Photos of Johnny Swing and his work, taken by Paul Specht.

The post Johnny Swing Gallery appeared first on Take Magazine.

Johnny Swing in his Brookline, Vermont studio. Photo by Paul Specht

Master welder Johnny Swing lived and worked in New York City for 13 years before bringing his curvaceous coin-based furniture to rural southern Vermont. “New York is a hard place for artists,” Swing says. “My mother was a painter. I was always discouraged by her innumerable excuses for not making art. So at a young age I pledged that I was never going to not make art. I had junkies for roommates. I lived in a burned out studio. None of that mattered. I can make art under any circumstances.”

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The post Extra, Extra: Johnny Swing appeared first on Take Magazine.

Don’t touch

What is it: “Thorny Bowl.” Bronze bowl with a base of porcupine quills. 5 in. wide, 3 in. tall. Price: $395.

Who makes it: Joy Raskin, Concord, New Hampshire. “I’m fascinated by porcupines,” says Raskin, “and their quills are quite challenging. Making the porcupine bowl was a different step for me. The longer quills add drama, which is what I was going for.”

Why we love it: The play between the lustrous, new-penny glow of the copper bowl and the organic wreath of spikes it’s nestled in. Use it to present something with the same unexpected dichotomy, like cayenne chocolates or fleur de sel caramels.

Metro Pendant. Photo courtesy of Vermont Modern

Hang it up

What is it: Metro pendant. Adjustable from 37.5 to 42.4 in. long. Available in several finishes. Price: $1,050.

Who makes it: Vermont Modern, Castleton, Vermont. “It delivers a design impact that doesn’t overpower a space,” says Sean Ruck of Hubbardton Forge, the company behind the VM lighting line. “Depending on how the tubes of the pendant are adjusted, it’s possible to have a very visually intriguing piece that still allows for open lines of sight within a space.”

Why we love it: The chic, urban styling and mass-transit-map inspiration created in the land of green mountains and covered bridges. The ability to change up the look with a twist here, a turn there, or a different bulb style assuages our design commitment issues.

Schon DSGN Pens. Photo by John Polak

Write tastefully

What is it: Schon DSGN Pens, Classic Collection. 4 in. long when closed, 5.75 in. long with cap posted on the back. Price: $58–$178.

Who makes it: Ian Schon of Schon DSGN, Boston, Massachusetts. “Materials like leather wear in, rather than out,” says Schon. “I think the raw metals used in these pens have a similar effect of wearing in, making them reflect the amount of use and care that one would have for an object that travels with you all the time.”

Why we love it: A sleek, modern addition to our bordering-on-obsessive collection of beautiful writing supplies. The varying weights of the metals—from 1 oz. for aluminum to 3.3 oz. for bronze—create different writing experiences for the user.

Joy Raskin – Silversmith
Concord, New Hampshire
Website
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Twitter

Vermont Modern – Lighting
Castleton, Vermont
Website
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram

Schon DSGN – Pen Makers
Boston, Massachusetts
Website
Twitter
Instagram

Top Image: Thorny Bowl by Joy Raskin | Photo by John Polak

The post Take It Home: Sleek, Spiny, Shiny appeared first on Take Magazine.

It’s early spring in Vermont, drizzly and chilly, and Nick Anger is a bit crabby about the weather. He can’t open up the doors of his workshop to use his propane-fueled forge, and that prevents him from pressing steel for his knife blades.

Anger loves to work. He often says he does nothing but sleep and make knives. He never loses the fascination with turning “an ugly little chunk of steel” into a stunning yet wholly functional object. “I really just like the constant challenge of outdoing what I’ve done before,” he says.

Anger specializes in Damascus steel. Layers of different metals turn into a flat slicing surface featuring watery waves, floral loops, or jittery lines like those on a heart monitor. He finishes them with natural-wood handles boasting their own striking motifs: black-and-white ebony, box elder burl, spalted curly birch, and flame maple.

