Native

Bay Area native and Lahaina business owner shares loss, impact after fire

Aug 13, 2023 By Admin in Native

Sunday, August 13, 2023 6:27PM

Bay Area native and Lahaina business owner shares impact after fire

MAUI, Hawaii (KGO) — When in Lahaina, locals and tourists alike visit the CocoNene shop on Front Street for everything from Hawaiian made home decor, wall art and photo frames.

The fire that swept through Lahaina destroyed that shop and hundreds of other businesses in the popular and historic area.

Kent Untermann is the founder and president of CocoNene and The Art Source Inc., the parent company. He and his wife Lori have been business owners in Hawaii since the 1980s. The two met after Kent moved from Marin, California to Hawaii on a football scholarship. Kent is now figuring out how to move forward after a total loss of the building and everything inside.

Editor’s Note: The interview in our video player above orginally aired on Friday, Aug. 11, 2023 on our weekday 5:30 p.m. 24/7 streaming newscast

MORE: Death toll from Maui wildfire reaches 93, making it the deadliest in the US in more than 100 years

The value of the 9,000 square foot building is in the millions and the inventory inside of CocoNene and Tabora Gallery is valued at more than $1 million.

Beyond the structural devastation and the items inside the business, he says three of his nine employees lost their homes. But thankfully all of them were able to evacuate the fires and are now safe.

Hundreds of businesses in Lahaina have been wiped out, some are shells of buildings.

VIDEO: Man records Maui destruction, comes across historic Banyan tree still standing

From restaurants, to historical buildings to popular shops, many have been burned to the ground.

Governor Josh Green described it as “a bomb and fire went off”.

Green says rebuilding Lahaina will be a long and costly undertaking, adding it will take time to know the full extent but it be in the billions without a doubt.

Funds are becoming available for businesses impacted by the fires, including federal FEMA money for housing.

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If you’re on the ABC7 News app, click here to watch live

Relationships Carved From Clay Bring New Partners to Museums

Aug 13, 2023 By Admin in Native

In a sea change, artisans and leaders from Native communities were invited to be curators, offering a window onto the intangible and personal dimensions of Pueblo pottery.

Claudia Mitchell, a potter from Acoma Pueblo in New Mexico, gathers clay on a mesa between two sandstone rock formations, hammer and pick at the ready. First she gives thanks to the Clay Mother — the Earth — in prayers and offerings that include a sprinkling of cornmeal, a small piece of turquoise and, always, water — the high desert’s most precious gift. She also thanks the women who came before her, especially her grandmother Lucy M. Lewis, a much-acclaimed potter who worked well into her 80s and whose hands, smooth and soft from years of clay, never lost their strong grip.

In her own work, Mitchell, 59, incorporates shards of pottery from previous generations that she finds along the road, grinding them into a powder to give her pots extra strength before firing. Through her vessels, “the spirit of all those people is brought back to life,” she said. “Our past and present become the future in the pottery.”

Now she is helping to broaden the understanding of American art. In a radical sea change for museums, Mitchell is one of 68 Pueblo potters, artists and cultural leaders invited to largely organize “Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the first Native American exhibition there that has been community curated. The objects were all selected by members of the Pueblo Pottery Collective and the labels highlight Pueblo peoples’ voices and perspectives, rather than the traditional museum label style. (The show, through June 2024, continues by appointment in a more intimate setting at the Vilcek Foundation in Manhattan, before traveling to the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and the Saint Louis Art Museum.)

Claudia Mitchell at her home in McCartys, N.M. She incorporates shards of pottery from previous generations that she finds along the road. Through her vessels, “the spirit of all those people is brought back to life,” she said.Adria Malcolm for The New York Times

˜The idea for the group exhibition originated at the School for Advanced Research (known as SAR) in Santa Fe, N.M., a scholarly resource center, academic press and artist residency program housed in a historic adobe compound. Its immense collection of Pueblo pottery, dating to 1050-1300, is the backbone of “Grounded in Clay,” which had its debut at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe last summer. “We thought it was very important for our people to see the exhibit first,” said Brian D. Vallo, a museum consultant and the former governor of Acoma Pueblo, near Albuquerque, who is a curator in the Vilcek exhibit.

The goal was to identify at least one curator from each Native community, said Elysia Poon, director of SAR’s Indian Arts Research Center. She approached Vilcek Foundation, which has its own extensive pottery collection, about partnering with multiple organizers. “I don’t think they expected to wind up with over 60,” she said. (Six curators are not from Pueblo communities; two of them are Native).

The School for Advanced Research’s immense collection of Pueblo pottery, dating to 1050-1300, is the backbone of “Grounded in Clay.” People from the Pueblos interpreted the works.Adria Malcolm for The New York Times

To reach potential participants, Poon and her staff visited Pueblo communities, distributing fliers during feast days and other cultural events. Each curator was invited to select one or two clay-works to be interpreted as they saw fit, through a handwritten essay, a poem or a voice recording. “Traditionally you come up with big themes and then choose pieces,” Poon said. “We did it backward.”

In this way, the exhibition offers an alternative model to Euro-American business-as-usual, which often excluded source communities from interpreting their own material culture, leaving that to scholars who tend to view works through a dispassionate art historical lens.

