Impressively harmonious artistic manifesto propels Storywork: The Prints of Marie Watt from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation exhibition at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts

In recent years, a continuous string of major exhibitions at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts (UMFA) has augmented their visual brilliance with overarching themes that speak potently to the evolving gateway role of museums. These exhibitions exemplify an unprecedented degree of sensitivity about the intersecting  spheres of the artist as a messenger of enlightenment and the patron-collector who selflessly acts to support as well as magnify the artist’s most authentic self.

One of the most impressive examples of this is Storywork: The Prints of Marie Watt from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation, which continues through June 21 at the UMFA. The exhibition extends beyond the artist’s print practice with her monumental blanket stacks, hanging textiles, and small-scale sculptures. Watt is the granddaughter of Wyoming ranchers and an enrolled member in the Turtle Clan of Seneca Nation (Hodinöhsö:ni’). Watt has described herself as “half cowboy and half Indian, conscious of the entangled histories of colonizer and colonized,” as noted by John P. Murphy, in a magnificent coffee table book that digs deep into Watt’s biography and artistic development, produced and published by Jordan D. Schnitzer and his Family foundation.

Schnitzer is no ordinary patron of the visual arts. In an age where many extraordinarily rich, notoriously aloof and antisocial art collectors compete to outbid their rivals for some of the world’s most famous artworks only to hide them in vaults, Schnitzer, one of the top 10 private real estate owners in the western U.S., unconditionally embraces art’s ideal as a public good to inspire, teach and enlighten. Recognized by ARTNews as a Top 200 collector, Schnitzer is one of the important facilitators in giving the public opportunities to engage with contemporary art. His foundation has supported more than 180 exhibitions and loaned works at no cost to more than 130 museums. Regarding the featured artist in this exhibition, Schnitzer said, “Marie’s [Watt] art takes us on a journey to another time and place. We travel back thousands of years to Native communities that lived on this honored land. She teaches us to see Native symbols and images that tell the story of those who came before us. Marie brilliantly uses that same symbolism to help us understand contemporary Indian Country.”

The most impactful artist is not just instinctively inspired, but also focused on calling exhibition visitors to, first, comprehend how her work responds to a contemporary problem and, second, how they can discover a fresh, informed understanding of peoples whose histories and identities carry much greater significance than what we have traditionally acknowledged. Watt is enrolled in the Seneca Nation, which totals 8,000 and more than half of them live outside of the nation territory. In one of the essays in that outstanding book-length companion to Watt’s art, Jolene Rickard succinctly states the problem and question for exhibition viewers to contemplate, as they engage with more than 60 works in the show:

So what happens when an artist like Watt is detached from the physical place of her ancestors but connected through her mother’s memory and lived experience? How do we read her art? What is it telling us about the concepts and experiences she is negotiating? It’s important to acknowledge that Watt’s experience as a diasporic citizen of the Onöñda’wa’ga Nation is more common than that of Indigenous peoples living within their nation territories. 

Drawing extensively from the Seneca Creation Story and how current actions affirm kinship and ecological stewardship for sustaining the world according to the Seneca principle of Seven Generations, Watt threads the archaeology of Hodinöhsö:ni’ knowledge with relevant contemporary parallels. She elaborates upon an elegant structure that continuously incorporates new synthesizing cultural elements as a work in progress. “Watt’s complicated subjectivity often resonates with various pulse points in Hodinöhsö:ni’ space, like a ping or an evocative echo that affirms the resilience of the original teachings or marks the impact of settler violence and decolonial love,” Rickard explains.

The exhibition provides many examples, as Watt engages with and reclaims Greek and Roman mythology, pop culture myths of Star Wars and Star Trek, the social sculptures of Joseph Beuys, minimalism’s plainspoken geometry, pop music and historical images which connect to contemporary sociopolitical causes. 

Murphy describes her 2014 Witness (Quamichan Potlatch, 1913)—a photo originally taken by a white missionary—as a “manifesto-in-miniature: a powerful statement scaled at 7 by 8 inches.” In her words, Watt documents an act of “ecstatic giving,” as the family standing atop a longhouse tosses a bright red blanket to the guests below. Witness, as Murphy emphasizes, signifies an “act of civil disobedience. At the time the original photograph was taken, potlatches were outlawed by the U.S. and Canadian governments.” Likewise, as Nancy Marie Mithlo, a Chiricahua Apache curator, writer and professor, explains, the timing of Watt’s Witness coincided with contemporary social movements including Black Lives Matter and the Standing Rock protests. 

