Q&A

1. What’s your background?
I grew up between two worlds of the wide skies of the Lake Traverse Reservation and the humming pulse of Brooklyn’s streets. In both, I was cradled by creation as in sculptors, painters, beadworkers, and seamstresses shaping beauty by hand, while the halls of New York’s great museums whispered their own histories.

I left painting in my youth, trading brushes for belonging,
hoping to fold myself into crowds where art felt too quiet.
But that path unraveled as I married too young, motherhood too soon, until one day, at twenty-six,
I found myself sketching at a college desk, rediscovering the voice I’d silenced.

At first, I reached for bold abstraction with large, unapologetic pieces that filled the canvas with intention.
But as I studied Native American history, my roots stirred.
Memories returned with the scent of sage and pine, the curve of riverbanks, the beadwork of my auntie’s hands.
They found their way into my landscapes: first in watercolor, then gouache, now in the gentle earthiness of soft pastels.

From Brooklyn came geometry from the loud color of street fairs, the angles of graffiti, shaped further by the precision of architectural drafting, a skill I learned to make a living, but one that now sketches its way into my art.

Each work I create now is a conversation with memory,
a reverie stitched with place and time, where nature meets city, and childhood meets return.

2. What does your work aim to say?
My work speaks in the language of dual worlds with a reflection of a life braided from the roots of the reservation
and the rhythm of the city. From the bold hands of my Indigenous relatives, I inherited color that doesn’t whisper,
but sings, and geometry that holds stories in its angles and lines.

In my abstract pieces, you’ll find a labyrinth like a winding path through childhood, where texture becomes memory,
and design becomes prayer. Each stroke offers a quiet resurrection, echoing the spirit of Luke 15:10 where once lost in the shuffle, now found in the form.

My landscapes, by contrast, arrive like memories do with
watercolor soft and fleeting, a mist that rises then dissolves. But in pastel, I return fully, combining the bold with the tender, the grain of the paper beneath my fingers
with the open skies and earth-toned silence of South Dakota.

My childhood was an emotional choreography, a dance of longing, joy, dissonance, and return. I hope you see that rhythm in what I make like in the way color collides with shape, and texture tells the tale my voice once couldn’t.

3. How does your work comment on current social or political issues?
A current heartbeat in my work, both painted and written,
is the grief and fury carried by the silence of the tragedy of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women & Girls.

This sorrow is not separate from my art, yet it seeps into the coarse textures of my abstracts, where beauty and violence collide. Vivid colors bloom, then fade like life, then loss with each hue a breath held too long, each mark a name not forgotten.

Cultural echoes thread through it all, symbols from memory that frame the edges of who we are, of who we’ve lost. Even in my landscapes, soft and haunting, the mourning lingers as if the land itself remembers.

4. Who are your biggest influences?
From the first glance, I was drawn into the soul of Wassily Kandinsky and his bold geometry, his spiritual compass etched in color and form. Then came the luminous energy of Emily Mason, her abstract expressionism igniting something familiar in me like a resonance of feeling, unspoken but deeply known.

I turned pages and years to John Marin’s restless watercolors, their fluid movement echoing windswept thought. Lately, it’s Richard McKinley’s pastels that call to me with dreamlike trails through landscapes untouched by noise, halcyon wanderings through places where the world slowed down and breath came easier.

Their works remind me of a time before the screen glow,
before the pace blurred our edges and when we could vanish into the wild, let the land speak its shifting truths,
and trace the emotional dance of light and shadow onto canvas or textured paper, in a dialogue as old as color itself.

5. How have you developed your career?
What began as a single Visual Arts course that was a simple space filler on my college schedule and soon unraveled into a calling. One class became many:
black-and-white photography, ceramics, drawing, painting with each being a doorway, each a voice. I gathered knowledge like a magpie gathers light, hungry to understand every medium my degree would allow me to touch.

That hunger never faded. Even after graduation, I followed its pull into workshops, into quiet rooms where skill and intuition mingled. To make a living, I turned to architectural drafting and its measured lines, and in between the grid of someone else’s vision, I poured my time into my own with writing by lamplight, painting at dawn, each practice reflecting the other, a pendulum swinging toward deeper understanding.

Art, for me, became a conversation not just between brush and canvas, but between myself and the world. Every hour in the studio is an offering, a question shaped in color and form, waiting for a reply.

And when the walls of galleries felt too far, I turned to the spaces I knew as in the bones of homes not yet lived in.
With the rhythm of the building trade behind me, I hung my work in new constructions, in homes freshly breathing,
inviting strangers to step in and feel something real
before the paint even dried.

6. How do you seek out opportunities?
I’ve drawn from the foundation of the familiar as in my ties to homebuilders and renovators to carve new spaces where my art can live and breathe. Empty walls become possibility, rooms mid-transformation cradle my work
like a whisper of what’s to come.

Beyond that, I walk the quiet corridors of galleries,
study their rhythms, reach toward fellow painters like constellations in the same creative sky. I listen for the pulse of opportunity in conversations with designers, in the way a space seems to ask for color, for story, for soul.

And as I keep painting, I prepare to share more with a newsletter taking shape like a canvas, where I’ll pour updates, current fascinations, techniques I’m chasing in pigment and time. A letter from my hands to yours,
mapping the evolution of a vision still unfolding.

7. How do you cultivate a collector base?
Much of it begins with interior designers that are curators of space, seekers of soul who come searching for that one piece to breathe life into a new home tour.

I open the doors of my home studio, invite them into the quiet hum of creation, where canvases lean like waiting stories and colors speak in low, luminous tones. Some of these works find new walls through an online marketplace,
where the digital and the handmade intertwine. And for those with visions of their own, I take on commissions that are collaborations in color, tailored echoes of emotion and place.

8. How do you navigate the art world?
It is a challenge, and at times, a quiet frustration, to carry my work into unfamiliar light, to find the hearts it was meant to reach.

Still, I walk forward. I root myself in the rhythm of local art centers, where the paint is still drying and conversations rise like incense from easels and open hands.

At art walks, I drift among kindred spirits, listening not only to what is shown, but to what hums beneath as in the pulse of now, the shifting tide of artistic thought. In that communion, I find compass and clarity, and perhaps, soften the edges of what once felt bewildering.

9. How do you price your work?
I weigh each piece with quiet care like the cost of pigment and paper, the stretch of canvas beneath my palms, the hours poured like water into every layer, every line.

Size speaks, time echoes, and materials hold their own voice all being part of the unseen architecture behind the finished work. Each painting, a balance of labor and love,
measured not just in strokes, but in the silent math of making.

10. Which current art world trends are you following?
Engaging with the pulse of the present, especially the wounds and wisdom rooted in my Native heritage is a calling I carry close.

Through my art, I seek not only to reflect, but to awaken and to lay brush to canvas like breath to flame, kindling dialogue along this diverse freeway of thought.

I hope each piece stands as a signpost in time like a remembrance of what was, a reckoning with what is, images that honor an era not lost, but echoing still, in the bones of the land and the beat of our becoming.