At the Sioux Falls Levitt All My Relatives – or in Lakota, Mitakuye Oyasin – Festival, Native American artists spoke on a panel about music, their communities and their identities.

Nathan Foote, on stage called Crime Spree, sat with Kobe Jordan and Jackie Bird Saturday in discussion of what music means to them.

“How I got started in music, I was locked up. It’s kind of a funny story but I was literally writing a letter to my family and some guy came up and asked me if I was writing rhymes,” said Foote “I didn’t know what he was talking about, I was like, ‘sure.’ And he was like, ‘spit it to me, let me hear it.’ I was like, ‘you want to hear my letter?’ He said ‘Oh you’re writing a letter.’ Yeah. He was like, ‘if I teach you how to write music will you go somewhere with it.’ And I was like, ‘yeah sure man.’”

Foote started taking music seriously after finishing out his sentence. Since that conversation, he has released four albums and been nominated for the Native American Music Awards.

Sitting next to him on stage was Kobe Jordan. He said his love of music began with his mother’s car radio on the way to elementary school.

Jordan mentioned the stigma surrounding the Native American community and alcoholism. He feels that artists serve as inspiration.

“I think it’s really great that we have people like us that try to make waves in quote unquote, ‘the outside world,’” said Jordan.

The final night of the festival was June 8. That evening Jordan opened for the final act performance by the band called “Indigenous”. The last panels also occupied the Levitt mainstage during the festival.

Jackie Bird said she has been an artist all her life.

“What I do with my life is offer all that I am to the traditional art to inspire others, so were remember who we are and live a real good quality life,” said Bird.

These artists and the festival were sponsored by South Dakota State University’s Wokini Initiative and Levitt at the Falls.

Two years ago, professional artist Steven Zatto couldn’t see and was paralyzed from the neck down.

The Huron Township native thought his life’s passion for creating artwork was likely a thing of the past since he couldn’t see colors for his drawings or even stand up to make a sculpture.

It was the lowest point in life that Zatto, 71, had ever experienced.

“I was at the end,” Zatto said. “Every time I talk about it, I get very emotional. Art’s everything to me.”

Even though it felt like the end for Zatto, eventually there would be hope on the horizon not only for good health, but also for a rebirth for his artwork.

Today, Zatto can see exceptionally well given all that he’s been through, and the culmination of the last several years of health struggles is currently on display at his “Figures and Forms” art show at Black Box, 1034 Monroe St., Dearborn.

The exhibit is open to the public through July 29.

“I have 24 works of art on display at the exhibition, and just about all of the works were created after loss of my vision and paralysis,” Zatto said.

Zatto’s physical health started to decline years ago when he was hit by a semitruck while traveling home from an art exhibit in Detroit in 1992.

“After a long court trial, nothing ever happened and nothing ever helped, and I dealt with back pain and chronic pain for many years, even while I was going to college,” he said. “After many years of pain, I got into another accident, and again I had no help, no insurance coverage.”

After his multiple accidents, Zatto said, his decline came on quickly and to the point where he suddenly couldn’t use his hands anymore.

“This was after I won a court case and was sent to a doctor who told me there was nothing wrong with me,” he said. “Three weeks after that appointment, I was paralyzed. It came on kind of quickly. I fell down a couple times, and then a day later, I found I couldn’t use my hands very well, and the next thing was I couldn’t walk, my speech was slurred, and I had all kinds of problems.”

Zatto said he went into emergency surgery and that’s when he found out some terrible news.

“I had to go into emergency surgery, and it was very scary when I found out what was wrong,” he said. “I had a brain stem injury. My neck was cracked and my brain stem had swelled up.”

After the surgery was finished, he came home to recover. Even though the brain stem surgery helped with his paralysis, that’s when he noticed his vision was starting to get worse.

“Over a couple months and then a year, it was terrible,” he said. “I couldn’t see anymore. I could see shapes, but I couldn’t see my colors, so basically I was staring all the time, just trying to keep my eyes and my hands coordinated.”

According to Zatto, this is around the time desperation began to set in. Art was his life, and not being able to see was one of the worst things that could happen to a person like him.

