JENKS, Okla. — The Muscogee Nation hosted a Native Christmas Market Saturday at the Jenks Riverwalk.

The event took place at the Jenks Riverwalk from 3 p.m. to 7 p.m.

During that time, more than 25 Native American vendors from various tribes were all showcasing their goods.

Sisters Brittany Hill and Breana Hill were selling handmade goods including beadwork, shellwork, paintings, ledger art and hand painted Christmas ornaments.

“We got it from our father, our father is a self-taught artist, and all our lives we’ve just been painting and drawing and so, we’re just now kind of starting to get into the art market specialty of it all,” Breana said.

They said their art depicts both their Muscogee and Ihanktonwan Dakota art styles.

Brittany said the event was a great place to showcase native art.

“We’re so happy to be here, it’s always such a great time when we have multiple vendors from different tribes come out and it’s just a great place to showcase native art,” she said.

Breana said she was thankful people were supporting local vendors and artists because of the amount of time and work that goes into the pieces.

“People take a lot of time outside of their daily life, whether that be their full-time job or not, to put these pieces together and just show a lot of their hard work and it’s a good depiction that we are still here today as indigenous people and showing our art pieces in modern and traditional times,” Brenea said.

She also said supporting local Native American artists is important because for many, art is a part of their identity.

The event also had live music, carolers, and a kids zone.

HOPKINTON — Native artist Brooke Waldron — painter, potter and proud Seaconke Wampanoag/Narragansett — sat inside her Hope Valley studio one morning last week, turning her pottery wheel and talking about contemporary Native art.

On the wall behind her, a painting of a white horse, framed by an orange rectangle and centered in a rich purple background, hung on a white wall. On the floor nearby, an enormous painting — featuring half a dozen different-colored horses galloping under a starry, moonlit sky — was leaning against a wall.

“We are not just tipis and dream-catchers,” said Waldron with a soft smile as she trimmed the edges of a small clay bowl. “Native art is so much more … and we’ve got to reclaim our seat at the table.”

Contemporary Native art often goes unnoticed, Waldron said, “and our culture and representation continues to be profoundly underrepresented.

“Our narratives, stories and artistic practice is almost exclusively told in the past tense and is rarely exhibited in an equitable way.”

Waldron will talk more about Native art, and take questions from the audience, this afternoon at 4:30 at the Gamm Theatre in Warwick, where an exhibit of her work is currently on display at the Gamm Theatre Gallery.

The solo exhibit — paintings from “Those That Guide Us” — features 12 of Waldron’s newer works, paintings that “present a breadth of style and color,” according to installation organizers, who note that the “collection is steeped in Indigenous symbolism.”

Waldron, who explores the relationship between color, nature and traditional native symbolism and contemporary techniques, has a deep affinity for the natural world and for animals.

“Our four-legged relatives” are common themes in Waldron’s work.

Rabbits and horses appear in her paintings, feathers and ferns pop up in her pottery. Birds and eagles too.

Also an equestrian and riding instructor, Waldron, 33, grew up on a 118-acre farm in Exeter with her parents and an older sister, Kara.

“She’s my biggest supporter,” said Waldron with a smile, “along with my parents, of course.”

Waldron graduated from Exeter-West Greenwich High School before heading off to work and to study at the Community College of Rhode Island.

Waldron, who is employed by the Rhode Island Regional Indian Council and works in the subsidiary office in North Stonington assisting Native communities in career development, said she knew from an early age that she was an artist.

In high school, she said, she was positively influenced by her high school art teacher and friend, Elizabeth Lind, who helped her realize there was space for the art she was making.

“She was very encouraging,” said Waldron. “She made time.”

Waldron participated in her first exhibit — as a teenager — at the Hera Gallery in Wakefield. She exhibited at the Hera again years later. She has also exhibited at the South County Art Association, where she has taken many classes, and the Warwick Center for the Arts. 

