The Peabody Essex Museum (PEM) will soon kick off a month-long collaborative art project with PEM Prize recipient Marie Watt (Seneca Nation). From Saturday, May 11 through Friday, June 7, Salem community members and other visitors are invited to help create a cloud-like sculpture from tin jingles, to be unveiled during the 16th annual Salem Arts Festival on Saturday, June 8.
Marie Watt is a renowned interdisciplinary artist who explores the intersection of history, community engagement, and Indigenous teachings. In 2019, Watt led five community sewing circles at the museum to co-create elements for a PEM-commissioned artwork, “Companion Species: Cosmos, Sunrise, Flint,” that’s currently on view in “On This Ground: Being and Belonging in America.” In 2023, she was awarded the PEM Prize, which recognizes artists whose work explores the catalytic relationship between creativity and civic engagement.
“The PEM Prize is awarded to artists, like Marie Watt, whose work helps us reinvigorate and reimagine our communities,” said Trevor Smith, PEM’s associate director of multisensory experience and curator of the present tense. “These artists are leaders, changing the way we see, experience and interact with the world around us.”
Watt’s jingle sculptures are composed of tin jingles, small metal cones traditionally made from the lids of tobacco tins that adorn regalia worn in Jingle Dances. These dances originated as a healing ritual in an Ojibwe community during the deadly influenza pandemic of 1918–1919. Dancers activate the cones through prayer, sound and motion.
Beginning Saturday, May 11, from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m., the public is invited to help string and assemble jingles that will be sewn together to make an abstract, cloud-like sculpture that will be suspended in the museum’s main atrium.
“Many hands in our PEM community will help construct this jingle cloud sculpture,” said Karen Kramer, PEM’s Stuart W. and Elizabeth F. Pratt curator of Native American and Oceanic art and culture. “Through the collective art making experience, Watt reminds us that — much like the ‘butterfly effect’ in nature — we all have the power to contribute small actions that can influence the future and help bring healing.”
PEM Prize Community Art Project
Saturday, May 11–Friday, June 7 | Included with admission
Join us from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. for a PEM Prize community art project and help build a work of art that will hang in the museum! Visitors ages 8 and up are invited to participate during regular museum hours in the museum’s main atrium.
Salem Arts Festival & PEM Prize Opening Day
Saturday, June 8 | Free and open to the public
Celebrate culture, creativity and community at PEM Prize Opening Day and the 16th annual Salem Arts Festival. As part of this family-friendly event, visitors will have the opportunity to dance with the finished jingle sculptures and activate them through movement. Hear from Marie Watt about her work and inspiration, see a Jingle Dance performance by world champion dancer Acosia Red Elk (Umatilla Nation), participate in a scavenger hunt throughout the museum and enjoy a themed brunch in the Atrium Café.
This event is co-produced by Salem Main Streets, the Creative Collective, and PEM.
About the PEM Prize
The PEM Prize is presented to artists from any field whose work explores the catalytic relationship between creativity and civic engagement. The PEM Prize Awardee is selected by a committee of museum staff and leadership. Along with a cash award, the PEM Prize recipient receives the opportunity to work with the museum on a project or series of projects that will be accessible to all. While each project will assume a different form, PEM Prize awardees will be individuals or groups who strive to deepen our global cultural connections, ignite our imaginations and inspire us to action.
About Marie Watt
Marie Watt is an American artist. She is a member of the Seneca Nation of Indians and also has German-Scot ancestry. Her interdisciplinary work draws from history, biography, Haudenosaunee protofeminism and Indigenous teachings; in it, she explores the intersection of history, community and storytelling. Through collaborative actions, she instigates multigenerational and cross-disciplinary conversations that might create a lens and conversation for understanding connectedness to place, one another and the universe. Watt holds an MFA in painting and printmaking from Yale University; she also has degrees from Willamette University and the Institute of American Indian Arts. In 2016, she was awarded an honorary doctorate from Willamette University.
Selected collections include the Peabody Essex Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Seattle Art Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Yale University Art Gallery, the Crystal Bridges Museum, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian and Renwick Gallery, the Tacoma Art Museum, the Denver Art Museum, and the Portland Art Museum. She is represented by PDX Contemporary Art in Portland, Ore.; Catharine Clark Gallery in San Francisco, Calif.; and Marc Straus Gallery in New York City. Learn more at mariewattstudio.com.
About Salem Arts Festival
The Salem Arts Fest is a popular family-friendly event, featuring a variety of art and art making, music, dance, and theater performances throughout downtown Salem. Public activities include multiple outdoor performance areas, onsite art making for all ages, local artisans and makers selling their creations, pop-up art exhibitions in businesses around town, a live mural slam on artists’ row and a temporary public art installation. Arts and culture are an integral part of day-to-day life in Salem, and this annual festival has become a source of pride and inspiration for hundreds of creative professionals and area residents.
