Support for Oregon Art Beat is provided by... and OPB members and viewers like you.

Funding for arts and culture coverage is provided by... [ ♪♪♪ ] WOMAN: Art is what is left behind of cultures.

WOMAN: Our ancestors made enormous sacrifices so that we could be alive today.

WOMAN: Our knowledge is not for us to keep, it's for us to share.

MAN: The full title is Crow's Shadow Institute of the Arts.

We're located on the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation here in Pendleton, Oregon.

We are a creative conduit to education, social, and economic development through artistic and creative means.

If you could describe Crow's Shadow as a person, it would be that its a facilitator for the creativity.

It really does bring things together both physically but also kind of spiritually.

[ ♪♪♪ ] Good morning, everyone.

My name is Terri Carnes, and I am the instructor for the buckskin-making class.

So a buckskin dress is definitely a part of an individual's being.

[ ♪♪♪ ] The different stitches, you notice the different colors of the beads, you notice the design, the whole layout of the dress, the cut, the style of the dress.

I did work off of a pattern that you're welcome to use.

And then we will get to cutting, sewing, and fringing, and then we'll have a dress.

If you speak to any creator, they learned form somebody else.

The stitch is called whip stitch.

So, the whip stitch, she'll just sew it all the way across.

So, this is a way for me to share and for them also to then share with their family members.

I always think about it this way: our ancestors are working through us.

So, me being able to share the knowledge that I was taught is super important for our future generations.

They did a really nice job of this.

Bobbie Connor is Aunt Bobbie Connor.

She is our elder.

They patched those in using just a lacing method.

They did the sides with a lacing method.

Today, Bobbie brought in four or five dresses for us to look at.

BOBBIE: When we cut into the hide, when we mend the buckskin, we're humbled and we're respectful because an animal's life is now repurposed into that buckskin dress, and so I think it's a great way to begin the class to start patching and mending the weak spots in the hide where it's thin, either through the skinning process or because of how it was killed and because of the thickness of the hide due to the season it was harvested.

So, you look at the imperfections of the hide, and it's a reminder to us of one other thing: none of us are perfect.

There is no perfect hide, there is no perfect person.

We all just come together as humble human beings doing the best we can, and we do it out of respect for the life that's been given.

And this is a beautiful dress.

You can see the flare.

It's incredible.

Part of what I was sharing was from books, because I wanted to demonstrate different kinds of skirts or different kinds of fringes or different movement of dresses and how dresses can be made to ride horses, dresses can be made as sort of a straight style for a certain contest and powwow, or they can be plain or very ornamental.

[ ♪♪♪ ] James Lavadour and Phillip Cash Cash ended up founding Crow's Shadow Institute of the Arts.

And James is very clear that the brilliance in this community needs to be thriving at all times.

It's part of our well-being to have our creativity and our forms of expression rich and vigorous.

Founding Crow's Shadow was a place to not only nurture artists but a place to teach people about getting art into the market and a place where people could learn about copyright and they could learn, especially, printmaking.

[ ♪♪♪ ] Printmaking was an idea early on, but it didn't really develop until the early 2000s, when we hired a master printer and started a residency program.

[ ♪♪♪ ] I'm Wendy Red Star, and I grew up on the Crow Indian Reservation in Montana.

I am now in Portland, Oregon.

I'm a visual artist, and I've been practicing professionally, I'd say, since 2006.

I've had a long history with Crow's Shadow, I think all the way since 2011.

And that's a gift in itself.

It's like my favorite residency.

Hi.

Hey, Wendy.

Good morning.

Good morning.

There's coffee in the kitchen.

Awesome.

So, did you get through this?

Yeah, those are done, so I'm just almost finished with the dark blue, and then I have the red and then just the outline.

Okay.

Okay.

Judith is the master printmaker, and she is basically the captain of the ship.

So, yeah, between today and Friday, there's 22 plates that we need to shoot and proof.

Okay.

Which is a lot.

Yeah.

[ laughs ] And alongside Judy is Maggie, and is Judy's right-hand person.

Basically, they know all of the technical things that need to happen within printmaking that an artist like myself who really doesn't have any experience with making technical prints can rely on them.

If it was up to me, I would put this one on-- With the simple one?

Mm-hmm.

Okay.

JUDITH: When the artist gets here, we have to go over ideas, talk about, like, what's feasible and what's not feasible, what can translate into print.

So these are the outlines of the parfleche.

I have been really determined to study parfleche.

So they're basically a rawhide folded case that has geometric designs.

This is at the National Museum of the American Indian.

These cases are utilitarian for the most part, and each tribe has their own designs and their own set of colors that they use, so you could identify Crows traveling across the plains by the parfleche.

I've been diligently collecting images off the Internet and printing them and making studies of, like, paintings of them.

And so that actually has carried over to what I want to do here.

Each color is printed as its own, like, layer, and then the next color is laid on top of it.