In 2007, Waldron attended the solo exhibit of noted Comanche Artist Nocona Burgess at the Peck Gallery in Providence, an event that stays with her.

It was an emotional experience for Waldron who had seen Burgess’ work in Santa Fe and Albuquerque and had become what she calls “a fangirl.”

She said she feels a sort of thread that connects her work with Burgess’ work and “pulls on through.”

Burgess, who has earned widespread recognition for his bold acrylic portraits of historic American Indian figures, including his famous great-great-grandfather, Comanche chief Quanah Parker, is known for his modern depictions of Indigenous men and women from various tribal nations of North America.

According to his biography, Burgess “explores the cultural context, life story and identity of each sitter. In this way, the artist urges us to update our perceptions of Native people and consider the intriguing and often highly politicized place of Native American portraiture.”

It is a philosophy shared by Waldron, who said she’d like to be a sort of change agent for the way people think about contemporary Native American art.

Especially now, during the month of November, which has been designated as Native American Heritage Month.

Waldron said when she was approached about the idea for the exhibit by Lauryn Sasso, the Gamm’s institutional engagement associate who facilitates the theater’s art installations, she was thrilled.

“I’m honored to be there,” said Waldron. “They have been very welcoming and I’m grateful for the space.”

Sasso called Waldron’s use of color in her paintings “stunning.”

“She is an intelligent and unique talent,” said Sasso, who first saw Waldron’s work at an exhibit at the Warwick Center for the Arts.  

Waldron’s work is “really, really singular in the way she delves into and integrates Indigenous lore and symbolism,” added Sasso. “And her ceramic work is beautiful too.”

“The collection is steeped in Indigenous symbolism, a departure from the human form,” reads a statement from the Rhode Island Humanities about the exhibit. “The series invites the viewer to interpret the many lessons we can learn from self-reflection.

“Using animals as the north star of her focus, the artist creates a narrative that shares her own personal story while connecting with the audience in a familiar way.”

Now that she’s completed her “dream project” — the creation of her Hope Valley studio — Waldron is pondering her next steps.

Maybe she’ll open a gallery for Native artists, a place “for our stories to be told,” she said. 

“I’m in a constant experimental state,” Waldron added with a smile.

Waldron plans to participate in a Dec. 9 holiday event in Hope Valley, will have some pieces at the Village Art Studio and maybe she’ll be at a Christmas market or two. In the meantime, “Those That Guide Us” will be on exhibit at the Gamm through Nov. 26. 

For more information, visit www.grayhorsestudioart.com and www.gammtheatre.org.

Charlotta Hauksdóttir is a Palo Alto-based mixed media artist whose works incorporate the stunning natural landscapes of Iceland, her native country. As Hauksdóttir’s awareness of climate change has developed, her works have evolved along with it. This is the story of that evolution.

Enter Here IV, by Charlotta Hauksdóttir

Hauksdóttir has a deep and abiding love for Iceland’s “magical” landscapes with their broad vistas, glowful lighting, varied terrain and ever-changing weather. As a child she spent summers camping, picking blueberries, and recreating outdoors with family and friends, forming deep bonds with people and the land.

After leaving Iceland to study photography at the San Francisco Art Institute, a bout of homesickness led her to put together sets of photographs, “Dreamscapes”, that reflected her memory of the land she loved. Imperfections in our memory, and our movement through the landscapes, are represented by gaps between photos and selective blurring. The photographs are not objective mirrors of landscapes, but instead reflect our perception of places. People are represented in the art, and the connection between people and nature, even though we are not visible.

Sharp Edges, by Charlotta Hauksdóttir

It had long been a dream of Hauksdóttir to study in San Francisco, but each time she traveled back to Iceland, even the moss-covered lava fields by the airport reminded her how much she missed her home. Her art diverged from the “fairy tale” dreamscapes to a more immersive format that could almost envelop the viewer. The human-scale art, placed at eye level, allows a viewer to look down by their feet, or up by the horizon, and see what you might see if you were there. Seams between the photos are visible to remind us that perception is not reality.

