-known quote by Spanish filmmaker Luis Buñuel: “You have to begin to lose your memory, if only in bits and pieces, to realize that memory is what makes our lives. Life without memory is no life at all.”

Memory is at the heart of a pair of captivating and long-overdue exhibitions currently on view on opposite coasts.

At the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, Mesa-Bains — an artist as well as an important scholar — is the subject of a career retrospective — her first. The show reunites nearly 60 works, including many of her sprawling altar-style installations inspired by themes of family, spiritual rite, the feminine body and politics.

Across the continent in New York City, the Whitney Museum of American Art also has an important retrospective on view: nearly five decades of work by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, a citizen of the Confederate Salish and Kootenai Nation, whose bold paintings borrow the iconographic language of Pop to assert the Native presence in the United States. Both exhibitions are on view through mid-August.

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, “Genesis,” 1993 is on view in the artist’s retrospective at the Whitney Museum in New York.

(Jaune Quick-to-See Smith / Garth Greenan Gallery)

Both shows incorporate the word “memory” in the title. Mesa-Bains’ retrospective is subtitled “Archaeology of Memory,” while Smith’s bears the designation “Memory Map.” Through their work, both artists have introduced important narratives about the Chicano and Indigenous experience, respectively, in institutions where these have long remained out of view. “Our collective memory,” Mesa-Bains says in “Homegrown,” “has been suppressed by educational institutions and the mass media.”

Together, these exhibitions work to remedy that. And they have more in common besides, marking analogous personal and cultural histories.

Both women were born in the same decade: Smith in 1940, on the Flathead Reservation in Montana, and Mesa-Bains in 1943, in the Santa Clara Valley (a.k.a. Silicon Valley), to Mexican parents without documents. Both artists have been influential activists, educators and curators: Mesa-Bains’ theories around Chicana domestic spaces inspired the group show “Domesticanx” at New York’s El Museo del Barrio last year; this fall, Smith is organizing a group show of 50 living Native artists, “The Land Carries Our Ancestors,” for the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Both artists have talked about feeling disillusioned with and excluded by the second wave feminist movement of the 1970s. And both have created works inspired by mapping, questioning how the borders of the United States have overwritten what was here before. Both have also tackled, in distinct ways, myriad issues around Indigeneity — countering, for instance, the celebratory approach taken by many institutions toward the 1992 quincentennial of Christopher Columbus’ arrival in the Americas.

Two years before that anniversary, Mesa-Bains presented a room-size installation at Phoenix’s M.A.R.S. Artspace (now the Phoenix Institute of Contemporary Art) that challenged romantic ideas about the settlement of the Americas. It contained a cabinet — evocative of Victorian-era curiosity cabinets — that featured arrangements of pre-Columbian-style figurines and shards of pottery alongside disconcerting medical instruments and tools of restraint. Placed next to the cabinet was a Louis XIV-style armchair that the artist had bathed in gold paint and then stabbed repeatedly, stuffing its wounds with her own hair and that of fellow Chicanas.

The cabinet is not part of the Berkeley retrospective, but “The Autopsy Chair” is included. And it is a disquieting work: a golden throne, the seat of conquest, upholstered with bits of literal bodies.

Amalia Mesa-Bain’s “The Autopsy Chair,” 1990, at the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive.

(Carolina A. Miranda / Los Angeles Times)

The quincentennial likewise fueled critical works by Smith, such as her ongoing “I See Red” series, which embeds a pejorative term used to describe Indigenous people within a figure of speech about rage. The works reference various aspects of Native life: a can of mutton stew or Petroglyph National Monument outside Albuquerque (a protected cultural site that the artist helped establish).

In keeping with the name, a number of the paintings in the series are bathed in layers of viscous red paint, such as “I See Red: Snowman,” painted in 1992, which shows the outline of a snowman (an interesting stand-in for whiteness) hovering over a mostly red background collaged with pieces of U.S. flags and snippets of print ads for ’92 Jeep Cherokees. Also included are pages from the Flathead Reservation newspaper: One advertises a local art exhibition; another notes the layoff of 331 workers by the Winnebago Tribe.

In its bloody tones and its message, it is a work that scorches — a masterful indictment of the ways Indigenous people have been reduced to mascot and brand name while day-to-day concerns remain out of view. As Smith told historian Lowery Stokes Sims, in an interview for the exhibition’s excellent catalog, the series is meant “to remind viewers that Native Americans are still alive.”

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, “I See Red: Snowman,” 1992.

(Carolina A. Miranda / Los Angeles Times)

If there are overlaps in Smith’s and Mesa-Bains’ work, there are marked aesthetic differences too.

Smith studied art and arts education, first in Washington state (where she spent a good deal of her youth), then in Framingham, Mass., before ultimately receiving her master’s in visual arts from the University of New Mexico in 1980. A trip to New York City in the 1970s exposed her to the work of Fritz Scholder, an enrolled member of the La Jolla Band of Luiseño Indians, whose wry, Pop-inflected canvases skewered Native tropes. In one of his best known paintings from 1971, “Super Indian No. 2,” a man in a buffalo headdress enjoys a pink ice cream cone.

Smith says she was “dazzled” by Scholder’s work. Other influences also materialize, including the multimedia works of proto-Pop painters such as Robert Rauschenberg, who integrated news clippings and other objects onto his canvas, and Jasper Johns, whose textured canvases of flags, targets and maps rendered quotidian objects enigmatic.

Smith’s Whitney retrospective — the museum’s first for an Indigenous artist — brings together more than 130 works over two floors. The show is an absorbing chronicle of the artist’s leaps as a painter, moving from lean abstracted landscapes in the 1970s into the larger-scale, more expressive, collaged canvases for which she is now known. Buffaloes, horses and flags materialize as prominent symbols in canvases whose carefully constructed backgrounds continuously articulate the Native presence and question the idea of who and what is considered “American.”

Her critiques of the imperial project extend well beyond the borders of the United States. Particularly powerful are a series of works from the mid-aughts critical of the Iraq war, such as “Trade Canoe for Don Quixote,” from 2004, and “War Horse in Babylon,” completed the following year, with their chaotic arrays of skulls and shrieking figures reminiscent of “Guernica.” Like Picasso’s original canvas, these are a cry against senseless war.

“War Is Heck,” a print from 2002 by Jaune Quick-to-See Smith features a ghostly, winged rider on a horse.

(Whitney Museum of American Art)

Where Smith draws from Pop to make a statement about the Native condition, Mesa-Bains imports the rituals of her hybrid heritage (she also has some Black ancestry) into a gallery context.

Her practice of creating altars and ofrendas (offerings) draws directly from the traditions of her family, such as the home altar kept by her grandmother, cluttered with Virgins and saints and even an image of John F. Kennedy. The home altar also has roots in Indigenous spiritual practices, and it is frequently maintained by women, making it a vital feminine space that, as Mesa-Bains notes in “Homegrown,” serves as “a counterpoint to church patriarchy.”

Her earliest altars, in fact, were to women. A 1976 installation, displayed at San Francisco’s Galería de la Raza for Day of the Dead, honored women, including family members, close friends, fellow artists and Mexican painter Frida Kahlo. It’s a gesture that, over time, has spawned ever more elaborate, complex and conceptual installations that nonetheless remain intensely personal.

At the Berkeley Art Museum & Pacific Film Archive, a wooden desk, for example, becomes the site of an altar to 17th century Mexican poet Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz (who wrote one of the great takedowns of male hypocrisy in a Spanish redondilla titled “Foolish Men”); an armoire draped in flowers and moss becomes a way of commemorating her family’s relationship to the land over a century and a half.

Tucked into these meticulously arranged installations are a staggering number of details: ceramics, framed poems, photographs of historic figures, lotería cards, maps of the cosmos, sage bundles and even a skull.

Amalia Mesa-Bains, “Private Landscapes and Public Territories, “ 1996-2011/2018.

(Michael Karibian / Rena Bransten Gallery)

One of the most enthralling, however, is a sprawling early piece titled “Venus Envy Chapter I: First Holy Communion, Moments Before the End,” which emerged from an extraordinarily challenging period in the artist’s life.

In the early 1990s, Mesa-Bains fell ill with cardiopulmonary disease, and her doctors feared she had only a few years to live. In an interview published in the catalog (which, like Smith’s, was conducted by Sims), Mesa-Bains describes the diagnosis as her “come to Guadalupe” moment. Until that time, her altars had been ephemeral projects, assembled and disassembled, with objects frequently reused.

But, facing mortality, she began to conceive of them as discrete works of art. Thus began a series, “Venus Envy,” in which individual installations were “chapters,” visual manifestations of the artist’s autobiography. “Venus Envy Chapter I” was inspired by Mesa-Bains’ Communion, a Catholic rite that marks a transition to womanhood and represents a unique moment of engagement with other women: finding a dress, choosing a veil, receiving family keepsakes from elders.

This room-size installation explores female archetypes of the bride, the nun and the virgin. One component centers on a vanity dresser — the site where a woman prepares to present herself to the world — which Mesa-Bains has covered in a dazzling array of objects: statuettes of virgins and saints, flower petals, seashells, framed family photos and hundreds of shimmering craft pearls. Elsewhere, vitrines gather the objects of her life, including keepsake rosaries, prayer cards, many more vintage photographs and a pair of braids tied neatly in white ribbon.

