Pojoaque Farmers’ Market showcases Native performers

Jun 16, 2023 By Admin in Native

On a recent, breezy Wednesday at Poeh Cultural Center in Pojoaque Pueblo, guitarist and songwriter Ailani played music while people sold tomato plants and Frito pies.

It’s part of a weekly farmers market that has taken place for several years. Since last year it has also hosted performances by Native musicians and dancers.

Museum specialist Jazlyn Sanchez started inviting Native artists and dancers to play at the Wednesday market after the center, which showcases Indigenous history and art, received a grant.

“They love to be in our market, they love to perform, they love to just be around the Poeh Cultural Center,” she said.

Sanchez said lots of people hear something they haven’t before.

“I think the people that come here definitely don’t know the majority of the artists that we have and the performers that we have, but now they do,” she said.

She said as the center showcases Native art and history, it makes sense to expand its scope to the performing arts at the weekly event.

MCA Denver’s summer exhibitions investigate the histories of Black and

Jun 16, 2023 By Admin in Native

Large collages of layered red paint, diagonal lines and faint silkscreen images stick out from the walls as a video of two people reenacting stress positions on street pavement plays. It’s difficult for the eyes to reconcile the images within these collages, but the longer one looks, the clearer the layered histories become.

The Museum of Contemporary Art (MCA) is now hosting two summer exhibitions featuring the works of Tomashi Jackson and Boulder-based artist Anna Tsouhlarakis.

The exhibitions will be on display until Sept. 10 and visitors can also plan to attend talks with Jackson on Aug. 1 and Tsouhlarakis on June 27 at MCA’s Holiday Theater.

Tomashi Jackson specializes in creating research driven work using paintings, printmaking, video, photography, fiber and sculpture. Titled, “Across The Universe,” the exhibition both celebrates and investigates the experiences of American communities of color as they pertain to issues of voting rights, housing, redlining, access of transportation and police brutality.

“What makes this show special is that she’s done these projects and investigations in Texas, Ohio, Georgia, the Hamptons. But this is the first show to bring the projects together,” said museum curator Miranda Lash.

In her silkscreen print, titled “Make Two Black Property Owners Look Like One,” Jackson plays with color to bring together two histories of Black property ownership in New York.

On the left is an image of Albro Lyons, a nineteenth-century abolitionist and resident of Seneca Village. The Lyons family owned property in one of the first free Black communities in New York before residents were displaced for the construction of Central Park.

On the right is an image of McConnell Dorce, a Brooklyn man who lost his property to New York’s Third Party Transfer program in 2018, which can declare buildings derelict, seize the building and hand it to developers for a nominal fee or, in some case, for free.

“When you look at these histories in juxtaposition, they become almost indistinguishable,” Lash said. “These are actually two different reds. [One] is more orange and [the other] is more purple. Something that she’s really great at is applying color theory to social history.”

Jackson’s work is heavily informed by Josef Albers’ theory of Color Relativity, which is based on how colors are seen relative to its surroundings.

“When you see two colors in juxtaposition in a painting, the colors inform each other.” Lash explained. “If you see orange next to black, it looks lighter or brighter next to white.”

This idea has then been incorporated in Jackson’s work over the years by layering and collaging images of landmark court cases, such as 1965’s Brown v. Board of Education, which questioned society’s perception of skin color with contemporary examples of police brutality.

Jackson will often use colors in high contrast that are opposite on the color wheel to intentionally make it difficult for the eyes to translate what they are seeing.

“These are intertwined legacies. They are not separate. It applies to how we operate in society too. When you have ideas in high contrast, that’s where the tension is,” Lash said.

The artist also uses materials in places she’s investigating, such as soil from Texas and election ephemera from Georgia, as backings for paintings. She most recently employed marble dust as part of her most recent work on Colorado.

The exhibit features 9 years of work by Jackson and begins in the upper level. It concludes with her most recent work in the lower level, featuring a video she recently filmed in Colorado’s Great Sand Dunes.

The first level will also feature an exhibition by Boulder-based artist, Anna Tsouhlarakis, who uses minimal text, color and humor to subvert non-Native expectations of what Native art should or shouldn’t be.

Titled “Indigenous Absurdities,” the Navajo, Creek and Greek artist gives the viewer an inside look into her own identity.

“Humor is kind of an inroad into looking at community, it’s a way of marking that you’re part of a group, when you have a joke that you understand,” said museum curator Leilani Lynch.

In her sculpture titled, “She Must Be A Matriarch,” the artist plays off of a 1918 sculpture by James Earle Fraser that depicts a slumped over Native man on horseback. Fraser’s piece has become an iconic symbol of Native identity since it debuted. Tsouhlarakis turns this image on its head and presents a female-forward piece that depicts women’s hands pointing forward.

Works in the exhibition often use prototypically Native materials, such as binding leather, bead work and tobacco lids, which are traditionally used for Native jingle dresses. But there are also many instances of contemporary materials, such as blown up condoms, a metal wrench, beer kegs and Ikea furniture.

Each work is titled with a joke, pulling from modern sources like billboards or social media memes.

“In her perception of what is expected of Native artists today is a lot of traditional, craft based work. She’s pushing against that with a more minimal aesthetic, as well as humor too,” Lynch said.

Tsouhlarakis’ exhibition is different from Jackson’s in that color is mostly absent, but it similarly attempts to investigate the ongoing narrative of community groups by challenging or resurfacing the histories that have shaped today’s experience.

“When we were thinking about how these exhibitions would fit together, we wanted to work with artists that had through lines and complemented each other,” Lynch said. “They both look at histories and communities in a deep way, just through their own approaches.”