“At that point, I figured if I couldn’t see anymore and I wondered how I could ever make art again,” he said. “I started to get desperate.”

Zatto said he began to research a little bit more about his vision problems, and he found a doctor in Florida who specialized in repairing damaged vision.

“I went to Florida and I found this doctor who was willing to do surgery on my eyes with a laser, and he got me my vision back,” Zatto said. “I’m sitting here today and I can’t believe my vision is getting better. Now I can read without glasses and I can see a good 100 yards perfectly.

After his first surgery, Zatto said he had to wait a while before the doctor would work on his second eye, and during this time, he had to refrain from making any artwork so his eye could heal.

“After my first eye surgery, I couldn’t draw and paint for over a year because my doctor told me not to stress my eyes,” he said. “So for a whole year I did exactly what he told me, really disciplined myself, and when he told me I could draw, I started drawing again and then I got my second eye done after a year.”

Once surgery on both of his eyes was completed, he said, it was like a rebirth — both for his physical ailments and for his creative spark.

“After my second surgery, I couldn’t believe it,” he said. “My whole world opened up again. I got color back, I got clarity, and on some days when I wake up, it’s almost like I’m looking at things like a child again, like everything is crystal clear.”

Because of his new lease on life, Zatto said the ball got rolling quickly again for creating art.

“I got charged up you know, I started painting again, my colors came back,” he said, “I was painting in blues, kind of like Monet, you know his colors were like grayed-down, and he started the impressionist idea of not having lines and things, and because I couldn’t really see well, I know what he saw because I was seeing like that.”

Zatto said it was hard to hold back his motivation to be creative once he had regained his vision again.

“I could barely hold onto myself when I would get ahold of my colors because it felt that new to me,” Zatto said.

Zatto is no stranger to the metropolitan Detroit art scene.

He began his artistic studies at the Center for Creative Studies where he received his bachelor’s degree in painting in 1983.  Zatto went on to receive his master’s at Wayne State University in 1985. He has also done extensive study in ceramics and sculpture.

He is a member of the Cass Corridor Group of artists, recognized for their rugged, direct, and vibrant work, and it is some of his friends in the Detroit art scene who helped him get through the hard times he has experienced as an artist.

“I had a really dear friend call me to be in a show at the Black Box Gallery, and I worked hard to get a piece done for that exhibit, and it sold, and that brought me to the show I’m at now,” Zatto said.

“When you have friends that believe in you, that don’t give up, no matter how bad it looks for you, they stick by you, that is everything. These are my friends from the long past, real old-timers who have been around for a long time. Their help and their confidence in me, really helped me push along. This also includes my wife, who has been by my side through this whole thing.”

Zatto said he thinks when a person is at their lowest point in life, there is something special working amidst all the chaos.

“I was missing for a while, but I’ve been resurrected,” he said. “You never know how things work. When you’re really down, something in the universe helps you. I put everything into this show, all my skill and the presentation. I wanted to give the city of Dearborn the chance that I had to see things new again.”

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KITCHENER — This is how revolutions begin: quietly, discreetly, without pomp or circumstance, on rainy July weekends when few people are around.

“This is us telling our stories and showing that we’re here,” says Thomas (“Tom Tom”) Sinclair, one of several Indigenous artists showcasing their work at the Neebing Indigenous Art Fair through July 16 at Bingemans.

“It’s so validating for us that our stories are going to be told, to be heard, and that we have friends helping us. It’s such a big deal for us and so humbling, and we’re so overwhelmingly grateful for it.”

Despite the fact the room is all but empty, with only a reporter and a handful of visitors on this lonely Saturday afternoon, the 40-something organizer says this with genuine gratitude, his voice breaking with emotion.

It has, after all, been a long road, stretching back to the Truth and Reconcilation Commission’s 94 “Calls to Action” in 2015 and the advocacy efforts of Gord Downie, the Tragically Hip frontman who championed Indigenous causes before his death from brain cancer in 2017.

For Sinclair, being here — in this space, supported by this community — is a milestone not to be taken lightly.