Guidelines developed by SAR, now embodied at the Met, represent an ambitious shift in practice in which museum professionals work side-by-side with Native communities to document objects, conceptualize their narratives and expand Indigenous peoples’ access to collections. It’s a strategy that is increasingly adopted by institutions like the Colby Museum of Art at Colby College in Maine, which worked with Native community partners on the current show, “Painted: Our Bodies, Hearts and Village,” offering Pueblo perspectives on the Taos Society of Artists, an Anglo-American group.

This storage jar, c. 1870–80, is by Arroh-a-och, a Laguna Pueblo potter in New Mexico, and was chosen by Max Early, a Laguna community curator. The painted designs on clay show spiraling clouds, flowers and deer.via School for Advanced Research

“It’s exciting to have more voices in exhibition spaces,” said Tom Eccles, executive director of the Center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College, which trains young curators. “We often think of curators as having exceptional knowledge, but today knowledge is also about experience. The more experiences we bring to these objects, the better.”

He added, “Curators today aren’t just in dialogue with artworks, they’re also in dialogue and engaged with communities. That’s a fundamental change.”

“Grounded in Clay” features Native curators from New Mexico’s 19 Pueblo communities but also from Arizona (Hopi) and Texas (Ysleta del Sur Pueblo). “We are excited about the opportunity to put these guidelines into practice,” said Dr. Patricia Marroquin Norby, the Metropolitan Museum’s associate curator of Native American art (Purépecha), who has collaborated with source communities since assuming her role in 2020, offering native perspectives in the American Wing’s Diker collection and in exhibitions like “Water Memories.”

But the scale of the collaboration in “Grounded in Clay” is unprecedented, including many potters carrying on ancestral traditions. The exhibition provides a window for non-Natives onto the intangible, personal and emotional dimensions of Pueblo pottery, “the literal vessel by which our people sustain themselves, psychically, culturally and spiritually,” Dr. Joseph Aguilar, the deputy tribal preservation officer of San Ildefonso Pueblo, writes in the catalog.

Installation view of “Grounded In Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery,” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Museum professionals worked with curators from Native communities, who chose objects and lent their voices and analysis.Richard Lee/The Metropolitan Museum of Art

More than 50 pieces strong, the water jars, storage jars, bowls and bean pots are as distinctive as human faces. Born from earth, fire and water, many recall the oranges, reds and tans of the Southwest’s mesas, cliffs and arroyos. Some have intricate black and white zigzag patterns inspired by clouds or lightning streaking across the sky, bringing the blessing of rain. Others celebrate turkeys, parrots or turtles in vibrant paint. Centuries-old vessels show their age and wear — the scrapes, fissures, bumps, cracks and indentations reveal just how well-used and loved they were, as much as an oil-splotched family cookbook.

“The beauty created in clay is as imperfect as we are, but soars with meaning and purpose,” writes Anthony R. Chavarria (Kha’p’o Owingeh/Santa Clara), curator of ethnography at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture.

Chavarria recalled by phone a sparkling micaceous bowl with a piecrust rim made by his grandmother and the squabbles that would erupt over who would get to commandeer it for morning cereal. For the show, he found himself drawn to a stone-polished blackware water jar with a high neck and a flared rim. “I see the collar and high neck in this jar, in the way its rim flares out,” he writes. “I see my grandma in the beauty from the earth.”

Blackware is typically achieved by a reduction firing process, using cow or sheep dung to modulate the flame — the lack of oxygen, mixed with smoke, will turn the warm red clay bowl a rich black.

When people ask Lonnie Vigil how he creates such a perfect monumental pot, he says he goes into “a dream space.”From left:, via School for Advanced Research;, via The Vilcek Foundation

One spectacular example greeting visitors at the Met is a monumental “grandfather” vessel with an iridescent ebony skin by Lonnie Vigil (Nambe Pueblo), an accomplished potter. He started building it coil by coil on his red 1950s Formica kitchen table — an “architectural feat made more poignant by the fact that it is balanced by hand and feel — not by machine,” writes Nora Naranjo Morse, an artist and poet who is another curator.

“People ask, ‘How did you make such a perfect pot?’” Vigil told me. He doesn’t have an answer. He said he went into “a dream space.”

In an interview at the Vilcek Foundation, Brian Vallo said his paternal grandmother, Juana Vallo, painted her pots with ground black hematite, a mineral, with wild spinach paste as a binder. It was a full day’s journey to gather clay. “My granddad would say that if you go in with a very pure mind, the clay will be easier to remove,” said Vallo. For the show, he chose an Acoma water jar painted with Zuni-inspired birds that his grandmother would call “Zuni Fat Tails.” At Acoma, women would collect rainwater from naturally-formed cisterns on the mesa top and then balance the bulbous jars on their heads — “basically carrying a cloud,” he said.

In Pueblo culture, pots mark important life events. They welcome babies and commemorate a loss. “It’s good to have plenty on hand, ” Mitchell, the potter, observes, “because you never know when someone is going to journey on.”

