Austin
Blanton Museum of Art, University of Texas at Austin
In one version of the jingle dress origin story, when a young girl of the Ojibwe nation fell ill during the 1918 global flu pandemic, leading Ojibwe women, guided by instructions in a dream, attached makeshift bells to their dresses and danced around the girl in a healing ritual. Native American dances and ceremonies had been outlawed by the American government since 1883, so their action was technically an illegal act of defiance and cultural self-assertion.
Marie Watt, an enrolled member of the Seneca Nation, pays tribute to this story and cultural heritage in Sky Dances Light (on view through October 20, 2024), a joyous and immersive installation that invites participation. Watt received an MFA at Yale in printmaking and painting, but in much of her work, she uses fabric and textiles to create large sculptural environments meant to be seen and experienced in the round. Her multidisciplinary practice is deeply informed by Native American history and storytelling. This installation is among the most recent in a series of works incorporating conical metallic jingles, which she first introduced as supporting elements in her textile sculptures, but here they take center stage.
Traditionally, the bells on jingle dresses were created from the rolled-up lids of tobacco cans. Watt has replicated and multiplied these upcycled materials in abundance, attaching thousands of bells together with red, white, and blue ribbons. The resulting nebulous forms are suspended midway between the ceiling and the floor, looking a bit like stalactites pressing down into the space. These abstract, cloud-like forms consciously evoke another traditional story, this one from the Coast Salish tribe, in which the Coast Salish (joined by many other tribes, all speaking different languages) collectively unified to push the collapsing sky back up into its rightful place.
A jingle dance is performative, and visitors are encouraged to touch Watt’s sculptures, activating them to produce sound, which underscores the fact that much Indigenous art wasn’t made to be admired behind a wall of glass; it was made to be used and embodied, much like the jingle dress itself. Fittingly, the installation also includes a short video featuring Acosia Red Elk, a 10-time champion jingle dress dancer of the Umatilla tribe, performing in the gallery space against the backdrop of Watt’s sculptures.
Sky Dances Light is an affectionate tribute to the enduring heritage of the jingle dance and its story of healing, and to the tactile, performative nature of Native American visual culture more broadly. Given our proximity to the recent Covid pandemic (during which the sky certainly seemed to be closing in, metaphorically speaking), the installation is uncannily relevant in its oblique evocation of another pandemic a century ago.