Like all her installations, it delivers surprises. Stare into the vanity’s mirror and it won’t be your own face that confronts you; Mesa-Bains has scraped off the mirror’s backing and inserted an image of Coatlicue, a Nahua female deity that is both creator and destroyer. It’s a reminder that Catholic ritual in Latin America is often a syncretic interpretation of existing Indigenous rite.

“Venus Envy Chapter 1: First Holy Communion, Moments Before the End,” 1993/2022, by Amalia Mesa-Bains, ruminates on female archetypes.

(Carolina A. Miranda / Los Angeles Times)

Together, the works of Mesa-Bains and Smith serve as a vital counter-record to dominant narratives about Indigenous people and Mexicans. But it’s the objects of everyday life woven into the pieces that make the works so personal and so powerful — a way of archiving stories and objects that might otherwise be discarded.

Smith’s paintings are studded with powwow fliers and clips from reservation newspapers; she also frequently writes place names into her canvases. “Almost everything you see in my drawings has the name of a place on my reservation,” she states in the catalog, “because I’ve been mapping the reservation.”

Mesa-Bains, meanwhile, has used her art to create a rich archive of Chicano life that goes far beyond what you’ll ever find in mass media. In an altar, she tells hooks in “Homegrown,” “You will see the medals from your uncle who died in the war, you will see your own baby booties, you will see the dried flowers from your cousin’s wedding, you will see the images of your mother and father as a young bride and groom, you will see the face of your great-grandfather, and you will see the image of the newborn child, because they are all in a cosmology of the family centered in memory that is linked to the present.”

Everything the history books didn’t — or wouldn’t — tell you.

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JOHNSTOWN, Pa. – A Johnstown native and author is coming back to the area to share her latest novel with the community that helped inspire it.

Idra Novey will be doing a reading and discussion of “Take What You Need” at 5:30 p.m. Monday at Classic Elements, 345 Main St., downtown Johnstown.

The Brooklyn, New York, resident said the fictitious town in the novel is a combination of several regional towns where she, her mother and grandmother grew up and where family still resides.

“I have lots of deep connections and it felt like something I hadn’t written about,” Novey said. “As I got older and raising children somewhere else, I started thinking more about how their childhood differs so much from my own. I saw how the people where I live now talk about rural Appalachia and how people in Appalachia talk about where I live now that, in both contexts, people were saying things in ways that weren’t really true to how I’ve lived it. I wanted to write a novel about the rural-urban divide in this country and how it’s not the way forward to be sort of deepening it instead of trying to create art that addresses it.”

Set in the Allegheny Mountains, “Take What You Need” traces the parallel lives of Jean and her beloved but estranged stepdaughter, Leah, who’s sought a clean break from her rural childhood.

In Leah’s urban life with her young family, she’s revealed little about Jean or how much she misses her stepmother’s hard-won insights and joyful lack of inhibition. But with Jean’s death, Leah must return to sort through what’s been left behind.

What Leah discovers is staggering – Jean has filled her ramshackle house with giant sculptures she’s welded from scraps of the area’s industrial history.

There’s also a young man now living in the house who played an unknown role in Jean’s last years and in her art.

Novey said during the writing process, she reconnected with Norman Ed, a Johnstown artist and educator.

“I had an interest in welding and he works with discards, and I wanted to write about a woman who takes scrap metal and transforms it into art,” she said. “I did some work with him and I was deeply influenced in the art that’s in the novel by Norm Ed’s sculptures, which are brilliant.

“It inspired me to figure out my own language for a woman artist from the region.”

Ed will be joining Novey at Classic Elements to discuss his artistic process.

In addition, Novey said Johnstown residents Helen Golubic, Rosemary Pawlowski, Aletha Jones, Dan Neville and Mary Ed also lent their artistic expertise to the novel.

“My conversations with them really deepened the things that I wanted to write about in a way that I felt hasn’t been written about as complexly as it needs to be,” she said.

Signed copies of “Take What You Need” will be available for purchase at Classic Elements.

“When you create a work of art it’s with an audiences in mind, and in a way, I think the audience I had in mind were the people who are making art happen in Appalachia,” Novey said.

“Take What You Need” was chosen for CBS Talk Pittsburgh’s Book Club and featured on ReadAppalachia.

The novel also was a New York Times Editors’ Choice and recently named one of The New Yorker’s Best Books of 2023 so far.

Novey has written for The Washington Post, The Guardian, The Atlantic and The New York Times, and she teaches at Princeton University.

For more information on Novey, visit www.idranovey.com.

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