The pandemic-themed piece, titled Wakitantanka (Strong-Willed) Pandemic Survivalist, won the Heard Market’s best-of-show prize this weekend and will now be in the Heard Museum’s permanent collection. Growing Thunder Fogarty’s soft sculpture doll depicts a Sioux woman dressed in striking regalia. She sits atop a platform featuring a beaded image of the COVID-19 virus, which has hit Native communities especially hard, and surrounding it are words of past pandemics that her people have survived, such as the 1630 smallpox pandemic, brought to Indigenous communities by European settlers. “This wasn’t our first pandemic; we’ve had pandemics throughout our whole ancestral life,” says Growing Thunder Fogarty. “Natives have been hit the hardest, statistically, by COVID. I actually stayed off social media last year because I was getting so depressed from seeing us lose our artists and elders.”
Each element of Growing Thunder Fogarty’s new art piece is embedded with meaning. Her doll wears a traditional penny dress, for instance, signifying how tradition can still exist in the contemporary world, despite all the obstacles Indigenous people have faced. “The penny dress is a Sioux dress. It’s a dress we wear to acknowledge that we’re living in this contemporary world and our traditional world,” she says. Around the dress is also a painted skirt wrap, on which the artist drew imagery of traditional medicines. “I drew some cedar, sweetgrass, and sage: Those are our traditional medicines that we use in teas, and we smudge with them too. They all have healing properties.” (Healing, in 2021, is more important than ever, she says.)
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