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I think The Frederick News-Post has a star on its hands in Katina Zentz.
I followed the inaugural girls flag football season and Katina did an amazing job covering this sport.
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Native American artists create unique items that can beautify a home.
Chandler resident Katherine Shields appreciated their beauty from a young age as she was exposed to a collector’s world. Now, she chairs an upcoming Valley event that showcases this art.
About 110 Native American artist vendors, some of them “rock stars” of the Indigenous art world, will sell their wares during the S’edav Va’aki Museum Indian Market from 9 a.m. to 4 p.m. on Saturday and Sunday, Dec. 9-10 at 4619 E. Washington St., Phoenix. (The venue was formerly known as the Pueblo Grande Museum.)
“There are not many places where visitors can engage with Indigenous artists in an informal setting,” Shields said. “Shoppers have a rare opportunity to chat with the artists about their art form, how they came to learn it, and its importance in their lives.”
Arizona’s second largest Indian Market provides a great opportunity to pick up paintings, woven rugs, pottery, sterling and gold jewelry, kachinas, Zuni fetishes, Native flutes and drums, sculptures, beaded items, arrowheads and other similar items. Prices start at $5 and can cost more than $3,000.
The U.S. Department of the Interior adjudicates the event, requiring vendors to adhere to stringent rules and regulations.
Each item sold at the Indian Market is individually hand-made from materials that are authentic to the art form, said Shields, who co-chairs the event and is the director of the S’edav Va’aki Museum Foundation.
This position is volunteer based, and her regular job is a contracted member for the Arizona Opera Orchestra, where she has played the viola since 1999.
Shields said the market is “not like an art fair where you just walk through and look at art and then maybe buy something or maybe you don’t. We have actual things to do.”.
In addition to the vendor booths, visitors may walk through the Ki:him, or “village,” a cultural demonstration area with 15 booths. Artists include Tony Duncan, who teaches hoop dancing, and the Kehewin Native Dance Theatre that teaches mask making.
The entertainment is provided by four big name acts and food trucks will be selling Native American food and a coffee truck.
Now in its 46th year, the market drew about 3,000 people last year.
“Some visitors are collectors, there to visit specific artist vendors; some are interested in the main stage entertainment; some families come primarily to visit the Ki:him area and eat Fry Bread,” she said.
“The Indian Market Committee has always viewed the market as a community-building event; the willingness of Ki:him demonstrators, entertainers and artist vendors to return year after year is evidence of the success in that arena.”
Shields’ grandparents and parents were interested in Native American culture and art since the early 1900s, and are collectors.
“My father took me to my first Indian Market in Santa Fe, New Mexico, when I was 9. I have been hooked ever since,” she said.
She is most fascinated by how the art is interwoven with the artists’ spiritual life and cultural practices.
“I find that each piece holds so much meaning. It’s not just another painting of a landscape,” she said.
In college Shields started collecting Santa Clara pottery from New Mexico’s Santa Clara Pueblo, but said, “I don’t think of myself as a collector, I just think of myself as a person who buys jewelry and paintings.
“I buy things that speak to me. Things just pop out. It just jumps up and says, ‘I need to go home with you.’”
Shields began volunteering for the Indian Market in 2017. She also began volunteering at the museum, facilitating school tours and working the Artifact Cart, where they demonstrate unprovenanced objects that can be passed around.
She chaired the Young Artist Market in 2021. In 2022, she joined the board of the S’edav Va’aki Museum Foundation.
“On the board, we each have a position, so I became chair of the Indian Market Committee. I have a co-chair, Jim Walker, and our committee of about 20 works hard every year to put on the Indian Market, which is the foundation’s biggest fundraiser for the museum,” she said.
Arizona has 22 federally recognized indigenous tribes and several are represented in the market. Besides Arizona, the artists come from New Mexico and California.
The market is pan-tribal, which means it is not promoting any tribes, but Native American art as a whole.
The S’edav Va’aki Museum Indian Market is one of about six markets in the US that are annual events that adhere to the Indian Arts & Crafts Act of 1990. It customarily draws the high-profile artists in the Indigenous art world, Shields said.
