Mellon Indigenous Arts Program

Born in Oklahoma, Anita Fields (Osage/Muscogee) creates works of clay and textile that reflect 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, and was featured in American Craft, Ms Magazine, American Style, and First American Art. 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; Sam Noble Museum; National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum; State of Oklahoma Art Collection; among others.

Registration is required: register at https://virginia.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_iq4wwq13Tg-ZVmpzYp9AnQ

You can also drop in to her class visit on March 23 from 1:00- 3:00 PM EST by logging into Zoom at https://virginia.zoom.us/j/98454067491?pwd=UHByN3FGZE50bEl3dG5SakhoMkc1UT09 (Meeting ID: 984 5406 7491 and Passcode: 072040).

image: Anita Fields, When Considering the Earth and Sky
Clay, slips, gold luster glaze, 2020
44 x 33 x 1 1/2 in.
© Anita Fields

Please join us for this classroom visit by Dr Carla Jaimes Betancourt, who will speak on "The ancient Amazon: Pre-Columbian monumental architecture and the origins of complex societies in the Llanos de Mojos, Bolivia".

This presentation will provide an overview of the history of southwestern Amazon, which dates back at least 10,000 years. We will focus on the monumental and cultural achievements of two specific areas of study: (a) the ring ditches in the Northeast or Iténez region and (b) the monumental mounds to the Southeast of the Llanos de Moxos. Their configuration, landscape transformation, regional patterns and internal organization show a long and complex social dynamic that was not exempt from the influence of broader regional processes. From the analysis of different types of archaeological finds from excavations of three monumental mounds and three ringditches, as well as surface material from more than a hundred archaeological sites, we offer a diachronic view of the reasons and timing of the sites’ transformations. This includes an assessment on the nature of monumentality. This presentation reflects on the political, ritual and defensive role of the mounds and ring ditches, and their relationship with the sudden transformations that occurred largely in Amazonia: the first during the first centuries A.D., and the second,at the beginning of the second millennium.

The event is hosted by UVA Professor Sonia Alconini's courses in ancient Archaeology. Log in to the zoom presentation at https://virginia.zoom.us/j/97409939357?pwd=WjdaU0pXYjJ3b0VwNGFlRDdIYjJJZz09
(Meeting ID: 974 0993 9357 and Passcode: 031470)

Bio

Carla Jaimes Betancourt is since 2016 lecturer at the Department of Anthropology of the Americas at the University of Bonn in Germany, and co-director of the BASA Museum (Collection of the Americas in Bonn). She holds a degree in Archaeology from the Universidad Mayor de San Andrés, Bolivia, and has completed her PhD in Anthropology of the Americasat the University of Bonn. Her research focuses on social complexity in the southwestern Amazon, processes of expansion and ethnogenesis in the South American lowland. Her research also promotes collaborative archaeologywith local indigenous populations.She was also co-director of the German-Bolivian project in the Llanosof Mojosfor over a decade, which explored monumental mound construction and ring ditch systems in the tropical lowlands. She is currently part of the Human and Environmental Relations in the Pre-Columbian Amazon (HERCA) project.

America Meredith (Cherokee Nation) is a visual artist, art writer, critic, independent curator, and the publishing editor of First American Art Magazine. Based in Norman, Oklahoma, she earned her MFA from the San Francisco Art Institute. Shows of her paintings have been organized at the Bardo Fine Arts Center; Cherokee Heritage Center; Oklahoma State Capitol; Wheelwright Museum; and Southern Plains Indian Museum, among others. She has been included most recently in Stretching the Canvas: Eight Decades of Native Painting (National Museum of the American Indian, New York City); Laughter and Resilience: Humor in Native American Art (Wheelwright Museum); and Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists (Minneapolis Institute of Art). Her work is held in the National Museum of the American Indian, Eiteljorg Museum, Cherokee Nation Historical Society, Heard Museum, Fred Jones Jr. Museum of Art, Tweed Museum of Art, Southern Plains Indian Museum, and the National Collection of Contemporary Indian Arts (IAIA).

Meredith is a Mellon Indigenous Arts Visiting Fellow.

Registration for this free webinar is required. Register at https://virginia.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_gmH5DntvQIy2zT80YbGouA

In addition to her artist talk on March 24, Meredith will hold a conversation on Wednesday, March 31, 3:30-5:30 pm EST, with students in the Intermediate/Advanced painting course with UVA professor Neal Rock. Sign in for this zoom conversation at https://virginia.zoom.us/j/98656028547?pwd=WTE0NVhvelFub2NKZmhyaDJhTEFsZz09  (Meeting ID: 986 5602 8547 and Passcode: 068963)

Left: America Meredith (Cherokee Nation), Mary Golda Ross: Ad Astra Per Astra, 2011, acrylic on canvas, 30 x 40 in., collection of the Smithsonian Institution, National Museum of the American Indian. © America Meredith.

Please join us for a free talk offered via Zoom by Nadia Jackinsky-Sethi (Alutiiq) on 'Alaska Native Reclamation and the Persistence of Indigenous Aesthetics.'

Nadia Jackinsky-Sethi is an Alutiiq art historian based in Homer, Alaska. She focuses her research on Alaska Native arts, Indigenous aesthetics, cultural revitalization, and the representation of Indigenous identity in art. Jackinsky-Sethi enjoys working with rural communities in Alaska to help develop community-based arts program through her work at The CIRI Foundation, where she oversees a grant program dedicated to supporting customary Alaska Native arts practices. In addition, Jackinsky-Sethi is a curatorial consultant, writer, and occasional instructor of Alaska Native art history at the University of Alaska Anchorage. She completed her PhD in art history at the University of Washington in 2012.

Jackinsky-Sethi is a Mellon Indigenous Arts Visiting Fellow. Her Zoom presentation is hosted by ARTH3595: Indigenous North American Arts taught by Professor Adriana Greci Green. Log in to the talk using this link:
https://virginia.zoom.us/j/98278672705?pwd=Z0dJZVFmRXp4eVBFQWlFOU5zY0d5dz09

Meeting ID: 982 7867 2705
Passcode: 184179

Email cew9f@virginia.edu with questions.

Photo: Gut parkas hang in the breeze at Mekoryak, 1964. Steve McCutcheon, Steve McCutcheon Collection; Anchorage Museum, B90.14.4.02001.

Please join us for a talk by America Meredith on Indigenous Artworks of the Southeast from 1400 CE to the Present.

America Meredith (Cherokee Nation) is the publishing editor of First American Art Magazine and an art writer, critic, visual artist, and independent curator, whose curatorial practice spans 28 years. Based in Norman, Oklahoma, she earned her MFA degree from the San Francisco Art Institute and taught Native art history at the Institute of American Indian Arts, Santa Fe Community College, and Cherokee Humanities Course.

Meredith is a Mellon Indigenous Arts Visiting Fellow. This presentation on Zoom is hosted by ARTH 3595: Indigenous North American Arts with Professor Adriana Greci Green. Join the free talk here.

Save the date for her artist talk on March 24 at 6:00 pm, and an additional class visit on March 31, 3:30 - 5:30 pm.

Photo: Martha Berry (Cherokee Nation), “Fire Carrier’s Footsteps,” glass seed beads on wood, saved-edge stroud, leather, silk satin ribbon, 4 x 8 x 9 in. © Martha Berry. Photo: Dave Berry