The University of Scranton Programming Board (USPB) Mission Committee and the Multicultural Center invite all to experience a presentation by native storyteller and dancer, Larry Yazzie on Wednesday, Oct. 18 at 7 p.m. at the DeNaples Center Ballroom, Room 407. 

“Larry Yazzie NATIVE | STORYTELLER | DANCER” is presented by the actor, a two-time World Champion Fancy Dancer and Eagle Dancer from the Meskwaki Nation in Tama, Iowa. Yazzie is the founder and artistic director for Native Pride Productions, Inc. based in St. Paul, Minnesota.

Yazzie’s repertoire includes performances worldwide, including at the Olympics, The Kennedy Center and the Smithsonian Institution. 

The international lecturer, dancer and educator is considered one of the nation’s leading experts on Native American dance. In May 2010, he and his son, Jessup, were the sole U.S. performers invited for presentations and workshops throughout northern France.

Yazzie founded Native Pride Productions to give back to his community and to the world. His goal: to share cultural traditions through artist-in-residency workshops, performances, lectures, classroom instruction and theatrical performances that enhance access to diverse, multicultural artists for people of all ages and backgrounds. His warm, enthusiastic spirit reflects the beauty of Indigenous people. Following the tradition of his elders, he gives back and enriches the lives of all audiences.

For questions or information, contact Jose Sanchez at jose.sanchez@scranton.edu or Julie Chropowicki at julie.chropowicki@scranton.edu.

PRICE, Utah — An exhibition of paintings by Ukrainian artist Volodymyr Bevziuk, entitled Let It Be, is on view at Gallery East from Oct. 9 through Nov. 3 on the campus of Utah State University Eastern.

In February 2022, when Russian troops invaded the eastern provinces of Ukraine, Bevziuk had no idea he’d end up exiled with his family in Ferron, Utah. But that’s exactly what happened to this native of Tashkent, the capital city of Uzbekistan. An old friend and longtime Ferron resident, Ben Wolford, and his wife, Sarah, gave Bevziuk’s family refuge from the war-torn country and a chance to find a new life away from the turbulence more than 5,700 miles away.

Born in 1969 to Ukrainian parents who were then working in Uzbekistan, the boy began exhibiting skills in drawing at age 3 and continued to excel in art as he progressed in elementary school after the family returned to Ukraine. Bevziuk’s parents and teachers soon noticed his abilities, giving him additional assignments to participate in drawing competitions.

Later, in middle school, he continued making mural art and attending extracurricular drawing classes in art school. During high school, he studied artistic design. He continued in art and design for two years in technical school and finished with high grades.

Later, Bevziuk served in the two-year mandatory Soviet army. After he married in his mid-20s, Volodymyr started a family, and built a career in construction, finishing apartments and houses. It wasn’t until about age 40 that he decided to go back to developing his drawing skills.

He started attending master classes, learning through videos on the internet, reading and putting his training to practice in his paintings. A few of his paintings were selected to be displayed in local exhibitions next to other artists.

After arriving in Utah more than a year ago, Bevziuk began painting the farmhouses, bookcliffs, mountains and fields dotted with horses in Emery County, his new (though temporary) home. His paintings indeed show a love of working from nature and painting landscapes. He continues to seek his unique style and develop his skills.

This is Bevziuk’s first-ever solo exhibition. It was organized thanks to longtime friends Benjamin and Sarah Wolford and their newly-made neighbors in Ferron. Bevziuk continues to paint from his home in West Jordan where he resides with his family.

Let It Be will be on view through Nov. 3. Volodymyr Bevziuk will be at Gallery East for a closing reception and gallery talk from 6-8 p.m. Friday, Nov. 3. Students, faculty, staff and the public are invited. The gallery is located in the Central Instruction Building.

The gallery is free and open to the public during the academic year. Gallery East’s Fall 2023 hours 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., Monday through Friday. Closed weekends and holidays.

For questions, contact Noel Carmack at 435-613-5241 or by email at noel.carmack@usu.edu.

The vibrant colors and sounds of the beaded jingle dresses and feathered headdresses and the beat of the drums gave a Harn Museum audience a dynamic show for all the senses. This was only the beginning of the festivities for the celebratory holiday of Indigenous Peoples’ Day at the Harn Museum of Art Thursday night. 

Indigenous Peoples’ Day is a holiday that celebrates and raises awareness of the many cultures of Indigenous people. It acknowledges that Native people are the first inhabitants of the Americas and deserve to be recognized, represented and empowered.

