Longtime gospel singer Yvonne St. Germaine took the stage next to present the Gospel Recording of the Year Award. Sundance and Sunshine Brass from the Pasqua First Nation took that prize.

Speaking to paNOW after the moment, Sundance noted winning the award was ‘tremendously awesome.’

“This is one of my very first awards I’ve ever received so I’m very thankful,” he said. “I can’t wait to look back 20, 30 years from now and say ‘hey, I was a part of the very first one in 2023.”

Next up was the Song of the Year category with five artists up for that honour: Shawn Adams, Nige B, JJ Lavallee, Donny Corrigal, and Jarrid Lee.

Prince Albert Mayor Greg Dionne presented that award to Metis Country performer Shawn Adams.

Fellow country artist Jarrid Lee was the next award winner, nabbing the Country/Roots Person of the Year Award.

Nige B, a member of the Lac La Ronge Indian Band was a big winner Sunday night, claiming two awards for Instrumentalist of the Year and Rock/Heavy Metal/Rap Person of the Year.

By far the greatest honour of the evening went to Lawrence Joseph, the first-ever recipient of the Willard Ahenakew Award.

Before presenting the award to Joseph, Ahenakew’s son, Lee spoke to the crowd about what it meant to have a lifetime achievement award named in honour of his father, who was unable to attend the ceremony in person.

Surrounded by his family, Joseph was humbled by the award and what it meant to him to be a champion for Indigenous musicians but also to use music to help those overcome substance abuse. He was congratulated with the night’s only standing ovation.

Joseph spent decades as a musician but also served on Prince Albert’s city council and was once Chief of the Federation of Sovereign Indigenous Nations (FSIN).

Following a performance by the Strong Sisters from Black Lake First Nation, the Female and Male Artist of the Year awards were next on the docket.

Falynn Baptiste of Red Pheasant Cree Nation won the award and thanked her community and all her supporters for helping her reach this pinnacle of her career.

The Male Artist of the Year trophy went to JJ Lavallee who in his acceptance speech thanked the province of Saskatchewan for making him feel at home. Lavallee is originally from Manitoba but said he’s looking forward to continuing his music career in Saskatchewan.

“I called Saskatchewan home over a year now and it’s been wonderful. I’m just looking forward to seeing what more Saskatchewan has to offer,” he said.

He added that he was a bit surprised to win the award given the amount of talent that was nominated.

Finally, it was time for the last award, The Fan Choice Entertainer of the Year. Five artists were up this prestigious honour: Donny Corrigal, Jarid Lee, Nige B, Berk Jodoin, Rebecca Strong, Glen Strong, Melodie Gliem.

Donny Corrigal was announced the winner and said after the event that being nominated was worthy enough.

“There was just so much talent here. SIMA did a great job of putting together this whole show.”

The show would not have been possible without the work of the board of the Saskatchean Indigenous Music Association (SIMA).

Talks of an awards ceremony first came to light about two years ago from president Donny Parenteau. From there the vision grew into what transpired on Sunday night.

However, as Donny and other board members mentioned that evening, this awards show is just the beginning as they anticipate greater events will happen in the future.

“We made history tonight as the first,” said Yvonne St. Germaine who sits on the board. “These nominees are going to look back and know where their start came from and to be a part of that, there’s no words.”

“It’s going to attract more younger artists, more people in those northern communities,” added Lavallee. “Now they see that ‘there’s something for me to aspire to and something to push my music towards.”

Sundance Brass agreed with the feeling that the awards show will grow each year, noting that music made a huge difference in his life, and it has the power to do that for countless Indigenous people in Saskatchewan.

“Music is very powerful. It’s a very powerful force not to be reckoned with,” he said. “Music speaks to many levels of people, all ages and to be able to come out and have awards like this with the music industry is so wonderful.”

Plans are already in motion for the 2024 Saskatchewan Indigenous Music Awards with many of the nominated and winning artists this year also in line for a Saskatchewan Music Award. That ceremony is set to take place Dec. 2 at the Broadway Theatre in Saskatoon.

—

derek.craddock@pattisonmedia.com

Snow Bear is helping Indigenous artists earn a bit more while many people are facing challenges with the cost of living. Artist Mélanie Villeneuve of Vankleek Hill also known as Snow Bear, has Ojibwe/Métis ancestry and is selling her work, and the work of three other Indigenous artists and one other Métis artists. The sale is called Snow Bear’s Corner: Kindness Market and is being featured at various community events and artisan fairs around the region.

The artists are Dave Charette of Wikwemikong on Manitoulin Island who lives in Ottawa, Chelsea Brosseau of Akwesasne, Charlene Tolley of Kitigan Zibi near Maniwaki, and Tion Twog-Ki who is Mohawk/Métis.

Villeneuve said the idea for the market is to help the artists meet their expenses, especially when prices are so high due to inflation. A fundraising jar is also at each booth to help raise money for a soup and Bannock meal during the holiday season in one of the artists’ home communities. Villeneuve described Snow Bear’s Corner: Kindness Market as a pilot project to help Indigenous artists eat while facing high prices for food.

“I like to take action and have a direct impact,” she remarked.

Villeneuve also described the art sale as an effort at reconciliation between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people.

Snow Bear’s Corner: Kindness Market made its debut on November 11 at the Creating Centre in Vankleek Hill. It will be at the Christmas Market at Église St-Pierre-Apôtre church in Hawkesbury on November 18, and at the Arbor Gallery in Vankleek Hill on December 9.