There might be, like, ten layers on a print.

[ ♪♪♪ ] JUDITH: From there, the artist starts to finally work on their pieces, and that includes, like, us cutting all the mylars, giving them all the materials, them trying to figure out composition.

From there, we start to make the plates so that we can start proofing.

All right.

Hopefully the artist finishes a piece and then we can make the plates as Maggie is making the ink, as I'm exposing everything.

And then Maggie and I come back together to proof.

Mm-mm.

WENDY: It's like an experiment each time.

To see the different layers and how they're placed can really inform, like, if you want to move in that direction or you want to change.

You would tell people, like, "I'm going to an artist's residency for two weeks," and they'd be like, "Two weeks?

That's a long time."

And I kind of think, "Yeah, two weeks is a long time."

But here we are, it's Sunday, and I've only got through the next Friday to be here, and it's like a time crunch.

We keep the completed approvals to print down here... We have a plate drawer where we just store all the plates labeled with all of the artist information.

And this was the proof that we made with the artist.

Without them, we can't edition.

[ ♪♪♪ ] My use of cultural designs and images of my ancestors is that everything has a meaning to it, so, with the traditional dressmaking here, I'm sure that shows up in their dresses.

Native women, especially in history books, we were truly underrated and underrecognized in the importance of our roles.

It's just basically Native women sort of shouting out, like really preserving our history and the importance of who we are through these geometric designs.

So, if I can do my duty and honor them and bring them into the light and show them to people, I hope that they get excited about them, too.

[ ♪♪♪ ] KARL: We've been in this building for 30 years.

The goal in the next two years is to help develop a piece of property here on the reservation that Crow's Shadow could then build its own new facility.

We're the only professional print studio on a Native American reservation in the U.S. We have artists from all over the country wanting to come to Crow's Shadow to make prints, work in the studio, and to be able to share that with much broader audiences.

There's museums now-- the Boston Museum of Fine Arts has a large collection of prints.

We were just featured in the Whitney Museum of Art in the biennial last year.

I hope that that can continue, and I really want more and more people to see the magic that happens here and be able to experience the art through both printmaking and the traditional arts.

WENDY: If we had a Crow's Shadow on my reservation, wow, that could really do stuff for the youth and community.

That would just be so impactful.

So, to see a Native person doing something and then also to see that the Native community here is supporting that is pretty powerful.

I'm just hoping for the community to have exposure to artists and the arts and for artists to have the opportunity that Crow's Shadow provides that are way beyond the borders of this reservation.

[ ♪♪♪ ] Come on.

[ clicks tongue ] [ whistles, clicks tongue ] All right, get your butt in.

[ ♪♪♪ ] Being surrounded by imagery and imaginative exploits and paintings and words is just a way of showing reverence and a celebration of all the beautiful, wondrous things around me, and it keeps the world alive.

My name is Mehran.

I go under the artist moniker Eatcho.

And I'm a working artist here in Portland, Oregon.

[ ♪♪♪ ] When I'm drawing or illustrating, very therapeutic, very healing.

I have no stops or gos on if it looks good or if people are going to like it or not.

I'm just driven to get it out.

[ ♪♪♪ ] I have a lot of details in my work and small things intertwining.

You're going to have to look at that work and move around it and discover things on your own.

Once you come to that, you know, your own discovery in something you see, you kind of own it personally a little.

You're like, "That's mine," you know?

"I took the work and effort to find that weird creature in that corner that's saying something to me" or whatnot.

And I'll go back to my old pieces and I like that, because it surprises me.

Years later I'll look at that and go, "Who is this guy?"

So I'm talking to myself, you know?

And I love that part, too.

I hope that makes sense.

I'm all over the place sometimes, and that's how my work is, you know?

[ laughs ] So...

I wanted to work on clothes with my artwork because I like the idea of the art moving around.

My painting is not in a gallery just sitting there, collecting dust.

Now it's-- the artwork is just moving around, and I like that.

It's just like, "Where are you going to go today, artwork?"

It's just moving around on someone's body.

The work on clothing started in Japan.

I was in Sapporo and started drawing with a Sharpie on my pants in order to translate things a little easier.

If I wanted to use the bathroom or I wanted to eat something, I'd just draw it on my pants and I'd be able to point to it.

This jacket I'm painting right now is for a dear friend of mine who's a musician.

She's a wonderful singer, so I'm going to paint a musician I love very much, and that's the Artist Formerly Known as Prince.

All right.

And so if you notice, this dove is crying.

Just make sure you notice that.

There's some symbology.

♪ This is what it sounds like When the doves cry ♪ We'll use the airbrush to really bring him alive a little more.

[ airbrush humming ] What I like about airbrush is it cuts down a lot of the blending time.

It helps give, also, the black-and-white work a little bit more depth and shadow.

