February 8 – May 28, 2014
In 2012, the Museum was one of ten art institutions in the country to receive the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation’s Artistic Innovation and Collaboration grant, a three-year grant designed to encourage artistic collaboration and innovation. Through this grant the Museum commissioned six artists to work with the people of the Spirit Lake Reservation. The commissioned artists were asked to create work in responds to contemporary life on the mixed-race, multi-cultural, poverty-ridden Spirit Lake Dakota Sioux Reservation. The show includes images of today’s painted and photographed inhabitants of Spirit Lake, sculptural investigations into Tribal family structure, poetic reflections on tough social issues faced by today’s Spirit Lake people, and work based in the mythic roll of the bison in Northern Plains Indian culture. An exhibition of the first round of work displayed at the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Project Space in New York’s prestigious Chelsea Art District. The artists invited the Cankdeska Cikana Drum Group to perform at the New York opening. After the exhibition closed in New York it traveled back home to the Spirit Lake Reservation and opened at the Cankdeska Cikana Community College in Ft. Totten, North Dakota. The exhibition continued on to the North Dakota Museum of Art. The artists are photographer Rena Effendi of Baku, Azerbaijan who now lives in Cairo; Bill Harbort, a New Yorker transplanted to Minot, North Dakota, who left a lucrative graphic design career to teach art to college students; and John Hitchcock, of Southern Cheyenne and Northern European descent who teaches at the University of Wisconsin. They are joined by North Dakota sculptor Terry Jelsing, Manitoba painter Tim Schouten, and New York video installation artist Mary Lucier who has completed two major works about loss in North Dakota.
Installation Images
Terry Jelsing, Conference of Mothers for Sunniva, 2013.
Mixed Media, 15 x 16 Feet.
Exhibition Partner:
