Puzzle Monday: Generation Gaps

Jun 12, 2023 By Admin in Native

The Aboriginal Australians of Mornington Island in the Gulf of Carpenteria are known internationally for their dancing, their art—and their languages.

The island off the north coast of the country has a population of about 1,200, made up mostly of the Lardil people, the original inhabitants, and the Kaidildt people, who were relocated there in the 1940s. Even though the island is poor, geographically isolated, and remote—more than 500 miles of Outback from Darwin and 1,400 miles from Sydney—the islanders’ culture is famous worldwide.

Lardil dancers performed at the opening of the Sydney Opera House in 1973, and a troupe regularly tours Europe and America. Mornington Island painters are represented in galleries in every Australian state capital, including the work of the late Sally Gabori, who exhibited in Europe. And the Lardil language remains one of the most studied Aboriginal languages, even though its last fluent speaker died almost two decades ago.

“There are many incredible things in Lardil,” says Erich Round, a linguist at the University of Surrey in England, who studies Lardil and Kayardilt, the language of the Kaidildt.

One reason Lardil remains an active area of linguistic research is because celebrated American linguist Ken Hale visited Mornington Island in the 1960s, during which time he learned Lardil and made almost 1,000 pages of notes. Later, as a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he related Lardil to influential theories of language that were emerging there.

The language has a number of fascinating features. Lardil people, like many Aboriginal peoples, have strict rules about family relationships, and these rules are woven into the grammar of the language (as seen in the challenging puzzle below). Another unusual feature is that Lardil is the only language outside Africa that uses the “click” sound as part of its phonology. (To be more accurate, the click sound only appears in words in Damin, a ceremonial language of about 200 words that is spoken only by Lardil men.)

“Boys would learn the ceremonial language when going through the ceremony from boyhood to manhood. It is very, very interesting because it has all the hallmarks of an invented language,” says Round. “It has an interesting system of data compression where a whole lot of words get crushed down.”

Mornington Island artist John Williams explains the world creation story known as Dreamtime to his granddaughter. Courtesy Mornington Island Art (MIART)

According to the 2021 Australian Census, there are about 300 speakers of Lardil on Mornington Island, though Round says all of them are native English speakers, and speak Lardil to various degrees as a second language. “I met the last fluent speaker of classical Lardil in 2005, and he passed away later that year,” he says.

About 160 Aboriginal languages are still spoken in Australia, and most are endangered. In Mornington Island, the success of Lardil artists and dancers is increasing pride in the Lardil language, too. “Lardil is spoken in everyday conversations by a lot of people, but it’s mainly the older folk who speak Lardil regularly,” says John Armstrong, arts centre manager at the Mirndiyan Gununa Aboriginal Corporation on Mornington Island. “We work with the local school on [Lardil] language lessons that include Kaidildt as well.”

He adds that the island has about 35 active artists, and that the sale of Aboriginal art is the largest contributor to the local economy. “The Kaidildt works are very colourful and abstract, whereas the Lardil works are more muted colours of ochres, browns, and blacks.” As well as exhibiting through galleries in Australian cities, islanders sell their work through their own online gallery.

Stumped? Download the solution, with all the logical steps to get there!

Agency 100 2023: Deloitte Digital

Jun 12, 2023 By Admin in Art World News

Financially, the pandemic years have been kind to Deloitte Digital’s bottom line, with U.S. chief marketing officer Mark Singer characterizing them as a “hypergrowth period.” The numbers bear that out, with agency revenue spiking from $374 million in 2021 to $441.3 million in 2022, a gain of 18%.

The company’s expansive offering and transformation-first mindset likely have something to do with the recent results. “We view ourselves as a transformation business that lives at the intersection of consulting and creativity, and the entire market has grown tremendously around driving transformation — with digital, with experience, with content, with creative,” Singer says. “There isn’t a company in the healthcare and life sciences sectors that we don’t do work for.”

