Brandeis Alumni, Family and Friends

Bright red dresses hung from tree branches across campus last fall. The dresses were part of The REDress Project, an art installation by artist Jaime Black, who is of Anishinaabe and Finnish descent. Black worked with Brandeis students to install the piece, which calls attention to the thousands of missing and murdered Indigenous women in North America.

Full of tribal symbolism and fueled by memories of powwows past, Wampanoag alumna Natasha Frye’s colorful paintings adorn a trading post and gathering space in her native Mashpee, Massachusetts.

Jeffrey Gibson’s BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY (2021) is on view at the Rose as part of the museum’s 60th anniversary exhibition re: collections, Six Decades at the Rose Art Museum. Gibson is a member of the Mississippi Band of the Choctaw Indians and his vibrantly patterned work refers to his Indigenous heritage and queer identity and the aesthetics and biases associated with those identity markers.

Mexican artist Noé Martínez, who is of Huastec lineage, questions the relationship between art, politics, and participation in his work. Pieces like Árbol. Las presencias dormidas (2020) in the Rose’s collection bring together biographical accounts of his family’s experience in his native Michoacán, manifestations of ancient Indigenous cultures of the region, along with contemporary social mobilizations.

James “Ari” Montford ’74 is a Black Indian descendant of the Simons family from the Mashantucket Pequot Nation, whose painting, collage, installation, and performance deeply explore transculturalism, reflecting his dual heritage and its traumatic histories. After 45 years of educating, curating, and creating in more than two dozen arts and academic institutions, exhibiting his work in over 100 shows, earning more than 30 awards and three degrees, his big thinking, bold intellect, and sensitive heart continue to reexamine what it means to have a sense of agency and identity in a tumultuous world.

The Robert D. Farber University Archives and Special Collections Department at Brandeis is home to 38 original watercolor paintings by several well-known Native American artists from the San Ildefonso Pueblo, just north of Santa Fe, New Mexico. Two works by Romando Vigil, also known as Tse Ye Mu, are now on view at the Rose.

The Rose Art Museum recently added Marie Watt’s Forerunner (2020) to its permanent collection. Watt is a member of the Seneca Nation of Indians and her multicultural background and Native American heritage deeply inspire her work, specifically Iroquois proto-feminism and Indigenous teachings. Forerunner is now on view at the museum in re: collections, Six Decades at the Rose Art Museum.