Submitted photos of items for sale at Snow Bear’s Corner: Kindness Market

The market for Les Lalanne, the French husband-and-wife duo known for their whimsical, surreal sculptures of animals and plants, has never been stronger. While the record-setting €18.3m sale of a historic work at Christie’s Paris on 20 October reflects the vital link between the artists and their native France, insiders say the demand for their output is global. “The Lalanne market knows no borders. It really is collected by every community and culture,” says Edith Dicconson, the executive director of New York’s Kasmin gallery, which has represented François-Xavier (1927-2008) and Claude (1925-2019) Lalanne in the US since 2007.

The piece sold at Christie’s, Rhinocrétaire I (1964), is a brass rhinoceros housing a desk, safe, bar and wine storage in hidden compartments. It was the first sculpture François-Xavier is known to have created after retiring from painting in 1963. He had participated in just one exhibition, in Paris in 1953, before turning his back on the medium. He told Vogue magazine in 1966 that “painting is done for”.

At his lone painting show, however, François-Xavier met Claude, the daughter of a gold broker and a musician, who would become his partner in art and life. Rhinocrétaire I was included in Zoophites, the duo’s first joint exhibition, held at Galerie J. in Paris in 1964.

“This is the manifest of François-Xavier Lalanne, and it’s crazy to see such a first work being so important within his career,” says Agathe de Bazin, head of design sales for Christie’s in Paris.

In 1966, Greek-American dealer Alexander Iolas showed François-Xavier and Claude alongside Surrealists like Max Ernst and René Magritte in an exhibition that helped put Les Lalanne “on the map”, Dicconson says. It also helped contextualise their sculptures. Although the works could be (and often still are) misconstrued as intellectually lightweight, they were informed by the “Surrealist idea of the radical juxtaposition, the opposite of form follows function”, says Nick Olney, the president of Kasmin.

“It’s having something that looks like a rhinoceros but then unfolds and becomes all of these other amazing things in a bar. You get this sort of cognitive dissonance but also joy when you start to experience them,” he adds.

‘Bringing the countryside to Paris’

This theme is common in the output of François-Xavier and Claude, whether working together or separately. The most recognisable works from either may be François-Xavier’s Mouton sculptures, life-sized sheep made from varying materials that he intended to be shown indoors to “create something very invasive… like bringing the countryside to Paris”, as he put it.

“I call the sheep the gateway drug,” Dicconson says, adding that new clients often buy a Mouton sculpture before falling in love with “the world of Lalanne”. Kasmin will try to induce more such love in April 2024 by opening a major show of the duo’s works curated by Paul B. Franklin from the collection of their daughter Caroline Hamisky Lalanne.

Les Lalanne have had a strong French market, as well as some active American collectors, since their early days, de Bazin of Christie’s says. A 1967 show at the Art Institute of Chicago helped anchor the couple’s reputation in the US. The Lalannes took part in exhibitions internationally throughout the following decades, and Iolas placed their work with such prestigious collectors as the French branch of the Rothschild banking family, British art collector Pauline Karpidas and Gianni Agnelli, the former head of Fiat.

Three years after Iolas’s death in 1987, the Lalannes began working with France’s Galerie Mitterrand, founded by their friend Jean-Gabriel Mitterrand. The dealer Ben Brown, who began representing the duo in London in 2004, significantly grew their market by introducing their work to Asia (his gallery expanded to Hong Kong in 2009) and featuring it at major events like The European Fine Art Fair (Tefaf) in Maastricht and New York. Brown says he also “brought Paul Kasmin into the network at the very beginning, as I knew that without New York and America, we would never succeed in bringing their market up to a level which they deserved”.

Brown frames the three dealers’ championing of Les Lalanne in the fine art world as an important bulwark against their works’ regular inclusion in decorative art auctions, a decision he labels “obviously absurd and the main reason why Claude and François never liked the auction houses”.

And yet, arguably the biggest turning point in Les Lalanne’s commercial trajectory came in 2009: Christie’s auction of the personal collection of fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent and his partner, Pierre Bergé, in Paris. It became the most valuable collection ever sold at auction at that date, racking up €373.9m in the depths of the Great Recession, with two commissioned Lalanne works in particular reaching what Olney calls “big, eye-opening, public numbers”: the Bar ‘YSL’ (1965), by François-Xavier, sold for €2.8m; and mirrors from the installation Salon des Miroirs (1974-85), by Claude, sold for €1.9m. The same year, Kasmin enjoyed a major hit by staging a massive outdoor installation of François-Xavier’s Mouton on New York’s Park Avenue.

Demand for the artists’ output has only grown since. “Basically, you can just add a zero to the price of any of their works now compared with when I started working with them,” Brown said in 2019. Four years later, he deems it “arguably easier to sell their work now [that] it is very expensive than it was when the prices were more reasonable”.

The collector pool for Les Lalanne is evenly split by region today, sellers say. Christie’s data show that roughly one-third of its Lalanne buyers are based in the US, one-third in Europe and one-third in Asia, with a small number elsewhere. Olney notes Kasmin has sold works to important collections in Central and South America.

