The nonprofit Puʻuhonua Society is aiming to promote visual art and Native Hawaiian values through a new grant program.

The group has announced a two-year grant program, called Hoʻākea Source, that will prioritize projects by visual artists, collaboratives and collectives living and working on Oʻahu.

Puʻuhonua Society aims to create opportunities for Native Hawaiian and Hawaiʻi-based artists and cultural practitioners.

Emma Broderick, Puʻuhonua Society’s executive director, said in a press release that “maintaining a local and Native Hawaiian identity through the arts in a contemporary context is an active form of disrupting a long history of systemic racism, and ensures that the unique identity of this place persists now and in the future.”

Hoʻākea Source will offer six to twelve grants ranging from $5,000 to $10,000.

It is a Regional Regranting Program Partner of the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, which partners with cultural organizations around the country

The new grant program launches on Nov. 28. It coincides with Lā Kūʻokoʻa, or Hawaiian Independence Day.

More information can be found at hoakeasource.org.

State Parks Addresses Discriminatory Names and Inequities

Secretary for Natural Resources Wade Crowfoot, State Parks Director Armando Quintero and Department of Transportation Director Toks Omishakin announced a series of actions to identify and redress discriminatory names of features attached to the state parks and transportation systems.

The move comes in the wake of a national conversation about the names of geographic features and builds upon Governor Gavin Newsom’s work to support equity, inclusion and accountability throughout the state to better reflect our values. To learn more, visit www.parks.ca.gov/ReexaminingOurPast.

The Alamance Artisans Art Extravaganza is coming up Oct. 28 and 29, and is sure to be a memorable event that will bring together a diverse group of talented local artists exhibiting their artwork. Twenty-one artists will present works in woodworking, painting, fiber art, pottery, jewelry and more. Among the exhibiting artists are Dottie Blanchard, Pat Scheible, James and Rita Duxbury, and Jean Fortune Kaplan.

And there’s also Coy Quakenbush, a native of Saxapawhaw, but who now lives in Graham, and whose artwork and style are unmistakable, but tricky to put under one label. He’s well-known for his pottery, which is done in the centuries-old Mata Ortiz style that originated in Mata Ortiz, Mexico. The method uses a coil implementation.

“It’s all hand-built,” Quakenbush said. “I sand it, scrape it, burnish it to get it smooth and shiny. And then I decorate it with clay slips to do the design work. It’s a structured process until you get to the design, and then you can go where you want with that.”

Among the advantages of the Mata Ortiz method is it requires less of a financial investment from the artist, since a pottery wheel isn’t needed to make the vessels, and “firing” is done outdoors in a bonfire instead of a kiln. The color of the pot is from the natural color of the clay, and not from a glaze.

Quakenbush, a master potter, creates bowls, vases, pitchers and other vessels using the technique that isn’t often seen in these parts, which has enabled him to carve a niche among other local pottery makers. 

“The Native American artwork, especially if it has a southwest look, isn’t something you find much in these parts,” he said.

When he first started making the Mata Ortiz-style pots, Quakenbush would spend as much as a week creating one piece. Over time, he has honed his skills and now has the process down to about three or four days. That now leaves him with time to pursue other methods for creating artwork, including painting, drawing and making abstract sculptures using paper clay.

This year’s Alamance Artisans Art Extravaganza will be a celebration of its 5th anniversary. The exhibit is the biggest event of the year for members of the guild, and offers the public an opportunity to view and purchase the artwork, and also provides a chance to meet and get to know the artists. Alamance Artisans members will donate art pieces to raffle, and some members will be on hand to demonstrate their art process.

This year’s show will, for the first time, be held at The Inn at Elon, at 605 N. O’Kelly Ave. in Elon. The show is Oct. 28 from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m.; and Oct. 29 from noon to 5 p.m.

The Carnegie Art Center is pleased to announce “All of Our Relations,” a month-long celebration in honor of Native American Heritage Month, featuring the rich cultural heritage of the Seneca and Tuscarora Nations. This significant event will take place at the Carnegie Art Center, located at 240 Goundry Street, North Tonawanda, NY 14120, from November 1 to 29, 2023.

In partnership with Seneca Nation community member Olivia Maybee, the Carnegie Art Center will host a compelling group art exhibition, showcasing talented artists from the Seneca and Tuscarora Nations. The exhibition will feature visual artists including Seneca artists Hayden Haynes, Sam Jacobs, Mary Jacobs, and Olivia Maybee, as well as Tuscarora artists Robert DAlimonte, Erwin Printup, and Kehala Smith. The event aims to highlight the resiliency of Indigenous communities and shed light on their cultural significance in the Western NY region.

“We hope you can join us for ‘All of Our Relations,’ a unique opportunity to experience the vibrant artistry of the Seneca and Tuscarora Nations,” said Natalie Brown, Program Coordinator at the Carnegie Art Center. “This exhibition and the accompanying events will foster important conversations about historical and contemporary impacts faced by Indigenous communities, while also celebrating their enduring strength and cultural contributions.”