Indigiqueer Festival Celebrates Pride with Indigenous Drag, Art, Dance, and More at Pier 62

Jun 16, 2023 By Admin in Native

by Amanda Ong

On Friday, June 23, from 4 to 8 p.m., the second annual Indigiqueer Festival will take place in celebration of Pride month and Indigeneity at Pier 62. The festival sets itself apart from other Pride events in that it has been organized by and for Seattle-area queer Indigenous people, with a drag show, art market, and food vendors.

“The term ‘Indigiqueer’ mashes up words in kind of a similar way to how I understand my queer experience,” Jordan Remington (Quileute), also known by their drag persona Hailey Tayathy and organizer of the Inidigiqueer Festival, told the South Seattle Emerald. “You have to understand my Indigenous experience and [my queer experience] and vice versa. So just sort of recognizing those identities [and] the way that they interact with each other.”

The lineup focuses on performers from the Pacific Northwest, such as dancers Aiyana Reid (Cowlitz) and Sierra Tasi Baker (Squamish). The festival’s entirely Indigenous drag lineup includes Cherri Bepsi, Baby, Genesis Storm, DuckHunt, Gila Suspectum, Koko Swallowz, and Hailey Tayathy. This will also be its first year with art vendors, featuring queer and Native artists’ beadwork, pottery, and more. Food will be offered by Native Soul Cuisine, a Native-owned catering group.

Performers at last year’s Indigiqueer Festival. (Photo: Robert Wade)

“One thing that we really loved about last year’s event was really just seeing how many Indigenous people came out to it,” Remington said. “That was really touching. So that’s something we do want to keep with for future years, trying to really keep it rooted within the queer, Indigenous community. … Anyone is welcome, but recognize what kind of space you’re picking up in that area.”

The event was organized in conjunction with the Northwest Portland Area Indian Health Board, which came to Remington last year while working on an Indigenous Joy Campaign to create Indigenous art exhibitions. Eventually, this evolved into an idea for a performing arts festival — and while Remington says they realized many queer Indigenous Seattle residents venture down to San Francisco for the Two-Spirit Powwow, they wanted to make their performing arts space a queer space in Seattle too.

“I have to imagine it’s the largest queer Indigenous event in the region,” Remington said. “[It’s] just really giving a chance for queer Indigenous people to sort of gather together, celebrate our community. And also just highlight some of the amazing work that queer Indigenous artists are doing in this region.”

This spotlight on queer Native people is important, especially considering the increased anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in the past few years. “I don’t think [a general audience] even necessarily realize that they’re in danger. So we’re going to be shining a highlight on our communities,” Remington said.

The event has been truly built from the ground up with the talent of the queer Indigenous community. This year, it is also going to have a walk-off competition in the spirit of challenge songs of the Coast Salish tribes, in which you can challenge someone else in a competition for the prizes. It is also meant to give people a chance to interact with other people who are there at the festival, which Remington hopes will have an even greater turnout of Indigenous folks, queer or not, than last year.

“I didn’t realize how meaningful that would be to me to see the community come together in the way it did last year,” Remington said. “Growing up, I didn’t really ever see queer Indigenous representation. And then even when I started doing drag, I was the only Indigenous drag artist that I knew of at the time. And so being able to create that space where other queer Indigenous people can see themselves represented and continuing to grow the community just to provide that representation I didn’t see [is important]. [We] build connections … so queer Indigenous artists can meet each other and get connected and hopefully do cool things outside of the festival as well.”

Kick off Pride month at the Indigiqueer Festival on Friday, June 23, from 4 to 8 p.m. at Pier 62 on 1951 Alaskan Way.

Amanda Ong (she/her) is a Chinese American writer from California. She is currently a master’s candidate at the University of Washington Museology program and graduated from Columbia University in 2020 with degrees in creative writing and ethnicity and race studies.

📸 Featured Image: Koko Swallowz performs at last year’s Indigiqueer Festival at Pier 62. The all-Indigenous drag show has brought in performers from around the Pacific Northwest. (Photo: Robert Wade)

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California artists, chefs find creative ways to confront destructive ‘superbloom’ of wild mustard

Jun 16, 2023 By Admin in Native

While ripping out yellow blooms blanketing hillsides in Los Angeles, Max Kingery has been questioned about his fervor for killing flowers.

But the clothing designer who used the plants to dye his spring and summer lines said he takes no offense at being accused of pillaging this part of California’s “superbloom.” Instead, he sees it as an opportunity to raise awareness about a destructive flower that proliferated in the state following an unusually wet winter: wild black mustard.

Mustard was among the most prominent of wild flowering plants that seemingly popped up everywhere in California this spring. As temperatures warm it is starting to die, making it tinder for wildfires in a state that has been ravaged by blazes. Its stalks can act as fire ladders, causing flames to climb.

Mustard also smothers native plants, transforming the landscape. Its leaves and roots inhibit the growth of other species, creating a mono-thicket that spreads rapidly. There are numerous kinds of wild mustards in California, but black mustard or Brassica nigra is considered among the most pervasive.

Kingery is part of a growing group of artists, designers and chefs, who are tackling the invasion by harvesting the plant to use in everything from dyes to pesto.

Foragers have led edible hikes to pick its peppery flower and munch on its leaves. There have been workshops and instruction guides on how to turn it into paper, fertilizer and a spicy version of the well-known condiment by the same name.

Kingery’s line, aptly named “Pervasive Bloom,” features sweatshirts, pants, tank tops and other items dyed naturally using mustard. On the website for his company, Olderbrother, a model embraces the uprooted weed while donning a mustard-dyed jacket. Other photos show the clearing of the land.