He has recently focused on more closely marrying the intricacies of the blades with their handles. “What I’m trying to do is understand the material more, and its relation to the natural woods that I find,” he explains.

A spatula and knives made with steel ball bearings and high-nickel powder. Photo by Nick Anger

In downtown Johnson, Anger’s workshop sits behind a Main Street shop, where he hopes to avoid unexpected visitors that disturb his flow. Big, burly, and lumberjack-like, Anger has a name that may seem like a suitable moniker—though the French name is actually pronounced “on-jay.” Heavy metal music blasts while he forges, or he listens to audiobooks through headphones. (2666: A Novel, by Roberto Bolaño, was his pick in the spring.) “When I work,” he says, “I shut off from the world completely.”

His 1,900-degree forge makes a thick chunk of steel, called a billet, glow orange hot. He twists the steel in a clamp, shoves it back in the forge, then hammers it on his anvil or in a pneumatic machine that pounds it with a rhythmic thud. A 24-ton hydraulic press provides the “squeeze” to meld the molten metal with as many as 400 layers. Each type of metal has a different chemical makeup, and reacts differently to the heat—creating the striated Damascus blade. Beaten into submission, the steel gradually flattens into a slicing shape, which Anger dips into ferric chloride, revealing the invisible pattern like magic.

The fiery forge. Photo by Scott Pasfield

Then, the grinding starts. Sparks spill from the grinder as the belt meets the blade. Sanding blocks with finer and finer grit finish the polishing. Anger fits the handles over the tang and attaches them to the bolster of the blade with industrial-strength glue, then coats them with resin.

The process involves as much chemistry as creativity. Anger recently coaxed some cool-looking squiggles out of a squeeze of powdered steel and 52/100 chromium steel ball bearings. “I love the constant surprise of grinding into that billet and seeing the pattern for the first time,” he says.

What he dislikes is any commercial aspect of his work. Anger gets ornery when someone asks about buying his knives. Questions posted on his Instagram feed—“How much and how can I get it?” is a common refrain—usually go unanswered. His 80,000 enthusiastic followers include fellow knife makers who gush “super badass” and “I drool every time” over each new image.

Anger has no interest in responding to email inquiries and taking orders. Customer demands will only restrict his vision, he states. “Then I’m no longer free to do what I feel like I need to do.” However, once he connects with someone—a chef, another artist, or even an eager young apprentice who manages to track him down—he will delve deep to deliver them the perfect knife.

A curly maple saya covering an eight-inch blade. Photo by Nick Anger

Matt Jennings found Anger while following other bladesmiths on social media and hearing about him from chefs he knew from the New England Culinary Institute in Montpelier. The chef and owner of Townsman in Boston and a multiyear James Beard Award nominee, Jennings was immediately drawn to Anger’s aesthetic and homegrown approach.

Jennings direct-messaged Anger and they conversed about food, people they both knew, and other non-knife topics. Then he suggested that he’d like a new tool. They discussed Jennings’s needs. “He asked me to tell him the story of where my food comes from,” says Jennings, who specializes in fresh, hyper-seasonal ingredients. “I told him I was just a fool for the ocean, a fool for the sea.”

Anger made Jennings a 10-inch chef’s knife with a maple handle that has an open crack, allowing light to shine through, where Anger embedded a scallop shell and a piece of fool’s gold. Jennings was blown away.

The chef has since bought three more Anger knives—including one for vegetables and a Kiritsuke-style slicer for raw fish. They perform as well or better than any other knife he has used, he confirms. They hold up under the abuse of a professional kitchen and are sharp enough to slice through a cardboard box (which he would never do) and still glide through fish flesh. All of his knife-obsessed cooks view them with envy. “[Anger] spends a lot of time sourcing materials and giving mindspace to how those materials get put together,” Jennings says. “Nick’s knives are meant to be used.”