Singer notes that the post-pandemic period has prompted an even greater emphasis on connecting with customers, patients, physicians and influencers. That, coupled with the industry’s ongoing data revolution, “really helped us accelerate,” Singer continues. “Clients aren’t just saying, ‘Give me my communications solution.’ They’re saying, ‘Give me the thing that will help us transform our business more effectively.’”

To help manage the company’s growth, agency-world veteran Joanna Ruiz joined last year in the newly created role of managing director, Deloitte Health agency head. She notes that the firm’s clients have embraced change and the evolving demands on their day-to-day operations.

“The old way involved working in a linear model. Campaign development would take eight to 12 months, starting with strategy and then going to planning and creative,” she explains. Today, it’s more like a virtuous cycle: “We can bring incredible data that feeds insights — and then those insights feed brand strategy, which feeds campaign and content development, which feeds precision engagement, which feeds measurement. Technology has changed the world and our clients; the marketing people as well as the agencies have to change how they operate to keep up.”

Deloitte Digital increased its staff from 1,753 at the end of 2021 to 1,900 a year later. The company’s major acquisition was Dextra Technologies, a software engineering firm based in Monterrey, Mexico.

“It’s helping us build capabilities around marketing tech, commerce and sales force, and even around content,” Singer says. “And as the Hispanic and Latinx population grows within the U.S., it gives us a more native capability.”

While 30% of Deloitte Digital’s growth last year came from new clients, Singer notes that not all of the logos are new ones to the company: “We may have been working with them on anything from talent strategies to execution or some kind of connectivity.” Clients include pharma giants such as Merck and Sanofi as well as large healthcare systems such as NYU Langone, for which the firm has created digital apps and platforms that allow patients to book doctor appointments and follow up on prescriptions.

“We have teams working in pod-based delivery models at scale on continuous improvement and building on these products,” Singer adds.

New in-house offerings during the past year included ConvergeHealth CognitiveSpark, a cloud-based platform that uses AI to help companies drive better decision-making in the digital marketing realm. Another new offering, the Deloitte Global Content Studio, facilitates nimbler production of high-volume, high-quality content assets.

Deloitte Digital also grew the size and ambition of its Health Equity Institute, founded in 2020 to help brands put health equity at the root of what they do. Ruiz reports that the program has impacted underserved communities: “We used our data analytics tools to identify sectors in Brooklyn’s gentrifying Crown Heights neighborhood, where folks don’t have the right nutrition or healthcare and are in danger of developing diabetes. Then we helped those individuals get the services they needed.”

Knowing that socioeconomic and mental health pressures have intensified in COVID-19’s wake, Deloitte Digital has also set about building awareness in predominantly Black and Hispanic communities of other health conditions.

A final new tool, the Ethos Offering, is designed to assist business leaders in developing programs around equity, climate change and sustainability.

“It’s about helping clients build sustainable manufacturing, distribution or supply chain practices,” Singer notes. “That allows companies to walk the walk, but do so in a way that benefits the longer-term future of their business.”

Amid it all, Deloitte Digital has stopped to smell the flowers, so to speak. “It’s not just about the work,” Ruiz stresses. “There’s a lot of camaraderie.” The company has grown to occupy eight offices, with Ruiz and Singer operating out of the Hudson Street headquarters in Manhattan. “It’s a great place to work and congregate, with a bar that serves coffee during the day and wine and beer at night.” There is, of course, ping-pong and karaoke.

Ruiz believes that Deloitte was minimally impacted by the pandemic from a business perspective, owing to its traditional consultancy model, which demanded a considerable amount of travel. “Our people have always been either at a client site, in an office or collaborating somewhere. It’s part of our culture to operate in a remote fashion,” she explains.

As for what comes next, neither Singer nor Ruiz expect the company’s current pace to slacken. “Just when you think marketing is going to slow down, something new and interesting gets thrown into the mix,” Singer says, pointing to Deloitte Digital’s “measured approach” toward AI and machine learning.

