Here’s What’s Going on in Indian Country, November 2nd

Nov 2, 2023 By Admin in Native

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By Native News Online Staff

November 02, 2023

This week in Indian Country, there are plenty of events for everyone to enjoy. From powwows to Indigenous People’s Day celebrations to California’s Indigenous Film Festival, here is Native News Online’s weekly round-up of arts, culture, and entertainment offerings around Indian Country.

Native American Festival and Powwow
Stone Mountain, GA
November 2, 2023

Featuring dance, music, authentic craft demonstrations, cooking traditions, storytelling, wildlife presentations and more. Ongoing activities include: a living history tipi village, primitive life skills, interactive demonstrations of local and regional native cultures, dance and drum exhibitions, live music, wildlife, native foods, weaponry, various arts and crafts demonstrated by renowned native artists and much more.

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American Indigenous Arts Celebration
Clewiston, FL
November 3, 2023

The American Indigenous Arts Celebration in Big Cypress, a culture extravaganza in the Everglades, will feature Native American arts, crafts, food and live entertainment for everyone.

Culture Queen Kids Hour: Native American Heritage Month
Washington, DC
November 4, 2023

Grammy-nominated teaching artist Culture Queen cordially invites your royal children to create cultural holidays celebrating the people, milestones, and things that matter most to them through fun, interactive, and engaging music, movement, storytelling, and craft activities.

California’s American Indian & Indigenous Film Festival
Temecula, CA
November 2-4, 2023

In its fifth year, California’s American Indian & Indigenous Film Festival has grown in both size and prestige — the latter thanks to programming that includes the big-budget Western/drama “Hostiles,” a film starring Christian Bale that’s already generating awards buzz. The festival returns to Pechanga Resort & Casino, and due to increased attendance, the entire festival will take place at the resort.

Choctaw Apache Veterans Day Powwow and Native American Art Festival
Noble, LA
November 3, 2023

This festival is held twice a year and features will include arts and crafts, an art walk, demonstrations and a wild game cook off. All Dancers and guest drums are welcome.

Native American Heritage: Li’l Feathers and Whisperhawk
Salt Lake City, UT
November 4, 2023

Join the City Library in celebrating Native American Heritage Month with some local talent. Enjoy performances by Granite School District’s youth Powwow group Li’l Feathers, and singer-songwriter Whisperhawk, a local folk/rock performer who is also one of The City Library’s featured HUM artists. Dave John, of KRCL Living the Circle of Life, will join as emcee.

Native American Day
Millsboro, DE
November 4, 2023

The Nanticoke Indian Association, Inc presents Native American Day at the Nanticoke Indian Museum. The celebration includes free admission to the museum as well as featured speaker: Drew Shuptar-Reyvis, museum tours, traditional dance performances, traditional drumming and singing, storytelling, Native American vendors and more.

Etowah Heritage Day
Cartersville, GA
November 4, 2023

Kick-off Native American Heritage Month with a guided tour at Etowah Mounds. Dress for the weather. Tours to the mounds are about 3/8 mile long, go to the top of a six story mound, and can be up to around an hour long, depending on the guest’s questions.

Celebrate Native American Heritage
South Windsor, CT
November 4, 2023

Pull up a log or layout a fur and join Abenaki elder and national storyteller Willow Greene who will bring with her a small, beaded pouch and asks volunteer audience members to reach in and pick out a stone. Since each stone relates to a different story, every one of Willow’s storytelling events is unique. Her stories talk about a variety of subjects, and may include how Gluskabe came into the world, why the sun shines the way it does and why skunk smells so bad. Gather around Nowashe’s central fire pit for this family-friendly event.

Native American Cultural Presentation
Creswell, OR
November 4, 2023

Come join at the Creswell library in honor of Native American Heritage Month, with Deitrich Peters of the Grand Ronde Tribe. Deitrich (Deitz) has graciously agreed to share elements of his regalia and will play flute music, talk about his culture, and answer questions. Bring the whole family.

