Storywork: Marie Watt

Storywork: The Prints of Marie Watt, from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation, is the artist’s first traveling retrospective and the first to reflect on the role of printmaking in her ambitious interdisciplinary work. 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 50 works, it presents Watt’s etchings, lithographs, and woodcuts alongside a selection of her monumentally scaled sculptures and textile works.

Watt (b. 1967, works in Portland, OR) is a member of the Seneca Nation (one of six that comprise the Haudenosaunee Confederacy) with German-Scot ancestry. Her work is a site of twinned language between the present and the past, drawing from Native and non-Native traditions such as Greco-Roman myth, pop culture, and Indigenous oral narratives. She is known, increasingly, for assembling material drawn from community sewing circle events or open calls, and for her central use of reclaimed textiles as humble, everyday materials that carry intimate meanings and memories. This is exemplified by Watt’s celebrated Blanket Stories sculptures, such as Blanket Stories: Great Grandmother, Pandemic, Daybreak (2021), a column made of folded, stacked blankets drawn from a call to the public and pinned with tags documenting the blankets’ stories.

Over the course of her career, Watt has also told stories through prints, collaborating with master printers at Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts (on the Confederated Tribes of the Umatilla Indian Reservation, Pendleton, OR), Mullowney Printing Company (Portland, OR), Sitka Center for Art and Ecology (Otis, OR), and Tamarind Institute (Albuquerque, NM). Storywork features prints that show how Watt has explored material, process, and concept through these collaborations, which date back to the early 2000s. First introduced to printmaking as a student at Willamette University, Watt enrolled in printmaking classes while attending the Institute of American Indian Arts, where she studied under the artist and Indigenous activist Jean LaMarr.

Since completing her MFA in Painting and Printmaking at Yale in 1996, Watt has returned to printmaking repeatedly: she has used a sewing roulette wheel to puncture woodblocks (Door, 2005), run collaged and sewn fabric through a press to capture the trace of an object (Artifact, 2014 and Companion Species [Malleable/Brittle], 2021), drawn intricately woven threads (Blanket Relative, 2002), and developed a visual language that moves fluidly between her print and non-print works.