Marie Watt: Finding Creative Ways to Collaborate Through the Pandemic

The American artists Marie Watt and Cannupa Hanska Luger originally envisioned their joint exhibition Each/Other at the Denver Art Museum (until 22 August) as a project that would activate the galleries with collaborative, hands-on events evoking Indigenous art-making and community-building traditions. But with plans upended by the coronavirus pandemic, the artists shifted their focus “toward the idea of shelter, both as it relates to the global health crisis but also the civil unrest in the US that ensued over the last year”, Luger says.

The show comprises more than 20 mixed-media sculptures, wall hangings, installations and two crowd-sourced works. The centrepiece of the exhibition, from which the show draws its title, is a she-wolf steel figure covered with more than 700 bandanas embroidered with personal messages by national and international contributors. The work was slated to be made through in-person sewing events but was completed through an online open call. It represents a “sense of sheltering—of motherhood and protection—either from others or from toxic air or from other aspects of life”, Luger says. The project took new pertinence amid the “isolation and precarity of the shelter-in-place format we were living through”, he adds.