Meet the artists of ‘Mesh,’ using their work to give voice to contemporary concerns

“Existential crisis” came up more often than was comfortable around the recent United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, Scotland. The phrase suddenly doesn’t sound hyperbolic. Which may be one reason why “Mesh,” a group show of emerging Indigenous contemporary artists at the Portland Art Museum, lands so well. The four artists, representing a range of geographies and tribes in Oregon and beyond, each bring a distinctive voice to shared concerns about what happens when we don’t care for our land and people.

Ka’ila Farrell-Smith: “It was a gamble to leave Portland”

Several years ago, the painter and mixed-media artists Ka’ila Farrell-Smith, a member of the Klamath Modoc Tribes, moved out of Portland as an act of resistance and relocated to Modoc Point in southern Oregon, historically Klamath land.

“It was a gamble to leave Portland,” she said. “I’m using refusal and flight as decolonial freedom and not participating in the white colonial system.”

Farrell-Smith is the daughter of Al Smith, an Indigenous activist whose court case defending the right to use peyote in Native religious ceremonies went to the United States Supreme Court and was the catalyst for the American Indian Religious Freedom Act Amendments of 1994. Her studio is near where her father was raised before being taken from his family as a young boy – Farrell-Smith uses the word “stolen” – and sent to boarding schools for Native American students. He repeatedly escaped.

She is keenly aware of her family and tribal history on the land, and of the contemporary threats to it. She walks looking down and collects debris, such as shell casings and deteriorated metal that serve as stencils, as well as the earth pigments that are incorporated into her sophisticated, layered paintings. The “Klamath charcoal” used in her work is from a wildfire burn near where she lives.

“Land Back” is her most recent series of paintings, started when she moved to Modoc Point. The phrase references a widespread movement to reclaim Native land, languages and culture; individual pieces in the series home in on the epidemic of missing and murdered Indigenous women and the fight against liquefied natural gas pipelines, which are often mapped across traditional Native American land and sacred sites.

While working on the “Land Back” paintings, Farrell-Smith was heavily involved in efforts to stop the Jordan Cove pipeline project, which would have crossed traditional Native lands. This past spring, a coalition of groups opposed to the project, including the Klamath Tribes, celebrated a victory when the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality denied the project a key permit.

“I use the word ‘activist,’” Farrell-Smith said as she described her evolution as an artist. “My father used the word ‘activist’ with his work.”

Leah Rose Kolakowski: “I don’t want us to look historical”

Leah Rose Kolakowski used to think she wanted to be a tattooer. Then she discovered photography and the dark room. She bought a camera and explored portraiture and the more experimental sides of the medium. As she was graduating from the Pennsylvania College of Art and Design, she considered going into fashion photography, but, she said, it felt meaningless.

An enrolled member of the Keweenaw Bay Ojibwa Tribe, Rose Kolakowski spent her summers as a child on her tribe’s reservation in Michigan, returning to Pennsylvania for school in the fall. At loose ends after college, she decided to move to Michigan, where she studied at Keweenaw Bay Ojibwa Community College, a small school that offers classes in Ojibwa language, culture and history. It was her first time back to Michigan as an adult. She stayed for a year and a half, finding new purpose in her photography and learning the traditions of her family and tribe.

She’d learned to powwow dance very young and started dancing again. As she did so, she realized that people were more comfortable around her, asking her to take photos or portraits. Her photographs of powwows from that time, such as the black-and-white “Woodland Powwow” from 2015, are both immediate and intimate, the luminous, detailed prints placing the viewer in the center of the action.

Encouraged by a friend to take her work to the Santa Fe Indian Market, one of the largest annual Native American art markets in the country, she used money she’d earned dancing at a powwow and got a flight to Santa Fe. She handed out her prints for free, meeting as many people as she could. It’s where she met the photographer Cara Romero, who would later become her mentor, in 2017, as part of the first cohort of the Native Art & Cultures Foundation’s Mentor Artist Fellowship program.

“With my work now, what I’ve found is my heart’s work, my art’s work,” Rose Kolakowski said. “I want people to look at my photographs in 200 years and say, ‘That’s how Indigenous people looked.’ It’s the opposite of Edward Curtis,” she said, referring to the early 20th-century photographer whose images of Native Americans were part of an effort to document what he saw as a dying culture.

