JUNEAU, Alaska (KTUU) – Sealaska Heritage Institute is honoring and celebrating the Alaska Native woman through a new exhibit, “Native Women’s Art: Drawn From the Spirits of Ancestors Within.” Guest curator, Alison Bremner, is an artist by profession and had the pleasure of bringing the exhibit to life choosing 56 Alaska Native women artists to showcase their work using all types of mediums.

“We have a great diverse [variety of] mediums that the artists are working in,” Bremner said. “We have some artists who you’d consider very traditional — traditional Chilkat weaving, traditional Ravenstail weaving — and then we have some artists that are working on what you might call the more contemporary side.”

Bremner said the exhibit title came from a quote by a Tlingit elder and gave artists a lot of freedom to pursue different kinds of art.

“As a curator, I got to approach these phenomenal artists, and give them the title and really leave it up to them,” she said. “Give a lot of trust to the artists who we’re approaching because we know their vision is amazing.”

The space goes beyond just the art. It’s also a reflection of the strength, integrity and resiliency of Alaska Native women and some of the challenges they’ve had to overcome.

“A lot of Alaska Native cultures were matriarchal, they had these very strong and respected women and it wasn’t until the advent of colonization where roles got a little bit blurred,” Bremner said.

Bremner says the space not only provides a purpose and place for history to be displayed, but a chance for others to experience the range of emotions that each piece brings to the table.

“There’s so much joy, so much love, you know, there’s humor. It really runs the whole human experience and I hope that people just really enjoy witnessing that,” she said.

“Native Women’s Art: Drawn From the Spirits of Ancestors Within” is open through December 2023.

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Take any major historical Western art movement from the 16th century through today and you can bet women played an important role. Until the last handful of years, you can also bet that male scholars writing the histories of those movements minimized their impact or omitted them all together.

Artemisia Gentileschi in the Renaissance. Berthe Morisot to French Impressionism. Grace Hartigan and Lee Krasner with Abstract Expressionism. Only within the past decade have they begun receiving any appropriate measure of due for their contributions.

Add Susie M. Bartow’s name to that list for the Hudson River School, the first major art movement in the United States. Founded in the mid-19^th century along the Hudson River in New York by Thomas Cole, the Hudson River School was a community of landscape painters exalting America’s natural beauty.

Barstow (1836-1923) receives the first retrospective of her career one century following her death during “Women Reframe American Landscape: Susie Barstow & Her Circle,” appropriately on view at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site in Catskill, NY through October 29, 2023.

No woman from the Hudson River School has ever had a solo show. Anywhere. Until now.

“When you think of the Hudson River School, you think of Thomas Cole, Frederic Edwin Church and Asher B. Durand, but the women have been erased from that history,” Kate Menconeri, Chief Curator and Director of Curatorial Affairs, Contemporary Art, at the Thomas Cole National Historic Site, told Forbes.com.

Barstow was selected because the Cole Center had one of her paintings in its permanent collection and in researching female Hudson River School painters looking for one to highlight, exhibition co-curator and Professor of Art History at Towson University Nancy Siegel connected with Barstow’s family who still had her sketches, sketch box, paint brushes, numerous paintings, and other items from her art practice.

“While there are certain formal elements that quickly identify Susie Barstow’s painterly style—her particular brush strokes with regard to the bark of birch trees or moon-lit recesses deep within nature—it is important to see how her work rests comfortably within the style of the Hudson River School as it evolved across the nineteenth century,” Siegel told Forbes.com. “Hers are paintings that glorify and celebrate the landscape just as those by her male colleagues. In this regard, these are artists not separated by their gender, rather, the artists of the loosely-defined Hudson River School were united by their passionate quest to hike, sketch, and paint the awe-inspiring views of nature they experienced first-hand.”

Barstow hiked up to 25 miles a day–in period clothing, of course–sketching the Adirondak Mountains, White Mountains and Catskill Mountains. She exhibited and sold paintings alongside major male figures of the Hudson River School, she just wasn’t written into the history books.

