Sandra Hale Schulman
Special to ICT
Ten Indigenous artists have been selected by United States Artists for the 2023 USA Fellows awards, which offer an unrestricted $50,000 prize in 10 different disciplines.
The Indigenous winners include three in the field of traditional arts, two each in dance and writing, and one each in media, craft and visual art.
The Native winners are among 45 people selected this year for the awards, which go to artists who inspire a world in which everyone’s stories are reflected and respected.
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Social engagement and community-based work were important to this year’s group, officials said.
“We are thrilled to celebrate this remarkable class of artists who reach across disciplines to imagine new forms of art-making reflecting commitments to care and kinship,” Judilee Reed, president and chief executive of United States Artists, said in a statement.
“As we enter this new chapter of United States Artists, we will continue to expand upon our historic commitment to elevating artists and their essential work, modeling new paradigms of support that can allow artists to truly thrive.”
One of the winners, Navajo weaver Barbara Teller Ornelas, hails from five generations of weavers who raise the sheep, shear them, and dry and spin the wool to create intricate, sophisticated rugs and tapestries.
“Thank you to US Artists for this award,” Teller Ornelas said in a social media post. “I’m so humbled and honored. I’m so blessed. Thank you to my grandmothers, my mom, brothers and sisters, my children and my grand babies for all the love and support. Thank you to my friends and collectors for support as well. I’m so grateful.”
Teller Ornelas was raised near Two Grey Hills on the Navajo Reservation, where her father was a trader. She’s a top featured artist annually at the Heard Museum Guild Indian Fair & Market, which returns to Phoenix March 4-5.
Teller Ornelas said she had an unusual introduction to the Indian Market after selling to trading posts for years. Unaware of the system of submitting applications to arts markets months in advance, she went to the Heard just one day before the market opened.
“They were setting up tables,” she told ICT. “They didn’t have tents then; they did all their markets inside the museum.”
She asked how to sign up and was told she’d have to come back the next year. But as she walked away, the woman asked what sort of art she did. When she told her Navajo weaving, she asked to see them.
“She just dropped everything,” Teller Ornelas said. “I showed them to her, and she said, ‘We never do this, but we’re going to give you a table.’”
Here are the Indigenous winners of the 2023 United States Artists fellows awards:
USA Fellows in Traditional Arts
*Marques Hanalei Marzan, Native Hawaiian, a culture bearer and contemporary visual artist who creates work in oceanic fibers, from Kāne’ohe, Hawaiʻi.
*Roquin-Jon Quichocho Siongco, CHamoru, a multidisciplinary artist who draws from his CHamoru and Queer experiences, originally from Yigu, Guåhan (Guam).
*Barbara Teller Ornelas, Diné, Traditional Navajo 5th generation Two Grey Hills weaver.
USA Fellows in Dance
*Antoine Hunter, also known as Purple Fire Crow, a deaf African-American/Cherokee/Blackfoot, is a producer, choreographer, director and advocate for the deaf, from Oakland, California.
*devynn emory, Lenape/Blackfoot and European descent,a choreographer, dancer and multidisciplinary artist based in Brooklyn, New York.
USA Fellows in Writing
*Ernestine Shaankaláxt’ Hayes, Wolf House of the Kaagwaantaan clan of the Tlingit nation, is author of the book, “Blonde Indian,” based on her master’s thesis.
*Ofelia Zepeda, Tohono O’odham, a poet and author of the only pedagogical textbook on the Tohono O’odham language, “A Papago Grammar,” which she wrote for a language course she teaches at Arizona State University, from Tucson, Arizona.
USA Fellow in Media
*Suzanne Kite, also known as Kite, Oglála Lakȟóta, a performance artist, visual artist, composer and academic raised in Southern California, now based in Oklahoma.
USA Fellow in Craft
*Luis Alvaro Sahagun Nuño, Mesoamerican, an interdisciplinary artist and ritualist whose works examine Msoamerican Indigenous healing practices, from Chicago.
USA Fellow in Visual Art
*Natalie Ball, Black/Modoc and Klamath Tribes, a visual artist who creates textiles and sculptures as “power objects,” from Oregon.
For a full list of the winners, visit the USA Artists website.
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