When first approached about the chance to participate in Vail’s Artist in Residency program, Danielle SeeWalker saw it as an opportunity to share her art and participate in a cultural exchange with the town.

“I was really excited about being a Native American woman coming into that community and being able to share and have a cultural cross-reference and exchange with their community,” SeeWalker said Tuesday in a phone interview with the Vail Daily.

But around 30 days before the program was expected to start, the residency unraveled over what town officials claimed were concerns from residents over a piece of artwork SeeWalker posted to Instagram. The town announced the cancellation of the summer program on Thursday, May 9.

Artist in Residency

Conversations around SeeWalker joining Vail’s residency program began in January when Molly Eppard, the town’s Art in Public Places coordinator, reached out to SeeWalker to gauge her interest in participating.

Over the next few months — through numerous emails, conversations and a visit from SeeWalker to Vail in March — the picture of the residency started to form.

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The town has been working for many years to create an Artist in Residency program in Vail, piloting it last July with Squire Broel, a visual artist based out of Walla Walla, Washington.

In a statement provided to the Vail Daily on Tuesday, the town indicated that it engaged in the conversations with “Danielle for a June residency based upon her interpretations of Native American culture through art; what we believed could be an important, contemplative discussion for our locals and visitors, alike, within our diverse Western community.”

SeeWalker is Húŋkpapȟa Lakȟóta and a citizen of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe in North Dakota who currently lives in Denver. On her website, she describes herself as “a fine artist, muralist, writer, activist, and boy mom of two.”

In addition to various murals in Denver, she has written a book and currently has an exhibition on view at History Colorado.

Specifically, the town discussed SeeWalker “creating a mural as a part of the town’s public art program based on SeeWalker’s existing body of public art murals highlighting Native American culture,” according to its statement.

“My mural work is much different than my studio work. My mural work is much more geometric, much more bold and vibrant and not as expressionistic as some of my studio work can be. And I was just really excited to be able to bring that over into the community,” SeeWalker said.

Her artwork, she added is “very much centered on my identity as a Lakota woman, as a Native American woman. It’s all centered on my personal experiences, my family’s experiences, historical perspectives that have occurred (and) stories that I’ve been told about my ancestors.”

In this way, SeeWalker said her art is like her diary.

“It’s about things I’m thinking about, personal experiences,” she added. “I’ve only been showing my art publicly since 2020. And so it’s very vulnerable still for me to put my art out there and have people respond to it, good or bad. It’s just because it’s very, very personal for me.”

From January to May, SeeWalker said the conversations with the town continued, forming the picture of “a pretty robust residency.”

Meeting minutes from the Arts in Public Places board meetings show that the board discussed SeeWalker’s residency at its Feb. 5, March 4, and April 1 meetings.

The two-week residency, as outlined in the initial release sent by the town on Tuesday, May 7, was to include SeeWalker creating a mural outside of the Vail Village parking structure pedestrian entrance as well as an engagement with the Vail Symposium, a community workshop and more.

However, while the details were seemingly “nailed down,” she never received a final contract, which had been expected to come through the first week of May, SeeWalker said.

The town has said that no proposal had been submitted for the mural and as such no contract was yet issued.

Still, even without a contract, SeeWalker said she had turned down other job opportunities in June — including another similar residency — and began work for the Vail program.

“I had spent time mocking up a mural design for them that I never did get the opportunity to present to their board,” she added.

The town said it never received a proposal.

Suspension of the program

Two days after the town issued a press release on May 7 announcing SeeWalker’s residency for June, SeeWalker received a phone call telling her the residency would no longer be happening.

SeeWalker said she had exchanged some text messages with Eppard earlier in the week “where she made me aware that we needed to urgently discuss the residency” as it related to her “G is for Genocide” painting.

SeeWalker had been traveling at the time and ultimately they scheduled a call for Thursday morning. Kathleen Halloran, the town’s deputy town manager, and Eppard were both on the call.