“The exhibition is a deep dive on Susie’s work and also includes other painters, specifically women, who were painting in her circle,” Menconeri explains. “We know that there were over 50 women who were painting landscapes in 19^th century America, so we want to bring them a spotlight and recognition.”

Contemporary Practices

“Women Reframe American Landscape” is a two-part exhibition with Barstow centering one half and contemporary women artists who focus on land and landscape in their work the other.

“American landscape painting–the paintings that we’ve been seeing–have all been by predominantly white men, so we’re only seeing landscape according to one specific group of people,” Menconeri said. “At the heart of this (exhibition) we wanted to say, ‘what’s landscape to women, not only in the 19^th century, but today?’ It feels urgent because there’s so much at stake with climate change and recentering people on the land and thinking more deeply about the history of the land in the United States.”

Always remember, America was built by slave labor working stolen land.

The exhibition’s contemporary works come from a powerhouse roster of predominantly African American, Native American and Latina artists including Teresita Fernández, Ebony G. Patterson, Wendy Red Star (Absáalooka), Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (citizen of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation) and Kay WalkingStick (Cherokee).

Diverging from Barstow and their Hudson River School forebearers, they use sculpture, video, collage, photography and site-specific installations to comment on land and landscape. Examples of all are on view during “Women Reframe American Landscape: Contemporary Practices.”

“Landscape art doesn’t have to just be a canvas with a single point perspective horizon line and a gold frame; landscape is something much more complicated,” Menconeri reminded.

Much more complicated in the hands of the contemporary artists.

Their work is less representational, more confrontational. They are not coy in their expressions of how land is contested. They consider themselves more participants in the land as opposed to observers of it. They make definite distinctions between “land” and “landscape.”

Unlike the Hudson River School painters, and most 19^th and early 20^th century American landscape painters, contemporary artists show the land’s human side. Land not removed from people–the so-called “wilderness”–but places that have been peopled for tens of thousands of years.

Concepts of land as either natural and wild, or developed and populated, are 19^th and 20^th century colonial concepts. Land needn’t be either/or.

People can be integral actors in spectacular, healthy landscapes teeming with biodiversity as surely as they can be absent from vast, dead landscapes wrecked by chemical contamination, mining or bomb testing. Think of Indigenous practices, people living productively on the land in balance with nature as opposed to white, settler colonial practices of people having to be removed from land in order to protect it, lest that land be logged, mined, farmed and paved to oblivion.

That tension is the entire foundation of America’s National Park System, the belief that unless people are removed entirely from these remarkable places except to visit, they will surely destroy them, failing to recognize that Indigenous people lived on those lands for thousands of years without doing so.

Cole can be considered an early environmentalist advocating for balance between the built and natural worlds through his painting and writing. He was ahead of his time speaking out against the escalating development and deforestation of the Catskill Mountains almost 100 years ago. Railroads and tanneries and iron foundries and mills chewing up the land, the landscape, but he was oblivious to the thousands of years of inhabitation that had occurred on that land by Indigenous people who didn’t similarly threaten it.

People don’t necessarily endanger the land and landscapes, white people do. Colonizers do.

Contemporary artists make this distinction clear.

Deliciously, their artworks are sited within and in response to Cole’s artwork, home, studios, and bucolic grounds creating one compelling juxtaposition after another.

As is generally the case, the Guerrilla Girls, an anonymous troupe of feminist artists, say it best in a text piece specially created for this exhibition which reads, in part: “Hudson River School Paintings depicted a wilderness tamed by white settlers; when, in fact, the land had been inhabited, cultivated and protected for millennia by Indigenous nations. While Hudson River School painters romanticized and idealized the stolen land, robber barons extracted whatever they could, and left a mess for future generations. These same tycoons bought Hudson River School paintings, donated them to museums, and promoted an Eden that never was.”