The Phoenix-owned Pueblo Grand Museum changed its name earlier this year to S’edav Va’aki Museum to more accurately represent the heritage it preserves and to recognize the living cultures and homelands of the Native peoples who have inhabited the land for centuries. “Pueblo” means town or village in Spanish.
Va’aki means “platform mound” and S’edav Va’aki translates as “Central Platform Mound,” referring to the ceremonial house of a village, of which there were several along the Salt River.
At one time, about 1,000 people lived on the site until it was vacated around 1200, probably due to drought.
Asked about the general interest in these cultures, Shields said: “I think interest in Indigenous art and culture is on the rise. Now that travel has opened up, cultural tourism is back in force.”
Details: phoenix.gov/sedav-vaaki
MADISON, Wis. (WMTV) – Twelve hundred miles, one backpack and a camera- a Madison man’s road to recovery took him through the Ice Age Trail.
After undergoing emergency heart surgery, in 2014, he decided to focus on gaining his strength back while making new friends along the way. He documented his voyage through his camera lens.
Two hundred and sixty-four pages later, photographer Cameron Gillie combined all the photos he took into a book. It took him four years to complete the hike and this year he is finally able to share it with the world.
“They realized once they got in there and saw there was a lot of blockage and I needed to have quadruple bypass surgery,” Gillie said.
The emergency open heart surgery reminded him that life is precious.
“Well, having something like that happened to you when you’re young is it’s an eye opener,” Gillie said. “You realize your mortality, you know you. You’re not going to be around forever, so. Yeah, it was. It became important to do.”
In hopes to complete his goal to walk one million steps, Gillie packed his backpack and camera and hiked through the Ice Age Trail.
“It was about four years after heart surgery, I started the hike and it took a long time because it’s 1,200 miles,” Gillie said.
He learned how much his body could handle in a day and how to make quick and easy dinners.
“I would make my own backpacking meals, things that were easy to rehydrate, like couscous and ramen,” Gillie said.
After meals, he would travel through towns to snap photos of people he met along the way. One day he ended up at a barber shop in Kewaunee.
“I knocked on the door and just called, just kind of ambushed him and said, ‘hey, can I take some pictures?’” he said.
He reminds others to never give up when things get hard.
“If you just keep making progress, you’ll get there,” he said. “At one point, you’ll get to the point where you’re a quarter of the way done.”
Gillie plans to create another book, taking another journey through Wisconsin and making connections with the people he meets. He thinks he might ride his bike this time.
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How do you make a museum show about Indigenous culture when the very idea of the museum, an invention of European enlightenment, has its roots in colonialism? This question rumbles behind but is never quite resolved in Indigenous Histories, the new show at Museu de Arte de São Paulo. It is also central to an indicative work in the exhibition: Peruvian artist Susana Torres’s decision in 1999 to start collecting and exhibiting commercial products and consumer packaging featuring Inca imagery.
The curators at MASP present just one such example from Torres’s Museo Neo Inka series (1999-2011): a sack of wheat flour that shows the head of an Inca man printed above the legally required nutritional table. For Torres it was ironic that the marketing people behind the flour, and brands such as Inca Kola (created by a British man in the 1930s) and Inca cigarettes (a favourite of poet Allen Ginsberg), were using the imagery to invoke a sense of tradition, while contemporary Peruvian Indigenous people were economically maligned and cut from the cultural conversation.
If this sprawling exhibition of 170 artists is an attempt to correct that, bringing Indigenous production into the canon, then it is certainly ambitious in its geographical spread. Programmed in collaboration with Norway’s Kode Bergen Art Museum, where the show travels next year, it is divided into eight sections: seven devoted to regions in South America, North America, Oceania and Scandinavia, as well as a first room for pan-global examples of Indigenous resistance to colonialism and capitalist exploitation.
It opened as Australians voted against recognising Aboriginal communities and Torres Strait Islanders in the country’s constitution and guaranteeing them a voice in decision-making but also as, more positively, Brazil’s supreme court rejected a law limiting what might be considered Indigenous peoples’ land. Indigenous issues are live today.
