The first solo exhibition of the Oregon-based artist Sara Siestreem (Hanis Coos) in New York marks her return to the city’s consciousness. After earning an MFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in 2007, Siestreem returned to her homeland in the Umpqua River Valley to teach traditional Indigenous weaving to her Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw Indian community. A central piece of this show at Cristin Tierney Gallery, 3/15/2020 minion (2024), was made collaboratively with her students, mostly young women. Consisting of four slip-cast ceramic dance caps draped with strings of red abalone, glass beads, and plastic buttons, the “minions” swayed ever so slightly as I approached, further animated by their shadows. For Siestreem, they call attention to the presence of ancestral protectors, who are attracted to the scarlet iridescence of abalone.
The palpable materiality of Siestreem’s art is irresistible. Everything desires to be touched. I wanted to feel the texture of the beads and Siestreem’s woven baskets, and to work out where the weave begins and ends. This tactility of her art is truthful to the sensory abundance of Indigenous culture, and contrasts with the primacy of the visual in Western art traditions. The baskets emanate the faint scents of medicinal plants—cedar bark, sweet grass, and spruce root—whose olfactory values serve as agents in the Indigenous ceremony of smudging. In glass bat (2024), the mixed-media painting to the left of the baskets, serial images of her hands shaking rattles further introduce a musical rhythm and dancing motion, as if to animate the countless extinct oysters Xeroxed across the composition.
