In Berkshires venues, Native perspectives

 

The Hudson Valley-based artist Jeffrey Gibson, whose new installation “Power Full Because We’re Different” opens Nov. 2 at Mass MoCA, draws from the vivid colors and patterns of abstract art and finds inspiration in the regalia of Indigenous faith ceremonies. Photo courtesy of Mass MoCA

 

By KATE ABBOTT
Contributing writer

 

“I went to the garden of love and saw what I never had seen …”
Martha Redbone will sing next summer on a stage made of glass gleaming like a prism, driving a deep blues rhythm and percussion like warm rain.

Stockbridge-Munsee stewards of the land Misty Cook and Kathi Arnold may walk in an herb garden in summer dusk and watch for wings in the milkweed. Andre StrongBearHeart Gaines Jr. may sit by the fire, sharing the beat of hand drums and the scent of cedar wood with dancers resting after rehearsal.

And their presence here begins this fall, as internationally honored artist Jeffrey Gibson is shaping performance spaces in the Berkshires. A citizen of the Mississippi Band of Choctaw and half Cherokee, Gibson is an artist in residence at Bard College and lives and works near Hudson, N.Y. And he is returning from the 2024 Venice Biennale, where he is the first Indigenous artist to represent the United States with a solo show in the exhibition’s national pavilion.
In the Berkshires, Gibson is gathering Indigenous artists together.

At Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in Becket, Gibson is curating creative work inside and outside the new incarnation of the Doris Duke Theatre, where the Pillow is reimagining its gardens, gathering places and indoor transitional spaces.

And on Nov. 2 at Mass MoCA, he will open “Power Full Because We’re Different,” an installation of his own work that will bring together more than two dozen queer Indigenous artists.

In the vast space of Building Five, he is imagining experiences on platforms of transparent glass and rainbow light, Mass MoCA curator Denise Markonish said. She remembers sitting with him on the steps, when Nick Cave’s “Until” turned the room into a glittering maze, and asking Gibson what he would think about filling this space.

Seven years later, he has he created seven stages and seven garments, robes for giants that shimmer in iridescence and leather and a patchwork of sheer silk. (Gibson was traveling internationally in late October, and an effort to schedule an interview with him was unsuccessful before this issue went to press.)

Markonish said Gibson finds inspiration in queer culture -- in the bright liminal spaces of dance clubs of the 1980s and ‘90s, and in his own lived experiences of freedom and exploration, and risk and exposure. In film and newly composed music, he considers what it means to see oneself clearly, with courage and integrity, and at the same time to be seen.

He draws from the vivid colors and patterns of abstract art, which has often, for centuries, found influences from Native and Indigenous art in turn, both in inspiration and appropriation.
And he finds a breath and soul in regalia from faith ceremonies. He is not making allusions to specific elements, Markonish said, out of respect for Indigenous people and cultures and communities, but he is holding an understanding of their nature and strength, the knowledge and connections they carry.

As Gibson’s visions for the show have evolved, she said, he has talked about the Ghost Dance, a pacifist movement that originated with the Northern Paiute.

The dance brought together nations of the northern plains, preserving culture and community against the fragmenting pressures of white colonists and the U.S. Army. In 1890, the military response to a gathering of dancers led to the massacre of up to 300 Lakota people, many of them women and children, at Wounded Knee, S.D. But the tradition lived on, and the dance remains active today.

Gibson acknowledges pain and fear and anger in his bright color and reflected light, Markonish said.

At Mass MoCA, he will show the 1992 documentary “Two-Spirit People” by Michel Beauchemin, Lori Levy and Gretchen Vogel. The film explores traditions in many Native cultures that honor people who hold elements of both male and female natures. The Indigenous idea of Two Spirits, of someone who embodies both masculine and feminine in themselves, can have power for many people in many ways, Markonish said, and Gibson has talked about how he has come to understand the phrase.

“He does not identify that way,” she said, “but he talks about how he has come to understand the nuance of it, not just sexually but spiritually … as a gesture of sovereignty, of being able to choose how you identify.”

Gibson is opening spaces for expression and honesty, she said, in many ways — in the seven stages he is making from glass and light, and in the garments he has imagined for each one. One made of patchwork silk has a name that comes from the words of his 8-year-old child, who once told him, “Sometimes your body changes, and you can’t remember your dreams.”

 

In Becket, shades of red
Inside the Doris Duke Theatre, Brenda Mallory will shape seven shades of red, colors of blood. An Indigenous artist and citizen of the Cherokee Nation who lives in Portland, Ore., she has shown her work across the country.

For the mountaintop in Becket, Mallory imagines sculpted currents – long strips of fabric as uneven as feathers, she said in conversation over Zoom.

She will make them from cloth impregnated with beeswax, some from these hills in the homelands of the Mohican people, and some from the Stockbridge Munsee community of the Mohican Nation, whose members live now in Wisconsin. The Mohican and the Cherokee nations both experienced forced removal from their homes.