In the global room, a 2012 photograph by Alexander Luna feels symbolic of this never-ending fight for first peoples’ rights. It shows Máxima Acuña dressed in the traditional clothing of the Peruvian Andes, holding her fist aloft. Acuña is smiling, but her story is deadly serious. In the years after the portrait was taken, Acuña faced legal proceedings from American gold-mining company Newmont Corp, which said her home illegally occupied land it had purchased for a new development. She also claims to have been assaulted by Peruvian police after eviction proceedings began. Her torment only ended after a higher court found in her favour and stopped her eviction.
The activist’s tale is a particularly dramatic one, but it is a similar fight for survival that unites the disparate communities present in the rest of the show. Just above Luna’s photograph is the Tino Rangatiratanga Flag (1990), designed by Linda Munn, Hiraina Marsden and Jan Dobson as a symbol of Māori struggle in New Zealand; on facing walls are posters by Arvid Sveen illustrating Sámi political consciousness across Norway and Sweden. Documentary photography by Edgar Kanaykõ Xakriabá shows the Free Land Camp, a meeting of Brazilian Indigenous communities that occupies grounds near government ministries annually.
Inviting guest curators to programme each of the different sections, while pragmatic, means the exhibition loses this initial cohesion. One gallery organised by Mexican artist Abraham Cruzvillegas is packed full of works from the early 20th century, tracing how the representation of Mexican Indigeneity was used to establish a national identity after the revolution of 1910-20. Paintings including “Our Ancient Gods” (1916) by Saturnino Herrán and “Indian Wedding” (c1931) by Alfredo Ramos Martínez are both complementary to Indigenous dignity and exoticising to modern eyes.
From there, the viewer can either enter a gallery of Western Australian “desert painting” or a gallery dedicated to the home culture of Canadian Inuit, First Nations and Métis communities. In the former, Yala Yala Gibbs Tjungurrayi’s “Wirrpi” (1997) is an intoxicating abstract painting of interconnecting ochre, brown and orange orbs, while Turkey Tolson Tjupurrula’s “Mitukatjirri” (1986) displays similarly beguiling patterning.
In the latter, Canadian Indigenous artist Jim Logan’s deeply evocative painting “The Visit” (1987) hangs, depicting several generations of a family gather in a single room, wrapped up warm but steeped in poverty, the presence of beer bottles suggesting social problems. Kananginak Pootoogook’s nearby bird’s-eye painting of a boiling pot of berries is more idyllic in sensibility.
All three displays, from the sultry Modernist visions of Mexico to this frozen scene, are strong in their own right, but aside from a common enemy, the connection of these communities, separated by climates, continents and history, is tenuous.
In Brazil it is only in the past few years that artists from Indigenous groups have gained recognition. This year MASP dedicated a survey to the Movimento dos Artistas Huni Kuin, a collective of artists with Huni Kuin ethnicity from western Brazil. A painting by one member here, Acelino Huni Kuin, shows the “bridge alligator”, a giant creature of myth who lay across the Bering Strait to allow passage between the Americas and Asia, the story subverting notions of the “old” and “new” world. Meanwhile, the stick-figure pen drawings by Taniki Yanomami depict the circularity of birth and death in Yanomami culture. In uncompromising fashion, both present the Indigenous understanding of time as being fundamentally non-linear.
In gaining recognition, however, Indigenous artists have made sacrifices to western art markets. Waxamani Mehinako paints the rhythmic patterns the Xingu peoples traditionally use in body painting, textiles and basketry, but while he uses local pigments, he applies them to canvas, an easier sell within a westernised art market. Maintaining hierarchies of what is art and what is not, just one basketry object is included in the exhibition, a Waláya basket of arumã fibre, by the Bainwa people, but the museum shop is full of lesser examples available to purchase.
The Peruvian artist Sandra Gamarra often hangs her own work, portraits of Spanish colonial nobility, upside down to upset the historic power dynamic between her subject and her Indigenous identity, and tasked with curating a section dedicated to her own country she chose to hang the work similarly. Facing the contemporary Indigenous work, all upside down, is a series of 18th-century oil paintings, only one of which, a Cusco school portrait of St Francisco Javier owned by MASP, is turned on its head. The lenders of the others, a Spanish museum, refused the request on conservation grounds: a signal that for all the progress evident in Indigenous Histories, an important show, if not a perfect one, there is some distance left to run in art’s decolonising mission.