“We know the dirty little secret, though I can’t quantify it just yet. But right now, if you use AI, it’s probably more expensive than using humans,” he adds. “Still, there’s a lot of promise. Can we use AI to create medically approved content? To streamline an MLR process? To create more personalization so that targeting rare diseases becomes more efficient?”

Despite that cautious approach, Singer is bullish about opportunities to use AI in the realms of content and design. He teases that the firm will unveil “two or three pretty interesting, and maybe even industry-changing, things” in this area in the months ahead.

When asked for her own predictions, Ruiz aims slightly longer-range. “By 2040, healthcare as we know it will no longer exist,” she proclaims. “We’ll use science and data and tech to identify diseases earlier, to intervene proactively and to better understand disease progression to help people feel better and live longer.”

Deloitte Digital, she adds, wants to keep working with “companies that get that,” and similarly hope to transform health and communication ecosystems. “There’s so much transformation happening in health and digital and AI — the impact is going to be profound.”

. . .

Our marketing role model…

Chidiebere Ibe, an artist and med student, noted the absence of diverse medical illustrations and aimed to fix that gap himself by creating positive, accurate images for the healthcare system. Often the best work stems from the creative collision of unexpected ideas, and Ibe’s beautiful, yet illuminating, art illustrations offer the perfect example of that collision in action — while marking a tangible step toward increasing representation in medicine. He’s not invested in effecting positive change for the sake of marketing and sales, but instead utilizes these as tools in his efforts for change. — Singer

From the June 01, 2023 Issue of MM+M – Medical Marketing and Media

New exhibit at Woodstock Museum focuses on portrait photography of the past

Jun 12, 2023 By Admin in Photography

Long before taking a selfie was as easy as pulling your phone out of your pocket, capturing a portrait was a serious undertaking.

A new exhibit at the Woodstock Museum gives a snapshot into the history of portrait photography as far back as 160 years ago — from the late 1800s to early 1900s — when smiles were a rare sight.

Don’t Smile opened Saturday and highlights about 100 vintage portraits collected in Oxford County, curated from the Museum’s collection of more than 13,000 images.

“We don’t think anything of taking a photo now,” said Adam Pollard, curator of collection at the Woodstock Museum. “Back then…it would have been a big event.”

The exhibit goes back in time to when getting a portrait taken was an expensive endeavour, said Pollard.

three kids in a sepia photo portrait — This photo from 1865 of Daisy, George and John Rose is featured in the ‘Don’t Smile’ exhibit. In most early portrait photography no one is smiling, which comes out of portrait painting, said curator Adam Pollard. (Submitted by Woodstock Museum)

It takes us back to an earlier time where this was an outing, an event — and even owning a photograph in early times was something special, he said.

“You had to get dressed up, you have to go to a studio, you would be posed in positions. They would take a couple of photos, and hopefully they would get a good one.”

The first commercial photography came around by 1849, but it didn’t get to places like Woodstock or London until the 1850s or 1860s. Back then, copper plates and chemical solutions were used to develop photos.

Smiles were rare in early portrait photography

“Don’t Smile comes out of the fact that in most early photography, you don’t see anyone smiling,” said Pollard.

While there are a lot of theories why, Pollard said it comes out of sitting for long periods of time for portrait paintings, as the next evolution of the portrait.

On top of that, the first portrait photography required long exposure times upwards of 20 seconds. “It was hard to hold a smile for that long,” he said, though as technology evolved, the time soon came down to a second or two.

man in low lighting inside — Adam Pollard, curator of collection at the Woodstock Museum, says that in the later 1800s getting your portrait taken was an event and something we take for granted today. (Submitted by Woodstock Museum)

Back then, copper plates and chemical solutions were used to develop photos, but came at a high cost. When glass plates came around, the cost went down. Photos could printed into multiple copies on paper.

More smiles emerged when the Kodak Brownie camera was released in the early 1900s. People started taking their own candid snapshots with people smiling. That bled into the majority of photographic studios around that time.