Nick Anger in his studio. Photo by Scott Pasfield

A native of Colchester, Vermont, Anger’s first post-college career was as a mental-health worker at Laraway Youth & Family Services in Johnson. In 2007, when his college classmate and best friend, Harlan Mack, was in residency as a metal sculptor and painter at the Vermont Studio Center nearby, Anger would hang out in the shop in his free time. “He was the smartest guy in school,” Mack says. “His brain is just beautiful.” Mack taught him a little about working with metal, and Anger was hooked. Still working at Laraway, Anger began apprenticing as a blacksmith at Iron Art in Stowe. Once he had enough money saved from his job, he quit to forge full time.

Anger devours information, and will ruminate for hours with Mack about, for example, the finer points of pairing 15N20 alloy with N29 steel, his friend says. “A lot of his creativity is generated from his ability to freely associate and create a web of connections between everything,” Mack explains. “The way he picked up metal was a way of letting his mind wander.”

Anger makes 100 to 300 knives a year and, when he sells them, charges $75 to $100 per cutting inch. But he’d just as soon give away a knife to a person he likes. These days, he has branched out with the business side a bit, offering pieces through eatingtools.com and homebutcher.com, allowing those websites to handle customer interaction. His online inventory quickly sells out.

The money has never been important to Anger. Only the work matters. That’s what feeds the insatiable imagination of an artist unable to stop forging—even in bad weather.

Nick Anger – knife maker
Johnson, Vermont
Website
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Instagram 

Top image: Anger’s Damascus steel can have a wood-grain look. Photo by Scott Pasfield

The post Making the Cut appeared first on Take Magazine.

Johnny Swing is a master welder, dairy farmer, sculptor, and somewhat devious poker player. He’ll tell you what’s in his hand just because that’s not the way things are done, then dare you to bet against him. Swing’s work sits beside de Kooning’s, rests on the lawns of the Duke of Cornwall and the Storm King Art Center, and is displayed in Christian Dior stores in Beverly Hills, Tokyo, and Seoul. He’s also a leader in the American Studio Furniture movement, his work considered on par with contemporary masterpieces by Ron Arad and Marc Newson—a position that makes Swing chuckle, feigning complete ignorance. For a former ’80s Manhattan art-kid troublemaker who used to hang with Basquiat, the development of Swing’s art from explosive installation to folk-art avant-garde has been linear, but the thinking that goes into his craft has been as curvaceous as the lines that run through his current work.  

Swing first started making furniture from coins in 1997, with Penny Chair. Using a design based on Harry Bertoia’s Diamond Chair (with legs inspired by Tatlin’s Tower, a tightly wound, constructivist monument designed in 1920), Swing’s initial piece was met with resistance. Consisting of 6,500 pennies with over 30,000 individual welds, the piece was basically a riff on Harry Bertoia’s iconic design. The indifference toward the piece sent Swing back to an actual drawing board, where he conceived his first completely original coin furniture piece, Nickel Couch (2000). With its graceful organic shape and unconventional use of materials, Nickel Couch got traction immediately.

“I’ve always been a sculptor,” says Swing. “My goal wasn’t to make furniture; after Penny Chair I felt defeated. I needed to create my own shape. I thought I was doing something smart—not in a sarcastic way—but taking something from the past, collaborating with the past and adding a sense of brilliance to it. No one got it. But the day Nickel Couch came off the mold, it got picked up by a local paper and went national within a week.”

Swing on his Brookline, Vermont, hobby farm, photo by Paul Specht

A Connecticut native, Swing, 56, moved to southern Vermont in 1995 from New York, a city he didn’t find conducive to marriage and a newborn. The family rented, then bought, a 200-year-old house that had once belonged to Swing’s grandmother, a well-known suffragette, in the tiny farming community of Brookline. The setting—a hobby farm with cows, sheep, and chickens—is a stark contrast to the sleek, urban vibe of the furniture he creates in the glass-and-cement studio Swing built a mile away. “I worked in New York City for 13 years,” he says, “and people thought my work was so urban. Now I’m in the country, and all of a sudden I’m a ‘Vermont artist.’”

