Marie Watt I-Beam Quilts At Carnegie Art Museum In Pittsburgh

Marie Watt's latest installation includes a soundtrack. Visitors won't hear it in the gallery, but they will listen closely, and you can read it.

That's okay. read it

“Aunt, Aunt”

“Sister, sister.”

Sound familiar?

“Mother, mother.”

“Brother, brother.”

Watt (Seneca Nation; b. 1967, Seattle) refers to this as the “language of twinning” and took Marvin Gaye's 1971 smash hit Marvin Gaye's 1971 performance as his starting point “What's Going On?”

“This song calls out 'mother, mother,' 'brother, brother,' and I thought, well, in a Seneca way and in an indigenous way, that call goes on and includes 'aunt, aunt,' and 'grandmother, grandmother.' ,' and 'uncle, uncle,' and includes 'sky, sky' and 'water, water' and 'deer, deer' and 'bobcat, bobcat,'” Watt told Forbes.com “This intersection between Marvin Gaye thinking in our relationship and an indigenous way of thinking about our relationship, which is to say that we are all connected and we are all related.”

Do you hear it now?

“When Marvin Gaye doubles those words, I started thinking, when he says 'mother, mother,' it's about making that urgent call go further into space, but it's also intimately connected to this story of call and response” , Watt continues. “In an indigenous way, I've started to think of it as a way of calling out to our ancestors and calling out to future generations.”

Watt sourced the words through collaborations with museum educators, the Pittsburgh Poetry Collective, and invitations to community members of all ages. His simple question was, “What's going on?”

The words appear on salvaged steel I-Beam fragments around Pittsburgh, the historic and reigning steelmaking capital of the world.

“(Watt) started thinking of words that we associate with what steel means today in this region,” Liz Park, Richard Armstrong Curator of Contemporary Art at the Carnegie Museum of Art, told Forbes.com. “He had an amazing list of associative words and inspired and informed by the research and he referred to the words as a word bank, which, again, I thought was a really beautiful way to build language around the material which he is collecting because these Words are also material in the same way that I-Beams are material.”

Soot, soot

Pride, pride

Work, labor.

Carbon, carbon

Explosion, explosion.

Selected words, community members were invited to write them on the beams to be later welded.

One of the hundreds of I-beams incorporated into Watt's two sculptures was cast from glass, another industrial material that Pittsburgh has long excelled in manufacturing. The artist found glass casting more demanding than expected.

What was supposed to read “Ghost Ghost” instead reads “Host Ghost” as a result of a crack in the glass beam forcing it to be cut.

“It's so perfect in so many ways; the word 'host' is very much part of my ethos as an artist,” explains Watt. “When I do a collaborative project, I set the table and what is created is shared by everyone.”

As TV painter Bob Ross used to say, no mistakes, just “happy accidents.”

I-Beam quilts

It is doubtful that anyone but the artist initially sees his room filling steel sculptures as quilts. I-Beam quilts. Watt's use of quilts and blankets is what she is best known for.

“I don't know if they chose me or if I chose them, and I guess that speaks to the way I like to work with materials,” Watt said of her predilection for perceiving the world through the prism of quilts and blankets “My initial interest in working with blankets came from how I see them working in my family and community. We give away blankets to honor people for witnessing important life events, but I quickly realized that when I started working with thrift store rescue blankets and tag sales and things that people would give me knowing that it was a staple for me, that “We're greeted in these objects, we go out into the world in these objects, and we're constantly printing them “.

Watt's “Blanket Story” sculptures, piles of neatly folded blankets, each with a unique story to tell, sometimes rising to nearly 20 feet, fill the most prestigious art museums from coast to coast.

“I think they have a life and energy of their own and I want to be a good listener,” Watt said. “Blankets were the beginning of this deep interest I have in listening to materials and working with materials that are often organic in nature and that connect to our stories.”

Like steel

Helping inspire the commission in Pittsburgh and an offshoot of Watt's “Blanket Stories” are his Skywalker/Skyscraper sculptures with blankets wrapped around an upright I-Beam. She was drawn to the I-Beam's intertwined history with generations of Haudenosaunee blacksmiths, known as “Skywalkers,” who built many of Manhattan's iconic skyline and other urban infrastructure.

“When I visited Marie in her studio, what struck me is how she surrounds herself with materials, and she's been collecting materials with intention, she's not just getting it from wherever she wants,” Park said. “She approaches this as an important part of her practice and process…there were literally stacks of blankets (in her studio) that she described as a library of blankets.”

A library of blankets. A bank of words. I-Beams All seemingly very different, but from Watt's perspective, all materials.

“One thing I love about working with (I-Beams) on this scale and in this location is that I've become very aware of the history that's embedded in this fabric, this material,” Watt explained. “This material has been touched by so many different people and when we see it without text, it often comes across as cold, structural and designed, we forget the human hand and the stories that go with this material.”

Like, you guessed it, quilts and blankets.

Marie Watt takes America

“Marie Watt: LAND STITCHES WATER SKY” at the Carnegie Museum of Art through September 22, 2024, is one of three major solo exhibitions of the artist's work currently on view nationwide. It joins “Storywork: The Prints of Marie Watt, from the Collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer and His Family Foundation,” (through May 18, 2024) at the Print Center in New York, the first traveling retrospective of the artist and the first reflection on paper. of prints in her interdisciplinary work, and “Marie Watt: SKY DANCES LIGHT” at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, TX (through October 20, 2024) with sculptural works composed of thousands of tin cones sewn into a mesh network creating abstract clouds. like shapes hanging from the ceiling.

This degree of institutional attention is rare for a living artist. Extremely rare for a living female artist. Almost unprecedented for a living, female Indigenous artist.

“I'm making up for lost time,” Watt said of the attention. “I've always been making this work, so what's present to other people or institutions isn't necessarily what I see or experience.”

The kind of 20-year “overnight success” typical of the arts or music. Despite a pedigree no less esteemed than receiving his Master of Fine Arts from Yale University, it's only recently that Watt has felt his career is on solid ground.

“This sounds weird even when I say it out loud, but I think it took until I was 50 and I said to myself, this looks like this is what I'm going to do when I grow up,” she said with a laugh. “I don't know why I felt that this career as an artist was something that someone could suddenly pull the rug out from under me and then I'd have to go back to another kind of job.”

As long as Watt has materials, he will continue to find unique ways to share stories through them and a career. Lucky for us, there's no shortage of quilts, words and steel waiting for her.