WATERTOWN, New York (WWNY)

36th Annual Artists’ Studio Tour

Saturday & Sunday | November 4th & 5th

10-4pm

Step inside the artistic process this fall!

SLC Arts and the arts community of the North Country are excited to announce the 36th annual Artists’ Studio Tour, where community members are invited into artists’ home or professional studios to see where and how they work on their creative practices!

Visual artists of all mediums, from painters to potters to jewelry makers, will open up their spaces on Saturday and Sunday, November 4th and 5th from 10-4pm to show and sell their work to community members from across the region.

Experience this unique opportunity to see some of the hidden gems of the North Country, and support local artists this holiday shopping season! Community members can participate in Studio Tour by following our interactive Google Map and visiting studios throughout the weekend. By visiting studios and engaging with artists, you directly contribute to the growth and sustainability of our region’s art scene.

Community members can learn more about Studio Tour by visiting SLCARTSCOUNCIL.ORG/STUDIOTOUR

Studio Tour

The interactive Google Map is viewable on that webpage, or can be visited directly at SLCARTSCOUNCIL.ORG/MAP

Map

Participation in Studio Tour is free and open to the community.

PARTICIPATING ARTISTS:

AKWESASNE

-321 State Route 37, Akwesasne: Akwesasne Cultural Center featuring Indigenous Artists from Akwesasne

-378 State Route 37, Akwesasne: Bruce Boots (Akwesasne Artistic Services), ohiatonkwa – Photography by Marjorie Kaniehtonkie Skidders, Sheila Ransom (Akwesasne Artist Studio)

CANTON

-651 SH 310, Canton: Cait Throop (Barefootweaver), Dennis Del Rossi (Bole Creations Woodworking), Nancey Brackett (My Corner Studio), Regan DeFranza (Boundless Bookworks)

MASSENA

-59 Main Street, Massena: Alexis Laneuville (Art Honey Studios)

PARISHVILLE

-65 County Route 47, Potsdam: Michiko Taylor (Michiko Taylor Fine Art Studio)

POTSDAM

-1677 County Route 35, Potsdam: Amanda Hitterman (The Dirty Business Bath Company)

-320 State Highway 345, Potsdam: Dean Thornton (Vulture Moon Workshop)

-31 Grant Street, Potsdam: Katherine Schuler (Schuler Woodworks)

-63 Market Street, Potsdam: The Third Wheel Community Pottery Studio

-22 Garden Street, Potsdam: Shubha Banavar (Chitraa)

-Market Square Mall Hub, 22 Depot St. Potsdam: Brenda Maxson (B. Maxson Art Studios), Dale Hobson (Liberty Street Books), Esthela Calderón (CaldEs), Jim Bullard (Jim Bullard Photography), Anchorspace Potsdam (located in Suite 19)

WADDINGTON

-2 Main Street, Waddington: AC Bistro/Artworks Creperie

-14 Main Street, Waddington: The Gallery at Lake St. Lawrence Arts

WEST POTSDAM

-16 Tanner Road, Norwood: Becky Harblin (Becky Harblin Fine Art)

Questions regarding the 36th Annual Artists’ Studio Tour can be directed to arts@slcartscouncil.org or 315.265.6860 (calls only).

Studio Tour is directly supported by the VanNess Family Fund of the Northern New York Community Foundation, and by the North Country Public Radio as a media sponsor.

SLC Arts programs are made possible with funds from the New York State Council on the Arts with the support of The Office Of The Governor and the New York State Legislature.

SLC Arts cannot guarantee that all studios are ADA-compliant. Please check with the building owner directly if you have a question regarding accessibility. Community members enter studio space at their own risk. Artists are liable for any incident that may occur on their personal or professional property.

Copyright 2023 WWNY. All rights reserved.

Famous as the birthplace of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, Philadelphia delivers one destination, five counties and countless things to do: fascinating museums, vibrant parks, national historic sites and famous (and delicious) food. Yo, welcome to Philly!

Rachael Youngman is the creator and host of the podcast Native ChocTalk. She interviews individuals from all tribes who wish to share their stories, ancestral history, traditions and cultural information.

Native ChocTalk was begun for preservation reasons, according to Youngman. “I am hoping to capture all those precious ancestral stories and history for multiple reasons,” said Youngman. “Not just for our listeners to learn and enjoy, but also for the families and descendants of my guests to hear the stories in my guests’ voices. I also hope in some way we’re honoring our ancestors by keeping their memories and names alive.”

Each episode takes many hours of research, script writing, interviewing, editing, posting and socializing. The Native ChocTalk team consists of Youngman, a site manager and a graphic artist.

Youngman is proud of her Choctaw heritage.