Los Angeles Powwow
Los Angeles, CA
November 4, 2023

The United American Indian Involvement (UAII) is gathering people in Los Angeles for a one-day contest powwow. Featuring amazing vendors, artists, musicians, community orgs, and some amazing drums and dancers all highlighting the best of Southern California. All Vendors, Dancers, and Drums are welcome.

Choctaw Powwow to Open Native American Heritage Month
Durant, OK
November 3-5, 2023

The 18th Annual Choctaw Powwow is the first event of November’s Native American Heritage Month scheduled for the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma. Regarded as one of the nation’s largest powwows, the event runs at the Choctaw Event Center. Admission to the powwow is free all three days.

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Exclusive Collections Gallery in Gaslamp highlights Native American art

Nov 2, 2023 By Admin in Native

SAN DIEGO (KGTV) — November is Native American Heritage Month, and San Diego County has the largest number of tribal governments and reservations in the U.S.

10News is committed to celebrating that rich history and culture. Anchor Lindsey Peña interviewed a woman paving an artistic path in the Gaslamp Quarter.

The Exclusive Collections Gallery is the Gaslamp’s first individually-owned Native American business.

“I’m really excited to represent our people. It’s also a little sad that it’s taken us this long, but you know — here we are,” says Ruth Ann Thorn, the gallery’s founder.

Thorn is a proud member of the Rincon Band of Luiseno Indians. A fixture in the San Diego art scene for some time now, she’s passionate about being an ambassador for creatives.

“Art is for everyone is really our tagline — that means we want to expose people to a lot of different styles,” she says.

Featured prominently in the gallery is the work of Native American artists from all over the country, like Jeremy Salazar.

“He grew up on the Navajo Reservation, his father is an artist and he utilized his art really to feed his family. I had never seen anything so detailed, and it’s realistic but it’s also contemporary,” Thorn says.

George Rivera’s pieces are another staple of the gallery.

“It’s one of the few stainless steel castings I’ve ever seen. It refers to the Lakota Tribe, or the Dakota Tribe, who were overtaken by the colonies by killing off millions of buffalo,” Thorn explained.

Thorn says the gallery enables her to share what Native American art really is, as opposed to what people think it is.

“We are a modern day people, so we have artists that are coming in still holding on to their culture, but bringing in contemporary views of that art,” Thorn says.

Later in November, the gallery will host its annual Native American Art Show for the first time at the new location.

“We have a huge group of native people, like the top of the different genres of art, painting, sculpture. We even have an artist that takes tin cans and makes baskets — California native baskets — out of them,” Thorn says.

Thorn’s hope is to give those creators a platform and the opportunity to have meaningful interactions with the community.

“A lot of these artists take their proceeds back to their tribes, and they feed their tribes and bring water and those types of things, and also for the people to be able to participate and learn about the first people,” she says. “There can be an understanding, and there can be a bridge and that’s what the arts have always done historically.”

The Native American Art Show at the Exclusive Collections Gallery in the Gaslamp District is scheduled from Nov. 10 through Nov. 12.

The show goes from 6 to 9 p.m. on Friday and Saturday, while the Sunday show takes place from 1 to 4 p.m.

Everyone is welcome and admission is free.

Jeremy Strick to retire from the Nasher Sculpture Center next year

Nov 2, 2023 By Admin in Sculpture

Since 2009, Jeremy Strick has been a transformative leader of the Nasher Sculpture Center — particularly with the Nasher Sculpture Prize. He’ll step down in spring 2024.

‘We cannot live without water’: UM kicks off first-ever Stolen Waters Summit

Nov 2, 2023 By Admin in Native

Before reading one of her poems in the University of Montana’s Payne Family Native American Center, Associate Professor Heather Cahoon looked out the window.

More than 100 audience members waited in anticipation.

“Let me see how much snow is out there,” she said, laughing. Cahoon studied the frosty Oval. “I think there’s enough. I think it’s OK. What do you think?”

Audience members turned their heads to face Arleen Adams, an elder of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes. Adams nodded, and Cahoon read.

