“Art for Zhegagoynak/Chicagoland” is an art exhibition, not an ethnographic or historic exhibition. Art. Contemporary art.
Kelly Church (Match-E-Be-Nash-She-Wish Band of Pottawatomi/Ottawa, born 1967) 'Native Land Mat, 2024. White cedar bark, black ash, ribbon, wood, laminated black construction paper. Collection of the artist, Image courtesy of the artist. HOLLY HENDERSON PHOTOGRAPHY
Kelly Church’s Native Land Mat (2024) seems simple enough. It’s not big, or flashy, or colorful. It doesn’t shout from the wall, more of a “psst.”
The Match-E-Be-Nash-She-Wish Band of Pottawatomi/Ottawa artist’s white cedar bark, black ash, ribbon, wood, and laminated black construction paper artwork would be easy to pass by without a second glance when visiting “Art for Zhegagoynak/Chicagoland” through July 13, 2025, at The Block Museum of Art at Northwestern University in Evanston, IL. Before passing by, however, be sure to look down to read this illuminated message: “YOU ARE ON NATIVE LAND.”
Church’s (b. 1967) mat is a welcome mat. The kind commonly found at front doors across America. Church is welcoming visitors to Native land.
Yes, sprawling Chicagoland is Native land. Same as every other square inch of the United States. Before inventing the skyscraper, Chicago was the traditional homeland of the people of the Council of Three Fires—the Ojibwe, Potawatomi and Odawa—as well as the Menominee, Miami, Ho-Chunk, Sac, Fox, Kickapoo, and Illinois nations. It has been a longstanding cultural and economic hub for Indigenous peoples and continues to be today.
“(Native Land Mat is) foundational to the exhibition, highlighting not just the presence, but the responsibility behind what it means to be on Native land at all times,” Jordan Poorman Cocker (Kiowa), Terra Foundation guest co-curator of the exhibition, told Forbes.com. “(Church) said in our artist panel that you're always on Native land. When you go to sleep, you're on Native land. When you go to work (you’re on Native land). I love that she brought out something that's very simple and intuitive within many of our (Native) communities, that simple fact.”
You are on Native land.
Land. Place. Home.
“There is no separation between the people and the place,” Jason Wesaw (b. 1974; Pokagon Band of Potawatomi) told Forbes.com.
Wesaw and Church along with Andrea Carlson (b. 1979; Grand Portage Ojibwe/European descent) and Nora Moore Lloyd (b. 1947: Lac Courte Oreilles Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe) are the four collaborating artists with connections to Zhegagoynak responsible for helping produce “Woven Being.”
“If you look around many areas in this entire country, but specifically in the Chicagoland region, you'll see evidence of our people in street names, town names, lake names, river names,” Wesaw continued. “It's profound to me how our influence is there, but people don't associate the language with the people. I feel like when people see our art, they see a reflection of us as Indian people, but when they see a reflection of us, it's my hope that they also see a reflection of the land, because everything of what we are as Potawatomi people, as Native people, it really comes to us from our connection to the natural world.”
Menomonee Street. Waukegan. Pistakee Lake. Somonauk Creek.
“My people have been in the Chicagoland region for many thousands of years so we have very, very deep roots, and putting a lens of contemporary art onto our culture and telling those stories in that way freshens them up and gives people a different perspective than perhaps what they've ever been able to experience,” Wesaw added.
Art for Zhegagoynak
Daphne Odjig (Odawa/Potawatomi, 1919–2016), 'Entrance to the Lodge,' 1984. Acrylic on canvas, 20 x 24 inches, J.W. Wiggins Native American Art Collection, University of Arkansas. © Estate of Daphne Odjig.
To be clear, “Art for Zhegagoynak/Chicagoland” is an art exhibition, not an ethnographic or historic exhibition. Art. Contemporary art.
“It's important to think about this exhibition as not just an Indigenous art show, but as a fine arts exhibition” Poorman Cocker said. “We talked early on with the four artists who informed our curatorial decision making through this process of asking them who influenced you, who are your heroes and or sheroes.”
Their list didn’t only include Native artists.
“One of the things that's cool about the presence of the work by Barnett Newman and Agnes Martin and Joseph Albers is how it flips the script,” Kathleen Bickford Berzock, exhibition co-curator and Block associate director of curatorial affairs, told Forbes.com. “We're so conditioned to walk into an encyclopedic art museum and see an exhibition by an artist like that and maybe there's a single work by an unnamed Native artist put there to contextualize their interest in Native art of some kind. In ‘Woven Being,’ we've said the same thing (in reverse). Some of the artists represented in this exhibition see their work being in dialog with (Newman, Martin, and Albers.)”
Native American artists are American artists, too, despite their historic remove from it by scholars, museums, galleries, and collectors.