“My tribe was a big influence on me as I began this podcast,” said Youngman.

She promotes information on researching tribal ancestry, Choctaw language classes, Choctaw artists, the CHAHTA Foundation, Choctaw ponies, and Jones Academy on the podcast and website. She grew up in Anadarko, where her dad was the art teacher at Riverside Indian School. Youngman graduated from Butler University, spent twenty years performing as a trained opera singer, and was the youngest recipient of the Young Talent Award from the Metropolitan Opera at age nineteen. She received awards for several years from the National Association of Teachers of Singing for opera competitions.

Youngman has worked in radio, commercials, infomercials and public relations for the Indianapolis Colts. She was publicist for a book about them and led a team promoting the Colts Business Alliance. She has been a dating and relationships columnist, a relationships counselor and currently works in software sales for technology companies.

Her inspiration was her great-grandmother, Ella (Davis) Shofner. Youngman said her sister interviewed the elder for a college paper.

“Ella was full-blood Choctaw, born in 1903. When I was in my late 20s, Ella passed away, and our family was devastated to lose her,” said Youngman. “One evening, I thought of her and regretted not spending more time with her in her last days; then the paper my sister had written came to mind, and I immediately scrambled to find it in the filing cabinet. There it was, tucked away, unread. I sat there, reading every word, and couldn’t stop crying.”

At age three, Ella had been sold by her mother into guardianship for $1,000 to a non-Native man, the wealthiest landowner in the area, according to the paper.

According to Youngman, she would not have known the tragic story if she had never read the paper.

Youngman says she is eager to learn more about her tribe and family through this journey.
“I am writing a book about their stories [her family] in hopes to bring them honor,” said Youngman.

She intends through the book to preserve her own ancestral stories and wants to give all tribes opportunities to do so as well through the podcast.

“If we do not do that now, those stories will be dust in the wind,” Youngman said.

Podcast guests are the experts, and Youngman says she learns from each one. She has interviewed from tribes she had never heard about and those with small numbers of surviving members.

“I feel a sense of urgency to record everyone’s stories, but even more so for those tribes whose members are so few,” said Youngman. “For my guests who feel comfortable sharing, I am all about helping them capture these important pieces of history for future generations. For many years, and rightfully so, our ancestors were told to hide their stories and not engage in their culture. I find that some elders are still in that mindset. Again, I understand why. To talk to outsiders meant they could be physically harmed or even killed. But now is the time to say no to burying who we are. Storytelling is who we are, it is what we are. And it brings us all together.”

She hopes through the podcast, people will want to share stories and dig deep into their histories. She said she believes the best stories are those not found in history books.

“Our people were forgotten for so long. I hope they will no longer be forgotten and will be honored by our bringing their stories to light. This isn’t just for family members who have passed,” said Youngman. “There are so many still living today who have amazing stories and have accomplished so much – business owners, leaders, artists, volunteers, grandparents and more. Everyone has a story.”

Youngman’s future goals are to develop a storytelling curriculum for schools and homeschoolers, continue supporting MMIW efforts, and support Native artists and businesses. She also wants to compile the stories from the podcast into a book.

“I feel I owe the women who came before me and paved what was probably a challenging path to work hard and succeed. At the same time, it is humbling, because with success comes responsibility,” she said. “I believe our female Choctaw ancestors worked incredibly hard. I have to believe that work ethic is in each and every one of us Choctaw women today, and I hope we are all tapping into that. I cannot help but think our ancestors must be cheering us on.”

You can listen to Native ChocTalk on their website, YouTube channel or most social platforms.

“As we celebrate National Native American Heritage Month this November, we recognize Native cultures as innovative, nuanced, and essential elements of our historic and contemporary cultural landscape.

The works of playwright Larissa FastHorse (Sicangu Lakota Nation), composer Raven Chacon (Diné/Navajo), visual artist Wendy Red Star (Apsáalooke (Crow), to name just a few Native artists and culture bearers, help us understand our world from different perspectives.

They offer us windows into diverse ways of thinking, feeling and being–helping us recognize our commonalities and meaningful differences, lifting up our humanity.

We encourage you to seek out and learn more about Native artists this month on NEA social media channels and other resources.” — NEA Chair Maria Rosario Jackson

Jaune Quick-to-See Smith is what author and journalist Gail Sheehy called “a triumphant personality,” someone who has seen off circumstances that would have extinguished lesser lights. Born to a 14-year-old mother and a much older father in a Jesuit mission on the Flathead Reservation in Montana, she was destined to scoop up the learning of the ages, reduce it to its elemental inspiration drawn from deep inside the earth, then apply the panache of 20th-century painting to produce work as original as it is wise, as universal as it is anchored in the visual language of someone with plenty to say.

