Marie Watt: Turtle Island is the first mid-career retrospective of the work of Portland, Oregon-based artist Marie Watt (b. 1967, Seattle). For thirty years, Watt—a member of the Turtle Clan of the Seneca Nation of Indians with German-Scot ancestry—has created solo and collaborative artworks rooted in what she describes as Haudenosaunee protofeminism and Indigenous teachings. At the same time, and in equal measure, she is deeply inspired by art history and employs innovative techniques and material applications in prints, paintings, textiles, and sculptures that together privilege history, community, and storytelling as vital forms of interconnectivity.
Watt often conceives of her artworks as “transportation objects” made from conceptually “storied” materials. Blankets, either found or donated, feature throughout her work and carry myriad associations. Like other conceptually rich and culturally specific materials such as vintage glass beads, steel I-beams, and acoustic tin jingles, blankets hold specific relationships to Native American tribes, including her own, even as they open to a broad array of personal, historical, and cultural associations. Watt works these materials fastidiously by hand, and according to the artist, meaning is made when they are “transformed into an object to remember, to connect, to liberate, to reveal, to repair.” The exhibition is accompanied by the first in-depth, scholarly monograph dedicated to Watt’s wide-ranging work, framed by the exhibition’s key themes and artworks.