Sara Siestreem (Hanis Coos). milk and honey.

A weaver from the Umpqua valley

Sara Siestreem is a Hanis Coos artist who lives and works in Oregon and grew up in the Umpqua River valley. She earned an MFA from Pratt Institute in Brooklyn in 2007, then went home.

What she chose to do there was teach traditional basket weaving to her own community: the Coos, Lower Umpqua and Siuslaw peoples. Weaving here is not a decorative skill. It is how a community keeps its knowledge of plants, of seasons, of where materials are gathered and how.

So when Siestreem's baskets appear in a New York gallery, they carry more than a shape. They carry a river, a forest, and the people now learning to weave alongside her.

Siestreem does not separate these two halves of her life. She paints large canvases and she weaves. She slip casts ceramics and she teaches. The 2024 exhibition put all of it in one room.

The exhibition milk and honey

milk and honey ran at Cristin Tierney Gallery, New York, from 6 September to 19 October 2024. The title is written in lower case.

The room held paintings and objects. un-ring bells, an eight foot wide painting made over 2013 to 2024, carries red ellipses, scans of oyster shells and images of ceramic dishes. glass bat is a mixed media painting with hands and extinct oysters. 3/15/2020 minion is a group of slip cast ceramic dance caps set with red abalone, glass beads and plastic buttons.

skyline is seven slip cast ceramic baskets in a row. A ceramic basket has no smell. It keeps the form of weaving but has lost the fibre and the plant. Next to real woven baskets, it shows what is lost when an object keeps only the part meant for the eye.

The baskets of cedar bark, sweetgrass and spruce root are different. As Farren Fei Yuan writes in The Brooklyn Rail, they give off the faint smell of plants used in Indigenous smudging ceremonies. The smell simply stands there, quietly, among the paintings.

The eye is not the only sense

Western art has long placed sight above the other senses. Paintings hang on walls, sculptures stand on plinths, and viewers may not touch or smell. Indigenous aesthetic traditions use the hand, the nose, the ear and the tongue. A basket is judged by how firm it feels, how it sounds when tapped, how its fibre smells.

Siestreem brings these baskets into the place where sight is most privileged. Visitors cannot hold them. But smell does not ask permission. It leaves the object on its own and makes people use a sense the gallery usually forgets.

The title, milk and honey, sounds like the promise of a land of plenty. Siestreem reads it through Roland Barthes's Mythologies, where milk is what nourishes and restores. She gives that image to weaving: a practice of sustenance, of getting by, of keeping a community going.

Here the work meets other practices that use ceremonial smell, such as the copal smoke in Donna Huanca's CUEVA DE COPAL. But in milk and honey nothing is burned. The smell comes from material that is whole, unburnt, still in use.