Native fashion takes the stage in Santa Fe

SANTA FE – On a recent visit to her hometown in western Canada, fashion curator and scholar Amber-Dawn Bear Robey discovered her father’s clothing at a museum exhibit. The dress was his ceremonial dance dress as a child, and is now locked away in a glass vitrine. Bear Robe for the Hyperallergic “It’s a deep sadness I can’t explain because it tells another narrative why this piece is in the museum. “Maybe it would sell for a dollar, but my grandparents needed money.”

Bear Robbie is working overtime to reverse that history in a big way. She is the founding director of the Southwest Indian Arts Association (SWAIA) Indigenous Fashion Show, an eight-year tradition at the world’s largest Native American arts festival that closes the Santa Fe Indian Market each year.

This year, in honor of the centenary of the Indian market, Bear is preparing Robe. Indigenous fashion artA simultaneous exhibition of historical and contemporary Native fashion for the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (MoCNA) at the Museum of American Indian Arts. When Hyperallergic toured with her, Bear Robe was feeling the push and pull between the fashion show and the exhibition, revealing the larger narrative ground she wanted to cover.

“One of the great things about Canada and the United States is that Native American design is the original design of this land,” Bear Robe said. “Killing seals, gutting and sewing together a waterproof jacket – you don’t get a more hateful coat than this.” In this regard, she was disappointed when she considered the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s 2021 exhibition. In America: A Dictionary of FashionIt featured only one Native American designer who stopped at the museum’s gala.

Bear Robe’s recent scholarly work has zeroed in on direct connections between Native American design and broader American aesthetics. She explores the issue in a subsequent article for the Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art. “In the 1920s, there was a big push for American designers to go and look at museum collections—historical and ancient’ arts, Native American textiles and pottery—to inform a uniquely American design language,” Bear Robey said of her research. It was like the ABCs and 123s of how to reconcile our cultures.

Establishing the presence and external influence of Native American fashion is only the first step in Bear Robe’s curatorial approach. She explains that focusing on these broad elements risks painting Native culture as a monolithic entity. Pushing it further, Bear Robe engages in dialogue with designers to tease out micro-regional narratives that aren’t necessarily written. Materials, colors, patterns and motifs can link a design to a tribe, or – as in her father’s dance costume – even a specific family.

“That’s the edge for me. This is not an external appearance; I know these designers and have worked with many of them. I want it to be the exact opposite of anthropological, static art,” says Bear Robe.

This year’s fashion events in the Indian market will launch capsule and full collections from 14 designers on August 20 and 21. Bear Robe portrays the runway as a time for swimming and kicking modern native fashion heritage. Among the participants, she singled out three “matriarchs” of fashion: Dorothy Grant, Himikalas Pamela Baker and Patricia Michaels.

Grant is known for her bold prints that combine Haida Nation motifs with a linear style, and Baker combines the beauty of First Nations from across Canada’s West Coast into her mixed media fine jewelry. Michaels, who competed on two seasons Project runway, Hand-dyed and dyed fabrics to create haute couture designs with flowing silhouettes.

Dubbed “innovators”, their work influenced the next generation of designers. Like Grant, Jamie Okuma and Lauren Good Day are known for their expressive prints: Okuma combines natural ideas with geometrics, and Good Day combines reference drawings and textile designs. Ashley Kaling Bull and Jessica Mateen are among the models taking the runway.

“Then there’s another part of it, which is artists blurring that line between art and fashion. They’re bringing the body that works,” said Bear Robey. She calls this circle “rule-breakers”, and it includes visual-artists-designers Kathryn Blackburn, Jason Bargh and Scavenati. Blackburn’s sophisticated beadwork has graced the runways of the Indian market before. her New Age Warriors The collection was exhibited in 2019 and soon became a successful traveling exhibition. This year she adds new designs to the clean silhouettes of associate designer Melanie LeBlanc.

The exhibit at MOCNA on the Santa Fe Plaza, a block away from the Indian Market Center, is a more intimate event. in Indigenous fashion artBear Robe traces the history of Native American fashion through approximately 28 looks.

She just returned from a trip to Phoenix and presented pieces from a fashion retailer by historic artist and designer Lloyd Kiva New. Kiva New Electric fashions mid-century silhouettes with playful, Native culture-inspired patterns, and adorns its signature leather bag with metal straps featuring Cherokee iconography.

Bear Robe is also confirmed by Virgil Ortiz, famous for his futuristic black and white prints on Cochiti Pueblo pottery motifs, and Orlando Dugi’s vivid embroidery and metallic fabrics that evoke Diné creation stories. She’s had more trouble securing jobs with some of the smaller designers: she’s so far missed a piece of the Okuma series of hand-yellow Christian Louboutin heels, but she’s on the trail of a private collector who might lend her a pair.

“Especially with the exhibitions, I have curatorial envy of these larger institutions because they have more money than MoCNA,” said Deb Robe. “They may have more money, but I have access.” She has been pulling the strings lately as interest in indigenous fashion grows and other curators enter the picture. More recently, Crystal Bridges is refurbishing its Native Fashion collection, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art is attempting to correct previous blind spots with a second edition. In America.

“Museums don’t lend a lot of the key pieces that I wanted to include,” says Deb-Robe. “Some of these pieces were originally shown at the SWAIA fashion show, but I was unable to return to the show, which is very disappointing.” She quickly explained that she was thrilled to see indigenous designers entering popular collections. It’s hard for her to imagine clothes sitting in an archive once awakened by natives. “Just let me hold it for the runway, then you can take it,” she said.