The Olderbrother store in Los Angeles is decorated with a huge panel of the plant’s stalks, leaves and flowers that were woven on a loom by designer Cecilia Bordarampe. The material came from the first harvest when Kingery said his team initially harvested about 450 pounds (204 kilograms) to make the dye. They have continued, removing more than a 100 pounds (45 kilograms) a week ever since, mostly from public land in Los Angeles.

Even that amount is only nipping at the problem, Kingery said.

The plant from Eurasia was first brought to California in the 1700s — it has been found in the adobe bricks of missions. But its presence exploded this year after a record amount of rainfall from December to April. Years of wildfires also created more spaces for the plant that thrives in disturbed lands.

State and local agencies remove mustard from managed lands, but it’s spread to places beyond.

At its peak bloom this spring, undulating swaths of yellow lined freeways. Hillsides jutting up from urban landscapes glowed. Sidewalk cracks were abloom.

“Physically, it’s been demanding,” Kingery said. “And yes, there seems in sheer volume, if you zoom out a bit, that there could be enough wild mustard here to make salads and dyed sweatshirts for everyone in the United States.”

But when Kingery sees native plants sprouting in plots that have been cleared, it makes it all worth it, he said. And, he added, to get the hues that he wants requires a lot of mustard, which in this context is a good thing.

“We don’t want to rip a bunch of plants out of the ground for no reason,” Kingery said. “The idea of something being utilized that is growing out of the sidewalk is a pretty cool concept.”

Artist Erin Berkowitz of Berbo Studio makes dyes from invasive species, including the dye for Kingery’s clothing line. She has offered classes along with a chef who crafts pesto from the mustard greens and mashes the flowers into dressing.

“This is an abundant art supply that is all around us.” Berkowitz said.

She said her work with Kingery showed the possibilities of what can happen if more people become aware of its uses.

“Visually we watched a whole hill of a park be denuded of mustard, which was a very hopeful thing,” she said.

Underneath the towering stalks of mustard, which can grow more more than 8-feet (2.4 meters) tall, blue lupine, poppies and other native plants were fighting to reach sunlight. “One public space, one whole neighborhood, returned to having healthy, functional native ecology,” Berkowitz said after the harvest in the working-class neighborhood of El Sereno in east L.A.

Jen Toy of Test Plot, an organization that partnered with Kingery and Berkowitz and helps people restore biodiversity to their neighborhoods, said “it’s really about broadening what we mean by land care, and getting other folks who might not see themselves as like environmentalists interested.”

To that end, ecological horticulturist Alyssa Kahn and artist Nadine Allan made a zine, a digital magazine, about the uses of black mustard, including to make paper, a face mask and even a kind of natural pesticide to till into garden soil.

Kahn said she was motivated to act in part because she has friends who lost nearly everything to wildfires.

“We wanted to incentivize people to do something about it,” she said, and educate them.

“They just look so pretty,” Kahn added. “They have those yellow flowers, and if you don’t really know kind of what’s happening on a larger scale, you might say, oh they’re just a sea of yellow flowers.”

Jutta Burger of the California Invasive Plant Council applauds the ingenuity and suggests people contact land management agencies to gather left-behind seeds when areas are cleared.

“You’ll never completely get rid of it, at least where it’s been established for a long time,” she said.

Still, Burger said similar efforts to creatively use something have made an impact. For example, she said, when chefs started crafting recipes involving the predatory lionfish and serving it in restaurants, its population decreased in areas, and it became widely known that the species was a threat to native marine life.

“One thing we would like to make sure people know is those yellow fields out there, they were once fields of not just yellow — they were fields of yellow, purple, pink, and blue,” Burger said.

Court artists on their three, very different Trumps

Jun 16, 2023 By Admin in Native

By Sam Cabral

BBC News, Washington

During most federal court cases in the US, the public gets a visual sense of what is happening through pastels on a canvas, not through the lens of a camera.

Cameras and other recording devices have been prohibited for decades in the vast majority of US federal courtrooms, leaving a record of proceedings in the hands of sketch artists.

Their work is done under intense pressure. The images are usually filed at the hearing’s next adjournment which means they can appear on front pages and cable news channels within minutes.

This was the case in Miami when Donald Trump heard 37 felony counts read out which allege he mishandled classified government documents.

Three veteran illustrators had front-row seats but their depictions of one of the most photographed men on the planet were quite different.

They each explain to the BBC how they go about this unique task.

Bill Hennessy

Over a career now in its fifth decade, William J Hennessy Jr has drawn Mr Trump in various settings – at a Supreme Court judge’s swearing-in, after his second impeachment, and even from footage of the US Capitol riot.

But this week critics accused Mr Hennessy of making the 77-year-old in the Miami courtroom look far younger and trimmer than he really is.

“I don’t put any editorialising into it,” the Virginia native, 65, responds. “I draw it as I see it because I’m there, because the camera can’t be there.”

Feedback is to be expected in such a high-profile case, he says, adding that members of the public pleased with the sketch have written him e-mails too.

Mr Trump – who has seen his fair share of courtroom interiors – was “fairly stoic”, says Mr Hennessy, not scowling or grimacing but just looking like he wanted to get it over with.

Since covering the 1980 assassination of an Iranian dissident in Washington DC, he has sketched for all manner of cases but mostly covers criminal cases.

Cameras have been limited in the courtroom since a media circus nearly derailed 1935’s so-called trial of the century, over the kidnapping and killing of aviator Charles Lindbergh’s baby.

Now, nearly every US state court allows electronic devices and even some federal district and circuit courts permit their use. It’s a trend that has Mr Hennessy concerned.

“For a lot of people, court becomes entertainment. For me, it’s news,” he says. “What I’m covering usually is very serious and not intended to entertain.”

Jane Rosenberg

If Mr Hennessy is choosing to ignore criticisms of his work, it’s a strategy that has served Jane Rosenberg equally well.