Associate Professor Heather Cahoon shares poems while speaking at the first night of the Stolen Waters Summit at the University of Montana’s Payne Family Native American Center on Wednesday. The summit brought together Indigenous water protectors, writers, activists, farmers and artists to celebrate environmentalism and stress the importance of protecting Earth’s natural resources.

ANTONIO IBARRA OLIVARES, Missoulian

In many Indigenous traditions, there are certain stories — particularly animal stories — that can only be told when snow is on the ground. Winter is considered a safe time because the animals will either be sleeping or, with snow on the ground, their tracks will be visible. The concept emphasizes one of the many ways in which Indigenous cultures and stories are inextricably tied to land and to animal relatives.

Wednesday evening kicked off the Stolen Waters Summit at UM. The first event of its kind, the summit brings together Indigenous water protectors, writers, activists, farmers and artists to celebrate environmentalism and stress the importance of protecting Earth’s natural resources.

While Tara Houska, a prominent Indigenous rights activist, had a last-minute conflict and could not attend Wednesday’s event, Cahoon and Chris La Tray, Montana’s Poet Laureate, shared poems and engaged in a meaningful discussion with audience members about storytelling, water, colonization and art.

More than 100 audience members listen to Associate Professor Heather Cahoon speak from the University of Montana’s Payne Family Native American Center rotunda during the first night of the Stolen Waters Summit.

ANTONIO IBARRA OLIVARES, Missoulian

La Tray, a citizen of the Little Shell Tribe of Chippewa Indians of Montana, invited audience members to think of a typical Western painting — the kind that shows Native Americans living out in the plains surrounded by nothing but tipis and fields of grass.

“Most of those are bullsh*t,” La Tray said. “People have needed to live next to water sources as long as people have been people. … Water is the thing that connects all of us together in a way that nothing else does.”

La Tray and Cahoon shared their own poems about dreams, land and violence and then read work by other artists, including Joy Harjo, the first Indigenous U.S. Poet Laureate, and James Welch, Blackfeet and Aaniiih author.

Cahoon told the audience that she does not use Salish stories in her work unless they have already been written down. If stories are only shared orally, she will not write them. La Tray said that colonization efforts were aimed at erasing those stories in an attempt to erase Indigenous cultures and traditions.

Arleen Adams, an elder of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, opens Wednesday night’s Stolen Waters Summit at the Payne Native American Center on the University of Montana Campus.

ANTONIO IBARRA OLIVARES, Missoulian

“We reached the point about 500 years ago, where there was pretty much a concerted effort to kill everybody who passed that wisdom down,” La Tray said, referring to colonization and assimilation policies. “It’s important to think about (this) when we consider, what is the source of our wisdom? … Where do we find wisdom? The wisdom is still in the river. The wisdom is still in this land.”

La Tray encouraged audience members to be intentional about forming relationships with the land.

“If you’re there, you fall in love with it, right?” he said. “And anything you love, you’ll want to protect. … Water is life. We cannot live without water. Nothing can live without water. It’s so simple, yet, it is so hard to protect.”

The conference — which was planned by UM Environmental Studies students and Indigenous graduate students — focuses on the Missouri, Columbia, Colorado and Rio Grande rivers, and speakers will discuss traditional ecological knowledge, the legacy of dams on reservations and food sovereignty movements.

More information on the Stolen Waters Summit:

Thursday, Nov. 2

10 a.m. Field trip to the “Place of Bull Trout” with Shirley Trahan and Lucy Vanderburg
1 p.m. Native students and alumnus discuss experiences at Standing Rock
2:30 p.m. Rosalyn LaPier on food sovereignty
5 p.m. Screening of “Covenant of the Salmon People”
7:30 p.m. Nick Estes lectures on Native resistance and climate change

Friday, Nov. 3

10 a.m. Panel discussion on dams on Indigenous waters
2 p.m. Panel on food sovereignty
4 p.m. Feast, round dance and drumming
8 p.m. Celebration with DJ Foreshadow, SABA and Joseph and Dylan Running Crane

For more information, visit stolenwaters.org.

