July’s show at the Pump House Center for the Arts is inspired by a reconstructed late-prehistoric American Indian village near Dayton.

“Reflections of Sunwatch: Ancient Cultures” had its opening Friday night in the Pump House in Chillicothe’s Yoctangee Park. The archaeological site was recognized and excavated starting in 1968 in preparation for construction of a Dayton water treatment facility.

Instead, “SunWatch” was reconstructed on part of its own foundations, and is an attempt to interpret the lifestyle that was lived between the Adena and Hopewell cultures and historical Indian tribes.

Half of the Pump House show is art inspired by SunWatch, curated by one of the eight Miami Valley artists. Rusty Harden gave me an introduction and tour of the exhibit in the videos below and in the next story. She said the artists worked to appreciate and understand the site, but not appropriate the culture.

The other half are works by local artists that highlight Native American culture, including fancy dancing in the Feast of the Flowering Moon by Shelley Pocock. She told me that she brought out some of her older art that has not been seen for several years. Other works are by Sara Cory and Jason Vaughan-Kinnamon.

The SunWatch park, as part of the Boonshoft Museum of the Dayton Society of Natural History, has a website and Facebook page. The Pump House Center for the Arts has a Facebook page and website. Also see the SunWatch entry in Wikipedia.

And, stay tuned for a deeper look at the show…

Find more in the article on the Scioto Post, including a video interview. Then see part two, a photo essay with a video tour of the show.

Kevin Coleman covers local government and culture for the Scioto Post and iHeart Media Southern Ohio. For stories or questions, contact Kevin Coleman or the iHeart Southern Ohio Newsroom.

First Friday in Ukiah included a pop-up display of basketry, beading, and other artwork by Native American artists who spent a year using a California Creative Corps grant to teach their craft to students in the community, hone their traditional skills, and have fun with found and harvested materials.

Corine Pearce, a Pomo basket weaver from Redwood Valley, covered a wall with work by her students. “Every completed basket up there is just magic,” she declared, including a fully functional cradle basket that was made by her goddaughter, Tanya Ruiz, for her own son. “I started weaving with her when she was nine,” Pearce recalled. She hopes this basket inspires the beginning weavers. “Here’s your beginning, your crooked beginnings,” on one end of the wall, all the way “to your perfect basket,” she said with an encouraging laugh.

Monique Sonoquie (Chumash, Apache, Yaqui, Zapotec and Irish), whose artist bio is printed on a  banner from a residency years ago, invites her students to join her in using recycled materials. That includes books of poetry, music, photography, and some lighter reading. “We take pages from books,” she explained. “You make poetry out of the page that you’re given, and then you can do art around that poetry…It depends on what book you have, too. At one of the events, the book was The Devil Wears Prada. Thank goodness it was mostly adults at that event.” For an MMIP/MMIW event, students put handprints made with beet juice on sepia-toned vintage photographs of Native Americans from around the country. 

Sonoquie’s kelp baskets were also featured at the Mendocino Art Center and the Noyo Center for Marine Sciences field station during kelpfest last month. She started making them one day when she was gathering seaweed for food and had too many things to carry in her hands and her pockets. In a moment of inspiration, she wove a basket with what she had at hand, which was bull kelp. She has been selling and displaying them ever since.

For her traditional Pomo baskets, Pearce said she used some borrowed materials and some from the wild gardens at Grace Hudson Museum. Her display includes photos of a work party at a basket weaving garden she helped start on tribal land in Redwood Valley not quite thirty years ago. She said the weavers built their own sand bed on the acre-and-a-half site to cultivate sedge, and brought in three kinds of willow, redbud, dogwood, and mock orange. It all burned in the 2017 Redwood Complex fires, “And since California plants are really raised on fire, it was very beneficial for the whole garden,” she recalled. “We were able to not only revive the basket garden, but we also added in traditional plants for medicine and for food. It’s very fancy.” She believes it is “the first dedicated traditional garden on Indigenous land for community use that has been done in California.” Gesturing to the wild gardens behind her, she added, “This isn’t Indigenous land. This is a museum. Same thing in Santa Rosa. They have it at museums, but not on tribal land.” With access to traditional basket-making materials on private property generally impossible, she concluded, “That’s a big deal.” 

Michael Racho is a Dry Creek member who has been doing beadwork and basketry “for the last 20 years at least.” He showcased a beaded necklace with a pendant that is a tiny basket, topped with an acorn cap, that has a very special purpose.