From left, at the Met: Mateo Romero’s “Tsi Ping Owingeh #9 (Tewa for the Village of Flint Mountain)” and Michael Namingha’s “Yupkoyvi (The Place Beyond the Horizon),” with hand-gathered sand, both show two sacred mountains. The artists contemplate how Indigenous spaces have been altered permanently by tourists and industrial exploitation.Richard Lee/The Metropolitan Museum of Art

For “Grounded in Clay” Norby also commissioned four contemporary Pueblo artists in other mediums; these works question the industrial and environmental exploitation of sacred Indigenous sites. “Yupkoyvi,” by the photographer Michael Namingha, for example, is an eerily pink composition in silk-screen and enamel with hand-applied sand. It addresses ancient sandstone slabs on Fajada Butte at Chaco Canyon, a locus of ancestral Puebloan culture, erected to measure solstices and equinoxes, which has been irrevocably altered by foot traffic from tourists and archaeologists and to industrial exploitation.

Community curators can provide guidance to museums by discovering objects in their collections that are culturally sensitive, or protected by federal repatriation laws. Vallo said that at the Vilcek he spotted a ceremonial bowl. He asked the group to consider returning it to the Tesuque Pueblo, which the foundation did. “I understand that it is now back in use,” Vallo said.

Repatriation is not always desired by Pueblos, he added. Some communities “won’t repatriate items that never should have left,” he said. “They would say that they have lost the essence of what made them sacred.” Once “Grounded in Clay” ends its tour, source communities will participate in coming up with “a robust plan for the stewardship of these items.”

Rose B. Simpson comes from a long matrilineal line of clay artists. Indigenous people and their stories have been “belittled and objectified,” she said, adding that an exhibition like this one can give an object “its life and identity back.”via the Vilcek Foundation

Until then, the infusion of Pueblo voices and life experiences in the show has been profound for artists like Rose B. Simpson (Kha’p’o Owingeh/Santa Clara), the celebrated sculptor who works in a variety of media and comes from a long matrilineal line of clay artists (her exhibition “Counterculture’’ is currently at the Whitney Museum of American Art).

Indigenous peoples and their stories have been “belittled and objectified,” she said, adding that an exhibition like this one can give an object “its life and identity back. We switch from extracting to respecting. This show is incredibly important because it begins that process.”

As a curator, she chose a black Santa Clara water jar (c. 1880-1900) with a broken rim. “I felt we had a lot in common,” she said. “Living in a post colonial-genocidal context, we still have broken parts of a complicated story.”

In Santa Fe, at the School for Advanced Research, Simpson sat alone in a silent room with the pots. “It snaps you into the awareness that these pots are watching you,” she said. “It was really cool to meet and get to know them — and now we’re giving other people the opportunity to meet them. Those pots will see the visitors as much as the visitors see the pots.”

Grounded in Clay: The Spirit of Pueblo Pottery

Through June 4, 2024, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1000 Fifth Ave., (212) 535-7710; metmuseum.org. It runs by appointment through June 2, 2024, at the Vilcek Foundation, 21 East 70th Street in Manhattan; (212) 472-2500; vilcek.org.

Denakkanaaga preserves cultural practices with monthly pop up sales

Aug 12, 2023 By Admin in Native

FAIRBANKS, Alaska (KTVF) – Seal skin slippers, sun catchers, ivory carvings. These are just a few of the items made by Alaska Natives in the Interior.

Finding ways to purchase their wares can sometimes be a challenge and a local non-profit hopes to change that. Denakkanaaga, which means “voice of our elders” in Koyukon Athabascan, is bridging the gap between indigenous artists and the general public with monthly pop-up sales.

A market featuring moose hide, birch bark baskets, and furs all seem to be an oddity to someone who may have never visited Alaska. Well, these items are actually considered functional art to indigenous people. The local non profit Denakkanaaga recognizes this and regularly helps elders in the Interior to feature their art and also help them sell their unique items.

Diana Sevier, Denakkanaaga Cultural Programs Manager says, “We get to share really more about culture over all and it imbues this greater meaning to the items rather just seeing like oh I see a shirt like well that not’s really just a shirt that’s this clothing item that’s been made for time immemorial.”

Robin Frerichs is originally from Kotzebue and she learned how to bead from her great grandmother. She began to bead for her family, and as her family grew, so did her reputation as a beading artist.

“When they were babies they were in the WEIO baby contest and then they went through JOM dance group doing their regalia’s and stuff and they got into the FNA pageants and WEIO pageants,” said, Frerichs.

Ultimately, these items are far more than meets the eye. Linda Peter, a dancefan and grassfan artist from western Alaska shares that creating traditional items bring her peace. “It brings you back to your ancestors and I feel like I’m talking with my mom and my grandma when I sew baskets.”

Officials with Denakkanaaga say it’s those voices that drive them to help the elders be proud of these one of a kind items that are available. They also say the lessons learned from their past will also help the Indigenous people of the future, that can be seen in every stitch. The Alaska Native Gift Shop is held every month at the Morris Thompson Cultural Center and more information can be found here.

What the New Wave of Prison Art Tells Us About U.S. Incarceration

Aug 12, 2023 By Admin in Native

This is The Marshall Project’s Closing Argument newsletter, a weekly deep dive into a key criminal justice issue. Want this delivered to your inbox? Subscribe to future newsletters here.

At first glance, the “Federal Prison Inmate Activity Book” looks like something a child might get at a fast food restaurant. But then you see that the word search puzzle includes terms like “larceny” and “embezzle.” On another page, above drawings of a panda and a one-eyed snake, it reads, “With so many gangs in prison, it’s hard to keep track! Circle the tattoos that might be found on gang members.”

