Artist Talk reflection: Gina Adams

"Its Honor is Hereby Pledged: Broken Treaty Quilts." 2018 installation at Dartmouth College.

                

I was unfortunately unable to attend the reception because of a schedule conflict with LSO rehearsal. My reflection will thus focus only on the talk.

See her website here.

I was impressed and moved by Gina Adams's work. I'm not sure if it's the bias in me towards seeing handcrafts as "not real art" or "women's work" or something, but when I heard she did work with quilts I was not especially excited. I should know better than that. Upon attending her talk, I realized I had severely underestimated my interest in her art and I listened with rapt attention.

I was intrigued to hear of her disregard for the origins of her antique quilts, and I wondered (but did not ask) why she might ignore that aspect of her found objects, when such a large part of her art is focused on correcting the misrepresentations of history. At the same time, I doubt many of these quilts were made by indigenous people, and so it's almost like a "f--- you!" to the white colonialist history the quilts are likely to carry. Reclaiming, repurposing. Replanting, replacing, rewriting. If white people are going to erase the atrocities they committed against indigenous peoples, then it seems we will get our history edited in turn.

I was also deeply fascinated her explanation of her choice of color. Adams told us that the reason some of the letters are nearly the same shade as the quilts is to make the treaties intentionally hard to read. She explained that when she reads the broken treaties and agreements for her designs, the language is duplicitous and seems intent on confounding the reader. Thus, she doesn't want to give her audiences the easy way out with reading the quilts. She wants us to struggle just as hard to understand what the agreements are saying as the indigenous people who signed them, and thus come to a deeper understanding of why the treaties are hostile to the people they were applied to, before they were broken and after. She wants us to sit in that feeling as we try to decipher what the quilts are saying, and I really appreciated the effort that was put into that extra detail.

Adams wearing one of her quilts.

I think a McLuhan quote that reminds me strongly of this talk is one that can be found on page 88: "A strange bond often exists among antisocial types in their power to see environments as they really are." Adams is doing the hard work of seeing the American environment as it really is and trying to do something about it, the hard work that many of us are still waking up to: this country is one that is founded on racism and bigotry, and we need to reckon with that. I hope the rest of us antisocial types catch up soon.