Sandra Hale Schulman
Special to ICT
The latest: ‘Pride in the ride’ in Denver, corn plants seed new generations, a Seminole statue rises in Florida
ART: Deserts in motion
El Caminos and NDN cars cruise the deserts of the Southwest, becoming as much a part of the landscape as mountains and cactus-studded plains in a new exhibit opening next month at the Denver Art Museum.
The exhibition, “Desert Rider: Dreaming in Motion,” explores the connections between transportation, landscape and cultural identity by focusing on self-identified Latinx and Indigenous artists whose art and transformed vehicles rev up their pride.
It challenges stereotypes and puts pedal to the metal on hope. It’s ride or die and a way of life.
The exhibition opens July 9 with a lowrider car show and arts celebration in the parking lot, and runs through Sept. 24.
“We are grateful for this fruitful collaboration… highlighting the inventive and energetic Southwest,” said Christoph Heinrich, the Frederick and Jan Mayer Director of the Denver Art Museum. “We hope visitors will feel joy and inspiration as they experience this powerful presentation, which has been expanded to engage Colorado artists and showcase their work.”
Curator Victoria I. Lyall said the works touch on universal themes.
“The themes and ideas explored in ‘Desert Rider’ are universal, but uniquely presented through the viewpoints and experiences of Latinx and Indigenous artists, communities deeply connected to and impacted by the region’s complicated past and their experiences,” Lyall said in a statement.
“Counterculture, customization, queerness, community, survival, pride and reclamation are concepts that create powerful connections for artists and visitors alike. These vehicles also evoke a history of community empowerment and have become symbolic of these artists’ identities. It’s about pride in the ride,” said Lyall.
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A section highlighting women and autos features women artists whose work challenges the perception that customized automobiles are a male-dominated field.
“With Stories Better Told by Others,” by Liz Cohen, features a series of color inkjet prints with hand-painted lettering and lithographs. Cohen celebrates the Lowrider Magazine cover models whose personas popularized lowriders.
A standout painting by Nani Chacon, Diné/Chicana, “What Dreams are Made Of,” is a larger-than-life-size black lowrider emblazoned with roses and declarations of love along with chrome rims.
Skate decks make an appearance, with Indigenous artists — Dustin Craig, White Mountain Apache; Gregg Deal, Pyramid Lake Paiute; and Douglas Miles, San Carlos Apache — using skateboards as moving canvases to reassert control over their own histories and landscapes.
FILM: Fighting for growth
It all starts with a seed. As part of the PBS film series produced by Firelight Media called Homegrown: Future Visions, a new short film, “Seed Warriors,” tells how tribes saved their seeds through generations.
Filmmaker Rebekka Schlichting, Ioway Tribe of Kansas, follows a group of Pawnee seed keepers as they work to regain food sovereignty in their ancestral homelands of Nebraska. By reclaiming the sacred corn seeds saved by ancestors, they seek to return to the healthy, traditional lifeways of the Pawnee people.
Sacred to their heritage, the corn was traced back to when the Pawnee were expelled from their homeland in 1877. They carried the prized seeds from Nebraska to Oklahoma, sometimes even storing the dried kernels in buffalo skulls, but the corn wouldn’t grow in the new environment. Set aside for years, the corn was on verge of extinction..
Keepers kept seeds and full-grown corn cobs in jars to compare the different ways it was evolving. Nebraska farmers stepped in to teach how to adapt the corn crop.
The corn is blanched, roasted, made into drinks, boiled and dried. One strain is called eagle corn for the small dark purple outlines of a flying eagle on each tiny kernel.
“We’ve been putting the wrong food into our bodies,” Deb Echo Hawk, one of the seed warriors, says in the film. “If we get back to a food that our DNA and our bodies recognize, we’re going to have a healthier people.”
ART: Earth Mother rises in bronze
A new bronze sculpture that celebrates the sovereign Seminole Nation has arisen in Pebble Park in Tampa, Florida.
The sculpture depicts a Seminole woman, grounded in the Earth, as she closes her eyes, flicks back her hair, and gets ready to meet the challenges of the future. The larger-than-life statue has glass panel patchwork that tells stories with its patterns and colors in a tribute to the unconquered tribe.
The piece was sculpted and cast by The Milligan Studio, a “public art practice” owned by husband-and-wife artists Alan Milligan and Nicole Mary Milligan, who are non-Native but worked closely with members of the Seminole tribe.
“The sculpture’s named ‘Sovereign’ as a way to honor the Seminole tribe,” Nicole Milligan told ICT. “If you look at it, it’s a matriarchal society. So, there’s a young woman and she’s throwing her hair back and she’s looking forward to the future. She’s looking forward to the challenges that she might come across in a modern world.”
The art piece is over 6-feet tall atop a 6-foot-high concrete pedestal. A patchwork pattern wraps around Sovereign’s full-length skirt and adorns the hem of her cape. The patchwork design is repeated in the form of three glass panels, set within a plaque installed in front of the statue.
The first panel has various shades of blue glass, representing moving water and the Alafia River, which flows near the sculpture. The second glass panel has shades of green and blue, symbolizing the Council Oak Treaty, a historic sovereignty agreement between the Seminoles and the U.S. government. The bottom glass tile of yellow and red reflects the Seminole’s matriarchal society.
Seminole artist Jessica Osceola contributed Sovereign’s symbolic patchwork patterns, made by piecing together colorful strips of fabric in a zigzag format.
The work was commissioned by the Hillsborough County Board of County Commissioners through the Public Art Program.
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