THE ARTS
Thursday, May 6, 2021 • ThE BuLLETIN
Continued from previous page
But that was the extent to which he
thought about it — for about a month
and a half, anyway. But because of the
pandemic, he kept mulling it over.
“Normally when we go through our
day to day lives during regular times, I
think we have a lot of pretty good ideas,
whether it’s about our job or our family
or our home, and we just kind of let it
go because we’ve got other things we’ve
got to get to,” Morin said.
“By the time another six weeks had
passed, I came up with having Native
American artists all across North Amer-
ica do works on antique maps,” he said.
Chapman was on board with it, too.
The proceeding would entail learning
quite a bit about the antique map world.
“I had to then find out where you
want to acquire them from — and
where you don’t,” he said. “Now my
time was filled up, but I wasn’t just sit-
ting around wondering about this and
that. … Then we had to get in the maps,
then we had to line up the artists and
then we had to get them to them and
get them back.”
They sent out about 100 maps to
close to two dozen Indigenous artists
from as far north as Alaska and Can-
ada’s Baffin Island and as far south as
Mexico. Though they haven’t received
all of the altered maps back yet, “you
just can’t wait forever,” Morin said. “We
can’t wait for all 100 maps to come back,
and we anticipated this would probably
happen.”
Morin and Chapman see these works
on maps as not only a new interpreta-
tion of ledger art, but also paralleling a
movement within geography and car-
tography known as “decolonizing the
map.”
“If you’re decolonizing the map …
you’re identifying the places that were
important to the Native American peo-
ple,” Morin explained. “That becomes
more difficult, because now you’re in-
volving the history of those people, so
you’re going to have to do a lot more
research in terms of what did they find
important that they gave names to.”
The artists took either a narrative
storytelling approach or depicted a sin-
gle subject. An example of the latter
is Caddo and Winnebago artist Do-
lores Purdy’s “We Haven’t Forgotten
You,” which depicts two women, one of
whom holds a parasol.
“That (title) is kind of the unofficial
name of the theme about missing and
murdered Indigenous women in the
American West,” Morin said. “I real-
ize the public isn’t going to know about
that … but people who know the Native
American world will understand what’s
going on there, and that will be even
more meaningful for them.
“I find maps fascinating, as I know
that the flattened perspective and place
names only hint at the rich world it rep-
resents,” Chapman added in a follow-up
email. “The artists involved in this proj-
ect brought their creativity and contem-
plation to each map. Their narrative and
perspective is now an important over-
lay. It’s simply fascinating to study each
map for its historical value and then see
it transformed into a contemporary and
timeless story.”
The reason Chapman and Morin
included “1st Edition” in the name is
because they have more such shows
planned for the future. As Morin said
earlier, they think the idea of antique
map art could prove to have legs, in the
way ledger art has.
“I don’t care if artists do this, and
if Native Americans want to get their
maps and start doing this, go for it,” Mo-
rin said. “But I don’t want another gal-
lery to jump on top of us and copy this.
So by calling it ‘1st Edition,’ we’re letting
the gallery world know that there will
an edition next year, and the next year,
and the year after that.”
e e
David Jasper: 541-383-0349,
djasper@bendbulletin.com
‘Kids Curate’ to open Friday
at High Desert Museum
BY DAVID JASPER
The Bulletin
On Friday, “Kids Curate,” an exhibit cre-
ated by fifth graders from R.E. Jewell Ele-
mentary, opens at the High Desert Museum.
Every school year, Museum curators work
with students from a different Central Ore-
gon school in the program, which integrates
art history, writing and science both in the
classroom and through field trips, culmi-
nating in an exhibit at the museum south of
Bend.
The Jewell students are part of the eighth
annual “Kids Curate” program, which ex-
plored how plants and animals use energy
from the sun. Each class was assigned a hab-
itat — forest, riparian or shrub-steppe —
and created line drawings of various flora
and fauna from the different ecosystems,
which were then laser-etched onto plexiglass
tiles to create a mosaic on the gallery wall. It
displays through June 6.
“The ‘Kids Curate’ students bring a one-
of-a-kind display to the High Desert Mu-
seum every spring,” said Museum Executive
Director Dana Whitelaw. “We are excited to
give students learning opportunities outside
of the classroom, fusing art and science as
well as connecting community and place.”
Contact: highdesertmuseum.org or 541-
382-4754.
e e
David Jasper: 541-383-0349, djasper@bendbulletin.com
Find it all online
bendbulletin.com
GO! MAGAZINE • PAGE 7
Submitted photo
Caddo and Winnebago member Dolores Purdy’s “We Hav-
en’t Forgotten You” is painted on a 14-by-23-inch 1883 map
of Indian Territory.