BE IMMERSED IN ARTISTIC INNOVATION AND THE TACTILE BEAUTY OF BEADS
The MacKenzie Art Gallery and Shushkitew Collective are thrilled to be hosting Beading Together: Radical Stitch Symposium on 25 June, 2022. This event is in celebration of the exhibition Radical Stitch, curated by Michelle LaVallee, Cathy Mattes, and Sherry Farrell Racette, hosted in-person and onsite at the MacKenzie Art Gallery with some events streaming online. This weekend will include artist-led hands-on beading circles and workshops, panel discussions, and conversation, and plenty of creative inspiration offered both in-person and virtually.
Schedule
Saturday, 25 June, 2022
TIME | EVENT | FACILITATOR | LOCATION |
---|---|---|---|
9 AM - 10 AM | Registration | Museum Staff | Lobby |
10 AM - 10:30 AM | Welcome & Opening Remarks | John G. Hampton and Tarah Hogue | Theatre |
10:30 AM - 12 PM | Workshop: Beaded Needle Case | Jennine Krauchi | Sculpture Court - North |
Workshop: Quilling | Judy Anderson and Katherine Boyer | Light Studio | |
Workshop: Hanging Amulet | Audie Murray | Sculpture Court - South | |
Session: Learning from the Grandmothers | Gregory Scofield | Salon | |
12 PM - 1 PM | BREAK | ||
1 PM - 2:15 PM | Artist Conversation: Milestones: Shaping the Medium | Ruth Cuthand, Katherine Boyer, Jennine Krauchi, and Judy Anderson | Theatre |
2:30 PM - 3:30 PM | Artist Conversation: Beading Kinship (virtual stream) | Audie Murray, Gregory Scofield, and Katherine Boyer | Theatre |
3:30 PM - 4:30 PM | Artist Conversation: Cross-Border Influences (virtual stream) | Teri Greeves, Elias Not Afraid, Dyani White Hawk | Theatre |
2:30 PM - 4:30 PM | Beading Circle | The Brandon Beading Babes & daphne beads: perler/parler | Salon |
4:30 PM - 4:45 PM | Closing Remarks | John G. Hampton, Liz Barron, Sherry Farrell Racette, Michelle LaVallee, and Cathy Mattes | Salon |
Workshop and Session Descriptions
Opening & Welcome Remarks
10 – 10:30 AM
Featuring John G. Hampton, MacKenzie Art Gallery & Tarah Hogue, Shushkitew Collective. All symposium participants will gather to begin our celebration of beading with an opening prayer. MacKenzie Art Gallery and Shushkitew representatives will make welcoming remarks.
Workshop & Session Offerings
10:30 AM – 12 PM
Please note: We will be sending out a survey to all symposium registrants, where you will be provided an opportunity leading up to the symposium to indicate your preferred workshop to participate in during this timeframe. Please be advised that due to limited seating, we cannot guarantee you will be registered for your first preferred workshop indicated in your survey submission.
Bead Workshop: Quilling
Featuring Katherine Boyer and Judy Anderson
Participants will be introduced to the methods of harvesting, dyeing, and the hard stitch.
Bead Workshop: Hanging Amulet
Featuring Audie Murray
Participants will be creating unique hanging amulets using beads and found objects. These amulets can be used as decoration or as energetic protection to be hung in a specific room, window, etc.
Bead Workshop: Beaded Needle Case
Featuring Jennine Krauchi
Participants will be making a beaded needle case.
Learning From the Grandmothers
Featuring Gregory Scofield
Join us for a discussion on Gregory Scofield’s path to beadwork collection, and his methods of caring for the works and how he learns from them.
Panel: Milestones: Shaping the Medium
1 – 2:15 PM
Moderated by Michelle LaVallee
Featuring artists Judy Anderson, Ruth Cuthand, Katherine Boyer, and Jennine Krauchi
Reflecting on their practice and what brought them to beading, panelists will speak to both the technical and conceptual challenges within beadwork projects and how the medium is contributing to shifts in contemporary art practices and the reception of beadwork today.
Panel: Beading Kinship
2:30 – 3:30 PM
Moderated by Michelle McGeough
Featuring artists Katherine Boyer, Audie Murray, and Gregory Scofield
The intent of the panel is to explore the many ways beading as a practice strengthens and expresses our relationship to the natural world, our family, and our communities. It has been said that beading was a way of expressing our identity as well as a way of covering our loved ones with medicines and prayers. This panel will explore how these artists see their practice as a way of not only producing art but as an expression of kinship.
Panel: Cross-Border Beading Influences
3:30 – 4:30 PM
Moderated by Dr. Lara Evans, Institute of American Indian Art
Featuring artists Elias Not Afraid, Teri Greeves, and Dyani White Hawk
Experience the richness of Radical Stitch through inspiring dialogue and community.