Demand for Claude’s solo pieces, often featuring playful flora and distinctive metalwork, has particularly grown in the past 15 years, Olney says. Her avant-garde jewellery, including pieces made for such fashion houses as Dior and Saint Laurent, has influenced generations of designers. Her Choupatte sculptures, of cabbage heads with chicken feet made in patinated and galvanised copper, exemplify her craftsmanship and broad appeal.

Record-breaking rhino

Yet Claude’s work still trails that of François-Xavier commercially; her record under the hammer is €3.7m (with fees), for a 2003 butterfly chandelier sold at Christie’s Paris in 2021, almost five times less than François-Xavier’s new auction apex of €18.3m for Rhinocrétaire I. The highest price achieved for a collaboration by the couple is €4.5m, for a hybrid sculpture combining one of Claude’s apples topped by one of François-Xavier’s monkeys, at Sotheby’s Paris in 2021.

François-Xavier’s death in 2008 further boosted his profile and market. Claude remained active in organising exhibitions for both her and her husband’s art, as well as in creating new work, until shortly before her death at age 93 in 2019. Months later, the family’s estate sale at Sotheby’s Paris fetched €91.3m (with fees), quadrupling the auction house’s high estimate. Buyers from 43 countries snapped up all 274 lots on offer.

Despite Les Lalanne’s global charm, selling the work in Paris still has a certain draw for collectors, de Bazin says. Rhinocrétaire I was consigned in the spring of this year and did not need to be sold urgently, allowing Christie’s time to perfect its strategy. The auction house arranged to sell it in Paris this October to align with the art world’s convergence on the city for the second Paris+ by Art Basel fair.

In early October, the sale of 19 additional lots from the Lalanne estate at Sotheby’s Paris more than doubled the low estimate, fetching nearly €8.2m (with fees). Sotheby’s also expected to make up to €11m (before fees) from 31 Lalanne works in the sale of art and design objects from the Karpidas collection in Paris on 30-31 October (after The Art Newspaper went to print). In fact, a Sotheby’s spokesperson previously cited the strength of her Lalanne collection (which Brown calls “certainly one of the best in the world”) as the primary reason the house prompted some shock in Britain by staging the auction in Paris, rather than London.

“There is a strong link between Paris and Lalanne,” de Bazin of Christie’s says. “It tells the story of a French artistic world. And we know this rings a bell for collectors.”

You would be forgiven if you walked into Miriam Abascal Zimms’ home and forgot you were in someone’s house. Inside the doors, you’re instantly greeted by art from floor to ceiling. Whether it’s pieces she made, from Santa Fe or her native Guatemala, the variety is enough to make the waterfront views of Lutz’s Lake Brant the second-most visually impressive part of the property.

When you turn the corner, there is a row of world masks adorning the wall. Just below, you notice the sink and refrigerator and are reminded that this is, in fact, someone’s home and not a live-in art gallery.

That art just may be Zimms’ life, though.

It was not always that way. Zimms has been on a long journey to get to where she is today.

A first-generation immigrant, Zimms left her native Guatemala in 1971 when she was 4. Along with her mother, Rosa, the two set out for America hoping to create their own version of the American dream.

If Zimms’ life were a book, the first chapter would be her mother’s version of that dream.

“I always had this creative side to me as a child,” Zimms said. “But I couldn’t tell my mother I wanted to go to New York and be on Broadway.”

She doesn’t remember much from those first few years in the United States, but she remembers her mother working hard and persevering in the face of discrimination.

“I always had this creative side to me as a child. But I couldn’t tell my mother I wanted to go to New York and be on Broadway.”

– Miriam Abascal Zimms

To honor her mother’s dreams, Zimms embarked on a career in business. She worked as a consultant in solid waste management for county governments, corporations and institutions, helping to plan their conservation and sustainability strategies. She took great pride in running zero-waste and waste reduction programs.

She was making the planet a better place for future generations.

Sadly, Zimms was not far into her career when her mother passed. Zimms was just 26. Her mother was 58 when she died from metastatic breast cancer.

Three other women on her mother’s side had also been diagnosed with either skin cancer, breast cancer or both. And her maternal grandfather had passed away from stomach cancer.

Zimms knew her risks. She started doing self-breast exams immediately. Once a month. Every month. She also got annual MRIs.

For 17 years, she found nothing. Two hundred straight self-exams. Everything status quo.

Until one day in 2010, when she became the fifth woman in her family to have that dreaded realization.

She found a lump in her left breast.

“I was not shocked,” she said. “But I was surprised.”

The diagnosis was triple-negative breast cancer (TNBC). She was 43.

“I remember thinking, ‘Wow, I really have done everything I was supposed to do,’” she said. “I embraced a wellness lifestyle. I exercised. I was eating healthy because I saw the women in my family go from being fit, healthy women to their bodies changing when they hit menopause.”

Zimms came to Moffitt Cancer Center for her treatment.

Up first was three months of chemotherapy. Once that was finished, she underwent a double mastectomy and the start of breast reconstruction to begin the process of feeling whole again. Reconstruction required four surgeries over the course of three years to complete. She worked through it all.

During that time, through genetic testing, she learned she had a BRCA1 mutation. With a newly discovered risk for ovarian cancer, Zimms had her ovaries and fallopian tubes removed.

A few months after recovering from surgery, something still didn’t feel right. She brought up her concerns to her surgeons, John Kiluk, MD, and Philippe Spiess, MD, who called for a CT scan of her lower body.

That scan revealed a suspicious spot on her pelvis. The initial fear was that her breast cancer had spread.

