Adrienne J. Keene

Adrienne Keene—Artist Statement

One of the Cherokee origin stories of North America begins with a world covered in water, and animals in search of land to walk on. Tiny Dayunisi, waterbug, dives all the way to the bottom of the waters after all the other animals failed, and brings up a speck of mud to put on Turtle’s back. That mud grows in all directions and becomes the land we now know as Elohi, Turtle Island. I see my art and writing as continuing the work of dayunisi--I am inundated by waves and waters of colonization, trying to swim downward toward the past in order to find and bring find the building blocks of a new world.

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.

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 artist, and in these areas of work I examine themes of representation, reclaiming ancestors and ancestral knowledge, and building futures. In my writing practice I have focused on issues of representation and cultural appropriation, pushing back against misrepresentations and stereotyping—but at some point in that work I realized that I needed to shift from tearing down misrepresentations to creating new representations to replace the outdated, harmful ones.

During my time as a Civic Media Fellow through the Annenburg Media Lab at USC (2021-2022) I began a project exploring my family’s allotment land in Oklahoma that was seized by eminent domain in the 1940’s due to the construction of a hydroelectric dam. My great-granny’s land, where my grandmother was born, was flooded out, and now sits at the bottom of Ft. Gibson lake. Through archival research I was able to find the original allotment maps showing my family’s acreage, and these maps became the basis for a series of art pieces. I wanted to somehow make that unreachable and intangible land tangible. I began with a set of paper weavings using traditional Cherokee basket designs, weaving the allotment map with a modern satellite drawing of the lake that now covers it. I then created a beaded gorget of the allotment map bleeding into the sky world, with my granny’s allotment marked out in red. I am in the process of creating a quilt as the last piece in the series, and as a clear connection to my family of quilters. The striking grid of the allotments is a clear colonial imposition, creating unnatural, clean, straight lines that are intersected by meandering rivers that refuse to follow the imposed grid. Yet despite the colonial roots, those grids still represented home for my family for two generations. In the last days of finishing the gorget, my grandma passed away. I put in the final stitches the day after her funeral. The artistic process allowed me to reclaim the land that had birthed my grandmother, and in doing so make a commitment to continue this process of reclamation and building.   

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. Living away from my homelands means I don’t have access to traditional weaving materials, and growing up without cultural teachers 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?

These baskets are a practice of Indigenous futurism, living in what Anishinaabe artist Beth Lepensee calls 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 through the contrasts of light/no light and a journey through the pathways of LEDs and electroluminescence. I play with reappropriating colonial technologies for Indigenous means, turning technological discard into Indigenous future dreams.