“These are considered medicine baskets for tribal community members or whoever needs a blessing or some care in their life,” he explained. “This one’s out of reed and raffia.” The tiny fingertip-sized basket is stuffed with angelica root and sage, two of the herbs that are used in cultural blessings and prayers. “When we present it to that person in need, it will actually give them some form of relief,” Racho promised. “We don’t know what, but you know, to the person that’s holding it, they love it.”

Racho starts his classes by teaching students how to make a rough draft of their beadwork by lining up their beads before they commit to stringing them. And he shared a key tip about making sure heavy abalone medallions stay in place. “You take your sinew on a needle and you come from behind the medallion and then run it through,” he said patiently. “Then you lay a bead on it and then run it back through the hole, so the bead will hold it. That way, it’ll stay flat on your chest. It’ll be presented flat.” He reported that all of his students, including the young ones, made beautiful necklaces. Most importantly, though, “Everybody had an extreme amount of fun…And just shared their love.” 

Pearce has noted something of a renaissance in traditional basket weaving. “There was nobody doing it for 20 years,” she recalled. She kept offering classes, “and there was nobody coming, but now they’re doing it!” Her ultimate goal is that there will be a weaver in every Pomo family again. “That might be a pipe dream,” she qualified; “But I’m seeing it….We’re almost up to 20, when we went from three. It’s amazing. There’s no limit. Everyone will have a weaver soon.”

Greeting viewers with bright-blue acrylic wings, a tall canvas depicting a thunderbird of Native American legend looms near the entrance of the newest traveling exhibition at the Chrysler Museum of Art.

A man’s face is painted into and peers out of the bird’s chest. The painting, “Thunderbird with Inner Spirit,” is a self-portrait by one of the first Indigenous North American artists, Norval Morrisseau, to have work displayed in mainstream fine art museums, starting in the 1960s.

The portrait is one of several works by Morrisseau included in “Early Days: Indigenous Art from the McMichael Canadian Art Collection,” that are on display at the Chrysler through Sept. 1.

The first survey of Canadian Indigenous art to be presented internationally, the show features some of Canada’s most renowned Indigenous artists and a wide range of art forms.

Color pencil drawings, photography, sculptures, tapestries and centuries-old beadwork are included in this exhibition, which is divided into thematic, sectioned galleries.

One section, “Vestiges of Exchange,” deals with Colonial and Native contact and centers on works inspired by Great Lakes ceremonial attire of the 1700s. Such works include wampum belts made of beads and used to mark the conclusion of negotiations.

A plaque reads: “The trading of objects also recalls the trauma of contagion, reminding us of the often-fatal exchanges that took place between settler and Indigenous cultures.”

A nearby artwork, “COVID-19 Mask No. 8” by Ruth Cuthand, resembles a medical face mask embroidered with glass beads. It represents the inequities in health care that persist in Indigenous communities.

But the exhibition features humor, too.

In a gallery titled “Wit and Satire,” a large painting by Kent Monkman, “Wedding at Sodom,” depicts a scene in which his alter ego — named Miss Chief Eagle Testickle — brings an “arrow of desire” to a cowboy during a gay wedding. 

Large, beautifully intricate ceremonial masks of red cedar, made by Henry Speck Jr., hang from the ceiling in the gallery devoted to the coastal Pacific Northwest.

Faye HeavyShield’s work “Sisters” is positioned at the center of a gallery devoted to women artists. As a child, she and her five sisters were sent to a school where they were abused and forbidden to speak their native language; the work’s 12 high-heeled shoes are thought to represent the sisters “circled in solidarity” to defend themselves and one another against threats, and the shoes’ cloven toes allude to the deer hooves “suggesting the animal’s attributes of elegance, strength and delicacy,” according to the museum.

The show was organized by the largest publicly funded gallery in Canada, the McMichael Canadian Art Collection, which has worked for decades to expand its collection of Indigenous works — a goal shared by the Chrysler, according to Chelsea Pierce.

The McKinnon Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Chrysler, Pierce said that her recent work has focused on making new acquisitions of Indigenous artwork and that the museum is striving to increase the visibility of works by Native Americans.

Just check out the front of the museum, she said.

In 2022, the Chrysler installed a mixed-media light box outside its main entrance doors — formed by big, yellow, boxy and decorated letters. The piece, placed in consultation with the museum’s Native advisory council, spells what the people of the Powhatan Chiefdom called their land on which the museum now stands: TSENACOMMACAH.

