Native

Alaskan Native artists explore contemporary issues in ‘Protection: Adaptation & Resistance’

Jun 29, 2023 By Admin in Native

*“Kaxhatjaa X’óow Herring Protectors,” modern interpretations of traditional dance robes that tell the story of the Herring Rock Woman. Photo by Caitlin Blaisdell.*

Recent studies have shown that Indigenous women in the United States are more than twice as likely to experience violence as any other demographic, and that, in Canada, the homicide rate for Indigenous women is almost six times as high as the homicide rate for other women. This epidemic of violence, part of an ongoing legacy of racism and colonialism, is just one of several crises facing First Peoples and Indigenous communities today.

Violence against women, as well as the pandemic, climate change, and other human health threats and human rights injustices, are at the core of the current exhibit at the Center for Native Arts & Cultures in Southeast Portland. Protection: Adaptation & Resistance, on view through August 4, explores these existential threats and the response to them through more than two dozen pieces by 52 Alaskan Native artists.

Organized by the Bunnell Street Arts Center in Homer, Alaska, the exhibit is central to the mission of the Native Arts and Cultures Foundation, the parent organization behind the Center. “First Peoples, including our talented Alaska Native relatives, bring millenia of learning and perspective to a diversity of artistic mediums that electrify the imagination,” noted T. Lulani Arquette, president and CEO of the Foundation. “Presenting the Alaska Native Protection Exhibit in our Center aligns with our mission to support and lift up the work of Native artists and culture bearers who are creating positive social change and healing communities.”

*A Chilkat Protector mask, one of a collaborative work by six Chilkat weavers, designed to be worn over an N95 mask. Photo by Bert Franks.*

Through three themes — Land and Culture Protectors; Activists for Justice and Sovereignty; and Resilient Futures– the artists, solo and in groups, draw upon the Ingenious values of community and collaboration as tools of resistance and adaptation, as well as powerful cultural affirmation and deep respect for nature. Some artists explore these contemporary themes in traditional art forms such as cedar bark hats, woven bark baskets, soapstone, tattoos, and regalia. Others express traditional stories through modern design, graphic novels, postage stamps, and graphic art posters. All of the works reflect the passing forward of Indigenous values of community, collaboration, mentorship, and resilience.

“We focus on the good of the whole community, not for the individual. We collaboratively hunt, fish, share harvests, raise children, and protect our elders. We rely on each other, and we must work together. We take care of each other. For survival. For the well-being of all.” – Lily Hope, Mentor Weaver of the Raven T’akdeintaan Clan

Healing and resistance

Hanging on the south wall of the main gallery is Yup’ik artist Amber Webb’s 12-foot-high “Memorial Qaspeq,” a hooded shirt known as a qaspeq in Yup’ik and as an atikluk in Iñupiaq. Traditionally, qaspeqs were made from animal intestines or seal or bird skin, designed to offer protection to the wearer in the harsh conditions of arctic Alaska. Webb’s “Memorial Qaspeq” is made from cotton bedsheets, hand-sewn together to create the oversized garment. Using black ink and the white sheets as her canvas, Webb has drawn the faces of more than 200 women, each of whom is among the missing and murdered Indigenous women and girls (MMIWG) from Alaska and Canada over the past decades.

*“Memorial Qaspeq” by Yup’ik artist Amber Webb. Photo by Bert Franks.*

The work is riveting, and the viewer can’t help but be drawn forward to look directly into the individual faces of these women – some smiling, some stoic – each the victim of violence and oppression. Webb describes the project as being about “healing myself and sparking healing for all Native women.”

*Artist Amber Webb discusses her work, “Memorial Quaspeq.” Photo by Mandy Yeahpau.*

Webb’s use of the qaspeq as a symbol of healing and resilience is carried on by a collective of textile artists in “Healing Stitches.” Six crimson red qaspeqs hang in a circle, where they pay tribute to the love and loss of loved ones. The installation is also of note for how Native Alaskan artists are using technology to both create and connect. Using Zoom, Bobby Qalutaksraq Brower (Iñupiaq, Utqiaġvik) invited Indigenous women from across Alaska to come together and learn to sew the garments in memory of MMIWG.

“Inuit culture and my Ancestors guide my work, but I am most inspired by our lives today and the way we live in two worlds, one old and the modern urban life.” – Holly Mititquq Nordlum, Iñupiaq tattoo artist

Adjacent to the qaspeqs are photographs depicting the work of contemporary Native Alaskan artists who are reviving the ancient practice of Inuit tattoo. In increasing numbers across Alaska, Indigenous women are embracing this traditional rite of passage as expressions of cultural identity and solidarity. The power of the markings on their living canvases speaks to a new generation of women who are declaring their strength and eschewing victimization.

Traditional Inuit tattoos on Inupiat and Yup'ik women. Photo by Carter Silago. — *Traditional Inuit facial tattoos on Iñupiak and Yup’ik women. Photo by Carter Silago.*

New technologies and ancient traditions

During the pandemic, several other artists also employed Zoom to bring communities of artists together and adapt traditional images and tools to create new works, including Chilkat Protector masks, Lingit and Haida cedarbark hats, and soapstone oil lamps. The use of technology not only allowed artists to come together, collaborate, and learn, but also ensures that the old ways and traditions continue to be revitalized and passed from elders to the next generations. In a land that is geographically expansive with locations often difficult to access, technologies like Zoom provide an invaluable and lasting resource for connection among the First Peoples of Alaska.

“My parents’ generation was punished for learning their culture. I don’t want the knowledge to die with me. Hat making is what we do. It’s generational, handed down through my family. It is how we celebrate and perpetuate our culture.” — Kunagoo Linda Starbard, Lingit weaver

The Covid pandemic appears throughout several works, including Lingit artist Crystal Rose Demientieff Worl’s “Haa Shagéinyaa: Our Protecting Power,” a series of posters that draw from her own Lingit design traditions in strikingly modern graphics to support public health, masks, and vaccines. “With these prints I aim to promote public health and wellness specifically in Indigenous communities, which are most vulnerable to the pandemic,” she noted. “We have the choice and capability to resist the virus and adapt with modern tools as a means to protect our loved ones. It is in our power to protect, adapt, and resist.”

*Crystal Rose Demientieff Wolf combined traditional Lingit designs with brilliant colors in her public health posters. Photo by Mandy Yeahpau.*

In “We’re Still Here,” Naal xak’w / Tommy Joseph created the alder and wood animal masks to fit over N95 masks, using a cultural tradition to encourage mask-wearing, particularly among elders. “Animals impart a level of protection,” noted Joseph, who is Lingit. “The animals are spirit helpers; they guide you in your journey. If we pay attention, they can teach us. We share the land waters with them. It’s up to us to protect them.”

Left: “We’re Still Here,” by Lingit artist Tommy Joseph. Right: close-up of “We’re Still Here.” Photos: Bert Franks.

Passing history to future generations

Lingit history is told through songs, dance, and stories. “Kaxhatjaa X’óow / Herring Protectors” are dance robes that tell the story of the Herring Rock Woman, who sang to Yaaw, the herring, until they schooled and laid eggs in her hair. Created by a collective of artists, the life-sized robes are decorated with a variety of elements, each of which has significance. For example, the robes’ silk lining and the mother-of-pearl buttons evoke the waters where herring spawn and the eggs they lay. Both are from WW2 era Japan, an acknowledgement of the extinction of the herring population due to overfishing.

*“Herring Protectors,” on view at the Center for Native Arts & Cultures. Photo by Carter Silago.*

The result is a powerful and poignant call for the protection of the herring, a vital food source in Alaska and an integral part of the greater ecosystem. “The herring, which mean so much to our culture and our ecosystem are being depleted all for what? Money? Greed? Without herring nothing is supporting the ocean. The whales. The salmon. Without herring, there is nothing supporting us,” said K’asheechtlaa/Louise Brady, one of the several artists who designed and constructed the robes.

Sponsor

Chamber Music Northwest Summer Festival Poetry in Music Portland Oregon

“Within the Native peoples of Alaska, there is tremendous diversity, but we have all survived the oppressions of colonization, especially the restrictions against subsistence. Calling on our ancestors or spirit helpers can help us to survive.” – Tommy Joseph, wood carver

In “Chickaloonies,” humor, heroism, and hope mix with tribal legends in the very contemporary art form of the graphic novel. The work of Ahtna artist Dimi Macheras and his collaborator and co-founder of 80% Studios, Casey Silver, “Chickaloonies” was inspired by Macheras’s childhood spent hearing traditional legends from his Chickaloon Village elders and about their Ahtna Athabascan (Dene’) language, values, and culture.

*A panel from the graphic novel “Chickaloonies,” which retells Ahtna legends in a modern format. Photo by Mandy Yeahpau.*

“We set our sights on creating a story based on my Ahtna heritage, but we didn’t want to retell old stories,” said Macheras. They asked themselves if they could create a new legend based on the themes and values of those timeless Ahtna tales. “The Ahtna were very adaptable people, and their stories contained very important lessons about how to be a good person and ways to live a good life.”

*Dimi Marcheras discusses his graphic novel “Chickaloonies,” which retells Ahtna legends in a modern format. Photo by Mandy Yeahpau.*

But “Chickaloonies” is much more than a graphic novel: The two artists also incorporated the Ahtna Athabascan language, an oral language which is represented with symbols, into the story itself. In an innovative and meaningful way, they used glyphs to differentiate the oral language from English. “Moji, who communicates with images and emojis, paired up with his best friend, Yelly, who blabs and talks non-stop, create a duo which represents the two pillars of the Graphic Novel medium: words and pictures,” Macheras said. “This allows us to explore how stories not only allow us to connect with the past, but shape our destinies.”