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Beyond ‘The Rose’: A New Monograph Shines a Light on Abstract Expressionist Jay DeFeo’s Unseen Photography

Nov 2, 2023 By Admin in Photography

Jay DeFeo barely took any photos of her hefty one-ton painting, The Rose (1958-66), during the seven years she spent layering it with inches of impasto and chiseling it. She may have forever regretted that.

In fact, for the first half of the late Abstract Expressionist’s career she hardly ever recorded her paintings in progress. But around 1970, she began an intense—if brief—affair with photography, documenting herself, her surroundings, and her paintings in pictures that fuse formal prowess with poetic playfulness.

While some of these works are currently in museum collections (including the Centre Pompidou, J. Paul Getty Museum, and Whitney Museum of American Art), DeFeo has not been broadly known for her photography.

But a new monograph, Jay DeFeo: Photographic Work (DelMonico Books, 2023 which reproduces DeFeo’s photographs at their original (small) scale), stands to change that. The book’s publication coincided with a recent exhibition at Paula Cooper Gallery in New York, with over 70 photographs, photocollages, photocopies, and chemigrams—the largest-ever presentation of the artist’s photographic work.

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Jay DeFeo: Photographic Work. © 2023 The Jay DeFeo
Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

“Much like singles on an album, her dignified and serious paintings are the ‘hits’ that carry her legacy,” writes the late artist’s friend Catherine Wagner in Jay DeFeo: Photographic Work. “But for those of us who had the good fortune to know Jay, her photographs and collages, the ‘B-sides,’ now play like watershed discoveries, full of experimentation and innovation for both new and seasoned DeFeo aficionados to delight in.”

Best known in the Bay area, where she lived for most of her life, DeFeo’s work has seen a reevaluation since her 2012 traveling retrospective organized by the Whitney and shown at SFMOMA. Most of this focus has been on her early paintings that culminated in The Rose (now in the Whitney’s permanent collection) and on works on paper made subsequently. Lesser known is the four-year phase that DeFeo called “the dropout years,” when she painted very little. It was then, after The Rose was extracted from her studio, that she moved from lively San Francisco to quieter Marin County and picked up a camera instead of her paintbox.

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Jay DeFeo, Untitled (1973). © 2023 The Jay DeFeo
Foundation/Artists Rights Society
(ARS), New York.

“She took her photographic work very seriously,” said photography historian Corey Keller in a recent interview. “When she was preparing to meet a curator or preparing for an exhibition, she would really outline what she wanted them to look at. And almost invariably would say ‘look at the photographs, they are really important to me.’ Almost invariably, the curators would ignore them.” Indeed, DeFeo’s photos were only exhibited once in her lifetime, despite her best efforts.

Remarkably, DeFeo never formally studied photography but learned darkroom printing from her students at the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI), where she taught painting. SFAI had one of the oldest photography programs in the country, founded by Ansel Adams in 1945, and his classical influence seeped into DeFeo’s prints. “For someone who was not known for being very careful, she was really intentional about her photographic work,” Keller said. This was especially true of her photographic ‘portraits,’ pictures of beloved objects that show a mastery in composition, light exposure, and printing technique. (One such series was devoted to a discarded plaster cast once used by DeFeo’s dog, R. Mutt.)

Foundation/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

DeFeo soon became as experimental in her photos as she had been with her canvases, reversing negatives, cropping images, and sometimes not using negatives at all, but making chemigrams, exposing photographic papers to light and then pouring developer and fixer over them in painterly gestures. In a nod to the surreal quality of these prints, DeFeo titled a 1973 group of chemigrams Salvador Dalí’s Birthday Party. “She just wasn’t bound by any of the rules,” noted Keller. “If a medium had rules assigned to it, those went out the window.”

In the same vein, DeFeo also began creating enigmatic photo collages, cutting, tearing, and layering her own prints. She’d often explore a shape repeatedly—like an old telephone she kept in her studio or a chair she saw in a thrift store—cutting out the object’s silhouette to leave a void that she filled with other images. “It reminds me of Mad Libs, where you put these funny words in and you end up with kind of absurdist poetry,” Keller explained. “That’s how her collages work.”

