New Interview: Eric-Paul Riege on Animate Objects, Performance, and Diné Weaving

“I consider everything I do a weaving,” says Diné artist Eric-Paul Riege. “Talking to you, I consider myself the weft and you the warp, and as we’re talking the threads of our lives, our histories, and our futures become intertwined and braided and tangled.” A fiber artist born and based in Gallup (Na’nízhoozhí), Riege makes sculptural installations from natural and synthetic materials—cat fur, sheeps wool, stuffed animals—to examine both his own personal cosmology and that of his Diné heritage. Following solo shows at the Hammer Museum in LA and ICA Miami, Riege recently returned to Minneapolis’s Bockley Gallery, site of a 2021 solo show, for the group exhibition Now You See It, Now You Don’t, on view through April 29. To mark the occasion, we shared our 2021 conversation—on topics including queerness, art activated through performance, and his belief that objects are animate—on Bockley’s newly redesigned website.

Read “I Am the Weft, You Art the Warp,” my interview with Eric-Paul Riege.

Eric-Paul Riege, dah ‘iistl’o ́ [loomz], weaving dance (fig.1) (2018), Sanitary Tortilla Factory, Albuquerque, NM.
Photo by Rapheal Begay, courtesy of the artist

Interview: Dyani White Hawk on her Whitney Biennial Artwork

With Wopila | Lineage (2022)—her 14-by-8-foot contribution to the 2022 Whitney Biennial—Dyani White Hawk wanted to make a statement: “I wanted to position Lakota aesthetics in the Whitney Biennial. Native people have not been able to walk into public spaces and see our lives validated, reflected, honored, and uplifted in the way that other folks have. So they’re the first audience I want to address.”

Beyond that, though, she wanted to use beauty—through the meticulous application of more than a half million shimmering glass beads—to open up a conversation with visitors. “‘Wopila’ expresses deep gratitude,” she tells me in a just-published interview.” And "‘Lineage,’ like much of my work recently, is meant to honor and show gratitude for the lineage of Lakota women and their contributions to abstraction, for Indigenous women at large and their contributions to art on this continent, for the generations of practiced abstraction that helped nurture and guide the work of the Western artists that were inspired by their work and brought that back into their studios with them as they created easel paintings. In these pieces I’m pulling from those histories—from my own very specific history of Lakota abstraction, from Indigenous abstract practices at large, from abstract easel painting practices—and hoping to create opportunities for conversation around how connected those histories are and the fact that one doesn’t happen without the other.”

She acknowledges there’s a critique embedded in the work:

It’s recognizing the bullshit that it has been, and the way that it’s been taught so far is extremely racist and sexist and ageist. Without a doubt, it’s a critique of how it has been presented to us and taught to us so far. But I don’t want to just sit in a place of anger. I want to sit in a place of: this is the BS that has existed; now how do we move towards a healthier future?

Read “Beauty Is Medicinal: Dyani White Hawk on her Whitney Biennial Artwork”

Interview: Pao Houa Her on Homelands Lost, Imagined, Constructed

Pao Houa Her was sixteen years old when she saw someone who looked like her on an art museum wall for the first time. Born in Laos and having arrived in the US as a refugee at age three, she was viewing photographer Wing Young Huie’s 1998 Walker Art Center show, which depicted, among others, Hmong residents of St. Paul’s Frogtown neighborhood. The exhibition was an inspiration for Her to take up photography, a move that led her to study at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design, where she earned her BFA, and at Yale, where she was the first Hmong graduate of the school’s photography MFA program. This year marks a momentous return to the Walker for the Twin Cities–based artist: it’s the site of her first solo museum show, Paj qaum ntuj / Flowers of the Sky—an honor that follows her appearance in the 2022 Whitney Biennial (where 54 of her photos were featured) and her third-place prize in the 2022 Outwin Boochever Portrait Competition at the National Portrait Gallery, where her photo is currently on view.

To inaugurate the newly redesigned website for Bockley Gallery (more on that soon), I interviewed Her about her practice and the thread of desire that weaves through all of her work—from the longing for a Hmong homeland for community elders displaced by the war in Vietnam to the search for official recognition by Hmong soldiers who were guerrilla fighters for the US but continue to be denied veterans benefits today.

Her works can be deceptive. Often shot in a traditional Hmong portraiture style, her photos also tell deeper, more complex stories. The portraits of Hmong women in the After the Fall of the Hmong Teb Chaw series, for instance, honor Hmong elders, but also nod to a scandal in the community: these women were victims of a Hmong swindler who promised them a stake in a fictitious Hmong homeland (or teb chaw) in Laos. Shot at a St. Paul senior center and the Como Conservatory, the imagery appears to be set in the lush jungles of Laos, but the reality of their displacement is betrayed by subtle details (a visible cord or electrical outlet, a mix of real and artificial plants).

Pao Houa Her, untitled (portrait), 2017
After the Fall of Hmong Teb Chaw series

The Attention series (2012–2014), too, carries a deeper meaning. Mimicking the aesthetic of traditional military portraiture, the series showcases Hmong soldiers, in dress uniforms, chests laden with medals, and often appearing against a backdrop of red velvet. But while she’s honoring these men on the walls of museums, she’s unable to name them, due to the Stolen Valor Act, which prohibits impersonating military personnel.

She tells me:

With these men, the uniforms and the medals that they wear are not US sanctioned. They’re not provided for them by the United States Army. They’re going out and buying their own uniforms, their own medals, their own pins, and they’re giving it to themselves. There’s that aspect.

Then one has to wonder: if they were in the US military, would they be getting all that? Maybe they would; I don’t know. Then the other aspect: I get that the United States Army has completely forgotten about them and that it’s important to them to be seen. And, as a person who’s making these photographs of them, maybe it’s important for me to name them. Maybe I am contributing to that continued erasure, but also I feel like: why is it up to another Hmong person—why is it up to me to do that, to give them names, when it should be the job of the people who are erasing them?

Please read, “Homelands Lost, Constructed, Reimagined: An Interview with Pao Houa Her”