5 Plain Questions

Filmmaker Loren Waters is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation and the Kiowa Tribe. Focusing her art on the intersection of film and Indigenous storytelling, Loren has a passion for sharing stories that center environmental knowledge and impact. In prior years, Loren worked for the Cherokee Nation Film Office, and documentary-style television show, Osiyo, Voices of the Cherokee People. Recently, she has been the recipient of the 2020 Next Gen Under 30, while also taking part in fellowships such as 2021 Warner Media Bootcamp, and 4th cohort of the Intercultural Leadership Institute.

Most recently, Loren was a Line Producer on the 2022 Sundance Film Festival selected short ᎤᏕᏲᏅ (What They’ve Been Taught), a film that is part of the Reciprocity Project by Nia Tero at Upstander Project.

Recent projects to her experience include Season 1 of Reservation Dogs and the Martin Scorsese directed feature film, Killers of the Flower Moon. Currently, Loren is the Background Casting Director for Season 2 of Reservation Dogs. She is also in development of a short film titled, ᏗᏂᏠᎯ ᎤᏪᏯ (Meet Me at the Creek), the fourth installment of a short documentary film series that focuses on tribal environmental professionals. The first two films, celebrating tribal environmental professionals, Polly Edwards and Yvette Wiley, premiered in 2019. The third film, Restoring Néške'emāne, screened at festivals such as deadCenter Film Festival, LA Skins, Durango Independent, and recently won Best Short Documentary at North Dakota Environmental Rights Film Festival.

Website:

https://lorenwaters.com/

Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/lorenkaseyjewelry

IG:

https://www.instagram.com/lorenkaseyjewelry/

Sylvia Houle is an emerging Anishinaabe contemporary artist residing in Rolette, North Dakota. She is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa. Born and raised far away from her indigenous roots along the Northern California Coastline, she didn’t have the benefit of the traditional teachings of her father’s people and would often feel out of place but did not understand why until many years later.

Sylvia’s work represents a visual map of various things that flow through her mind, influenced by colors, nature, people, thoughts, emotions, and cultural teachings; all these things she processes through different art mediums, mainly soft pastels. A couple of her main themes she likes to explore are reconnecting to her Anishinaabe heritage and portraiture. The artist herself explains, “I want to share my knowledge and experiences with others in my version of visual storytelling; to give folks encouragement to engage in their creative evolution, conduct soul searching for themselves, and never stop seeking knowledge.”

Even though Sylvia has been creating most of her life, she didn’t start taking her art more seriously until not long after she arrived in North Dakota in 2017. Eventually, Sylvia would like to continue her college education to become an Art Therapist and a Professional Artist.

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sylviahouleart/

IG: https://www.instagram.com/sylviahouleart/

Pinterest: https://www.pinterest.com/pin/soft-pastel-portrait-by-sylvia-houle--320318592242181590/

Penny Kagigebi, White Earth Ojibwe (1st generation descendant)

A lifelong resident of Becker County, Penny has always lived on or adjacent to White Earth Reservation in Northwestern Minnesota. This is where she gathers traditional foods, mashkiki-medicine plants as well as materials for making quillboxes.

In 2014, she achieved a tremendous goal to go learn quillwork and quillbox construction from renown Ojibwe artist Melvin Losh. Today Penny makes what she calls “slow art” – durable quillboxes painstakingly produced through uncountable hours and intense attention to detail. She has been told her work demonstrates an ethereal quality, allowing one to hold the sacred beauty of the natural world in the palm of their hand.

Birchbark basketry, ribbon with appliquéd beadwork bags, beaded earrings and appliquéd mural blankets round out her creative work for ceremonial gifting. At all times, Penny’s commitment to the thriving and vibrant lives of her community and relatives push her to learn and pass these teachings on.

Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/quill.everlasting.1

Contemporary Indigeneity:

https://www.unl.edu/plains/contemporary-indigeneity

Dakota Mace (Diné) is an interdisciplinary artist whose work focuses on translating the language of Diné history and beliefs. Mace received her MA and MFA degrees in Photography and Textile Design at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her BFA in Photography from the Institute of American Indian Arts. As a Diné (Navajo) artist, her work draws from the history of her Diné heritage, exploring the themes of family lineage, community, and identity. In addition, her work pushes the viewer's understanding of Diné culture through alternative photography techniques, weaving, beadwork, and papermaking.

She has also worked with numerous institutions and programs to develop dialogue on the issues of cultural appropriation and the importance of Indigenous design work. She is currently a grad advisor in painting and drawing at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and the photographer for the Helen Louise Allen Textile Center and the Center of Design and Material Culture.

Her work as an artist and scholar has been exhibited nationally and internationally at various conferences, collectives, museums, and galleries, including: Textile Society of America, Weave a Real Peace, Indigenous Photograph, 400 Year Project, Wright Art Museum, Contemporary Arts Center, Kemper Museum of Art, and the Wallach Art Gallery.

Website:

https://www.dakotamace.com/

IG:

https://www.instagram.com/dmaceart/

Brad Kahlhamer’s (b. 1956 Tucson, AZ) art lives at the crossroads of real and imaginary worlds. Born to Native parents and adopted by a German-American family, he was raised in Arizona and Wisconsin and spent his early adulthood as a musician living on the road before settling in New York City. Shaped by this nomadic history, Kahlhamer’s work explores the particularities of the American landscape: the desert ecology of the Southwest, the parks and waterways of the upper Midwest, and the gritty streets of the urban Northeast—often fusing references to multiple regions within a single work of art. Similarly, Kahlhamer draws from a broad array of artistic sources, from Native American aesthetics and Abstract Expressionism, to graffiti and popular culture. Even his references to Native culture cut across tribal traditions, as Kahlhamer views himself and his art as “tribally ambiguous.” Kahlhamer’s art explores notions of cultural hybridity and the experience of navigating multiple communities, as well as the representation and appropriation of Native culture.

Kahlhamer lives and works in New York City and Mesa, Arizona. His work has been included in national and international group exhibitions, at institutions including the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art, the Aspen Art Museum, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art (Kansas City), and the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York). His work has recently been shown in solo exhibitions at the Joslyn Museum, Omaha; Zidoun-Bossuyt Gallery, Luxembourg; Jack Shainman Gallery, New York; Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut; and Andréhn-Schiptjenko Gallery, Stockholm, Sweden.

Swap Meet at Scottsdale Contemporary Art Museum

https://smoca.org/exhibition/brad-kahlhamer-swap-meet/

Brad Kahlhamer: 11:59 to Tuscon at the Tuscan Museum of Art

https://www.tucsonmuseumofart.org/exhibition/brad-kahlhamer-1159-to-tucson/

Brad Kahlhamer: Fort Gotham USA at Garth Greenan Gallery

https://www.garthgreenan.com/artists/brad-kahlhamer

Brad Kahlhamer: A Nation of One at Plains Art Museum (2019)

https://plainsart.org/exhibitions/brad-kahlhamer/

America Meredith (Cherokee Nation) is the publishing editor of First American Art Magazine and an art writer, critic, visual artist, and independent curator, whose curatorial practice spans 28 years. She

earned her MFA degree from the San Francisco Art Institute and taught Native art history at the Institute of American Indian Arts, Santa Fe Community College, and Cherokee Humanities Course.

Northeastern State University named Meredith its 2018 Sequoyah Fellow. Based in Norman, Oklahoma, Meredith serves on the Cherokee Arts and Humanities Council board and the collections and acquisitions committee of the First Americans Museum foundation.

First American Art Magazine Website:

https://firstamericanartmagazine.com/

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/AmericaMeredithArt

Raised on the Standing Rock Sioux Nation, Tyrel is a Hunkpapa Lakota and Ihanktowanna Dakota, with German descent. His upbringing with the strong influence of his Lakota and Dakota ancestry and culture shapes his photography and art.

He seeks to raise and empower Indigenous voices across the continent known as North America. He has re-purposed photography, long a tool used to create monolithic caricatures of Native peoples and “poverty porn,” to more accurately show the lifeways of people as they live and not as idealized or romanticized images.

