Sandra Hale Schulman
Special to ICT
The latest: Ceramic sculptures shape motherhood, a choreographer wins a top award, a new book tells of death and greed in early Oklahoma and a bestselling author wins recognition.
ART: Celebrated sculptor’s striking figures
Mixed-media artist Rose B. Simpson will open her first New York City solo exhibition, “Road Less Traveled,” on Feb. 23 at the Jack Shainman Gallery.
Simpson, Santa Clara Pueblo, focuses her work on motherhood, her relationship with her daughter, and how Indigenous heritage and a sense of place shape identity.
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Her ceramic and mixed-media sculptures represent “her hopes and prayers for both herself and the world at large,” according to the gallery website. “These sculptures represent her never-ending investigation into the human condition and act as messengers of her intentions.”
The exhibition will continue through April 8.
Simpson comes from a family of Santa Clara Pueblo ceramic artists, including her mother, Roxanne Swentzell, and learned to express herself through her work.
“Whether exploring ancestral memory, post-colonial stress disorder, or frustration with navigating the polarizing nature of contemporary society, her pieces speak to these personal journeys,” according to the gallery.
The title work for the exhibition, “Road Less Traveled,”comes from Simpson’s realization that she was aligning against others based on differing beliefs — which manifested as an image of her splitting down the middle.
“This is how I want to be seen,” she said in a statement. “I want to be the raw self, that which wears no mask. There is a sketch portrait of myself hanging around the neck, but it is limited and shallow. I am what lies beneath. I am the process. I am that which I carry, I am the materials of life.”
Simpson has another installation, “Dream House,” featuring ceramics, sculptures and textiles, at the Fabric Workshop and Museum Studio in Philadelphia. It runs through March 26.
DANCE: Work based on personal, collective identity
Choreographer and performer Rosy Simas — who describes herself as a dance artist — has received the Doris Duke Foundation’s $550,000 award for dance this year for her work embodying the concepts of movement in people, images and objects.
Simas, a citizen of the Seneca Nation, is one of six recipients recognized for their “transformative creative potential and seismic ongoing contributions to the fields of contemporary dance, jazz and theater at large,” according to a statement from the foundation.
The Doris Duke Artists program celebrated its 10th year this year by doubling the annual award to $550,000.
Simas weaves themes of personal and collective identity, family, sovereignty and healing into her performances and installations. She received a United States Artists Fellowship in 2022, among other awards.
“My last piece is called, ‘she who lives on the road to war,’” Simas told ICT. “It’s an installation and performance work, currently up at the Wiseman Art Museum in Minneapolis, and it had a two-month run at All My Relations Arts in Minneapolis at the same time. Then we did 15 performances within the installation. It’s always different. Every single piece is different.”
The work is about relationships.
“It started with me in relationship to the Seneca Lands, and just being back home,” she said. “I do a lot of field recordings of video and sound. It starts from being in relationship to the place and then to family and friends in Seneca Territories in New York. From there I bring concepts and ideas to a group of performers that I work with.”
She uses deer skin as a medium to connect the dancers to each other, and also to connect to the audience and to space.
Simas’ celebrated dance works include “Weave,” “Skin(s),” and “We Wait In The Darkness,” all of which have toured widely. Her latest work, “she who lives on the road to war,” will be touring through 2024.
A champion of contemporary Native dance, she is also the artistic director of Rosy Simas Danse and three thirty one space, a creative studio for Native and BIPOC artists in Minneapolis.
BOOKS: Blackfeet author wins Tulsa writers award
Blackfeet author Stephen Graham Jones will receive the Tulsa Library Trust’s Festival of Words Writers Award on March 4 in Oklahoma.
Graham Jones is the New York Times bestselling author of 30 horror and science fiction novels and collections that include “The Only Good Indians,” “Don’t Fear the Reaper,” “My Heart Is a Chainsaw,” “Mapping the Interior” and “Mongrels.”
His new comic-book series, “Earthdivers,” launched in October 2022. It is set in an apocalyptic future when four Indigenous survivors take on a one-way mission to save the world by traveling back in time to kill Christopher Columbus to prevent the creation of America.
Graham Jones, the Ivena Baldwin Professor of English at the University of Colorado in Boulder, has won numerous awards, including the Ray Bradbury Award from the Los Angeles Times, the Bram Stoker Award, Mark Twain American Voice in Literature Award, the Shirley Jackson Award, the Jesse Jones Award for Best Work of Fiction from the Texas Institute of Letters, and the Alex Award from the American Library Association.
The Festival of Words Writers Award recognizes contributions by Indigenous authors, poets, journalists and scriptwriters. Started in 2001, the award is handed out in odd-numbered years and carries a $10,000 prize. It is the only award given by a public library to honor Native American writers.
The award will be presented in Connor’s Cove at Hardesty Regional Library in Tulsa.
NEW RELEASE: ‘Between Two Fires’ tells of murders and money
Oil, theft and murder in Tulsa, Oklahoma, is the theme of a new historical fiction book by author J.D. Colbert, “Between Two Fires: The Creek Murders and the Birth of the Oil Capital of the World.”
Colbert, Chickasaw/Muscogee (Creek)/Cherokee and Potawatomi, tells the story in the 1920s of the injustices perpetrated upon the Muscogee (Creek) land allottees in what was then Indian Territory near Tulsa. At the time, the Glenn Pool had the world’s largest reservoir of oil.
“While the focus of my historical fiction book is on the Muscogee-Creek allottees in the Tulsa area in the early 1900s, it really weaves a pan-Native experience,” Colbert said in a statement. “Those included forced allotment, compulsory assimilation, the Indian boarding school experience, the discovery of oil and valuable minerals on Native lands and the subsequent legal theft of Native wealth via the Native guardianship.”
Colbert has been a columnist for several Indigenous publications, including The Hownikan of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, The Chickasaw Times of the Chickasaw Nation, and Native Oklahoma Magazine.
The book was published by Red Bird Publishing and was unveiled at a recent event hosted by the Tulsa Historical Society and Magic City Books.
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