“When that biopsy came back, I got a phone call saying, ‘Do you want the good news or the bad news?’ And I said, ‘Well, I’d like the good news first,’ and the good news was that it was not metastatic TNBC,” Zimms recalled. “But the bad news was that I had chondrosarcoma, primary bone cancer.”

If her first cancer diagnosis was surprising, this new diagnosis was a full-blown shock.

Zimms found herself in a dark place during her recovery from chondrosarcoma, which had followed months of treatment for breast cancer. A chance visit to Moffitt’s Arts in Medicine studio introduced her to the Zentangle art style that would transform her life.

There had been little to no time to separate from the breast cancer, months of chemotherapy and all the surgeries, but she couldn’t take a break now. Her life was on the line.

Zimms underwent an internal hemipelvectomy. She had the majority of her left pelvis, hip ball and top part of her femur removed.

What followed was seven months of bed rest with in-home physical therapy, then one and a half years of additional in-home physical therapy. A lifetime of physical therapy became part of her new full-time job.

“The surgery saved my life,” Zimms said. “But it left me with the inability to use my left leg and took away many of the things I used to do. I’ve had to modify the way I live, including my energy level of productivity.”

During the months of not being able to leave her bed, the negative thoughts crept in.

“I felt like a helpless baby,” she said. “I needed a full-time caregiver to help me with everything. That was when I started to think about the loss of my primary female body parts. My breasts, fallopian tubes, ovaries and now my left pelvis.”

She was depressed. She was down. She was angry.

She describes the feeling as being on a bus. She was on her journey exploring how to live life after breast cancer. Suddenly, someone slammed on the brakes.

“The last four years just came flying forward,” she said. “And I had to deal with it.”

It was the darkest time in her life.

Then Moffitt’s Arts in Medicine program brought out a light in Zimms that had been dormant for decades.

The Arts in Medicine program started in 1998 and celebrates its 25th anniversary this year.

It began with a single artist and a cart full of art supplies. Frances Falk was the program’s first coordinator, serving in the role from 1998 to 2003. Falk would visit patients at their bedsides and in the lobbies and waiting areas, bringing art directly to the people.

Later that first year, the program added a musician and transitioned into an open studio for patients to visit while they were undergoing treatment.

The program is based off an expressive arts model. The idea is to use art for healing and self-discovery.

“Our artists and musicians are not practicing as therapists,” explained Amanda Bonanno, the program’s current coordinator. “They’re not coming up with goals or treatment plans. The control is all in the hands of the participant.”

“No one is going to interpret or impose any meaning on the artwork that is made. As a result, it’s oftentimes a process that opens people up to sharing, and that is their choice.”

– Amanda Bonanno, Arts in Medicine Program Coordinator

Bonanno joined Moffitt as the Arts in Medicine coordinator in 2016. She believes the open-endedness of the program gives patients the ability to feel free in their expression.

“No one is going to interpret or impose any meaning on the artwork that is made,” Bonanno said. “As a result, it’s oftentimes a process that opens people up to sharing, and that is their choice.”

Today, the program has seven artists-in-residence sharing both visual art and music across three Moffitt locations. That includes two art studios for anyone to visit during their time at Moffitt. True to the program’s origins, the artists still use the art carts to visit patients right where they are.

Zimms had visited the art studio at Moffitt’s Magnolia campus some during her breast cancer treatment. But during her recovery from hip surgery, something magical happened.

Marcia Brown was the artist-in-residence working in the studio that day. She had brought over a few projects to try, including Zentangle art, a creation of patterns using a repetition of dots, lines, curves and orbs.

Zimms initially declined. The rehabilitation process she was going through was brutal. She had to learn to sit, stand and walk again. The most basic movements came with a combination of pain and fear that was often overwhelming.

“I wasn’t in a space of wanting to put anything dark on paper,” she said. “It all felt so dark. But that’s the space I was in.”

That’s when Brown had the idea to flip the script. Instead of having Zimms put black ink on white paper, Brown suggested using a white pen on black paper.

Zimms took the supplies home, and the rest is history.

“At that point in my life, people were giving me books and all this big stuff to do at home, and I was not in a mental space to absorb any of that,” she said. “So I needed something small and fast.”

What followed was 300-plus pieces of Zentangle art tiles. People around Zimms quickly took notice.

“My husband and my stepdad would tell me I was really talented,” Zimms said. “But then one of the Moffitt artists asked me to start bringing some of my pieces in and said, ‘Wow, Miriam, you’re really doing something special here.’”

Zimms describes her artistic style as “art brut,” a French term that refers to pieces made outside of the traditional definition
of fine art.

The decision was made to showcase Zimms’ art in Moffitt’s Healing Arts Gallery, which features art made by patients, families and staff. Each of her 300 pieces was framed and displayed for over a year. The pieces told the story of Zimms’ journey. From her breast cancer to chondrosarcoma. They are tributes to her husband, Mitch Kessler, and Moffitt, as well as loss, pain and suffering.

“I did get a lot of feedback from doctors, and people would write me saying that they would stop and look at it. It really did a lot of healing,” Zimms said. “Not just for the patients and families, but for team members who would stop every day on their way to the parking lot. It really touched a lot of people’s lives.”

Zimms left her career in waste management to focus on her chondrosarcoma recovery. Cancer may have taken that part of her life from her, but it ended up unlocking something different.