In the call, SeeWalker said she was told something along the lines of “we can’t put ourselves in a position to have politics involved in our community or two sides, and so we can’t have someone like you with a political message coming into the community to create art.”

“I was pretty shocked. It was just a very direct conversation, very matter-of-fact,” SeeWalker said. “I tried to have an engaging conversation and try to provide some context and understand what they meant by being too political and someone like me. But they would not hear me out and the conversation ended pretty abruptly.”

SeeWalker expressed disappointment in the nature of the call, saying she wishes it had been an “engaging, professional, respectful conversation.”

The town said in its release suspending the June program that while it “embraces her messaging and artwork surrounding Native Americans, in recent weeks her art and her public messaging has focused on the Israel/Gaza crisis.”

In its latest statement, the town said it “was premature to have announced the residency before a mural had been proposed and a contract put in place. That’s on us. And we sincerely apologize for the inconvenience.”

“The decision to suspend the residency program, only in its second year, was made in part to allow the town time to reexamine its approach and create robust and specific guidelines, timelines and deliverables for both artists and the town to ensure a positive experience for all moving forward,” adds the statement.

The controversy and ultimate cancellation refer to a piece of SeeWalker’s entitled, “G is for Genocide.”

SeeWalker said that this piece was created at the end of February for a group show in March in Denver.

“As I was thinking about what I wanted to create (for the show), at that time in my life, I had seen tons of graphic images of children and women, both from the Israel and the Gaza side, being harmed in the name of you know suppression, oppression, war, land issues, etc.,” SeeWalker said. “It got me thinking, this is a modern-day situation very similar to what happened to my ancestors; being forced off their land, being killed or taken as prisoners in a way, forced onto reservations, having your whole identity and culture being eradicated.”

The resulting painting, she added is centered on “this loss of culture and the parallels between those two cultures.”

Initial sales for the piece raised around $2,500 for the UN Crisis Relief Fund. On Tuesday, she said that the figure had risen after the events of the past week.

In an Instagram post by SeeWalker on Thursday, she wrote that the town’s “solution is a closed-minded, judgmental one. They are consciously silencing a Native American woman artist which ripples down to silencing people of color as a whole.”

In Tuesday’s statement, the town said the decision not to pursue a contract with SeeWalker was made following “thoughtful consideration and discussion by the AIPP board and town staff,” adding that it was not made in a vacuum.

“After releasing her name in an announcement, community members, including representatives from our local faith-based communities, raised concerns to town staff around SeeWalker’s recent rhetoric on her social media platform about the Hamas-Israel war,” the statement reads.

“We cannot tolerate rhetoric that targets one group of residents or guests over another as we are a welcoming and inclusive community for all,” the town added.

The town added that if “SeeWalker would like to discuss expense reimbursement incurred while preparing for the residency, we will speak with her.”

SeeWalker said the whole situation has been upsetting, disappointing and heartbreaking.

“I wasn’t even allowed to talk or get out what I wanted to say or even have a formal conversation with anybody from the town of Vail — that in and of itself is disappointing,” SeeWalker said. “I would have wanted to understand how they’re defining one piece of art as being my whole identity as an artist.”

While the town decided to suspend the residency, Vail Symposium has decided to keep its conversation with SeeWalker on the calendar.

On Friday, James Kenly, executive director of the Vail Symposium, told the Vail Daily while it was aware the town was considering canceling the residency, it was not involved in the decision.

Kenly added that the Symposium feels the conversation planned between SeeWalker and Clay Jenkinson on June 19 supports the organization’s mission to “provide educational programs for the community that are thought-provoking, diverse and affordable.”

On Tuesday, SeeWalker said she is still planning to participate in the event. 

“I’m really excited about it. It’s all about centering my art and not necessarily any politics or anything that got construed through what the town of Vail thought I was standing for,” SeeWalker said. “It’s really just about being Native American, being an artist, and really centering my artwork, which is not defined by that one particular piece out of thousands of pieces of art that I’ve created.”