Rose Kolakowski’s more recent work, portraits where her sitters dictate how they want to be represented and hyperkinetic images of powwows, are shot in full color.

“I don’t want us to look historical,” she said.

Lehuauakea: Kapa work guides “path of cultural reclamation”

At 25, Lehuauakea, who is mixed-Kanaka Maoli (Native Hawaiian), is the youngest artist included in “Mesh.” Their art practice has evolved quickly, however, from the painting they were doing in college to the nuanced, craft-based work they now focus on.

Born in Portland, Lehuauakea spent their childhood in Hawai’i before returning to Portland for high school and college. They were working through a standard Western art curriculum at the Pacific Northwest College of Art, they said, when they realized something was missing. In their last two years of college, they started incorporating traditional pattern work, replicating objects they’d seen as a child in Hawai’i.

From there, the transition to working with kapa, a kind of cloth made from hand-beaten bark, took Lehuauakea down what they described as a “path of cultural reclamation.” (They also note that there’s no word for “fabric” in their traditional language.) The work is time and energy intensive. Lehuauakea makes the tools that are used to beat the bark into thin sheets that they then hand paint with earth pigments and plant dyes that they also make and process.

The patterns and designs that Lehuauakea uses on the textural sheets are personal as well as place-based. They have created patterns of cedar and pine trees, and rivers and waterfalls also make their way into their work. “There’s so much water here!” said the artist, who is now based in Seattle.

“It’s most appropriate for contemporary makers to make new patterns that represent them and their experience today,” Lehuauakea said. “There’s so much of the spiritual held in the patterns created centuries ago. Using them isn’t approved of without knowing their origins or knowing who they belonged to.”

In their more recent work, Lehuauakea has stopped including English translations of the works’ titles. They describe this as an act of Indigenous resistance and resilience. It’s also a revindication of the Native Hawaiian language, whose use was banned from 1846 until 1986.

“Part of that is what needs to be shared, what deserves to be shared, and what deserves to be kept as part of our communities,” Lehuauakea said. “You can see something beautiful in the patterns and technical forms, but unless you have access to a good dictionary or know the language, the meaning is available to only some audiences.”

Lynnette Haozous: “What are my modern-day weapons?”

It was important to Lynnette Haozous’ family that she get a college degree, which she did, majoring in social work and graduating from New Mexico Highlands University in 2016, at the age of 31. But by then she also knew that she wanted to be an artist.

Haozous, who is Chiricahua Apache, Diné and Taos Pueblo and a member of the San Carlos Apache Tribe, cites activism as the catalyst for her taking her art more seriously. Her senior year of college, she participated in the Save Oak Flat movement, an effort to protect land considered sacred by the Apache Tribe that is being threatened by copper mining in Arizona.

“What are my modern-day weapons?” she remembered asking herself. She created posters and flyers for the movement and saw explicitly how art could be used for something powerful and to promote a message.

Her interest in mural painting grew from wanting to use her art to communicate to a wider public, and in 2020 she was selected to apprentice with Nani Chacon as part of the Native Arts & Cultures Foundation’s Mentor Artist Fellowship program. Working with an established muralist who was also an Indigenous woman, Haozous learned not just technique, but also the importance of actively engaging with a community about what content goes onto public spaces.

“She taught me the importance of using art to better communities and futures, the importance of teaching and giving back,” said Haozous.

Haozous’ contribution to “Mesh” is a graphic mural painted directly on a gallery wall, where it saturates the space with color and warmth. In it, a monumental young Indigenous woman surrounded by geometric forms — turquoise Apache morning stars, yellow-gold orbs, and stacks of triangles — gazes resolutely back into the galleries. The abalone shell on her forehead is a reference to the Sunrise ceremony, a coming-of-age dance for women that was illegal to perform from 1883 until 1978, when the American Indian Religious Freedom Act was passed.

Many Indigenous societies were historically matriarchal, Haozous noted; art museums and institutions have traditionally not been.

“What a way to make this an act of rematriation and decolonization,” she said.

— Briana Miller, for The Oregonian/OregonLive