“I believe that allowed the left brain to shut down,” she said. “And what had been there when I was younger and very creative was allowed to completely blossom and show its face.”

Local libraries started noticing her work and invited her to host shows and speak to art groups.

“People started to ask me if they could purchase this piece or that piece,” she said. “That’s when things really started happening.”

Zimms suddenly found an additional life purpose as an artist and teacher of the Zentangle method and expressive arts, contributing greatly to her own healing. 

Arts commissions started calling. She was connected with Arts4All Florida, an organization that pairs artists with disabilities with galleries throughout the state. To date, her art has appeared in 10 galleries in Florida.

Zimms now spends her days working on new art projects and teaching Expressive Tangling, a combination of Zentangle and expressive arts, to groups both locally and virtually across the country. Although she still deals with chronic pain, PTSD and anxiety, her feelings of depression are no longer constant. They have begun to come and go.

She describes her artistic style as “art brut,” a French term that refers to pieces made outside of the traditional definition of fine art. Also known as outsider art, it’s often self-taught or discovered following a major loss or health impact.

In her art, Zimms has also started focusing on larger pieces, applying repetitive patterns using tangling strokes to showcase a theme of body loss. It’s a theme she knows all too well.

Zimms has 17 scars on her body to document her journey. Each of those 17 scars are showcased in her art.

“Body loss stays with us,” she said. “When there’s a piece of our physical body that’s been removed, it’s traumatic.”

If chapter 1 of her life story was her mother’s American dream, this was chapter 2. It was her American dream.

“It’s really an opportunity that came into my life thanks to the Arts in Medicine studio at Moffitt,” she said. “It came at a time that I needed something to give me purpose. It was a gift and a blessing.”

Zimms and her husband believe in the healing power of the arts, and they have become generous supporters of the Arts in Medicine program. They want to make sure all patients have access to these types of holistic support programs. In June 2022, they donated a piano to the cancer center in honor of Jerry Kessler. It now sits in the lobby of the Richard M. Schulze Family Foundation Outpatient Center with the intent of providing joyful music for years to come.

Zimms is now 10 years’ chondrosarcoma free and 13 years’ breast cancer free. She has yearly follow-up scans to keep an eye out for any signs of new disease.

“I witnessed my mother’s courage. I gained my knowledge and strength through her experience and then through my own,” Zimms said. “Even though she passed when I was young, her legacy is carried inside of me. And no one can take that away from me. Not even cancer.”

Zentangle art is a creation of patterns using a repetition of dots, lines, curves and orbs. For Zimms, the artistic technique opened up a creative part of her that contributed to her healing.

This article originally appeared in Moffitt’s Momentum magazine.

Encountering Earthly Paradise, Colombian sculptor Delcy Morelos’s fragrant dirt wall sculptures at the 2022 Venice Biennale, was an indisputable highlight of the international exhibition. Navigating the maze-like installation encouraged viewers to appreciate and engage with the earth—blended with hay, cassava flour, cacao powder, cloves, and cinnamon—in an entirely unexpected way, elevating the humble soil to the realm of fine art.

“The soil as a sacred element has been forgotten by contemporary civilization,” Morelos told me, speaking through a translator. “I like to show the earth/soil in a way that is has not been seen, so it appears very delicate, soft, and that it smells delicious. I make beautiful sculptures so that the earth/soil can be seen as beautiful.”

Though the biennale was something of a breakthrough moment for Morelos on the art-world stage, work was already well underway on her first U.S. solo show, which opened last month at the Dia Art Foundation in Chelsea.

“This has been one of the most complex projects that I have done,” Morelos said of the exhibition, which features two monumental new installations, Cielo terrenal (Earthly Heaven) and El abrazo (The Embrace). “We spent four years finding a way to make it happen.”

Delcy Morelos, Earthly Paradise (2022) at the Venice Biennale international exhibition, “The Milk of Dreams.” Photo: Ben Davis.

Both pieces continue to explore our relationship to the earth, and Morelos’s desire to make it more sustainable, in keeping with her indigenous heritage, descended from the Emberá, the indigenous people of Panama and Colombia, on her grandmother’s side.

“Those who are making use of the land are not operating from a space of care and respect towards Mother Earth. The people who do are the ancestral cultures, for example in the Amazonian jungle, because they maintain thousand of years of traditions, caring for the jungle and the soil,” she said. “But it is not easy because people are always thinking about making money not protecting the earth. They don’t realize that when they destroy the land, they are destroying themselves, because we nourish ourselves from the earth, and we will return to the earth when we die.”

The show at Dia came about after a group trip that the foundation arranged to Colombia in 2019, on the occasion of Dan Flavin’s first show in the nation, at the Museo del Moderno de Medellin. Flavin, of course, is one of the artists at the core of Dia’s collection, which is focused on Minimalism and Land Art. But in recent years, the foundation has worked hard to expand its purview beyond the white male artists traditionally associated with those movements.

Colombia “was a learning trip,” said exhibition curator Alexis Lowry, who recently started a new job as curatorial director at Hauser and Wirth. “We visited Delcy’s studio and Jessica [Morgan, the director of Dia] and I walked out and immediately said ‘Well, that’s a show.’”