Passing along the generational knowledge, the stories, and the traditional skills from one generation to the next, the artists on view in Protection: Adaptation & Resistance present works that powerfully express and affirm their cultural identities and values, whilst bringing them into the future. They also give all of us cause to celebrate their reliance and hope, as well as extending the invitation to become allies, supporters, and advocates.

Protection: Adaptation & Resistance was made possible in part by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Sustaining Humanities through the American Rescue Plan in partnership with the Association of Tribal Archives, Libraries, and Museums. The exhibit will be on view later this year at the Tulsa Living Arts in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and the International Folk Art Museum in Santa Fe, New Mexico, before concluding its tour at the Alaska State Museum in Juneau in 2024.

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Protection: Adaptation & Resistance is on view from 4 p.m. to 7 p.m. Fridays through August 4 at the Center for Native Arts and Cultures, 800 S.E. 10th Avenue, between Morrison and Belmont in Portland. Street parking is available. Admission is free.

Desert Dreamers 10: The Artists

Jun 29, 2023 By Admin in Native

“Easter Sunrise” (1970) by John W. Hilton.
PHOTO COURTESY PALM SPRINGS ART MUSEUM

One of the earliest paintings of the Mojave Desert — an 1853 oil titled “Jornada del Muerto,” or “Journey of the Dead” — depicts a stretch of the Old Spanish Trail (the “back way” to Vegas) as an uninhabitable hellscape: drier than dust, void of life, the ground crackling under a broiling sun. Yet the artist, George Douglas Brewerton, cast onto this Martian scene a golden glow that 170 years later still stirs a strange sense of longing.

He captured something special, and by the turn of the century, writer John Van Dyke put it into words. “It is stern, harsh, and at first repellent,” he wrote in his seminal 1901 tome, The Desert. “But what tongue shall tell the majesty of it, the eternal strength of it, the poetry of its widespread chaos, the sublimity of its lonely desolation? And who shall paint the splendor of its light; and from the rising up of the sun to the going down of the moon over the iron mountains, the glory of its wondrous coloring? It is a gaunt land of splintered peaks, torn valleys, and hot skies.”

“Old Palm Springs” (circa 1925) by Sam Hyde Harris.
PHOTO COURTESY PRIVATE COLLECTION

Writers such as Van Dyke, Charles Francis Saunders, and J. Smeaton Chase conveyed the mesmerizing beauty of the desert to influential effect. In their wake came many more dreamers, often “lungers” and loners in search of a healing climate and solitude but also artists, who found something closer to heaven than hell. It was an extreme landscape, sure, but a place where they could tune their palettes to sandy washes, colorful mountains, and otherworldly plant life and rock formations.

In his book Our Araby: Palm Springs and the Garden of the Sun, published in 1920, Chase predicted the Coachella Valley would blossom as an artist colony like those that had formed on the Monterey Peninsula and in Santa Barbara and Laguna Beach. “Our Araby,” he wrote, “with its marvelous display of tone and color — tone the most elusive, color the most unearthly and ethereal — is a land of enchantment to the painter, and its fame has spread from one to another until, now, every winter and spring sees painters of note studying these desert landscapes, so fascinatingly different in their problems of conception and handling from anything that commonly come in the artist’s way.”

Indeed, by the time Chase published his petite volume, several notable artists were living and working in the area, including James Swinnerton, John Frost, and Alson Skinner Clark. All the artists had distinctive styles and particular interests. Swinnerton was known for painting smoke trees, Clyde Forsythe for old mining camps, Gordon Coutts for that distinctive glow over opaque mountains and blue skies. Other landscape painters, including Fernand Lungren of Santa Barbara and Lockwood de Forest of New York, visited the desert repeatedly over many years to capture its mercurial moods over time. Their impressions recorded the landscape prior to the desert’s postwar development.

When Palm Springs emerged as a weekend retreat and resort destination, some of the painters exhibited and sold their work at The Desert Inn, where proprietor Nellie Coffman opened the area’s first art gallery. A second wave of painters — Paul Grimm, Marjorie Reed, and Sam Hyde Harris among them — expanded the scene.

While new generations of painters carry on the landscape tradition, the legacy of many early artists still resonates. Palm Springs Art Museum recently mounted a major exhibition of paintings by Agnes Pelton, and earlier this year, the Brigham Young University Museum of Art hosted a three-day symposium on the life and works of Maynard Dixon. Even relatively minor figures earn an occasional nod. Desert Island Country Club in Rancho Mirage christened its new restaurant The Penney to honor the late resident and landscape painter Frederick Penney.

Here, we introduce some of the personalities who helped propel our desert as an enduring hub for artists.

Early artist Carl Eytel draws in the desert with his burro.
CHARLES FRANCIS SAUNDERS, COURTESY SANTA BARBARA BOTANIC GARDEN

Carl Eytel (1862–1925)

The Artist of the Palm Tree

The first and arguably most influential artist to call Palm Springs home was Carl Eytel, a German immigrant who wasn’t a particularly good artist at all.

Eytel spent much of his childhood sitting in Stuttgart’s Royal Library, reading and daydreaming about the American West. He fantasized about cowboy life, made countless drawings of cattle, and yearned to travel. Eventually, he saved enough money to cross the Atlantic and found work with a German-speaking cattle rancher in Kansas. After briefly returning to Germany to study art, he continued on to California, finding ranch work in the San Joaquin Valley in 1898 before settling in Palm Springs in 1901.

“He longed for the sand and sage and colored hills of the Mojave and Colorado deserts toward which his thoughts had been directed for so long, and where he felt a special place had been set aside by the Almighty for those who could understand solitude and immeasurable space,” journalist Ed Ainsworth wrote of Eytel in Desert Magazine.

Eytel made a modest home in a tiny cabin near Tahquitz Creek with the permission of the McCallum family, pioneers in the pre-incorporated “village.” Here, he dedicated his life to sketching and painting the desert. He worked during the week and displayed his paintings for tourists to buy on weekends. His depictions of California fan palms — “primly dressed, with their vivid green crowns and drab tan skirts,” the artist once described — were most popular.

Eytel’s prolific journals reveal a nomadic life roaming the Coachella Valley and the Southwest with his mustang, Billy. He traveled from Palm Springs to Idyllwild and Hemet via Round Valley (near today’s Palm Springs Aerial Tramway); to Joshua Tree via Whitewater Ranch; and to Death Valley via the Mojave Desert. He also ventured into Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah and befriended Navajo, Hopi, Chemehuevi, Serrano, and Cahuilla people. He scribbled Native terms in his notebooks and became one of few settlers in the Palm Springs area to speak passable Cahuilla. (After Eytel died in a Banning sanitarium, he was buried, at his request, in the Cahuilla Indian cemetery.)

Ink drawing by Carl Eytel.
PHOTO COURTESY PALM SPRINGS HISTORICAL SOCIETY

“Few knew more intimately [the desert’s] Indians, its mountains, its mesas” than Eytel, the writer and desert biologist Edmund G. Jaeger told Palm Springs Villager, the forerunner to Palm Springs Life. “His mind habituated to see loveliness in form and color and found expression in literary work and in painting in oil and watercolors. He also did considerable excellent pen drawing.”

Eytel shared his knowledge of the land and influenced the work of writers such as Jaeger and Charles Francis Saunders, as well as painters, particularly James Swinnerton and adventurer/homesteader Cabot Yerxa. Most notably, he collaborated with George Wharton James on the 1906 publication of Wonders of the Colorado Desert, which included 300 of Eytel’s drawings and a generous helping of lore from his journals.

As the desert’s elements chipped away at his health, Eytel gave most of his sketchbooks and journals to Jaeger, who in turn presented them to Lloyd Mason Smith, the first director of Palm Springs Desert Museum (now Palm Springs Art Museum), where they remain in the permanent collection.

Maynard Dixon contemplates his next masterpiece.
PHOTO COURTESY PALM SPRINGS HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Maynard Dixon (1875–1946)

The Man Who Painted Poems

The most celebrated of the early desert painters is Maynard Dixon, best known for his paintings of the Navajo country of New Mexico and the deserts around his homes in Mount Carmel, Utah, and Tucson, Arizona. However, the California native (born near Fresno) was hopelessly drawn to the Colorado Desert and painted around Box Canyon in Mecca as well as the Indio Hills and Chocolate and Orocopia mountains.

He had a cottage near the Salton Sea where he welcomed fellow painters James Swinnerton, John Hilton, and Clyde Forsythe. He and Swinnerton famously feuded over the depiction of clouds, with Dixon declaring that his friend’s clouds had been “lousy” for 30 years and he’d never learned to paint them. Swinnerton returned the insults in good spirit, but, Dixon told journalist Ed Ainsworth in Desert Magazine, “We never spoke a decent word to one another in public.”

“Evening on Orocopio (Painted Canyon), Imperial Valley” by Maynard Dixon, March 1940.
PHOTO COURTESY PRIVATE COLLECTION

Dixon, who started his career as a commercial illustrator and was married for 15 years to the documentary photographer Dorothea Lange, experimented with postimpressionism and cubism as he matured his own style. In addition to the landscape, he depicted Native Americans and Hispanic and Anglo settlers and their horses. He also became a respected muralist.