Gainesville is the only city in Florida to change the name of the holiday from Columbus Day to Indigenous People’s Day in 2018, making Gainesville a huge hub for the community. While 574 tribes are federally recognized, there are several more nations across the country.

Generations of people enjoyed an array of activities and events, all curated to celebrate the rich cultures, histories and contributions of Indigenous People. Multiple tabling partners showcased community resources and information with the common mission of highlighting the beauty of Indigenous culture.

Many indigenous people gave museum-goers a taste of culture through different art expressions. From beaded clothing to clay pottery, each table presented a piece of different tribes from across two continents.

Duana Whitehorse, a 76-year-old from the Kiowa tribe of Oklahoma, makes unique clothing and moccasins for every occasion by hand. Using deer hide, feathers and colorful beads, each intricate piece takes days to create. 

His wife, Maria Irizarry Whitehorse, a 73-year-old from the Taíno tribe in Borikén, modeled her husband’s handmade designs. Maria’s modest tea dress was designed to give women the ability to breastfeed children while they work on the fields and place them in the back when their child is done eating. 

“It feels good to make our own [clothing] because we’re proud of it,” Maria said.

The scheduled events for the night included two choreographed dances and a drum and dance demonstration with Maria Irizarry Whitehorse, Duana Whitehorse and Terrell Anquoe. Little bites and refreshments were offered all night long.

The performance was opened by the Indigenous Peoples Task Force who works to educate people about the existence and presence of indigenous people. One of their goals is to permanently change the name of the holiday everywhere.

The lively dance and drum performances are an outlet for storytelling. The dances, labeled incorrectly by many as war dances, are dances of prayers. Duana Whitehorse explained the motions of the dances and the differences in regional dancing traditions which differ from the clothes they wear to the style of dance. There are four different styles of women’s dancing and six different styles of men’s dances depending on age group.

Artists and friends Silvestre Hernandez-Reyes and Mario Mutis exhibited their handmade crafts alongside each other. Ten years ago, they started creating projects together and learning from each others’ crafts.

Hernandez-Reyes is a 46-year-old metalsmith and jewelry designer from the Comanche and Totonac tribes. He works to educate people about the jewelry making process and how to be proud of it. He incorporates symbols like the warrior jaguar, the frontier and the moon which is representative of the cycle of women into his pieces. Hernandez-Reyes sells his jewelry at local farmers markets and galleries.

Mutis, from the Muysca tribe, is a 34-year-old 3D arts professor at Santa Fe College. He creates functional hand-painted clay pottery with various uses including musical, spiritual, or educational. The pieces he creates are not for sale because they act as a form of expression and communication. He creates his art and gifts it to family and friends.

“My job in Santa Fe teaching feeds like my belly, right?” Mutis said. “And this stuff feeds like my spirit because I’m happy giving it to somebody.”

The metal casting technique he uses is a communal process done by Muysca people

that requires the breath of several people to reach the temperature required to create the clay pottery. 

“Teaching that process is just as exciting as giving somebody a thing because you’re transmitting knowledge,” Mutis said. “And you know that whatever happens to me, that knowledge stays alive.”

People are identifying as indigenous more than ever. The Native American population count more than doubled since 2000, despite being enumerated since the 1860 Census. Now, people are taking DNA tests and recognizing and identifying with their ancestry. Despite this, there are still large stigmas and misconceptions surrounding the Indigenous community. 

“It’s pretty bad because everybody’s realizing that they can say yes [to their Indigenous identity] but my mom will not say she’s indigenous,” Maria said. “Because she says they think we’re savages.”

The first misconception people have about indigenous people is that they exist in the past context or do not exist at all anymore.

“A lot of people have their understanding and their relationship with those people is through media or movies, or books,” Mutis said. “We have to remember that we’re still existing, we’re still thriving. We’re still struggling, but we still exist.”

Another misunderstanding is that Indigenous people are only native to the United States or Canada. Hernandez-Reyes’s family comes from North Mexico while Mutis’s ancestry is from the Cundiboyacense region of Colombia.

A massive common error people make is homogenizing Indigenous peoples’ identities and believing they are all the same and part of a one group. In reality, they have very different values, traditions, religions and practices. Maria and Duana Whitehorse have learned to compromise in many ways because of their different backgrounds and traditions. The Taino is a matriarchal tribe, while the Kiowa is patriarchal. Maria grew up on fish and vegetables while her husband eats deer and buffalo meat.

Despite all the differences between the tribes and nations, family and community is an essential value to everyone.

“We will fight back as hard as a man or harder because when it comes to defending your child or your family [you do] what you got to do,” Maria said.

There are many ways to learn more about each tribe. While the internet is a great resource for many, Hernandez-Reyes urges the importance of travel.

