Marie Watt (Seneca)

"Blanket Stories" Catalogue

Portland Art Museum exhibit

Art in America

Marie Watt is an artist whose work is centered on community. Most notable is her work with blankets – both as an object and as a metaphor in Native life. Funding for this project assisted Marie with the first phase in a new body of work from her new studios in NYC that included elements of drawing, 3 large hand sewn tapestries, and community projects that featured sewing circles and The Incomplete Indigenous Botanical Canon – Plant Stories, Remedies, Illustrations. This project culminated in a solo mid-career survey exhibition, Lodge,  at the Halle Ford Museum of Art in Salem, Oregon (February 4 - April 1, 2012) and will then travel to the Tacoma Art Museum, June 23 - September 24, 2012. Museum attendance at the Hallie Ford is expected to be 6,500, while at Tacoma Art Museum, over 21,000. 225 people will have participated in community sewing circles, while 100 will participate in a Blanket Story Exchange.

With a recent move of her family and arts practice to New York City, Marie says of her work, "I tend to think of my work as part of a continuum. One project leads to more questions that lead to future work. In this case I feel the past year has paved the foundation for work that will happen over the next decade, .... the work accomplished this year seem like the first act to a larger proposal. The grant from NACF represents communal support and validation (a sense of others believing in what you do), fiscal means for the most basic of resources (in my case, studio space and materials), and ultimately, the encouragement to take risks." Marie's work is continually referenced in contemporary Native art discourse. Her work has been featured at the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), Crow's Shadow Institute, and PDX Contemporary Art as well as a host of group shows whose themes range from New American Voices to New Directions in Native Arts and from Redefining the Canvas to When Dog Turns to Wolf.