“Going to museums growing up and investigating my own curiosities about art and who the masters were, I never saw people of from my own community and stories from our perspective,” Wesaw said. “When I would go into these great institutions, the masters, for the most part, were of European descent, and 99% male. I wondered why works of indigenous people were not held in the same regard. I felt the power of the artworks that were created in my community by mentors and teachers and relatives of mine, but I would never see anything like the beautiful black ash basket in ‘Woven Being’ by my elder John Pigeon. I would never see a work of art like that in a contemporary art museum, and I always felt like our works belonged next to those folks considered modern masters.”
All the Native artists in “Woven Being” deserve canonical recognition and consideration beyond the “Native art” silo. Ancestor modern masters in the show include Rick Bartow, Woodrow Wilson Crumbo, Jim Denomie, and George Morrison; living masters include Frank Big Bear, Jeffrey Gibson, Teri Greeves, and Virgil Ortiz.
“As this show was being hung and put together, there were all these synchronicities and these conversations that were going on between the individual artworks that no matter how many discussions we had over the years, or no matter how hard we tried, I don't think we could have made some of those things happen,” Wesaw said. “There's an obvious spirit contained within the show that revealed itself the way that it needed to be revealed, regardless of what we were trying to do as curators, collaborators and artists, and I think that's evident in some of the works by the non-Native artists and the way that they're in this beautiful conversation with the works around them.”
Indigenous Chicago
Andrea Carlson, 'The Indifference of Fire,' 2023, installation view. Oil, acrylic, gouache, ink, color pencil, and graphite on paper approximately 46 x 182 inches (overall), 11.5 x 30 inches (each of 24 elements), Gochman Family Collection. ©Andrea Carlson Block Museum of Art
“Woven Being” seeks to enhance understanding of Chicago by seeing it through Indigenous perspectives. Understandings like how Evanston namesake, Northwestern University founder, and four-decade NU Board of Trustees chair John Evans was connected to the 1864 Sand Creek Massacre where U.S. Army cavalry soldiers slaughtered approximately 150 Cheyenne and Arapaho, most of them women and children.
Understandings like how long before Chicago was remarkable for tall buildings, Chicagoland was remarkable for tall grass. The entirety of Illinois was at one time tallgrass prairie, an ecosystem so rich and diverse with plants and insects and birds and mammals as to make the Garden of Eden look like an abandoned lot on Halsted Street. Carlson’s 15-plus-foot-long The Indifference of Fire (2023) reminds visitors this landscape was once managed by Native people, by fire–‘ishkode’ in Ojibwe–for thousands of years before it was destroyed by that “Great” Chicago fire.
“You can't really support folks that you don't know, and this exhibition does a beautiful job of breaking down some of the barriers through these gorgeous works of fine art around what's known about the region, what's known about the land, what's known about the water, and a little bit about the folks who have called this place home for many generations,” Poorman Croker said. “One of those barriers, especially in urban spaces, is invisibility. There are folks in communities who don't know Native Americans still exist, which is strange from my perspective, but the gaps in our educational system around indigenous histories, continuity, and vitality definitely impact that understanding.”
Tribal nations covered Illinois before the U.S. government pushed them out and stole their land. Then, beginning in the 1950s, another effort to separate Indigenous people from their land, culture, and heritage, brought Native people from around the country to Chicago. Chicago was a hub for urban Indian relocation.
The museum’s location brings extra weight to these overlooked or omitted histories.
“Northwestern and the Block Museum are within walking distance of Lake Michigan, and understanding how that place is an indigenous space changes the way that I personally see where I live and where I work, and I think that's one of the things that this show can do for people who don't have that indigenous perspective,” Bickford Berzock, a 30 year Chicago resident, said.
Weesaw lives on the Michigan side of Lake Michigan. His people refer to the Lake as Kchegmé, large body of water.
“My people did not differentiate the five Great Lakes, rather we knew them as one large, connected body of water, separate from the oceans, rivers, and inland lakes,” Weesaw explains. “Kche (big or large) gmé (water) and put them together: Kchegmé. Interestingly, early explorers and map makers translated what they heard as mshegmé, which eventually was changed even further into how we know the water and state in the present day: Michigan.”
Weesaw produced an installation for “Woven Being” replicating lake life.
“It's common when you're sitting and listening to those waves coming up and feeling that breeze, there's something about it that really connects you as a human being to something larger than our own self,” he explained of his Water Carries Memory. “That work was really satisfying to bring to completion because it's my hope that people are going to find a peaceful, introspective place as they sit and look at the work. I don't need them to think about indigenous perspectives or history or what wrongs need to be righted. I need them to understand that they have a beautiful place in this world that is dependent upon them understanding where they fit into that circle of life, that human beings aren't at the top of some pyramid, but we're merely a part of so many other things going on around us, and it's good to observe those things.”
Admission to The Block Museum of Art is always free.
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