In this conversation, moderated by Dr. Lara Evans (Institute of American Indian Arts), artists Dyani White Hawk, Elias Not Afraid and Teri Greeves discuss ethics, emotions, and care in their beading practices.
Beading Circle
2:30 – 4:30 PM
Moderated by Cathy Mattes and Sherry Farrell-Racette
Featuring The Brandon Beading Babes and daphne group: perler/parler
Join us for an afternoon of beading and community. Participants will have the opportunity to gather together, work on their own projects, and learn from each other in a relaxed setting. The Beading Circle will be facilitated by two Canadian beading groups: The Brandon Beading Babes (Manitoba) and daphne group: perler/parler (Quebec).
About the Facilitators
Judy Anderson
Judy Anderson is nêhiyaw from Gordon First Nation, SK. Her practice includes beadwork, installation, three-dimensional pieces, painting, and collaborative projects, her work focuses on issues of spirituality, family, colonialism, and nêhiyaw ways of knowing and being. Her current work is created with the purpose of honouring people in her life and nêhiyaw intellectualizations of the world. She is an Associate Professor of Canadian Indigenous Studio Art in the Department of Art and Art History at the University of Calgary.
Katherine Boyer
Katherine Boyer (Métis/Settler) is a multidisciplinary artist, whose work is focused on methods bound to textile arts and the handmade – primarily woodworking and beadwork. Boyer’s art and research encompasses personal family narratives, entwined with Métis history, material culture, architectural spaces (human made and natural). Her work often explores boundaries between two opposing things as an effort to better understand both sides of a perceived dichotomous identity. This manifests in long, slow, and considerate laborious processes that attempt to unravel and better understand history, environmental influences, and personal memories. She holds a position as an Assistant Professor at the University of Manitoba, School of Art.
Ruth Cuthand
Ruth Cuthand is a Plains Cree and Scottish/Irish artist, much of her work explores the frictions between cultures, the failures of representation, and the political uses of anger. Ruth expanded her practice to include drawing, photography, and beadwork. She has been the recipient of the Lieutenant Govenor’s Arts Award (2013), and the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts (2020).
Teri Greeves
Teri Greeves is beadwork artist and an enrolled member of the Kiowa Tribe of Oklahoma who lives and works in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Teri’s beadwork follows and updates the Kiowa tradition of beadwork, to tell the story of the American Indian, both contemporary and historical. Her works includes, but is not limited to, beaded books, jewelry, and high-top sneakers. Teri’s works can be found in public collections such as the Heard Museum, the Museum of Arts and Design, the Brooklyn Museum, the Denver Art Museum, the National Museum of the American Indian, the New Mexico Museum of Art, and the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture.
Jennine Krauchi
Jennine Krauchi is a Métis beadwork artist and designer. Her clothing and replica work is in the collections of the Manitoba Museum, Parks Canada, the Canadian Museum of History, the Canadian Museum for Human Rights, and institutions in Scotland, France, and the US. She has spent much of her career sharing traditional practices to foster their survival through contemporary applications.
Audie Murray
Audie Murray is a relative, dreamer, skin-stitcher and Michif visual artist based in Oskana kâ-asastêki (Regina, Saskatchewan; Treaty 4 territory). Her practice is informed by the process of making and visiting to explore themes of contemporary culture, embodied experiences and lived dualities. These modes of working assist with the recentering of our collective connection to the body, ancestral knowledge systems, space and time. She has exhibited widely, including at the Independent Art Fair, NYC; The Vancouver Art Gallery; Centre for Contemporary Arts, Glasgow; and the Anchorage Museum. Murray is represented by Fazakas Gallery on Sḵwx̱wú7mesh, Səl ̓ ílwətaʔ, and xʷməθkʷəy̓ əm territory (Vancouver, B.C.).
Elias Not Afraid
Elias Not Afraid is an Apsaalooké beader, fashion and graphic designer. I’m a self taught bead artist, I been beading since i was 12 years old. I learned multiple beading techniques and mediums over the years. I been a full time artist since 2016. In the same year i participated in Santa Fe Indian Art Market for the first time and both entries won. I been doing SFIAM and the Heard art market from 2016 to this day and in that time frame, I collaborated with companies such as Crate & Barrel, Teton Trade Cloth and Wells Fargo to name a few, i been published in multiple magazines and online articles such as Native Arts Magazine, Powwows.com, Upper Case, Instyle and was featured in the February 2021 issue of Vogue magazine and the book “ Vogue: The United States of Fashion” and many others. I was 1 of 5 artist picked nation wide (USA) to design a bank card for Wells Fargo Bank based off my beadwork.
