Sandra Hale Schulman
Special to ICT
The latest: Sharks and water art in Vegas, Navajo musicians go global, digital reveries
ART: Tribe gambles on art, wins jackpot
The San Manuel Band of Mission Indians, based in Highland, California, is fast becoming known for its art collection, design, film production and entertainment.
The tribe’s new showstopper is The Palms Casino Resort in Las Vegas. The tribe is the first to own and operate a casino there – and stay true to its Indigenous values.
“The top value we have as tribal people is giving back to others and that’s regardless of location whether we’re on or off the reservation or here in Las Vegas,” Latisha Prieto, the chairperson of the San Manuel Gaming and Hospitality Authority that operates the Palms Resort Casino for her tribe, told ICT. “We’re going to carry those values with us wherever we go.”
Before the tribe even opened its doors at The Palms, it gave away $10 million in the Las Vegas community to educational institutions and nonprofit groups to sow good will in their new home.
The tribe bought The Palms, which is just off the strip in Las Vegas, in 2021 for $650 million, renovated it with cutting-edge design, top-notch art and some of the best restaurants in Nevada. High-roller suites have swimming pools on the balcony, full bowling alleys, a basketball court, and private movie theaters.
The art collection includes the dreamlike “Water Memory” by Cara Romero, Chemehuevi, in the lobby dedicated during a two-year anniversary ceremony with the Las Vegas Paiute and San Manuel Band. The piece has been shown at the Met in New York.
English artist Damien Hirst was commissioned to design the 9,000-square-foot penthouse duplex – it sports a wall of diamonds under glass, taxidermied sharks in a tank, and a spin art pool table. Wanna spend the night? That costs $100,000.
Food choices include award-winning barbecue, Asian dim sum, and a steakhouse Scotch 80 Prime with knockout choices. Thursday is all-you-can-eat lobster and shrimp night. For real.
Put that all together with the most hospitable staff in town, it’s no wonder The Palms has become the choice place to stay for musicians and artists and visiting Natives.
MUSIC: International collabs ‘Shine’ on
In a lush new collaboration, Sihasin, the Navajo brother sister duo from Arizona, were on tour in Armenia when they recorded a remix of the song “Shine” with local musicians there.
The video, filmed on location at UNESCO World Heritage site Zvartnots Cathedral and Meeting Point Studios, Yerevan, highlighted magical moments from the Armenian tour, including performances at Wine Days Festival and TUMO Gyumri, master classes at TUMO Yerevan, Emili Aregak Center, and AGBU with the Karin Folk Dance Group – and the band’s visit to stunning Geghard Monastery.
The musicians on vocals and exotic instruments were Lily Alexyan (vocals), Qristine Hovsepyan (kopal dhol) and Gohar Qeshishoghlyan (qanon).
The remix was produced by Narek Barsegyan of The Bambir, originally produced by Ed Stasium (The Ramones) and Sihasin.
“As indigenous peoples from the United States, it was inspiring to connect and build dignified bridges of respect towards cultural preservation, through music, dance, language, and the arts. With this collaboration, we hope to ‘shine’ a spotlight on Armenia’s rich intangible cultural heritage,” said Clayson Benally, drummer for Sihasin.
“I greatly enjoyed working with ‘Sihasin’ band. I was very excited to learn about the culture of our guests and share our own culture with them. We had a great collaboration”, said Gohar Qeshishoghlyan, one of the collaborating artists.
ART: AI dream art goes digital
Creative Time, New York’s public art organization, has unveiled its latest project by artists Kite and Alisha Wormsley. Cosmologyscape, is a multi-layered, interactive, ambitious public art project integrating AI that asks viewers to share dreams with color and action cues that create the image through AI.
Kite, Oglala Lakota, is a performance artist, visual artist, and composer raised in Southern California. Her practice investigates contemporary Lakota ontologies through research-creation, computational media, and performance.
Alisha B. Wormsley, African-American, is an interdisciplinary artist and cultural producer. Her work contributes to the imagining of the future of arts, science and technology through the Black woman lens, challenging contemporary views of modern American life.
Cosmologyscape plays on the centuries-long dreaming practices of Black and Indigenous communities to bring dream states into waking life that listens, prophesizes, congregates and celebrates the cosmos of the human subconscious. Using an Indigenous AI framework, Kite and Alisha offer these new ways of seeing to a wider, public community of dreamers and encourage reflection of dreams in individual and collective lives.
The site will host a collection of “dream paths” for deepening, influencing and interpreting dreams and invite the public to share their dreams with a dream journal chatbot, feeding them into a digital dream tapestry. The virtual cosmic quilt will move into the physical realm in a series of public sculptures and installations to be unveiled in Brooklyn on September 20, alongside the annual Creative Time Summit.
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