The exhibition will kick off with a free Opening Reception of the group exhibition on Thursday, November 2, from 6 to 8 PM. Throughout the month, the Carnegie Art Center will host a series of free and public Special Events, including a Cultural Storytelling Event titled “Re-Thinking Thanksgiving” with Perry Ground on Saturday, November 11, at 1 PM, and a Smoke Dance Demonstration with Q&A featuring Jordan Smith & Co. on Saturday, November 18, at 1 PM. The exhibition will culminate in a Closing Reception & Artist Talk on Wednesday, November 29, from 6 to 8 PM, featuring the artists from the group show.

“We invite everyone to join us in celebrating the creativity, resilience, and cultural heritage of the Seneca and Tuscarora Nations,” added Brown. “This exhibition and the associated events are open to all ages, offering a unique opportunity to engage with Indigenous art and traditions.”

The “All of Our Relations” exhibition and events are made possible with funds from the Statewide Community Regrant program, a regrant program of the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of the Office of the Governor and the New York State Legislature, and administered by Arts Services Inc.

Special thanks to the JC Seneca Foundation and Gail’s Tobacco & Gas on Tuscarora Reservation for their generous support of “All of Our Relations.”

For more information about the exhibition and the Carnegie Art Center, please visit www.carnegieartcenter.org or contact Natalie at info@carnegieartcenter.org or 716-694-4400.

Leilehua Lanzilotti often references visual artworks in her compositions, but it’s more than a source of inspiration — it’s infused into her earliest memories and inextricably linked to her childhood growing up in Hawaiʻi. Her mother, Louise King Lanzilotti, was the first curator of education at The Contemporary Museum in Honolulu, which young Leilehua would visit every day after school. From day one, contemporary art felt accessible and rooted in curiosity and play. It was normal to just hang out in David Hockey’s L’enfant et les sortilèges exhibit with Ravel’s 1925 opera of the same name playing in the background, or to spend time outside in the sculpture gardens admiring one of the giant glazed “Moons” by ceramic artist Toshiko Takaezu.

Leilehua’s forthcoming album is part of a large-scale touring retrospective and monograph on Takaezu, who passed away in 2011. The album will be released next year on innova Recordings — the in-house label of American Composers Forum — and was selected from one of innova’s national calls, which welcome projects representing a diversity of musical approaches and at various stages of the recording process.

Born in Hawaiʻi of Okinawan heritage, Takaezu was one of the most important sculptors and art educators in the United States during her lifetime, and sound played an unexpected role in her practice. “At some point, Takaezu accidentally dropped a piece of clay into one of these large vessels that she made,” Leilehua explained in a video call. “When it came out of the kiln, it made this gorgeous resonance, so she started [adding pieces of clay] on purpose. When she talks about her work, she talks about how that dark space inside the sculpture is just as important. She was so incredible and innovative with her knowledge of glazes… so she had already created this beautiful 360 landscape around the outside of the sculpture. But the aspect that was really important to her was the part inside that you can only see in your mind’s eye through the physicality of trying to hear how the little clay pieces rattle and move around.”

For the retrospective, Leilehua is contributing an essay to the monograph and co-curating an exhibit demonstrating the development of Takaezu’s conceptual practice and large-scale installations. Additionally, the Noguchi Museum has commissioned her to write several new compositions that interact with or respond to Takaezu’s works, which is what listeners can expect to hear on her innova album. The piano trio Longleash has already recorded her piece based on the resonance of Takaezu’s bronze bells, and a composition written for Sō Percussion’s Flexible Commissions program will explore the resonances and rhythms of Takaezu’s ceramic sculptures.

Leilehua’s innova album is a new touchpoint with ACF, following her 2021 McKnight Visiting Composer Residency, a program that invites artists who live outside of Minnesota to spend time connecting with the communities in ACF’s home state. The creation of new artistic work can be part of the residency, but it’s not required.

Leilehua was intrigued by the community aspect of the fellowship. The opportunity came at a time when she was refocusing her practice on Indigenous language revitalization, beginning with reclaiming her Hawaiian name and connecting to her Kanaka Maoli heritage. Until recently, Leilehua went by her full legal name: Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti. The practice of giving children a Hawaiian middle name stemmed from increased Western influence on the islands in the 19th century and an 1863 law on naming, which required that all children be given a Christian first name. The law was repealed in 1967, but naming practices that began as a government mandate have since been misconstrued as tradition.

Leilehua Lanzilotti — Photo by Laura Banchi, courtesy of the Bogliasco Foundation

During the pandemic, Leilehua found connection to the Indigenous diaspora through the Western Arts Alliance’s Native Launchpad program. Hearing people use their Indigenous names and introduce themselves in their own languages helped her realize that “it’s OK to take up space and claim [my name]… it just feels like my name, and it shows we still exist — Hawaiians still exist.”

