Art Gallery concert to celebrate Mexican Aztec, Southwest Native and Mayan music – El Camino College The Union
Art Gallery concert to celebrate Mexican Aztec, Southwest Native and Mayan music
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Man sentenced for posing as Arizona tribe member to sell artwork
SEATTLE — A Washington state man who falsely claimed to be a member of the San Carlos Apache Tribe in Arizona to sell his artwork at downtown Seattle galleries was sentenced Wednesday to federal probation and community service.
The U.S. attorney’s office said Lewis Rath, of Maple Falls, was sentenced Wednesday in U.S. District Court to two years probation and 200 hours of community service. He was charged in 2021 with multiple crimes including violating the Indian Arts and Crafts Act, which prohibits misrepresentation in marketing American Indian or Alaska Native arts and crafts.
An investigation started in 2018, when the Indian Arts and Crafts Board received a complaint about Rath, according to the U.S. attorney’s office.
Rath sold carved wooden totem poles, transformation masks and pendants to Seattle retail stores, the attorney’s office said.
Agents searching Rath’s residence also recovered feathers from birds protected under the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act and the Migratory Bird Treaty Act, according to results from the National Fish and Wildlife Forensic Lab.
“Counterfeit Indian art, like Lewis Anthony Rath’s carvings and jewelry that he misrepresented and sold as San Carlos Apache-made, tears at the very fabric of Indian culture, livelihoods, and communities,” U.S. Department of the Interior Indian Arts and Crafts Board Director Meridith Stanton said in a Justice Department statement. “Rath’s actions demean and rob authentic Indian artists who rely on the creation and sale of their artwork to put food on the table, make ends meet, and pass along these important cultural traditions and skills from one generation to the next.
Stanton also said his actions undermine consumers’ confidence in the Indian art market in the Northwest and nationwide.
Jerry Chris Van Dyke, also known as Jerry Witten, 68, of Seattle, also pleaded guilty to violations of the IACA in March. He was sentenced on May 17 to 18 months of federal probation.
Fairmont State University photography students submit art for Mtn Craft Film Festival gallery
CLARKSBURG, W.Va. (WV News) — Fairmont State University photography students are getting to see their work presented in a gallery at the Mtn Craft Film Festival this week, an achievement that their professor hopes will give them real-world experience and confidence in their work.
Fairmont State University Associate Professor Jared Tadlock said that the film festival — which is being held this weekend at the Robinson Grand Performing Arts Center in Clarksburg — reached out to Fairmont State to suggest a gallery space at the venue displaying work by the students, something to which Tadlock was very excited to agree.
A day of remembrance: artists paint a mural in Art Alley for Orange Shirt Day
BISMARCK, N.D. (KFYR) – When Phyllis Webstad was six, in 1973, she was sent to an Indian boarding school.
She wore the orange shirt her grandmother bought her on her first day.
When she arrived, she and the other children were forced to change into new clothes, and her shirt was taken away from her. She never saw it again.
In 2021, Canada declared September 30 as the National Day for Truth and Reconciliation, known more commonly as Orange Shirt Day. It’s not officially recognized as a holiday in the U.S. yet, but many people wear orange shirts and remember those affected by the injustices of the Indian boarding school system.
This year, relatives of boarding school survivors are creating a mural to remember both those who did and didn’t come home.
“People tend to think of it as historical, and doesn’t touch our generations today, but it does. The purpose of this mural is not only to educate. The purpose of Orange Shirt Day is so that even our non-native neighbors will have an understanding of what our people, indigenous people, have endured,” said Agnes Yellowbear, one of the artists creating the mural and a daughter of a boarding school survivor.
In 1879, the Carlisle Indian Industrial School opened in Pennsylvania. Thousands of students from more than 140 tribes walked through the school’s doors before it closed in 1918, but the effects of the trauma inflicted on many of the students who attended still have a lasting impact today.