The booklet wasn’t published by a prison; it’s a cheeky collaboration between artist Daniel McCarthy Clifford and an incarcerated person he kept anonymous “to protect them from retaliation,” according to a display card at the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, in New York City. The center is currently showing “Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration,” an exhibit curated by New York University professor Nicole Fleetwood. It has toured several museums since 2020 and is one of at least four exhibits in New York this year that feature artists with prison experiences, along with similar shows in Arizona, California, Connecticut, Florida, Michigan, New Mexico and Wisconsin.

Together, they suggest a renaissance — not of prison art, which is probably as old as prisons, but of its public reception. Americans seem collectively more eager to engage with this work, and to understand the processes and experiences behind it. The visual counterpart to the music I covered in collaboration with The New York Times last week, prison art can convey the experiences of confinement, trauma and redemption, in ways that transcend words alone.

A blue and black sculpture, composed of tables and stool similar to those found in prison visiting rooms, is on display in an art exhibit.

Much of the art in these new exhibits employs hard-earned virtuosity in the service of social commentary, from Mark Loughney’s drawings of his fellow prisoners to Jesse Krimes’ psychedelic quilts to Gilberto Rivera’s three-dimensional smears of paint and prison uniforms. But Clifford’s activity book stuck with me precisely because it isn’t a technical marvel. As with Marcel Duchamp’s famous urinal, your first reaction might be to laugh at its simplicity and irreverence. Clifford tried to send the booklets to federal prisons, but administrators rejected them as a security threat. So the object in the museum is imbued with the absurdities of censorship, especially when you consider that some prisons are letting in Hitler’s “Mein Kampf.”

With volume comes variety. For all the artists who show us prison’s horrors, others put playfulness and joy in the foreground. Native American artist Henry Frank constructed a bustling, miniature prison visitation room out of LEGO toys. After a childhood spent visiting her father in prison, sculptor Sable Elyse Smith used institutional stools and tables to assemble a structure that wouldn’t be out of place on a playground, showing how a child’s gaze can thwart the austerity of a visitation room, while also underscoring the effect of incarceration on loved ones on the outside. The Hollywood Reporter recently described Anthony Gomez’s mockumentary shorts as inspired by “The Office,” while NPR noted Sherrill Roland’s use of Kool-Aid in his sculptures.

Not all the artists make work that is directly about their physical circumstances, and some curators encourage them to go beyond “genres of traditional prison art.” “You have to actively seek new visual stimulation, or you’ll get stuck with the same old prison images, tears, bars, cement blocks, the very, very prison-like things,” Johnny Van Patten, a formerly incarcerated artist in Michigan, told Colossal earlier this year.

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Still, most art signals the time spent making it. When you look at an eagle made of tiny folded magazine pages, or a miniature travel trailer made of teabags, cigarette foil and soda cans, it’s impossible not to think of these artists’ particular relationship to hours, weeks and years. “They are navigating endless penal time, scheduled by others, while mourning the loss of domestic time — family time, home time, free time,” Leslie Jamison wrote in The Atlantic when “Marking Time” debuted.

While museums are increasingly interested in showing this art (and there are more opportunities for collectors to buy it), many prisons still try to keep it inside. Several years ago, the Trump administration banned Guantánamo Bay prisoners from taking their art with them upon release. The Biden administration lifted the ban. Earlier this summer, New York state officials considered new restrictions on prison art, along with writing, music, and other creative work, which they scrapped after public outcry. But many states still try to bar artists from making money from their work, which can be a way to pay for the high cost of phone calls and commissary items.

Even when prison art reaches the public, there is no guarantee it will spark mercy. Earlier this summer, lawyers for Michael Tisius published his art as part of a campaign to stop his execution, arguing that he’d transformed himself on death row, since killing two jail guards in 2000.

The nature of prison art, like all art, is that its effects are impossible to predict and go far beyond the artist. Tisius was executed in June, but his murals still fill the walls of a Missouri prison. He wanted “to brighten [the] environment,” he said in his clemency application, and “erase some of the darkness of my past and to bring some beauty to this world, while I can.”

Move over, monuments: The Mall gets first curated multi-artist exhibit

Aug 12, 2023 By Admin in Native

The National Mall is a place of imposing monuments, but also of memories of monumental events — Marian Anderson’s 1939 concert after being barred from Constitution Hall because of her race, the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, and the 1986 display of the AIDS Memorial Quilt.

It is the fleeting sort of monument that inspired “Beyond Granite: Pulling Together,” an installation of six artists’ works on the Mall. Organized by the Trust for the National Mall, the project will be on view from Aug. 18 to Sept. 18.

The phrase “pulling together” comes from educator and activist Mary McLeod Bethune’s account of how Anderson’s concert “told a story of hope for tomorrow — a story of triumph — a story of pulling together, a story of splendor and real democracy.”

“Over time, artists have come to us on an ad hoc basis,” says Teresa Durkin, executive vice president of the Trust for the National Mall. So the trust decided to undertake a pilot program to place temporary artworks on the Mall, the first time a curated multi-artist program has been exhibited there. The goal, Durkin says, was to try “to learn everything that we can by actually installing six different pieces across the whole length of the National Mall, all at once, in a curated exhibit.”

