Join us for a conversation about Osage arts with Anita Fields (Osage/Muscogee). Born in Oklahoma, Fields is a visual artist in clay and textile whose work reflects Osage worldviews, including notions of duality, earth and sky, and male and female. In an effort to understand our shared existence, Fields asks viewers to consider other ways of seeing and being, and she employs heavily textured layers and distorted writing to reference the complex layers and distortion of truths found in the written history of Indigenous cultures. Landscapes, environment, and the powerful influences of nature are themes found throughout her work, reflecting how we understand our surroundings and visualize our place within the world, time, place, and how the earth holds the memory of cultures who once called a specific terrain home.
Fields just received the prestigious 2021 Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship, and is currently 2017-2020 fellow with the Kaiser Foundation’s Tulsa Artist Fellowship. She has been included in many exhibitions including the recent Hearts of Our People and Art for A New Understanding. Her work is in the collections of the Minneapolis Institute of Art; Crystal Bridges Museum; Museum of Art and Design, New York; Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe; Heard Museum; Eiteljorg Museum; National Museum of the American Indian; Osage Tribal Museum; Hood Museum; Fred Jones Museum of Art; among others.
Fields is a Mellon Indigenous Arts Visiting Fellow. Please join this conversation with students in UVA professor Adriana Greci Green's Indigenous North American Arts class on March 23 by logging into Zoom at https://virginia.zoom.us/j/98454067491?pwd=UHByN3FGZE50bEl3dG5SakhoMkc1UT09 (Meeting ID: 984 5406 7491 and Passcode: 072040).
She will also offer an artist talk on April 7. Look for the registration link at https://indigenousarts.as.virginia.edu/anita-fields-artist-talk
Left: Anita Fields, Osage Woman’s Ribbonwork Hand Blanket, 2002
Right: Anita Fields, Osage Wedding Hat, commercial top hat, dyed feathers, thread, dowel rods, waxed twine, satin ribbon, 2019
© Anita Fields