Woven Being Interweaves the Complexities of Native Art and Life 

EVANSTON, ILLINOIS — The single greatest collage I have ever seen is by Frank Big Bear, a member of the White Earth Ojibwe tribe. “The Walker Collage, Multiverse #10” stretches more than 30 feet wide and includes cut-out images of everything. I mean everything: Cycladic figurines and Cindy Sherman dress-up, Assyrian kings and Marilyn Monroe, the human brain and a poison dart frog and high fashion and war death and family and friends and a Studio Gang high-rise and the cosmos. And that’s only about two dozen of the individual panels that comprise the tidy wall-length grid Big Bear completed in 2016. Any one of those is a good collage on its own, but there are 432 of them, each made on an identical invitation card for an exhibit by Star Wallowing Bull, the artist’s son. Most interconnect, mesmerizingly and surrealistically, and the sum total is utterly flabbergasting.

Big Bear is one of 33 artists including in Woven Being: Art for Zhegagoynak/Chicagoland, an ambitious if uneven exhibition currently on view at Northwestern University’s Block Museum. He manages to do in one enormous artwork what the curators claim for the show as a whole: tackle themes of land and waterways, extra-human connection, and nonlinear time; and attend to shared aesthetics, materials, and values among community and kin. The Block set for itself some big, worthwhile goals for Woven Being, namely to take seriously its responsibilities to the unceded Indigenous land on which it sits and the dispossessed peoples of that land. To that end, the museum’s curators, Kathleen Bickford Berzock and Janet Dees, were joined by collaborators of Native descent: curator Jordan Poorman Cocker of the Crystal Bridges Museum, and four of the exhibiting artists, Andrea Carlson, Kelly Church, Nora Moore Lloyd, and Jason Wesaw. Each of those artists, in turn, selected a constellation of other artists, past and present, to be in the show.

Such dispersed, non-hierarchical structuring is not how exhibitions are typically organized, and it is exciting to see an institution embrace curatorial methodologies that align with their subject. Echoes of documenta 15 reverberate, the German quintennial whose last edition was put together by Ruangrupa, an Indonesian artist collective; Ruangrupa invited other artist collectives, who invited more still, many of them from marginalized populations in underrepresented parts of the world. The results of documenta 15 were messy, complicated, and patchy, but also surprising, convivial, and sincere. So it goes with Woven Being. This is, on the whole, a good thing.

Any show with multiple curators, especially artist-curators, is going to have sub-themes, declared and not. Woven Being is no exception, and Jason Wesaw’s great contribution is a conversation about Native versus non-Native abstraction, prompted by his inclusion of little modernist gems from Josef Albers, Barnett Newman, and Agnes Martin alongside Indigenous counterparts. Jeffrey Gibson’s elk hide drum dazzles with disco sun and moon vibes, while George Morrison’s pointillist studies of Lake Superior luminesce. They are all in good company in terms of both art history and installation — their salon-style hanging is a highlight of the show. Meant to pay respect and bring overdue attention to some of the elders who have played a critical role in the Indian art community in Chicago and beyond, the selection also features some mighty fine artworks. It includes an improbably blue deer by Woodrow Wilson Crumbo, a cubistically rendered lodge by Daphne Odjig, an elegantly expressionist wolf-man by Rick Bartow, and newfangled warrior symbols by Joe Yazzie that would look equally good on skateboard decks. 

Naturally, given its title, Woven Being includes a whole lot of baskets, as well as non-baskets made using related weaving techniques and materials. A few of these are traditional, but most are not, proving both the versatility of ancestral methods and their critical potential. Kelly Church plaits black ash and white cedar bark to form a boxy sign that spells out “NATIVE LAND” in dark lettering; a second phrase, “YOU ARE ON NATIVE LAND,” is cast on the ground below by light shining through the sculpture. She twists a porcupine basket from shiny white vinyl window blinds, not for the sake of novelty but because the emerald ash borer, among other threats, has devastated basket-makers’ trees. Cherish Parrish, Church’s daughter, turns a basket into a freestanding jingle dress, and Lisa Telford creates an equally witty ode to the feminine with a pair of high heels twined entirely from red and yellow cedar bark.