The idea began with the National Capital Planning Commission, which has long wrestled with the demand to place new landmarks on the Mall’s increasingly crowded 700 acres. NCPC and the trust agreed to experiment with a solution, Durkin says, “for this problem of ultimately not having enough land, if we continue to build permanent memorials on the National Mall.” The two organizations together applied for a $4.5 million Mellon Foundation grant to fund the undertaking.

Stop building museums on the National Mall

To curate the project, the trust selected the Monument Lab, a Philadelphia nonprofit organization whose director is Paul M. Farber, also a senior research scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. As co-curator, he enlisted Salamishah Tillet, a professor and administrator at Rutgers University Newark and a Pulitzer Prize-winning critic-at-large for the New York Times.

“This was an opportunity to think about artists from a variety of practices, a variety of backgrounds,” Farber says, “who would answer the question that is at the center of this project — what stories remain untold on the National Mall? — in distinct but complementary ways.”

In choosing sites for the installations, the curators had to follow National Park Service guidelines and yield to practical considerations. All but one of the artworks will be on a hard, flat surface that can handle installation machinery, but several pieces will be placed near existing Mall features to which they respond.

Artist Vanessa German took on the subject of Anderson’s concert with a statue titled “Of Thee We Sing.” The other artists are Derrick Adams, Tiffany Chung, Ashon T. Crawley, Paul Ramírez Jonas and Wendy Red Star.

Red Star’s “The Soil You See … ” speaks to the ignored or abrogated U.S. treaties with Native Americans and will stand on Signers Island in Constitution Gardens, near the memorial to the signers of the Declaration of Independence. The piece is a seven-foot-high glass thumbprint that represents the many Crow chiefs who signed such treaties with a thumbprint.

“The ridges of the thumbprint are red, and in between the ridges it’s clear, and within the ridges are all the names of the different chiefs who signed those treaties between 1825 and 1880,” says Red Star, who grew up on a Crow reservation in Montana.

Chung’s “For the Living” is a world map of the routes taken by refugees from Southeast Asia in the 1970s. It purposefully lacks national boundaries, the Vietnam-born artist notes. “The map is from that particular refugee migration out of Southeast Asia after the war, but I want to open it up so that people can reflect on their own journeys.”

Two of the pieces rely on sound. Ramírez Jonas’s “Let Freedom Ring” is an automated carillon that plays 41 notes of “My Country ‘Tis of Thee” but leaves the 42nd note to a 600-pound bell that can be struck by visitors. “In a way, it’s a very straightforward thing,” Jonas says. “If you participate, the song is complete. And if you do not participate, the song is unfinished.”

Crawley’s “Homegoing” is a three-station memorial to AIDS victims, especially musicians, singers and choir directors from the Black Pentecostal tradition in which the artist was raised. The music was written or co-written by Crawley, who teaches at the University of Virginia.

Crawley — who is writing a book about the Hammond organ, the AIDS crisis, Black churches and popular culture — says he sees the sound installation as “the performance of the book … and a way to engage a different kind of audience that might not be interested in reading the book but would be interested in listening to some of the sonic materials.”

Adams’s “America’s Playground: DC” is an interactive piece that features at its center a large reproduction of a photograph of one of the first desegregated play areas in D.C. To Adams, playgrounds are inherently political.

“It’s a place where you have to learn negotiation,” he says. “It’s a place where you have to learn to take turns. It’s a place where you understand leadership, and take risks.”

While Adams’s piece turns on a single photo, German’s collage-statue of Anderson features many, including multiple views of the singer’s face and scenes of the diverse crowd at her 1939 concert on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. Also incorporated are images of Sandhof lilies, which flower occasionally in a small area of Africa; hanging blue bottles like those the artist says were used by enslaved Africans on the Gullah “to capture evil spirits”; and a bodice trimmed with the notes to one of the songs Anderson performed, “Nobody Knows the Trouble I’ve Seen.”

The assemblage, German says, embodies “that sense of fight and spirit and love and just grit that makes you want to keep going.”

Of all the artists, German was the least impressed by her initial experience of the Mall. “Very cold,” she recalls. “A lot about war and men.”

Red Star first visited the Mall in 2018 but saw it anew when surveying it with the Monument Lab curators and her fellow artists last fall.

“What I noticed is that there really isn’t any color represented on the Mall,” she says. “That was surprising to me. Everything is, like, the color of the natural materials the monuments are made of,” she says. “So my thumbprint is red.”

Chung’s response to the Mall’s grandiosity was to devise the only installation that will hug the earth. “I want to create something that is not like a humongous, larger-than-life monument that reaches to the sky,” she says. “Instead, I would like to spread it onto the ground.”

“Monuments are my métier,” says Ramírez Jonas, who’s a professor and department chair at Cornell University, so he visits the Mall frequently. “It’s one of the few places in the country where people are deliberately visiting that site to look at monuments. Most of the time, people encounter monuments incidentally.

“Monuments should be open, so each individual can input what they think is significant,” he adds. “We have an ever-changing composition of our population. But we don’t have monumental forms that speak to that.”

For a month, “Beyond Granite: Pulling Together” will try to do just that. The attempt could lead to profound experiences, co-curator Tillet suggests.