“The Cherokee Nation, or the Cherokees, we were removed forcibly and illegally and taken to a place that nobody wanted … until they did,” Mallory said. “And so it’s just the same old stories over and over. Even though I’m not of this area, and I live far away even from Oklahoma now, the stories are the same. So I felt a deep connection.”

Her artwork holds communion with outdoor places. The hallways in the new theater will open into a garden planted with native medicinal plants and wildflowers, a gathering place for dances and ceremonies, and a home place with a hearth fire.

Misty Cook, author of “Medicine Generations,” works with natural medicines of the Mohican people, and Kathi Arnold, an analytical chemist, acts an advocate for environmental stewardship. Together they are creating a powwow circle, a sacred circle of dance and music traditions with symbolism meaningful to their communities.

Andre StrongBearHeart Gaines Jr. will create the fire pit connecting to the garden and nearby forest. An Indigenous artist and citizen of the Nipmuc, who are native to what is now known as Massachusetts and parts of Connecticut and Rhode Island, he is creative director of the Nipmuc-led organization No Loose Braids.

Gaines sees his gathering fire as a place where people can detach from fast-moving lives and rest, he said by phone from his home in Ashfield. He will build a fire pit and a hearth for cooking, an arbor, and a wetu -- a traditional Nipmuc home made from local cedar.

He hopes to connect the wetu to a boardwalk into the wetlands on the ridge and to teach about traditional foods, foraging, self-sufficiency, food sovereignty and relationships with the earth.
Gaines said he has enjoyed the chance to share ideas with fellow artists.

“We’re coming together as sister communities,” he said. “We have kinship ties as Stockbridge Munsee and Nipmuc. It’s beautiful to come together and focus on restoration … still present where we have been for thousands of years.”

 

Honoring the past — and future
Mallory too has found connection in conversations with her fellow artists. She went kayaking with Cook and her son on a lake near the hotel where they all stayed when they came to walk through the Pillow theaters and grounds. They felt natural in each other’s company, she said.

Talking with Cook and Arnold, she learned that when the people of the Mohican nation were forced to leave these hills and head westward, they were removed seven different times from different places.

Like Gibson, she finds a resonance in that number in her work. Mallory said she will construct her wall hanging in seven sections, each formed from groups of cloth fronts echoing the pattern of seven.

And she said she is weaving in the sense of seven generations — the idea that actions today influence seven generations in the future, and what happened seven generations back affects the world today.

“We see what’s going on in our world right now, the environmental degradation caused by short-term profitability thinking,” Mallory said. “Seven is the idea of being responsible, not only for yourself, but those who come after you. And maybe they aren’t even directly associated with you, but they are associated with you through interconnected kinship, as we all are on this earth, both people and creatures and plants, the whole thing.”

The number seven is also important in Cherokee cosmology, she said.
“Besides the four directions, we also have the directions above and below and in the center of where we are,” she explained.

Mallory said she often considers ideas of time in her work — time in a natural rhythm, a movement of seasons, a lunar cycle, a year’s worth of days based on the motions of the moon.
And she first began sculpting fabric with cloth made for women.

“I used to own a business called Glad Rags,” she said. “We made cotton menstrual pads for women, and they’re washable, reusable, better for the environment, better for women’s bodies.”
She had offcuts from the cloth and wax in her studio, she said. And sewing was a familiar craft from her childhood.

“And wax holds an important place for me,” Mallory added. “My grandfather was a beekeeper. So I was always around the smell of wax and watching him process the honey and the wax out of the bees’ hives. So it seemed like a natural material to me.”

She finds depth and pleasure in working with wax the bees have made, full of bits and pieces of their lives, plant matter and the detritus of busy insect life.

Their wax, she said, can come in shades of gold and amber and dark, like honey, taking on shade and flavor from the season and the flowers that open where the bees are collecting. Waxes too can have a different quality, a different flavor or aroma.

 

Hard metal, waxed cloth
Mallory will bind the crimson strands of her sculpture together with hog rings. Harsh metallic connectors speak to her of how hard it is to stay connected, she said, or to reconnect once a community or an ecosystem has been disrupted.

The rings also recognize a wounding that comes from a constant pain. Hog rings are literally the rings put through the nose of hogs to keep them from rooting under fences or into gardens, causing them pain.

They also raise for her an idea she often thinks about and talks about in her work, challenging the human belief that people have dominion over other creatures — and other people.

After sewing her sculptural forms, Mallory will dip them in skillets of hot wax or brush the wax on. After forming the cloth into shape, she says, she will use a torch to burn and melt the wax further in, and the heat can create texture and color and pattern like a patina.

“It becomes a mysterious material,” she said. “I love working with it because it looks like rawhide or animal gut, … and it has a wonderful aroma to it.”

As she works, her patterns become organic, as nature might grow, or a bee, a honeycomb might form. They accrete, she said, as variations and different rhythms emerge, and they hold a vitality and energy in the design. They grow the way plants grow, with different forms of patterning, cracking, meandering and propulsive energy.

“That smell of wax that is so attractive to us — that is a reflection of this bee’s buzzing journey through a field of pollen and plants,” Mallory said. “And smell is one of those senses deepest in our brain.”