Every little pair of jeans and item of clothes is original, and once you have that, you have a one-of-a-kind, you know, item of clothes that you're going to wear all your life.

And someone's like, "Where'd you get that weird thing?"

And there will be a long story.

You might make a new friend.

So, yeah.

[ ♪♪♪ ] Another theme in this is how UFOs are real, and that's another thing about our world that we're living in now, and I like to always put that in my work, little UFOs everywhere.

[ ♪♪♪ ] I was born on a planet called Krypton.

I was found at a farm-- [ record scratches ] No, just joking.

[ laughs ] No, I was born in Los Angeles, and I was only there until around 3, and then my mother moved to Fresno, California.

And then a small town right on the side of Fresno, Clovis, is where I was raised.

When I was young, I had to be around 5 years old, I was watching Mickey Mouse with an adult and they drew a picture of Mickey Mouse at the same time I'm watching it, and it blew my mind that you can create the things that you see.

And when he showed me that, I was done.

And so after that, I was like, "Oh, okay, I get it."

And so I've just been drawing since 5, ever since then.

So this is... this is all painted by-- Look at this painter, dude.

One of the artists I was really inspired by in the beginning was Salvador Dalí.

A lot of people remember the dripping clocks, but those dripping clocks were also speaking about time.

Everyone can paint a pretty picture, but what is it saying?

And so that's what I always try to challenge myself when I'm doing something.

[ ♪♪♪ ] I wouldn't want to say that I always want people to have a positive experience with my work.

I would like them to have a real experience.

Whether the experience is something you don't like or you do like, you at least can learn from it.

And I hope I can be a part of that, to always inspire people to have their eyes open and be willing to take in the reality that's coming in.

[ ♪♪♪ ] It doesn't matter how long I've been doing murals, every single one is always like diving in the deep part of a pool you've never been in.

And you never know what you're going to get, and it's really great, because the wall communicates back to you on how the wall should be painted on.

[ engine revving ] The Cathedral Park mural, it's a tribute to the jazz district in Portland.

And jazz is always-- describing jazz is flow.

And that's all water is known to do, is just flow.

So jazz and water is kind of the main focus in that.

It left me room to be very free and flowing.

[ ♪♪♪ ] The mural at The Knock Back, the mural's real positive, real fun, and it's also a nod to my old style which was, I would say, more cartoonish and more energetic and more colorful.

The influence I hope my work has on the world is just to inspire people to keep learning and to be curious.

[ indistinct conversation ] If someone's walking by and they look at that piece of artwork and they go, "What is that?

Why is that?

That's crazy!"

And I'm like, "Yeah, so is everything!"

That's neat!

Keep up the good work.

Thank you very much.

Y'all have a good one.

I constantly want to remind people about how-- how magical this is, this experience is.

We're actually all collectively creating magic.

He's so chill with it.

[ ♪♪♪ ] [ ♪♪♪ ] [ chitters ] My name is Carlos Sanchez.

I am the head veterinarian at the Veterinary Medical Center at the Oregon Zoo.

Part of my exam is to move the leg back and forth, back and forth.

I manage a team of three veterinarians, five technicians, and we take care of all the medical needs of the zoo collection for all animals, from the little frogs to the big elephants.

We are responsible for over 2,000 animals of all kinds.

They fly, they swim... we take care of all of them.

One day we're checking up a tiger, and the next day we have to check a butterfly, so it's always different, and that's what I like about it.

[ ♪♪♪ ] So, we use radiographs very often to evaluate different systems and organs in the body of all animals.

From the radiographs, we are able to tell if there is anything abnormal, whether it's in the joint, if the animal is starting to develop arthritis, sometimes we are able to detect cancer at an early stage where we can do something about, something we just do routine exams.

Isolate out these digits.

This female bat is an 18-year-old bat, which is like, you know, an equivalent of a 75-, 80-year-old person, but for her age, she looks pretty healthy.

We can see, for example here, this is actually an old fracture that healed.

These bones are very, very thin, very small, so sometimes just by flapping into something hard, they can break the bones.

But then also they have a great regenerative capability.

And you can see, it's almost straight.

[ ♪♪♪ ] We love seeing the radiographs, not just from the diagnostic point of view.

You can actually argue that these are pieces of art very unique for that animal.

So something that I do enjoy from purely the artistic point of view is the diversity of things that we can see.

You can see the bats, in the fingers, are so thin and spread out.

And then you look and compare it with a bear, and you see these massive digits.

So for me, the comparison between the species is something that fascinates me.

I love it.

I wish sometimes to be able to print them in a big size and hang it on the walls because they are so unique and they are so majestic that it makes me happy to look at them.

If I walk in the building and I see a radiograph of an animal, to me it's just like looking at a nice painting.

[ ♪♪♪ ] To see more stories about Oregon artists, visit our website... And for a look at the stories we're working on right now, follow us on Facebook and Instagram.

Right here.

Right here.

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