“I aim to interpret, for the most part, the poetry and pathos of the life of Western people seen amid the grandeur, sternness, and loveliness of their country,” Dixon told Anthony Anderson, the art critic at the Los Angeles Times at the time. “My objective has always been to get as close to the real nature of my subject as possible — people, animals, and country.”

In November 1945, Scripps College’s Florence Rand Lang Galleries mounted a 50-year retrospective of Dixon’s work. Although he was too unhealthy to attend, he sent a letter to be read at the opening in which he shared his experiences of the West and the silent desert. He wrote, “I must find in the visible world the forms, the colors, the relationships that for me are most true of it and find a way to state them clearly so that the painting may pass on something of my vision.”

He found it all in great measure.

James Swinnerton and his untitled desert landscape with smoke trees in a wash, circa 1935.
PHOTO COURTESY PALM SPRINGS HISTORICAL SOCIETY

James Swinnerton (1876–1974)

The Dean of Desert Artists

Gregarious, acclaimed cartoon artist James Swinnerton was beginning to recover from a toxic mix of alcoholism, tuberculosis, and exhaustion when he made his way to The Desert Inn, Nellie Coffman’s fledgling sanitarium (later resort) in Palm Springs.

Swinnerton created the long-running Little Jimmy and Canyon Kiddies comics and illustrated political and sports figures for William Randolph Hearst’s newspapers and magazines for more than seven decades. However, early in his career, when Swinnerton was 28, the New York nightlife had almost consumed him, and Hearst put him on a train to Colton, California, to get healthy. From that point on, Swinnerton began, as we say today, working remotely.

Back in his native state (he was born in the pioneer town of Eureka), he stopped drinking, started walking in the Mojave Desert, and soon came to Palm Springs to finish his recovery and commit himself to painting the desert.

“I’ve kept strictly to the landscape,” Swinnerton reflected in a 1963 interview with Armed Services Radio, noting that he’d been painting landscapes all along in the backgrounds of his cartoon art. “I took up desert painting because, first, going to the desert gave me my health back in the [tuberculosis] situation, and second, I thought it was a misunderstood land, the most despised of all the landscapes. … I found some beauty there.”

Untitled painting by Swinnerton.
PHOTO COURTESY PALM SPRINGS ART MUSEUM

Soon after he arrived, Swinnerton met Carl Eytel, and they began taking camping trips to paint the San Jacinto Mountains, Box Canyon, and the Salton Sea. Eytel educated Swinnerton on the ways of the desert, and Swinnerton shared his bounty of food and art supplies.

In the summers, Swinnerton retreated to the San Gabriel Mountains north of San Bernardino, but his subject remained pure nature. “The real purpose of painting is to call attention to the beauty of nature,” he told his friend John Hilton, a fellow artist and a writer for Desert Magazine. “A successful painting is a signpost reading, ‘Yonder is beauty! Go see for yourself.’ ”

For several decades, Swinnerton lived in Flagstaff, Arizona, and frequented the Grand Canyon, Monument Valley, and the Hopi and Navajo Indian reservations. There, he favored saturated colors — deep reds, intense oranges, turquoise skies, purple shadows — to emphasize the power and majesty of the formations. However, the warmth of the Sonoran Desert drew him back in late winter and early spring to capture his favorite subjects — puffy smoke trees and prickly ocotillo plants — in bloom. On these trips, Swinnerton switched to more blond tones and wispy brushwork.

“There is no end to the beauty of sand and rocks and sagebrush,” Swinnerton
explained to Hilton. “All of the serious work I have done has been on the desert, and there is enough there to occupy me the rest of my life.”

Light master John W. Hilton was also a musician.
PHOTO COURTESY PALM SPRINGS HISTORICAL SOCIETY

A strange sequence of events led to the multitalented John Hilton becoming a desert painter. After being expelled from art school in Redondo for making a nude drawing of a classmate, he appeared with his quartet, the California String Ticklers, on KHJ, the Los Angeles radio station where he heard program manager “Uncle John” Daggett recite a poem about night in the desert. The poem compelled Hilton to convince his father, a missionary, to drive them to Black Rock, northwest of Barstow, to experience the “silent blue night” that Uncle John described.

There, in the Mojave, Hilton’s love affair with the desert ignited.

He switched studies from art to gemology and enjoyed a career as a gemologist for the Golden State Gem Company — that is, until the stock market crashed, the Depression set in, and he found himself liquidating possessions to survive.

Hilton came to the Coachella Valley to collect on a debt but learned on arrival that the man who owed him had died. The man’s daughter gave Hilton an assortment of curios as a gesture. Later that day, when he stopped at Valerie Jean Date Shop, people began picking through his newfound bounty, and the proprietor, his friend, convinced Hilton to open a rock shop across the street. “That is how I became a part of the desert,” he explained in the March 1963 issue of Desert Magazine, “and how it became a part of me to the point where the long-submerged desire to paint came out.”

Hilton’s shop became a gathering place for painters including Maynard Dixon, James Swinnerton, and Clyde Forsythe. “The desert painters as we know them today had found each other through the rankest amateur because I had a centrally located place where they could all camp in the yard and cook spaghetti and sing at the top of their lungs.”

Hilton learned everything he could from them, particularly Dixon, who encouraged him to abandon his photorealistic brushwork in favor of daubing knifework. Hilton also started mixing beeswax into his paints to achieve his signature textural quality and mastered the glow of “magic hour.”

A perfectionist, Hilton had an annual New Year’s Eve tradition of inviting friends to Box Canyon to burn paintings he deemed unworthy. “It was a holocaust of art,” his friend and journalist Ed Ainsworth wrote in Palm Springs Villager. “This remarkable man was his own severest critic.”

In 1950, Hilton and his wife, Barbara, moved to the High Desert, where he became founding president of the Twentynine Palms Artists Guild. However, his love of the Coachella Valley never wavered. He wrote, “I can never forget that it is a short way back to the valley where two snowcapped mountains guard the pass, where a sea below the level of the sea mirrors rose-colored mountains reflected in the sunset, where canyons of wild palms will still beckon, and dunes still put on their spring finery.”

Steven Willard was among the early photographers who captured the desert on film.
PHOTO COURTESY PALM SPRINGS HISTORICAL SOCIETY

Stephen H. Willard (1894–1966)

The Desert’s Ansel Adams

A photograph in the Palm Springs Art Museum collection shows a 22-year-old Stephen H. Willard stranded on a dirt path in the desert, surrounded by creosote bushes and changing a tire on his vehicle. Shot in 1917, before automobiles had demountable rims, the image demonstrates the lengths he’d go — with the weight of his C.P. Goerz 8×10 Format Bellows Camera — to freeze the most captivating views of the desert in its most dramatic light.

Willard, an Illinois native who grew up in Corona, began making the 68-mile trip to Palm Springs in 1914 as a teenager, armed with a camera that his father gave him. It opened his eyes to nature, inspired a career, and set him on course to become the preeminent photographer of the Coachella Valley and Mojave Desert regions.

Willard briefly enrolled at Pomona College and served a year as an army photographer in France during World War I. He returned to Palm Springs in 1919, published the booklet The Desert of Palms, and married Beatrice Armstrong.

“While Winds and Sands Are Resting” (1925) by Stephen H. Willard.
PHOTO COURTESY PALM SPRINGS ART MUSEUM

For the next couple of decades, Willard traveled by car and burro to remote areas of the Colorado and Mojave deserts and amassed a prodigious body of images. He became an unlikely promoter of Palm Springs, having pioneered the paint-on-photo technique and replicated the colored images as postcards to sell at the Palm Canyon Trading Post. (The postcards remain collectible today; see one on page 10.)

“The idea held by most people that every mile of the desert is like every other mile could not be a more mistaken one,” a 21-year-old Willard wrote in an article for the 1915 American Annual of Photography. “Let one take his camera, canteen, blankets, and provisions, and go out for a week’s stay in the desert solitudes, and he will always come back deeply impressed by its supreme majesty and mystery.”

Willard, who spent summers and maintained a studio at Mammoth Lakes, also had a notable impact on environmental preservation. In the 1930s, his atmospheric black-and-white photographs were used to promote Death Valley and support a proposal that led to the creation of Joshua Tree National Monument (now a national park).

In 1947, as Hollywood and tourism transformed Palm Springs, Willard moved
from his south Palm Springs home and studio — now enveloped by Moorten Botanical Garden — to Owens Valley, where he died in 1966. In 1999, his daughter, Beatrice “Bettie” Willard, donated his archives — more than 16,000 items, including photographs, glass and film negatives, hand-colored lantern slides, photo-paintings, postcards, correspondence, maps, and photographic equipment — to the Palm Springs Art Museum.

Painter Agnes Pelton settled in the Cathedral City Cove.
PHOTO VIA PALM SPRINGS LIFE ARCHVES

Agnes Pelton (1881–1961)

The Desert Transcendentalist

Agnes Pelton earned her living by making landscapes like the other early artists of the desert. Only she called them “tourist paintings.” She happily painted them with precision and passion, but what truly drove and distinguished Pelton were her imaginative, vaporous abstractions.

Born to American parents in Stuttgart, Germany, Pelton wielded a vivid imagination for as long as she could remember. Her earliest drawings reflected her moods, feelings, and inclination to experiment.

After studying under Arthur W. Dow at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, New York, she might have been content to paint landscapes, flowers, and portraits. However, the art world was turning toward new schools of painting, and Pelton leaned in. She was invited to exhibit two of her Symbolist-inspired paintings in 1913 at the International Exposition of Modern Art (now the Armory Show), a scene-shifting survey of the avant-garde that included works by Marcel Duchamp, Pablo Picasso, and many others.