After leaving the Thomas Cole National Historic Site, “Women Reframe American Landscape” travels to the New Britain Museum of American Art in New Britain, CT from November 16, 2023, through March 31, 2024.

Jean LaMarr’s colorful and seductive yet hard-hitting satirical artworks challenging long-held cultural stereotypes and preconceptions about Native American people and cultures will be on view in the exhibition The Art of Jean LaMarr at the IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts from August 18, 2023, through January 7, 2024. The Art of Jean LaMarr, organized by the Nevada Museum of Art (NMA), features more than 60 artworks including paintings, prints, and sculptures spanning from the 1970s to the present. Jean LaMarr (Susanville Indian Rancheria), an internationally recognized artist, educator, and Native American advocate with ancestral ties to Pyramid Lake, Nevada, and Susanville, California, sparks powerful and important conversations about racist imagery, representations of Native women, legacies of colonization, and environmental justice.

“The Nevada Museum of Art is proud to present this major exhibition of work by Jean LaMarr, who has been a respected artist involved in the Great Basin arts community for decades,” says NMA Andrea and John C. Deane Family Senior Curator and Deputy Director Ann M. Wolfe. “While Jean lives and works in the relatively secluded rural community of Susanville, she has exhibited her work widely and is highly regarded by scholars, curators, and artists around the world.” MoCNA Chief Curator Dr. Manuela Well-Off-Man adds, “We are excited to host this exhibition at MoCNA, especially since Jean LaMarr taught at IAIA for several years and contributed to advancing contemporary Native art through works that powerfully blend Indigenous cultural elements with Modern art and paved the way for many female Native artists.”

LaMarr (born 1945) is descended from Wada Tukadu Numu (Northern Paiute) and Illmowi, Aporige, and Atsugewi (Pit River) ancestry, with strong family ties to Northern Nevada and Northern California. She was born and raised in Susanville, California, and is now an enrolled member of the Susanville Indian Rancheria in Susanville, California, where she lives. In 1964, LaMarr relocated to San Jose, California as part of the Indian Relocation Act, and in 1976 she graduated from UC Berkeley, where she became involved in activist politics and participated in protests including the American Indian Occupation of Alcatraz (1969) and the Pit River Occupation in Shasta County (1970).

LaMarr founded the Native American Graphic Workshop in Susanville in 1994 to help engage Native American youth, elders, and community members in artmaking. LaMarr largely built her artistic reputation as a skilled printmaker while teaching and practicing as an artist in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1970s and 80s. She went on to teach at IAIA in Santa Fe for many years before returning to Susanville.

LaMarr believes “that one painting would be in one home or museum, but a print or video or mural would reach everyone… One painting might be worth a million dollars, but prints will reach millions of people.” For nearly a decade, LaMarr designed the popular Bear Dance posters for the annual Maidu gathering held in the mountain community of Janesville, California, just an hour north of Reno, Nevada. Many of LaMarr’s screenprints feature bold graphics and bright colors that communicate a direct political message to viewers.

My art is a “rejection of the idea of the vanished American Indian,” LaMarr says, explaining that contemporary Native American people are part of vibrant and living cultures. While her paintings, prints, and installations celebrate and honor ancestors and cultural traditions, they also confront racist stereotypes of Native American people, such as those perpetuated by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his epic 1855 poem “Song of Hiawatha,” or Slim Whitman’s popular 1924 song “Indian Love Call.” In her Cover Girl series and in many other artworks, LaMarr has worked tirelessly to reclaim the dignity of Native American women, whose bodies were often exploited by early twentieth-century non-Native anthropologists and photographers and later appropriated for use on consumer product packaging. Another strand of LaMarr’s work tackles the legacies of colonialism, including the impacts of ongoing environmental trauma on Native American tribal communities in the American West.

