pearly gates
pearly gates
Sara Siestreem
March 5 – October 2, 2022
The University of Oregon’s Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art is exhibiting pearly gates by Sara Siestreem, featuring paintings, installations, videos and woven baskets. The exhibition opens on March 5, 2022 and will run through October 2, 2022.
pearly gates considers access in terms of land, ancestry, resources, and human relationships. Through a multivalent installation in an academic art museum, the artist will make visible some of the complex systems between ancestral objects and contemporary practices. Siestreem’s work bridges education and institutional reform, and this project specifically focuses on the care for Indigenous works in museum collections as well as the structural systems that provide or omit access and appropriate context to the presentations of Indigenous fine art.
Sara Siestreem (Hanis Coos, b. 1976). summertime, 2021. Painting installation (acrylic, graphite, Xerox transfer, panel board), 88 x 128 inches. Courtesy of the artist and Elizabeth Leach Gallery. Photography by Jason Hill.
Sara Siestreem (Hanis Coos) of the Confederated Tribes of Coos, Lower Umpqua, and Siuslaw Indians is a multi-disciplinary artist from the South Coast and lives and works in Portland, OR. Siestreem’s studio work includes painting, photography, printmaking, drawing, sculpture, video, and weaving. She considers painting her primary visual language.
This exhibition is made possible by the University of Oregon, Center for Art Research (CFAR) and Curators-in-Residence, Tiffany Harker and Iris Williamson. Their 2021-22 program, titled HABITS OF DENIAL, features research, exhibitions, and public programs around the theme of “access.” Collaborating artists investigate specific issues within larger systems of power and their embedded exclusionary impacts. Four anchoring programs will examine access through lenses of language and communication, technology and economies, communities and archives, and Indigeneity and institutions. Residency and related programming are made possible by The Ford Family Foundation.