While his work has been shown in New York, London, Paris, Los Angeles, and Miami, it’s taken 22 years for Swing to have a show in the state where he lives: a solo exhibition at the Bundy Modern in Waitsfield, which ran July 21 through September 17, 2017. A proverbial labor of love, the exhibition featured seldom-seen lamps, built like ominous alien lily pads, that had been in storage for years. “They’re some of my favorite works,” he says. “The lamps are like doodling for me— basically free-form organic structures with a lot of structure inside them. It took an enormous amount of effort to put them up, but it’s valuable to remind myself how much pleasure I got in making them.”

The most recognizable feature of Swing’s furniture, besides the overtly sensual curvatures that run through nearly all his work, is the use of U.S. coinage as the primary physical component. Creating furniture out of pocket change can have a disconcerting effect on the viewer. While the lines of the work are reminiscent of Isamu Noguchi, or maybe an original earthworks drawing by Robert Smithson, up close, the aged dollar coins of his more recent work pull the viewers out of the realm of aesthetic curiosity, and push them into a sociocultural analysis of the work.

Half Dollar Chair (2013) in the Manhattan home of a private collector, photo by Jamie Diamond

“I use old coins because I love the history of them,” explains Swing. “Say a piece has 8,000 coins in it—what’s the least amount of people that have owned those coins? Say 10 per coin: that’s 80,000 experiences locked up in that work. How cool is that? This history of a single piece is just mind-blowing.”

Eventually, the viewer starts to wonder just how much the work cost to build. Swing faces this question every time the work is shown. “Money is way more dynamic than functional,” he says. “A shovel is functional, but are people precious about their shovel? What we’re really talking about are the materials the furniture is built with. [If you’re] using round metal shapes to make furniture—if it’s not coins, the next most logical thing would be a washer. But ironically, you can’t get a washer the size of a 50-cent piece for 50 cents! It all starts with a Yankee mentality of thriftiness—and it’s really funny to think of using coins as being thrifty.”

Nickel Couch, 2000, photo by Jamie Diamond

The other question in this, Swing describes, is whether the furniture is worth more than the coins it took to build it. The question comes not only from people trying to be funny, but also from a place of deep uncertainty, especially when confronted with a couch made of more than 8,000 dollar coins. Compared to the work of Richard Prince or Andy Warhol, whose mastery comes in the form of reinterpreting images, Swing’s work incorporates the literal money itself, setting up a whole other slew of questions and considerations.

“That question approaches a viewer’s insecurity and morality,” he explains, “because [the furniture is] clearly worth more than the money it’s made out of. The fact that people are interpreting the art on that level means they are confronting the value of money, and [the idea] that money has an implied intrinsic value. There’s something beyond my control, in a really positive way, about using money as a medium to work in. Does it put me in a little bit of a box? Yes. Am I the coin furniture guy? Yes. Do I resent it? Sometimes. But at the same time, I feel really privileged that I’ve come up with a way to pose these questions, especially about the intrinsic value of art.”

Penny Chair, 1997, photo by Jamie Diamond

David Eskenazi, an early Swing collector, notes Swing’s instinctive sense of design and raw organic sensibility. “There’s an intuitive level of craftsmanship that goes into the furniture,” he says. “A lot of people are creating biomorphic forms, relying on computer models to develop the shapes, pushing the forms to their extreme. But with Johnny, the shapes all spring directly from his hands, and sometimes a chainsaw. His furniture isn’t symmetrical; it doesn’t fit classical molds of what furniture is supposed to be. It’s not geometric or perfectly symmetrical, but that’s part of what makes [the pieces] so surprisingly comfortable.”