Cielo terrenal (Earthly Heaven), 2023, at Dia Chelsea, New York (detail). Photo by Don Stahl, ©Delcy Morelos.” width=”1024″ height=”768″ srcset=”https://www.mecreates.com/story/news/wp-content/uploads/2023/11/Don_Stahl_DELCY-MORELOS-001-2048×1536-1-1024×768.jpeg 1024w, https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2023/10/Don_Stahl_DELCY-MORELOS-001-2048×1536-1-300×225.jpeg 300w, https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2023/10/Don_Stahl_DELCY-MORELOS-001-2048×1536-1-1536×1152.jpeg 1536w, https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2023/10/Don_Stahl_DELCY-MORELOS-001-2048×1536-1-50×38.jpeg 50w, https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2023/10/Don_Stahl_DELCY-MORELOS-001-2048×1536-1-1920×1440.jpeg 1920w, https://news.artnet.com/app/news-upload/2023/10/Don_Stahl_DELCY-MORELOS-001-2048×1536-1.jpeg 2048w” sizes=”(max-width: 1024px) 100vw, 1024px”>

Delcy Morelos, Cielo terrenal (Earthly Heaven), 2023, at Dia Chelsea, New York (detail). Photo by Don Stahl, ©Delcy Morelos.

Visitors to the exhibition are first greeted by Cielo terrenal, in which Morelos has painted the floors and lower third of the gallery walls—up to the level of flooding caused by Hurricane Sandy in 2012—with a thin layer of water and acrylic binder mixed with soil sourced from Goshen, New York.

“Goshen is part of what’s known as the Black Dirt Region in the Hudson Valley. It’s incredibly rich in nutrients and some of the most fertile soil in the country,” Lowry said.

Morelos also used the soil mixture to coat various pieces of wood and lumber sourced from dumpsters at Dia’s outpost in Beacon, New York—remnants of construction projects from past exhibitions laid out in neatly stacked piles on the floor. The effect is a stark, monochromatic black.

“Delcy is really breathing new life into this material,” Lowry added. “She’s always done these earth-lined rooms with a consideration of life cycles and the idea that death fertilizes life—what is beneath the ground is composed of decay, but also constitutes growth.”

Delcy Morelos, El abrazo (The Embrace), 2023, at Dia Chelsea, New York (detail). Photo: Don Stahl, ©Delcy Morelos.

“The earth is expressed as the transforming matter of life in death and death in life,” Morelos agreed. She also wanted to incorporate earth from her native country, but import/export laws prevented her from shipping soil across international borders. Instead, the Dia fragments are paired with ceramics she made in Colombia from local black earth.

“They were made using this ancestral technique where you fire the clay over an open flame, so it both literally colors the ceramic, but also that color is then augmented naturally, with vegetal pigments,” Lowrey said.

“These elements are more organic, and they are remnants that are found in the jungle,” Morelos added. “It turns out that these elements that can be seeds, shells, and tree trunks that will nourish the plants that will be born in the future. There is a difference in form, but just the same, the elements from Dia can nourish the plants of the future.”

Less than two weeks after the artist’s New York debut, Morelos also opened her first solo show in France at Marian Goodman in Paris, where she just joined the roster. It is also the first time the 56-year-old artist has had formal gallery representation, despite having appeared in numerous biennials and institutional exhibitions.

There, Morelos created another site-specific installation for the gallery’s lower level, again painting part of the floor and walls with soil. But the exhibition also includes more market-friendly pieces, including hanging textiles and works on paper made over the past 20 years.

Installation view of “Delcy Morelos: El oscuro de abajo” at Galerie Marian Goodman, Paris. Photo: courtesy of Marian Goodman.

These earlier works showcase Morelos’s first forays into natural materials, such as red pigments and jute fiber. A reverence for the earth and the cycle of life is the through line across her practice.

“I am a witch—a witch is a woman of wisdom who learns from nature and its secrets,” Morelos said. “I come from a lineage of ancestral knowledge, and I understand that the soil is nourishment.”

At Dia, the second gallery is the show’s titular work, El abrazo, is a towering mound of earth liberally studded with individually placed stems of Hudson Valley hay. Lowry helped with the nearly two-month-long install process, and was chastised by the artist for attempting to insert multiple pieces at a time. “Delcy is the most detail-oriented artist you could possibly imagine,” the curator said.

Delcy Morelos installing El abrazo (The Embrace), 2023, at Dia Chelsea, New York. Photo by Don Stahl, ©Delcy Morelos.

Made from top soil recycled from a Manhattan roof garden, mixed with clay, an organic landscaping compound used to keep grass seed in place, and ground coconut husks, the piece is designed to be touched. Morelos found people were inevitably drawn to the earth at the Venice Biennale, and decided to embrace that impulse. She hopes this creates a sense of intimacy in the work, reminding the viewer of our ties to the earth.

In El abrazo, “the earth is a mountain that embraces you, because I think that people feel very alone living in the city and sometimes they need a hug,” Morelos said.

But the installation also appears to float above the gallery floor, its heavy mass improbably levitating in space in something of an engineering miracle.

“Because the earth is something that we always walk on, I wanted to elevate it,” the artist added, noting that the large scale is also meant to dwarf the viewer.

Both Dia installations take up the entirety of a dimly lit gallery. The aroma of Morelos’s earthen creations, which incorporate spices such as cinnamon and clove, hit your nose before your eyes adjust to the light, which is filtered through scrims installed on the skylights. (The artist recommends return visits with the changing seasons, to encounter the works under different lighting conditions.)