“Jean LaMarr speaks from a place of fierce pride in her indigeneity, and a willingness to challenge the erasure and structural racism that Indigenous Peoples face in their lives. Her work has that razor-sharp political commentary, yet can transmit the softness and beauty of our cultures, particularly of Indigenous women,” says Dr. Debra Harry (Kooyooe Tukadu Numu from Pyramid Lake), Associate Professor of Indigenous Studies in the Department of Gender, Race, and Identity at the University of Nevada, Reno.

In conjunction with this exhibition, the Nevada Museum of Art has published a hardcover book, The Art of Jean LaMarr, which will be available for purchase in the MoCNA Museum Store. The Art of Jean LaMarr includes an essay by Ann M. Wolfe, the NMA Andrea and John C. Deane Family Chief Curator and Associate Director, with contributions from Allan L. Edmunds, Mary Lee Fulkerson, Debra Harry, Ph.D., Archana Hortsing, Lucy Lippard, Judith Lowry, Susan Lobo, Ph.D., Malcolm Margolin, Raymond Patlan, Jan Rindfleisch, and Peter Selz. The exhibition will also be accompanied by Purple Flower Girl (2022), a short video about LaMarr produced and directed by Tsanavi Spoonhunter, who is a descendant of the Northern Paiute, Lakota and Northern Arapaho nations, and who received her master’s degree from the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley, with a focus in documentary filmmaking.

The Art of Jean LaMarr is sponsored by Kristi Overgaard; Sandy Raffealli|Bill Pearce Motors; The Phil and Jennifer Satre Family Fund at the Community Foundation of Western Nevada; with supporting sponsorship from Kathie Bartlett, and with additional support from Nevada Humanities and in memory of Bernadette Kaye. The MocNA presentation of The Art of Jean LaMarr is supported by the Ford Foundation.

This story comes to you from MPR News through a partnership with Sahan Journal.

The Reclaiming Our Identities powwow celebrated the two-spirit community during Pride weekend in Minneapolis.

Singers, dancers, and community gathered for the powwow at South High in Minneapolis. Fringed with rainbow colors, the gymnasium was transformed from a basketball court to a dance arena. Just down the hall in the open-air lunchroom, Indigenous artists and vendors covered folding tables with beaded jewelry, hats and ribbon work.

The next row over, community organizations set up tables with pamphlets and flyers, and paper powwow fans—much needed for a hot June day.

Volunteers wore bright pastel tee shirts with the progress pride and gender fluid flag, everyone celebrating Indigenous queer identities.

Two-spirit refers to an Indigenous person who has both a masculine and feminine spirit, a way people from across many tribal nations identify their spiritual and gender identity.

New Native Theatre, a company in Minneapolis hosts the annual social dance. This was the second year that organizers welcomed people to the gathering.

Charli Fool Bear, who is Dakota from the Standing Rock Sioux tribe, is an artistic producer with New Native Theatre. She said the event began to honor two-spirit theater artists and art-makers.

“Theater itself is built on the work of two-spirit people. A part of Indigenous theater’s history starts with two-spirit folks,” said Fool Bear. “People who put it all on the line for our community, for storytelling, for … everything.”

Two-spirit Sisseton Dakota elder and lifelong Minneapolis resident Reva D’Nova said she arrived from another event to spend the day with her two-spirit relatives.

“The recognition of the two-spirit community is long overdue,” said D’Nova.

As a two-spirit elder, D’Nova said her role is to providing guidance to the younger people.

“If I’m able to help them and guide them than I am happy to do it,” she said.

Longtime Minneapolis resident Mo Mike helped lead the day’s events as one of two head dancers. Cree from Beardy’s and Okemasis First Nation, Saskatchewan, Mike identifies as two-spirit transmasculine. He said the event’s organizers work hard to make the space welcoming for people who may not have grown up going to Indigenous social gatherings.

“This will be safe space for them to be who we are as two-spirit trans people, gender non-conforming. We’re making it as safe as possible for all of us to be there.”