The exhibit features some famous faces from history such as Alexander Graham Bell, John A. MacDonald and con artist Cassie Chadwick.

museum panel with old portrait photos — Cabinet cards were the primary style of portrait photography from after the 1870s to the early 1900s, according to the exhibit. They were photos printed on paper and mounted on a card. (Submitted by Woodstock Museum)

For those looking to capture a bit of the past, a historic studio camera and portable studio camera from the late 1800s or early 1900s are on display. The cameras, on loan from Annandale National Historic Site and Museum, were once used in a Tillsonburg photography studio, Pollard said.

The photos used in the exhibit are all reproductions because light can be very damaging for old photographs, he said. It also allows them to do some enhancements to faded or damaged photos.

“It’s very important for us to keep the collection safe,” he said.

Pollard will be giving a curator talk on how to care for photographic images on Saturday, June 10 at 2:30 p.m. at the City of Woodstock’s Cultural Canvas event.

WHERE TO FIND IT:

What: Don’t Smile: A selection of early photographic portraits exhibit.
Runs: June 10 to September 9.
Where: Woodstock Museum National Historical Site, 466 Dundas St. in Woodstock, Ont.

Capturing the Moment at Tate Modern: all killer, no filler

Jun 12, 2023 By Admin in Photography

A

bsolute bangers abound in Tate Modern’s latest show. In the show’s biggest room, with Marlene Dumas, Peter Doig and Luc Tuymans close by, is arguably David Hockney’s best painting, Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), made in 1972. You surely know it: a depiction of his lover Peter Schlesinger looking down into a pool in which a man breaststrokes beneath the surface, with verdant French hills behind.

It’s the great summation of his Sixties and Seventies obsessions: pools and bathers, enigmatic double portraits, queer desire and longing, sardonic riffs on abstraction.

The split composition is daring: chlorine up close, chlorophyll beyond. The painting is also a marvellous exposition of the mechanics of its medium, from the glistering highlights on the stylised ripples in the pool, the subtly modulated colouring on the poolside tiles, and the inspired painterly shorthand for trees and mountains in the landscape.

Its significance in this show is its deep relationship with photography. Hockney conceived of the scene through a serendiptious spotting of a pair of unrelated photographs on the studio floor, which gave him the idea of the standing figure looking down on the swimmer. In the complex process of making the painting, he took hundreds of photographs that he then used in the two-week burst of activity that brought the painting to its completion.

Richard Hamilton, Towards a definitive statement on the coming trends in menswear and accessories (a) Together let us explore the stars (1962)

/ © The estate of Richard Hamilton/Tate

I was expecting much more from Hockney in this show. He’s spent decades expounding on his theories of the relationship between the camera and the brush, the human eye and the photographic lens (including some controversial statements about the limits of photography), so a show exploring what it calls “the dynamic relationship” between the two disciplines would seem an ideal stage on which to explore this in depth.

But Capturing the Moment is emphatically not that kind of show. I imagined something exhaustive and exhausting; the kind of dense, comprehensive survey that has defined Tate Modern’s programme – dozens of rooms, a 500-page catalogue, a whole world of theory about mediated images and mechanical eyes. But while the show begins with a great Susan Sontag quote – “The painter constructs, the photographer discloses” – it’s largely pretty lightweight intellectually, with no catalogue, and a meandering thematic structure.

And while at the core of the show are a couple of rooms where photography is centre stage – including marvellous, vast pieces by Jeff Wall, key figures in the Düsseldorf School, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth and Candida Höfer, and the cool calm of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s seascapes – it’s mostly a show about painting that relates to photography. But even then, it doesn’t really analyse how. You could say it has a blurry focus.

