Storywork: Marie Watt

The Jordan Schnitzer Museum of Art at Portland State University presents Storywork: The Prints of Marie Watt from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation, including 73 of Watt’s prints, sculptures, and textiles, featuring a newly commissioned jingle cloud that immerses visitors under a canopy of tin jingle cones. The exhibition highlights the artist’s career from 1996 to the present and shares the stories that inform her work. Her early print works, created during her MFA program at Yale, are displayed alongside her collaborations with several master printers, as well as her monumental textiles and sculptures. The exhibition also explores Watt's evolving practice of organizing sewing and printing circles with family, friends, and community members. Unique to this presentation is a never-before-seen work – Forest Shifts Light (Sequoia, Crest, Canopy), a floor-to-ceiling, three-part interactive work of tin jingles commissioned by the Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation. The sculpture references the jingle dress dance, which began as a healing dance in the Ojibwe tribe in the 1900s, during the influenza pandemic. Audiences are invited to gently walk through the “forest” and experience the soft tinkling of the jingles.

“I view materials as sites for storytelling, repositories of experiences, vulnerabilities, and histories,” said Marie Watt. “Through playing with shifting light, the soft curves of wood grain, the droops of a baby blanket, I examine how familiar textures draw you into the story of a piece, gently leading you to a unique yet shared experience – an interaction with heirloom-like objects. The story does not start or end with a singular work, but expands beyond what is visible, carried forward by the meaning-making viewers bring to the work.”

“Local artist Marie Watt is one of the most important American artists of our time! Her art helps us understand stories and symbols of Native communities,” said ARTNews Top 200 Collector and real estate developer, Jordan Schnitzer.

Marie Watt (b. 1967) is an acclaimed multidisciplinary artist whose work draws on personal experience, Indigenous traditions, protofeminism, mythology, and art history. Watt, who lives and works in Portland, Oregon, is a member of the Turtle Clan of the Seneca Nation of Indians and has German-Scot ancestry.