The Institute of Contemporary Art / Boston is celebrating the art of storytelling through cloth, beads and community with Marie Watt: Turtle Island, the first mid-career retrospective of the acclaimed Portland-based artist Marie Watt, now on view.
Watt, a member of the Turtle Clan of the Seneca Nation of Indians, has spent thirty years creating solo and collaborative artworks rooted in Haudenosaunee teachings and Indigenous worldviews, while drawing equal inspiration from art history. Her materials are conceptually rich and deeply personal: reclaimed wool blankets, vintage glass beads, steel I-beams and acoustic tin jingles.
Blankets, either found or donated, carry myriad associations with Native American tribes and open a broad array of personal, historical and cultural meanings. Watt works these materials fastidiously by hand, and, in her words, meaning is made when they are transformed into objects to remember, to connect, to liberate, to reveal, to repair.
The exhibition spans prints, paintings, textiles and sculptures, and is accompanied by the first in-depth scholarly monograph dedicated to Watt’s wide-ranging work. A luminous, moving tribute to history, community and craft, now at the ICA Boston.
Photo: ICA Boston
