Submitted by South Puget Sound Community College
South Puget Sound Community College today announced it will partner with yəhaw̓, a year-long Indigenous community-building project, to bring the 2019 Native American Art Exhibition “And Now We Know: Indigenous Artists Write the World” to The Gallery at Kenneth J. Minnaert Center for the Arts. The exhibition will run from February 7 to March 8, 2019.
Curated by artist Asia Tail, the exhibition features Indigenous artists of the Pacific Northwest, working across media at the intersection of literary and visual arts. The Gallery will also host a library with a selection of publications by local Native writers.
Join us for an Opening Reception with refreshments and readings:
Opening Reception
Friday, Feb. 8, 2019
6:00 – 8:00 p.m.
More from guest curator Asia Tail:
Language plays a prominent role in the Lifting the Sky story, as told by Upper Skagit elder Vi Hilbert. She speaks of a time when Indigenous people from diverse communities gathered because the sky was too low. Although they spoke different languages, by creating just one word with shared meaning— yəhaw̓ (‘yahowt’), which means ‘to do the work’—together they were able to raise the sky, creating a better world for themselves and each other. Vi Hilbert ends her telling with the phrase “and now we know”, teaching us not only how the world came to be, but our role in its transformation, and that through ingenuity and creativity we shape our collective futures.
Whether using Native dialects or subverting colonizers’ vernacular, the artists in this exhibition embrace verbal and visual languages to tell their own narratives. Indigenous creatives continue to explore new forms in storytelling to communicate experiences simultaneously personal and political in impact: a poem, a prayer or protest, a lullaby as much as love letter. As in the Lifting the Sky story, artists are creating worlds with their work.