Louise Lawler, Splash (2006)

/ Louise Lawler

This is in part because it’s effectively an introduction to a private collection, that belonging to the YAGEO Foundation, founded by the collector Pierre Chen, who runs an electronic components company in Taiwan. Chen must have deep pockets – the Hockney was briefly the most expensive artwork by a living artist when it sold for more than $90m at Christie’s in 2018 – and he’s assembled a collection that’s clearly rich in both photography and painting. So it doesn’t take a huge leap of the imagination to picture how they arrived at the shape of this exhibition, which accompanies the YAGEO holdings with works from Tate’s collection.

What it lacks in intellectual rigour, though, it makes up for in stonkingly great works. Early on, there’s a rare pairing of photograph and painting of the kind I wish we could see more often – two images of mid-century humanitarian turmoil, which aptly illustrate Sontag’s maxim. Picasso’s Weeping Woman (1937), that devastating picture evoking the tragedy of the Spanish Civil War, turns to face Dorothea Lange’s defining image of the Great Depression, made a year before Picasso’s painting, Migrant Mother, Nipomo, California.

In both images, the woman’s hand is raised to her face, but Picasso can use the fractured forms of his post-cubist language to capture a shattering grief, while Lange had to find a precise moment in which to convey a similar depth of emotion. This pairing perhaps conveys a second meaning in the exhibition’s title most effectively – that of the different ways in which painting and photography represent the times in which they were made.

Francis Bacon, Study for a Pope VI (1961)

/ The Estate of Francis Bacon

Similarly mournful is Lucian Freud’s portrait of his mother nearby, one of 18 he made of her following his father’s death, and among his most moving works. Freud, ever a painter from life, is one of the more unfathomable inclusions in the show – one senses he’s here to support his old mate Francis Bacon, whose work is one of the most remarkable explorations of how paint can respond to the photographic image. Bacon’s portrait triptych of Freud from YAGEO’s collection here is a marker of what he called the “violence” he did to his sitters, using photographs – Freud’s face is all sinew and bruised flesh amid a blood-red ground.

There are marvellously productive conversations between painters all through the show: Bacon opposite Marwan, the Syrian painter, whose painting of the writer Bader Chaker al Sayyab pictures the poet’s head with a slab of meat above it, seemingly about to crush it. Opposite the Hockney there’s a fantastic wall of British and US pop art using photographs – Pauline Boty’s wry comment on pin-ups in which the writer and artist Derek Marlowe sits cheerily beneath four bluntly severed portraits of Marilyn-esque women; a magnificent Robert Rauschenberg silkscreen painting, Almanac (1962); and a thrillingly austere Andy Warhol Brando painting. Two artists that could have commanded entire exhibitions with their relentless interrogation of the photographic image, Gerhard Richter and Wilhelm Sasnal, share a transcendent space.

Andy Warhol, Self Portrait (1966-7)

/ The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc.

A compelling subplot is Tate showing off its great collection of contemporary painters. Works by Michael Armitage, Lisa Brice, Christina Quarles, Laura Owens and Njideka Akunyili Crosby, among others – all acquired in the past decade – show how productively and distinctively artists are grappling with the photograph and the screen.

Tate should, at some point, do the great scholarly painting-meets-photography show I expected. If you want real insight into the tension between these two disciplines, you won’t get it here. But you will see dozens of out-and-out bangers, and that’s enough for now.

Tate Modern, to January 29, 2024; tate.org.uk

Journalist, Arts Professional

Jun 12, 2023 By Admin in Art World News

This is a truly exciting time to join Arts Professional, the UK’s leading B2B digital publication serving the arts and cultural sector at a time of significant change in the industry.

With a website, a series of weekly e-bulletins and solid social media presence, we serve professionals working in or with the arts sector, across the full spectrum of art forms. This summer we will go live with a new modern publishing platform and updated branding.

Known for our high-quality investigative journalism and in-depth research-based coverage, we report on the stories that arts professionals need to develop their organisations and their work – everything from cultural policy and research, to fundraising and marketing, to advocacy and best practice. From time to time, we run our own surveys to gather the perceptions and opinions of the cultural sector on hot topics and key policy areas.

