Constellations of Relationality: Woven Being at the Block Museum

Lori Waxman reviews Woven Being: Art for Zhegagoynak/Chicagoland at the Block Museum of Art for Hyperallergic. Works by Frank Big Bear, Andrea Carlson, George Morrison, and Jim Denomie join others in mapping Indigenous art histories of Zhegagoynak/Chicagoland.

Frank Big Bear’s The Walker Collage, Multiverse #10 is composed of over 400 collaged postcards that “interconnect, mesmerizingly and surrealistically, and the sum total is utterly flabbergasting,” writes Waxman. She continues, “He manages to do in one enormous artwork what the curators claim for the show as a whole: tackle themes of land and waterways, extra-human connection, and nonlinear time; and attend to shared aesthetics, materials, and values among community and kin.”

Woven Being is the result of a collaborative curatorial process between Block curators Kathleen Bickford Berzock, Janet Dees, and Jordan Poorman Cocker and four of the exhibiting artists: Andrea Carlson, Kelly Church, Nora Moore Lloyd, and Jason Wesaw. Each collaborating artist created “constellations” of artworks–theirs and others’–to touch on subjects as wide-ranging as Native abstraction, historical events, and stereotypical depictions of “Indian warriors” used by settler-colonial corporations.

Woven Being remains on view at the Block through July 13. An exhibition catalog is forthcoming.