“When he had the very last Hip concert I’m absolutely positive every single Canadian had their chequebooks out to write out a fat donation to Sunnybrook (Hospital) for cancer research,” says Sinclair, an Ojibway from Couchiching First Nation who grew up in Thunder Bay.

“But he spoke about Anishinaabe people and the problems we have in the north, and because of that, it made our stories known.”

People don’t understand the devastating impact the residential school system had on generations, he says, or the “cultural genocide” that inflicted pain, “but what Bingemans has done — I’m going to get emotional here — this is truth and reconciliation!”

The pain, the resilience, the hopes for the future: it’s all here, in brightly coloured acrylic paintings of turtles and deer and bears and canoes sweeping down vast rivers in a timeless dreamscape of Indigenous symbols signifying life, hope and resilience.

“This is one of our oldest writing styles and oldest forms of communication,” Sinclair says of pictographic works that, in ways large and small, celebrate the Grand River and local Indigenous landscape.

“Our elders would write in symbols and draw animals in the dirt as they were telling stories, kind of like mnemonics. And those same stories are being related here in our artist’s vision.”

Co-organizer Autumn Smith agrees.

“People say Indigenous people didn’t have a written language, but our art was our written language,” says the 26-year-old self-taught Ojibway-Odawa artist from Magnetawan First Nation.

“It was used to convey messages and share knowledge, so that’s what we’re doing, continuing that tradition our ancestors have been doing for thousands of years.”

Ultimately, it’s about sharing with people who, until recently, had little interest or awareness.

“I don’t care about money and I don’t care about sales,” insists Patrick Paul, who struggled with alcohol and substance abuse before discovering the rejuvenating power of art.

“The most important part is being able to show our culture and places it hasn’t thrived before, where it’s been shelved to the background of society. For us to be able to share this in the forefront of Kitchener-Waterloo is really important.

“We’re doing something that Indigenous people weren’t allowed to do before.”

With bright colours and impressionistic symbols, many paintings intertwine with their creators’ painful pasts, exerting a healing power they say is redemptive.

“This one explains how I’m the first generation of my family in four generations that didn’t have to attend residential school,” says Sinclair of a stark, vibrant work he calls “Surviving the Sex Offender.”

“But that also means that after all the things that happened to me in my childhood, I didn’t have the church or the residential school or the government to be angry at.”

His story — about abuse victims inflicting harm on future generations because it’s what they know — is painful to hear.

“I had people who were teaching me how to hunt and fish, coming over for Christmas and Thanksgiving dinners,” he says, noting abuse at the hands of his own people impacted his mental health and resulted in time living as an addict on the streets.

“They were the ones who hurt me. It was like people who were traumatized trying to help traumatized people.”

Art helped save his life, he says, because it validated his existence.

“It was finding peace within myself, and love. It was letting go of the shame, those hurts, and finding pride in my culture, my people, in who I am as an individual.”

Smith left her job as a child and youth worker when she realized the key to broader connections — and healing — was sharing her culture through art.

“When I was a kid, nobody knew anything,” she says.

“Their ideas about native culture were based on movies and television and things they would read in books. But those things put us in the past as people who wore buckskin all the time and lived in teepees.”

The post-2015 emphasis on the trauma of residential schools was a reality check for many, she notes, but misleading in a different way.

“We hear so much about the truth and reconciliation stuff, about residential schools and the Sixties Scoop and day schools, but there’s not so much talk about the beauty of our culture and what we kept and what’s still here.

“That’s what we want to share. We’re not just our trauma. We’re also a really beautiful and colourful people.”

Indigenous paintings are alive, she says. They have spirits.

“There’s an Anishinaabe belief that things a lot of us think aren’t living actually are: rocks are living, water is living. That’s what we’re trying to show with these paintings, the relationships between living things that still exist today.”

It’s an optimistic view, and eight years after the Truth and Reconciliation Commission issued its momentous report, a welcome change.

“There’s definitely a shift that’s happening and it’s going to change the way Indigenous art is presented,” agrees Paul.