“You need to go into the deep of the land. That is when you really see the diversity,” Hernandez-Reyes said.

Indigenous Peoples’ Day is an important holiday in recognizing, appreciating and learning from the indigenous people and their rich histories.

“It [Indigenous People’s Day] means everything because we’ve been denied for so long. “Bringing it out now makes us proud that we’re there, that we’re doing something,” Maria said.

The Harn Museum MUSEs, volunteers of the Museum Undergraduate Student Educators, ran and organized a large portion of the event. It executed several activities and crafts in order to give museum-goers an interactive experience. In preparation for the museum night, the MUSEs visited the Florida Museum of Natural History’s exhibit on indigenous communities.

Another resource available to attendees were the docents. The volunteer museum educators gave brief art tours, a more approachable option of exploring the new exhibit. The four “Art Blast Tours” lasted about 15 minutes each and gave groups a snippet of what the collection has to offer. The tours explored the Florida Impressions Exhibition and the Modern Gallery. 

This event was made possible by UF Student Government support whose funding gives students free memberships. The Harn’s Museum Nights occur every month and are free to the public. 

Contact Molly Seghi at mseghi@alligator.org. Follow her on Twitter @molly_seghi.

Details

By Native News Online Staff

October 14, 2023

The Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art is pleased to announce that award-winning artist and educator Monica Raphael (Anishinaabe/Sičáŋğu Lakota) has been named new Thomas G. and Susan C. Hoback curato of Great Lakes Native cultures and community engagement.

A culture bearer, grandmother and fifth-generation quillwork artist known for flora and fauna designs, Raphael has created pieces that are in the collections of the Smithsonian Institution National Museum of the American Indian, the Hood Museum of Art at Dartmouth College and the Eiteljorg. 

Raphael also has an impressive background creating and implementing cultural, educational and human services programs within tribal communities, and she has served as an instructor and guest lecturer.

“Working with curators and the museum’s education and public programs staff, Monica Raphael has a major role in cultivating working relationships with artists and tribes and developing events for the public, with a special emphasis on Native cultures of the Great Lakes region, which is her background,” Eiteljorg President and CEO Kathryn Haigh said. “Monica’s past association with the Eiteljorg already has made an impact on the community we serve, so we are thrilled that she has joined the Eiteljorg team as the Hoback curator.”

Until joining the Eiteljorg Museum last month, Raphael had been a self-employed artist in southwest Oklahoma since 2018, creating quillwork and beadwork jewelry and ribbonwork clothing.

“I am thrilled to join the Eiteljorg team of dedicated individuals who have already made a positive and impressive impact sharing the Eiteljorg mission,” Raphael said, “and I am excited to bring my creativity and knowledge of Great Lakes Native American cultures, languages, philosophies, teachings and ways of knowing to the Eiteljorg, museum visitors and the greater Indianapolis community.”

Raphael’s pieces have received awards at Native art markets such as the SWAIA Santa Fe Indian Market, Heard Indian Market in Phoenix and Eiteljorg Museum Indian Market and Festival, and have been featured in magazines highlighting Native American arts.

An enrolled member of the Grand Traverse Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians, Monica Raphael grew up in Grand Rapids, Michigan, then lived near Traverse City in Suttons Bay, Michigan.

Understanding cultural dynamics was key when she worked for the Grand Traverse Band from 2002-2012, developing a behavioral health program for Native youth to increase local high school graduation rates. She obtained federal grant support for that program, which included managing a youth dance company, Mino Bimaadziwin, for which Raphael served as artistic director, choreographer and costume designer. Four students she trained won champion titles in hoop dance. The program was so successful that it was replicated in a Hopi community in the Southwest.

After 25 years helping to make data-driven change in tribal communities, Raphael in 2018 made a career change to follow a lifelong dream of becoming a full-time artist. In 2021, she was awarded the prestigious First Peoples Fund Cultural Capital Fellowship and the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation LIFT Award. Her work as an artist also brought her to the Eiteljorg multiple times for Indian Market and Festival and an artist residency, and later led to her joining the museum staff as Hoback curator of Great Lakes Native cultures and community engagement.

Great Lakes Native arts and cultures are important to the Eiteljorg. Through a grant from Lilly Endowment Inc., the museum in 2019 acquired more than 400 such artworks and cultural items that greatly increased the depth of its collections in that category. Beautiful examples of beadwork, basketry, carvings, mixed media and other items were included in the acquisition. Some of the Great Lakes works are on view now in Expressions of Life: Native Art in North America, in the museum’s new Native American Galleries that were reconstructed and reinstalled as part of the Project 2021 capital/endowment campaign.

