Anya Montiel - Böcker

Celebrates the groundbreaking work of six contemporary craft artists from Indigenous Nations across the USThis volume features the work of six Indigenous artists whose craft speaks to the responsibility of honoring cultural traditions while shaping the future. Joe Feddersen (Arrow Lakes/Okanagan) is a printmaker, glass artist, and basket maker who creates geometric patterns sourced from everyday life. Multimedia artist Erica Lord (Athabascan/Iñupiat) crafts beaded burden straps and sled dog blankets with abstracted representations of diseases that disproportionately affect Native and other marginalized communities. Geo Neptune (Passamaquoddy) is a master basket maker, activist, and educator who uses colorful narrative to emphasize the honor and burden of keeping tradition alive. Sisters Lily Hope and Ursala Hudson (Tlingit) weave labor-intensive textiles that convey Tlingit values of reciprocity and balance, maintaining cultural integrity while experimenting with new forms and materials. Textile artist Maggie Thompson (Fond du Luc Ojibwe) creates large-scale works that explore the intersections of grief and trauma with honor, beauty, and healing.Exhibition dates: Renwick Gallery, May 26, 2023 — March 31, 2024

During the summer of 2020, the space outside the Renwick Gallery-the Smithsonian American Art Museum's dedicated museum for contemporary craft and decorative arts-became home to a new discussion about racial justice on Black Lives Matter Plaza. The curators at the Renwick Gallery felt the need to align themselves with what was going on right outside the Gallery's door, the organizing rationale for understanding the objects presented in this volume, many of which are new acquisitions.The title is taken from Alicia Eggert's 2019-2020 eponymous neon work, and the 85 objects in the main plates section lead the reader from the idea of shelter, through layers of expanding spaces to the vast expanses of the universe. The volume looks at contemporary American craft "in the whirlwind of now" revealing possibilities for contemporary makers to respond to a more empathetic future.