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But it was in the late 70s that she began photographing paintings in progress—which some have speculated she regretted not doing for The Rose. As she told art historian Sidra Stich, these photos allowed her to take a step back and view “the strength of the real basic spatial statement … so that I don’t allow all the sensuousness of the paint to kind of seduce me into thinking I’ve got something structurally strong, when I don’t.”

DeFeo continued photographing into the 1980s, but the intensity slowly faded. Later in life, as she looked back on these works, DeFeo described her the process as having engaged with “photography for its own sake, which I just didn’t stay with long enough.”

For now, her paintings still tend to be the draw for museums and collectors. “Market interest in DeFeo’s paintings and works on paper is, of course, more developed than that of the photographs, but this is largely due to this body of work being relatively little-known,” said Steve Henry, senior partner at Paula Cooper Gallery. Prices for her photographs reflect this, starting at around $20,000 against an auction record of $281,250 set in 2016 for an oil painting. An oil on paper sold at Sotheby’s New York in December 2022 for $94,500, exceeding its presale high estimate of $60,000.

Yet many believe that as her photographic work garners more notice, it will come to be as celebrated as The Rose. “Her career has been so overshadowed by the 2000-pound painting, the gorilla in the room. I think that there’s a prejudice, still, against the photographic output of a painter,” Keller said. “I would argue that I’m not sure if we can call her a painter anymore. I think she’s something more complex than that.”

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Md. photographer’s stunning photo of ‘Wolf Spider Mama’ wins worldwide contest

Nov 2, 2023 By Admin in Photography

For some it’s creepy, for some it’s beautiful, for others, maybe it’s a mix of both.

Gaithersburg photographer Ben Salb’s close-up shot of a mother spider has earned him first-place in the Insects and Arachnids category in the Nature Conservancy annual contest.

“It’s a super zoomed in photo of a wolf spider mom with dozens or maybe a hundred or so spiderlings, her babies, on her back,” Salb said.

Gaithersburg photographer Ben Salb used a technique called focus stacking to get the above image of a wolf spider and her babies. (Courtesy Ben Salb)

According to a news release from the Nature Conservancy, 80,000 photographers submitted over 189,000 entries for the prestigious worldwide contest. Salb took his winning photo in a neighborhood park in Gaithersburg.

He calls it “Wolf Spider Mama.” Salb used a technique called focus stacking to get the final image.

“It’s actually 129 photos that were taken individually from the closest point to the lens, to the hairs on the baby’s legs,” he said.

The camera Salb uses takes the shots automatically, but afterward, he uses software in a painstaking process to get a final, perfect image.

Salb’s prize for winning the contest? A $1,000 Amazon gift card.

“Not too bad, got some Christmas shopping money.”

Photography is not Salb’s full time job, but he said he started honing the craft during the pandemic.

“There was kind of an international wave of people who started the bug photography and macro photography at the same time,” Salb said.

You can see more of his work on his Instagram page @bens_small_world.

“I don’t know if the internet or world is just more interested in bugs, or if we’ve kind of helped people see bugs in a different way.”

UNF will install five new sculptures at Jacksonville Beach park

Nov 2, 2023 By Admin in Sculpture

The University of North Florida will install five new student-created sculptures at UNF’s Seaside Sculpture Park.

A New Documentary Follows the Ohio Environmentalists Making Paint from Toxic Mining Runoff

Nov 2, 2023 By Admin in Art World News

In southeast Ohio, toxic drainage from abandoned coal mines has devastated streams and rivers. The acidic sludge, which is filled with heavy metals, leaches into waterways, destroying ecosystems and turning what should be clear, bluish waters into murky, rust-colored runs. In Athens, home of Ohio University, a Hocking River tributary known as Sunday Creek is a prime example of mining’s harmful effects, with more than two million pounds of iron oxide pouring into the stream each year A new documentary directed by Jason Whalen visits the area and the team vowing to clean it up.

