Melinda Schwakhofer | Artist

News and Events

This Land Calls Us Home
Through November 6, 2024

Four pieces of my art work have been selected for inclusion in This Land Calls Us Home at Hartsfield Jackson Atlanta International Airport .  This exhibition features the work of 26 contemporary Native American artists and designers that conveys the relevance of their personal and collective Indigenous relationships with their ancestral homelands in the Southeastern United States.

Road to Oklahoma

My film Road to Oklahoma was selected for the 2023 Native Spirit UK Film Festival.   The film shows how I made my art quilt Road to Oklahoma but also relates the powerful story of the Muscogee people's removal from our homelands and the long-lasting impact on my own family and personal story. I am an enrolled member of the Muscogee Nation.
Click here to watch the film.

Road to Oklahoma Quilt
Purchased by the Muscogee Nation in 2022

My Art Quilt The Road to Oklahoma was placed 2nd in the 49th Trail of Tears Art Show 2020.  It toured with the Speak: Speak While You Can exhibition through 2021. Curated by Bobby C. Martin and Tony Tiger, the exhibition " makes clear that our languages are still—and will always be—an integral part of our identity as Native peoples".
In 2022 the quilt was acquired by the Muscogee Nation for permanent exhibition in the Council Oaks Comprehensive Health Care Center, Tulsa, Oklahoma. 

Este Mvskokvlke Owis (I am Muscogee)

This photographic self-portrait won the Inaugural Jessie Ross Cobb Award presented by First American Art Magazine at the 50th Annual Trail of Tears Art Show in 2021.  In 2022 it was acquired by the Royal Albert Memorial Museum and Art Gallery in Exeter, England for permanent display in the Reclaiming identities section of their Americas Collection.

Este Mvskokvlke Owis (I am Muscogee)  COVID-19 Art Mask

This mask was made for an online exhibition, Masked Heroes: Facial Coverings by Native Artists, curated by First American Art Magazine.  In 2021 it was purchased by the New York Public Library as part of a larger collection of 75 culturally significant masks from the COVID-era that the Library has selected.


 

SacRED Threads
First Americans, Museum Volkeunde,Leiden, Netherlands

Displayed from April 2020  through July 2023

This piece represents a blending of cultures that makes sense to me as an artist and as a Mvskoke woman. Using historical photographs reclaims them from being ‘images of a vanishing/vanished people’ and gives them a powerful new presence, actively carrying a bloodline that links Indigenous Women over generations. The red colour also points to the ‘hidden’ issue of murdered and missing Native women. In recognition of the commonality of this experience, the dress fuses Plains styling, with imagery from the Eastern Woodlands, the Plains, and from my own Mvskoke heritage.



© Melinda Schwakhofer 2020