Marie Watt

Celebrated artist Marie Watt (Hodinöhsö:ni’, Seneca Nation) has roots in the Buffalo area. Her family grew up in Cattaraugus territories, now part of Seneca Nation. She also has German-Scottish ancestry. Her interdisciplinary work draws from history, biography, Iroquois proto-feminism, and Indigenous teachings; in it she explores the intersection of history, community, and storytelling. Through collaborative actions she instigates multigenerational and cross-disciplinary conversations that might create a lens and conversation for understanding connectedness to place, one another, and the university.

Watt holds an MFA in painting and printmaking from Yale University; she also has degrees from Willamette University and the Institute of American Indian Arts; and in 2016 she was awarded an honorary doctorate from Willamette University.

She has attended residencies at the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture and the Vermont Studio Center, and has received fellowships from Anonymous Was a Woman, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, the Harpo Foundation, The Ford Family Foundation, and the Native Arts and Culture Foundation, among others.

Watt serves on the board for VoCA (Voices in Contemporary Art) and on the Native Advisory Committee at the Portland Art Museum, and in 2020 became a member of the Board of Trustees at the Portland Art Museum. She is a fan of Crow’s Shadow, an Indigenous-founded printmaking institute located on the homelands of the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla, as well as Portland Community College.

Selected collections include the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Seattle Art Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Yale University Art Gallery, the Crystal Bridges Museum, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian and Renwick Gallery, the Tacoma Art Museum, the Denver Art Museum, and the Portland Art Museum. She is represented by PDX Contemporary Art in Portland, Oregon; Greg Kucera Gallery in Seattle, Washington; and Marc Straus Gallery in New York City, New York.

In Buffalo, Watt’s work has been exhibited at K Art and the Buffalo History Museum, with themes associated with these two prints. Her website describes her solo exhibition, Hodinöhsö:ni’ Resurgence: Marie Watt, Calling Back, Calling Forward, which was on view July 14-October 31, 2022:

Celebrated artist Marie Watt (Hodinöhsö:ni’, Seneca Nation) has roots in the Buffalo area. Her family grew up in Cattaraugus territories, now part of Seneca Nation. In her Buffalo exhibition, Watt and her collaborators worked to amplify the resurgence of Hodinöhsö:ni’ Peoples in the region. Inside the museum, visitors found Watt’s monumental textile works and sculptures known for their engagement with Hodinöhsö:ni’ worldviews. Moreover, visitors will encounter several interventions staged by Watt and the curators that ask viewers to consider the relationship of the museum to Indigenous communities. Typical displays of Seneca objects have been rethought to underscore the absence of those objects from and, in some cases, their future return to their communities.

Additionally, for this exhibition, Watt designed a 24-foot-long neon sign on the rear façade of the Buffalo History Museum bearing the name of Nancy Bowen (Hodinöhsö:ni’, Cayuga), who was the subject of an issue-laden homicide trial in Buffalo in 1930. Watt’s neon sign invites us into the museum to learn about Bowen and Hodinöhsö:ni’ life from a Hodinöhsö:ni’ perspective. Moreover, it furthers Watt’s interest in neon signage as an opportunity to spark learning by bringing important words and names from Indigenous languages and experiences to vibrant attention. Bowen’s name, as a glowing marquee, may bring us to recall Indigenous activists who defended her name in 1930, or call us forward in time, to the contemporary #sayhername movement.

In its Summer 2022 news release, Mullowney Printing provided details about the significance of Nancy Bowen as the subject of the print:

Nancy Bowen was a Cayuga and Hodinöhsö:ni’ woman from the Cattaraugus Reservation of the Seneca Nation. In 1930 she was tried for the murder of Clothilde Marchand in Buffalo, New York. Prior to her trial, however, the media and judicial system demonized Bowen and proclaimed her guilty for the crime of being Indigenous, rendering her guilty in the court of public opinion and denying her the opportunity for a fair and just trial. This project aims to reclaim Nancy Bowen’s story and place it in the context of what is happening today. Her story connects to our present moment, to the story of George Floyd, Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women (MMIW) and others who have directly experienced death, incarceration, and systemic trauma as a result of entrenched racism. In Nancy Bowen (Reconciliation), Watt worked directly on two soft ground plates repeatedly writing Nancy Bowen’s name with her left and right hand simultaneously. There is no accessible record of Nancy Bowen’s signature, which led Watt to use this process to imagine and reflect on Bowen’s bodily presence or in the words of Jason Vartikar “invoke history and futurity in one stroke.” The resulting image is an amalgamation of many layers of writing which appear, when printed in the intaglio process, backwards. Watt chose to have the plates printed on two thin translucent sheets of gampi, then adhered frontside down on the backing sheet so that the text was again right reading. Twinning language is a concept that Watt uses throughout her work, in this case a calling back and calling forward to recognize the permutations of historic racism in ongoing conversations and hopes for reconciliation.

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