Swing’s gut-level approach is compelling. Going back to Penny Chair, and most notably in Ring Chair and Ring Couch (2012), Swing has developed an ornate arachnid style to his furniture’s legs and backing, none of which is drawn up ahead of time. The backings are completely free form—visualized, then built on the spot without blueprints or instructions. The work appears kinetic, or as Swing calls it, “like the feeling of a cat when it’s about to pounce.” And while the couch might be made of coins or ring shapes, the angular backing is seamless and ornate, like subtleties in an extended jazz composition, adding depth and signature to the work instead of being a mere pedestal on which it stands.

For a master of the American Studio Furniture movement, organic lamps, chairs made of glass jars, and coin-centric couches might very well be the heart of Swing’s work, but his fixation with currency and response to it as craft material sometimes moves from eccentrically sensual to truly disconcerting. In addition to building stuffed animals from paper currency, Swing stitched together a rug in the shape of an American flag (Dollar Bill Rug, 2017), which was exhibited on the floor of his New York gallery, R & Company. Even though Swing testified in front of Congress in 1994 under the Visual Artists Rights Act regarding the eventual destruction of one of his installation pieces, he considers Dollar Bill Rug less a political act and more a performance-art piece. So is this new direction a shape of things to come? “I don’t foresee the work getting more and more pointed. I think it’s going to keep its rounded edges,” Swing says, gesturing to a half-built dollar couch. Then again, he’s a hell of a poker player, so with Swing you never really know.

For more images from our shoot at Johnny Swing’s studio, visit our subscriber-only gallery. 

Johnny Swing–furniture maker
Brookline, Vermont
Website & Gallery
Facebook
Instagram

Top image: Murmuration, 2012, welded nickels and stainless steel; 32.5 × 132 × 55 in. Photo by Jamie Diamond

The post To Coin a Chaise appeared first on Take Magazine.

Bella Ortiz-Wren is the resonant, inviting voice behind bella. Their most recent release, Wild Rose, continues bella’s honestly dreamy, low-fi bedroom tunes but in a bigger way, featuring longer songs, more tracks, and a bit more musical urgency and variety.

Wild Roses cover art by Bella Ortiz-Wren

Wild Rose invites listeners in for a peek at something familiar and revealing, like that small handmade gift living on your best friend’s shelf, or the edges of a love note emerging from a passing stranger’s journal. Undoubtedly, Ortiz-Wren engineered a unique sound and poetic diction for Wild Roses, though their approach mirrors other musical acts that fit into the “bedroom tunes” genre. What makes bella different is their precise use of these select sounds melding with their candid intimacy to create a signature poetic paring of music and storytelling.

For Ortiz-Wren, songwriting is not a linear craft. It functions not only as a means of expression but also as a way to process complex feelings about love, loss, and identity, “I would see writing songs as a form of journaling. I’ve never kept a journal, but I can track different memories, experiences, or feelings through the songs I’ve written,” says Ortiz-Wren. “It almost feels like a necessity.” This honesty and transparency is present in every note sung by Ortiz-Wren and in every echoing guitar cord.

In addition to the simple yet universal narratives embedded in these songs about unrequited love, the wilderness, and queer feelings, Ortiz-Wren writes about the complexities associated with being mixed race in the United States. Themes of reckoning with this specific identity are throughout Wild Rose and, according to the artist, are especially apparent in the song “siempre dejo algo,” the only track where Ortiz-Wren sings in Spanish. “That song is about this experience of floating in between these two places and not feeling very grounded in that position,” says Ortiz-Wren. “I think there are a lot of people who are biracial or bi-cultural who have the same experience of erasure or scrambling to scrape [together] what it means to have a mixed identity. I’m expressing a loss, and I’m not sure what that loss is.”

Bella Ortiz-Wren, singer/songwriter – bella
Marlborough, Vermont
Bandcamp
Facebook

Top photo Bella Ortiz-Wren of bella | Photo by Willa Chandra

The post A Wild Rose From bella’s Bedroom appeared first on Take Magazine.