A follower of Agni Yoga, Pelton continued to develop her ideas through abstraction while living and working in a lighthouse on Long Island, New York, and fine-tuned them after settling in Cathedral City.

When Pelton arrived in 1932, Ed Ainsworth wrote in Palm Springs Villager, “She visioned the great stars in the clear air and the healing sunshine pouring its beneficent rays upon a world of serried dunes.”

Pelton built her studio/house with a corner fireplace, plenty of light and space, and inspiring surroundings. (The house is now owned by Peter Palladino and Simeon Den, who established the nonprofit Agnes Pelton Society, which hosts tours and talks.)

“Mother of Silence” (1933) by Agnes Pelton.
COURTESY PALM SPRINGS ART MUSEUM

Here, the artist painted in solitude under the sky, returning to the studio to “work over” her pictures “many times to get the effect I want,” she told the Villager. The desert’s distinctive glow had an immediate and lasting effect on Pelton and her art. “The vibration of this light, the spaciousness of these skies enthralled me. I knew there was a spirit in nature as in everything else, but here in the desert, it was an especially bright spirit.”

She was known to take in the night sky from her garden, cataloging her visions in a vocabulary of curvilinear and biomorphic forms, brilliant orbs, and delicate veils.

“The aim of these abstract paintings over many years,” she said, “has been to give life and vitality to the visual images [that] have appeared to me from time to time in receptive moments, as symbols of fleeting but beautiful experiences.”

The 2020–2021 exhibition Agnes Pelton: Desert Transcendentalist at Palm Springs Art Museum put the artist’s cosmic vision on display with all its abstract forms, curious symbolism, and allusions to the desert landscape.

Eye on the Arts: James Brooks bursts onto the art scene in vibrant color

Jun 29, 2023 By Admin in Native

By Marc Gave | New Pelican Writer

In my daily Facebook post, “The Artist’s Life,” I write about a staggering variety of visual artists, many of whom made art for decades and are no longer with us. Of those who are still working, the majority have produced a sizable body of artwork in one recognizable style or in a specific range of styles and media.

James Brooks with a sampling of his recent works. [Courtesy]

When writing about a young up-and-coming North Lauderdale artist such as painter James Brooks, the story is only beginning to be told. He is exploring his main medium, acrylic paints, along with watercolors, and extending his range.

This South Florida native states that he “always had a knack for art. I began drawing and coloring when I was around three. My grandfather is a retired architect, and I believe I inherited my talent from him. It came naturally. I won a contest at Broward Mall at a very young age.”

Eventually, Brooks attended the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale, which helped launch his career as an artist. He now lives in the area where he grew up. Previously, he was a resident of Coconut Creek and before that of Coral Springs, where he recently exhibited his work at the Coral Springs Museum of Art and is a member of its Artist Guild.

While he creates paintings on commission – especially animal pictures and pet portraits – and left to his own devices, Brooks says his “inspiration can come from anywhere and anything: from nature, from going to the movies. It’s like a sixth sense.”

When he addresses the easel, he strives to work outside of traditional norms, rendering his subjects “in colorful, eccentric ways but with a classy elegance.” Brooks said he’s considering experimenting outside his traditional media. “Perhaps I’ll work in oils – or coffee.”

One experiment he has recently undertaken is applying three-dimensional flowers to canvas. “I bought silk flowers at a local store, spray-painted them, and glued them onto the canvas. It’s a long process, as it takes the flowers several hours to dry. But I got the idea and wanted to challenge myself to see what I could do with them.”

Inspiration comes from encountering other artists’ work as well. “It gets me to see different people’s perspectives, giving me experiences beyond what I can experience firsthand.”

One such recent experience was a visit to the Dalí Museum in St. Petersburg. “It was very amazing to see his out-of-the-box paintings.” Brooks said. Another visit was to the immersive Van Gogh exhibition last year in Miami. “I felt myself transported to his world.”

While he doesn’t strive to imitate their styles, they do greatly enhance his vision and his approach to painting.

Brooks finds Broward County to be very supportive of the arts. “It is open to art and artists in an ever-expanding way. This works in two positive ways: letting our (artists’) voices be heard and building a public appreciation for artists. As art is my passion, I paint from my heart, and I believe my art has a healing factor as well.”

He continues, “My biggest thrill comes when I inspire other artists who haven’t painted in a long time to return to their work.”

Visit Artist Touch – James Brooks Facebook page to see more of his work.

City of Seattle’s Food Equity Fund invests $2 million in 21 community-initiated projects

Jun 29, 2023 By Admin in Native

Photo credit: Young Women Empowered

The City of Seattle is investing $2,000,000 to support community-led projects through the Seattle Department of Neighborhoods’ (DON) Food Equity Fund General Grant. Twenty-one community groups will receive awards ranging from $49,688 to $100,000 to advance projects that increase equitable access and opportunities to grow, learn about, and/or eat healthy, affordable, and culturally relevant foods. The projects are varied and include food distribution, Indigenous food sovereignty gatherings, youth food justice cohorts, sustaining community farms, supporting food entrepreneurship, hosting intergenerational community dinners, Black-led early childhood cooking segments, and more.

“Partnerships with local cultural organizations are core to our One Seattle vision, leveraging City support and resources to help meet the unique needs of our diverse communities,” said Mayor Bruce Harrell. “We know that food insecurity remains high in our region which is why the Food Equity Fund is a critical investment in the health and wellbeing of our community, ensuring that every neighbor can access fresh, affordable, and culturally relevant foods.”

“We are honored to invest in these community-driven visions for creating access to culturally relevant food,” said Jenifer Chao, Director of Seattle Department of Neighborhoods. “These projects make it clear that the organizations and individuals leading this work know exactly what their communities need in order to thrive.”

The Food Equity Fund was developed in 2021 in response to recommendations from the Sweetened Beverage Tax Community Advisory Board to increase investments in community work led by those most impacted by food and health inequities: Black, Indigenous, People of Color (BIPOC) communities, immigrants, refugees, low-income individuals, families with young children, youth, and elders. The fund is supported by the Sweetened Beverage Tax.

For 2023, approximately $2.3 million is available for funding through the Food Equity Fund and those funds are distributed through two grant programs: General Grant and Capacity Building Grant. The General Grants announced here have a maximum award amount of $100,000. Capacity Building Grants, which are currently open on a rolling basis through October 31, have a maximum award amount of $20,000 and are focused specifically on community organizations with annual budgets under $500,000.

Seattle Department of Neighborhoods received 86 eligible applications for the 2023 General Grant, reflecting a total of $8 million in funding requests. The grant review process included community leaders with expertise in racial justice, food systems advocacy, and health disparities.

To learn more about the Food Equity Fund visit: http://www.seattle.gov/neighborhoods/programs-and-services/food-equity-fund-.

What Grantees Are Saying

“We are ecstatic to have been awarded funding from the 2023 Food Equity Fund. Since the beginning we’ve worked around food equity, bringing our community together through multicultural kitchens and other aspects of the food system in our center. These funds will open new opportunities and greatly contribute to our efforts of having our community design the project, using their untapped skills, and most importantly, leading their own future. ¡Si se puede!”

Peggy Hernández, Co-Director, Lake City Collective

“One of the strongest community-driven outcomes of the COVID-19 pandemic was a resurgence in Indigenous ecology and food sovereignty. Young leaders were able to gather outdoors and plant thousands of native seedlings, food and medicine bundles were distributed to elders, and we remembered the practices of our ancestors to restore our well-being through our relationship with the land. Through the generous support of the Seattle Department of Neighborhoods’ Food Equity Fund, the Na’ah Illahee Fund is able to continue this work through our Yahowt Program, of ‘lifting up the sky, together’. This grant will enable the urban Indigenous people of Seattle to continue to have the resources to gather, learn, and practice the traditional ecological knowledge that is a cornerstone of what food equity means in the Pacific Northwest.”

Susan Balbas, Executive Director, Na’ah Illahee Fund

“The Food Equity Fund will be instrumental in Basilicas’ programming for the next two years, helping us both to sustain current food justice and community education initiatives, and to start new initiatives centered around food justice and youth leadership. This fund will support a new food distribution support program called MINT, the Bridge to Youth Leadership Program, and will continue to support Basilica in paying our team a livable wage. Meals in Need Today (MINT) will work by providing hands-on support, education, and promotion for food distribution events in Seattle. The program will build a well-connected network of food distributors, educators, and community members to help produce, prepare, and distribute healthy produce in Seattle, while also putting more BIPOC community members in leadership positions in Seattle’s food distribution network.”

Jordan Jackson, Co-Founder, Basilica Bio

2023 Food Equity Fund – General Grant Awards

The following community organizations will receive Food Equity Fund General Grant awards for 2023:

$100,000 to Basilica Bio to sustain and expand programming that supports education around food and environmental justice in schools; connects students and community members to experiential learning opportunities; and delivers accessible food and environmental justice workshops in a STEM context. This grant will support a new Community Classroom Initiative Bridge to Youth leadership program, Meals in Need Today (MINT) food distribution programming, and the addition of new team members.

$100,000 to Black Dollar Days Task Force for the recurring costs of the Clean Greens Youth programs at South Shore Community Center and behind the Amy Yee Tennis Center. This funding will also support the implementation of the Community Herb Bank, organic honey processing, environmental trainings, workshops, and community gatherings.

$100,000 to Black Farmers Collective to support long-term sustainability and community programs at the organization’s farms. The grant will also support staff in building community, running educational programs, and growing food for and by BIPOC folks with a focus on uplifting and distributing resources within the Black community.