Website: https://www.istamaza.com/

IG: ista_maza

Nancy Marie Mithlo (Chiricahua Apache) is a professor of Gender Studies and core faculty with

the American Indian Studies Interdepartmental program at the University of California, LosAngeles.

Mithlo’s curatorial work has resulted in nine exhibits at the Venice Biennale. A life-long educator, Mithlo has taught at the University of New Mexico, the Institute of American

Indian Arts, the Santa Fe Community College, Smith College, California Institute of the Arts,Occidental College and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Her 2020 book Knowing Native

Arts was published by the University of Nebraska Press.

Mithlo’s research addresses the pressing need for accurate and sensitive information for and

about American Indian communities using institutional critique, curatorial strategies and arts

analysis. She is concerned with the unequal application of resources in the arts and culture field

and the outmoded theoretical frames of analysis that tend to describe, but fail to analyze the

wealth of knowledge inherent in Native arts production and circulation.

Order her book here:

https://www.nebraskapress.unl.edu/nebraska/9781496202123/

Website:

https://nancymariemithlo.com/

Raven Chacon is a composer, performer and installation artist from Fort Defiance, Navajo Nation. As a solo artist, Chacon has exhibited, performed, or had works performed at LACMA, The Renaissance Society, San Francisco Electronic Music Festival, REDCAT, Vancouver Art Gallery, Ende Tymes Festival, and The Kennedy Center.

As a member of Postcommodity from 2009-2018, he co-created artworks presented at the Whitney Biennial, documenta 14, Carnegie International 57, as well as the 2-mile long land art installation Repellent Fence.

A recording artist over the span of 22 years, Chacon has appeared on more than eighty releases on various national and international labels. His 2020 Manifest Destiny opera Sweet Land, co-composed with Du Yun, received critical acclaim from The LA Times, The New York Times, and The New Yorker, and was named 2021 Opera of the Year by the Music Critics Association of North America.

Since 2004, he has mentored over 300 high school Native composers in the writing of new string quartets for the Native American Composer Apprenticeship Project (NACAP). Chacon is the recipient of the United States Artists fellowship in Music, The Creative Capital award in Visual Arts, The Native Arts and Cultures Foundation artist fellowship, the American Academy’s Berlin Prize for Music Composition, the Bemis Center’s Ree Kaneko Award, and in 2022 will serve as the Pew Fellow-in-Residence.

His solo artworks are in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum and National Museum of the American Indian, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Getty Research Institute, the University of New Mexico Art Museum, a various private collections.

Website:

www.spiderwebsinthesky.com

IG: Ravenchcn

Twitter:@Raven_chacon

Tessa Sayers grew up in Washington State on a small llama farm. She is a certified Native artist with her tribe, the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa from North Dakota. She has worked within Indian Country for 20 years. While obtaining a B.A. in Sociology with a focus in Native American studies from Western Washington University, she was the Co-Director of the Native American Mentoring Program at WWU and spent time on the Lummi Reservation tutoring and mentoring youth. In 2005, she moved to Utah, attaining an M.Ed. in Educational Psychology at the University of Utah. From 2007 to 2010, Tessa was the high school counselor at NAYA ECA, a Native American high school in Portland Oregon. She then transitioned to the Nike World Headquarters at Nike N7, a brand within Nike that inspires and enables Native and Aboriginal youth to be physically active. After meeting her husband, she moved back home to Port Orchard, Washington and became the Marketing Manager for the Kitsap Regional Library. Currently, she is the Director of Marketing and Program Development for the American Indigenous Business Leaders, overseeing marketing and student mentoring. She is also owner and designer of her own brand, Soul Curiosity, inspiring healing through art. Her evenings are spent in the country with her husband and their two fur babies Tule and Rollo, farm cat Boo and 6 chickens.

Website:

https://www.mysoulcuriosity.com/

IG:

https://www.instagram.com/soulcuriosity/

Facebook:

https://www.facebook.com/mysoulcuriosity