If the idea of sitting outdoors on a blanket, sipping wine, and eating local, farm-fresh food while watching Vivaldi’s Four Seasons ballet sounds like a perfect way to spend a Vermont summer evening, you’d be right.

Farm to Ballet is the brainchild of Artistic Director Charles “Chatch” Pregger, 37, a classically trained dancer and ballet instructor who has danced with the Boston, Washington, and Houston ballets. Now in its third season, this unique blending of art and agriculture runs Saturdays and Sundays, July 15 – August 13, at eight farms across the Green Mountain State. Each show benefits an agricultural nonprofit by supporting farms with their sustainability efforts.

Soloist and sixth-generation Vermonter Kyla Paul, who’s been dancing for 20 of her young 24 years, says each new venue is a challenge. “We never quite know what the terrain will be like,” she says. “Will the grass be slippery or scratchy? Will there be sticker bushes? Cow patties? Once we had to dance in a field that had just been bush-hogged, so there were lots of holes that we had to maneuver around. A stage is easy and predictable; I like this better.”

Soloist Kyla Paul in Farm to Ballet, photo by Tim Barden

Paul, who performed the role of Pig in last summer’s production, will be donning a plaid shirt and straw hat this season as she portrays the Farmer. All told, the event includes 25 dancers and many more volunteers who help pull off a delightful blend of dance, music, good food, and community.

While attendees listen to a string sextet perform Vivaldi’s score, and watch as the dancers help Paul’s farmer tell the story of growth on a Vermont farm from spring through fall, they can dine from local food trucks or on bounty straight from the farm itself. Some shows will have local spirits on hand, although guests can BYOB as well.

The story begins with geese returning to the farm in spring. As the planting begins, the dancers irrigate, tend, and harvest the crops while pigs and cows and chickens join in celebration of life on a farm. A traditional farm share closes the ballet as the geese fly south for the winter.

Farm to Ballet performance on the Shelburne Farms Breeding Barn lawn.

For Pregger, seeing amateur dancers perform alongside the professionals is immensely gratifying. “For those who came to dance as adults, a professional career is closed to them,” he says, “but with this they do get a taste of their dream and can live the life of a ballerina for a summer.”

Pregger has been surprised by the social connection between dance and community. “For most of my life, I thought of dance as being solely for the sake of art, which is great, but I now realize that ballet can be more accessible and helpful,” he says. “My art is now contributing to my value system, and that’s been unexpectedly amazing.”

Funds from past productions have gone to the Vermont Land Trust, Vermont Feed’s Jr. Iron Chef and Rural Vermont, among others. The farms use the revenue they receive for a variety of programs. Golden Well Farm & Apiaries, for instance, used its share to plant a pick-your-own berry patch.

Charles “Chatch” Pregger–artistic director
Farm to Ballet
farms across Vermont
Website
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Top image by Tim Barden

The post Lettuce Entertain You appeared first on Take Magazine.

Michelle Holzapfel acknowledges that she has some talent for whittling wood, but she credits as much of her artistic success to sheer chance. “You go along almost following your nose, following some feeling that you can’t even put words to,” she says in the latest episode of the PBS series Craft in America. “And that aspect of things cannot be overlooked. It’s very important to take your chances.”

The new “Nature” episode of the series, which celebrates handcrafted creativity across the country, included Holzapfel among five artists who pull their inspiration, materials, and medium from the natural world. Holzapfel embraces every knot in the pine, every twist of burlwood, every fissure that she works into a design.

Her work is technically astute yet thematically whimsical. Her trompe l’oeil pieces include a remarkable rendition of a knitting basket, detailed down to every wrap of yarn, and book ends that themselves look like stacks of books, one with a Raggedy Ann doll seated atop. Some of her vases and bowls hold intricate carvings of leaves, faces, coiled snakes, and even a “knitted” wooden sweater. In other sculptures, such as an apple with its stem still attached to a branch with leaves, the wood appears as sleek and impenetrable as marble.