To February 25, masp.org.br
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The First Americans Museum is hosting its annual Winter Holiday Art Market this weekend in Oklahoma City.
Tom Farris, with the museum, joined News 9 in the studio to talk about what to expect.
Farris said they have curated a selection of some of the best First American artists in the country, with over 50 artists and vendors throughout the museum.
There will also be performances, a children’s story time, a book signing, and a visit from Indigenous Santa.
For more information on the event, visit their website.
U.S. photographer Elliott Erwitt, renowned for capturing the lighter side of his subjects, their canine companions and celebrities, has died aged 95, the Magnum agency where he was a mainstay said on Nov. 30.
“He died peacefully at home surrounded by family,” the storied agency, founded in 1947, wrote on X, formerly Twitter.
The New York Times reported that he passed away in New York on Nov. 29.
“His images have helped build our general understanding of who we are as a society and as humans and have inspired generations of photographers despite the changes in the industry and trends,” said Magnum Photos president Cristina de Middel.
Erwitt was widely recognized for capturing unique moments in his images, including historic events such as the famous 1959 encounter between then-Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev and Richard Nixon, then the U.S. vice president.
Alongside such milestone images, Erwitt had a keen eye for the quirky and offbeat, giving dogs and their owners parity.
“It was Erwitt’s firm belief that photography should speak to the senses and emotions rather than intellect,” Magnum added.
[HH] Pillar of Magnum agencyBorn on July 26, 1928, in Paris to Russian parents, Erwitt grew up in Milan before emigrating in 1939 to the U.S. with his family just before World War II broke out.
After 10 years in New York he moved to Los Angeles, where he started to learn photography. He was taken on as a printer in a laboratory specializing in portraits of stars.
Erwitt was conscripted to the army in 1951 as an assistant photographer and continued working for several publications while stationed in New Jersey, Germany and France.
After his military service in 1953 one of his mentors, renowned photojournalist Robert Capa, recruited him to Magnum.
Erwitt would combine the abilities of its two founders — French humanist photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson and his “decisive moment”, and Capa’s sense of history.
“Erwitt became known for benevolent irony, and for a humanistic sensibility traditional to the spirit of Magnum,” the agency said on its website.
He toured the world several times. It was the golden age of illustrated magazines and he contributed to Collier’s, Look, LIFE and Holiday.
Some of his many legendary snapshots also include Cuba’s Fidel Castro and Che Guevara in 1964, a GI sticking out his tongue at the height of the Korean War.
Erwitt will also be remembered for a snapshot of a veiled Jackie Kennedy at her husband’s JFK’s funeral, a tender private conversation between Erwitt’s wife and baby girl and an old Russian woman in curlers.
But arguably his best known is “California Kiss” in which in one click in 1955 he sums up the optimism offered by the U.S. West Coast.
In the 1970s, he turned to video, making documentaries on subjects ranging widely from Japan and country music to Afghan glassmakers.
In the 1980s he made 18 comedy and satirical television programs for the U.S. channel HBO.
Aged 90 in 2018 he published a book on Scotland.
Married four times and father to six children, Erwitt also owned eight dogs.
“Taking pictures of celebrities is exactly like taking pictures of non-celebrities”, he said in “Elliott Erwitt’s Personal Best” in 2006.
“Above all do not be intimidated. Remember that even the most exalted celebrities brush their teeth at night before going to bed.”
Art from more than 100 Indigenous students was showcased Friday during the first in-person art show Haskell Indian Nations University has held since 2019.
David Titterington teaches art at Haskell. In his classes, he introduces students to Native American artists and situates their work within the context of their time.
For their final projects, students create artwork inspired by, or informed by, the artists who came before them, and use art to make a statement.
A unifying theme in modern Native American art is the expression of messages the artists find important. The art is intended to teach a lesson or share a message.
Common themes in Friday’s art show ranged from MMIW (Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women), refuting stereotypes, environmental issues, depression and personal identity.
