Native American Heritage Month
November marks Native American Heritage Month and here, at Hudson Valley MOCA, we are proud to display works by two extraordinary contemporary artists, Jeffrey Gibson and Marie Watt.
HVMOCA’s history with Jeffrey goes back to 2015 when he appeared in our exhibition, ‘The New Hudson River School’ and later when he worked with the advanced creative writing students from Peekskill’s Middle School. Jeffrey’s roots are in the Cherokee-Choctaw nations. One of the rare contemporary artists to be supported through art school by his tribe, Jeffrey comes with a classic art background having graduated from the Art Institute of Chicago and receiving his MFA from the Royal College of Art, London. Early works referenced abstract painting but gradually morphed into an integrated language that embraced his native artistic heritage. Jingles, beads, studs, geometric imagery, potent phrases embellished ‘Everlast’ punching bags, tapestries and figures, metaphors that cut to the heart. Marie Watt, a graduate of Yale, has roots in the Seneca nation, her language mainly textile based, drawing on Iroquois proto-feminism and indigenous teachings. She explores the intersection of history, community, and storytelling. Through powerful communal sewing circles she elicits words, ‘mother’, ‘peace’, ‘beautiful’, ‘strong’, ‘time’, each embroidered on squares, sometimes on new felt, often on repurposed ‘story blankets’ that bear the scars and marks of time and memory. Her blanker obelisks can be frontal, human size, or totemic, reaching to the clouds, some 10ft’ high.
When artists work with materials that are viewed as ‘craft’ based, they blur the boundaries between ‘fine art’ and ‘craft’, often making their works more difficult to categorize, to accept. Add to that the challenge of being accepted on merit, despite heritage, culture, or racial nuance. These two artists have managed to bridge these challenges, creating works that are universal in appeal, that speak to the heart. And after all, is that not what great art must do.
Jeffrey Gibson, Someone Great is Gone, 2013
Someone Great is Gone, 2013. Elk hide, acrylic, paint, graphite, colored pencil. 73 x 66 inches.
Jeffrey Gibson
American, born 1972
Gibson’s artworks are in the permanent collections of many major art museums, including the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Smithsonian, the National Gallery of Canada, the Nasher, the Nerman, Crystal Bridges, and the Denver Art Museum. Recent exhibitions include SCAD Museum of Art (Savannah and Atlanta), National Academy Museum in New York, Institute of Contemporary Art Boston, Cornell Museum of Fine Art, Denver Art Museum and Ruth and Elmer Wellin Museum of Art. He has participated in Greater New York, Prospect New Orleans, the Everson Biennale, and Site Santa Fe. Gibson is a member of the faculty at Bard College and a past TED Foundation Fellow and Joan Mitchell Grant recipient. He was included in the 2019 Whitney Biennial.
Marie Watt, Forerunner, 2020
Forerunner, 2020. Vintage Italian glass beads, industrial felt, thread. 39 x 102 x 0.25 in (99.06 x 259.08 cm)
Marie Watt
American, born 1967
Marie Watt’s work has been on view in 2020 at: The Whitney Museum in the exhibition Making Knowing: Craft in Art, 1950–2019, the Yale University Art Gallery in Place, Nations, Generations, Beings: 200 Years of Indigenous North American Art, the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists.
Watt was born and raised in Seattle, Washington, and currently resides in Portland, Oregon. Her work is in the permanent collections of National Gallery of Canada, the Portland Art Museum, the Smithsonian, Renwick Gallery, Albright-Knox Gallery, The Whitney Museum in NY, Seattle Art Museum, US Library of Congress, Denver Art Museum, Crystal Bridges Museum, and more.