By Rory Cahill

Large crowds gathered at the Adele H. Stamp Student Union’s art gallery on Wednesday for the opening reception of “We Will Not Be Silent: Art Transforming Rape Culture.” This exhibition, which runs through Dec. 15, features four artists whose works address sexual assault and reflect the experiences of survivors.

Hannah Brancato, a third-year doctoral student who majors in American studies, curated the exhibition. All the artists involved were previously part of the collective Monument Quilt project, which Brancato helped organize. The artists decorated quilts to support survivors of sexual assault or to express their own experiences as survivors.

“We Will Not Be Silent” came from the connections Brancato made during the Quilt Project.

“I looked through the archives of the quilts and thought about folks that were artists that had a body of work in addition to the quilts that they made, and invited some of those artists that I found to be part of this exhibition,” Brancato said.

One of the artists, Nickole Keith, contributed a quilt to the Monument Quilt Project, along with her tribe, the Nottawaseppi Huron band of the Potawatomi. However, the quilt is in the National Museum of the American Indian, and she was unable to get it back in time for the exhibit, so a photo of the quilt was installed instead.

The centerpiece of Keith’s artworks was “Nnoshe,” a vivid portrait of a murdered Native American woman surrounded by 10 bloody handprints. Keith said the portrait is meant to draw attention to the incredibly high rates of kidnapping, murder and sexual violence against Native American women. The handprints represent how the murder rate for Native American women is 10 times higher than the national average. 

“Nnoshe”, a Potawatomi word which translates to “maternal aunt” in English, is a painting that is inspired by Keith’s aunt, who was groomed from a young age and murdered when Keith was five months old. 

Keith cited the continued impact of “historical trauma” as one of the root causes for violence against Native American women. 

“Even in my mom’s generation, she was taken away from her family, taken away from the reservation, seven of her 13 siblings were removed. And when my maternal grandmother and Grandpa were children they were forced to attend boarding school,” Keith said via email. “Not until now did I realize that everything was impacted, the way that I was raised. My mom was always in fear that we would be taken away by somebody.”

In addition to the various quilts, paintings and other artworks in the gallery, the reception included a live performance by artists Jadelynn St Dre and Eva Salazar. The room fell completely silent as St Dre washed “bones” made of salt in bowls of water and scattered the pieces in a circle around the center of the room. 

Salazar came out midway through the performance, half-naked and covered in clay slip, and thrashed around wordlessly, crying out in anguish. In an email, Salazar said the response—or lack of response—from audience members dictates the noises they make, which are an “improvisation based on a loose structure.”

At the end of the performance, there were still many bones remaining, and St Dre invited guests at the exhibition to wash the bones themselves, and place the salt remains to further complete the circle.

“Bones are something that I feel [are] in our subconscious so often,” St Dre said. “Like when we think of grief, when we think of loss, we often think of bones … but also bones are the last thing of us, they’re the last thing that gets left behind.”

St Dre said the bones reference intergenerational trauma, but also transformation. 

“We wash our babies, we wash our elders, we wash our dead,” St Dre said. “And so this act of tenderly washing the bone and watching it crumble, creates this little time slip where we’re able to focus our attention on this intergenerational tending—both from the generations behind us and the generations that we envision [in] the future.”

St Dre said placing the salt in a circle is meant to symbolize protection. 

“For many of us, especially those of us that experience oppression at multiple intersections, both here and globally … we have to be the visionaries, the architects of our own healing, the architects of the world we want to see,” St Dre said. 

 Salazar also brought several other artworks to the exhibit, including two tapestries and their interactive piece, “To Have and to Hold”, a checkerboard table covered with abstractly shaped dried ceramic pieces. Salazar encouraged visitors to touch the pieces and move them around.

“Everybody always wants to touch a textile, but they’re not very good at enduring that,” Salazar said. “Clay is better at that.”

Salazar shapes the clay in their hand, then fires the pieces in a clay oven. Salazar said the goal was to create a piece of art that is comforting, almost like a fidget toy. They described their art in an email as “healing yourself through yourself, like when a cat purrs to heal itself through these vibrations.”

Featured Image: Quilts on display in the Stamp Gallery on Wednesday, Oct. 5. By: Rory Cahill.