There is a tradition of Indigenous artists “remixing” the work of Edward Curtis, whose infamous photography — intended to document the “vanishing Indian” — left a stereotypical and limiting legacy that Indian Country is still dealing with today.
Rasheed Shorty, Navajo, made a digital collage that invokes satire to show the absurdity of the stereotypes still applied to Native Americans today.
The work features the engine (a play on the slur “Injun”) of a Jeep Cherokee, overlayed on an Edward Curtis photo. The engine is wearing a stock photo image of a Plains-style headdress. This piece uses humor to transmit a message and was inspired by Cannupa Hanska.
Morgan Noisey, Cherokee Nation, was inspired by Steven Paul Judd’s work where he added pop culture icons to old photos. In this image, Noisey added elements of Star Wars to an Edward Curtis photo.
Lawrence Aguilar, San Ildefonso Pueblo, added an interactive element to an Edward Curtis photo, encouraging the audience to engage with the environmental horrors afflicted upon the people of San Ildefonso Pueblo by the Los Alamos National Laboratory.
“To this day no justice is being served for the Pueblo people suffering from the Lab’s detrimental actions against their ancestral land and its people,” Aguilar wrote in the artist’s statement.
There are hidden truths painted with UV-reactive paint to be revealed with flashlights which are available to anyone who chooses to look. The piece was inspired by Steven Paul Judd and T. Cannon.
Bradley Billy, Choctaw/Muscogee Creek, remixed Jeff Widener’s infamous Tiananmen Square photo by situating the faceoff in the context of Manifest Destiny. In the artist’s statement, Billy states that he hopes his “ancestors are proud of the fact that I will not let their sacrifice be forgotten. They will be remembered for their fight against American ‘democracy’.”
Ledger art is a distinctly Native American genre of art. It originated in boarding schools during the assimilation era of Federal Indian Policy. Indigenous children were prohibited from making art while detained in the forceful assimilation work camps, but that didn’t stop them. The resourceful children made art in ledger books because that’s what was available to them.
Many Haskell students continue this tradition, as shown in some works displayed Friday.
Violence against Indigenous women, girls, and Two Spirit people is an issue that some students expressed in their art.
Megan McCain, Diné, paid homage to Cara Romero’s “symbolically rich photographs of strong Indigenous women” with this piece on domestic violence.
McCain wrote that many people “feel trapped in their situation, like a ghost, and they try to process all the emotions and invalidate their feelings. … Under that ghostly shell of conformity is a strong Indigenous person waiting to be freed.”
Taneille Lewis, Hunkpapa Lakota of the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe, was impacted by the Dakota Access Pipeline and the ensuing assault on Water Protectors and Indigenous sovereignty.
With this piece, she wanted to focus on the river that her people would “spend endless summer days and nights in.” About the river, she said, “if we did not protest, those memories would be swimming oil, genocide, and the dehumanization of our Native relatives, forever tainted for future generations.”
Isabelle “Jojo” Blackwood, Kickapoo, Potawatomi, and Cherokee, displayed an interactive piece. Her art is “just a little compact, and that’s okay.”
The travel-sized version of Stan Herd’s “Little Girl in the Wind” is a portrait of Blackwood. Herd takes lifesize images and makes them larger than life, and in this piece, Blackwood reversed that process by making a Herd piece “smaller and cheaper” to express how she feels compared to her mother — the “little girl” in Herd’s earthwork piece, Carole Cadue-Blackwood.
Tea Murray, Diné, was inspired by Damian DineYazhi. Murray grew up in the middle of the Navajo Nation reservation and would drive hours with their mother to get essentials. While driving through boarder towns they’d see American flags on the homes of non-Natives. Despite being citizens of the United States, Murray knows they live under white supremacy.
“Living in a colonized country, Indigenous peoples are forced to relive atrocities that are being perpetuated even today,” Murray wrote.
Molly Adams (she/her), photojournalist and news operations coordinator for The Lawrence Times, can be reached at molly (at) lawrencekstimes (dot) com. Check out more of her work for the Times here. Check out her staff bio here.
