Celia Álvarez Muñoz: Breaking the Binding

Since the time I left the Crow reservation, I have encountered my tribe’s material cultural in every city I have exhibited or occupied. It is incredible that so much of my community’s history and material culture is kept in the vaults of these institutions, hundreds of miles away from their source.

– Wendy Red Star

Wendy Red Star made her first big move off the Crow reservation to attend Montana State University in Bozeman. During one of her study sessions she discovered an image of Medicine Crow, an Apsáalooke chief, in a random book in the university library. Enamored by his image, she made a xerox copy and kept the chief’s image in her sketchbook. A decade later, in 2014, she revisited this image to create an exhibition at the Portland Art Museum titled Medicine Crow & the 1880 Crow Peace Delegation.

Bíilukaa builds upon this theme of researching historical photographs of Apsáalooke individuals and material culture, with the artist drawing on both her personal collection and works held in museums and archives across the country. The book features interviews with the artist and members of her extended family and scholars, alongside new works of primarily collaged photography. Red Star has chosen the title Bíilukaa in reference to what the Apsáalooke call themselves: Our Side. Bíilukaa is the book Red Star wishes she could have read when setting out as a young artist, a book that educates the public about collections and archives, while also honoring her family and community.

wild and playful, full of surprises and gifts in every page.
i touch it, as a living animal.
let’s pray the deer will help us bring back the dance.

— Cecilia Vicuña

Inspired initially by Jerome Rothenberg’s translation Flower World Variations, which Cecilia Vicuña first encountered in 1985, Deer Book brings together nearly forty years of the artist’s poetry, “poethical” translations, and drawings related to cosmologies and mythologies surrounding the deer, and sacrificial dance in cultures around the world.

Woven like one of her quipu installations, Vicuña’s texts—which include original compositions in Spanish as well as English translations by Daniel Borzutzky—become meditations on translation, not just of the sacred nature of this animal but on how our understandings of ceremony and ritual are transformed, by this ongoing process. Taken as inspiration rather than conundrum, the impossibility of translation opens up poetic possibilities for Vicuña as she continues her lifelong exploration into the nature of communication across eras and distant lands, languages and shared symbols within Indigenous spiritualities.

My aim is to incite public remembrance and to impede distorted realities that I witness, like the social amnesia that surrounds us all.

– Vincent Valdez

Vincent Valdez blends large, representational paintings—the scale of which recall Western traditions of history painting as well as mural painting and cinema—with contemporary subject matter. In Memory is the first book-length study of the artist’s work, which focuses on subjects that explore his observations and experience of life in the twenty-first century. The results are powerful images of American identity that confront injustice and inequity while imbuing his subjects with empathy and humanity. Recognized for his monumental portrayal of the contemporary figure, his drawn and painted subjects remark on a universal struggle within various socio-political arenas and eras.

Printed on paper made from Japanese shrubs, this work of book art documents artist Ann Hamilton’s fascination with tactility, an exploration into the possibility of cultivating attention in a hyper-distracted world of information.

Throughout her practice, Ann Hamilton has used videos and still images as part of her larger installation works, though they have rarely been the singular focus of a project. This publication brings together vocabulary from four bodies of image-based work produced over the last five years and includes photographic portraits as well as lens-less contact scans of ornithological taxidermy, fabrics and garments, and objects from various personal and institutional collections. Hamilton believes that her projects can be considered not as artifacts or something to be documented, but as their own material object—in this case, a book. While Sense contains images that Hamilton has accumulated over many years, of people and of objects that conflate touch, light, and surface, the book also becomes an object in hand, a thing felt, an artwork in itself. 

Reprocessed through multiple printings on tissue Gampi and newsprint, the images emphasize the tactile nature of their substrate and Hamilton’s material hand. The work’s physical presence is reinforced by the textured surface of the book’s pages and scale shifts. This volume thus becomes an art object of its own; repetition, the atmospheric nature of the images’ shallow depths of field, and the intuitive connections made between different bodies of work create an almost film-like cadence that renders the felt qualities of touch.