Sisters of the Great Lakes: Art of American Indian Women
By Fred Camper
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Several pieces replace the complete picture of Three Sisters with multiple, more open images. Shirley M. Brauker’s Sisters is a clay vessel solid in its lower half but broken in the upper by a friezelike openwork design that includes four women and various plants and animals. While the women’s outstretched hands touch, unifying the scene, gaps appear between their legs and arms and the tree trunks. In addition, each woman is clad differently, symbolizing a coming together of different tribes, and faces in one of the four directions, long an important symbolic tradition in Native American cultures. “The animals,” Brauker told me, “are like spirit animals: each one has a different lesson or medicine they can give the people.” Once again human figures and nature are intertwined, a melding that the broken surface heightens: the open areas take their outlines from the figures, and the resulting lack of closure suggests that these trees, or women, cannot be fully evoked by images, inviting the viewer to imagine links and spirits not fully shown.
Yvonne M. Walker-Keshick’s To Our Sisters is a birch-bark box covered with a design made of porcupine quills, which add a coarse, grainy texture to the images. Walker-Keshick, who comes from a long line of quill workers, doesn’t usually dye her quills; instead she uses brown-and-white quills to create a sort of drawing in the two tones. Cutting and arranging the quills with great care, she creates human figures and animals whose edges are articulated by the color change within single quills. She also often arranges the quills to enhance the texture of what’s depicted, to show the veins of a leaf or suggest the grain of wood. She even places a few extra quills on top of the box, above the inlaid ones, to show us what they look like on their own: you’re not only looking at pictures of nature but at the natural materials themselves, once part of an animal and now the artist’s medium. The work thus suggests the unity underlying nature: the spirit residing in any of its parts echoes throughout the whole.
There are also 31 paintings and drawings on view: the show constitutes the entire oeuvre of this farmer’s wife and factory worker, who lived near Pekin and died in 1981 at the age of 85. Untrained as an artist, she began making quilts in 1976; at that time collector Merle Glick encouraged her to paint as well. The paintings are charming but reminiscent of much naive art. More extraordinary are the six large quilts, two on Biblical themes and four on historical subjects.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): “Skywoman Looks Back” by Jolene Rickard photo courtesy Sisters of the Great Lakes/MSU Museum; “History of Illinois” by Mary Eveland.