$100,000 to Casa Latina for 60 Latino immigrant workers to participate in a cohort-based program based in the organization’s community kitchen. Cohort members will build food service skills and prepare and share cultural meals with their fellow workers each week, who will access and enjoy nutritious, homecooked foods.

$100,000 to Cham Refugees Community to educate and train youth interns and empower individuals to take leadership roles in advancing Cham Refugees Community’s mission of increasing equitable food access through community identified solutions and access to healthy, local foods for all community members. This grant will support a series of intergenerational community dinners and increase capacity in their community garden.

$100,000 to Eritrean Community in Seattle and Vicinity to create a cultural and traditional gardening co-op at their community center. Farming is a large part of the Eritrean legacy, and this project will allow for generations of farming history and gardening techniques to live on in the following generations.

$100,000 to FEEST for the Student Organizer program, which will engage up to 25 students per year to increase their understanding of food justice and develop their organizing and leadership skills. FEEST will promote access to fresh, free, culturally relevant food for low-income youth and youth of color in South Seattle through food justice trainings and food provision, embodying the type of food access they want to see in schools.

$100,000 to InterIm CDA to support the Intergenerational Food Equity and Food Access Project in the Danny Woo Garden in Chinatown International District (CID). This culturally relevant, intergenerational learning and food production project will help increase and exchange knowledge between youth and elder Asian and Pacific Islander generations about growing and eating culturally relevant produce, creating infrastructure that supports ongoing food security, and growing produce that supports the nutritional and food accessibility needs of low-income elders in the CID.

$100,000 to Lake City Collective for the creation of a “Cook It Yourself” recipe kit that includes community gatherings around family recipes and a youth-led zine that will capture their recipes and stories. Funding will also support Si se puede Foodpreneurship Cohort to provide information about starting a food business and renovation to the Collective’s Garden which serves as a source of culturally relevant vegetables and as an education tool to teach community how to grow traditional produce adapted to their urban environment.

$100,000 to Na’ah Illahee Fund to advance food security and food sovereignty in Seattle’s urban Indigenous community. Through integration with the Native Youth Trails Program the group will plan and implement community events on the Indigenous lands of the Daybreak Star Indian Cultural Center in Discovery Park as well as increase community knowledge and skills in traditional harvesting practices. These will include planting parties of native traditional foods and medicinal plants, community traditional foods workshops, annual virtual Indigenous Food Sovereignty gatherings, Buffalo harvesting, and honoring luncheons for the community.

$100,000 to Rainier Beach Action Coalition to expand the services offered by an existing Farm Stand to better support BIPOC farm partners in collecting and distributing their produce to Rainier Beach residents. The organization plans to complete tenant improvements to their Food Hub and will make available dry and cold storage, a washing and packing station, and transportation to farmers in order to increase access to free, fresh, and culturally-relevant fruits and vegetables.

$100,000 to Union Cultural Center to pilot the Nourishian Training Program, which will provide life skills and job skills to young adults ages 17 – 25 in the Rainier Beach area. Life skills include meal planning, shopping on a budget, basic cooking skills, and nutrition knowledge.

$100,000 to yəhaw̓ Indigenous Creatives Collective to steward a South Seattle site on the ancestral homelands of the Duwamish, Muckleshoot, and Suquamish peoples, in Coast Salish territories. They will host a series of seasonal Creative Residencies, where interdisciplinary Indigenous artists and thinkers are invited to complete a self-determined project on site. They will also partner with the University of Washington to understand the best locations and formats for food plant growth and build an Indigenous community garden with Native plants.

$97,969 to Young Women-Empowered (Y-WE) Y-WE Grow’s mentorship-based empowerment programs focus on environmental justice and healthy food systems in BIPOC communities, serving diverse young women ages 13-24 through a lens of healing and belonging. Through urban farming and food justice activities, participants gain knowledge, skills, and resources around growing and eating healthy, culturally relevant food. This work is an ongoing expansion of our existing Y-WE Grow program and paid summer internships, which engage youth who are most impacted by systemic inequity and lack of access to nature.

$99,650 to Wa Na Wari for Love Offering: Community Meal Program. The program provides free-of-cost African diasporic food and Native American-inspired soul food made by Black/Indigenous chefs every Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday at Wa Na Wari from 4-6pm. Love Offering promotes economic stability for BIPOC caterers, increases access to nourishing meals, and cultivates community and a sense of belonging around cultural dishes.

$99,532 to Look, Listen, & Learn TV for the production and distribution of the cooking segments for upcoming seasons of our Black-led children’s TV show. With this Food Equity Fund grant, they will film local children and adults collaboratively preparing and enjoying healthy snacks and tasty treats for up to three seasons of Look, Listen and Learn.

$96,066 to Ethiopian Community in Seattle to address food inequities in the Ethiopian community by offering increased access to Ethiopian cultural food through cooking demonstrations, sharing of meals, provision of bags of ingredients from ethnic shops, and storytelling. The program will especially focus on youth and young adults who have expressed their need to learn more about Ethiopian food and the rich culture that surrounds it.

$99,000 to Queer the Land to empower the QT2BIPOC (Queer, Trans, Two Spirit, Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) community through stewardship and sustainability. This grant will support managing a community garden and greenhouse where community members can volunteer and actively participate. Through partnerships, Queer the Land will offer workshops on plant care, nutrition, and herbal remedies. They will create a thriving, inclusive space where the community can learn, grow, and celebrate together while fostering a deeper connection with the land.

$88,595 to It Takes a Village for monthly events where participants will learn about food economics, creative development, food service job skills, and growing food in small spaces. The group will deliver 300 hot meals to community members and host six cultural events focused on food, storytelling, and creative arts that engage and feed community members.

$69,500 to First Tongan Senior Nutrition Association to support over 80 seniors a week with food distribution and community meals for Pacific Islander and other low-income seniors near the Highland Park neighborhood. Over the next two years, they will continue to be a place for elders to gather, communicate in their familiar language, stay healthy, and feel less lonely.

$49,688 to Concord International Elementary Native/Indigenous Students Club to hire Native and Indigenous educators and Elders to share traditional ecological knowledge with Native/Indigenous students and families at Concord International Elementary. Funding will support field trips to forage and learn about traditional and culturally relevant ingredients and medicines. In addition, they will work with local Native and Indigenous chefs and restaurants and traditional medicine practitioners to provide access to traditional and culturally relevant foods and medicines for students and their families as well as lessons in food and medicine preparation.

30 artists named 2023 Kresge Artist Fellows and Gilda Award winners, awarded $550,000

Jun 29, 2023 By Admin in Native

15th award cycle highlights metro Detroit’s literary and visual artists

Thirty metro Detroit artists will share an unrestricted $550,000 in the 2023 Kresge Artist Fellowships and Gilda Snowden Emerging Artist Awards. The no strings attached awards were announced Thursday by the Kresge Arts in Detroit office located at the College for Creative Studies, which administers the program on behalf of The Kresge Foundation.

Since 2008, Kresge Arts in Detroit has awarded nearly $8 million in unrestricted dollars directly to Wayne, Oakland and Macomb county artists through 15 Kresge Eminent Artist Awards ($50,000 each), 278 Kresge Artist Fellowships ($25,000 each), and 52 Gilda Awards ($5,000 each).

The 15th cohort of award recipients consists of 15 Kresge Artist Fellows in Visual Arts and 5 Kresge Artist Fellows in Literary Arts, as well as 7 Gilda Awards in Visual Arts and 3 in Literary Arts. For the second year, awards in each category were proportional to the relative number of applications received.

“We at The Kresge Foundation – like the community at large – are always excited to see who are our new Kresge Artist Fellows and Gilda Award recipients. Whether we’re being reacquainted with artists we’ve known or whether we’re being introduced to others who are new to us, the roster is always a reaffirmation of the breadth and depth of talent in metropolitan Detroit,” said Kresge President and CEO Rip Rapson. “As with Fellows and Gilda Award recipients of past years, we are proud to contribute to these 30 careers that in turn contribute to the cultural identity and vitality of our community as a whole.”

Elevating Artists’ Careers

In addition to the monetary prize, Kresge Artist Fellows and Gilda Award recipients are invited to participate in a series of tailored professional development experiences that include skill-building, networking, promotion and coaching opportunities. Produced by Kresge Arts in Detroit, offerings are created and delivered in collaboration with artists and arts and culture organizations representing local and national perspectives. Kresge Arts in Detroit also pairs Fellows with local filmmakers to create short films featuring the newest fellows’ art practices and perspectives. The most recent films, featuring the 2022 Kresge Artist Fellows, premiered on Detroit Public Television in March and are available online.

“For 15 years, The Kresge Foundation has demonstrated a remarkable commitment to Detroit artists and an unwavering respect for their contributions and impact,” said Christina deRoos director of Kresge Arts in Detroit. “Looking ahead to the next 15 years, Kresge Arts in Detroit will continue to champion abundant, unrestricted investment, consistent exhibition and performance opportunities, and other conditions that are necessary for artists to truly thrive.”

