Marie Watt , recipient of the Bonnie Bronson Fellowship Award
"Multi-disciplinary artist Marie Watt draws on her matrilineal Seneca Nation Iroquois/Haudenosaunee) and Scottish-German Wyoming rancher heritage-she describes herself as "half Cowboy, half Indian"-to inform her richly layered work that includes sculpture, drawing, prints and large-scale installation. Storytelling, everyday materials, and the ways that family traditions manifest themselves anew with each generation inspire her. Nonetheless, her work is firmly in the realm of contemporary art and Modernist tradition. Marie Watt was one of five artists featured in the Portland Art Museum's 2008 Contemporary Northwest Art Awards exhibition. Jennifer Gately, curator of that exhibition, describes Watt's work as examining "social and cultural histories embedded in everyday objects and the objects' innate abilities to evoke human connections." She is best known for transforming blankets into complex cultural objects--blankets folded and stacked into precarious towers, or cut up, quilted and re-assembled into compelling configurations. Frequently engaged in large-scale projects, Watt has consequently enlisted family, friends, neighbors and strangers to participate in extended sewing circles, thus creating forums for sharing stories and engaging communities.
About Watt's work Jo Ortel wrote in Migrations: New Directions in Native American Art (2006), "Small details fill Marie Watt with wonder and become the basis for thoughtful, elegant works of art. Through her work, Watt draws attention to the unnoticed parts of our lives. 'I am particularly drawn to the human stories and rituals implicit in everyday objects,' she has said, 'like blankets, bridges, and doorknobs. Made familiar by use and scaled to the body, they often go unnoticed, but make me think about the relationship between part and whole; I wish to capture this sense of familiarity in the objects I make.'"
Watt's work has gained prominence throughout the West as well as nationally. In the last five years, her work has been featured in solo exhibitions at, among other venues: the Boise Art Museum, the Seattle Art Museum, the Institute of American Indian Arts Museum in Santa Fe, the Missoula Museum of Art, the Nicolaysen Museum of Art in Casper, Wyoming, the Wright Museum of Art in Beloit, Wisconsin, and the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian in New York. Marie Watt lives and works in Portland, Oregon. She is represented by PDX Contemporary Art in Portland, and by Greg Kucera Gallery in Seattle.
The Bonnie Bronson Fellowship
In August 1990, Pacific Northwest artist Bonnie Bronson died in a climbing accident. Bronson, whose accomplishments included enamel on steel sculpture, welded and painted steel collages, painting and fabric design, as well as video production and gardening as an art form, had been a powerful force in the Pacific Northwest art community. Family and friends established the Bonnie Bronson Fund in her memory in 1991 as a special interest fund under the aegis of the Oregon Community Foundation. The purpose of the fund was to publish a catalog documenting Bronson's work and life, and to award an annual fellowship to a working artist to advance and encourage intellectual and creative growth. Publication of the catalog coincided with the Bronson retrospective exhibition mounted by the Portland Art Museum in 1993.
A public reception for Watt will be held at Reed College on Monday, April 27, from 5:30 to 7:30 p.m. in the Gray Lounge of Kaul Auditorium