Molly Adams / Lawrence Times About 20 vendors gathered to sell art, jewelry, baked goods, holiday decorations and even muktuk Saturday at Haskell’s fifth annual Holiday Bazaar.
August Rudisell/Lawrence Times The all-horse Old-Fashioned Christmas Parade returned to downtown Lawrence Saturday, drawing spectators who lined Massachusetts Street and beyond to see all the sights.
Contributed Teen leaders of the Lawrence nonprofit Honor Moon invite community members to drop off a donation and shop awhile during their holiday fundraiser.
Trust plays an important role in developing design solutions that meet the needs of a community and specifically underrepresented and underserved communities of color, according to presenters of the session “Relationship-Based Design—The Role of Trust in Healing” at the 2023 Healthcare Design Conference + Expo, held in early November in New Orleans.
Throughout the nation, many underserved communities of color face the challenge of access to quality, comprehensive healthcare, which can lead to numerous health disparities within these communities, according to speakers Christina Yates, designer, senior associate at NBBJ (Seattle) and Antwanette Lyons, manager, community health program and development, at Seattle Children’s Hospital, Odessa Brown Children’s Clinic (OBCC; Seattle).
“Health systems are generally built around driving throughput and efficiency,” Lyons said. “Additionally, many health organizations that serve communities of color are often federally funded and have specific requirements and associated limitations to how care can be delivered and by whom.”
To help illustrate their point, the speakers shared how gentrification and rising costs Of living in Seattle’s Central District displaced many residents near OBCC’s Yesler Way clinic. In response, OBCC sought to develop a new pediatric clinic in Southeast Seattle’s Othello neighborhood to move closer to displaced community members.
Key to delivering the project and creating a clinic that met the specific community’s needs was developing a trusting relationship among the provider, residents, and the project team.
“The mission of the OBCC is to provide quality care with dignity to those in need, regardless of ability to pay,” Lyons said. “OBCC has always been a part of the community and has always valued the partnership within the community and families. The clinic was specifically created to serve the Black community within Seattle’s Central District neighborhood and to provide quality care with dignity.”
During the project, OBCC and NBBJ intentionally invited families and community members to be an active part of the design process. “A truly trusting relationship allows for vulnerability and sharing of true needs and innovative design solutions are born out of a connection to solving specific problems,” Lyons said. “They are the experts about what the challenges and barriers are and what needs are priorities for their community.”
The design process began with listening to what programs families want and need. OBCC also developed a governance council comprised of community and staff members and patient families to “act as a checks and balances system for OBCC to make sure we are engaged,” Lyons said.
Opened in 2022, the Othello clinic is located in an urban space that includes a charter elementary school and mixed-income housing, helping to address health disparities and build a relationship of trust in the care the clinic provides to pediatric patients and their families.
“The new clinic is easy to access as it is located next to light rail, it has ample and free parking,” Lyons said.
Inside the clinic, several design features were chosen to also help foster community relationships, including local artwork. Specifically, the speakers said the new OBCC Othello location includes more than 20 commissioned art installations and more than 20 portable art pieces from local artists of color, including for the exam rooms and public spaces.
“[The] artwork is created by native indigenous artists to honor and reflect the history of the place and their role in the community,” Yates said. (For more on OBCC Othello artwork, read “Using Artwork To Alleviate Patient Anxiety.”)
Another clinic design feature meant to build trust with locals is the use of larger exam rooms for families and multiple care providers and waiting spaces outside of exam rooms for siblings and parents to wait when privacy is needed during a clinical visit.
An open work space for providers in the front of house portion of the clinic (called the Town Square) allows patients and families to connect and see their care provider in real time when they come in for an appointment. Additionally, the OBCC Othello clinic provides a recreation center and community kitchen that helps support groups and community-based learning to address key health challenges.
“There are different models of delivering care that make sense for different communities,” Yates said. “Take risks and challenge assumptions and be okay with some unknowns. A good trusting relationship between the client, community and the design team can facilitate a process that leads to a successful outcome.”
For more session reviews from the 2023 HCD Conference + Expo in New Orleans, visit hcdmagazine.com/news/awards-events.