The public can meet her at upcoming events including a gallery tour Nov. 3 and a quill stitch workshop Nov. 17.

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A Minnesota graphic designer is exploring what the Minnesota state flag is made of through a new exhibit in Brooklyn Park.

“Deconstructing the Minnesota Flag” at North Hennepin Community College takes a look at how art is both subjective and symbolic.

The Minnesota state flag has hung untouched for years. Luis Fitch, an artist who calls Minnesota home, said he believes it has never changed.

“It does not represent where we are right now as a state,” Fitch said. “Not just from demographics, but just in general. The state of mind of the community.”

Designer Luis Fitch stands in front of a piece of his “Deconstructing the Minnesota Flag” exhibit at North Hennepin.

The current flag is also a recent topic of conversation. Minnesota lawmakers have pushed for some time to redesign the flag for a number of reasons, including the emblem that is considered offensive to native Americans. A commission got to work in September to craft that redesign.

In addition to being an artist, Fitch was selected to lead that commission. His deconstructing project is not connected to that work.

‘Deconstructing the Flag’

At the exhibit, Fitch is taking the flag apart. He shows it at eight different stages as he removes key design elements. In particular, it showcases the power of symbolism.

The first iteration of the flag in Fitch’s exhibit showcases it as it looks today.

“I don’t know exactly what is bothering the community, but what happens if we start with the flag the way it is and pay attention at first?” Fitch said.

The first layer is the flag as it is. The second removes the shotgun and axe from the foreground of the image.

“It makes it less violent, and there is less of a story,” Fitch said.

Still, Fitch said there is a story to be told.

“We don’t know what the story is, but it doesn’t have to take too much to understand that the Native American is not touching the land that the white person has,” Fitch said.

The third iteration removes the land and person in the foreground. The fourth version removes people entirely.

For the fifth layer, Fitch pulled the years and Minnesota writing. The sixth removes all graphics– and is a look at the land alone.

One of the final iterations of Fitch’s project removes all written graphics and people, leaving the land and a blue background.

“You really have what probably Native Americans first encountered when they first moved here. And that’s the sunset, the river, and the land,” Fitch said.

The seventh layer removes all iconography, leaving a blue flag. For the eighth:

“You remove the color blue because even the color has meaning, and finally you have a white flag,” Fitch said. “Everything has meaning.”

A New Conversation

Fitch hopes his exhibit provokes questions. It looks like it already has. North Hennepin student MJ Schuster said it got her thinking about symbolism.

“You can just assign meaning to really little things, or what people consider to be throwaway things, or things people pay no attention to. But people can really identify with it positively or negatively,” Schuster said.

Schuster’s class got a chance to redesign the flag.

Fitch explains his exhibit and design process to students at North Hennepin.

“I don’t think I realized how bad it was, how extremely colonizer-focused it was until we started doing this project,” Schuster said.

The deconstruction is sparking conversation. It also is an opportunity to create a new story and a symbol for years to come. She said she is hoping a new flag is more representative of Minnesota’s indigenous peoples.

“It almost makes you wonder, if the deconstruction process looks the way it was, why did you add things the way you did?” Schuster asked.

The exhibit opened up on Oct. 12. It’s free and open to the public and runs through Dec. 18 at the Joseph Gazzuolo Art Gallery at North Hennepin. More information about the exhibit is available on North Hennepin’s website.

People can also submit their own ideas and designs for the state seal and flag to the committee. More information about what they are looking for and how to submit is available on the redesign commission’s website. Those submissions are due by Oct. 30.

Brooklyn Park

Cellist Yo-Yo Ma performs in composition that gives voice to ‘a lot of unexpressed grief’ over loss of salmon

Renowned cellist Yo-Yo Ma joined a group of Alaska Natives, artists and environmental activists last month in Fairbanks for a performance that expresses Indigenous peoples’ grief over the shrinking population of salmon and other impacts of climate change on the far north.

In his composition performed during a climate change workshop at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, Yo-Yo Ma’s mournful strains reflect the sorrow that Alaska Native peoples feel at the loss of once-rich salmon runs decimated by climate change and overharvesting.

The tempo builds early in the composition before it gives way to cries of outrage in the verses of a poem composed for the occasion by Gwich’in filmmaker, screenwriter and activist Princess Daazhraii Johnson from Arctic Village.

The poem is entitled “When We Were Salmon,” and Johnson describes it as a sort of lament about the state of planet and its peoples.