“A lot of us are still on the powwow trail selling art at markets, but I really deeply believe we have gallery level material here.

“This is our culture. It deserves to be at the forefront.”

The Neebing Indigenous Art Fair runs through July 16 in Bingemans Embassy Room, 425 Bingemans Centre Drive, in Kitchener. For more information go to www.indigenouswr.ca

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The 50th year of Art in the Park in Steamboat Springs featured a wide array of vendors from around the country and drew a large numbers of visitors.

Art in the Park included around 130 vendors in Lincoln Park as the main feature of the event organized by Steamboat Creates. The artists came with a large variety of mediums and styles, featuring everything from woodworking to fiber arts to jewelry making, as well as a large variety of inspirations and reasons behind the work.

One of the newer vendors at Art in the Park, the Hahn Family Wood Company, has been working with wood and epoxy resin for a little over three years. Hailing from Alt just outside of Fort Collins, Zachary Hahn founded the company in 2020 as a part of his journey through sobriety.

His stand featured several handcrafted cutting boards, each with unique epoxy resin work, such as a small beach scene or scattered tiles. On his website, Hahn says his work has allowed him to connect with his faith, find joy and “create a legacy that (he) will be proud to pass down to (his) children, nieces and nephews.”

On the other end of the festival, Charles Acuna of The Stone Edge has been working with his craft for more than 30 years. Calling himself a “neolithic technician,” Acuna, who is of Native American descent, recreates traditional hunting knives using an ancient method known as “flint knapping.”

While he had been to Art in the Park around 30 years ago, traveling from Ranchos de Taos in New Mexico, he described noticing all the changes around the city when he returned to the event two years ago. His booth also featured a variety of tomahawks, bows and traditional beadwork, some of which were featured in the Paramount+ series “1883.”

In addition, there were many other vendors with activity booths and from local nonprofits, such as the Rocky Mountain Raptor Program, whose booth featured several birds of prey that are a part of the nonprofit’s ambassador program.

Growing up in the Oglala Lakota Nation, Jaida Grey Eagle didn’t see many contemporary fine-art portraits of Native people.

So now, the St. Paul-based photographer and bead artist is creating them herself.

Starting this month, Grey Eagle will be one of four yearlong artists-in-residence at Second Shift Studio Space of St. Paul, a nonprofit arts organization on the East Side.

Other resident artists are Dahn Gim, who uses a variety of materials, including water, to explore isolation, displacement, and women’s bodies; Anna Lehner, who creates glass sculptures and other installations inspired by the Earth’s tectonic plates and geologic change; and Ivonne Yáñez, originally from Mexico City, who works with dream-like and surrealist themes in textiles and painting.

Second Shift, which also includes a public gallery space, was founded by Chris Larson and Kriss Zulkosky in 2019, in an old linoleum shop on Payne Avenue. The organization is geared toward providing accessible resources for artists who are women, gender-nonconforming, or otherwise marginalized due to gender.

Each artist will have rent-free access to their own 350 square-foot studio for a year. Artists don’t live on-site but are expected to spend a significant amount of time in the studio and lead at least one public event during their residency.

Grey Eagle’s current project focuses on portraits of women from the Oglala Lakota Nation.

For this series, she prints her photos using cyanotype, a process that exposes a monochromatic image on special blue paper using sunlight or other ultraviolet light. She then adorns the cyanotype images with traditional Native beadwork.

“It’s something that’s only now becoming accessible, to have contemporary portraits of Indigenous people made by Indigenous people,” she said. “That’s not to say that hasn’t been happening for a long time, but I think the work itself is just now being uplifted.”

Grey Eagle, who was born in South Dakota, grew up in the Twin Cities. She herself recently moved to the East Side and said she’s looking forward to having a studio in the neighborhood. The dedicated workspace at Second Shift will allow her to create bigger and more ambitious works, she said.

In addition to her artistic portraiture, Grey Eagle is also an accomplished photojournalist. Currently, she reports for Sahan Journal through the Report For America program.

Her fine-art work and documentary-style photos both have similar motivations, she said.