According to the Carlisle Indian School Project, Carlisle was one of at least 408 federal Indian boarding schools in the U.S. The schools were meant to assimilate indigenous children into American society by erasing their native heritage.
Two indigenous boys who lived in North Dakota, Edward Upright and Amos LaFromboise, were sent to Carlisle in 1879. They were among the 186 children who died at the school, and their bodies are only just now coming home.
The project’s website said that many students were subjected to both physical and sexual abuse at Carlisle and the other boarding schools.
“My father has shared a lot, from his first years in life until he was six years old when authorities came to take him and his two younger siblings. He told me about the day, he remembers all of it. He remembers the punishment, the cruelty,” said Yellowbear.
Yellowbear said the trauma inflicted on her father has carried over into following generations, and it was a cycle she had to break.
She said the butterflies and dragonflies in the mural she’s been working on with fellow artist Melanie Moniz represent resilience and strength.
Moniz said they’re also seen as carriers of spirits.
The 18 flowers in the mural represent the 18 Indian boarding schools that have been identified so far in North Dakota alone.
“The hope and the goal of this mural is to empower those most impacted and bring awareness because ultimately we can’t create a better North Dakota if we don’t have all of the truth and all of the discussions on the table,” said Melanie Moniz, the other artist working on the mural and daughter of a boarding school survivor.
In 2022, the Interior Department reported that more than 500 children had died across the 400 schools identified in the U.S. They said they found 50 gravesites, but that they’d likely find more.
A Remembrance Walk will be held tomorrow from 2 p.m. to 6 p.m. starting at Custer Park. The finished mural will be unveiled around 3:30 p.m. at Art Alley.
Copyright 2023 KFYR. All rights reserved.
London Sculpture Week 2023: from an AR sculpture to a 21-metre-tall installation
STIR speaks to Stella Ioannou, artistic director of Sculpture in the City, and Fatos Üstek, curator for Frieze Sculptures, about the joint initiative
Native artist’s sculptures installed by new tribal building near New Town
Artist Monte Yellow Bird Sr. stands by his military sculpture, “Remember who you are, Remember where you come from, you will always be remembered,” shown in this photo by Karen LoneFight. This and another sculpture were placed near the new Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation’s new Administration Headquarters, west of New Town.
NEW TOWN – Sculptures by native artist Monte Yellow Bird Sr., known to the art world as “Black Pinto Horse,” were installed on Tuesday in the southern courtyard of the new Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation’s new Administration Headquarters, west of New Town.
Various art/design projects for the new tribal building were originally put up on bids by the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation to artists.
Yellow Bird said he submitted bids for these two sculptures and was fortunate to have been chosen. The two themes for these projects were spirituality and a military memorial.
The military sculpture, “Remember who you are, Remember where you come from, you will always be remembered,” reflects the Vietnam era, although it honors all the military branches, from those who are presently serving and who have served in the past as well as recognizing the first indigenous warriors of this continent as many of our tribe’s service men and women are descendent of,” said Yellow Bird.
“I chose this era because it was a very significant conflict/war/police action to me personally as I watched it on our first black-and-white TV as a young boy. It also influenced me artistically in my early years as a young artist and it was reflected in my earlier art themes.
This spirituality-themed sculpture, “Stand before all of creation and remember all the people with prayer,” by artist Monte Yellow Bird Sr., was installed near the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation’s Administration Headquarters, west of New Town, along with another sculpture by Yellow Bird. Photo by Karen LoneFight.
“As I began to develop as an artist my themes began to focus on spirituality, and formed the foundation of later work, although my new work is still tied to my earlier influences and original themes of warriorship, honor, traditions and culture. It became the catalyst for my interest in 1800s Plains Indian ledger art, which I am currently known for today and have collectors worldwide,” he said.
The second sculpture is “Stand before all of creation and remember all the people with prayer.”
Yellow Bird said the sculptures were placed near the Administration Headquarters on “two beautifully designed pedestals.”
