Anita Fields, Elements of Being

0:00:06.6 Dr. Beth Harris: We’re in the galleries at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, and we’re looking at the work of an artist named Anita Fields. This is called Elements of Being.

0:00:17.8 Dr. Ashley Holland: What we have here are three women that are made up of individual panels, and this whole work is earthenware, and so it’s a clay product that is fired in an electric kiln. It is painted with a slip that’s called terra sigillata, which is created using the clay and water and a couple of different components, as well as the addition of ink to create the different tones that you see in the work. There are two masks that are affixed on the left and the right figure that make you think that these are most likely women, and they are enshrouded in almost a black type of cocoon that embodies their entire being, but on top of that are overlaid these little white images or dots or almost twirling spirals. And what you start to see is that these are figures that are meant to symbolize the night sky as well as almost stars. Anita Fields is Osage, and the Osage call themselves the people of the sky.

0:01:22.3 Dr. Beth Harris: To me, when I first saw the figures, their cocoon-like figures seemed to be embedded in the earth, this black space on the bottom. But at the same time, those black areas read like stars or the sky or galaxies, and that pattern continues on the cocoon-like form so that they themselves seem to be ethereal, to be celestial.

0:01:46.9 Dr. Ashley Holland: The title, Elements of Being, which is tied to an Osage prayer, is an important call-out of these being embodiments of a larger reality. For the Osage, the earth is tied to the feminine, and so if we decide that these are female figures, then this tie to the earth is a real continuation of the earth as a female entity.

0:02:12.6 Dr. Beth Harris: Almost to me as though they’ve come from the sky and have embedded themselves in the earth. And their lack of limbs, of legs, of arms suggests figures who have a kind of transcendent power.

0:02:26.8 Dr. Ashley Holland: These are lifelike size. If you were to stand next to them, they would probably be fairly similar to the size of you. But that is, in a lot of ways, where the familiarity to the human form ends. And I think it’s really important to call out that Osage are not potters. So Anita has made this choice to use a media that is outside of her cultural community.

0:02:54.2 Dr. Beth Harris: And yet this is still so informed by the importance of her Osage identity.

0:02:58.9 Dr. Ashley Holland: Yes, this is why I love contemporary Native art, because it can exist in these moments of contradiction, of overlap. But artists like Anita are very much informed deeply and holistically by their community and by their culture.

0:03:17.4 Dr. Beth Harris: The bundles that we see in front of the ceramic panels are specific in that way.

0:03:23.8 Dr. Ashley Holland: They are cloth-like in appearance. They are soft and filled, but they are just as earthenware as the rest of the piece. And they are talking about the gift-giving protocol that happens within the Osage, in that gifts are wrapped in cloth and given to others. She grew up with a grandmother who was a seamstress. And so cloth is something that she very much identifies with.

0:03:50.9 Dr. Beth Harris: The stools that these rest on are squares, rectangles. But so much of the forms that we see in the panels are circular.

0:03:59.7 Dr. Ashley Holland: I think it calls to this idea that is true for the Osage, and I know is true for a lot of other Indigenous communities, which is about balance. And that balance is very much something that you strive for because it creates harmony in the world. And so for the dark, you have the light. For the hard edges of the tables, you have these soft edges of the gift packs. You have the rounded shape of the bodies, but the angular moments of the panels that they are produced upon. And so that constant back and forth.

0:04:33.5 Dr. Beth Harris: And I’m noticing, too, that the forms on their torsos are above their hearts. So we have these white and gold circles on the right. In the center, a circle with a hand and a spiral over the heart. And on the leftmost figure, this white spiral on gold over the heart. So there’s a real feeling of unity here, despite the disparateness of these figures.

0:04:58.9 Dr. Ashley Holland: Absolutely. And we don’t know if that middle figure is turned away from us and that that hand is on the back of them or if it’s on the front of them. And that ambiguity is something that’s really exciting about the piece, because even if you don’t know anything, you can start to embed your own interpretation upon it. And I think that there is validity in that approach.

[music]

This work at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art

The artist’s website

Mindy N. Besaw, Candice Hopkins, and Manuela Well-Off-Man, Art for a New Understanding: Native Voices, 1950s to Now (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2018).

Jami C. Powell, editor, Form and Relation: Contemporary Native Ceramics, exhibition catalogue (Hanover: Hood Museum of Art, 2020).

Contemporary art, an introduction

1980–now in the United States, an introduction