In 2015, she was mocked and bullied by online trolls who said her court sketch from the “Deflate-gate” trial had made NFL star quarterback Tom Brady look like Lurch from the Addams Family.

Donald Trump in court in New York in April

Mea culpa, she told the New York Times, with tongue firmly in cheek, “for not making him as good-looking as he is”.

Speaking to the BBC this week, she says critics should realise that the job is hard.

Faced with very tight deadlines, stressful courtroom restrictions and no tolerance for creative freedom, the artists all do the best they can, she says. “I’m working my butt off in court.”

Trained as a fine artist, Ms Rosenberg loves to draw people. In addition to thousands of court scenes, she also paints “en plein air” (outdoors) and displays work at a gallery in Massachusetts.

In what she has described as the “most stressful assignment” in her 43-year career, Ms Rosenberg earned a New Yorker magazine cover for a sketch in which she captured Mr Trump turning to glare at the prosecutor in his hush money arraignment in Manhattan in April.

Tuesday’s assignment was equally stressful, she says, with security in the Miami courthouse so heavy that she feared she would not get a good seat inside. But she was lucky to end up in the jury box – in her view the best seat in the house.

“The more time I have, the more likely I will be accurate,” Ms Rosenberg notes, but she says it is nearly impossible to plan ahead. “In a trial, I could have somebody sitting there all day long. An arraignment is usually very quick.”

Elizabeth Williams

Like Ms Rosenberg, Ms Williams covered both of Mr Trump’s arraignments this year.

“The first hearing in Manhattan, he sat there irked and annoyed and somewhat contemptuous of the process,” she says. There was a seething contempt captured by her art.

The Miami court appearance was different, she says, a more defiant Mr Trump who did not speak throughout.

Her first encounter with Mr Trump was in 1987 when he sued to force a merger between the NFL and the US Football League (USFL).

Thirty-six years later, he does not look like his age, she notes. “I think I’ve got worse bags on my face than him and he’s quite a bit older than me.”

Originally a fashion illustrator, Ms Williams has seen every kind of character in court, from drug kingpin El Chapo’s wife (“it was like drawing a Barbie doll”) to rapper Tekashi69 (“he had such charisma!”).

She calls herself a “visual reporter”, faithfully informing the public what went on and complementing the words written by news media.

“Authenticity is extremely important,” Ms Williams says. “I’m like a substitute camera, drawing what a photographer would shoot. There’s no making stuff up.”

But she believes her profession is a dying art.

“I don’t believe for a minute that we’re going to be doing this in 10 years from now.”

More coverage

Graton Rancheria to fund, support Native American filmmakers

Jun 16, 2023 By Admin in Native

Artists and prospective filmmakers with Native California ancestry will gain new opportunities and mentorships. That’s thanks to a multi-million dollar endowment set up by the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria, here in Sonoma County.

The Sundance Institute, best known for its affiliated film festival, announced the $4 million endowment Wednesday.

Greg Sarris is tribal chairman of the Federated Indians of Graton Rancheria. He told KRCB Thursday the endowment will expand Sundance’s 29-year-old indigenous program.

It is open to members of California tribes whether they are officially recognized by the federal government or not.

“We see a lot of American Indians who are starting to get in film and television, but it’s always plains Indians, which I’m very happy about, but, historically, California Indian people have been overlooked, in politics, in film, in all of that, and I have a chip on my shoulder, and I want to support al of my people,” Sarris said.

Sarris made the remarks at a groundbreaking ceremony for an expansion of the Graton Casino and Resort.

Sarris himself participated in the Sundance Institute’s Screenwriters Lab in 1992.

The endowment will sponsor $25,000 fellowships for emerging and midcareer Indigenous artists with projects in development or production and include creative support.

Applications are open until August 28. The first round of fellowships and scholarships are expected to be distributed next year.

Billings chamber to sell ‘signature’ Sharp painting at auction

Jun 16, 2023 By Admin in Native

Indigenous people of the West have long fascinated outsiders, an intrigue stoked by the works of such artists as Charles M. Russell, Frederic Remington and Joseph Henry Sharp. These artists came from the East to roam the Great Plains and document the traditional lives of Native people as they were being forced onto reservations. The illustrious and often romanticized worlds they created became part of Montana’s expanding folklore.

One such work, “The Young Chief,” a 20×30” oil painting by Sharp that portrays an intimate exchange among an Apsáalooke (Crow) family, will be available at auction on July 15 in Reno, Nevada, during the Coeur d’Alene Art Auction. The painting, one of Sharp’s first open-air camp scenes, depicts the family preparing for a sweat lodge ceremony as the warm hue of morning hits the prairie. Grazing horses dot the horizon and tepees rise in the background, merging with a pink-tinted sky.

“The Young Chief” is valued between $300,000 and $500,000, according to the auction catalog.

That the painting is for sale is not unique — the art market is rich with paintings that have drastically appreciated as originals become scarce and “western” continues as a fashionable lifestyle trend.

What is unique is the story behind the painting, created by Sharp in 1905 and gifted to the Billings Chamber of Commerce in 1915 by Charles Bair, a close friend of the artist’s and a well-known businessman of the region.

Some area art experts worry that selling the painting is a mistake in a long line of Montana’s historic artwork being parceled off to the highest bidder. The chamber’s current leadership maintains the painting is rarely seen by the public and should be sold so the proceeds can be used for other purposes.

“The painting is a magnificent work of art, and we are hopeful that it will be purchased by an organization or individual who will be able to fully enjoy and appreciate the piece,” Billings Chamber of Commerce President John Brewer told Montana Free Press.