“We do have a lot of unexpressed grief about what it happening,” she said, “and from my perspective as an Alaska Native person, it’s like so many families are not able to fish anymore up and down the Yukon River and feed our families and communities.”

That was the theme of three workshops held this summer in Fairbanks by a group that included the Alaska-based indigenous-advocacy organization Native Movement, the Fairbanks Climate Action Coalition, Association of Interior Native Educators and UAF Climate Scholars.

The workshops were presented in partnership with a program run by Yo-Yo Ma’s organization called Our Common Nature, which explores how culture connects people to one another and the natural world.

“It was really a pilot program, of sorts,” Johnson said in a recent interview with other workshop participants. “We brought in elders, and we listened to traditional stories from the region, and then we brought in a lead artist for every workshop that we did.”

But the stories related by elders and other workshop participants weren’t just focused on the loss of salmon. The conversations also brought comfort, and healing for other emotional pain, as highlighted in a final event called “Gath and K’iyh: Listen to Heal.”

“Gath in the word for King Salmon in the Benhti Kenaga dialect,” she said, “and then k’iyh is the word for birch — the birch trees.”

Mato Wyuiyuhi, who helped facilitate the musical component of the workshops, says he found comfort in Ma’s composition.

“It was really a cool thing,” he said, “because it was mournful, but it wasn’t glum or it wasn’t really solemn. It was like a really beautiful thing.”

Wyuiyuhi is a musician, filmmaker and a member of the Oglala Lakota tribe of Pine Ridge, S.D. His professional experience includes work as a composer for the hit television series “Reservation Dogs.”

Wyuiyuhi says he appreciates what he calls the “spiritually centered” approach to grief in workshop sessions.

“So I think that sacred element was really good,” he said. “And then, yeah, moving forward, how do you integrate the type of grief into something that can actualized through music?”

Another workshop participant, Eli Wasserman, brought his experience as an educator who gives music instruction to kids in Baltimore schools that don’t have enough funding for the arts.

“So I definitely took my music education background, teaching people how to write music and make music and why music is important, and kind of create together,” he said. “And then brought that to the workshop.”

The hundred or so people who attended the workshops included kids who, like all the participants, were welcome to join some of the jam sessions held during the workshops, which included a Sept. 4^th finale with Yo-Yo Mah at the University of Alaska President’s House on the UAF campus.

“Throughout all these workshops, we’ve really thought about everybody who enters that space as being a participant, whether they are an organizer, or an artist, or an elder,” says Aurora Bowers, a communications organizer for the Fairbanks Climate Action Coalition. She herself picked up a fiddle to accompany Ma in the final workshop concert.

Bowers says the workshops showed how music can bridge cultural divides and heal the trauma of climate change.

“It’s a massive, massive issue to be facing,” she said, “and so we really need tools to be able to feel our way through that.”

On Jefferson Boulevard, the new gallery Tureen, the brainchild of Cody Fitzsimmons and Chris Scott, inhabits a building with tin ceilings and the original 1912 tile floor. The couple, previously based in Houston, opened the space over the summer with an ambitious exhibition that encapsulated their programming. The group show, entitled Eugenics in the Garden, criticized imperializing Western aesthetic tradition, seeing it as a dead-end.

Now, Mark (on view until Oct. 14) introduces the work of Alaska Native artist Sonya Kelliher-Combs, of Iñupiaq, Athabascan, German, Irish, Scottish, and Danish descent. Enter to find a red slash, a length of found wood coated in automotive paint that curves and tapers to a point. It looks like a wound, a gash. It could be a tusk, the relic of something animal. The artist prods the ambiguity. The supreme tactility of the materials is intrinsic to what makes this exhibition evocative. It takes on the porous boundaries between Western and Indigenous cultures, but first and foremost, in its delicate marriage of beauty and latent violence, it makes you think and feel.

Both Eugenics and Mark clinch Tureen’s spot as an important gallery in the local constellation, a serious and conceptually rigorous trailblazer off the beaten path—neither in the Design District nor the Riverfront area—gloriously fringe.

“We’re very interested in underrepresented artists and underrepresented histories,” Fitzsimmons says. “Artists who ask questions about those things.”

On the walls for the current show, the “Secrets” and “Pink Slips” series offer pouch-like shapes: reworkings of the walrus-tusk form imbued with community meaning as a shape used in parkas. In Credible Secrets, the intricate, sewn repositories blend U.S. Geological Survey maps, thread, and human hair. Others add beading techniques to walrus stomach, seal intestine, or reindeer hide. Referencing the 35 abuse claims brought against the Catholic Church by Alaska Native communities (a too-small reported number, the artist points out), the pouches walk a line between beauty and repulsion.