Delcy Morelos, El abrazo (The Embrace), 2023, at Dia Chelsea, New York (detail). Photo by Don Stahl, ©Delcy Morelos.

Olfactory elements have been a key part of her practice for least a dozen years, after Morelos was inspired to try and use soil to make cookies that recalled the scent of maternal milk, mixing in cacao butter, brown sugar, beeswax, cinnamon, and cloves. Over the years, she’s refined that process to give her more control over the organic elements, to prevent fermentation, mold, or fungus.

For Morelos, it’s important that her work activates the “senses that we have forgotten, such as the sense of touch and smell—too much importance is given to vision” she said. “The sense of smell activates our memories, and the memory will take you to those happy moments where you once were in the forest.”

But the artist is also looking to the future, with a career survey set to open at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation in St. Louis in March. It will feature work from the 1990s through to today, including a site-specific monumental earth work.

“The sculpture at the Pulitzer is about the obsession of being owners of the land. People put up nets, fences, and railings to delineate and separate land, saying this is ‘mine’ and that is ‘not mine,’” Morelos said. “But it is absurd to think that we can be owners of the earth. We form part of the earth and we are united with her—we are not her proprietors.”

Quotes from Morelos were translated by Amparo Vollert.

“Delcy Morelos: El abrazo” is on view at Dia Chelsea, 537 West 22nd Street, New York, New York, October 5, 2023—July 2024.

“Delcy Morelos: El oscuro de abajo” is on view at Galerie Marian Goodman, 79 and 66 Rue du Temple, 75003 Paris, October 14–December 21, 2023.

“Delcy Morelos: Interwoven” will be on view at the Pulitzer Arts Foundation, 3716 Washington Boulevard, St. Louis, Missouri, March 8–August 4, 2024.

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GRAND JUNCTION, Colo. (KKCO) – It’s a wrap for the three-day Native American Market here in Grand Junction.

The Native American Market Days Festival brings together indigenous artists and vendors; it’s a celebration of Native American diversity. On its last day, the event featured a world-champion hoop dancer, the Danza Aztec dance group, and bear dance singers.

The marketplace brought Native American jewelry, blankets, art, and so much more. “We bring these people here, and they have their own profession; most of it is the southwest, silver and turquoise, and what their gourds and their blankets, and just anything that these artists will produce,” said Chief Roland McCook, chairman of the Native American Cultural Programs. “So we give them a place to do this, and it’s very lively and colorful here, and everybody’s having a good time.

Copyright 2023 KKCO. All rights reserved.

Nov 13 (Reuters) – Lawyers for a Russian artist who faces up to eight years in prison for replacing supermarket price tags with demands for an end to Moscow’s war in Ukraine told a court on Monday their client would not survive a jail term and must be freed.

Critics say the case of Alexandra Skochilenko, 33, is part of a crackdown on anyone who speaks out against Moscow’s “special military operation” that has triggered nearly 20,000 detentions and over 800 criminal cases.

After it sent troops into Ukraine on Feb. 24 last year, Russia tightened its laws on dissent to try to silence critics Moscow regards as unacceptably divisive when the country is locked in what President Vladimir Putin has portrayed as an existential struggle with the West.

Skochilenko, an artist and musician known as Sasha to her friends, has admitted replacing price tags in a supermarket in her native St Petersburg on March 31 2022 with small pieces of paper urging an end to the war and criticising the authorities.

But Skochilenko, who has already spent over a year-and-a half in prison in St Petersburg, denies the formal charge of knowingly spreading false information about the Russian army.

She could be sentenced to eight years in a penal colony after a state prosecutor asked a judge for such a punishment. The prosecutor also asked for her to be banned from using the Internet for three years for committing what he has described as a serious crime out of “political hatred” towards Russia.

In the hearing in St Petersburg on Monday, two of her lawyers appealed to the presiding judge to acquit Skochilenko who, they said, had only acted on her conscience and had committed no crime.

“You should never punish people for thinking and feeling differently. You should never punish people for objective criticism of the authorities and their decisions,” lawyer Yana Nepovinnova said.

“There can be only one verdict – an acquittal. Times change, but our actions remain forever in history and on our conscience. I will finish my speech with a quote from my confidante Alexandra Skochilenko: ‘This is a test of your humanity. You have a chance to pass it.'”

For Skochilenko, who was already suffering from poor health before her arrest, what she called an “inhuman” sentence could be fatal, she said.

“Alexandra won’t survive in a penal colony,” she said.

Supporters clapped the lawyer when she finished her speech, angering the judge who said her courtroom was not a circus and adjourned proceedings until Tuesday when she said the proceedings would be closed to the public.

Skochilenko will have a chance to make a final statement to the court before the verdict, which could be delivered on Tuesday or in the following days.

‘PRISONER OF CONSCIENCE’

According to the Russian-language Mediazona outlet, Skochilenko told the court on Nov. 3:

“I just wanted to stop the war – that was my motivation. Not hatred, but compassion. I am sure that every person in this room does not want there to be a war.

Amnesty International has declared Skochilenko “a prisoner of conscience” – someone who is imprisoned solely because of who they are or what they believe.

Copies of the imitation price tags produced by Skochilenko are on display on a website maintained by her supporters.

One of the tags seen on the website accuses the Russian army of bombing a theatre in the port city of Mariupol where around 400 people were hiding – a charge Moscow says is false.