A member of the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation, Yellow Bird grew up at White Shield. He attended the Institute of American Indian Arts in Sante Fe, New Mexico, and graduated in 2004 from Minot State University with a bachelor of fine arts degree. His achievements include being the only U.S. artist to be selected to represent the United States and his Native people at the 2021 Dubai Art Expo, a three-day gathering of more than 500 artists from more than 170 nations. Yellow Bird lives in New Mexico, where he owns and operates Black Pinto Horse Fine Arts, a fine arts and educational company, at Rio Rancho.
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- This spirituality-themed sculpture, “Stand before all of creation and remember all the people with prayer,” by artist Monte Yellow Bird Sr., was installed near the Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation’s Administration Headquarters, west of New Town, along with another sculpture by Yellow Bird. Photo by Karen LoneFight.
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- Artist Monte Yellow Bird Sr. stands by his military sculpture, “Remember who you are, Remember where you come from, you will always be remembered,” shown in this photo by Karen LoneFight. This and another sculpture were placed near the new Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara Nation’s new Administration Headquarters, west of New Town.
7 Rite of Passages Photographers Go Through
There are some shots, shoots, or situations that are simply a rite of passage for photographers learning the craft. Here are seven examples most photographers have experienced. How many have you gone through?
Now, we can’t all go through every rite of passage and I doubt anyone will get every entry on this list, but let me know in the comments how many applied to you and what ones I missed.
1. Steel Wool
I can turn my nose up all I like at steel wool photography, it’s still damned cool, fun to shoot, and my first successful photograph (seen above) used the technique, albeit I went a little too far. The above shot was taken by setting fire to an entire 50 cm wheel of fine-grade steel wool, standing on a roof, and hurling it around with a homemade contraption.
Still, it’s one of those types of shots that as a new photographer, you cannot resist the allure of trying, and nor should you!
2. Friends and Family Wedding Inquiry
In all honesty, I have lost count of how many times I’ve had inquiries for weddings of those I know, and against my better judgment and the advice of fellow photographers, I even took some of them on. Perhaps having your friends and family (and their friends and family) reach out to you to see if you would photograph their special day is purely a compliment — a sign that you’re creating decent images — but it does feel as if there are several other motivations.
If you have never had an inquiry, fear not, one is likely coming soon! And fair warning: it’s harder than it seems.
3. Pet Portrait Shoot
If you have a pet and you take up photography, that pet’s free time is going to be impacted — there’s no escaping it. For the first few years, every lens, every light, and every backdrop I received, my dog, cat, or praying mantis was going to be drafted in for some unpaid work. If they’re obedient, and the dog above was nothing if not obedient for my camera, then they act as invaluable subjects. Also, a snapshot I took of my dog in the rain ended up on a get-well-soon card and I got royalties for years, so he earned his keep!
4. Vintage Lenses
This is a little more specific — perhaps only to me and the photographers I know well — but the vintage lens phase was incredible (and not entirely over for me). Buying new lenses is so expensive; even used lenses are not cheap. This is a disappointing truth to the wide-eyed, experimental, new photographer who just wants to try every lens they can. This is when you discover that adapted vintage lenses, at the cost of autofocus, can give you an enormous selection.
I ended up buying quite a few vintage lenses, most of them useless but with the occasional gem, and as recently as this month, I was looking at a vintage projector lens to adapt to my Fujifilm GFX 50R. This might be my favorite rite of passage, and few things have evoked the level of joy I got from discovering a $100 lens called the “bokehmonster”. Speaking of bokeh…
5. The Bokeh Obsession
When you start photography, many people get drawn to those portraits taken with an 85mm f/1.2 that were top of 500px constantly; I was one of them. That crazy subject-background separation, with the cinematic vista of translucent orbs, is reasonably hard to replicate on a budget. If you’re comfortable with forgoing some of the extreme bokeh, you’ll be fine, but if not, you need thousands of dollars or a penchant for vintage and obscure lenses.
