The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida presents an exhibit featuring more than 100 works of art by 12 Native American artists. Reclaiming Your Home: Contemporary Seminole Art is on display March 18 through September 4 in the Ulla R. and Arthur F. Searing Wing and features works by Seminole, Miccosukee, and Métis artists from Florida, as well as notable works by artists of Muscogee (Creek) and Seminole from Oklahoma, California and elsewhere. The exhibition aims to expand the conceptual framework of Native American art made in Florida today and to better understand the complexity of the issues surrounding Seminole diaspora art.
Members of the Seminole and Miccosukee Tribes of Florida are represented by visual artists who work or have worked in clay, textiles, film, woodworking, beadwork, digital drawing, and painting. Their art offers an intimate look at the artists’ lived experiences and explores issues of ancestry and identity, the environment, interfaith, and traditional ways of knowing in Florida’s Native communities. Drawing on techniques of photo and digital collage, performance, video, installation art and mixed media, Seminole diaspora artists immerse themselves in the creation of images and the Creek and Seminole anthems, offering diverse perspectives on the themes of memory, history, health and representation as expressions of Indigenous visual sovereignty.
Artists of the exhibition at The Ringling include the late Noah Billie (Seminole), Wilson Bowers (Seminole), Houston R. Cypress (Miccosukee), Elisa Harkins (Cherokee/Muscogee [Creek]), Alyssa Osceola (Seminole), Jessica Osceola (Seminole/Irish), C. Maxx Stevens (Seminole/Muscogee [Creek]), Tony Tiger (Sac and Fox/Seminole/Muscogee [Creek]), Hulleah J. Tsinhnahjinnie (Taskigi/Diné [Navajo]/Seminole), Brian Zepeda (Seminole), Corinne Zepeda (Seminole/Mexican) and Pedro Zepeda (Seminole/Mexican).
Get your house back is accompanied by an exhibition catalog with scholarly texts by Durante Blais-Billie and Dr. Stacy E. Pratt, published by Scala Arts Publishers.
To learn more, visit ringling.org.