Another alleges Russia was sending conscripts to fight in Ukraine, which Russia has also denied. A third cites alleged Russian casualty figures and accuses state TV of not talking about them, and a fourth accuses President Putin of lying and speaks of “pointless deaths”.

The Kremlin says Moscow was forced to send troops into Ukraine to protect Russian-speakers there and stop the creeping expansion of the NATO military alliance. The West and Kyiv accuse Moscow of waging a colonial war of conquest.

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles.

The Nov. 16 Akakū Upstairs salon will welcome two profound cultural muralists: Oahuʻs John ʻPrime’ Hina and Maui’s Noble Richardson.

KAHULUI — On Thursday, Nov. 16, the Akakū Upstairs salon is excited to talk story with two profound cultural muralists: Oahuʻs John ʻPrime’ Hina of “Urban 808” and “DearLoveStory,” and Mauiʻs Noble Richardson of E.H.A.(Endemic Hawaiʻi Artists).

Hina is a world-renowned Native Hawaiian street artist with over 1,000 murals worldwide. After surviving a tough Oahu neighborhood and almost losing his life to gang violence, he turned his life around. In 2007, he founded Hawaiiʻs first graffiti-based art organization, Urban 808, focused on using art to mentor at-risk youth away from drug abuse, gang affiliation and violence. Through the years, he has collected traditional Hawaiian stories from generational families, and recently he began a new journey with “DearLoveStory,” sharing his passion for visual creativity with Hawaiian storytelling. His hope is to share and preserve valuable cultural stories for future ancestors.

Richardson carries the fingerprint of who he is in his artwork through the strengths of his Maui community, where he was born and raised, and raises his own family. He created E.H.A. Murals to amplify and aid the need for sourcing local Hawaii artists to be a creative source for Mauiʻs cultural connection to the community and its economic growth. E.H.A. Murals has nearly a decade of public art relationships, including youth and volunteer mentorships. Noble is also an art instructor for many local programs and schools, including Hui Malama camps, summer intensives at UH Maui, after school programs at Liliuokalani Trust and maintaining Wailuku Elementaryʻs art program school-wide. His work is heavily influenced by Hawaiian values and culture.

Register for free at https://bit.ly/Akaku-Upstairs-Murals; seating is limited. The event will be held at Akakū’s Upstairs Media Lab, Suite 205. Doors open at 5:30 p.m., and the program runs from 6 to 7:30 p.m.

Akakū Upstairs is supported in part by Bank of Hawai’i and Pacific Biodiesel.

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Tucson is a city rich in art, especially expression through painting and uniquely southwestern styles. The La Encantada Fine Art Festival’s purpose is to bring to light the talented artists who live in our community. 

The festival allows any artist in Tucson who’s interested to apply and be able to sell their art as well as display it for select weekends of the year. Each artist is allowed to attend two of the three yearly festivals in order to keep the displacement fresh for those visiting. 

Held in the beautiful garden walkways of La Encantada, artists from all around Arizona congregate to show their craft. In the case of Ute Van, a local artist who immigrated from Germany, her purpose was to show those around her what the beauty of Arizona is truly like. 

“I’ve been painting ever since I was 10 years old,” Van said. “I love it just as much as I did then, and I specialize in natural art, so I do a lot of animals, plants and their magical and whimsical aspects.” 

One of her pieces, named “The Bond,” reflects this as it depicts a Native American girl and her horse. 

“The story behind this one was I wanted to do a painting that shows the connection that an animal has with a person, and I was trying to figure out, ‘how would I paint that?’ Her hair floats into the mane of the horse, and the horse has a feather in it, and the girl has the same one as earrings,” Van said.

Along with “The Bond,” Van has many other amazing art pieces for sale that reflect her own artistic style. Walking around, you may discover, however, that rather than using art as a way to convey beauty, some use it as a way to spread important messages. 

Roger “Sosakete” Perkins is a member of the Mohawk nation and the owner of Powowpop Art. He has a unique style that combines popular culture with 19th-century photographs of Native American tribal leaders. 

“When I was taking a multimedia class in 2012 in Berkley, California, our instructor told us to create our own art movement,” Sosakete said. “I took old photos of tribal leaders and brought them into my digital programs and did a lot of different manipulations, adding color and adding a background to create an entirely different version of them like superheroes, singers or pop art icons and called my art movement ‘Powowpop’ art”. 

A “Powwow” is a Native American ceremony involving feasting, singing and dancing, which Sosakete loves to attend. Sosakete doesn’t just limit himself to his own ideas, however. 

“People want to see their faces on some of these pictures I make because they’re so cool. They also wanna see their families’ faces,” Sosakete said.

Sosakete is a fighter for Indigenous people’s rights, and the reason Sosakete makes his art is very powerful. The slogan of his business is “It’s a good day to disobey!” This is a play-off of the saying “It’s a good day to die,” which Sosakete says was an important slogan used by Native American leaders during the American Indian Wars, in which the United States’ government forcefully relocated tribes. 

“When I say I’m talking about all the laws, I’m talking about all the laws, systems, education, religion, politics and all the different rules that trapped us on these little reservations to keep us off our original homeland,” Sosakete said.

He believes that Arizona is a very safe place to spread his message because of the many tribes that call this state home. The La Encantada Fine Art Festival will run again on the weekend of Jan. 27, 2024, and is located at 2905 E. Skyline Dr. Find more information on the La Encantada Fine Art Festival website.

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