Discover how My Body Is a Basket artists Brenda Mallory, Danielle Morsette, and Sara Siestreem push textile traditions into unexpected terrain through a conversation that explores weaving as a practice, metaphor, and source of artistic experimentation.

In a conversation moderated by exhibition co-curator Asia Tail, these three Pacific Northwest Indigenous artists will share the ways they bring abstraction and traditional practices together, build relationships with their materials, and engage with gender roles through their work.

About the Artists

Brenda Mallory’s mixed-media sculptural works comprise a variety of materials including cloth, fibers, beeswax, and found objects. By creating multiple forms joined with crude hardware, her work addresses ideas of interference and disruption in long-established systems of nature and human cultures. She is a recipient of the Hallie Ford Fellowship, the Eiteljorg Contemporary Native Art Fellowship, the Native Arts and Culture Foundation Fellowship in Visual Art, and the Ucross Native Fellowship. Mallory lives in Portland, Oregon, but grew up in Oklahoma and is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation.

Danielle Morsette is a Suquamish tribal member with ancestral ties to the land where the Frye Art Museum now stands. Morsette is an expert weaver, who crafts wool textiles and wearable regalia, and works in other media. Through her practice, she explores and celebrates the legacy of her ancestors. She is the first wool weaver in her family in generations and hopes to grow representation for Coast Salish weavers in Seattle. Her work has been collected privately and publicly, including by the Seattle Convention Center, the Seattle Art Museum, Clearwater Casino, and the Burke Museum.

Sara Siestreem is a Hannis Coos multidisciplinary artist from the Umpqua River Valley on the South Coast of Oregon working in painting, photography, printmaking, weaving, and large-scale installation. Siestreem combines the ceremonial customs of her ancestors with contemporary artistic approaches and materials to engage social and ecological justice, education, and Indigenous feminism. Siestreem was awarded the University of Oregon’s CFAR Fellowship and the Forge Project Fellowship. Her artwork was recently included in the landmark 2023 book An Indigenous Present. Her work is in museum collections, including the Brooklyn Museum (Brooklyn, NY), Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (Berkeley, CA). She lives and works in Portland, Oregon.