What does the role involve?

The role offers the chance to get involved in all aspects of editorial content, be part of the editorial decision-making process and be given responsibilities not available in a larger organisation. The successful candidate needs to be self-motivated, trustworthy, flexible and an adaptable self-starter.

The purpose of the role is to source, research, write and publish relevant high-quality news content for this well-established and respected digital publication for people who work in the arts and culture sector.

Is this the job for you?

The role will suit a journalist with professional experience, a keen interest in news journalism and, ideally, relevant expertise in the arts sector. This home-working role will suit a keen self-starter capable of working both independently and as a team player. Our team meet several times a year in London.

Sounds like the job for you? Then take a look at the Job Pack for more details of the company, the role, and the qualities we’re looking for.

Job Pack

How to apply

To apply, please submit a cover letter outlining how your skills and experience meet or exceed the person specification and why you would like to work for Arts Professional (max 1 A4 sheet), along with your CV and two examples of your published articles.

Applications will be anonymised before being considered by the panel, and shortlisted candidates will be asked to complete an equality and diversity
questionnaire.

Please send your application to our HR colleagues at careers@baker-richards.com

Closing date for applications: 8am on Monday 26 June 2023
Candidates will be invited for interview: 6 or 7 July 2023

Super sculpture Saturday

Jun 12, 2023 By Admin in Sculpture

Some of the most talented and imaginative artists from all around the region and the state entered their artworks into the Yelarbon Sculpture Day on June 10, with some truly amazing artistic feats on display. 12 artists and 24 sculptures were on display on Saturday. Michelle Irlam from Barntree Studio in South Maclean, Brisbane won […]

In West Seattle, a rogue sculpture of the infamous Rolf Neslund is saved

Jun 12, 2023 By Admin in Sculpture

West Seattle residents have saved an unpermitted sculpture of Rolf Neslund, who earned the nickname “patron saint of the broken bridge” and was murdered by his wife.

Sacramento photographer documents war in Ukraine, shares 1,000 photos in midtown exhibit

Jun 12, 2023 By Admin in Photography

“The First Year” – a photography and artifact exhibit documenting the war in Ukraine – was held at CLARA Auditorium in midtown Saturday and Sunday.The exhibit featured more than 1,000 photographs taken by photographer Alina Tyulyu of Sacramento.Tyulyu was born in eastern Ukraine. Her family moved from Ukraine to Sacramento as refugees in 1999. With friends and family members still in the country when it was invaded by Russia, she planned a trip to the border to assist them however she could. The trip was supposed to be for three weeks.“It ended up being almost a year,” she said. “I was completely moved by everything I was seeing.”The photographs displayed Sunday show birthday parties and people cooking alongside images of the wreckage and of soldiers resting. Items from the front lines were also displayed.Tyulyu is an experienced photographer, however, her subject matter, she said, largely was within the hospitality industry. Wine and parties, as she described it. She said she started posting images on social media and quickly realized how important it was to her to share them with the world.“I want people to listen. I want people to see,” she said. “I want people to remember. I want people to remember what war looks like. What this is.”Profits from the event will be used towards humanitarian projects in central and eastern Ukraine.Tyulyu encouraged anyone who wants to learn more about the photo exhibition or about her efforts in supporting Ukraine to contact her via social media.

SACRAMENTO, Calif. —

“The First Year” – a photography and artifact exhibit documenting the war in Ukraine – was held at CLARA Auditorium in midtown Saturday and Sunday.

The exhibit featured more than 1,000 photographs taken by photographer Alina Tyulyu of Sacramento.

Tyulyu was born in eastern Ukraine. Her family moved from Ukraine to Sacramento as refugees in 1999. With friends and family members still in the country when it was invaded by Russia, she planned a trip to the border to assist them however she could. The trip was supposed to be for three weeks.

“It ended up being almost a year,” she said. “I was completely moved by everything I was seeing.”