“Toxic Art” follows an unconventional pairing of two Ohio University professors who have teamed up on a project that turns sludge from the stream into pigments for oil paint. A project of the global conservation organization Rivers are Life, the short film shares the story of artist John Sabraw and Guy Riefler, the chair of the Civil Engineering department, who have spent six years developing pigments using iron oxide they collected from the creek.

Riefler explains that conventional treatments are often cost-prohibitive, and so the pair decided that if they could create and sell a commercial product, they could fund clean-up efforts on their own. From there, they helped develop True Pigments, a collaborative project with Gamblin Artist Colors that uses proprietary technology to create vibrant pigments from the toxic material.

“We’ve been refining a process that can continuously treat acid mine drainage, restore a stream for aquatic life, and collect sustainably sourced iron pigment that can be sold offsetting operational costs,” Sabraw told Hyperallergic. “Based on our best estimates, we should be able to create jobs and produce a small profit, while eliminating a perpetual pollution source.”

While primarily comprised of volunteers manually harvesting and processing the materials, the multi-pronged project has now secured $3.5 million in funding to construct a True Pigments facility on the Appalachian site. Once that plant is running, Sabraw estimates that his team will be able to completely restore Sunday Creek, “remove over 6,000 lbs of iron… and theoretically produce 75,000 tubes of paint,” every day. Because that’s a staggering amount of material that would overwhelm the consumer market, the team plans to sell much of their future stock to industrial sources.

Watch “Toxic Art” above to see the innovative pollution-to-pigment pipeline in action, and purchase your own set of reclaimed materials from True Pigments.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $5 per month. The article A New Documentary Follows the Ohio Environmentalists Making Paint from Toxic Mining Runoff appeared first on Colossal.

Photographer Captures Punks, The Unhoused, and The Abandoned in LA

Nov 2, 2023 By Admin in Photography

An anonymous street photographer spent six months visiting hundreds of different areas in Los Angeles documenting raw and poignant images.

Warning: This article has photos that contain mild nudity and depictions of self-harm.

Suitcase Joe’s photos are an empathetic look at displacement and mental illness; Joe previously spent ten years documenting the inhabitants of the notorious Skid Row area of downtown Los Angeles.

For his new project, Grey Flowers, Joe departed from his work on Skid Row and traipsed around the wider L.A. area to meet punks, the unhoused, the abandoned, and what Joe calls “beautiful strangers.”

“I thought I had a good idea of how diverse Los Angeles is but after moving around so much from neighborhood to neighborhood on a daily basis it gave me a whole new perspective,” he tells PetaPixel.

“This city is a never-ending world of different people and places. I could shoot a hundred books around L.A. and they could all be different. There were so many neighborhoods and communities I wanted to dive deeper into while shooting the book. I’m now currently doing just that.”

Grey Flowers is a hardbound coffee table book containing 300 photos all in black and white because Joe feels that the medium has more impact than color photography.

“They capture more of the raw truth of people and their environments. They have a timeless feel that always leaves me longing and wanting to know more. I chase those feelings in my photos,” he explains.

Joe says he visited a different neighborhood every day while shooting for Grey Flowers and it was never the same.

“One morning I could be by the railroad tracks shooting near DTLA, by lunch I’d be in Venice, and later that evening I’d take a bus several miles up Sunset Boulevard and walk back home,” he says.

“It was all a great medicine for the soul and it gave me a whole new love for this city.”

Joe says his experience was different from when he shot Sidewalk Champions — a project all about Skid Row — and he didn’t shoot as many transient people

“There was a girl named Trash who in the book is the girl with hundreds of scars on her arms from cutting,” Joe says.

“She was really fascinating to me and I kept going back to see her. I heard recently she passed away but I can’t confirm it; though, I haven’t been able to find her since.”

Joe says that he continued to keep in touch with many of the subjects in his book and is keen to keep documenting in the same vein.

“After I had enough photos for a new book I felt there was still so much to explore,” he says.

“So many captivating stories and lives of varied people each drastically different from the other but equally fascinating.

“I’ve now partnered with another filmmaker and we’re making a docuseries based on some of the people and subcultures I discovered through Grey Flowers.”