“I just want these things to exist…rather than in my head or in an archival picture somewhere,” said artist Janae Grass (Sac & Fox/Absentee Shawnee/Mvskoke) in an interview over Zoom. Grass, a silversmith and beadwork artist from Tulsa, Oklahoma, was talking about her artistic output. “Whether it’s on a wall or on a person, I just want these things to be out in the world.” Grass co-curated the exhibition Echoes of Time and Place: Sauk Art and Culture with fellow artist Tony Tiger (Sac & Fox/Seminole/Mvskoke). The exhibition, which opened Oct. 3 at the Dubuque Museum of Art, marks the first major exhibition made up entirely of Sac & Fox artists outside of Oklahoma. There are three Sac & Fox federally recognized tribes: the Meskwaki Nation in Tama, the Sac & Fox Nation of Missouri in Kansas, and the Sac & Fox Nation headquartered in Oklahoma. Echoes of Time and Place reunites Sac & Fox, or Sauk, artists from the Oklahoma land with their ancestral homelands in Iowa.