The photographs displayed Sunday show birthday parties and people cooking alongside images of the wreckage and of soldiers resting. Items from the front lines were also displayed.

This content is imported from Twitter.
You may be able to find the same content in another format, or you may be able to find more information, at their web site.

SACRAMENTO | “The First Year” – a photography exhibit documenting the war in #Ukraine – was held at CLARA Auditorium in midtown. The exhibit featured more than 1,000 photographs taken by Alina Tyulyu. “I want people to remember what war looks like,” she said. @kcranews pic.twitter.com/MTsEsYpTNo

— KCRA Lee Anne Denyer (@KCRALeeAnne) June 12, 2023

Tyulyu is an experienced photographer, however, her subject matter, she said, largely was within the hospitality industry. Wine and parties, as she described it. She said she started posting images on social media and quickly realized how important it was to her to share them with the world.

“I want people to listen. I want people to see,” she said. “I want people to remember. I want people to remember what war looks like. What this is.”

Profits from the event will be used towards humanitarian projects in central and eastern Ukraine.

Tyulyu encouraged anyone who wants to learn more about the photo exhibition or about her efforts in supporting Ukraine to contact her via social media.

How We Perceive and Are Perceived: Memory Map, the Art of Jaune Quick-to-See Smith

Jun 12, 2023 By Admin in Native

*Coyote Sees the World Clearly*. Charcoal drawing by QTS Smith, 1996. Photo by the author

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith is an Indigenous artist and a member of the Salish and Kootenai Nations in Montana. Her rich art shows a wide range of subject matter, inclusive of joy and lightheartedness, as well as the dark depths of suffering, historical and ongoing. Her work is complex visually and politically, and yet as the viewer I felt drawn in, never alienated. I wanted to understand more about her experience, her vision in relation to the natural world, ancestors, cultural traditions, and our modern society. I found her work to be paradoxical, heartbreaking, yet full of hope and potential. Throughout her many decades as an artist, Smith has also been an art teacher and an activist. She influences younger and older generations in vital ways. Even now, in her 80s, she continues to impress and is quite prolific in her creation of artwork.

Her work is currently on display at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, offering an impressive recognition for her work, long overdue. She recently said that she could only ever imagine partaking in the group show Venice Biennale, never imagining she would one day have a solo retrospective. Having just encountered her artwork, I felt a great sense of joy for Smith, and for me to be exposed to such meaningful activist art. As the artist states of her younger days:

While working as a full-time artist, I also consistently organized and curated exhibitions for Native artists for over 30 years. One of my most memorable was the first touring Native women’s exhibit: Women of Sweetgrass, Cedar and Sage. After receiving the catalog, one woman wrote me that she laid the catalog against her cheek and cried. She had no idea there were so many Native women artists out there and she no longer felt alone.

(Brooklyn Museum)

Detail of a large quadriptych painting by QTS Smith. Photo by the author

As an engaged Buddhist, I find it imperative to interact with artists and works that explore what it means to be fully human and alive today. Addressing such conundrums as the “meaning of life,” how humans hurt one another, and what awareness is; how awareness includes both ultimate and relative levels, intertwined, is one facet of the arts. Art has the power to transcend these two levels and interweave them, leaving the viewer or experiencer to absorb and metabolize what they will. This is a form of meditation in action and compassionate activity—to listen, to observe, or to hold space for dialogue with viewpoints familiar or foreign to us, holding them in positive regard. It is a way of looking both backward and forward in a linear timeline held within the mandala of timeless time.

If the path of meditation is to transcend or liberate all from suffering, it is not a practice we engage merely for our own benefit. Engaging with the arts as a maker, viewer, listener, or participant is a form of meditation in action, where compassion for oneself, others, and our cultural systems are embraced in our bodhisattva vow. This encompasses all possible human emotions—anger and confusion, joy and sorrow—giving us a tangible path to walk in communicating our needs and desires, our hopes and failings. As we wish to know others better through their expressive means, we strive to understand and therefore care for them—and all relations, i.e., sentient beings—in ever more skillful ways.