Colin Warren-Hicks, 919-818-8138, colin.warrenhicks@virginiamedia.com

___

If you go

When: 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays; noon to 5 p.m. Sundays. Through Sept. 1

Where: Chrysler Museum of Art, One Memorial Place, Norfolk

Cost: Free

Details: chrysler.org

Details

By Cheyenne River Youth Project,

July 06, 2024

SEATTLE — A green oasis in South Seattle is now reclaimed. A native arts nonprofit purchased a stretch of land, then later, a neighboring house. It once again returns the properties to indigenous ownership.

It’s a 1.5-acre parcel that visitors frequently describe as a “secret garden” in the city – with good reason. Walk onto the land, and the noise of the city fades.

“You see the big, beautiful oak, you come through this little channel of the laurel hedge, and it sort of opens up into this mysterious fountain. This shady, dappled light comes through,” said Asia Tail. Tail describes herself as an urban native who grew up in Tacoma and is Cherokee.

On the property, you hear sounds of song sparrows and a gurgling creek.  Old structures like an outdoor fireplace and a fountain evoke a sense of adventure and the long summer days of childhood.

One gets the sense that there is something precious here.

“We couldn’t believe that there was over an acre of green space just sitting in the middle of South Seattle,” Tail said.

The new owners of the land might surprise you. It’s a native arts nonprofit, the Yəhaw̓ Indigenous Creatives Collective. (“Yəhaw̓” is pronounced “ya-HOW’t.”)

“It is definitely unique to be an arts nonprofit stewarding land. I think that that’s an unusual thing in Seattle, and we’re excited to kind of break new ground,” Tail said.  Tail is also the director of the Yəhaw̓ Indigenous Creatives Collective.

They’re breaking ground literally by planting veggies and weeding invasive blackberries, but also when it comes to reclaiming ancestral land once stewarded by native tribes.

Forced migration and forced assimilation stripped away 99 percent of Indigenous land, including from Coast Salish tribes. The practice separated families, suppressed language and culture.

Now there is a growing movement to right injustice and find ways to regain lands lost. In this South Seattle case, by and for Indigenous artists.

A banner lines the entire forward-facing fence that makes it clear, yəhaw̓ is here.

“Yəhaw̓ is a Lushootseed word,” Tail said. “It comes from a beautiful story of lifting up the sky together, of using that word to synchronize movements, and be able to achieve something that no single person could do alone,” she said.

The collective bought the land for $1.9 million in 2019 with help from several grants. It runs 100-feet wide and 600-feet deep.

Then in March 2024, the collective also purchased the adjacent brick house.

“I never thought I’d be so excited about trash and water and power,” Tail said.

“When we need shelter from the rain, we’re so happy to have this house to retreat into. And I know so many stories will be told in there,” said Owen Oliver, a writer. He’s the first artist officially showcased on the property.

When KIRO 7 visited the space in June, artists and volunteers were working the land. The goal for the space is starting to take shape – using the land as a native art center.

“I do visual art, kind of more sculpture,” said Mel Carter, the development lead for the collective.

“I am a graphic designer,” said Denise Emerson, a Skokomish and Navajo elder who grew up in Seattle.

Tail describes the land as a space to experiment. Artists might gather around the old fountain and do beadwork. Or build sculptures that are left to weather with the elements.

“One of the days I sat out here for 13 hours and just listened to the land,” Oliver said. He’s working on a lyrical essay, focusing on the passage of time, and connecting with the land.

What you won’t see at the native art center are sterile white walls.

“We are definitely breaking out of the standard gallery model,” Tail said.

But more than a place to create, she says this land is a second home.

“Being able to find a place in Seattle where native people can gather – experience, culture even if they’re far away from their cultural roots – I think it will be really important for healing for Indigenous peoples overall,” Tail said.

Emerson, the graphic artist, uses historic photographs to inspire her creations.

“My ancestors have been here for thousands and thousands and thousands of years.  So knowing that I walk – anywhere I go in Seattle – it’s where my people were,” Emerson said.

Yet, she says being on land reclaimed — undisputedly considered yours – that’s an experience unlike any other.

“It belongs to us. And that’s what I like about it. It’s a different kind of feeling,” Emerson said. “I’m a part of it and I belong here,” she said.

Volunteers who want to help plant and work the land can stop by on Fridays this summer. Find out more about volunteering here: https://yehawshow.com/events.

©2024 Cox Media Group

Eighth Generation is a Seattle based art and lifestyle brand that partners with several Native artists. #newdaynw