Brian Heart, a citizen of the Yankton Sioux tribe and a longtime resident of Minneapolis was asked by the event’s organizers to offer welcoming remarks.

“It’s time that we’re able to come out, be who we are, share a part of our knowledge and our wisdom,” said Heart. “It’s never too late to learn who you are as a person.”

Deanna StandingCloud, citizen of Red Lake Nation, has been emceeing powwows for the past several years. She said the powwow is important to her as a parent.

“I am the mother of a two-spirit daughter. it’s really taught me a lot about being an Anishinaabe person, and also being a mother,” said StandingCloud. “A powwow for the two-spirit community needs to be a safe place because we’re reclaiming a lot of those teachings and a lot about being in community with each other.”

The event made history as the first powwow to have two women as emcees. Deanna StandingCloud was joined by her longtime friend—who also just happens to share her first name. Deanna Beaulieu, citizen of White Earth Nation, joined StandingCloud at the emcee stand. For Beaulieu it was her first time emceeing.

Beaulieu said she was a bundle of nerves on her way to the powwow.

She credits her own two-spirit family members with helping to instill within her and other young family members a sense of acceptance. She said it helped her to remember to just be herself as she stepped into the new role.

“Raising us with that sense of like, ‘We are accepting people and we’re generous with the spirit of giving and sharing, and inclusion’—I think that’s super important,” she said.

Located in downtown Hill City, Warriors Work and Ben West Gallery stand as a testament to the power of art and community. Randy Berger, the mastermind behind Warriors Work, and Janna Emmel, the creative force behind Ben West Gallery, have curated a space that seamlessly blends native artwork with contemporary masterpieces.

A Unique Blend of Art

Established in 2002, Warriors Work Gallery represents the essence of native artwork through its leather-framed designs. On the other hand, the Ben West Gallery focuses on contemporary art, featuring a diverse selection of sculptors, painters and furniture makers. With approximately 25 artists showcased, both galleries provide a dynamic and ever-evolving experience for art enthusiasts.

An Ever-Changing Canvas

One of the distinctive aspects of Warriors Work and Ben West Gallery is the constant rotation of art. The owners pride themselves on creating a space that flows effortlessly, ensuring that each piece finds its perfect place. Whether a piece is sold or relocated, Randy and Janna meticulously rehang and relight the space to maintain its allure.

Creating an Ambience of Grandeur

Stepping into Warriors Work and Ben West Gallery is akin to entering a sophisticated New York studio. Randy and Janna have intentionally crafted an environment that captures attention and fosters appreciation for the artwork on display. Visitors are transported to a realm where they can envision investing in statement pieces that serve as captivating focal points in their own spaces.

The Workshop Within

Beyond the gallery walls, a workshop hums with creative energy. Randy’s leather-working studio, which was previously located at the back of the building, has found its way into the gallery space. Here, unique framing designs made from bison and deer skin are meticulously crafted for each artwork. The novelty of leather frames captivates visitors, who are encouraged to touch and appreciate these one-of-a-kind creations.

Community Involvement and Art as an Economy

Randy and Janna’s journey has been one of defying stereotypes and building a thriving art community. When they first opened the gallery 26 years ago, naysayers believed that locals would not support their venture. However, they proved the critics wrong by cultivating a loyal base of local customers who return time and again. Recognizing that art goes beyond the gallery walls, Randy and Janna immersed themselves in the community, welcoming artists, organizing events, and showcasing their commitment to making Hill City a destination for art.

A Center for Art and Celebration

Warriors Work and Ben West Gallery serve as a vibrant hub for creativity and festivities. Hosting art events and providing an exquisite venue for parties, the galleries have become an integral part of Hill City’s social fabric. Randy and Janna’s involvement in various community initiatives, such as dog sled races and downtown events, reflects their dedication to nurturing a flourishing and cohesive town.