“There’s an opportunity as you go from artwork to artwork,” she says, “or if you just sit in front of one of them, to really meditate, in community of other people at the Mall, what it means to be American, what it means to be at the Mall at this moment, and really for all of us to pull together to live up to the promise that the Mall has meant for so many people.”

Beyond Granite: Pulling Together Aug. 18-Sept. 18 at various locations on the National Mall. beyondgranite.org/exhibition.

Lewiston Art Festival: It’s all about the artists this weekend

Aug 12, 2023 By Admin in Native

The Lewiston Art Festival officially gets underway today.

Running mainly along Center Street in the village, the free event runs 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. today and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday.

The festival features:

• More than 20,000 original artworks in painting, graphic arts, mixed media, photography, ceramics, jewelry, fiber/metal/wood

• Indigenous Market: a celebration of traditional and contemporary Native American art and crafts

• “College Alley” features student work

• Live entertainment

• ArtZone: Hands-on activities for kids of all ages!

• Chalkwalk: Friendly team competition for ages 6 to 60+

This year’s featured artist is Jessica Gadra. Her piece, “The Firebird,” is the official image of this year’s Art Festival.

“I’ve drawn since I could hold a pencil, but being an artist has always been my ‘and’; I’ve always been a (fill-in-the-blank) and an artist. I still struggle with it. It’s hard to assert yourself unequivocally, but I think that those doubts are good to have — they keep you trying.” Jessica’s work is featured in children’s books, theater posters, the fashion industry, art galleries, and in commissioned pieces. The self-taught artist, who works in pen and ink, watercolor, and pencil, tells us that she “plucks” the inspiration for her art in “the brew of the old stories and the eternal legends that speak to us all.”

The myth of the firebird travels across time and cultures. The many versions of the story were born of oral traditions, with the magical, glowing bird at the center of tales of courage and a challenging quest, foretelling glory or heralding doom. In Jessica’s silhouette, we see the young protagonist sitting on a blanket of forest animals; “the child is rooted (no pun intended!) in the forest and is attuned to the whisperings of all its creatures”. The mystical bird comes to rest in the tree as the child is sleeping; we see the moment the child fully awakens and is filled with the fire of inspiration.

Gadra took first price in the “Graphic Arts and Drawing” category in the 2022 Art Festival. She lives in Buffalo with her husband, author Alex Livingston (whose Knave of Secrets was published earlier this year). The two met while both were studying English at Canisius College and have been together ever since. To see more of Jessica’s work, please http://jessicagadra.com/

Lewiston Art Festival: It’s all about the artists this weekend

Aug 12, 2023 By Admin in Native

The Lewiston Art Festival officially gets underway today.

Running mainly along Center Street in the village, the free event runs 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. today and 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday.

The festival features:

• More than 20,000 original artworks in painting, graphic arts, mixed media, photography, ceramics, jewelry, fiber/metal/wood

• Indigenous Market: a celebration of traditional and contemporary Native American art and crafts

• “College Alley” features student work

• Live entertainment

• ArtZone: Hands-on activities for kids of all ages!

• Chalkwalk: Friendly team competition for ages 6 to 60+

This year’s featured artist is Jessica Gadra. Her piece, “The Firebird,” is the official image of this year’s Art Festival.

Former Whiteclay beer store is now a church another is artist makerspace

Aug 12, 2023 By Admin in Native

It was once called the “skid row of the plains” and a shame on Nebraska. But Whiteclay is quite different today, six years after the Nebraska Liquor Control Commission stopped renewing the licenses of four beers stores in the town of a dozen residents. The litter is gone and so are people passed out on the streets and sidewalks.”We don’t have, you know, have to look at people that are intoxicated,” Holly Hosie said.She remembers when the beer stores used to sell nearly four million beer cans a year, mostly to residents of the nearby Pine Ridge reservation, where alcohol is banned.”It was a it was a human rights issue. They were killing themselves. It was like it was a slow suicide,” Hosie said.On April 30, 2017, the four beer store closed their doors.”It’s now a place where there’s all kinds of good traffic, there’s business are going on,” Jonathan Ruybalid said.Ruybalid purchased one of the former beer stores and converted it into a makerspace for local Native artists to create and sell their work. “What we’re doing. We’re creating jobs were creating spirit for people to support themselves and their families,” Ruybalid said.The store is now a tourist destination on Nebraska Passport.”The irony is huge. But we are showing off a part of Nebraska people can be proud of,” Ruybalid said.There is a local grocery store, a clothing and apparel store, cafe and auto repair shop. One Family Dollar store is doing so well, a Dollar General is preparing to open on the other end of town.Two of the former beer stores remain empty. The fourth store is now a church.”It used to be my favorite bar. And now it’s my favorite church,” Sylas Condon said.Condon is a member of the Community Fellowship Church. He, like many of the members, used to be drawn to Whiteclay seeking booze. Now they thirst for scripture.”Finally listening to God and Jesus to help me to change and stop living evil, you know, hurting people,” Condon said.Hosie manages the artist maker space.”We provide the space. We provide the tools. We provide customer artist support,” Hosie said.”It’s definitely helping us to give back to the people what was taken away from them because of alcohol,” Hosie said.She said alcoholism has left a lot of scars on a lot of families. “I think it’s going to take a long time for us to get over what the alcoholism has caused to the Native American people. But it’s a beginning,” Hosie said.David Grimes is the pastor of the church. He said he serves a God of miracles. “I battled alcohol and drugs for years before God set me free and I know that if God can turn around a scumbag like me, he can turn a liquor store into a church too,” Grimes said.Get the latest headlines from KETV NewsWatch 7

WHITECLAY, Neb. —

It was once called the “skid row of the plains” and a shame on Nebraska.

