June 28, 2024—The Miller Art Museum will debut two new exhibitions opening on Sat., July 13, 2024: (ha)kirinąk / to return home featured in the Museum’s first floor main galleries and Stand Together! on the Ruth Morton Miller Mezzanine. The exhibitions feature a collection of 35 artworks by Henry Payer, a Ho Chunk artist enrolled in the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska currently residing in Sioux City, Iowa, and Camille Billie, Weeya Calif, Pat Kruse, and Christopher Sweet––four regional Woodland artists.
There will be a free public reception on Friday, July 12 from 5:30 – 7 pm. Light refreshments will be served. The exhibitions will remain on view through September 21, 2024.
(ha)kirinąk / to return home is Payer’s debut solo exhibition in his ancestral state of Wisconsin. The artist views the exhibit as an opportunity to bring his collection back home; the title of the exhibit uses the Ho Chunk language expression (ha)kirinąk, meaning one who has been far away and has returned.
“My work generally has to do with the culture that I come from, and my background as a Ho Chunk, the Indigenous people of Wisconsin...” says Payer. “I’m trying to get people to question and learn more about not only their cultural perspective but about history. This is not just my history that I'm talking about. It's American history. It's regional history. It's state history. It's local history. Indigenous history.”
Payer’s bold, contemporary work utilizes collage, window panes, found objects, and ledger paper in narratives about the history of the Ho Chunk people of Wisconsin and their removal westward. The Interpreter (2017) features a portrait of Alexander Payer, Henry’s patrilineal fourth great-grandfather who lived through all stages of the removal and served as an interpreter for the Ho Chunk during this lifetime.
“Ledger paper art originated from prisoners of war. In the 1870s, various tribes were loaded by train across the south and sent to Fort Marion in Florida. While they were imprisoned there, the guards gave them used ledger books to pass time. From there, they reflected on their traditional pictographic arts, which were done on animal hides, rocks, and birch bark, and they recorded their former lives in courting scenes, ceremonies, and their war honors. The story is they were allowed to sell these drawings to tourists who came to view the prisoners of war.” Payer explains.
Henry Payer uses the iconic Winnebago Chieftain RV as a symbol of self, home, travel, and displacement, posing questions about the blurred lines of iconography and cross-cultural visual references. He compares the design of the popular recreational vehicle to the traditional Native American longhouse––multi-family structures––and plays with the irony that the RV is an iconic symbol of American road trips and recreation.
In his ongoing photographic #wanderingwinnebago series, Payer poses a vintage toy Winnebago Chieftain RV in front of landmarks he visits during travel. Aiming the photographs from the ground upwards, he contemplates how he is connected to the location through inherited or shared experiences.
“By utilizing extensive research in combination with inherent perspective; I am able to recover, document, and expand contemporary Ho Chunk artistic expression. I aim to contribute to the revision and inclusion of our history through the active depiction of the Ho Chunk narrative,” says Payer.
Born in Sioux City, IA in 1986, Henry Payer received a BFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, NM in 2008. He was invited to study at the University of Wisconsin-Madison where he obtained his MFA in 2013. Henry has exhibited his work at locations such as the Great Plains Art Museum in Lincoln, NE; All My Relations Gallery in Minneapolis, MN; Sherry Leedy Contemporary Art in Kansas City, MO; and the Overture Galleries located in Madison, WI. Payer’s work has been exhibited at the University of Venice Ca’ Voscari, Palazzo Cosulich in Venice, Italy and has spent tise as an instructor at the Oscar Howe Summer Art Institute located at the University of South Dakota in Vermillion, SD. In 2021 the artist was awarded a five-year Joan Mitchell Fellowship.
“It is a real privilege and honor to exhibit Payer’s collection in Door County and for the Miller Art Museum to bring his unique combination of artistic and historical perspective of the Ho Chunk people back to Wisconsin through this exhibition,” writes Helen del Guidice, curator. “As he connects himself to his ancestors, his work also emphasizes the connection of contemporary visual culture and the past.”
Through the award of a grant from the Kohler Foundation, Inc., the museum will acquire Payer’s work for its permanent collection.
“This will set a precedent as the first artwork by a Native American artist to be intentionally collected by Miller Art Museum,” del Guidice continued.
An exhibit titled Stand Together! will be featured concurrently on the Ruth Morton Miller Mezzanine which features work by Camille Billie, Oneida Nation (De Pere, WI); Weeya Calif, Echota Cherokee Tribe of Alabama (Green Bay, WI); Pat Kruse, Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa (Duluth, MN); and Christopher Sweet, Ho Chunk Nation/Ojibwe (Beaver Dam, WI). In unison with (ha)kirinąk / to return home in the main galleries, the exhibit explores the creative culture of Woodland artists from around the Great Lakes.
To curate this exhibition, the Miller Art Museum engaged Coleen Bins, a Turtle Clan, Oneida Nation Wisconsin member of Egg Harbor, as a guest curator.
“In selecting Bins as the guest curator for this momentous exhibition, we aimed to bring Woodland artists together to acknowledge the ancestors of the past and the deep connection that Indigenous communities have to this land,” del Guidice says.
Bins is a graduate of the Institute of American Indian Art in Santa Fe, New Mexico, and the Rochester Institute of Technology, School for American Crafts, where she earned her master’s degree in Art Education. She has a long history as an art educator in the Indigenous communities of New York and Wisconsin and was a contributing founder of the Oneida Nation Arts Program under the direction of Beth Bashara.
The exhibitions are presented with support from Avenue Art and Co. on 3rd with additional grant and in-kind support from the Kohler Foundation, Inc., the Wisconsin Arts Board with funds from the State of Wisconsin, and the National Endowment for the Arts.