O-bit-u-ary by Peter Jones
Opened September 29, 2023. On display now.
Lynn Rodeman Metzger Galleries
“To date, 5800 Native women have been found murdered or are missing from our communities across the United States and Canada and no one has been held accountable. O-bit-u-ary is an exhibition that brings this horrific reality to the forefront of public awareness.”
Peter B. Jones is a renowned potter and sculptor who resides on the Allegany Territory of the Seneca Nation of Indians. He studied under Hopi artist Otellie Loloma while attending the Institute of American Indian Art in New Mexico. His pottery, some of which is derived from traditional Iroquois pit firing, hand-built coiling and slab construction, is admired and collected by community members, Native American art collectors, and museums across the country and internationally, including the National Museum of the American Indian and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Institute of American Indian Arts. He has been instrumental in reviving historical Hodinöhsö:ni’ (Haudenosaunee) styles and techniques of pottery making, while also developing a body of figurative pottery that highlights and reflects the issues that have impacted the Haudenosaunee communities, past and present, such as the impact of colonialism, and indigenous dispossession, oppression, genocide, resistance, and resilience.
Internationally and nationally, Jones was invited to visit Bulgaria by the US State Department to speak and show Native art in 2013 and participated in a Metropolitan Museum of Art lecture on Art and Activism: Environmental Protection and Contemporary Indigenous Art, in 2023. He was Featured in First American Art Magazine in their Spring 2022 issue.
Locally, Jones is known for his bronze-cast Native American man portaging a canoe, located on the corner of Merriman Road and North Portage Path, and more recently, by his “River Trade” sculpture, a public artwork depicting what the Cuyahoga River meant to the Indigenous Peoples of the area, commissioned by Cuyahoga Falls and funded in part through the National Endowment for the Arts' Our Town initiative.
This exhibit is part of the North American First Peoples Day event series organized by the Portage Path Collaborative.
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