"Intersections" Native Artists Panel Talk 

Tweed Museum of Art

Due to the recent snow storm in our area, we had to postpone this event and reschedule it to April 30.
The Tweed Museum of Art invites you to partake in a panel discussion about the current exhibition Intersections.
Dyani White Hawk, Steve Premo, and Karen Savage, the featured artists, will participate in a panel conversation moderated by Professor Jill Doerfler, Chair of the UMD American Indian Studies Department. They will address several topics, including their careers, artistic styles and themes, and discuss how their work intersects with other artists.
Intersections, an exhibition of contemporary Native art from Minnesota-based artists, features works primarily from the Tweed Museum collection. The exhibition highlights significant artists, beginning with George Morrison and Patrick Desjarlait, who were at the forefront of the contemporary Native art movement and have influenced artists since then. It is a continuation of the Tweed Museum’s focus on the development of Native arts in our region.
The exhibition shows how these particular artists have informed each other and how they intersect in an aesthetic field with a mutually recognized canon as to artistic style, medium, and subject matter. While each artist has an individual artistic voice, combined they amplify a strong, distinct, and unifying voice, which has influenced the contemporary national and international art world. The artists express compelling visual narratives, and each tell a culturally powerful story, sometimes based on oral tradition. They advocate for socio-political justice by requiring audiences to think more about Native people’s place in American history and current society.
The event is free and open to the public but registration is required as space is limited.
 
About our Moderator:
Dr. Jill Doerfler is a professor and the department head of American Indian Studies at the University of Minnesota Duluth. She is from the White Earth Nation and her scholarly interest is in American Indian, specifically Anishinaabe, identity and tribal citizenship. She currently co-coordinates Zaagibagaang, which is a grassroots community education and empowerment project.
 
About our Panelists:
Dyani White Hawk currently resides in Shakopee, Minnesota. She is Sicangu Lakota, an enrolled member of the Rosebud Sioux Tribe. White Hawk earned a MFA in Studio Arts in 2011 from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and BFA in 2-Dimensional Studio Arts in 2008 from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. She served as Gallery Director and Curator for the All My Relations Gallery in Minneapolis, Minnesota from 2011-2015. In May of 2015, White Hawk transitioned into full-time studio practice.
White Hawk is a 2019 recipient of a Jerome Hill Artist Fellowship grant in the visual arts, a 2015 Native Arts and Cultures Foundation Visual Arts Fellowship, 2014 Joan Mitchell Foundation Painters and Sculptors Grant, 2013/14 McKnight Visual Artist Fellowship, and the 2012 Southwestern Association of Indian Arts Discovery Fellowship. Her work has been acquisitioned into the collections of the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, Tweed Museum of Art, Akta Lakota Museum, the University of Wisconsin- Madison's Wisconsin Union Art Collection, and the Robert Penn Collection of Contemporary Northern Plains Indian Art of the University of South Dakota. She is represented by Shiprock Santa Fe and the Bockley Gallery in Minneapolis.
 
Steve Premo is a member of the Mille Lacs Ojibwe band. Steve has been drawing and painting since he was a child.When he was little, he suffered a leg injury, which left himat his mother's side. With her guidance, he learned to make beadwork, birch bark baskets, quillwork, jingles, and bandolier bags. His wise mother, Rose Clark, took him to the medicine lodge In Mille Lacs when doctors in Minneapolis wanted to amputate his leg. His healing began, and Steve learned to walk again. This was the beginning of his life as an artist. In 6th grade, he went to the Minneapolis Institute of Art where he realized in a moment of inspiration that he wanted to "chronicle or be the recorder of Ojibwe life and conscience." He studied art at University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, Minneapolis College of Art and Design, and the Institute of American Indian Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Today, Steve's work combines traditional and contemporary art forms, painting, illustrations, textile design, and ceremonial blankets.
 
Karen Savage-Blue lives on the Fond du Lac Reservation in northern Minnesota. Her Native American heritage insists that she acknowledge nature by practicing respect and gratitude for the natural world. She was introduced to oil paints in high school and took many art classes. After graduating, she went to the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. While attending the Institute, she met some of the most proficient Native American Artists of our time. Karen returned to the Great Lakes area and lived on her Reservation while attending the University of Minnesota-Duluth, where she received her K-12 Teaching Art License. In 2012, she received a Masters of Education. She currently teaches at the local Fond du Lac Community College.