JTF (just the facts): A total of 17 photographic works, framed in painted wood, and hung against white walls in the small gallery space, the entry area, and the office area.

The show includes the following works:

• 8 woven archival inkjet prints on Hahnemuhle bamboo paper and Hahnemuhle rice paper, tape, 2024, sized 40×60 inches, unique (with handmade artist frame)
• 9 woven archival inkjet prints on Hahnemuhle bamboo paper and Hahnemuhle rice paper, tape, cotton thread, 2024, sized roughly 24×24 inches, unique (with handmade artist frame)
• Eveline Battiest Steele: 1 basket (sugar cane, natural dyes), 2024

(Installation and detail shots below.)

Comments/Context: For many if not most Indigenous artists, a deep connection to the land and the ancestors who once lived there flows through their work, with the richness of the past activating the present in complex ways. Ancient learnings from nature, familial interdependence, tribal bonds, and traditional artistic practices form a foundation on which contemporary works are then built, with the darker histories and truths of violence, dispossession, and marginalization never far from view.

Hand crafting is an integral part of many Indigenous artistic pathways, with approaches to painting, dyeing, weaving, beading, ceramics, and other methods carefully handed down from one generation to another. But many surviving examples of traditional Indigenous art are now tucked away in museums and archives (and often out of view), essentially separated from the cultural environments in which they were made. So many contemporary Indigenous artists have been digging through these repositories, looking for connections to their own pasts, and finding ways to reclaim those isolated objects in their own works.

For Sarah Sense, a photographic artist with ancestors from both the Choctaw (from Oklahoma) and Chitimacha (in Louisiana) tribes, an interest in and appreciation for basket weaving came from her grandmother, and with the blessing of tribal leaders, she has embarked on an artistic career that mixes photography with traditional weaving methods. In her 2022 gallery show (reviewed here), she introduced an approach that physically interlaced photographs she had made of her ancestral lands with images of archival treaties, contracts, maps, and other documents that related to the history of those places, actually cutting the prints and weaving them together using traditional patterns and designs. The works took the form of framed wall-hung objects, as well as some baskets, mostly in roughly square shapes and in a light yellow palette (the colors coming from both skies and waters in the landscapes, as well as the aging documents).

In the past few years, Sense has continued to search through museums for the woven baskets of her tribes, spending particular time in the collections of the Montclair Art Museum (in New Jersey), the Brooklyn Museum (in New York), and the Worcester Art Museum (in Massachusetts). Her recent works take specific baskets she found in these archives as inspiration for a new series of handwoven sculptural photographs, making a total of twelve large works and twelve smaller studies, a portion of which are on view in this show. Once again, Sense has merged her own landscape photographs with scanned fragments from a range of archival materials, including colonial documents from the American Antiquarian Society, colonial maps from the British Library, and original allotment blueprints from the Choctaw Cultural Center.

With the original baskets as a kind of guide, Sense has channeled the makers of generations past, echoing weaving patterns that respond to particular animals (bear, blackbird, rabbit, and nesting mouse) and graphic motifs (eyes, dots, and bowties). In her large works, which are now more rectangular rather than strictly square, Sense has created a two part aesthetic approach, with an under layer of flat, generally tightly patterned imagery providing a base for second layer on top, where looser, more expressive weaving coils and unravels, often rising from the surface and extending beyond the borders of the woven images underneath.

While the images Sense is using and the weaving patterns she is borrowing (and honoring) change from work to work, the conceptual structure is essentially the same. Landscapes (in this case, mostly misty views of forests and woods) are inextricably merged with colonial documents, intermingling present and past through the activity of weaving; the additional weavings seem much more expressive and personal, with plaits, braids, twists, bends, and ribbons turned on edge breaking out of the rigid structure of the weaving and allowing for more lyrically improvisational gestures. Each work is almost like a song, with a clear melody providing the general structure, and unexpected harmonies and riffs expanding and enhancing the familiar tune. Or another way to think about these two layers is in the context of movement, with one layer relatively fixed and aligned and the other more free to change and wander.

The smaller studies tend to leave more of the base photograph visible, with the weaving less finished, creating a more in-process feel. In many cases, the works feel like tests or experiments, with a weaving pattern or image combination tried out just far enough to know whether it will provide what the artist wants, without having to tediously complete the effort edge to edge. This mid-point stopping inherently leaves rolls of unwoven strips hanging loose, which Sense can then play with as compositional (in terms of placement or location) or sculptural (in terms of spatial depth and texture) elements. In a few cases, these strips swoop and turn, fanning out or twisting into braids, creating layers of lines that move with much more graceful curvature than the regimented woven patterns.

It’s interesting to think about Sense actually holding the treasured baskets now in museum collections, and meditatively channelling the spirits of female ancestors back through the decades and centuries; it makes her work part of a much longer continuum, even if she isn’t making baskets in exactly the same manner. Sense says “I saw the joy of weaving in the patterning but also felt the desperation of weaving,” and it is this uneasy friction that comes through most strongly in her own works, with landscapes literally disrupted by the policies and maps of others, their intrusions now inextricably grafted to the land. In this way, the meticulously elegant patterning in Sense’s works is given an edge of astringent bite, where conflicting (and traumatic) histories are permanently woven together, leaving little room for loosening those bonds.

Collector’s POV: The works in this show are are priced at $$12000 and $30000, based on size. The single original basket is not for sale. Sense’s work has little secondary market history at this point, so gallery retail likely remains the best option for those collectors interested in following up.