In her series Headdress, Dana Claxton continues to extol indigenous cultural abundance. The personal collections of five womxn are featured: Jeneen’s collection of beadwork spans three generations from Old Crow Yukon, with designs that are specific to the Vuntut Gwich’in First Nation; Connie, matriarch of beadwork, adorns her own hand beaded pieces; Shadae mixes it up with hip-hop baseball caps, a Coast Salish woven cedar hat, and her husband’s pow wow/peyote fans; Dee and Dana wear pieces of the same inter-tribal collection made by beaders from the four directions. In these portraits, the beadworks cover and espouse the womxn’s silhouettes, becoming more than just objects: the beadworks are cultural belongings, and the womxn are cultural carriers.

Dana Claxton is a member of the Wood Mountain Lakota First Nations located in Southwest Saskatchewan. Claxton is a critically acclaimed artist who works with film, video, photography, single/multi- channel video installation, and performance art. Her practice investigates indigenous beauty, the body, the socio-political and the spiritual. Her work has been shown at the Museum of Modern Art (NYC), Metropolitan Museum of Art (NYC), Walker Art Centre (Minneapolis, MN), Sundance Film Festival, Salt Lake City (UT), Eiteljorg Museum of American Indians and Western Art, Indianapolis (IN), Museum of Contemporary Art (Sydney, AU), Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art (Bentonville, AR), Nasher Museum of Art at Duke University (Durham, NC), Memphis Brooks Museum of Art (TN) and the Minneapolis Institute of Art (MN).

This program is funded in part by Boulder Arts Week, Visit Boulder and Create Boulder

Artist website: danaclaxton.com