“A lot of times I use recycled items, found garments that I give new life to, and sometimes content,” Kelliher-Combs says.

“I’m interested in ideas of Western consumption,” she says, and “Western definitions of things from the land, including Indigenous people and ways. Categorizing and quantifying.” Also of interest is the very idea of a collection, “because a lot of our material history, for Indigenous people, minority populations, is housed away in these huge collections far, far away from us, without access.” In her recent “New Artifacts” series, she’s playing with ideas of definitions, “And who has the power to define what things like artifacts are.”

This is not the first time Kelliher-Combs’s work has broached abuse, marginalization, and violence. Her pieces in a 2018 group show entitled The Un-Heroic Act: Representations of Rape in Contemporary Women’s Art in the U.S.—phallic shapes fashioned from sheep rawhide and stuck with porcupine quills—drew critical acclaim and slipped into a New Yorker musing by Jia Tolentino that spoke to the #MeToo movement.

It’s also noteworthy that she is currently being exhibited in four locations: at Tureen in Dallas; at STARS gallery in Los Angeles, which is co-presenting Mark; at the Alaska State Museum in Juneau, in a show that touches on “gut knowledge,” exploring its resonance as a vehicle for Indigenous voice and highlighting Kelliher-Combs as one of the only artists working with marine mammal gut; and in the New York group exhibition Young Elder, a tongue-in-cheek presentation of the very relevant tension and synchrony possible between old and new.

Such dialogue is exactly what Fitzsimmons wanted. Fitzimmons began with a career in fashion branding. But drawn to the art world, he soon moved from New York back to Houston, where he held a job at high-caliber gallery Hiram Butler. Then he decided to open a gallery where he could hone his distinctive vision.

During the pandemic, Fitzsimmons pivoted to art advising, and in those long months, he and Scott, who is an attorney, plotted their move to Dallas. The duo have been avid art collectors, and their taste preceded them. Their Houston townhouse was featured in that city’s Paper City magazine in a feature whose photos bear witnessing.

“They’ve amassed an audacious array of paintings, photographs, and sculptures . . . often provocative, sometimes startling, and occasionally disturbing,” the author writes. Their aesthetic for the gallery, Fitzsimmons is quick to point out to me, is no different.

“Freedom is very important to me,” Fitzsimmons says—hence his decision, unlike many gallerists, not to represent a stable of artists. Instead, he prefers a model in which he is not in competition with galleries from New York, Los Angeles, or elsewhere. If he wants to show their artist, he can more easily do so. “The gallery doesn’t have to see me as a threat,” he says. This, he hopes, will allow him to be nimble, original, and ambitious in his programming.

Scott grew up in Oklahoma and has Cherokee heritage, making Tureen the only Indigenous-owned gallery in Dallas. And certainly, this underlies the connection with Kelliher-Combs. “But also, they’re sensitive human beings, who are looking at the whole picture of our country and the world and who are offering an opportunity for voice and for dialogue that’s not always front and center. So that’s beautiful,” she says. “These are people who are doing the work to create the dialogue and the opportunities.”

In many ways, this historic space that used to be Oak Cliff’s first pharmacy—with its chipped tile and tin ceiling—is aesthetically suited to its mission to create space for unspoken, neglected, or buried narratives. “Yeah, they didn’t whitewash it,” Kelliher-Combs says when I point this out. Neither the space nor the stories.

It’s an interesting and rich time in Kelliher-Combs’s career; but in Dallas’ art scene as well.

“And all this is the result of [Scott] Googling me,” she says. Of the duo, in her eyes, taking a chance.

I should also note that Jaune Quick-to-See-Smith’s retrospective exhibition, recently at the Whitney Museum of American Art, opens at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth one day after Tureen’s exhibit closes. And so the relay of a double narrative unfolds. Kelliher-Combs is the one to bring it up, this overlap. “Why has it taken so long?” she asks me of Jaune Quick-to-See-Smith’s solo as we end our conversation.

Indeed, why?

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Eve Hill-Agnus

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Eve Hill-Agnus was D Magazine’s dining critic from 2014-2021. She has roots in France and California and during her time at D wrote…

On Jefferson Boulevard, the new gallery Tureen, the brainchild of Cody Fitzsimmons and Chris Scott, inhabits a building with tin ceilings and the original 1912 tile floor. The couple, previously based in Houston, opened the space over the summer with an ambitious exhibition that encapsulated their programming. The group show, entitled Eugenics in the Garden, criticized imperializing Western aesthetic tradition, seeing it as a dead-end.

