Kelly c. Frye

The soul and spirit of my work springs from my curious nature. This curiosity has led me to many adventures throughout my life. Self-discovery through the arts allows me to express a contemporary voice of my Indigenous world. I find limitless possibilities of expression in a combination of historical and personal narratives. These experiences have allowed me to explore different mediums, culminating in a passion for sculpture with casting metals, welded steel, and clay.

Darby Raymond-Overstreet

“As a Diné artist, working with patterns is the most illuminating way for me to explore and expand my understanding of the world. Much of my work is about identity. I’m interested in how cultural practices of art influence and inform collective identity, and how our relationships to our ancestries, our contemporaries, and our descendants culminate to define personal identities and perspectives.

As a digital artist, I create cultural portraits that describe modern day Diné in the visual language of our heritage. I merge the artistry of traditional woven textiles into the format and medium of digital art, and suspend the works in traditional looms. These works emulate the duality of Indigenous traditionalism and the adaptation to western society that shapes much of today’s Diné experience. I use woven patterns in my portraits as a way of both reclaiming and celebrating our visual cultural aesthetic. Prompted by rampant cultural appropriation by corporate industries, I find it an apt response to show who these designs come from and for whom they were made. The works also serve as an homage to weavers and the practice of weaving itself. As a printmaker, I explore what it means to be a part of something and how identity is formed. Coming from a mixed racial background, my identity has often been explained and understood by others in terms of parts, but I don’t experience my identity in parts.

I experience the wholeness of myself through the relationships that I have to my kin. So to examine this feeling of wholeness I create arrangements of pattern designs, cut them apart, and splice them together in compositions that through the process become something different yet whole again. Each individual piece takes on its own particular meaning, usually, relating to place, emotion, and memory.”

A. Thompson

“In all the wonderful creations this life offers, as an artist, we want to make the unknown seen. We want to bring forth the underlayer of what is also almost demised. That is the thing about art, it is simple but also a huge book of confusion and that is where I want my art to be. I want you to look at my work and question both its light and dark, its joy and hatred, its death and life. Most of the art is coming from an emotion of anger, understanding, comfort, and peace. These works are a reminder that we’re allowed as humans to freely and truly express in many foams during incredible harsh times. We can strive with our culture, we can survive with our stories, we can live and move forward with our own power.”

A.Thomspson, artist’s statement