On view at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, “Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map” is an exhibition of paintings, prints, drawings and sculptures first assembled by curator Laura Phipps at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City.

The point, Smith says while leading a group through the Modern show, is to declare, “We’re still here. … We live everywhere in the U.S., if not on a reservation then in a community.” Operating from an overflowing well of extraverted energy, her tiny frame dressed in black, from a Western hat with beaded band to sleek pants and boots, she makes a strenuous yet easy effort for the people around her. Indeed, to get Smith on the phone, as I did for an interview, is to hear a voice of such animated warmth that it seems suddenly the sun has appeared, promising a lovely encounter.

One might think a disposition as radiant as hers would come from an enchanted life. Not so. “As a kid, life was so tough,” she says. “I knew right away how white people were treated differently from Indigenous people. … Life is pretty scary.” After her mother left the family when Jaune and her sister were young, the girls lived with their father, moving from reservation to reservation as he traded horses for a living.

In time, Jaune was working, too, at any job available, including alongside migrant farm laborers in California. “They are related to me,” she says. “They are Indigenous, too.”

She hasn’t forgotten how the federal government “stole land, took land … millions of acres” owned in several Western states by her tribe, the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation, and gave in return a fraction of those holdings in the form of a reservation. The tribe had property in Canada, too, and there, “It was like a lobotomy,” she says. “You take away food, you take away clothing, you take away culture.

It’s happening in Ukraine. … It could happen here. We must be wise, [live] carefully, stay alert.”

Smith has always been alert and determined. After zig-zagging across the country from a community college in Washington state to a teachers’ college in Massachusetts (she was told she could teach art but not practice it, not as a woman and, especially, not as a Native American woman) to the University of New Mexico, which did not admit her until after three tries. By then, she already was gaining recognition for her work in New York.

Neal Ambrose-Smith, Jaune’s son, also an artist, is with her in Fort Worth. His mother, he observes, “keeps going to the next door to find one that opens. She is not held back by closed doors.” Nor is she held back by previous, successful styles of making art. From a 1974 self-portrait of breathtaking power and beauty, she moved to abstraction over the next five years, arriving at pictures that only hint at her inner convictions with an occasional horse or canoe dropped in as a reference to her background. But in time the canvases grew larger, their authority more assured, till finally Jaune took a look and pronounced them “not political enough, not saying enough.”

Then began collages not only with fabric as before, but also newspapers, lightbulbs, baseball caps, and some with the sayings of Chief Seattle from 1854 (“The air is precious — for all things share the same breath, the animals, the plants and the humans”), others with her own commentary on capitalism and the corruption of modern culture (“Clear Cut Choice,” “Fusion Illusion?,” “Bedeviled by Ethnicity.”)

Jaune is a master printmaker, and during a week at the University of North Texas in 2002 she produced War Is Heck, dramatized by a horse, unremarkable enough, but surrounded by unlikely ironic images such as what appears to be a male Native American dancer winged like an angel; several buffalo, going from benign to aggressive, lined up like postage stamps; a quartet of American flags, small, discreet, nothing like the flag paintings Smith borrowed from Jasper Johns and put to devastating service illustrating the lands and petroglyphs of the earliest Native Americans, the products and slogans of modern Americans and more.

Before that piece came a satirical series of prints featuring Gen. George Armstrong Custer. With one of him lying down, another upside down, another still with a Magritte pipe, they echo a screen-print by Andy Warhol, but Smith’s interpretations are so murderously witty that they bring to mind Gloria Steinem’s masterful uses of ridicule.

Then there’s the trade canoe made by Jaune and Neal. It’s suspended from the ceiling and loaded with Styrofoam objects like Starbucks coffee cups and takeout containers, hypodermic needles and wooden crosses, all coated in red ocher. For me, it’s the centerpiece of the show.

It could be said that with this retrospective, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith is coming into her own. But she has been coming into her own for most of her 83 years, just more forcefully with each iteration.

Details

“Jaune Quick-to-See Smith: Memory Map” continues through Jan. 21 , 2024, at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth, 3200 Darnell St., Fort Worth. Open Tuesday through Thursday and Saturday and Sunday from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., Friday from 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Tickets are $16 for adults; $12 for seniors 60 and over, active and retired military personnel and first responders with ID; $10 for students with ID; and free for those under 18. themodern.org

click to enlarge

• Pamela Polston
• “Partner Pieces: Mint I, Bolo Tie”

Humans have been coaxing metal into utilitarian, nefarious and artistic objects for millennia. Yet somehow, people still find inventive ways to craft it. For contemporary sculptor and jewelry maker Margaret Jacobs, the malleability and solidity of metals suits her aim to make permanent the ephemeral expressions of the natural world, as well as to carry cultural narratives.