2023 VISUAL ARTS FELLOWS

Austen Brantley, Sculpture (previous Gilda Awardee in 2017)
Halima Afi Cassells, Interdisciplinary Work
Rita Dickerson, Ceramics
Jessica Frelinghuysen, Performance Art (previous Gilda Awardee in 2021)
Louise Jones, Painting
Lauren Kalman, Interdisciplinary Work
Miranda Kyle, Painting
Elton Monroy Duran, Painting
Mario Moore, Painting
Robert Schefman, Painting
Erin K. Schmidt, Book Art
Rory Scott, New Media
Francis Vallejo, Book Art
Venusloc, Video Art
Tony Whitfield, Interdisciplinary Work

A grid with the photos of 15 artists that were named the 2023 Kresge Visual Arts Fellows. — 2023 Kresge Visual Arts Fellows. Top row (left to right): Erin K. Schmidt, Halima Afi Cassells, Elton Monroy Duran, Louise Jones, Rita Dickerson; Row 2: Miranda Kyle, Francis Vallejo, Venusloc, Jessica Frelinghuysen, Austen Brantley; Bottom row: Robert Schefman, Tony Whitfield, Rory Scott, Lauren Kalman, Mario Moore.

2023 LITERARY ARTS FELLOWS

James D. Fuson, Poetry
Tuyishime Claire Gasamagera, Creative Nonfiction
Gail Parrish, Playwriting
Edward Salem, Interdisciplinary Work
Morgan Mann Willis, Creative Nonfiction

A grid of photos of the five artists named the 2023 Kresge Literary Arts Fellow s — 2023 Kresge Literary Arts Fellows (left to right): Gail Parrish, James D. Fuson, Tuyishime Claire Gasamagera, Edward Salem, Morgan Mann Willis.

“This year’s impressive 2023 class of Kresge Fellows and Gilda Award recipients truly demonstrates the impact of creativity in and around the City of Detroit,” said Don Tuski, president of the College for Creative Studies. “On behalf of CCS, I am proud to honor these artists and their artistic achievements, critically important work and influence in the Detroit community.”

“The literary and artistic scene in Detroit remains alive and thriving in the hands of this cohort and the artists who took the time to apply for this prize,” said Jonah Mixon-Webster, a 2023 Literary Arts panelist. “The diverse work of this cohort and the pool of applicants is emblematic of the rich culture that is currently being incubated in the area, while remaining in touch with the voices of the nation and the world at large.”

The Gilda Snowden Emerging Artist Awards

Gilda Awards are $5,000 prizes for emerging artists, named in honor of Gilda Snowden’s (1954–2014) legacy as a mentor and champion of emerging artists in metro Detroit. The recipients are selected from the applicants for the Kresge Artist Fellowships. Gilda Awards recognize artists who are early in their artistic career, are gaining momentum, and who demonstrate exceptional potential through creative risk-taking and pushing the boundaries of their chosen art form.

GILDA AWARDS IN VISUAL ARTS

Quinn Alexandria Hunter, Fiber
Kimberly LaVonne, Ceramics
Shanna Merola, Collage
Ackeem Salmon, Interdisciplinary Work
Manal Shoukair, Sculpture
Melissa Webb, Interdisciplinary Work
Lauren Williams, Interdisciplinary Work

A grid of photos of seven artists named the 2023 Gilda Award recipients in Visual Arts. — 2023 Gilda Award recipients in Visual Arts (left to right): Shanna Merola, Kimberly LaVonne, Ackeem Salmon, Manal Shoukair, Lauren Williams, Quinn Alexandria Hunter, Melissa Webb.

GILDA AWARDS IN LITERARY ARTS

Cieara Estelle, Fiction
Liana Imam, Creative Nonfiction
Brittany Rogers, Poetry

A photo gird of three artists named the 2023 Gilda Award recipients in Literary Arts. — 2023 Gilda Award recipients in Literary Arts (left to right): Liana Jahan Imam, Cieara Estelle, Brittany Rogers.

A Competitive Selection Process

The 2023 cohort is comprised of artists from various career stages and disciplines. The selection criteria for Kresge Artist Fellowships include a demonstrated track record of artistic achievement and high-quality work; the potential to grow and advance one’s artistic career; and the potential to reflect, enhance or impact communities within metro Detroit.

“This cohort of artists includes voices that are often overlooked and not always celebrated,” said Jean Alicia Elster, Literary Arts panelist. “The collective impact of this cohort of artists is heightened by a profoundly varied range of backgrounds and experiences.”

The award recipients are selected by panels of local and national arts experts and practitioners, in their respective disciplines. The process takes several months and numerous rounds of review.

“In my experience, as a critic and educator, the communities that support their artists, as Kresge has done, have a far richer and varied spectrum of artists,” said Literary Arts Panelist Robert Pincus. “Such support is the catalyst for a better civic environment for all citizens.”

2023 LITERARY ARTS PANELISTS

Andrea Abi-Karam, Poet & Performer
Jean Alicia Elster, Professional Writer; Middle Grade/Young Adult Author; 2017 Kresge Artist Fellow
Jonah Mixon-Webster, Poet; Performer; Sound Artist; Mellon Arts Postdoc Fellow, Columbia University
Robert Pincus, Ph.D., art critic, art historian, author and adjunct professor, California State University, Long Beach and University of San Diego
Kelsey Ronan, Prose writer, Director of Room Project

2023 VISUAL ARTS PANELISTS

Kyohei Abe, Artist; associate professor and area coordinator of photography, Towson University; executive director and curator, Detroit Center for Contemporary Photography
Isabel Barbuzza, Sculpture/Intermedia Professor. School of Art and Art History, University of Iowa. School of Art and Art History Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion Committee Chair
Andrea Carlson, Artist and writer; Co-founder Center for Native Futures
Tylonn Sawyer, multidisciplinary artist educator and curator; 2019 Kresge Artist Fellow
Juana Williams, Associate Curator of African American Art, Detroit Institute of Arts

Makah Museum marks anniversary on Saturday

Jun 29, 2023 By Admin in Native

NEAH BAY — The Makah Museum will mark its 44th anniversary with pop-up shops showcasing the talents of Makah artists on Saturday.

The celebration, set from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. at the museum, 1880 Bayview Ave. in Neah Bay, also will feature traditional storytelling by Steven Jimmicum at 1 p.m. in the indoor longhouse.

More than 20 vendors will offer a diverse range of handmade items, including carvings, basketry, jewelry, drums, beaded items and baked goods.

The artists and vendors will retain 100 percent of their earnings from their pop-up shops, which will be on the grounds of the museum.

“As part of the festivities, attendees will have the chance to engage in the rich cultural heritage of the Makah tribe through traditional storytelling,” said Janine Ledford, executive director.

“The Makah Museum’s 44th Anniversary Celebration is a testament to its enduring commitment to preserving and promoting the vibrant Makah culture,” she said in a press release.

“By providing a platform for local artists, this event not only showcases their unique talents but also celebrates the resilience and creativity of the Makah community.”

Featured at the event will be well-known Makah artist Spencer McCarty.

An enrolled member of the Makah Tribe, Spencer’s Indian name is Nuu·kʷis·me·ya, which means “he who has feasting songs wherever he is.”

He describes his artwork style as being Southern West Coast, Makah and contemporary. Although Spencer carves a variety of artwork, he specializes in rattles, paddles, face masks, totem poles and model canoes.

Other artwork that Spencer makes includes cedar bark rope, headdresses, bowls, spindle whorls, whistles, clubs, talking staffs, steam-bent boxes, canoes, shell rattles, harpoons, spears, knives, bailers, halibut hooks and carving tools.

McCarty’s work has been exhibited in “Neah Bay Now” at the Legacy Gallery in Seattle; National Native Community House Gallery in New York; “Northwest Native Expressions” at the Native Art Gallery in Port Townsend; and “Annual Mask Show” at the Snow Goose Gallery in Seattle.

He also has been featured in the Journal-America- Sunday Issue 1989, Peninsula Cultural Arts in the Spring of 1992. He was a member of the performing arts “American Indian Dance Theater” and was featured in the Los Angeles Times.

Spencer’s artwork has been commissioned by the Makah Cultural and Research Center in Neah Bay, the Burke Museum in Seattle and Washington State Historical Society in Tacoma. He is featured in a book titled, “Northwest Native and Native Style Art.”

“My commercial artwork shows examples of possibilities within the laws of the cultural heritage of the Makah people,” Spencer has said.

“I am especially grateful to our Elders who allow us to make our living through their arts and history. By the Elders allowing us sell our artwork commercially, we are able to practice and hone our skills to make artwork for our chiefs to be used in dances. I am also thankful to my God for the gifts given to me.”

Spencer has worked with other Northwest Coast Indian Artists that include Frank Smith, Henry (Hank) Thomas, Otis Baxter, Aaron Parker, Art Thompson, Greg Colfax and George David. Spencer is presently working with Theron Parker and John Goodwin.

The museum interprets and houses artifacts that are between 300 and 500 years old recovered from the Ozette archaeological site, as well as other historic and replica pieces and photographs related to the Makah Tribe on display year-round.

It also offers educational programs that highlight the history, traditions and contributions of the Makah people.

For more information, see makah.com.

Ocala artists team up for joint city art display

Jun 28, 2023 By Admin in Native

OCALA, Fla. (WCJB) – A married couple in Marion County curated an art exhibit they will never forget.

William Lee applied to the City of Ocala’s Art in City Spaces program to publicly display his work. After securing his spot, they decided to make it a group exhibit instead with the help of his wife Diana.

Their exhibits are displayed on the top and bottom floors of the Mary Sue Rich Community Center. This is their first joint art display in Ocala.

Diana’s collection “Bold and Inspired: Native American Regalia” is based on photographs she took of Native American costumes in South Florida.

“I went to some pow-wows at Seminole Hard Rock and I started taking photographs of the Indians and I thought how down through the centuries all the costumes remain the same,” said Diana Lee.