I’m still in this rite of passage and I will likely die on the bokeh hill, but that’s another article.
5. Street Photography
Some types of photography are just a bit… dorky. Macro photography is one of my favorite genres of the craft, but it isn’t “cool.” However, some types of photography have images that are iconic, photographers that are artists, and collections that furnish gallery walls. One of those is street photography, and most new ‘togs go through a phase with it. Some of those will go on to become street photographers — I’m openly envious of you — but most seek more financially viable genres or gravitate toward other areas.
6. Over-Editing
The above portrait was one of my first, inspired by a trend of HDR black-and-white portraits that were doing the rounds back in 2011ish. I couldn’t believe the positive reception I got for it (and in retrospect, I’m even more surprised), and I distinctly remember being elated with how “sharp” it was. What an idiot. Nevertheless, to find your balance, you sometimes have to go (miles) too far and then dial it back, and that’s what all photographers do when they first start. It didn’t help that when I started photography, HDR was just emerging as a trend, so I was doomed.
7. A Ridiculous Watermark
To give myself a slight break from the self-deprecation, I wasn’t too bad with watermarks. The worst example I could find was from the above shoot, which was my second time as press at Motorsport at the Palace. The first time I went, I sold some of my panning images to the drivers and was thrilled. However, some drivers stole the images from my website and didn’t pay the meager fee I asked for the full-sized digital file, so the next year, I nuked them with a watermark.
There’s a large debate on whether watermarks are worthwhile at all, and I think the instances are fewer and fewer these days, but if they annihilate your artwork, get rid of them!
Final Thoughts
There’s no way to do an exhaustive list of these sorts of rites of passage we photographers go through, and there were a few more I wanted to add, like the social media follower obsession, or worshiping golden hour, or shooting in Manual mode without a good reason. Now, I want to know your rites of passage, either that you’ve gone through yourself, or you’ve noticed lots of photographers bumping into as they get to grips with the craft. Share them in the comment section below.
Celebrate Cultura y Comunidad at the Winters Library
This October, the Winters Community Library is presenting Cultura y Comunidad (Culture and Community), a series of bilingual programs designed to celebrate the culture and heritage of the Latinx community
A deep dive into the history of China’s art market
The Chinese journalist and lecturer Kejia Wu displays her deep knowledge of the Chinese art market in this new book. It offers a thorough, English-language analysis of the market, its origins, its extraordinary growth over the past 30 years and its uneasy relationship with official government policy. As a columnist for the Financial Times China and author of Tefaf’s China Art Market report in 2019, Wu is ideally placed to tell this story, and she does so in fascinating detail.
The book is divided into three sections. The first part traces how the art market rose, like a phoenix, from the devastation of the Cultural Revolution. As Wu remarks, even today this remains a sensitive, even taboo subject: “Most people do not want to mention what happened, let alone relive this period in great detail. This lack of information has resulted in the media and art critics enthusiastically writing about the miraculous rise of the Chinese art market, without closely examining how such a ‘fairytale’ could have happened in the first place.”
She digs deep into this “fairytale”, outlining the problems posed by the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, the restitution of cultural objects that had been ransacked by the Red Guards and detailing some of the lawsuits brought by dispossessed collectors. She then explains how the two leading auction houses, Poly and China Guardian, came into being in the mid-1990s. Initially traditional art dominated, such as scrolls, ceramics and bronzes.
Fast forward to the early 2000s, when contemporary art really entered the scene. Galleries were set up in the 798 district in Beijing, Sotheby’s Hong Kong created a new stand-alone category for Chinese contemporary art, Western galleries started opening on the mainland and private museums were established. And then Art Basel powered into Hong Kong, buying up the initial Art HK fair in 2011 and transforming the territory as the Asian destination for contemporary art. Wu rounds off her analysis of the market with a section boldly predicting the future—from the buying behaviour of wealthy young Asians to the likelihood of private museums being able to sustain their ambitions.
