Wisdom / Knowledge-keeping

As a child Faye HeavyShield briefly experienced the boarding school system that separated Native children from their parents and tried to force assimilation into white culture. This floor-to-ceiling thread-based installation looks at blood ties, ancestry, heritage, family, the site of wounds, and the potency of memory. HeavyShield’s minimalist forms are often a metaphor for the human body, and her sculptures sometimes suggest familial structures. Here she considers the multiple associations that blood presents.

This work by Canadian-Lebanese artist and activist Jamelie Hassan features a photograph of a page from an 18th-century Arabic/Persian grammar manuscript. It is overlaid with the last letter of the Arabic alphabet, ى (yaa), which symbolizes completion, depicted in red neon. For Hassan, the use of Arabic calligraphy raises political questions and issues of translation. Although she grew up hearing her parents speak Arabic, she is not fluent in the language. Hassan says: “My struggle for language has somehow become a subtext in my work.”

Evoking a strong sense of community, Sonié Joi Thompson-Ruffin creates worlds and stories in this quilt made of African and American pieced fabrics. The design features a grid of colorful abstract patterns that allude to front porches, sidewalks, and bustling activity. The quilt tells the story of a tight-knit neighborhood of African Americans in the city of Joplin, Missouri.

On the back of this quilt Thompson-Ruffin inscribed the words: "Quilts tell a story our souls need to hear."

Based in Santa Clara Pueblo, New Mexico, Rose B. Simpson is a Native artist who works in ceramics, custom cars, metalwork, performance, installation, and writing. These two prints feature her integration of black-on-black Pueblo pottery traditions and deeply honor the work of Pueblo matriarch Maria Martinez, whose black-on-black jar is displayed nearby and for whom the car prints are named. The prints portray a 1985 Chevy El Camino that Simpson restored herself, in the style of Martinez’s ceramics.

Simpson customized the 1985 Chevy El Camino represented in these prints, naming both the car and prints after her Pueblo ancestor Maria Martinez. She applied a geometric design using satin and high gloss black paint to the El Camino, inspired by the black-on-black pottery developed by Martinez and other artists from San Ildefonso and Santa Clara Pueblos in the early 1900s. The visual lineage connecting Simpson’s car design and Martinez’s pottery can be seen in works created by Martinez in the Spencer’s collection, including the black-on-black jar featured in this exhibition. 

Simpson’s car and prints also honor the art traditions shared through her family lineage. Like many Pueblo potters, Simpson learned the art of pottery from her family members, and then passed along that knowledge to her husband Julian, her son Popovi Da, and her daughter-in-law Santana Roybal. Simpson is from one of the largest families of Santa Clara artists. She is the daughter of Roxanne Swentzell, well-known for her works in clay and bronze, the granddaughter of architect and sculptor Rina Swentzell, and the great-granddaughter of pottery matriarch Rose (Gia) Naranjo. In Maria, Simpson pays homage to this familial legacy through alternative mediums that challenge conventions of gender. 

This black-on-black jar by Maria Martinez directly inspired Simpson's Maria car and prints.

The art of Ke-Sook Lee draws inspiration from her roots in two countries and from her work as a professional artist while also a mother, homemaker, and gardener. While growing up in Korea, Lee learned needlework from her grandmother and great-grandmother. In this thread and paper work Lee uses a technique inspired by quilting, stitching together pieces of stiff Tarlatan (similar to open-weave cheesecloth) with rice paper and clay, in a grid filled with shapes that evoke East Asian calligraphy.

The symbols in Lee’s artworks have personal meanings for the artist. The spidery form repeated in this work is one of the artist’s most frequently used motifs. Lee has characterized this symbol as related to the power of women stating, “Contemporary women have so many things to take care of; not only homemaking but also their careers. All the arms and legs represent strength and the ability to do more—it’s energy. It represents me as I’ve gotten stronger, too.”

Graciela Iturbide was drawn to visit Juchitán, Mexico, and learn from the city’s Indigenous Zapotec community because of their markets where women control local commerce. Influenced by Iturbide’s Catholic roots, this poetic portrait casts Zobeida Díaz as a Madonna donning an iguana halo and enshrined in an archway. The Zapotec people incorporated the image into their own cultural context, naming it “The Juchitán Medusa.”

This needlework sampler was made by a young girl in the Netherlands, likely as part of her school curriculum. In addition to demonstrating the stitcher’s knowledge and skill, the embroidery shows bold defiance by placing a girl in a red dress front and center—an act that was far outside the sampler rule book. Schoolgirl samplers were popular among later generations of collectors, including Sallie Casey Thayer, who donated this sampler as part of the Spencer Museum’s founding collection in 1917.

Schoolgirl samplers were used to educate girls about housework, motherhood, and morality in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Surviving samplers are evidence of the ways in which womanhood has been constructed in European and American societies. They also served as forms of expression for the women who made them. In the words of feminist art historian Rozsika Parker, “The art of embroidery has been the means of educating women into the feminine ideal, and of proving that they have attained it, but it has also provided a weapon of resistance to the constraints of femininity.”