Her husband’s exhibit “Abstract Island Expressions” hangs along the walls upstairs.

“I’m inspired by the bright colors of the Bahamas where I was born and Junkanoo parades we have there twice a year,” said William Lee.

The artists have been married for 48 years and said they appreciate the support and feedback they get when it comes to creating.

“It’s great cause he tells me ‘don’t do that’ and I tell him ‘I don’t like that’ so we help each other,” said Diana.

William and Diana have traveled across the world together, but ended up back in the U.S. to wrap up their degrees. They said they love Ocala’s art scene.

“Ocala is a very artistically-minded community,” said William. “They have a lot of cultural events with which we are quite happy to participate.”

The couple’s exhibits will be on display until January 2024.

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Emma Big Bear Winnebago History Day Saturday

Jun 28, 2023 By Admin in Native

Terry Landsgard of West Union will provide a presentation on the Native American handcrafted items created by Cliff Kulish of Prairie du Chien, Wis., during the 17th annual Emma Big Bear Winnebago History Day Saturday, July 1, at the Marquette Community Center. (Mike Van Sickle photo)

The 17th annual Emma Big Bear Winnebago History Day will be held Saturday, July 1, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m., at the Marquette Community Center. Presented by the Emma Big Bear Foundation, the historic presentations and exhibits are free to the public.

Those in attendance can learn about Big Bear’s family life and traditional tribal living in northeast Iowa. Additional information will be provided about the Elgin Historical Society of Tribes of the Turkey River Project, sub-agency Native American schools, local Winnebago villages and chiefs, traditional demonstrations by Indigenous artists.

Speaker presentations will be held from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m., in the exhibit hall. Historic peservation experts will share important facts, personal stories and tales about Big Bear and her Winnebago family. Big Bear and Winnebago baskets, jewelry, photos, artifacts and similar items will be on display in the exhibit hall.

University of Iowa Office of the State Archeologist will be on hand to identify artifacts brought in by visitors to the event. A limit of two artifacts per individual is requested. The archaeologist will provide cataloging and care tips. In addition, they will confidentially record where artifacts have been discovered for the Iowa site file.

Big Bear came from a long line of Decorah family chiefs of the Winnebago Nation. She made her home mostly in the McGregor-Marquette area, where she traded in Iowa and across the Mississippi River near Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin.

To make a living, Big Bear sold her handmade wares and traded with other Winnebago women on the banks of the Mississippi River. Iowa, Wisconsin and the effigy mounds areas dotted along the river were Big Bear’s most beloved places to live and work. She always returned and never lived very far away from the homes of her ancestors in the Upper Mississippi River Valley.

Formed under the Community Foundation of Greater Dubuque corporate structure and guided under its county affiliate, Clayton County Foundation for the Future, the Emma big Bear Foundation is a nonprofit corporation whose mission it is to educate the public and preserve hand-made baskets and jewelry, artifacts, photos, paintings, traditions, history and stories of Big Bear and her Winnebago Ho-Chunk people.

Native activists hit back at ‘Yellowstone’ creator’s claims about law

Jun 28, 2023 By Admin in Native

Native American activists are calling out Yellowstone creator Taylor Sheridan for his recent comments claiming that his 2017 film Wind River “changed a law” affecting violence against Indigenous people.

In a June profile in the Hollywood Reporter, Sheridan discusses the behind-the-scenes drama that has affected his Paramount Network series Yellowstone, which stars Kevin Costner as John Dutton, the head of a prominent Montana ranching family who is constantly fighting to protect the land he lives on from those who want it.

The irony, especially for Sheridan, who is white, is that his main character Dutton is fighting for land that once belonged (and arguably still belongs) to the Native tribe he often spars with in his constant efforts to protect the valuable acreage for his own descendants.

While that storyline in and of itself is rich fodder for discussion among Native communities, it’s what Sheridan said about his 2017 film spotlighting the issue of missing and murdered Indigenous women and people that is raising eyebrows among Native activists, artists and creators.

“[Wind River] actually changed a law, where you can now be prosecuted if you’re a U.S. citizen for committing rape on an Indian reservation, and there’s now a database for missing murdered Indigenous women,” Sheridan told the industry publication.

“That law had a profound impact,” he added. “All social change begins with the artist, and that’s the responsibility you have.”

Sheridan is referring to the Violence Against Women Act (VAWA) Reauthorization Act, which President Biden signed into law in 2022. The law, which first passed under President Bill Clinton in 1994 and has since been renewed four times, has strengthened its reach in Native communities, “expanding special criminal jurisdiction of Tribal courts to cover non-Native perpetrators of sexual assault, child abuse, stalking, sex trafficking, and assaults on tribal law enforcement officers on tribal lands.”

What Native groups have taken issue with is Sheridan’s assertion that he and his film, which stars white actors Jeremy Renner and Elizabeth Olsen in the lead roles investigating the murder of an Indigenous woman (played by Julia Jones, who is of Choctaw and Chickasaw descent), were responsible for the law’s reauthorization.

“Yellowstone creator Taylor Sheridan’s attempt to take credit for the passage of VAWA is gross and completely discredits years of tireless advocacy from the Native community,” Native rights attorney Mary Kathryn Nagle (Cherokee) said in a statement shared by Native social justice organization IllumiNative. “His movie Wind River perpetuates the myth that the FBI investigates MMIW cases. They do not. Sheridan should be apologizing, not taking credit for a victory secured by Indian Country advocates and led by Native women.”

Among those advocates are organizations such as the National Indigenous Women’s Resource Center, a nonprofit founded in 2011 “dedicated to ending violence against Native women and children,” and Sovereign Bodies Institute, founded in 2018, another Native female-led nonprofit with its own MMIP database that “builds on Indigenous traditions of data gathering and knowledge transfer to create, disseminate, and put into action research on gender and sexual violence against Indigenous people.”

Nagle and IllumiNative aren’t the only Native voices that are speaking out. In addition to TikTokers like Ethan Young Wolfe (Cherokee), who also shouts out Native women and Indigenous communities that have “fought to pass” the law, actress and writer Jana Schmieding (Lakota), who starred in and wrote for the TV series Rutherford Falls on Peacock and also stars on FX on Hulu’s Reservation Dogs, spoke to In The Know by Yahoo about her reaction to Sheridan’s statement.

So Sheridan shit talk is a necessary part of my healing from sick irony that our show, the FIRST NATIVE SITCOM EVER, was cancelled after 2 seasons and Sheridan cont.s to make bad spin-offs that have afforded him enough $ to purchase lots of ranch land in NDN territory. #WGAstrong pic.twitter.com/jS43Blimca

— jana (@janaunplgd) June 22, 2023

‘Colonizer behavior’

“None of it is surprising, and all of it is offensive,” Schmieding tells In The Know. “And that’s colonizer behavior. It’s also ‘white man in Hollywood with power’ behavior.”

The Rutherford Falls actress, who starred as Native museum curator Reagan Wells, also wrote an episode of the series titled “Adirondack,” which is a not-so-subtle satire of Yellowstone and a swipe at the practice of using Native talent as consultants rather than as writers, directors or producers on shows.

On that episode, Schmieding points out, Native casino owner Terry Thomas (played by Michael Greyeyes, who is Plains Cree) says, “I grew up watching Indians played by Italian men getting shot off of their horses by white men playing cowboys. So this is a step up.”

That statement highlights some of the frustrations encountered by Native creators, who have had a long history of being sidelined, or even erased, in Hollywood — often in their own stories — by white creators. In fact, among broadcast, cable and digitally scripted TV shows in the 2020-21 season, Indigenous people represented less than 1% of lead characters, with cable showing no Native lead representation whatsoever, according to UCLA’s 2022 Hollywood Diversity Report.

In his productions of Yellowstone and Wind River, Sheridan has employed Native actors in supporting roles, including Gil Birmingham (Comanche), Mo Brings Plenty (Oglala Lakota) and the aforementioned Jones (who also, coincidentally, worked on Rutherford Falls). While that could potentially raise eyebrows in the Native community, given the strong sentiments about Sheridan’s practice of not hiring Native writers (or any writers, for that matter), Schmieding stresses that she doesn’t take issue with their work on Sheridan’s projects.

“I never blame Native people for the projects that we get hired for. We are so unrepresented in this industry, the amount of jobs that we have available to us are so slim, and that is the fault of white creators,” she says. “If more non-Native people would hire Native folks to perform in their content and not just as stereotypical Native characters in somebody’s western, then we wouldn’t be in this pickle where we have to be in Taylor Sheridan television shows to make ends meet.

“We can’t afford to boycott him,” she adds. “He’s too powerful.”

For Wind River, arguably a white-character-centered movie about an important issue in the Native community that had no Native voice in its creation, the addition of Sheridan’s statement claiming ownership of a law affecting Indigenous people adds insult to injury.

“I genuinely think he believes that he is that important to Native people’s existence, which is the hubris of a colonizer,” Schmieding says. “For him to believe that he had any involvement in the Violence Against Women Act being passed, any touch on the murdered and missing Indigenous persons issue in Indian country, I’m so offended.”

That’s why she “stands with” and is helping to support efforts by organizations like IllumiNative to raise awareness about the appropriation of Native work and ownership of issues that preexisted Sheridan’s involvement in Hollywood’s Indigenous storytelling — ironically the same message as the tribal leaders give to Dutton in his Yellowstone series.

“I feel that we disrupt sometimes this liberal fantasy of racial reconciliation,” Schmieding says about Native communities speaking out, “because we’re not really satisfied with how it is for us and we’re not satisfied accepting the scraps of the industry.”