Michelle Holzapfel, Vermont Spoons

Holzapfel grew up in rural North Smithfield, Rhode Island, learning to make things by hand—from a fort of branches in the woods to clothing stitched with needle and thread. Her mother made dresses. Her father was a machinist who did carpentry and metal work. “As a kid, as long as I can remember being alive, I loved to manipulate my world,” Holzapfel says. “I just grew up sort of immersed in a culture of fixing things, making things.”

In high school, she tried printmaking, using tools to cut wood for block prints. “I discovered that I really liked the carving part better than the printing part.” For her first commissioned work, she whittled name plaques for neighbors to hang at their front doors.

Her family took regular trips to the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence to see shows and the museum. Today, the RISD museum collection includes her work, as does the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; Yale University Art Gallery in New Haven, Connecticut; the Museum of Arts and Design in New York; and the Currier Museum in Manchester, New Hampshire.

Michelle Holzapfel, Rage Correctly

Holzapfel came to Vermont to attend Marlboro College, where she met her husband, fellow woodworker David Holzapfel. They started selling their creations at craft shows and to travelers passing on Route 9 in the summer.

After their two sons were born, the Holzapfels realized that sending them to college and providing them health insurance required the financial anchor of a full-time job. David set aside woodworking and became an elementary school art teacher in Marlboro.

By the 1990s, galleries in New York, Atlanta, Los Angeles and Philadelphia had picked up Michelle’s work, fetching her prices upwards of $12,000 for a piece. After 30 years of relentless paring, her pace has slowed now, but she still sells to patrons and picks up commissions.

Yale University recently asked her to create the mace—a ceremonial staff representing each of its colleges—for a new residential college named for civil and women’s rights activist Pauli Murray. And this month, a show of Holzapfel’s work opens at The Gallery at Rhodes Arts Center at Northfield Mount Hermon prep school in Massachusetts.

Michelle Holzaphel–woodworker
Applewood Studio and Gallery
Marlboro, Vermont
Website
Craft in America “Nature” episode featuring Michelle Holzapfel

The post Going With The Grain appeared first on Take Magazine.

Whether it’s the Dakota Access Pipeline, coal mining on Black Mesa, Arizona, or fracking the Bakken shale, Native American Indian reservations are ground zero for the fight against extractive industries and the neo-colonialism they bring with their drills. O’Feral and Heck, documentary filmmaking partners, are exploring one particularly painful piece of this struggle: increased rates of violence against Native American women.

Their first feature film, Arming Sisters, follows a number of women fighting this epidemic with whatever they have available. The film introduces Patty Stonefish, a young Lakota woman bringing self-defense workshops to reservations, Dawn White, a tribal cop on call in the thick of the oil craze, and Sarah Deer, a Muscogee lawyer, professor, and MacArthur Fellow developing policy.

O’Feral, a Marlboro College alumna who moved to Brattleboro, Vermont, by way of Brooklyn three years ago, got the seed for the film while drumming with an Afro-Brazilian drum corps. A fellow drummer shared Patty Stonefish’s Indiegogo campaign, and Willow was hooked. She emailed Stonefish: “I don’t really have any money, but you don’t have any media of your work,” she wrote. “I could provide that for you.” The two started talking, and Stonefish became “the portal into this
whole project.”

Expecting to capture a straightforward story in Stonefish, the filmmakers raised $20,000 on Kickstarter, “loaded up our Subaru, and drove out to the Northern plains.” Upon arrival in Fargo, North Dakota, they heard about “the oil boom in the northwestern part of the state. The Bakken gold rush.” The Fort Berthold Indian Reservation, home to the Mandan, Hidatsa, and Arikara tribes, was “smack in the middle of the bullseye.”