Watt’s attention to history engulfs her artistic practice. During her Crow’s Shadow residency in Pendleton, Oregon in 2003, Watt began collecting and reclaiming blankets from thrift stores as well as those given by friends. As Murphy writes, the blankets became a polyvalent palimpsest for reclaiming Indigenous sovereignty, just as critical as how blankets, capable of telling one’s life story, are also common ritual gifts for Native powwows, graduations, weddings and funerals. “Stacking them in vertical columns conjured for Watt a host of associations: the Douglas firs of her native Northwest, the towering totems of Coast Salish tribes, Constantin Brancusi’s Endless Column (1938), or Donald Judd’s minimalist sculptures,” Murphy adds.

Definitive examples of Watt’s Companion Species series evokes the inspirational 2003 book by Donna J. Haraway: The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. These prints stand out in this exhibition, for how, as Murphy explains, compels us to look beyond the binaries and to rethink our perceptions of human dominion. Inspired by one of the most iconic bronze sculptures of antiquity highlighting the Capitoline Wolf in the legend of Romulus and Remus, Watt pays homage to the values of motherly obligations. Just as resonating for Watt, in emphasizing the Seneca principle of Seven Generations, is Marvin Gaye’s What’s Going On (1971) opening verse, “Mother, Mother.” Watt is clear about why this link becomes essential to her holistic philosophy as an artist.

He is calling us all, and he wants a response. Embedded in that response is a sense that we are all related. I researched the history of that song, and it led me to consider the time in which it was written [citing the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the occupation of the Alcatraz prison and the Vietnam War protests]. It was actually Obie Benson who penned the lyrics, and Marvin Gaye reworked them and recorded it. Berry Gordy’s label did not want to produce music that had an activist slant to it, so Marvin Gaye did what artists sometimes do when people throw up roadblocks: he decided to self-produce the song. Copies were pressed in small numbers, and those singles were played to immense critical acclaim, which then made it advantageous for Motown to release it.  

Watt ingeniously bridges many intersections while ensuring the integrity of the Indigenous Original Instructions, the cornerstone of traditional knowledge. Transit, edition 7/25, (2004) emerged during a Tamarind Lithography Workshop at the University of New Mexico, where Watt was inspired by two Jasper Johns works: Flags (1973) and Target (1974). Murphy explains, “Watt also associated the circle with the storytelling circles her mother initiated in the Seattle area as part of her work as an Indian Education specialist. Circles can expand or contract based on the number of participants, and the form implies equality among the participants.” Watts affirms this: “As one of the first drawn images in most cultures, it’s inherited memory. Then there is the sewing circle and the Native American medicine wheel…It is also shield-like…and an anchor to family and knowledge.” 

The exhibition’s internal harmony is evident at every turn. Drawn directly on a limestone block to generate its lithographic design, Three Ladders, edition 12/20 (2005), comprises the most characteristic elements in her work—the ladder, the star quilt pattern and the blanket stack. It is perhaps Watt’s most personal statement on Haraway’s companion species articulation, as it signifies Watt’s ancestral affiliation with the Turtle Clan and the origins of the Hodinöhsö:ni’ existence. This is reiterated in Companion Species (Malleable / Brittle), edition 20/20 (2021). “Is this work a symbolic call for a time of renewal? Are the banner-like, red, layered slashes an embodiment of the womb yet reimagined or a literal reference to a “companion species,” like a wolf,” Rickard notes. “Hints of cultural priorities such as water, root, tree, adaptive are balanced or juxtaposed with human struggles— extraction, chaos and brittle.”

Jo-ann Archibald (Q’um Q’um Xiiem) speaks to the creative brief of the exhibition’s title, which embodies the seven principles of Indigenous story work: respect, responsibility, reciprocity, reverence, holism, interrelatedness and synergy. “Watt’s Blanket Stories lithographs give form to storywork as woven strands of interrelatedness, mutual respect and reciprocity,” Archibald notes. “The nexus of vertical and horizontal lines, interwoven and overlapping, create the silhouettes of blanket stacks: a new kind of monument to humility rather than power, respect rather than dominance, the community rather than the individual.”

Without exception, one justifiably marvels at the beauty, heart nd soul in the collection of works for this exhibition. But it is even more important to comprehend the historical gravity of the stories that drive Watt’s artistic practice. We have seen far too many news accounts about the government’s asset-obsessed mindset threatening, for example, Chaco Canyon, Columbia River Tribes and salmon, the revested Oregon and California Railroad Lands, and ongoing efforts to undo Indigenous legal precedent and subvert tribal sovereign rights to govern their own territories. In this age, art takes on even greater impact, especially as they relate to the principles of Indigenous storywork. We cannot ignore its inherent political impact even when artists do not overtly express it.

The exhibition is organized by the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation in partnership with University Galleries, University of San Diego, and curated by John Murphy, Hoehn Curatorial Fellow for Prints. The UMFA’s iteration of this exhibition was curated by Emily Lawhead, associate curator of modern and contemporary art. ​ For more information, see the Utah Museum of Fine Arts website.