In The Know by Yahoo reached out to Sheridan’s representatives for comment but have not received a reply.

In The Know by Yahoo is now available on Apple News — follow us here!

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How a Pittsburgh Native Went From Home Makeovers to Red Carpet Premieres

Jun 28, 2023 By Admin in Native

PHOTOS COURTESY OF BRETT FREEDMAN | ACTRESS MARLEE MATLIN HAS SOME FUN TURNING THE BRUSH ON MAKEUP ARTIST AND MONROEVILLE NATIVE BRETT FREEDMAN WHILE GETTING READY FOR THE 2021 OSCARS.

Armed with more brushes than Van Gogh, Brett Freedman works tirelessly to create beautiful masterpieces — on some of Hollywood’s best faces.

The Monroeville native has always envisioned glam looks for celebs, even while doodling on old covers of The Enquirer as a boy.

“I would draw on Joan Collins, men, women, it didn’t matter; they all got a makeover. I loved pink. Everyone got pink lips and cheeks, and indigo and silver eyes. My looks were subtle and classy,” adds Freedman, 55.

After decades of perfecting his craft, Freedman is sought after by many of Hollywood’s best to complete their look, whether they’re about to grace the red carpet or step in front of the camera for a photoshoot or interview.

He has also created his own line of affordable cosmetics, Brett Glam Beauty, that focuses on his specialty — eyebrows.

Academy Award-winner Jodie Foster, who starred in 1991’s The Silence of the Lambs, which was largely filmed in the Pittsburgh area, shared in a statement for Pittsburgh Magazine: “There’s nothing like Brett’s hand in the natural look department. He understands skin and brings that freshness without piling on a ton of makeup. He’s got snap instincts that know how to change small things quickly to give a whole new look. Because he’s great with hair, too, he can play with different periods and references. Honestly, I’m not a makeup person, but Brett brings out the dress up fun in me.”

Always an Artist
Freedman says he always knew he would be an artist like his father.

“My dad ended up owning a catering company when he bought an old church in the ’70s and turned it into the Mellwood Party Center,” Freedman says. “There would be two weddings there on the weekends, and I used to help out there. It’s now getting a new life as a production space called Sunken Bus Studios.”

At a time when it was taboo for a teenaged boy to work with makeup (he would borrow mascara and other staples from his neighborhood friends), Freedman continued to push the boundaries and never gave up shooting for the stars.

“I never really focused on academics because I knew I was going to be an artist,” he adds.

He started by transforming his shy gal pals into fashionistas in his makeshift Glamour Shots studio in the basement gameroom.

Experimenting with makeup in the 1980s meant bold colors, thick, sweeping lines of blush (rug burn blush), big hair and lots of lace.

“I was really into Madonna,” he recalls. “I would take my high school gal pals, put hot rollers in their hair, use lace hair ties and give them makeovers. Then I would put up a red backdrop and use an industrial light to take their picture. Back then, we went to the mall to drop off our film and waited anxiously for an hour for them to be developed.”

The Gateway High School and Art Institute of Pittsburgh graduate also recalls reading his sister’s Teen magazines and having his own skincare regimen.

Though his parents, Jess and Reda Freedman, initially hoped he would choose a different path because of those taboo views at the time, he notes they became his biggest allies and have been incredibly supportive through his career.

Pursuing His Career
Freedman began working as a rotating makeup artist at both Kaufmann’s and Horne’s department stores Downtown in the late 1980s, and was one of the few men to do so back then.

He eventually landed a lucrative position with an advertising agency following graduation from the former Art Institute, but makeup always had its way of finding him. He would do makeup for photography students’ photoshoots and “word got out that I could do makeup.”

“I would also do weddings in the Pittsburgh region. I wasn’t even trying and the phone would ring for different opportunities. So I thought, ‘What if I lean into this and just do it?’”

His first paid gig as a makeup artist was a photoshoot for a plus-size shop in Monroeville.

“I got $50 and we shot it in someone’s condo in Churchill,” he says. “That’s how the makeup career began. After that, I started working for a Glamour Shots knockoff in Dormont called Image Makers where we turned housewives into hookers with lots of rug burn blush and pink, frosted lipstick!”

In 1991, Freedman read an article in Allure magazine about makeup artists doing photoshoots on the beach in Miami that also highlighted male hairstylists.

“I told my family I was going to move to South Beach, get a studio apartment and work at a makeup store on the beach,” he says. “They were concerned, but I had this feeling of why not? There’s gotta be something for me there. So, I moved to Miami in 1992.”

When Freedman arrived in The Magic City, he told everyone he was a makeup artist and did any job that came his way — even makeup for Black Tail adult magazine.

Freedman notes he became familiar with styling eyebrows while working in the makeup store.

“One of my coworkers asked me if I wanted him to do my brows, and I said I don’t do that. He said we will just clean them up. The brows really change the look. Then he said, ‘Let me give you some advice. Learn how to do eyebrows and do them because a lot of artists are afraid.’ So I did.”

While working with models in Miami, he was mentioned in an Allure article on eyebrow grooming, which garnered attention and landed him an agent.

He began getting deals with companies such as Revlon and Lancôme, and started doing commercials, along with models’ makeup.

In 1996, Freedman decided to relocate once more to Los Angeles.

“I visited California with my family in 1980 and we toured Universal Studios. I remember riding the open-air tram and seeing everyone working on the lot, going in and out of the studios, and I thought, ‘I want to live in Hollywood!’”

Early in his Hollywood career, he did models’ makeup for Fantastic Sams posters and covers for TV Guide.

“That was impressive to my parents because they could see that in the grocery store,” he says. “My mom also went to the Fantastic Sams in Monroeville and told them her son did the makeup for the posters. It was fun seeing their reaction to pop culture then.”

Freedman recalls his agent telling him he needed more actresses in his portfolio to make it in Hollywood, noting that it would help to get actresses from “Friends.”

“Now I do Lisa Kudrow’s makeup and even did her makeup for the ‘Friends: The Reunion’ that aired on HBO in 2021. Everyone I work with, I’ve worked with for years. They’re all my favorites in different ways.”

Some other early clients were Sharon Lawrence of “NYPD Blue” for McCall’s Magazine and Courtney Thorne-Smith of “Melrose Place,” whose publicist began sending actors and actresses his way.

ACTRESS CATHERINE ZETA-JONES HAS SAID IN INTERVIEWS THAT SHE LIKES HOW MAKEUP ARTIST BRETT FREEDMAN PUTS HER LOOK FROM HEAD TO TOE INTO CONSIDERATION WHEN STYLING HER FOR PREMIERES.

He has since enhanced the beauty of Patricia Heaton, Mariah Carey, Gwyneth Paltrow, Marlee Matlin, Sarah Silverman, Taylor Swift, Anna Camp, Kirsten Dunst, Britney Spears, Reba McEntire and Catherine Zeta-Jones.

Creating His Brand
Freedman eventually decided it was time to branch out and create his own line of cosmetics. Brett Glam Beauty products mainly focus on eyebrows (of course!), but he also sells lip gloss (GLOSS-A-HOLIC) and balm (Dr. Kiss).

“I felt that there was a hole in the market with eyebrow products,” he notes. “I created a very pale blonde and a very gingery red in my line.”

He acknowledges that creating the line was tough because he doesn’t consider himself to be a “natural businessman.”

“It turns out creating the makeup line, naming the products and demonstrating how to use them is only about 4% of the process. The hardest part is you don’t know what you’re doing for like a year and a half!”

Freedman is thankful his line took off because when the pandemic hit, he couldn’t do makeup from 6 feet away. He also doesn’t know if he can “run around with my makeup box forever.”

“I always had this feeling that my career would end and I wouldn’t be the flavor of the month. I wanted to do something that I could age into.”

Freedman says he is fortunate for the success he has had and eventually learned to step back and enjoy life. He married his husband, Andrew, in 2019. The couple has a puppy and soon plans to adopt a child.

They also plan to venture back to the East Coast this summer to visit family. Freedman is excited to return to Kennywood for the first time in years and discover some new restaurants.

Expert Tips
What makeup tips does Freedman have for those who may only dream of stepping foot on the red carpet?

“It depends on how you want to move through the world. If you don’t want to wear makeup, don’t. There’s no cookie-cutter face. I will say now is an exciting time for makeup. People are being really creative with different looks,” he says.

He adds most working women want tips on looking fresher and less tired. This look can be achieved with a tinted moisturizer with SPF, a light foundation that is matched to your upper chest/breastbone, curled eyelashes (even if you don’t use mascara), a luminous blush and lip products in pink, peach or mango hues.

“When we get older our skin starts to lose its vibrancy and our lips get paler,” he notes. “Those juicy hues will help freshen your look.”

And the key to on-fleek eyebrows?

“Get a pencil or a powder that’s a bit lighter than the hairs, and fill in the spaces behind them. I also recommend doing a little of one brow and volleying back and forth between them to notice any holes you might be missing. I also think everyone would benefit from an eyebrow gel. Brush them up and out to make them look fuller for a more wide-eyed look.”

He recommends going to a store like Ulta or Sephora, finding an associate sporting a look that you like and asking them questions.

“Whether you want a look that’s just me, but a little more vivid or want to look like a Kardashian, they can help you find what you need to complete that look,” he adds.

Two rules he lives by: asking clients what doesn’t work for them and always making sessions fun.

“You want them to feel like they’re in the driver’s seat,” he adds. “I’m just there to make them look like them.”

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