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Frank Lloyd Wright’s architecture is an artform that speaks through space, materials, light, and landscape—guiding us where to look, linger, and reflect. Taliesin reminds us that structures hold stories. Its exposed materials, support systems, craft, and integration with nature reveal something about how it was made, how it has changed, and the ideas and values embedded in its design.
The Native Art Marketplace offered another dimension to consider what art communicates. Featured artists’ work reflected identity, family connections, and relationships to place, carrying forward generational skills, memories, cultural knowledge, and traditional teachings.
On August 1 and 2, Taliesin Preservation and the Little Eagle Arts Foundation (LEAF) welcomed visitors to the second annual Marketplace held at Hillside. Indigenous artists, educators, performers, and speakers presented painting, beadwork, jewelry, basketry, wood carving, music, dance, and food. Visitors were invited beyond familiar questions: “What is it? Who made it? What is it made of?” toward others: “What does it remember? What does it teach?”
Karen Ann Hoffman
An Object Carries Knowledge
Raised-beadwork artist Karen Ann Hoffman offered one answer through her piece Flame Urn. The fabric vessel tells the founding of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy and the role of Jigonhsasee, or Mother of Nations, whose central fire became a gathering place for representatives of five warring nations seeking peace. The work embodies a particular understanding of peace: one not founded on negotiation, bribery, or compromise, but an earnest, shared willingness to listen, deliberate, find consensus, and accept responsibility for a common future.
Karen Ann Hoffman, “Flame Urn,” 2017, velvet, glass beads, felt.
Hoffman extends this understanding through tellings of personified trees and featherless birds. In the telling of the Tree People, Creation asks each species to watch over Turtle Island, but only the Pine keeps its promise. Remaining green through the seasons becomes a reward for commitment.
Another follows the buzzard, who neglects his own needs while gathering plumage for the other birds and eventually depends on the deer’s self-sacrifice to complete his journey. It teaches that care requires commitment to others as well as attention to one’s own limits.
In connecting history, spirituality, environmental knowledge, and art, while challenging Western distinctions between them, Hoffman’s work continues the long withstanding practice of transmitting native teachings through forms beyond the written word.
Sandra Peterson
The Nature of Materials
Throughout Hillside, artists showed how materials can carry histories and meaning beyond their physical form.
Basket maker and featured artist Sandra Peterson displayed raw birch bark alongside finished baskets, revealing the time, patience, and skill required to transform a natural material into something useful and beautiful.
Leah Winneshiek’s jewelry draws attention to birch bark’s natural character, sometimes preserving it and sometimes shaping it to bring particular qualities forward. Her work asks us to notice and appreciate the beauty already present in the material.
Gene Delcourt
Gene Delcourt’s basswood sculpture revisits an earlier work created for an international festival celebrating French sculptor Camille Claudel. Where the original depicted one hand holding a globe, supported by three hands representing different races, the new work gives every hand an equal place beneath the Earth. The gesture shifts from the idea of some providing support to one of shared responsibility among all.
Markers of Identity and Intention
Painter and muralist Christopher Sweet offered another way of seeing through place. His paintings return to family, Ho-Chunk identity, Wisconsin landscapes, and the places that have shaped his life. Birch trees, the Wisconsin River, sandstone formations, appliqué patterns, regalia, and familiar landmarks become markers of memory, belonging, and identity.
Lilian Whiteeagle
For bead artist and Native dancer Lilian Whiteeagle, beading began with a practical purpose: creating a custom set to complement her personal regalia. Whiteeagle dances three styles (appliqué, fancy, and jingle) and each has its own variations in regalia designed to support the movements and traditions of the dance. Her work brings inherited elements into conversation with new designs, incorporating Bear Clan symbolism from her father’s side of the family alongside functional elements designed to securely carry an inherited eagle feather while dancing. For Whiteeagle, making is also an act of intention. She believes the maker’s emotional state becomes part of the work, so joy can be carried into what is made, just as frustration or distress can be transmitted through it.
June Little Soldier was drawn to art through her father, celebrated Ho-Chunk sculptor Harry Whitehorse. She even recalled his connection to Frank Lloyd Wright, having painted several of Wright’s automobiles, and his remarkable artistic versatility. Her own work moves between beadwork and wood. She spoke of a community art project featuring one of her carved burial-mound tables and of returning to beadwork after time away, teaching herself with beads that had once belonged to her father. For Little Soldier, the Marketplace was also a way to make Native artists visible and affirm her identity:
“It’s nice to have a place to show off my work. It’s a visible way to say I’m Native and support Native artists.”
Listening Beyond the Object
Perhaps this is what distinguished the Native Art Marketplace from an ordinary art market: not only what was shared, but where and how it was shared. Taliesin’s Hillside Complex, a place shaped by its own history of creative practice and the exchange of ideas, provided a setting in which artists were not simply presenting objects to admire or purchase. They were sharing the processes, stories, and relationships that give those objects meaning.
Inside Hillside Theater on Saturday, the Wisconsin Dells Singers and Dance Troupe opened the weekend with songs and dances carrying native traditions through movement and regalia. Wade Fernandez brought together cedar flute, guitar, looping soundscapes, and song. Chef Elena Terry shared perspectives on Indigenous food sovereignty and the recovery of traditional Ho-Chunk foods and ancestral seeds. Casey Brown, Ritchie Brown, and Julia Pello’s presentation on their efforts to create a documentary on Wisconsin’s effigy mounds invited visitors to encounter them not simply as archaeological sites, but as sacred landscapes with deep cultural and spiritual significance.
Southwest x Midwest
Evening musicians Southwest Meets Midwest with Delbert Anderson, Wade Fernandez, Quintin Fernandez, Felix Sainz, shared a series of songs in response to photographs they had shared while documenting ancestral knowledge. In one instance, their elders encouraged them to see what lay beneath a desolate desert arch, inspiring a new piece in which the steady pulse of the flute moves through the chaos of the surrounding elements.
Learning How to Listen
The Marketplace’s deeper lesson was not simply learning about Native art, but learning how to look beyond the object and listen for what it carries: materials, memory, place, family, and tellings.
The Native Art Marketplace continues Taliesin Preservation’s partnership with the Little Eagle Arts Foundation, creating space to celebrate Native artists and the living cultures, histories, traditions, and communities of Wisconsin’s First Peoples.