Brewer, when asked, did not disclose any other works the chamber intends to sell, but Warren Rollins’ “Indian Portrait,” a 38×28” oil painting valued between $15,000 to $25,000, will also be auctioned in July. According to the Coeur d’Alene Art Auction, billed as the nation’s largest auction of western art, the painting also is owned by the Billings Chamber of Commerce.

Gordon McConnell, assistant director of the Yellowstone Art Center in Billings (now the Yellowstone Art Museum) from 1982 to 1998, disagrees with the sale of Sharp’s work.

“My initial reaction is that [the decision to sell the painting] is disconnected from any social or cultural responsibility,” McConnell said. He recalls “The Young Chief” being exhibited during the 1998 inaugural exhibition of the Yellowstone Art Museum, which included a major addition to the former art center that was housed in the old Yellowstone County Jail.

At the time, the museum received a large gift from Virginia Snook, a Billings resident whose family collected art and entertained many artists and writers, including Russell, Sharp, Ernest Hemingway, Will James and Isabelle Johnson. Though the YAM was a contemporary art museum, “We saw it as a responsibility to accept Virginia Snook’s generous gift to preserve that for the people of Montana,” McConnell said. “We were trying to fill out the narrative of art history in Montana.”

The painting has been on extended loan to the museum since 1967, stored as a courtesy to the chamber, according to Laura Krapacher, YAM’s registrar.

Historian Thomas Minckler saw “The Young Chief” in the early 1980s and recalls being in awe.

“It was a signature Joseph Henry Sharp painting of a Crow encampment, very typical, though a very important piece of that period,” said Minckler, who is a Montana scholar and author of “Montana: A Paper Trail” and “In Poetic Silence: The Floral Paintings of Joseph Henry Sharp.”

In November 2022, Minckler was asked by Brewer to assess the value of the painting. Minckler did not conduct a formal appraisal, but estimated it could easily sell for $300,000, and up to as much as $800,000.

In an emailed response to MTFP, Brewer said the chamber board in December 2022 unanimously voted to contract with the Coeur d’Alene Art Auction and based its decision “purely on the merits of the sale,” noting that “the Chamber is on solid financial footing with healthy reserves.”

In May 2023, the Billings Chamber Foundation was created and will be operated for educational and charitable purposes, Brewer explained. “The corporation shall support the educational programs of the Billings Chamber of Commerce, as well as community placemaking initiatives.”

When asked, Brewer would not specifically say whether the proceeds of the sale will be used for the foundation. But in an email obtained by MTFP, Brewer told Minckler the proceeds will be gifted to the chamber foundation.

*C.M. Russell’s “Lone Warrior” is part of the collection of the Billings Public Library.*

Brewer told MTFP that the board is considering holding the principal similar to an endowment, “which will allow the asset to provide value to the community for many years to come.” Some initiatives that Brewer foresees the chamber supporting include diversity, equity and inclusion efforts, workforce development and increasing tourism.

The sale hasn’t been publicized in Billings, but the art was displayed at the C.M. Russell Auction in Great Falls in August 2022 and in several national art publications to generate interest, Brewer said.

SHARP AMONG THE CROWS

Both Sharp and Russell came west in search of something mystical and ruggedly romantic, their brushes conjuring grand scenes: part folklore, part observation of Indigenous people who lived in connection with the land for thousands of years.

Born in Ohio in 1859, Sharp began painting at age 14. He attended the McMicken School of Design in Cincinnati and then studied in Antwerp, Munich and Paris among the modernists and the impressionists. He brought their sweeping brush strokes and casual style back with him to America. His subjects ranged from florals to landscapes to portraits, but he is perhaps best known for his portrayal of Native Americans at the turn of the century. He painted with a familiarity gained from living on the Crow Reservation and frequenting the Blackfeet Reservation in the early 1900s. His impressionistic and intimate scenes of Native life and the tribes of the region were rich with detail and the nuances of everyday life.

“He was such a versatile painter,” Minckler said. “He was known for firelight scenes when the sun is just starting to set, illuminating the inside of the tepees. He painted figural scenes in the Southwest, and his Crow and Blackfoot camps are just masterfully painted.”

Sharp’s paintings contrasted with the works of his contemporaries, who often painted the clashing of Native people with western pioneers.

“Frederic Remington and, to a lesser degree, Charles Russell, especially in his early work, tended to portray the Indian as a malevolent force,” Peter Hassrick wrote in “The Charles M. Bair Family Collection,” published by the Yellowstone Art Museum in 2004. “They were pictured … as resisters of civilization, to be feared and revered for their bellicose traditions.”

When Sharp arrived at Crow Agency in 1902, he met Charles Bair, who leased land on the reservation to run sheep and cattle. Bair became Sharp’s largest customer in Montana, as described by Carolyn Reynolds Riebeth in her book “J.H. Sharp Among the Crow Indians 1902–1910.” Riebeth noted that Bair “would buy paintings for gifts and for himself. A fine one in the [Billings Chamber of Commerce] is long ago a gift from Bair.”

Riebeth was the daughter of Indian Agent Samuel Guilford Reynolds, and the family arrived the same year as Sharp to reside on the Crow Reservation. Bair, Sharp and Reynolds became close friends. Bair even gave Sharp a covered sheep wagon with a stove to use during his outings to paint in the winter, as Sharp was drawn to the winter landscapes of the plains.

“Bair was the patron, Sharp the creative force, and Reynolds the facilitator,” according to Hassrick.

In 1915, Bair gifted “The Young Chief” to the Billings Commercial Club (later renamed the Billings Chamber of Commerce) as a “thank you” for promoting a showing of Sharp’s works, according to Brewer.