Now, Mark (on view until Oct. 14) introduces the work of Alaska Native artist Sonya Kelliher-Combs, of Iñupiaq, Athabascan, German, Irish, Scottish, and Danish descent. Enter to find a red slash, a length of found wood coated in automotive paint that curves and tapers to a point. It looks like a wound, a gash. It could be a tusk, the relic of something animal. The artist prods the ambiguity. The supreme tactility of the materials is intrinsic to what makes this exhibition evocative. It takes on the porous boundaries between Western and Indigenous cultures, but first and foremost, in its delicate marriage of beauty and latent violence, it makes you think and feel.

Both Eugenics and Mark clinch Tureen’s spot as an important gallery in the local constellation, a serious and conceptually rigorous trailblazer off the beaten path—neither in the Design District nor the Riverfront area—gloriously fringe.

“We’re very interested in underrepresented artists and underrepresented histories,” Fitzsimmons says. “Artists who ask questions about those things.”

On the walls for the current show, the “Secrets” and “Pink Slips” series offer pouch-like shapes: reworkings of the walrus-tusk form imbued with community meaning as a shape used in parkas. In Credible Secrets, the intricate, sewn repositories blend U.S. Geological Survey maps, thread, and human hair. Others add beading techniques to walrus stomach, seal intestine, or reindeer hide. Referencing the 35 abuse claims brought against the Catholic Church by Alaska Native communities (a too-small reported number, the artist points out), the pouches walk a line between beauty and repulsion.

“A lot of times I use recycled items, found garments that I give new life to, and sometimes content,” Kelliher-Combs says.

“I’m interested in ideas of Western consumption,” she says, and “Western definitions of things from the land, including Indigenous people and ways. Categorizing and quantifying.” Also of interest is the very idea of a collection, “because a lot of our material history, for Indigenous people, minority populations, is housed away in these huge collections far, far away from us, without access.” In her recent “New Artifacts” series, she’s playing with ideas of definitions, “And who has the power to define what things like artifacts are.”

This is not the first time Kelliher-Combs’s work has broached abuse, marginalization, and violence. Her pieces in a 2018 group show entitled The Un-Heroic Act: Representations of Rape in Contemporary Women’s Art in the U.S.—phallic shapes fashioned from sheep rawhide and stuck with porcupine quills—drew critical acclaim and slipped into a New Yorker musing by Jia Tolentino that spoke to the #MeToo movement.

It’s also noteworthy that she is currently being exhibited in four locations: at Tureen in Dallas; at STARS gallery in Los Angeles, which is co-presenting Mark; at the Alaska State Museum in Juneau, in a show that touches on “gut knowledge,” exploring its resonance as a vehicle for Indigenous voice and highlighting Kelliher-Combs as one of the only artists working with marine mammal gut; and in the New York group exhibition Young Elder, a tongue-in-cheek presentation of the very relevant tension and synchrony possible between old and new.

Such dialogue is exactly what Fitzsimmons wanted. Fitzimmons began with a career in fashion branding. But drawn to the art world, he soon moved from New York back to Houston, where he held a job at high-caliber gallery Hiram Butler. Then he decided to open a gallery where he could hone his distinctive vision.

During the pandemic, Fitzsimmons pivoted to art advising, and in those long months, he and Scott, who is an attorney, plotted their move to Dallas. The duo have been avid art collectors, and their taste preceded them. Their Houston townhouse was featured in that city’s Paper City magazine in a feature whose photos bear witnessing.

“They’ve amassed an audacious array of paintings, photographs, and sculptures . . . often provocative, sometimes startling, and occasionally disturbing,” the author writes. Their aesthetic for the gallery, Fitzsimmons is quick to point out to me, is no different.

“Freedom is very important to me,” Fitzsimmons says—hence his decision, unlike many gallerists, not to represent a stable of artists. Instead, he prefers a model in which he is not in competition with galleries from New York, Los Angeles, or elsewhere. If he wants to show their artist, he can more easily do so. “The gallery doesn’t have to see me as a threat,” he says. This, he hopes, will allow him to be nimble, original, and ambitious in his programming.

Scott grew up in Oklahoma and has Cherokee heritage, making Tureen the only Indigenous-owned gallery in Dallas. And certainly, this underlies the connection with Kelliher-Combs. “But also, they’re sensitive human beings, who are looking at the whole picture of our country and the world and who are offering an opportunity for voice and for dialogue that’s not always front and center. So that’s beautiful,” she says. “These are people who are doing the work to create the dialogue and the opportunities.”