On Fort Berthold, O’Feral and Heck witnessed the epidemic in real-time and began to dissect its causes. Violent crimes “are typically intra-racial,” O’Feral says. However, according to U.S. Department of Justice statistics, 86 percent of perpetrators of rape against Native women are non-Native men.

“Perpetrators are smart,” O’Feral says. “They go where they think they can get away with it.” In this light, Arming Sisters details what Sarah Deer explains very clearly in the film: “The legal system, as it’s structured today, does not protect Native women.”

And so, as the film’s title suggests, Native women are protecting each other and demanding systemic change. “They have the answers, they know exactly what to do,” O’Feral says, “and so we’re trying to push forward their vision for change.”

Arming Sisters focuses on the Northern Plains, but O’Feral says, “the oil boom is really just like a way to throw the situation into relief.” Similar cycles are ongoing elsewhere. “If you look at a Native woman as a microcosm of the tribe, she may have been wounded in her lifetime and by historical trauma, but she is finding her strength and transforming that into a source for social change.”

Willow O’Feral — filmmaker
Brattleboro, Vermont
Website
Facebook
Instagram

Photos by Brad Heck

The post Sisters In Arms: Violence and Native American Women appeared first on Take Magazine.

Although best known for her ground-breaking and award-winning work as founder of the Janus Press, Vermont-native Claire Van Vliet has produced other acclaimed bodies of artwork as well. The current exhibit at the Brattleboro Museum & Art Center called “Ghost Mesa” is just one example.

“Ghost Mesa” is a series of lithographs inspired by the American Southwest that focuses on portraying the power and presence of giant rock formations stretching against the sky. Having lived on the Salisbury Plain near Stonehenge as a child, Van Vliet has been drawn to mountains and rock formations since she was a child. “Rock formations are pure form created by the initial form of the rock and how it has been molded by the elements of water and wind,” Van Vliet says.

For inspiration, Van Vliet took many trips to the Southwest. “It is magical; the landscape in many places feels vast, but in fact is intimate. That is its hook for me,” she says. “Plus so many of the rocks are sedimentary because it was submerged under the great inland sea–it is strange to be a mile high and be on the seabed looking up to cliffs.”

Ghost Mesa – Artist Proof C 1991-2011, 35″ x 32 1/2″, Lithograph, pulp painting, collaged on handmade paper

Van Vliet’s background is in printmaking (lithography and relief), but in 1976 Van Vliet began making naturalistic images on paper thanks to the opportunity to make paper at Twinrocker Handmade Paper in Indiana.

In 1985 Van Vliet began thinking about her lithographs as variable editions, printing them on a variety of handmade papers, both plain and imaged. As ideas emerged, she worked on the prints with drawing, painting, and collage. The process is ongoing, and with the “Ghost Mesa” lithograph, five of the edition of 18 remain to be finished. “The exhibition includes the four completed ones that I have and some from the series on Little Echo Amphitheater and Copper Canyon,” Van Vliet says.

Little Echo Amphitheater 8/10B 1998-2016, 18″ x 22 3/4″, Lithograph and pulp painting

As with much art, lithography is often collaborative, as the printing of the images drawn on the stone is an art in itself. “’Ghost Mesa’ was printed by Jack Damer, ‘Little Echo’ by William Kitchens, and ‘Copper Canyon’ I pulled myself,” says Van Vliet. “Papermaking is also collaborative, and in these prints I worked with Magnolia, Katie MacGregor, Bernie Vinzani, and Pam Smith.”

Van Vliet has lived in northeastern Vermont for 50 years, and during that time has found a lot of different rocks. “Here the rock has been ground and gouged by glaciers forming distinctive whaleback mountains,” says Van Vliet. One of these is Wheeler Mountain, which is also an ongoing series.

Claire Van Vliet – Artist & Founder of Janus Press
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Top image photo by Michelle Frehsee Photography

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