Adrienne Keene

Artist Statement

As a Cherokee woman raised far from her homelands due to settler colonial policies that moved my family westward to California: removal, allotment, boarding school, flooding of family land; my life and work has been about reclamation and restoration of cultural practices and identity while writing and weaving a world that holds the contradictions and joys of who I am as an Indigenous person. Now I have relocated to Tulsa, Oklahoma, living on the Cherokee reservation for the first time in my life, and am making work from a new perspective as a diasporic Cherokee returned home.

I come from generations of Cherokee women who made beautiful things with their hands—quilting, knitting, crocheting, sewing, creating award-winning teddy bears, and more—and these legacies carry through me. I am a scholar, a writer, and an emerging fiber and textile artist, and in these areas of work I examine themes of representation, reclaiming ancestors and ancestral knowledge, reclaiming recycled and discarded materials, and building Indigenous futures.

My current work is based in traditional Cherokee fiber art forms of double wall basketry, flat mat weaving, beadwork, and twining, but most often created with found, discarded, and reclaimed materials. I work in e-textiles and soft circuits as well, bringing in LEDs, sewn speakers, and Arduino coding to make the work light up, create sound, or respond to external stimuli. These works are a practice of Indigenous futurism, living in what scholars call the “hyperpresent” now—looking forward to the past and recognizing all spacetimelines at once.  They pull on ancestral skills but remix materials to reimagine Indigenous futurity. I play with reappropriating colonial technologies for Indigenous means, turning technological discard into Indigenous future dreams.

My practice of basketry began holding a spool of plastic-coated wire from my dad’s workbench. I looked at the red wire and realized that it had the same width and shape as the round reed traditionally used in Cherokee baskets. At the time, living away from my homelands meant I didn’t have access to traditional weaving materials, and growing up without teachings around those materials means I am very careful about wanting to do things the right way. I never wanted to inadvertently cause harm by harvesting without cultural knowledge. The wire gave me the opportunity to weave without fear, with recycled and reclaimed materials, and explore the possibilities of what baskets could be. Baskets carry materials and carry culture, and through the materials in the baskets I create—electronic materials, refuse of technology and western society, other carriers of culture—language, sounds, songs, and even light can be carried through as well. I weave in electroluminescent wire, making the baskets glow in the dark, allowing them to be seen even when there is no light. We know that baskets can carry objects, but what can they carry in their walls?

I now engage in practices of tongue-in-cheek “sustainably harvesting from the homelands”—gathering discarded materials from events and ditches across the Cherokee reservation. Whether twined weavings with caution tape harvested from a traditional games event, weaving inner tubes from flat tires earned by biking on the back roads of Tahlequah, or utilizing nylon hay netting and construction fencing for weaving bases, the materials, while manmade, are imbued with the land they come from and become both a reclamation and a rescue.

Deep research is at the heart of my practice, combining my background and skills as a scholar with my creative practice. I am engaged in a long-term project centered around my family’s allotment land which was seized by eminent domain and flooded out to make a manmade lake in the 1940s. This research has generated thousands of documents, photographs, and maps which have become the basis for a series of weavings and beadwork, and as the story slowly unravels through colonial archival records, the project continues to grow, with potentials for experimental film or other place-based practices.

As I emerge as a visual artist I am finding my voice as a fiber artist that works in the intersections of tradition, technology, and sustainability.

GROUP EXHIBITIONS

2026       Punk Politics…Camp Costuming; La Sudestada Gallery, Brooklyn, NY (Invited)

2026       Trail of Tears Art Show; Tahlequah, OK (Juried)

2025       30th Annual Cherokee Homecoming Art Show; Tahlequah OK (Juried)

2024       Okizi (to heal); All My Relations Arts; Minneapolis, MN (Juried)

2023       Tradish-ish Consistency; Portland, OR (Invited)

2023       28th Annual Cherokee Homecoming Art Show; Tahlequah, OK (Juried)

2022-23  Disruption: Cherokee Contemporary Artists; Museum of the Cherokee Indian; Cherokee, NC (Invited)

CURATORIAL

2018-20  Drone Warriors: The Art of Resistance and Surveillance at Standing Rock

               Co-Curator, Haufenreffer Museum, Brown University

   Reviewed in Museum Anthropology: https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/muan.12206

2015-16  Seeds of Culture: Native American Women of Project 562, by Matika Wilbur

               Curatorial Consultant, Radcliffe Institute, Harvard University

2015       Native Re-Appropriations: Contemporary Indigenous Artists

               Curator, Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America, Brown University

RESIDENCIES AND WORKSHOPS

2025       Tin House Winter Workshop, creative nonfiction (Tin House Scholar winner)

2024       Electronic Textiles Camp Residency, Prairie Ronde Artist Residency

2024       Haystack Mountain School of Crafts—etextiles and soft circuits intensive

2024       Monson Arts Residency, visual art (accepted, declined for scheduling)

2021       Storyknife Writers Residency, nonfiction writing