For her McKnight residency, Leilehua proposed connecting with local Indigenous organizations to learn how languages unite and empower communities. During her month in Minnesota, she immersed herself in Indigenous Roots, an arts activism organization dedicated to cultivating opportunities for Native, Black, Brown and Indigenous peoples. She hit the ground running at their outdoor festival, bringing water to artists, going on runs for ice, and helping with the simple, basic acts that go a long way in showing up for your community.

From this entry point, Leilehua worked with Mary Anne Quiroz, the co-founder and executive director of Indigenous Roots, to identify how her unique skill set intersected with the organization’s needs. The residency turned into a series of workshops and conversations about grant writing, resources for Indigenous artists, and balancing creative work with the business side of the industry. “The focus was ‘How do I support this Indigenous organization and how they’re empowering people through language to make their art and forward what they’re doing culturally?’’ Leilehua explained. “I ended up doing that in a kind of interesting and different way because that’s what I was hearing from the community — that was what they needed, and that’s so important in all these interactions: how are you showing up, and are you listening?”

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During the residency, Leilehua was also conducting research for the libretto of her opera, tentatively scheduled to premiere in fall 2025. The bilingual libretto draws from diaries, letters, and songs written by Liliʻuokalani, the last Queen of Hawaiʻi. The first piece Leilehua wrote entirely in the Hawaiian language was On Stochastic Wave Behavior (2021) for Roomful of Teeth. The work for vocal octet has “a kind of playfulness in looking at language and words,” she said, and it features the unique sounds of two diacritical marks from the Hawaiian language: the ʻokina (glottal stop) and the kahakō, which lengthens and stresses vowels. Sputtering consonants and pulsating glottal stops are peppered over clustered layers of vowel drones before finally converging into a glowing, hummed resonance.

Reclaiming her Hawaiian name and language has allowed Leilehua to take up space as a human being, but compositionally, this started to unfold in with eyes the color of time, a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Music. The string orchestra work, written in 2020, was the first time she gave herself permission to write a longer-form piece with slow, deliberate pacing. Commissioned by the String Orchestra of Brooklyn, each movement refers to works of art that she had encountered at The Contemporary Museum in Honolulu as a child. Barely audible harmonics and pitchless bowing on the side of the bridge whisper like the wind in “Nahele (the bronze horse / the forest),” a cacophony of scratch tones bring a child’s reckless destruction to life in “les sortilèges (the wound / the torn page),” and swirling metal rattles evoke the hidden clay pieces of Takaezu’s sculptures in “mahina.”

Reflecting on the piece, Leilehua told me that it’s really an attempt to answer questions about how we navigate challenges: “How does art help us deal with the struggles that we find in our world… how does art help us have the creativity and the imagination to work through really difficult things in our lives?” And through her work to revitalize Indigenous languages, Leilehua is continuing this line of inquiry, looking for “the languages of your heart that help you work through the struggle.”

Leilehua’s innova album is made possible thanks to generous support from the Sorel Organization. ACF’s McKnight Visiting Composer Residency is funded by the McKnight Foundation.

I CARE IF YOU LISTEN is an editorially-independent program of the American Composers Forum, and is made possible thanks to generous donor and institutional support. Opinions expressed are solely those of the author and may not represent the views of ICIYL or ACF.

You can support the work of ICIYL with a tax-deductible gift to ACF. For more on ACF, visit the “At ACF” section or composersforum.org.

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By Native News Online Staff

October 25, 2023

Board member Dawn Houle (Chippewa Cree Tribe of Montana) has been elected Board Chair. Houle succeeds Stephine Poston (Pueblo of Sandia), who completed her term of office. 

Launched in 1922 with the Sante Fe Indian Art Market, SWAIA has a significant role in shaping Native American art. Held in August, the market draws up to 100,000 visitors from around the globe to purvey the works of thousands of artists from across Indian Country. The Sante Fe Indian Art Market Best in Show award is considered by many to be the most prestigious honor for Native art. 

In a press release, Houle acknowledged the pivotal role SWAIA plays in elevating Native American artists onto a global stage. 

“The new board members play a big role in supporting and advocating for Native Artists and I’m excited to join this world-class leadership in shaping how we continue to elevate Native Artists to the world stage,” Houle said in a statement. “We have a century of legacy work that we can build upon and I’m grateful to Ms. Poston for the tremendous efforts she provided to the organization. In a world of pressing issues and challenges, the expression of art helps us learn and celebrate. I welcome this new role to strengthen member commitments while bringing in new resources to support SWAIA and the artists.”

New appointments to the executive committee include Michael Trujillo, Vice-Chair, and JoAnn Chase (Mandan, Hidatsa and Arikara), elected Secretary. Tom Teegarden will remain in the position of Treasurer. Natasha K. Hale, the Director of Native American Partnerships for the Catena Foundation, is also a newly elected board member. 

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