Minckler recalled speaking to Alberta Bair, the daughter of Charles Bair, in the early 1980s about the painting. They were members of the “Yellowstone Corral of the Westerners,” a chapter of the international history group that gathered periodically at the Northern Hotel downtown. “She said her father was a great friend of Billings,” Minckler said. “At the time he gifted the painting, it was perhaps worth $400 or $500. That was a lot of money back in 1904. He wasn’t just gifting for fun.”

Elizabeth Guheen, executive director of the Charles M. Bair Family Museum in Martinsdale, did not return inquiries for comment for this story.

“The Young Chief” demonstrated a shift in Sharp’s subject matter, according to author Hassrick. “Such paintings came to be considered something of a corrective in the pictorial interpretation of the American Indian … Sharp, having lived peaceably for so long among the Pueblo in Taos and the Crow in Montana, explored another more accommodating dimension of Native life.”

Though Sharp shied away from painting scenes of conflict, he did paint the battlefield from Custer’s last stand. From the back window of his studio at Crow Agency, Riebeth wrote, he could see Custer Hill.

“Custer Battlefield,” a thickly layered, 24×36” oil painting depicting the Little Big Horn Valley blanked in snow with the battlefield in the distance, is owned by the Billings Public Library. It is one ofsix paintings by Sharp, dating back to the early 1900s, owned by the Billings library. Sharp donated the painting to the library in 1944 in memory of Reynolds. The painting was described as one of his few remaining Crow Reservation paintings in a letter from Riebeth, acting on Sharp’s behalf, to offer the artwork to what was then the Parmly Billings Library.

As city assets, the paintings belong to the people of Billings, local historian Joseph Lanning told MTFP. The collection also includes a watercolor by Russell, six hand-tinted prints by photographer L.A. Huffman, and Luther “Yellowstone” Kelly’s 1870s oiled-silk map.

Lanning, who oversees the library’s archives, described the library in the early 1900s as the place residents went for cultural exposure, which is why such artworks hung on its walls. Sharp, who held painting demonstrations at the library during his “old days,” Riebeth wrote, believed the library was “a logical place for a memorial to my father, and who I know was Mr. Sharp’s best friend in Montana and one of his best anywhere.”

Lanning utilizes the library’s collection of art for educational programming and to represent the myriad cultures in the region.

“It’s very important that I don’t use this art to just look back,” he said. “I want to know how I can use this art collection going forward, not just teaching new generations about it, but seeing them through a new lens and getting new voices and interpretations of them.”

Due to their value, the paintings are not hung at the library permanently, but rather stored in the Yellowstone Art Museum’s vault, Lanning said.

A LEGACY OF LOSSSelling Sharp’s work is part of a larger story of loss that dates back at least to the 1950s, when Montanans lost one of the greatest collections of C.M. Russell’s works to Amon G. Carter, a wealthy Texan who used the art as the foundation of the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth, Texas.

Russell, who was born in 1864 in St. Louis, came to Montana at age 16 and never left, becoming internationally known as the “original cowboy artist.” After his death in 1926, his widow, Nancy Russell, sought to ensure her husband’s legacy in Montana and donated to the city of Great Falls his studio and its contents, which would become part of the C.M. Russell Museum.

Russell’s works were coveted during his lifetime and even more so after his death. A robust collection of paintings made their way to Billings in the 1940s after the death of one of Russell’s longtime friends, Malcom Mackay. His son, Bill, in the book “Montana’s Charlie Russell: Art in the Collection of the Montana Historical Society,” remembered his father’s love of Montana to be “deep and abiding. Living in Montana was a particular way of life, and it was easy to see why the paintings of Charles M. Russell immediately caught dad’s fancy.”

The Mackay collection expanded to the point where the family built a “Russell Room” in their New Jersey home to display the collection of paintings, drawings and bronze sculptures, according to Montana Historical Society archives. After Malcom passed away in 1932, his wife, Helen, approached the Northern Hotel in Billings about displaying the collection. The hotel was being rebuilt after a devastating fire and boasted of its state-of-the-art (and fireproof) new facility. When it opened in July 1942, Russell’s paintings were on display in the lobby and became a tourist attraction for the next decade.

The leaders of the Montana Historical Society in Helena also wanted to share Russell’s legacy. Director K. Ross Toole pushed to expand the society and establish art galleries and a museum, and in 1952 he formalized the acquisition of the Mackay Collection of Russell paintings and bronzes, spurred by the loss that same year of another great collection of Russell’s works obtained by Sid Willis, owner of the Mint saloon, which operated in downtown Great Falls through the 1960s. Having served him drinks and befriended the artist over the years, Willis collected a great deal of Russell’s work.

Willis sold his collection of nearly 100 original oil paintings, watercolors, pen and ink drawings, illustrated letters and clay models in 1945 to the Mint Corporation, an organization established by Maurice and Gretchen Egan of Billings and George and June Sterling of Great Falls, according to the publication “The Mint Collection and the Saloon Entrepreneurs” by Paul T. Devore. A clause in the sale required that if the collection were to be resold, it would first be offered to Montanans, and in 1948, it was. The Charles M. Russell Memorial Committee was formed to raise the $125,000 asking price, and when it failed to raise even half that amount, the collection was purchased by Amon Carter.

After the loss of the Willis collection, Helen Mackay decided it was time to offer the family’s collection to the state, and asked for $50,000 — a fraction of its worth. Toole went about fundraising, promoting the collection as the last chance to keep a large body of Russell’s work intact and in the state.

“We simply could never explain its loss to our children. We could never rationalize our apathy and selfishness,” Toole wrote in a society brochure to promote the purchase. “Are we awake enough to save this last and finest collection?” The effort succeeded, and the collection now makes up the Montana Historical Society’s Charles M. Russell room.