In many ways, this historic space that used to be Oak Cliff’s first pharmacy—with its chipped tile and tin ceiling—is aesthetically suited to its mission to create space for unspoken, neglected, or buried narratives. “Yeah, they didn’t whitewash it,” Kelliher-Combs says when I point this out. Neither the space nor the stories.

It’s an interesting and rich time in Kelliher-Combs’s career; but in Dallas’ art scene as well.

“And all this is the result of [Scott] Googling me,” she says. Of the duo, in her eyes, taking a chance.

I should also note that Jaune Quick-to-See-Smith’s retrospective exhibition, recently at the Whitney Museum of American Art, opens at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth one day after Tureen’s exhibit closes. And so the relay of a double narrative unfolds. Kelliher-Combs is the one to bring it up, this overlap. “Why has it taken so long?” she asks me of Jaune Quick-to-See-Smith’s solo as we end our conversation.

Indeed, why?

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Eve Hill-Agnus

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Eve Hill-Agnus was D Magazine’s dining critic from 2014-2021. She has roots in France and California and during her time at D wrote…

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SALT LAKE CITY — Dozens of Native American artists will come to Utah’s capital city to showcase a variety of beadwork, paintings, pottery, sculptures, weavings and more this weekend.

It’s the Natural History Museum of Utah’s 10th year hosting the Indigenous Art Market. Over 45 Indigenous creators will sell their wares Saturday and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. All art is purchased directly from the artists, who receive 100% of the sales.

“The Indigenous Art Market at the Natural History Museum of Utah offers a wonderful opportunity to experience and collect genuine Native artwork while engaging with the artists in person,” museum store manager Suzanne Ruhlman said in a statement. “It’s so wonderful to meet the artist and hear the story of the piece you fall in love with.”

This is Shannia Crank’s first time at the market. Although she’s sold at a variety of other markets through her family business Puganini Design, she’s not sure what to expect since this weekend’s market also coincides with an eclipse, which is observed differently among Native American cultures. Crank’s Navajo beliefs, for example, dictate that individuals stay inside, face to the east and pray. She plans on observing those traditions the best she can while not interacting with customers.

Crank, a full-time mom and artist, learned beadwork as a teen through online videos and asking others in her community about their techniques.

“When you do the outline of the beadwork and you start to fill it in, you can see the colors. That’s my favorite part is just looking at the whole aspect of it and finding the different colors that lay together so smoothly,” she said. “What I’ve been taught is you should look for the little easter egg in each piece, because how I’m taught is that when you create something, you’re always supposed to leave either a mistake you made or you’re supposed to make a mistake in your work because nothing’s perfect in life. I thought that was pretty beautiful to learn about; you can’t make anything perfect because it just won’t be perfect and that’s OK.”

Crank is excited to see different perspectives on art and a variety of different traditions, techniques and styles at the market. She said it’s a good opportunity for Native Americans living in urban places like Salt Lake City who don’t always have the opportunity to participate in markets and powwows on reservations.

“It’s important to share the culture and to teach others that we’re still here, we’re still part of America in a big way and we still have our influence and power in ourselves to push through and to allow others to explore our diversity,” she said.

Cherokee painter John Balloue agreed that the market will be an opportunity to see a wide variety of artwork.

“There’s going to be a lot of talented people there and a lot of good things to see and do,” he said. “With Native people, sometimes it’s things that you haven’t seen before or a different way of looking at things. Especially now with contemporary people, it’s a newer way of interpreting traditional ideas and traditional values that we may not have seen before.”

Although he was an artistic child, Balloue didn’t begin painting until after he finished serving in the military during the Vietnam War. Initially the classes he took were for his own pleasure, but he eventually earned a bachelor’s degree in art and started his own business. His art has gone through different phases over the years, but Balloue says his work draws on his own experiences in the Native community as well as places and people he’s met in his own life.

“You go someplace or you see something and as an artist, you go, ‘Wow, I could do my twist on that, or that opens up a part of my brain,'” he said. “I’m a child of the ’60s, so I went through a lot of political type of things, but I wanted to share my work that had a positive affirmation of Native lives and Native people from my perspective.”

The event will also feature performances by Ute/Hopi and Blackfood/Navajo dancers with Buffalo Nation; a collections showcase by the Anthropology Department; Indigenous food offerings; artist talks from Navajo artist and photographer Eugene Taphe and Indigenous painter and organizer Jihan Gearon.

Tickets to the market are included with Museum admission, which is free for University of Utah faculty, staff, and students as well as enrolled members of a federally- or state-recognized tribe and any children in their household. Tribal members must present a tribal enrollment card or tribal ID on-site. More information and museum tickets can be found online.

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