Marie Watt (b. 1967) is an American artist. She is a member of the Seneca Nation of Indians and also has German-Scot ancestry. Her interdisciplinary work draws from history, biography, Iroquois protofeminism, and Indigenous teachings; in it, she explores the intersection of history, community, and storytelling. Through collaborative actions, she instigates multigenerational and cross-disciplinary conversations that might create a lens and conversation for understanding connectedness to place, one another, and the universe.

Currently

Group show

26 Mar 202406 Oct 2024

Time Travelers: Foundations, Transformations, And Expansions At The Centennial

Tucson Museum of Art

140 North Main Avenue, Tucson, AZ 85701

In 2024, the Tucson Museum of Art and Historic Block (TMA) celebrates 100 years since its founding. The museum marks this milestone of exhibitions, collections, and programs by looking at the relationship of art to time in Time Travelers: Foundations, Transformations, and Expansions at the Centennial. This exhibition presents original contexts and offers new interpretations of significant artworks collected by the museum over the past century, reconsidering their complex relationships to the past, present, and future.

 Photograph by Blanton Museum of Art.

Solo show

03 Mar 202420 Oct 2024

SKY DANCES LIGHT

Blanton Museum of Art

210 E. Martin Luther King Jr. Blvd, Austin, TX 78712

Watt’s immersive installation at the Blanton features new and recent sculptural works from her Sky Dances Light series. Tens of thousands of tin cones sewn on mesh netting make up abstract cloud-like forms that hang from the ceiling. Known as “jingles,” these small metal bells historically made from rolled tobacco tin lids reference the Jingle Dress Dance. Today an important Native American pow-wow dance and regalia, the Jingle Dress Dance began as a healing ritual during the 1918 flu pandemic. According to Watt, “one version of the story is that a member of the Ojibwe nation had a sick granddaughter. They had this dream in which they were instructed to attach tin jingles to a dress and have women dance around this sick child while wearing the dress. The idea was that the sound would be healing. It’s assumed the medicine worked, because the dance was shared with other communities.”

 Photograph by Argenis Apolinario.

Solo show

25 Jan 202418 May 2024

Storywork: The Prints of Marie Watt

Print Center of New York

535 West 24th Street , New York, NY 10011

Print Center New York is pleased to present Storywork: The Prints of Marie Watt, from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation, the artist’s first traveling retrospective and the first to reflect on the role of printmaking in her ambitious interdisciplinary work. On view in the Jordan Schnitzer Gallery, the exhibition considers Watt’s printmaking both as a process and a philosophy—a medium that has had a nuanced and enduring impact on her career since 1996. Featuring over 60 works, it presents Watt’s etchings, lithographs, and woodcuts alongside a selection of her monumentally-scaled sculptures and textile works.

Group show

11 Nov 202330 Jun 2024

Daughter/Mother/Ancestor: Threads of Connection

Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields

Newfields, 4000 Michigan Road, Indianapolis , IN 46208

For centuries, women across cultures and generations have passed down textile-making skills to their daughters, granddaughters, nieces, cousins, and other chosen kin. Now rich with symbolism and meaning, the materials and formal qualities of fiber art are employed by many women artists today to honor their female ancestors and the noble role of motherhood.

Featuring historic and contemporary works from the IMA at Newfields’ global collections, Daughter/Mother/Ancestor: Threads of Connection explores the ways that women artists preserve intergenerational skill-sharing, manifest acts of care, and materialize familial love through longstanding traditions in textiles.

Group show

14 Oct 202330 Sep 2024

Soft Power

Tacoma Art Museum

1701 Pacific Avenue, Tacoma, WA 98402

The textile-based works in Soft Power are declarations: potent expressions of care, rebuke, resistance, and resilience. These soft manifestations of cultural heritage - the natural, tangible, and intangible- amplify personal narrative and social criticism through process and materiality. Visitors are encouraged to join in the creation of a large-scale collaborative soft artwork within the gallery.

Group show

25 Sep 202315 Sep 2024

How to Survive

Anchorage Museum

Anchorage, AK

Chinese-American activist and philosopher Grace Lee Boggs once said, “The only way to survive is by taking care of one another.” How to Survive is an exhibition investigating how ethics of care can help us face interlocking crises stemming from climate change.

Examining ideas of interconnectedness, caretaking, and listening—between humans, land, plants, and animals—the works on view invite reflection, encourage action, and seek to cultivate optimism in the face of challenge. Featuring installations by female-identifying contemporary artists, as well as historical objects, recent design innovations, and an interactive community response hub, How to Survive focuses on the habits we must nurture to bring forth more positive and equitable futures.

Visitors will encounter immersive projection installations, creatively upcycled garments and housewares, memes, large-scale sculpture, a reading library, as well as tools and prompts for learning more about our surroundings.

Serving as a testing ground for thinking about how we create, consume, and display artwork in a changing word, How to Survive also reveals decisions and processes behind exhibition-making and encourages learning about local research and entrepreneurship in green-product fabrication and material re-use.

Both practical and aspirational, How to Survive invites us all to greater depths of relation and caring in ways large and small.

View of Cannupa Hanska Luger and Marie Watt's *Each/Other* (2021) installed at the John Michael Kohler Arts Center in Sheboygan, WI, as part of *Considering Kin: Sharing the Same Breath*, curated by Kaytie Johnson in 2023. .

Group show

20 May 202321 Apr 2024

Considering Kin: Sharing the Same Breath

John Michael Kohler Arts Center

608 New York Avenue, Sheboygan, WI 53081

The cultivation of kinship with the living world is the foundation for Sharing the Same Breath. The exhibition brings together nine artists who consider the world’s complex web of relations through artworks that emphasize human, nonhuman, and interspecies forms of kinship and connectivity. These relationships are explored through a wide range of mediums including sculpture, photography, drawing, video, film, and installation. Together the works form a kincentric viewpoint that challenges narratives of human exceptionalism and encourages us to regard our symbiotic relationship and shared fate with our more-than-human family with greater attention and care.

Recently

Solo show

03 Mar 202420 Oct 2024

SKY DANCES LIGHT

Blanton Museum of Art

The University of Texas at Austin, Austin, TX

Group show

30 Nov 202320 Jan 2024

Concentric

Satchel Projects

New York, NY

Group show

02 Nov 202323 Mar 2024

Making Their Mark

The Shah Garg Foundation

New York, NY