Basketry has come to the attention of the art world recently thanks in part to the virtuosic work of Jeremy Frey, a member of the Passamaquoddy tribe whose astounding vessels were celebrated in a recent retrospective that traveled to the Art Institute of Chicago. Far less well-known is mazinibakajige, or birch bark biting, wherein thin layers of summer bark are folded and then indented with the eyeteeth into dragonflies, turtles, flowers, and other shapes. Woven Being includes examples by three different practitioners, everyone’s teeth leaving unique impressions, with blown-up images on the museum’s front windows, as if artist-giants had gnawed at the skin of the building itself. 

Other traditional forms revisited in Woven Being include shakers and totem poles. Jason Wesaw hangs a few dozen of the former from the lobby ceiling. He fashioned the simple ceremonial rattles by attaching twisted wooden handles to vintage Calumet baking powder tins, old enough that they feature the company’s original stylized Indian warrior mascot. Inside are copper BBs and pebbles. If shaken they make noise, which Wesaw explains is meant to remind humans of their relationship to all other beings on the planet. I imagine such actions might also help reclaim long-stolen imagery. The exhibition’s one slightly terrifying totem pole comes courtesy Jim Denomie, who carved its human-animal spirits from a tree trunk but gave them shape using some decidedly contemporary and unsettling materials, including plastic food-pouch tops and a metal typewriter ball.

Though only a few artworks touch on specific historical persons and events, the smell of sweetgrass infuses the entire exhibition, emanating from Kelly Church’s memorial to the generations of Native children forcibly removed from their homes and sent to Indian Boarding Schools. Two clay figurines by Virgil Ortiz invoke the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, when the nations of New Mexico banded together to push out their Spanish colonizers and kept them out for 12 years; slickly outfitted in gothic sci-fi gear decorated in Pueblo pottery motifs, Ortiz’s “trackers” are as much about the future as the past. Chris Pappan, a candidate for finest living draftsman in Chicago, presents a haunting triptych based on 19th-century photographs. Meticulously rendered in graphite, a member of the Sac and Fox Nation is mirrored, fragmented, and gridded, then run through with brilliant blue gouache in the “Y” shape of the Chicago River — as if de-oxygenated and violently plotted, like this land.

Woven Being is accompanied by a small, conventionally organized, and absolutely wonderful solo show, held in the Block’s downstairs gallery, dedicated to the Northern Cheyenne painter Jordan Ann Craig. it takes a long time to stay here showcases Craig’s crisp geometric compositions, their rigidity softened by Southwestern colors and unfinished sides, their poetry amplified by specific but unknowable titles. Head on, they are still; from the side, they vibrate. Indebted as much to Neo-Geo and Op-Art as to traditional Indigenous textiles and quillwork, Craig participates in the discussion about abstraction ongoing upstairs. And she adds to it: Unafraid to acknowledge the ornamental aspects of patterning, she decorated the gallery’s padded bench covers, so visitors can stay here a while.

Woven Being: Art for Zhegagoynak/Chicagoland continues at the Block Museum of Art (Northwestern University, 40 Arts Circle Drive, Evanston, Illinois) through July 13. The exhibition was developed by Kathleen Bickford Berzock, Jordan Poorman Cocker, Janet Dees, Erin Northington, and Dan Silverstein, with Terra Foundation Fellows Marisa Cruz Branco and Teagan Harris.  

it takes a long time to stay here: Paintings by Jordan Ann Craig continues at the Block Museum of Art through April 13. The exhibition was curated by Kathleen Bickford Berzock, Janet Dees, and graduate fellow Jacqueline Lopez.