“I grew up seeing stories made about our people that felt so out of our hands and felt like such an outsider’s perspective,” she said. “I’m always seeking stories that bring that back to the people.”

On view now at Second Shift: The outgoing group of artists-in-residence are showing work through Sept. 16. The Resident Artist Group Exhibition includes works by Cameron Patricia Downey, Stephanie Lindquist and Zoe Cinel and is part of the Wakpa Triennial Arts Festival, a several-month public art fair produced by Public Art St. Paul.

Second Shift Studio Space: 1128 Payne Ave.; open Saturdays 12-4 p.m.; instagram.com/second.shift.studio.saintpaul/

Doleac just wrapped up his first headline tour earlier this year

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (WCBI) – Country music artist Adam Doleac is staying busy this summer, cranking out lots of new music.

WDEF in Chattanooga caught up with the Hattiesburg native at CMA Fest, right after he released his latest song about his wife, “Biggest Fan.”

Doleac just wrapped up his first headline tour earlier this year. He says it was exciting, selling out more shows than they didn’t sell out.

In addition to performing, Doleac is passionate about writing the songs he sings on stage – even for other artists. He’s written for several, including Darius Rucker, Lainey Wilson, and even Kane Brown.

Doleac wrote “Pull It Off” for Kane back in 2016, which was his first cut as a songwriter.

Seven years later, Adam says he already has plenty of other new songs up his sleeve for himself.

“I think we’re going to put a new song out every six weeks for the rest of the year, so we have a lot of new music coming,” Doleac said. “Album two is, I know we just finished album one, but album two’s already probably almost halfway done, so it’s coming. That’s exciting. So do you know when that will come out yet? I don’t know. I just know that we’re going to do song after song after song, and then hopefully one of those things gets rolling up a chart somewhere, and we’ll put the full record out kind’ve behind that.”

Doleac will be on tour this fall with Old Dominion.

MADISON (WKOW) — Downtown Madison is seeing some extra traffic this weekend as people head to Art Fair on the Square. 

“This is a great way to kind of meet the people that are collecting your art,” artist Hannah Stelter said.

“Every weekend in the summertime, I drive to festivals like this,” Stelter said. “So, this was an eight-hour drive for me. I’m going to a show in Washington, I’ve been to one in D.C. this summer. And it helps me reach people all across the U.S. who maybe don’t use social media or who prefer to see my art in person.”

Stelter, a North Dakota based artist, focuses on body positive art.

“The mission behind my artwork is body positivity and self-love and just encouraging people to embrace who they are by turning them into a piece of artwork,” Stelter said. “But I’m not really turning them into a piece of artwork, because they already are one.”

Stelter says she’s had experiences at art shows before where someone will see a piece that reminds them of their own body, and they’re overcome with emotion. 

“It’s that moment when you know they feel the effects of the piece,” Stelter said. “The piece that is meant to help people embrace themselves and love themselves a bit more.” 

Artists on the square say the best way to spread their name and share their art is by coming to shows like this. 

“A big way, I think, to get out in front of people is to do art fairs,” jewelry artist Steve Mitchell said. “Give a lot of cards away, that’s the networking.” 

Mitchell, an Iowa native, started turning rocks and silver into unique pendants, rings, bracelets and more when his wife saw a piece of jewelry in the store and said, “you can make that for me!”

“I said, ‘I have no idea,” Mitchell said. “So, she signed me up for a jewelry class at a local art studio…and here we are.”

Mitchell says not only are art shows good for artists. They’re good for the communities that host them. 

“There’s dollars being spent in town, not just the art show,” Mitchell said. “There’s 400 and some artists here that are staying in motels and eating food and that kind of stuff. So, it’s good for the community too.” 

Artists are all at their own booths, so if you see something that catches your eye, you can speak to the creator yourself. 

“You have some amazing talent and there’s people from all over the U.S. who are here. You get to see some really cool, unique things,” Stelter said. 

27 news is a proud sponsor of Art Fair on the Square. Members of the news team will be at our booth just outside the capitol on the state street corner all weekend.