But Whiteclay is quite different today, six years after the Nebraska Liquor Control Commission stopped renewing the licenses of four beers stores in the town of a dozen residents.

The litter is gone and so are people passed out on the streets and sidewalks.

“We don’t have, you know, have to look at people that are intoxicated,” Holly Hosie said.

She remembers when the beer stores used to sell nearly four million beer cans a year, mostly to residents of the nearby Pine Ridge reservation, where alcohol is banned.

“It was a it was a human rights issue. They were killing themselves. It was like it was a slow suicide,” Hosie said.

On April 30, 2017, the four beer store closed their doors.

“It’s now a place where there’s all kinds of good traffic, there’s business are going on,” Jonathan Ruybalid said.

Ruybalid purchased one of the former beer stores and converted it into a makerspace for local Native artists to create and sell their work.

“What we’re doing. We’re creating jobs were creating spirit for people to support themselves and their families,” Ruybalid said.

The store is now a tourist destination on Nebraska Passport.

“The irony is huge. But we are showing off a part of Nebraska people can be proud of,” Ruybalid said.

There is a local grocery store, a clothing and apparel store, cafe and auto repair shop. One Family Dollar store is doing so well, a Dollar General is preparing to open on the other end of town.

Two of the former beer stores remain empty. The fourth store is now a church.

“It used to be my favorite bar. And now it’s my favorite church,” Sylas Condon said.

Condon is a member of the Community Fellowship Church. He, like many of the members, used to be drawn to Whiteclay seeking booze. Now they thirst for scripture.

“Finally listening to God and Jesus to help me to change and stop living evil, you know, hurting people,” Condon said.

Hosie manages the artist maker space.

“We provide the space. We provide the tools. We provide customer artist support,” Hosie said.

“It’s definitely helping us to give back to the people what was taken away from them because of alcohol,” Hosie said.

She said alcoholism has left a lot of scars on a lot of families.

“I think it’s going to take a long time for us to get over what the alcoholism has caused to the Native American people. But it’s a beginning,” Hosie said.

David Grimes is the pastor of the church.

He said he serves a God of miracles.

“I battled alcohol and drugs for years before God set me free and I know that if God can turn around a scumbag like me, he can turn a liquor store into a church too,” Grimes said.

Get the latest headlines from KETV NewsWatch 7

Native Market Days in Lehi offers chance to support Indigenous students, vendors

Aug 12, 2023 By Admin in Native

Estimated read time: 4-5
minutes

LEHI — Navajo fry bread, a hoop dance competition, a fashion show and Indigenous made goods — Lehi’s native Market Days has it all.

The event is organized by Lehi-based nonprofit American Indian Services, which provides scholarships for Native American students across the country. All are welcome to attend the event at Electric Park at Thanksgiving Point Friday and Saturday.

Chauma Kee-Jansen, the nonprofit’s executive director, said the event is both a fundraiser and an opportunity to bring Native and non-Native communities together.

“This event is so important because growing up in Utah as a Native American, you never saw events that focused solely on Native American art and culture and brought the two communities together. It was kind of separate,” she said. “This kind of opens up that space to Native and non-Natives where they could share and learn.”

Kee-Jansen, who received an American Indian Services scholarship as an undergraduate student, said nonprofits hope the proceeds will help 20-30 students.

“When a student has to worry about what they’re going to eat or their housing, if they’re going to have a bed to sleep in — I think it impacts them greatly. (With a scholarship), they can focus more on getting the schooling done and completing their degree in a timely manner, instead of taking time off, which statistics show that if any student takes time away from college, they’re more likely not to finish their degree and more so I think with Native Americans.”

According to data published by the National Center for Education Statistics in 2021, only 36% of Native American students in 2014 were able to complete their degrees in six years, compared to 60% of all other students. A number of Utah colleges have recently announced tuition waivers for Native students in an attempt to close that gap; however, Indigenous students still face a number of unique barriers to higher education, with a 2022 study finding that 72% of Native students reported running out of money at least once in the previous six months and almost 50% of respondents saying they served as the primary source of income for their household during college.

Kansas John looks at crafts with his daughter Tyler John at Utah Native Market Days at Thanksgiving Point in Lehi on Friday. All proceeds are going to Native student scholarships. There was hoop dancing, food and crafts. (Photo: Scott G Winterton, Deseret News)

Receiving scholarships from American Indian Services made the difference for Mapleton resident Brandon Benally and his wife as undergraduates at Brigham Young University.

“It helped me tremendously. … I was really grateful for their services. It actually really helped us graduate from college,” he said. “I would like to see more people come out, like more of the community. I think it’s a great opportunity to enrich and teach the community more about Native American culture. Let people know that there are Native Americans here in Utah. They’re everywhere, the culture is live. It’s still thriving, and there’s tons for us to share with the community.”