Walk on Water, by Charlotta Hauksdóttir

As her children grew, her work switched to focus more on family and life changes, with the themes of time evolving and nostalgia for moments in time coming to the fore. But in 2016 she turned back to landscapes, this time feeling an urgency “not to assemble the landscape, but to disperse it in pieces”. She wasn’t sure where this impetus was coming from, or what it would look like. She knew only that the dispersal should be a meaningful pattern, something organic. It took a lot of trial and error until she found a technique that resonated, cutting up her photographs and layering them. This was a destructive act for her, as she described it, “physically cutting up these memories”. But Iceland was changing, and it felt right.

Hauksdóttir began with a fingerprint pattern, here rendered in black velvet, that reminds viewers that we are more than passive observers of nature.

Impression XXV, by Charlotta Hauksdóttir

She also employed a cut-out pattern of retinal veins, conveying “our unwillingness to admit or see what’s happening in nature”.

Imperception IV, by Charlotta Hauksdóttir

In other works gaps in the terrain, often where snow or ice might have been, are filled with texts about global warming.

Erosion VII, by Charlotta Hauksdóttir

Hauksdóttir recalls seeing Iceland change through her twenty years of photographing it. “If you look at the glacier in this photo, I took that in 2014. I went back in 2019, and the glacier was so much smaller, with pieces coming off as I watched. The erosion of nature that I have witnessed is represented in these works.”

A series of topographic works physically removes pieces of the landscape, giving a sense of time passing as erosion happens.

Topography Study XV, by Charlotta Hauksdóttir

“People often visualize topography,” Hauksdóttir observes, “with the pieces being built up from the base. But in mine they are cut away from the surface, showing the wearing away of our natural environment.” In an upcoming exhibition in Berkeley, viewers will themselves be taking away some of these pieces, reinforcing our involvement in the environmental degradation we are seeing.

Hauksdóttir’s work continues to evolve. With the storms of last year, she incorporated both the destructive force of the winds and our ability to repair by weaving together pictures bound around sticks. This work is more hopeful in that it not only cuts things up but also binds things together.

Reclamation IV, by Charlotta Hauksdóttir

This year, after many walks with her dog looking at plants growing in the smallest of sidewalk cracks, she developed new works that emphasize the resilience of nature in the face of the changes we are seeing.

Resurgence III, by Charlotta Hauksdóttir

“Sometimes I get criticism that my works are too beautiful, that they do not show enough of the destruction from climate change, or the harm that we are doing to the planet. But at the same time, it is important to draw viewers in. I find that people appreciate the works even more when they understand what they are about.”

Art can help us to connect with our feelings. Even Hauksdóttir does not know what her works are about until after she has created them and reflected upon them. We need to bring both our hearts and our minds to the environmental challenges we are facing. It is not enough to know without caring, or to care without knowing. Art that incorporates climate change themes can help us to reflect more deeply on the scale of the change, the destruction, the uncertainty, and the resilience that we are living with as the planet warms.

Indentation I, by Charlotta Hauksdóttir

You can see more of Hauksdóttir’s work on her website. She has a studio in Palo Alto’s Cubberley Community Center. She also has multiple pieces up at the Garvey Simon Gallery in San Anselmo, and will soon have several on display at 120710 in Berkeley. I hope many of you will take a look.

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone!

Current Climate Data
Global impacts (October 2023), US impacts (October 2023), CO2 metric, Climate dashboard

Globally, October 2023 was the warmest October in the 174-year NOAA record. The year-to-date (January–October) global surface temperature ranked as the warmest such period on record. October 2023 marked the fifth consecutive month of record-warm global temperatures. According to NCEI’s Global Annual Temperature Outlook and data through October, there is a greater than 99% probability that 2023 will rank as the warmest year on record.

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