Romare Bearden: ‘Final Study for Berkeley – The City and Its People, 1973’; collage on board; University of California, Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive; Gift of Dr. and Mrs. David Dragutsky © 2023 Romare Bearden Foundation / Licensed by VAGA at Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY
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If you head over to BAMPFA’s new collection show, “What Has Been and What Could Be,” you’ll find 107 works on display — from 17th-century Japanese scrolls to mid-century abstract painting, feminist art and quilts. 

Take a close look at a chaotic, colorful collage made by the New York-based artist Romare Bearden and you’ll likely recognize an iconic civic symbol emblazoned on everything from trash cans to city notices: four overlapping faces in profile. 

Together, the faces inspired the city of Berkeley’s logo. They represent, Bearden said, the four races of man and are “set over a blueprint for a better world, which the students and people of Berkeley will augment.”

The 21-by-32-inch collage on view at BAMPFA was a study for a larger, 10.5-by-16-foot mural titled “Berkeley — The City and Its People,” which was commissioned by the city for $16,000 in 1971 to redecorate the drab-looking City Council chamber. Bearden was selected at the recommendation of Peter Selz, the Berkeley Art Museum’s founding director.

The city plans to hangs its Romare Bearden mural up in its new chambers on University. Image: City of Berkeley
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Bearden came of age during the Harlem Renaissance and later became one of the most acclaimed American artists of the 20th century for his narrative collages that depict the Black experience. In 1963, along with a group of fellow artists, Bearden founded an African American artist collective born out of the Civil Rights Movement. He was awarded the National Medal of the Arts in 1987 by President Ronald Reagan.

While much of his work centered Black life and culture, according to his New York Times obituary, Bearden (who had Cherokee, Italian, and African ancestry) argued for a multicultural understanding of what it meant to be American, rejecting the notion that his work was “black art.” “Except for the American Indian, everybody who came here or was brought here becomes, starting with the second generation, four things: Part Anglo-Saxon, part Indian, part frontiersman and part black,” Bearden said. “These are the roots that form American culture.”

Bearden’s selection for the mural project received pushback from some conservative Berkeleyans, as Lauren Kroiz, an art history professor at Cal, has written. 

The Berkeley Citizens United newsletter took issue with the time he spent in racially diverse flatland neighborhoods (he conducted research throughout the city) and, in articles rife with racism and stereotypes, asked readers to imagine “filth” and “degradation” — “a collage of Black Panthers waving clenched fists, filthy tent hovels at People’s Park, street revolutionaries tearing down the fence [at People’s Park], drug addicts lying stoned on Telegraph Avenue, Berkeley Communists waving the Viet Cong flag, Berkeley barbarians rampaging through the streets, looting, smashing, burning.” 

That was far from what Bearden had in mind. 

“Rather than foreground the contemporary sites and symbols of dissent registered in Black Power, counterculture, and Third World liberation as BCU worried,” Kroiz wrote. “Bearden represented Berkeley to its citizens by layering representations of people and landmarks, past and present, in photography, paint and colored papers.”

Read more about the creation of Bearden’s mural and its continued resonance

Included in the mural are Native Californians, early settlers, miners, the Campanile, the Berkeley Marina and more. In it, Berkeley’s civic strife, iconic symbols, messy diversity and striving for harmony are placed in dynamic tension. 

Bearden wrote in his description that it “symbolizes the past, the present, and the future possibilities of the city.”

What Has Been and What Could Be, BAMPFA. On view through July 2024.

Four Atlanta-based artists, all in their early 30s, are currently having shows that offer unusually revealing reflections on the range of today’s American cultural styles in a city and region that’s changing faster than many feel they can keep up with.

If it weren’t for the portentous title written on hand-lettered signs in Evan Jones’ Destruction Derby Dreamland, at Thomas Deans Fine Art through July 12, and the fact that the show opens with a triptych titled The USA on Fire, it would be easy to assume that this is a straightforward celebration of a particular strain of American culture. Tightly rendered paintings of stock cars and loosely rendered portraits of NASCAR race drivers abound.