What is particularly interesting in this section is the number of interviewees, which range from established dealers such as Lorenz Helbling to collectors including Jenny Wang of Fosun, artists such as Zhang Xiaogang and Liu Xiaodong and auction house specialist Evelyn Lin.
The second section, entitled “The Paradox of Two Parallel Art Systems”, examines the complicated relationship between China wanting its culture to be used as “soft power” and its desire to control every aspect of people’s lives. “China is the only major art market in the world where an immense state-endorsed-and-censored art system and a significant market-oriented art system co-exist in parallel,” writes Wu. She explains how difficult it is for curators, art fair organisers and galleries to negotiate the censorship criteria, since these are “often more a concept than a strict set of written rules”. And she quotes the Chinese president Xi Jinping: “We must tell the world positive Chinese stories.” This of course may clash with what contemporary artists are trying to say in their art.
Finally, Wu tells the stories of five artists—Xu Bing, Li Songsong, Qiu Anxiong, Lu Yang and Zheng Bo—from three different generations, including those who lived through the traumas of the Cultural Revolution, showing how they have shaped their practices as a function of their environment. The story of Zheng Bo pulls together the different threads of the overall story including the influence of Western culture on Chinese creators as well as Zheng’s concerns with Taoism, of the ecology and the situation of migrant workers in Hong Kong, where he now resides. He was the only artist from China to be identified as one of the biggest biennial stars by Artnews at the Venice Biennial in 2022.
• Kejia Wu, A Modern History of China’s Art Market, Routledge, 280pp, 15 colour & b/w illustrations, £120/£34.99 (hb/pb), published 8 May
• Georgina Adam is art market editor-at-large at The Art Newspaper and a contributor to the Financial Times
Seattle man sentenced to two years of probation for selling fake Native American art
A 54-year-old artist from Washington state has been sentenced to 24 months of probation and 200 hours of community service for presenting himself as a Native American artist, despite his lack of tribal enrollment or Native heritage.
Lewis Anthony Rath, of Maple Falls, Washington, pleaded guilty in March 2023 to violating the Indian Arts and Crafts Act, which forbids the misrepresentation of artists as tribal members for monetary purposes. US district judge Tana Lin read a letter submitted by Terry Rambler, chairman of the San Carlos Apache Tribe, in open court, detailing the harm Rath’s scheme had caused his community.
The investigation into Rath began in July of 2018, when the Indian Arts and Crafts Board received the first complaints related to Rath. For over a year, he had been selling fake Native American wooden totem poles, transformation masks and pendants in various stores around Seattle. When agents executed a search warrant at Rath’s residence, they also recovered feathers from birds protected under the Bald and Golden Eagle Protection Act and Migratory Bird Treaty Act.
“Rath’s victims are real: they are Indian artists, many who struggle to make a living, who lost out on sales to those who seek authentic Indian artwork; and they are also consumers who were defrauded into purchasing fake Indian art,” Tate London, an assistant US attorney, said in a statement.
Meridith Stanton, the director of the board of the US Department of the Interior’s Indian Arts and Crafts Board, concurred. “Counterfeit Indian art, like Lewis Anthony Rath’s carvings and jewelry that he misrepresented and sold as San Carlos Apache-made, tears at the very fabric of Indian culture, livelihoods and communities,” Stanton said in a statement. “Rath’s actions demean and rob authentic Indian artists who rely on the creation and sale of their artwork to put food on the table, make ends meet and pass along these important cultural traditions and skills from one generation to the next.”
A variety of other high-profile breaches of the Indian Arts and Crafts Act have come to legal fruition over the past year. Earlier this month, Cristobal “Cris” Magno Rodrigo was sentenced for operating a forgery ring of Alaska Native objects. And in May, Jerry Chris Van Dyke, a Seattle-based artist, was sentenced to federal prison for his fake Indigenous carvings.
