Kavi Gupta invites you to experience the beauty, dynamism and healing energy of traditional Indigenous Jingle Dance with a special performance by Acosia Red Elk at Kavi Gupta | Washington Blvd.
A 10-time World’s Champion Jingle Dancer, Red Elk is of Umatilla, Cayuse and Walla Walla, Nez Perce and Colville heritage on her father’s side. For this rare event, she will mobilize Jingle Dance to activate the gallery space of Marie Watt’s exhibition Sky Dances Light. Watt is an interdisciplinary Seneca artist, whose bold, multi-sensory visual language celebrates and fosters community connections.
The exhibition centers Watt’s new series of biomorphic, hanging sculptures assembled from tens of thousands of jingle cones, rolled pieces of tin historically fashioned from the circular lids of tobacco containers. Though their invention and use as fashion adornments dates at least to the late 1800s, jingle cones became an iconic element of Indigenous dance traditions during the Spanish Flu pandemic of 1918. One version of the story is that an Ojibwa medicine man with a sick granddaughter received the dance in a vision, during which he was told that the sound of the jingles would be a healing sound. Sky Dances Light is on view through September 30, 2023.
