Material Matters

Treaty Quilt with the Osage, 1808

Gina Adams made Treaty Quilt with the Osage, 1808 in 2018 as part of her series titled Broken Treaty Quilts. Each work is stitched with text from a treaty negotiated between the US government and Native American tribes that was subsequently violated. In 1804, twelve Osage chiefs met with President Thomas Jefferson in Washington, DC. The Osage tribe then signed seven treaties with the United States over the course of thirty years. The first of these was the Treaty of 1808, signed in St. Louis, Missouri. Along with establishing a trade factory at Fort Clark and regulating the fur trade, this treaty also negotiated disputes over territory. Articles such as these allowed the United States to claim land from the Osage, taking the majority of what is now called Missouri and a swath of what is now called Arkansas in 1808, and giving them in return trade goods of limited utility to the tribe. Continued land losses over the next thirty years left the Osage with only a small territory in southern Kansas. The opening lines of Article 1 can be read on Treaty Quilt with the Osage, 1808, sewn into the quilt using hand-cut letters. In her series, Adams, an American artist descended from colonial Americans as well as the Ojibwe and Lakota peoples, chose the medium of quilting for its associations with warmth and comfort, along with its importance in Osage culture, which contrast the vulnerability imposed upon the Osage by these treaties. Furthermore, the language of these treaties was deliberately vague, leading to easy misinterpretation. Adams mirrors this willful obscuring of significance in the colorful but hard-to-decipher lettering on the quilt.

 

29 Palms

29 Palms is a work by Alison Elisabeth Taylor crafted in 2007 using the technique of marquetry, which involves the precise application of thin pieces of wood, or veneer, to a backing in order to create a design. Inspired by ancient inlaying techniques, marquetry gained in popularity during the Renaissance, when rich patrons hired craftspeople to produce furniture using this costly and time-consuming method. First, high-quality hardwoods would have to be imported, painstakingly sawed into thin tiles, finely carved to shape, laid into a groundwork one piece at a time, and then burnished and sealed. As a result of the lavish materials and protracted labor needed for its creation, marquetry came to be associated with wealth and, in turn, became a status symbol of the elite in Renaissance Europe. Taylor, an American artist originally from Las Vegas, presents a scene from Twentynine Palms, a city in California, of a trio of young boys crossing a desertscape near a highway on which a collection of military vehicles drive. Two of the figures turn their heads to the side to look outside of the composition while the right-most figure fixes the viewer with his gaze, asserting his presence. Twentynine Palms is home to both Joshua Tree National Park the Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center, meaning there are periodic inflows and outflows of both military personnel and tourists. This has resulted in an unstable economy for the permanent residents of the city, as their incomes depend on irregular industries. In 2019, for example, the median household income in Twentynine Palms was over $20,000 lower than the national median. As such, the city is representative of the economic inequality that plagues American life. Contrasting sharply with the historical prestige of Taylor’s marquetry technique is the association with poverty of the cheap laminate wood out of which the work is made. As the artist says of the medium, “A viewer can find dual associations with the opulence of Louis XIV and the squalor of wood laminate living.”

In summary

While Adams and Taylor selected their media for their historical and cultural associations, through their choice of content, they have countered those associations. From their long histories, quilting and marquetry have been imbued with meanings, such as comfort and prestige, respectively. These artists borrow and mutate this shorthand to make the point that material matters. As these media moved through time, they collected resonances from the variety of contexts in which they were employed, to the end that a quilt is not just a quilt. In Osage culture, a quilt is a marker of identity that is presented to figures of honor at tribal gatherings. By sewing the words of a treaty that took away the majority of Osage territory onto a quilt, Adams is demonstrating the depth of the violation perpetrated by the US government on Indigenous peoples. Likewise, Taylor’s work is not just a clever play of associations between what was expensive furniture in the Renaissance and what is cheap, tacky laminate wood decor today. She is elevating and aestheticizing youth culture in a disadvantaged city to the status of Renaissance art. Thereby, she asserts that these are not forgotten people—despite the transience of tourists and the Marines—in and out of their city, but a community to be valued. Thus, the figure’s piercing gaze challenges the viewer’s expectations and defies them to ignore him.