But before visitors reach the gallery containing these artworks, they are confronted with I Never Paid a Dime and I Got My Money’s Worth. Here an iconic Elvis is posed against the clouds of the Challenger shuttle explosion, his image flanked at the margins by the word that forms the title of one of his movies, Girls! Girls! Girls!

This theme of unrestrained self-destruction is echoed in a painting that repeats the exhibition title. In Destruction Derby Dreamland, a provocatively dressed young woman is shown against the backdrop of the carnival-poster flames first seen in The USA on Fire, with the words “THRILL RIDE!” and aggressive American eagles as additional decorations.

The paintings’ apparent braggadocio is tinged with subtle ambiguity. For example, a Revolutionary War flag’s pine tree emblem is replaced with tree-shaped air fresheners in An Appeal to Heaven. Those are the words written above the tree on the original flag and above the heroically posed car that is the central feature of the painting.

The most conceptually challenging painting in the show is Sunset in the West, in which Caravaggio’s half-clad Bacchus dominates the foreground, framed in grape leaves against a luridly tinted sunset.

Above him are two iconic bull-riding cowboys facing one another. The cowboy mounted on the white bull wears a black hat, and the one on the black bull wears a white hat.

Thanks to a succession of differently portentous paintings featuring contested aspects of present-day American culture, the show turns into a Rorschach test: What the viewer reads into it says more about the viewer than about the artist’s intent.

At Whitespace Gallery through August 5, Charlie Watts’ Entangled presents large-scale photographs of people of various ethnicities (alone or in pairs) nestled in nonsexual nakedness in the greenery of metro Atlanta’s Weelaunee Forest – or in a body of water in the same location.

The lushly inviting woodland is the hotly contested site of what’s now known as Cop City, Atlanta’s projected police training site. That goes unmentioned, however, in this gentle evocation of human beings finding a form of renewed harmony with the natural world that still surrounds them. Watts describes her rapidly changing native city as “a fragile, interdependent, entangled world.”

Also through August 5, Whitespace’s Whitespec project room is filled with the paintings in Aineki Traverso’s No te elcanzon los ojos. Translated as “your eyes are not sufficient,” the title denotes what Traverso describes as “a beauty that transcends sight.”

The works are sources of mystery, paintings of her own eyes, traced with her eyes closed, and other fragmentary glimpses of an interior vision that she calls “a world too overwhelming to experience.” They are apt symbols for the complexity of her origin as the daughter of an Argentinian mother and an American father of Chinese and Japanese descent. She is increasingly recognized in this city of entangled ethnicities, being the 2024 winner of Forward Arts Foundation’s Edge Award.

Hannah Adair’s Chapel in the free-standing Shedspace in the garden adjacent to Whitespace Gallery, both questions and honors the ubiquitous small religious spaces of the rural Southern environment. Most of these tiny, unobtrusive buildings represent various Christian denominations with small congregations, but the landscape also holds similarly structured chapels, nondenominational but available for prayer, wedding ceremonies and other moments of ritual.

Fascinated by the forms of arched windows and church bells, Adair has transformed the Shed with ceramic representations of both, but adorned with images from nature instead of religious symbolism.

Do these forms seem to create a contemplative mood because of past experience of such spaces, or do they induce contemplation in and of themselves?

Whatever the answer, Adair has evoked a quiet spiritual dimension that is as much a part of the Southern environment as the demonstrative brand of display that is all over Jones’ exhibition. And both exist amid the increasingly complicated interplay of nature and culture that is an intrinsic part of Watts’ and Traverso’s work.

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Dr. Jerry Cullum’s reviews and essays have appeared in Art Papers magazine, Raw Vision, Art in America, ARTnews, International Review of African American Art and many other popular and scholarly journals. In 2020, he was awarded the Rabkin Prize for his outstanding contribution to arts journalism.