Kelina Anderson, a 22-year-old hoop dancer from Spanish Fork, is excited at the opportunity to share the dance with Utahns. She began dancing at age 6 after watching her dad perform and continued dancing with BYU’s Living Legends group.

“The hoop dance is a healing dance and it’s really special to our people and our cultures. It really is spiritually uplifting. We have a saying that we dance for those who don’t or those who can’t. And so that’s always something that’s been really important to me,” she said. “I do believe that when we dance, we do it with a good heart and good intentions and then we are really uplifting a community.”

Britney Tourangeau, along with her two sisters, owns Ozaawigwane. Native Market Days is the trio’s first time selling a number of Native-inspired handmade items and bead-work jewelry. Tourangeau, who is of Navajo and Saulteaux descent, grew up in Lehi and said the event is unique.

Sisters Britney, Rachel and Kim Tourangeau talk while sitting at their craft booth at Utah Native Market Days at Thanksgiving Point in Lehi on Friday. All proceeds are going to Native student scholarships. There was hoop dancing, food and crafts. (Photo: Scott G Winterton, Deseret News)

“Growing up, it was hard to really be involved with the Native community because we’re a very small community out here. I think it’s really neat that more people are setting up these events,” she said. “I think it’s a good opportunity to learn about the culture of Native Americans of Utah, and you’ll be able to see all the hard work that everyone has put into making their crafts and everything.”

Rebekah Jarvey, the producer for the event’s fashion show, said the show will feature designers from the Southwest and Canada.

“I hope people just get more familiar with the Indigenous fashion industry. It’s a new industry. We’re building it and it’s been growing in popularity through the past couple of years,” she said. “It’s just something new and exciting that we’re doing. I hope people just enjoy it and get good feelings and hopefully support the artists that designers with their work and respect it.”

More information about the event, including a schedule and ticket fees, is available on American Indian Services’s website.

Photos

Most recent Multicultural Utah stories

Sydnee Gonzalez is a multicultural reporter for KSL.com covering the diversity of Utah’s people and communities. Se habla español. You can find Sydnee at @sydnee_gonzalez on Twitter.

Meet the Three Native Women Selected for the Forbes 50 over 50 Women List

Aug 11, 2023 By Admin in Native

Fawn Sharp, President of the National Congress of American Indians; Stephine Poston, Co-founder of Native Women Lead, and Cynthia Chavez Lamar, Director of the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution. (photos: Forbes, graphic by Kaili Berg)

Details

By Native News Online Staff

August 11, 2023

The third annual Forbes 50 over 50 Impact List came out last week, and three women making an impact in Indian Country made the list along with high visibility women like Jamie Lee Curtis.

The list highlights dynamic female leaders and entrepreneurs who have achieved success over the age 50, often overcoming formidable odds or barriers, providing that success has no age limit.

This year’s list, produced in partnership with Mika Brzezinski and the Know Your Value platform, divides these women into four categories: Impact, Investment, Innovation, and Lifestyle.

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Meet the three women–already well known to Indian Country–who made the list:

Fawn Sharp (51), President of the National Congress of American Indians: In November of 2021, Sharp (Affiliated Tribes of Northwest Indians) became the first tribal leader to receive diplomatic recognition from the U.S when she represented all 574 tribes at the United Nations COP26 Summit in Glasgow. Sharp was elected president of the Native Congress of American Indians in 2019 and was reelected in 2021. She is the current Vice President of the Quinault Indian Nation in Taholah, Washington. Sharp holds a J.D. degree from the University of Washington and certificates from the National Judicial College at the University of Nevada and the International Human Rights Law at Oxford University. She graduated from Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington, with a degree in criminal justice when she was just 19 years old, and before becoming a lawyer, she worked for the CIA and the Washington State Department of Corrections.

Stephine Poston (55), Co-founder of Native Women Lead: Stephine Poston is one of the co-founders of Native Women Lead, an organization she helped establish to invest in and provide loans to Native women founding and running businesses. She is also the founder of Poston & Associates, a full-service communications firm specializing in serving the Native American population. Under Poston’s guidance, Native Women Lead has piloted three lending programs since 2020 to help Indigenous businesses in New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and Utah. She launched the Matriarch Restoration Fund in March 2022, which offers $10,000 to $50,000 loans at 3 percent interest rates to Native women artists, makers, crafters, and creatives in the Indigenous communities.

Cynthia Chavez Lamar (51), Director of the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution: Cynthia Chavez Lamar (San Felipe Pueblo) took office as the director of the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI). She is the first Native American woman to lead a Smithsonian Institution museum. She oversees an institution with more than 1 million objects and photographs and over 500,000 films, digital images, and other media documenting Native Nations and tribes’ cultures and experiences. Chavez Lamar grew up in Katishtya, the Pueblo of San Felipe (her tribe’s reservation), and earned a doctorate in American studies from the University of New Mexico. Chavez Lamar’s career is coming full circle. The first job she took after earning her doctorate was an internship at NMAI, contributing research towards the museum’s expansion. Under her leadership, the NMAI dedicated the National Native American Veterans Memorial in 2022. It was a $15 million project and the first large public celebration the NMAI held since March 2020.