SANTA FE — On a latest go to to her house area in Western Canada, style curator and scholar Amber-Daybreak Bear Gown got here throughout her father’s garments in a museum show. The garment had been his ceremonial dancing costume as a boy, and now it was locked in a glass vitrine. “It’s a feeling of deep sadness that I can’t explain, because it talks to another narrative of why that piece is in the museum,” Bear Gown advised Hyperallergic. “It was probably sold for a dollar, but my grandparents needed money.”
Bear Gown has been working additional time on a grand reversal of that story. She’s the founding director of the Southwest Association for Indian Arts (SWAIA) Indigenous Fashion Show, an eight-year-old custom that yearly closes out Santa Fe Indian Market, the world’s largest Native American arts competition.
This yr, in honor of Indian Market’s centennial, Bear Gown is curating Artwork of Indigenous Fashion, a concurrent exhibition of historic and modern Native style for the Institute of American Indian Arts Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (MoCNA). When Hyperallergic visited together with her, Bear Gown was feeling a conceptual push-and-pull between the style present and the exhibition, plotting the appreciable narrative floor she’d wish to cowl.
“The one overarching element, the one solid thing across Canada and the United States, is that Native American design is the original design of this land,” stated Bear Gown. “Killing a seal, cleaning the intestines, and sewing them together to make a waterproof jacket — you don’t get any more haute couture than that.” In that respect, she was disillusioned when the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork’s 2021 exhibition In America: A Lexicon of Fashion, which anchored the museum’s gala, solely featured one Native American designer.
Bear Gown’s latest scholarly work has zeroed in on direct hyperlinks between Native American design and a broader American aesthetic. She explores the subject in a forthcoming article for the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Artwork. “In the 1920s there was a strong push for American designers to go and look at museum collections — historical and ‘primitive’ arts including Native American textiles and pottery — to inform a unique American design language,” Bear Gown stated of her analysis. “It was like the ABCs and 123s of how to appropriate our cultures.”
Establishing Native American style’s presence and exterior affect is simply the first section of Bear Gown’s curatorial method. She defined that specializing in these broader parts can threat portraying Native tradition as monolithic. Pushing additional, Bear Gown conducts conversations with designers to tease out microregional narratives that aren’t essentially written down. Supplies, colours, patterns, and motifs can hyperlink a design to a selected tribe, or — like the beading on her father’s dancing costume — even a selected household.
“That, to me, is the edge that I have. It’s not this outsider look; I know these designers and I’ve worked with many of them. I want it to be the absolute opposite of anthropological, static art,” stated Bear Gown.
This yr’s style occasions at Indian Market will debut capsule and full collections from 14 designers on August 20 and 21. Bear Gown envisions the runway as a swishing and stomping timeline of up to date Native style legacies. Amongst the individuals, she identifies a trio of style “matriarchs”: Dorothy Grant, Himikalas Pamela Baker, and Patricia Michaels.
Grant is thought for her daring prints that mix Haida Nation motifs with the formline model, and Baker blends First Nations aesthetics from throughout Canada’s West Coast in her mixed-media tremendous jewellery. Michaels, who competed on two seasons of Venture Runway, hand-dyes and paints sheer materials to create high fashion designs with flowing silhouettes.
Their work has influenced a subsequent era of designers, which Bear Gown has dubbed “the innovators.” Like Grant, Jamie Okuma and Lauren Good Day are recognized for his or her assertion prints: Okuma blends pure motifs with geometrics, and Good Day references ledger drawings and textile designs. Ashley Calling Bull and Jessica Matten are amongst the fashions taking the runway.
“Then there’s another component to this, which is the artists who really blur that line between art and fashion. They’re bringing the performative element,” stated Bear Gown. She calls this circle “the rule-breakers,” and it contains visual-artists-turned-designers Catherine Blackburn, Jason Baerg, and Skawennati. Blackburn’s elaborate beadwork has graced Indian Market’s runway earlier than; her New Age Warriors assortment confirmed in 2019, and have become a profitable touring exhibition quickly after. This yr she’s including vibrant new designs to the clear silhouettes of collaborating designer Melanie LeBlanc.
The exhibition at MoCNA, which is one block away from Indian Market’s epicenter on the Santa Fe Plaza, is a tighter association with much more plot to unspool. In The Artwork of Indigenous Fashion, Bear Gown will hint the arc of Native American style historical past by way of an estimated 28 appears to be like.
She had simply returned from a visit to Phoenix, the place she sourced items by historic artist and designer Lloyd Kiva New from a style seller. Kiva New electrified modern mid-century silhouettes with playful, Native culture-inspired patterns, and adorned his signature leather-based purses with metallic buckles bearing Cherokee iconography.
Bear Gown has additionally confirmed appears to be like by dwelling legends Virgil Ortiz, who’s well-known for futuristic black-and-white prints that riff on Cochiti Pueblo pottery motifs, and Orlando Dugi, whose shimmering embroideries and metallic materials evoke Diné creation tales. She was having extra bother securing works by a few of the youthful designers: A bit from Okuma’s collection of hand-beaded Christian Louboutin heels has to date eluded her, however she was on the path of a non-public collector who would possibly mortgage her a pair.
“Specifically with the exhibition, I have curatorial envy of these larger institutions that have a hell of a lot more money than MoCNA,” stated Bear Gown. “They may have more money, but I have access.” She’s been pulling strings extra aggressively currently, as curiosity in Indigenous style grows and different curators enter the image. Lately, Crystal Bridges has been fleshing out its Native style assortment, and the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork is angling to right its earlier blind spots with a second version of In America.
“Several of the key pieces I wanted to include, museums won’t loan them,” Bear Gown stated. “Some of these pieces first appeared in the SWAIA fashion show, but I can’t bring them back to show, which is so disheartening.” She shortly clarified that she’s overjoyed to see Native designers getting into outstanding collections. It’s simply tough for her to think about clothes sitting in archives after they had been as soon as activated by Native folks. “Just let me have it for the runway, then you can take it,” she stated.