In her artist’s statement, Jacobs puts it like this: “I find metal is an incredibly versatile material that lends strength and visual weight to the work, but can also be worked so that it is organic and delicate.”

Though larger, weightier sculptures are cataloged on Jacobs’ website, her current exhibition at Vermont Studio Center in Johnson presents small forged-steel sculptures and adornments in powder-coated brass. Titled “Shape of a Memory,” the show is modest in size but rich in symbolism.

A member of the Akwesasne Mohawk tribe, the upstate New York artist writes that her culture inspires her “to create pieces charged with power, strength and beauty.” Her ability to do just that has earned coverage in art journals and fashion magazines alike. A Harper’s Bazaar spotlight featuring one of Jacobs’ bolo ties, for example, observed that her work “speaks to the connection between community, self, and nature.”

Jacobs’ jewelry — which is really wearable sculpture — includes necklaces, bolos, earrings, brooches and collar pins, all with finely crafted botanical elements: strawberry, blueberry, mint, garlic, mushrooms. The works that she calls “Partner Pieces” attach to both sides of a shirt or jacket collar. One of these, “Blueberry I, Collar Pin,” features tiny clusters of the fruit with two fine brass chains swooping, necklace-like, between them. Another similar set replaces the berries with miniature antlers; in matching earrings, antlers dangle beneath purplish pieces of wampum.

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• Pamela Polston
• “Plantain I”

Most of the wall-hung or tabletop sculptures in the exhibit merge elements from botany — Jacobs calls them “plant relatives” — with referents to Mohawk ironworkers. Renowned for helping to construct bridges and buildings — including numerous New York City skyscrapers — members of the Mohawk and Kahnawake tribes (from upstate New York, Ontario and Québec) proudly passed down their “walking iron” tradition over generations.

Jacobs honors this history in steel sculptures such as “Plantain I,” a wall-hung piece in which a cluster of leaves and stem anchors a diminutive ladder. In a tabletop version, “Plantain With Nail,” an outsize screw nail lays on a pedestal and intersects the plant, whose stems shoot upward.

Jacobs graduated from Dartmouth College, where she has subsequently been a guest lecturer, and is currently adjunct faculty at SUNY Adirondack in Queensbury, N.Y. The long list of exhibitions, awards and residencies on her CV indicates an active presence, and a welcomed Indigenous voice, in the art world. With “Shape of a Memory,” Jacobs quietly but eloquently resolves cultural and material dichotomies with expressions of harmony.

KEARNEY, Neb. (KSNB) – The Museum of Nebraska Art is celebrating Native American Heritage Month with Oglala Lakota storyteller Jerome Kills Small.

Kills Small tells children’s stories and animal stories that have been passed down for generations as part of the Lakota and Dakota Sioux traditions. Among the types of stories covered are iktomi (trickster tales) and ohunkanka (old legends).

The event is scheduled for Monday, Nov. 13 at 3:30 p.m. at Kearney Public Library. This event is free and open to the public.

Jerome Kills Small is an Oglala Lakota from Porcupine, South Dakota, on the Pine Ridge Reservation. A 1997 graduate of the University of South Dakota with an M.A. in Selected Studies, he retired after 20 years at USD. He taught Lakota Language, American Indian Thought, Siouan Tribal Culture, Early Native American History. He is featured in the book Wounded Warriors: A Time for Healing and has a story in the Silver Anniversary Anthology published by the South Dakota Humanities Council. Kills Small has parts in the videos: Sucker Punched, Nagi Kicopi (Calling Back the Spirit,) Lost Landscapes, and Bones of Contention: Repatriation and Reburial (BBC.) A storyteller for public schools, museums, and colleges, he translates, explains, and sings Lakota ceremonial, sweatlodge, powwow, rabbit, round dance, warrior, vision quest, and sundance songs. He sings with the Iron Wing Singers of Wagner, SD. He is a powwow organizer, announcer, and arena director, and he helps in conducting Lakota ceremonies. He portrayed Tecumseh, a Shawnee Chief and British General. He also portrayed Dr. Charles Alexander Eastman, the first Dakota Medical Doctor. Kills Small is on the Board of Directors for the Native American Advocacy Program.

For information detailing the available speakers and guidelines visit www.humanitiesnebraska.org (Speakers section) or contact Humanities Nebraska at 215 Centennial Mall South, Suite 330, Lincoln, NE 68508, phone (402) 474-2131, fax (402) 474-4852 or e-mail info@humanitiesnebraska.org.

Copyright 2023 KSNB. All rights reserved.