31-year-old’s dog grooming business brings in $1.3 million a year: ‘I came to the U.S. with two scissors and a clipper’

Jun 16, 2023 By Admin in Native

Gabriel Feitosa has a knack for turning animals into art.

At his grooming salon in San Diego, anything is possible: Bernedoodles become giraffes and poodles become Pokémon.

Feitosa, a native of São Paulo, Brazil, opened Gabriel Feitosa Grooming Salon in 2018, capitalizing on a $1.3 billion global pet grooming market.

Feitosa and his 10 employees groom about 20 dogs a day, and at least 500 per month, the 31-year-old tells CNBC Make It. But many of the animals he works with don’t just get a haircut — they get a full makeover.

As a dog grooming artist, Feitosa combines traditional grooming techniques with unique designs, and uses vegan, pet-friendly dyes. His larger-than-life creations have amassed a cult social media following, with over 2 million followers on TikTok and 400,000 on Instagram.

The intricate designs can take between 3 and 5 hours to complete, including food and bathroom breaks for the pup, and cost anywhere from $500 to $1,200. In a typical week, Feitosa works between 40 and 50 hours.

The salon brought in about $1.2 million last year, according to tax documents reviewed by CNBC Make It. Feitosa earned another $125,500 in 2022 for brand deals and sponsorships.

“This salon is a dream for me,” says Feitosa. “I came to the U.S. with two scissors and a clipper, and now I have a place where I feel like an artist and show the world that this career is possible.”

Finding career inspiration while running an errand

Feitosa’s dog grooming career began when he was 12.

Feitosa would take his sister’s dog, Icaro, to the local groomer in São Paulo whenever he needed a bath and a haircut.

Little did he know these trips to the groomer would jumpstart a fulfilling career of his own. Feitosa was fascinated watching the groomer bathe, cut and spruce up the dogs.

“I thought, ‘Wow, this lady gets to play with dogs all day and make money?'” he says. “I just got obsessed.”

Feitosa was eager to learn more, so he asked the groomer to teach him how to wash dogs. Soon, he started working at the shop after school.

He left high school right before graduating to pursue dog grooming as his full-time career, working at the salon and teaching dog grooming at a vocational school based on his real-world learnings. Pet grooming does not require specialized education or certification, and Feitosa says he did not complete a formal education program.

From artist to entrepreneur

Shortly after he turned 23, Feitosa was offered a grooming internship with a dog breeder in Sacramento, Calif. and moved to the U.S.

He spent the next three years working with groomers and dog shows around the U.S. as part of the internship before settling in San Diego with his then-husband in 2017.

In San Diego, Feitosa got a part-time job as a dog groomer for a small salon with a pet boutique and bakery in the front. He took on a second part-time gig assisting a poodle breeder to make ends meet.

Several months later, Feitosa’s boss approached him with a deal: She would sell him her grooming business, which included all of the equipment in the shop, as well as her client list, for about $40,000. He would also have to pay the $1,100 monthly rent for the space.

Feitosa took the offer and grew his grooming business in the back of the building while his former boss ran the pet boutique and bakery in the front.

Feitosa says it was challenging to balance his artistic pursuits with the responsibilities of being a business owner.

Photo: Tasia Jensen

But having the freedom to experiment with designs trumped the headaches of running the shop, like renovating the space and managing employees.

“Sometimes, you need to take a leap of faith not knowing if it’s going to work out,” he says. “But I was excited to create a safe space where people — and their dogs — could feel good, and I could do what I love.”

The salon shut down for two months at the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, but was deemed an essential business and allowed to re-open in May 2020.

That same month, Feitosa’s former boss retired, and he took over the lease for the entire ground floor of the building.

He received a small business loan of about $60,000 from the government, which helped cover the costs of renovating the space and hiring additional help.

‘It brings so much joy to people’

In 2021, Feitosa was cast on “Pooch Perfect,” a competition TV show for dog grooming artists on ABC, where he was a finalist.

That opportunity helped him grow his social media following and business. Feitosa says people have flown in from other states just to bring their dogs into his salon.

He’s transformed shelter pets waiting to be adopted, family pets and therapy dogs that work in hospitals.

“The designs might seem fancy and unnecessary, but the amount of smiles you put on people’s faces by walking by with a dog in one of these designs is an unforgettable experience,” he says. “It brings so much joy to people.”

Looking ahead, Feitosa hopes to open a second grooming salon in Los Angeles and host his own dog grooming TV show. He thinks his 12-year-old self would be proud of where he ended up.

“I’ve learned that success is a consequence of following your passion and your purpose,” says Feitosa. “If grooming dogs is the most random thing, but that’s what you love doing and you do it to the fullest and hardest you can … why can’t you achieve wealth and success?”

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Review: A heroic Robert Motherwell survey at the Fort Worth Modern

Jun 16, 2023 By Admin in Native

FORT WORTH — If mad Ireland hurt W.B. Yeats into poetry, as W.H. Auden averred, the rise of fascism and World War II stirred up defiant new energies in the visual arts. Thanks to European artists fleeing oppression and destruction, a lot of those energies landed on these shores, in turn challenging American artists to find new modes of expression. In the 1940s, as Robert Hughes has written, there were more modern masterpieces by European artists to be seen in New York than anywhere else.

Centered in New York, a powerful artistic reaction was what soon was dubbed abstract expressionism. A whole group of artists born in the first two decades of the 20th century rejected obvious representation in favor of slashes, washes, blobs and dribbles of paint. They included the Armenian-born Arshile Gorky, the Latvian-native Mark Rothko and the Dutch-born Willem de Kooning, but also the native-born Adolph Gottlieb, Clyfford Still, Franz Kline and Jackson Pollock.

