Today we’d like to introduce you to Laurie Steelink.
Hi Laurie, it’s an honor to have you on the platform. Thanks for taking the time to share your story with us – to start maybe you can share some of your backstory with our readers?
I’m a citizen of the Akimel O’otham Nation and a member of the Gila River Indian Community in Arizona. I was born an artist. My birth mother gave me up for adoption, and at six months old, I became a member of a progressive Euro-American family who encouraged and supported my creativity with music and art lessons. In the early 1980s as a young adult, I was immersed in the alternative/Punk music scene, playing in several bands in Tucson, Arizona while taking art classes at the University of Arizona. Eventually and on my own, I earned a BFA at the San Francisco Art Institute and an MFA at Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ. While on the East Coast, I became steeped in the history of Fluxus (an International art collective and movement from the 1960s-1970s that valued simplicity and anti-commercialism, with chance and accident playing a big part in the creation of works and humor also being an important element). Simultaneously, I started learning more about my Akimel O’otham heritage, which led me to find my birth family. It’s a life process to come to terms with what was missing in my life–the connection to my ancestral roots–and art is the big catalyst for that to happen. I’ve lived and worked in Los Angeles for over 25 years as an artist, curator, director of an art gallery, and founder of my own project space, Cornelius Projects. I currently reside on the unceded land of the Gabrielino-Tongva in the Los Angeles Port community of San Pedro. I’ve had a rich arts education and work experiences that have informed my practice and inspired me to develop new forms of visual language, and an approach to expanding the understanding of how art can be integrated into our everyday lives and our communities, especially from a contemporary Native perspective.
I’m sure it wasn’t obstacle-free, but would you say the journey has been fairly smooth so far?
I compare my path to the figure in the O’otham “Man in the Maze” basket design, which depicts a human being standing at the entrance of a circular maze. “For the Tohono O’odham, the symbol represents a person’s journey through life. The twists and turns represent choices made in life; with each turn, the human becomes more understanding and stronger as a person.” I try and look at struggle as a learning opportunity. We live in an unpredictable world. Staying flexible with a willingness to learn from our own and collective mistakes is an evolutionary process. A smooth road maybe be comfortable, but possibly not as interesting as one with “struggles” along the way”.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
My practice is dealing with the complexities of division and fragmentation in my life from a contemporary Native perspective. I’m constructing a bridge using the tools I’ve received–my education and experience–and embedding them in a kind of conceptual offering with a critical gaze while paying homage to my Native ancestry. The process is an evolving decolonization exercise, a continuum where everything, including the materials, from re-purposed paintings, treated found objects, assemblage, and installation, is a constant rethinking, blending, and recovering. My practice is a form of healing. I want to extend my work beyond a static installation and allow for an embodied experience, incorporating mechanized works, sound, light, and video projections. Generating a dialogue surrounding the work through performative presentations, as well as acknowledging the First Peoples of the land and being respectful of the relationship to where the work is situated has become another layer to my practice. To me it makes sense to develop these kinds of relationships for the work to have any kind of meaningful existence.
In 2018 I curated three exhibitions at Angels Gate Cultural Center in San Pedro to coincide with the 4-day Indigenous cultural and spiritual event the “Many Winters Gathering of Elders”. All three exhibitions addressed the Gathering beginning with the history, “In A Good Way: A Survey Of Gatherings 1992-2017”; the community, “What Does Your Land Mean To You?: Photographs Of Coastal Southern California Indigenous People By Tom Gugler”; and the Gathering’s influence on me as an Indigenous artist and curator, “Coming Into Being; Gathering the Elder in Me”, an installation chronicling my path as a human being and artist from birth to adoption, to adulthood. I regard the project as a kind of site-specific anthropological inquiry, combining family ephemera, photographs, and collected found and gifted objects. An Indigenous curator recently said, “Indigenous artists don’t have boundaries between our personal lives, our political lives, and our artistic lives because they are all intertwined”.
My installation, “Gathering Power (Indian market booth)” was recently included in the inaugural exhibition “California Biennial 2022: Pacific Gold” at the newly constructed Orange County Museum of Art. The invitation to participate in the exhibition, combined with the circumstance that I would be one of the first Native artists to exhibit there, compelled me to create a site-specific work that addressed the museum’s location on the ancestral homelands of the Acjachemen Nation. Using my Indian market booth walls, which I had previously taken to participate in Indian markets in Santa Fe and California, I hung individual works on the walls and placed mechanized assemblages within the footprint of the booth. One of the mechanized assemblages periodically produced sound, a call to attention. On an adjacent wall to the booth, I applied a hand-drawn text that read: GATHERING POWER/WITH HONOR + RESPECT/AN AKIMEL O’OTHAM/ON THE UNCEDED/TERRITORY OF THE/ACJACHEMEN NATION. From the beginning, my intention was to include an educational component to the work, offering the public an opportunity to learn about the purpose of the installation and the importance of acknowledging the First Peoples of Orange County. In January 2023, I organized with Adelia Sandoval, the Spiritual Overseer (Púul) and Cultural Director for the Acjachemen Nation, an immersive layered experience that included a creation story about the making of my installation and how I came to be, and Adelia read her creation story of the Acjachemen. The experience ended with traditional songs performed by Adelia and her all-women’s singing group “Tushmaluum Heleqatuum” (the hummingbirds that sing), bringing the installation to its conclusion.
Currently, as of this writing, my installation “Laurie Steelink: Spirit Is Alive, Magic Is Afoot” is on exhibit at the Moss Arts Center at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia through December 17, 2023. The installation begins with an exhibition I curated of work by Victoria Ferguson, a citizen of the Monacan Nation, the First Peoples of the Blacksburg area.
Since 2014 I’ve devoted a third of my live/work space on the ancestral homelands of the Gabrielino-Tongva in San Pedro, CA to exhibiting the arts, history, and culture of the surrounding area under the name Cornelius Projects. Cornelius Projects is another layer to my multidisciplinary practice.
The crisis has affected us all in different ways. How has it affected you and any important lessons or epiphanies you can share with us?
The pandemic showed us how our lives impact nature. Nature responded to us humans slowing down and staying put. The air got cleaner. More animals showed up. We as a society need to learn from that response and greatly decrease our impact on Mother Earth. Think globally, act locally.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.lauriesteelink.com/
Image Credits
Laurie Steelink Airi Katsuta Yubo Dong/ofstudio Tim Maxeiner Tim Maxiener Pippi Miller Sean Meredith