My beadwork was featured in the The Field Museum exhibition: Apsaalooke Women and Warriors in 2020. Also my beadwork is in the permanent collections of multiple museums such as the Smithsonian.
In July 2021, i launched my first ready to wear fashion line. When i design or create an item, I usually come up with the design (floral or geometric) ill most likely come up with the design on the spot or ill blend both my style and design with my great grandmothers designs together or will bead one of her designs but i just change the colors to my liking. I use the same materials she did as well such as old glass seed beads, smoked deer hide, elk ivories, trade beads but also other items like metal spikes, bones, exotic leathers and bullet shells. I keep the foundation of my work rooted in my traditional elements but also like to branch but and challenge myself to see what else i could do with what was left for us by our ancestors.”
Gregory Scofield
Is Métis of Cree, Scottish and European–Immigrant descent whose ancestry can be traced to the Métis community of Kinosota, Manitoba. He has taught Creative Writing and First Nations and Métis Literature at Laurentian University, Brandon University, Emily Carr University of Art + Design, and the Alberta University of the Arts. He currently holds the position of Associate professor in the Department of Writing at the University of Victoria. Scofield won the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize in 1994 for his debut collection, The Gathering: Stones for the Medicine Wheel, and has since published seven further volumes of poetry including, Witness, I am. He has served as writer-in residence at the University of Manitoba, the University of Winnipeg and Memorial University of Newfoundland. He is the recipient of the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Metal (2012), and most recently the Writers’ Trust of Canada Latner Poetry Prize (2016) that is awarded to a mid-career poet in recognition of a remarkable body of work. Further to writing and teaching, Scofield is also a skilled bead-worker, and he creates in the medium of traditional Métis arts. He continues to assemble a collection of mid to late 19th century Cree-Métis artifacts, which are used as learning and teaching pieces. Scofield’s first memoir Thunder Through My Veins (Doubleday Canada/Anchor Books) was re-published Fall 2019.
The Brandon Beading Babes
The Brandon Beading Babes group was established by Dr. Cathy Mattes in 2014, originally to provide graduation gifts for the Indigenous Graduates at Brandon University. The BU Beading Babes found a home at the Indigenous Peoples Centre (IPC), in the McKenzie Building at Brandon University. The Beading Babes meet at IPC every Tuesday evening year-round from 5:30 pm – 8:00 pm. The core group of participants includes students, faculty, Elders, and community members. The Beading Babes is an inclusive group, welcoming hundreds of members throughout the years, all are welcome to participate and celebrate Indigenous art, in the spirit of collaboration, mentorship and kinship.
The Beading Babes travelled to attend Beading Symposium: Ziigimineshin Winnipeg 2020, which took place Feb. 6 – 9th. Symposium organizers Fran Hebert-Spence, Albyn Carias and Jessie Januska are all graduates of the Visual and Aboriginal Art program at Brandon University.
Members include Christine Tokohopie, Barbara Blind, Kimmi Charlton, Justine Hutcheson, Jena Brisson, Shirley Natowappo, Eleanor Daniels, and Kevin McKenzie.
daphne group: perler/parler
daphne beads: perler/parler (db:p/p) was created in the early months of the pandemic as on-line programming for Centre d’art daphne. At db:p/p people are invited to come together and bead. The evenings are facilitated by daphne co-founders Hannah Claus and Skawennati. We have held artist talks and techniques nights in which new skills are taught; on other evenings people speak about their own projects, artistic practices, or seek advice about the work they are creating. Mentorship is abundant. There is always talk and laughter!
Members include Skawennati, Hannah Claus, Jobena Petonoquot, Kaia’tano:ron Dumoulin Bush, Kathleen Dearhouse, Linda Grussani.
DYANI WHITE HAWK
Dyani White Hawk (Sičáŋǧu Lakota) is a visual artist based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Recent support for White Hawk’s work has included 2021 Anonymous Was a Woman Award, Academy of Arts and Letters Award in Art, and McKnight Visual Art Fellowship, 2019 United States Artists Fellowship in Visual Art, Eiteljorg Fellowship for Contemporary Art, Jerome Hill Artists Fellowship, and Forecast for Public Art Grants, and 2018 Nancy Graves Grant for Visual Artists.
White Hawk’s work is featured in the 2022 Whitney Biennial and in recent solo exhibitions, Dyani White Hawk: Speaking to Relatives, at the Museum of Contemporary Art Denver and Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art. Her work is among many public and private collections such as the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Denver Art Museum, Minneapolis Institute of Art, Museum of Modern Art, Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian and Walker Art Center. She is represented by Bockley Gallery in Minneapolis.