The youngest of that initial group, born in 1915 and educated in philosophy and literature as well as art, Robert Motherwell became its intellectual spokesman. Writing and editing publications and teaching, he was also a prolific painter who explored abstraction, gesture and texture.

“Robert Motherwell: Pure Painting,” currently on display at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, is billed as the first major exhibition of the artist’s work in more than a quarter century. Organized by guest curator Susan Davidson, it includes more than 50 paintings tracing the developments of a 50-year career. (The Fort Worth Modern itself owns 72 Motherwells in various media, a collection second only to that of The Museum of Modern Art in New York.)

Robert Motherwell’s 1962 work “Caprice No. 3” is featured in the Fort Worth exhibition that traces the developments of the artist’s 50-year career. (Krause & Johansen)

The son of a prosperous banker, Motherwell grew up in Washington state and California. He took early lessons in painting, but he was also drawn to literature, especially French poetry from Baudelaire and Mallarmé to Valéry. He got a bachelor’s degree in philosophy at Stanford, and, after a prewar European tour with his family, began Ph.D. studies in philosophy at Harvard.

But his real passion was art, and after he switched to studying art history at Columbia, his professor, Meyer Schapiro, encouraged him to give up academics to become a painter. Acquaintance with surrealists who’d washed up in New York in the early 1940s introduced Motherwell to artistic automatism: spontaneous creation, without a plan.

Ironically, as his career progressed, Motherwell was an obsessive reviser. After a painting had been shown, he was entirely capable of asking for its return to make extensive changes. “I begin a painting with a series of mistakes,” he wrote in 1947. “The painting comes out of the correction of mistakes by feeling … by innumerable trials and errors.”

Although himself an intellectual, Motherwell saw painting as a visceral and emotional experience, calling his work “a barbaric force.” While several recurrent themes can be seen in his oeuvre, much of it based on a limited palette of black, white and ocher, he didn’t have a definitive style in the sense of a Pollock or Rothko. Indeed, the Fort Worth show displays the breadth of his imagery and approaches.

Robert Motherwell is best known for his “Elegy to the Spanish Republic” series, which eventually grew to more than 250 paintings and works on paper. As with many artists and intellectuals of the day, Motherwell was deeply troubled by the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War.(Copyright 2023 Dedalus Foundation Inc. / Licensed by the Artist)

Given Motherwell’s extensive awareness of modern art, and friendship with many of his contemporaries, it’s no surprise to see occasional winks and nods toward others’ work. There’s more than a little Picasso in La Belle Mexicaine and Three Figures, both from 1941. The Garden Window looks like an abstracted Matisse.

Motherwell is best known for his Elegy to the Spanish Republic series, which eventually grew to more than 250 paintings and works on paper. As with many artists and intellectuals of the day, Motherwell was deeply troubled by the 1936-39 Spanish Civil War, in many respects a dress rehearsal for World War II, and by the subsequent atrocities and oppression from Spanish Gen. Francisco Franco’s regime.

The signature look of this series is black on white, the black paint roughly laid on in alternating vertical swaths and ovoid shapes, with drips and dribbles here and there. “They are funeral pictures,” Motherwell wrote, “laments, dirges, elegies — barbaric and austere.” Related paintings titled Iberia have masses of black all but obliterating dying embers of white, gray and/or ocher at the bottom.

A very different series of paintings titled Open, from 1967 to 1974, depicts suspended rectangles, incompletely outlined or occasionally filled in with contrasting color — sometimes visibly “corrected” with overpainting. The effect here is austere, intellectual, anti-emotional, although the fuzzy outlines and scruffy painterly textures suggest something provisional, in process. But the format could be pressed into emotional duty, too, as in the stark Open No. 150 in Black and Cream (Rothko Elegy). (Rothko died by suicide in February 1970.)

Motherwell was capable of a light touch as well, even whimsy. With more varied geometries and more emphasis on color, a number of paintings from the mid-1940s seem playful, even unashamedly decorative. The Emperor of China and The Checkered Skirt are fantasy caricatures that could almost be by Klee.

Summer vacations in Spain, France and Italy in 1958 and 1960 with Motherwell’s new wife, fellow artist Helen Frankenthaler, yielded new openness and color — even experimentation with Frankenthaler’s smearing effects with paint thinned by turpentine. (The marriage, third of Motherwell’s four, lasted only until 1971.) Summers in Italy and Provincetown, Mass., inspired bold gestures evocative of waves and swimmers.

Motherwell remained active until his death in 1991, sticking to abstraction through successive trends of pop art and minimalism. The Fort Worth show is devoted solely to paintings, with none of Motherwell’s extensive works on paper and with collage. And the 1970s and ‘80s are far less represented than the three earlier decades.

Still, you can see the very last Elegy to the Spanish Republic, No. 172, completed in 1990. With smudges of gray on the white background, the slashes and ovals of black seem particularly large and menacing, not entirely hiding squiggles and smears of blood red. What Motherwell called his “barbaric force” was not yet spent.

Details

“Robert Motherwell: Pure Painting” is on display through Sept. 17 at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, 3200 Darnell St., Fort Worth. 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Sundays; open until 8 p.m. Fridays. $16; discounts for students, seniors, active/retired military personnel and first responders; free for under 18. Half-price tickets on Sundays and free admission on Fridays. 817-738-9215, themodern.org.

Oscar Howe Summer Art Institute Held At USD

Jun 16, 2023 By Admin in Native

High school students arrived on the University of South Dakota campus during the second week of June to take part in the Oscar Howe Summer Art Institute. The institute lasts a full week. Students learn about the late artist, Oscar Howe and his role in Native American History.

Howe was born on the Crow Creek Indian Reservation in 1915. He went on to be credited with bringing Native American art and artists to the forefront of the art scene. In the 1960s he taught a small group of students on USD’s campus.

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