Three drawings by the Artist, 2022. Photos by the author

As the exhibition materials state:

Smith’s work persistently draws attention to the fact that indigenous peoples exist and flourish in the United States, despite centuries of attempted erasure by waves of European invaders, subsequent generations of white settlers, and the policies of the federal government. She feels strongly that her works should, in her words, “leave an imprint on the land that says we are here. We have been here, and these are our stories. These are my stories, every picture, every drawing is telling a story. I create memory maps.”

(Whitney Museum of American Art)

*Going Forward/Looking Back*, mixed media, 1996. Still from exhibition video. From youtube.com

Much of Smith’s artwork combines painting, collage, lithographs, and mixed media to convey the interrelationships of her people with the land, the elements, animals, and the experiences her people and the Earth continue to face under cultural repression and brutality. The way Smith incorporates humor, satire, and multi-layered meanings, as well as forms, imagery, and colors, give her work a truly unique and expressive style. Smith’s “driving concerns [are]: ecological disaster, the misreading of history and the genocide of Native Americans, but also the restorative power of kinship and education. Rejecting a strict chronology, the exhibition instead offers moments to discover the linkages between Smith’s images and ideas across time.” (Whitney Museum of American Art)

I have traveled extensively in the world and seen art in many places. But one thing I almost never do is take part in a guided tour of a museum exhibition or gallery. I suppose I’ve always thought that I would rather let the works speak for themselves, to make their impression upon my heart, mind, and visual senses without someone elses’s commentary. However, in Smith’s show, there was a tour underway, and I overheard the guide giving extensive and fascinating commentary on the works.

He—and, in fact, all the guides—had obviously been educated directly by the artist about what she wanted verbally conveyed about her work. I was riveted by the talk. As we moved through the gallery, the guide spoke at length about four different works of art, encouraging questions from the group, engendering a lively and deep conversation. This was yet another opportunity for me to learn something about my own learning style and my preset notions. In the future, I will pay more attention to the option of an excellent guided tour. It feels liberating to cut through one’s own limiting beliefs!

*No Comment*. Drawing by the artist, 2002. Photo by the author

Employing satire and humor, Smith’s art tells stories that flip commonly held conceptions of historical narratives and illuminate absurdities in the formation of dominant culture. Smith’s approach importantly blurs categories and questions why certain visual languages attain recognition, historical privilege, and value.

(Whitney Museum of American Art)

After viewing about 80 per cent of the exhibition, far more than I predicted, I descended in the elevator to the lobby, ready to leave the museum. One of the docents asked me if I would do an exit survey. I was happy to oblige. She asked many questions about my experience at the museum and of the Smith exhibition, which was the only one I saw. There were several other compelling exhibitions, but I could not add anything more to my emotional or mental palates. And in fact, I did not want to disturb the mood I had been left in through experiencing Smith’s moving and impactful work.

The artist in her studio. From whitney.org

It was, and remains, an emotional journey, delving into her experience even a little bit and letting it penetrate through the layers of my ignorance and tenderness around the issues of genocide, cultural erasure, and the dominance of one culture over another. Since I belong to the typically dominant white culture, it takes effort to engage with such bodies of work that bring up a painful collective past. Although I am committed to, and deeply interested in, the Indigenous activist arts, it takes energy to engage with challenging material. Thus, self-care and replenishment are required. I did not want to mix up my mind with any other artists or viewings that day, but simply to rest in the deepened awareness and appreciation for Indigenous voices and creativity. This prolific and impactful artist Jaune Quick-to-See Smith, with her very apt name, is an artist to seek out. Educational art such as hers stands out as a much-needed antidote to the nonsense pervading US political culture today in terms of further erasure of vital voices, Indigenous among them, who ought to be seen, heard, recognized, and appreciated for their unique human being-ness.