The Brooklyn Rail

Collaboration and community are at the heart of Marie Watt’s practice. The interdisciplinary artist explores her Seneca Nation and German-Scot heritage while at the same time imbuing references to music, pop culture, and Greco-Roman mythology into her work. Watt combines texts and motifs from these diverse sources to consider how material and visual culture hold personal and collective meanings. She works in a variety of mediums, including prints, sculpture, textiles, and mixed-media installations. For some projects, she invites public engagement, incorporating materials contributed to her through open calls. Others, like printmaking, are inherently collaborative disciplines. In her first traveling retrospective, Storywork: The Prints of Marie Watt, From the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation, this collaborative spirit is brought to the fore. The exhibition, on view at Print Center New York, focuses on the role of printmaking in Watt’s practice, exploring how the discipline parallels and deepens broader themes in her work, including memories, motherhood, community, and the nuances of identity.

Storywork features examples of Watt’s prints from throughout her career, beginning with engravings of corn husks, a significant crop in Seneca culture, made in 1996 while an MFA student at Yale. After graduating, Watt continued to experiment with printing techniques and, in the early 2000s, began collaborating with two leading workshops: Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts and Sitka Center for Art and Ecology. In the years since, she has also worked closely with Mullowney Printing Company and Tamarind Institute. In its most basic form, printmaking is a collaborative process that requires multiple people working together. The show features several types of prints, including lithographs, etchings, aquatints, and woodcuts, as well as a copper plate used to make Companion Species (Malleable/Brittle) (2021), a softground etching on view nearby, a reminder of the mechanical process of printmaking.

Watt’s interest in collaboration reflects her broader ecological perspective. She often investigates human-animal relationships, in particular through the form of the mythological Etruscan she-wolf who nurtured Romulus and Remus, the twin founders of Rome. Like many human-animal relationships, the twins suckling the she-wolf positions nature as a resource that sustains humans. In Companion Species (Ancient One) (2017), a small cast bronze statue of a she-wolf sits atop a reclaimed wool blanket once owned by the artist’s mother, and a wood base. Exhausted and depleted, the she-wolf is emblematic of the human inclination to extract from nature and a reminder of the importance of sustainable relationships between all species, as well as non-human resources.

In art history and material culture, textiles traditionally have been associated with women and domesticity. A material with inherent utility, textiles provide warmth and protection. They also hold memories of the people who made and used them. Blankets and textiles play significant roles in Watt’s practice, connecting her with the legacy of fiber artists. Wool blankets, in particular, have a complex role in the history of colonialism in the United States, as settlers traded them for Indigenous pelts and hides. Colonists also weaponized blankets, as historical records indicate they gifted Natives smallpox-infected textiles with the intent to eradicate them. In Native communities, blankets also mark milestones, such as weddings and funerals. With both Native and European heritage, Watt’s own background is one of duality, a fact she grapples with in her work.

Welcoming the associations inherent in textiles, Watt also depicts blanket and quilt motifs in her prints and sometimes even uses physical, repurposed examples. The blanket motif emerged in the early 2000s, seen best in Blankets (2003), a lithograph and photo transfer featuring a tall stack of neatly folded textiles, a reference to her signature sculptures. In other works, such as Companion Species (Words) (2017), blankets are run through a printing press to create a patchwork edition.

Storywork includes an emblematic example of Watt’s sculpture entitled Blanket Stories: Great Grandmother, Pandemic, Daybreak (2021). The sculpture is composed of blankets collected during an open call. Totemic in form, it also recalls minimalist sculptures reimagined in a material associated with utility and craft. Featuring blankets in a folded stack placed on a plinth,

each unique textile is pinned with a tag bearing the name of the donor and its story. Some stories are short, such as one stating that the owner’s cats enjoyed it as a warm bed. Others include heartfelt memories—stories of loved ones who used the blankets for comfort while battling cancer, mothers who spent years gifting hand-knit items, families who passed them down over generations—all as unique as the textures, colors, and patterns that adorn them. Together, they form a monument to every person whose memories are embedded in each fiber.

In addition to her sewing circles and open calls for blankets, Watt hosts printing circles where she invites local communities to create small text-based plates and pressure prints, which she then assembles and turns into editions with Mullowney Printing. Printing circles will take place at Print Center where participants can contribute small prints to an evolving installation and receive one from the artist in exchange. Much like the blanket sculptures, the resulting work will bear evidence of individual voices as well as a larger narrative, a poetic metaphor for a more interconnected world in general. While Storywork centers on Watt and her rich artistic practice, the show ultimately reveals the many hands, minds, and communities that have contributed to her life as well as to her work.