The Brooklyn Rail

The first solo exhibition of the Oregon-based artist Sara Siestreem (Hanis Coos) in New York marks her return to the city’s consciousness. After earning an MFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in 2007, Siestreem returned to her homeland in the Umpqua River Valley to teach traditional Indigenous weaving to her Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw Indian community. A central piece of this show at Cristin Tierney Gallery, 3/15/2020 minion (2024), was made collaboratively with her students, mostly young women. Consisting of four slip-cast ceramic dance caps draped with strings of red abalone, glass beads, and plastic buttons, the “minions” swayed ever so slightly as I approached, further animated by their shadows. For Siestreem, they call attention to the presence of ancestral protectors, who are attracted to the scarlet iridescence of abalone.

The palpable materiality of Siestreem’s art is irresistible. Everything desires to be touched. I wanted to feel the texture of the beads and Siestreem’s woven baskets, and to work out where the weave begins and ends. This tactility of her art is truthful to the sensory abundance of Indigenous culture, and contrasts with the primacy of the visual in Western art traditions. The baskets emanate the faint scents of medicinal plants—cedar bark, sweet grass, and spruce root—whose olfactory values serve as agents in the Indigenous ceremony of smudging. In glass bat (2024), the mixed-media painting to the left of the baskets, serial images of her hands shaking rattles further introduce a musical rhythm and dancing motion, as if to animate the countless extinct oysters Xeroxed across the composition.

The multi-dimensional experience—albeit only a taste of the wealth of Indigenous ecologies—is the artist’s offering to the attentive viewer. Siestreem deftly mediates between the two realms, not only through her singular mastery of both Native and Western art forms but also her command of poetic language. Her haiku-like titles, such as un-ring bells (2013–24) or not enough sweetness in the world to drown you out///so the tsunami came and washed you away (2024), convey an entwining sense of loss and persistence echoing throughout Indigenous communities as they contend with the ravages of settler colonialism and climate catastrophe. Yet such weighty messages are channeled through the whispering lightness of the lowercase, a minor mode of speaking that unsettles signification, like a soft breeze.

The simultaneous precarity and persistence of memory is also captured in the incantation of hollow forms in un-ring bells: the red ellipses drawn repetitively by hand to form a loose grid, the spectral Xerox scans of oyster shells and an empty Dansk dish (Siestreem’s predilection for this technique stems from her teenage zine-making years). This complex eight-foot-wide painting took eleven years to complete; it resists comparisons with the Rauschenbergian flatbed picture plane, the gestural abstraction of Informel, or Morris Louis’s drip paintings. Rather, Siestreem appropriates elements of Western art forms only to re-contain them within the geometric language of Native traditions, subverting the former’s claims to originality. Her radical juxtaposition of the ancient and modern, the organic and manufactured, questions these binary categories while insisting on the longstanding vitality and contemporaneity of Indigenous art.

But the most vivid sensation is certainly the gustatory delight of milk and honey. The exhibition title is taken from the name Siestreem gave to her white slip-cast ceramic basket with golden glazed edges, shown concurrently at this year’s Armory Show. The significance of milk here harmonizes with the view of a distant thinker, Roland Barthes. Milk is “anti-wine,” Barthes writes in Mythologies, “because in the basic morphology of substances milk is the opposite of fire by all the denseness of its molecules, by the creamy, and therefore soothing, nature of its spreading. Wine is mutilating, surgical, it transmutes and delivers; milk is cosmetic, it joins, covers, restores.” By casting her baskets with a mixture of milky white clay, Siestreem symbolically nourishes her craft tradition and allows it to spread. At the same time, milk embodies the symbiotic relationship between Indigenous artists and their materials. In the Indigenous worldview, plants and oysters are animate beings; the process of artmaking involves praying and caring for them throughout the year and asking for their permission to participate. milk and honey—both the work and the exhibition—therefore positions the Native weaving tradition as a practice of sustenance, subsistence, and sustainability.

As is characteristic of Siestreem’s practice, themes are often developed through different iterations of the same work. For this occasion, the artist has placed seven of her slip-cast ceramic baskets in a row facing the windows to form a new work, titled skyline (2024). Their subtle variations, under the soft glow of contre-jour light, quietly index the passage of time. Siestreem has also alternated the color and order of the dance caps in her minion for different presentations: for example, four white caps at the Armory Show, three white caps and one black at a group exhibition at the Sun Valley Museum of Art (Intertwined: Weaving in Community, April–June 2024), and three black caps and one white here at Cristin Tierney. Playful and duplicitous, Siestreem’s work resists explanation: meaning is coded but open, hence always residual. For the curious, her art is generous and nourishing, like milk and honey.