The relatively new, compact, light and inviting Center for Native Futures gallery is currently featuring two art exhibits by Indigenous creators, where most pieces are for sale: Gagizhibaajiwan runs until December 14 and The Upsetters runs through January 18.
The first section shares its origin story:
Misshepezhieu, the Underwater Panther, lives below the water. Animikii, the Thunderbird, lives in the sky. These two beings live in constant conflict and constant relation, meeting along shorelines and whirling up storms. In Anishinaabe art, the two are often represented together, suggesting a way to hold duality’s tension. How do we reconcile what cannot be reconciled?
In Anishinaabemowin, gagizhibaajiwan is a continuous swirling motion of water portending the Underwater Panther’s emergence from under the surface. The churn mediates earth, water and sky, implying fluid movement through layers of the world spanned by Misshepezhieu and Animikii.
The four Anishinaabe Gagizhibaajiwan artists move through these layers in story and art, evoking Anishinaabe teaching on duality, ambiguity and balance. In the depths of sky and swirling water, there is room for paradox.
Written and translated by Forrest Bruce (Ojibwe).
Curated by Lois Taylor Biggs (Cherokee Nation/White Earth Ojibwe), Gagizhibaajiwan features work by Marcella Ernest (Gunflint Lake Ojibwe/Bad River Band of Lake Superior), Michael Belmore (Anishinaabe from Lac Seul First Nation), Renee Wasson Dillard (Little Traverse Bay Bands of Odawa Indians), and Zoey Wood-Salomon (Wilkwemkoong Unceded Territory).
The gallery’s side room features a variety of installations, including interlocking river stones across the floor, textural woven beads and fibers as wall hangings, and stylized, animated images of spawning salmon swimming upstream.
Chris Pappan (Osage, Kaw, Cheyenne River Sioux) and his “Native American Low Brow” style uses pencil on 1937 Evanston Municipal “Special Assessment” ledgers, highlighting Indian (his preferred term) concerns more fluidly over rigid Western classifications (he’s married to artist Debra Yepa-Pappan, Jemez Pueblo, the Center for Native Futures co-founder and exhibitions director). Chris Pappan also created the cover of the August 1, 2024, Chicago Reader print edition featuring the article “Iilaatawiaanki (We Speak a Language): The Miami-Illinois Speakers of Chicago Wake A Sleeping Tongue.”
The Upsetters exhibit celebrates natural forms like flowers, bubbles, skulls, hummingbirds and lightning, by New Mexico resident Amber Gunn Gauthier (Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin, Menominee Nation), April Holder (Sac and Fox Nation of Oklahoma/People of the Red and Yellow Earth), pow-wow singer and dancer David Martin (Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians), Albuquerque-based Ryan Singer (Diné/Navajo), and Los Angeles native/Las Vegas resident Avis Charley (Spirit Lake Dakota/ Diné), who also had long, lovely tribal earrings on display.
What Remains, Holder’s medium-sized acrylic on canvas, depicts a blue X-ray-like image of a snake skeleton, the angular jaw softened and surrounded by a few airy bubbles. Charley’s oil painting Her Ancestors depicts the continuum of women stepping into the future through red lines proclaiming “her ancestors celebrate her as she celebrates you.”
Singer’s large-scale Nostalgic Battle blends often-humorous pop-culture references with Native concerns. A merry-go-round horse comprises James Earle Fraser’s classic weary horse and Indigenous rider carrying a spear, situated in front of a pepperoni pizza slice. A Magic 8 Ball predicts “Land Back” in the mystery triangle, and an Atari logo and Rubik’s Cube populate the canvas.
David Martin specializes in photo-realistic portraits like Simon Pokagon. He also paints with tattoo ink on buffalo hide. Gauthier’s X-Ray Excavation deconstructs the female form, akin to Frida Kahlo’s meditations on viscera, using oil, acrylic, paper and pieces of circuit boards.
Tulsa native June Carpenter had several pieces on display. She talked about her process of consultation and collaboration for her acrylic on wood painting The Sun Through the Darkness, her family history about the Reign of Terror committed against the Osage people, recently dramatized in the movie Killers of the Flower Moon. She also recommends listening to the 11-part podcast In Trust to learn the brutal legacy of the mineral estate below Oklahoma and the Natives who were supposed to be the sole beneficiaries of those valuable “head rights.”
The artist was also inspired by characters in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, mother Demeter and her doomed daughter Proserpina. Carpenter’s own mom teaches the Osage language and translated much of the dialogue in Scorsese’s Flower Moon.
A bulletproof vest with German silver conchos, nylon fringe, glass, horn and bone beads.
So much of marginalized group history is relegated to the past. Suppressed cultures are looking to a future where they are the authors of their own stories, writ large.
Gagizhibaajiwan runs until December 14, and The Upsetters runs through January 18, 2025, at the Center for Native Futures, 56 W. Adams St.. The gallery is on the first floor across from Calder’s Flamingo statue in Federal Plaza, and admission is free.
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