Oral history interview with Anita Fields

Little Thunder: My name is Julie Pearson-Little Thunder. Today is Monday, February 14, 2011. I'm interviewing Anita Fields for the Oklahoma Native Artists Project, sponsored by the Oklahoma Oral History Research Program at Oklahoma State University. We're in Stillwater at Anita's house. Thank you for taking time to speak with me, Anita.

Fields: You're welcome.

Little Thunder: You began your professional career a bit later in life, but your unique approach to ceramics, including your renderings of cultural items in clay, has made you very sought after. You're a member of the Osage tribe, but you're also Muscogee Creek. Is that on your mom or your dad's side?

Fields: I'm Osage on my dad's side, and I'm Creek on my mother's side.

Little Thunder: Where were you born and where did you grow up?

Fields: I was born in Hominy, Oklahoma, and I grew up until about eight to ten [years old] in Osage County in Hominy. We lived on my great-grandfather's allotment. My dad built a home out there, but then we made a move to Colorado, and back and forth. There was a couple of years they couldn't get quite settled in Colorado and they were very homesick. We kept moving back and forth to Oklahoma, and we finally settled in Colorado, lived there until I was about eighteen.

Little Thunder: You didn't happen to know the Grays while you were there?Fields: The Grays are my relatives, so we made that move, we were all up there together [in Denver].

Little Thunder: What did your folks do for a living?

Fields: My dad was a guide and outfitter, but he was also a welder, and my mom was a housewife.

Little Thunder: What are your earliest memories of art?

Fields: My earliest memories of art are in Oklahoma, out there on my great-grandfather's allotment that I was talking about earlier. Memories of very hot Oklahoma summers, playing in the dirt and making mud pies. My mom would save those little tins, you know, the little bitty ones like Bama Pies. And I would mix water and the earth and grass and pebbles and put them on a board and let them dry in the sun. Very much like what I do today. (Laughter) But also just memories of being creative, of creating things with natural materials.

Little Thunder: In three dimensions?

Fields: Yes. Another thing that I talk about quite a bit in my earliest memories of making things are that my grandmother on my mother's side sewed. She was a really, really wonderful seamstress, and so she would sew. I don't even know how young I was, but I think I was like six, six or seven, and I asked her to teach me how to sew. She gave me some scraps, and she taught me basic sewing. So, I started making these little doll clothes for a favorite doll of mine. They're very vivid in my memory, what they look like. I have, still today, a fondness for material and textiles and sewing. I still incorporate a lot of fabric into my work and clothing. It's just an extension of things that I learned early, early on.

Little Thunder: What kinds of art experiences did you have in primary and secondary school?

Fields: In Oklahoma I don't recall much except what I was talking about, what I did at home. But in Colorado, we went to parochial schools. There was a really elderly nun--when I was in third grade, she came once a week and taught us art. Today, as an adult, when I think about her, I really enjoy these memories because she was really, really quite passionate about artwork. She taught us how to make a fresco, a real fresco, the way that it's been historically done, which is really kind of amazing for third graders. She was just very passionate about her love for art, and one of the things that she asked us to do was to create ourselves in a collage. She taught us what a collage was and how to make a collage, then she said, "I want you to create what you see yourself being when you grow up, in collage form." And I made an artist, and she had a little tam on and she had a smock on and she was holding a palette. She taught us some techniques that you just don't learn in third grade, normally. I remember that pretty vividly.

Unlike today, when people have lots of opportunities inside communities to make artwork, or to go to a place that has classes, those were not so available to us when we were young. There was a place that taught kind of crafty things, some kind of community center, and I remember going to that a couple of times. But I was the kind of child that got real immersed when I was making something, creating something. It was just kind of a self-taught activity. I would get whatever we had at home and start making things, whether that was sewing, making a costume to wear to a party or just making things. My dad was a pretty good painter, so I watched him paint. I think that the activity of making things, of creating, that language was real comfortable for us. Nobody told you, "Don't do that," or, "Spend your time doing something else." We were just kind of left alone to explore those activities, the activity of creating something, of making something. But I do remember--and this awareness came to me after I started doing the Artist-in-Residence program here in Oklahoma many years ago--watching children who never had the opportunity to work with clay, but it just came very natural to them. Out of a hundred kids that you'd see in a day, there'd be two or three kids that [were] just, "I can't leave this material, I don't want to go back to the classroom. I'm all immersed." And I thought, "Oh, that's the kind of kid I was." I saw myself in them.

Little Thunder: You went to school at the Institute of American Indian Art [IAIA] in Santa Fe for a while. Were your parents in favor of you going there? I know Gina had to talk her folks into it.

Fields: Gina was really young when she went up there. No, not really. I had graduated high school, so it was my decision, and they were okay with that.

Little Thunder: Was pottery your focus there, too?

Fields: No. I went to IAIA to paint. I had dabbled in painting and I went out there to paint. But when I went out there, we were exposed to so many mediums--one of them was video and multi-media, clay, sculpture. We were exposed to all kinds of things, and so that was my first time to work with clay. I really liked it, but I didn't really pursue clay until leaving IAIA. Well, when I left IAIA, I got married and started having a family, so my art was kind of always on the side. Or if I had a job, I was just making sure that I was at some kind of community art center or some university where I could take classes, so I could have access to a studio. I did that for a long, long time.

Little Thunder: Who were some of your fellow classmates and maybe some of your favorite teachers at the Institute?

Fields: Well, there was a lot of people--we were very influential on each other. John Kindred was a painting instructor there. He was a great teacher, a great person to give you motivation and encouragement. I took printmaking from Seymour Tubis. He was another great teacher. One thing about these guys that was really cool was that if they saw some talent in you, they would buy your work or they would trade with you.

Little Thunder: Even the teachers?Fields: Yes. Not all of them. Two or three of them would do that. Ralph Pardington was the clay instructor that I had. There was a couple--Otallie was there, [Otallie] Loloma. Allan Houser was there in sculpture. But I didn't always have those instructors. In terms of students, Mike Romero was a great painter that we all admired. There were so many people from so many places. Gordon Van Wert was a sculpture student. Of course, Gina was there, painting. I could go on and on and on.

Little Thunder: Tell me about meeting Tom, [your husband].

Fields: Tom was going to film school there. I don't even remember what the name of that place was. Richard [Whitman] was there, and there was a couple other guys.

Little Thunder: It wasn't St. John's College, was it?

Fields: It might have been there, but it was a program that was going. I actually met Tom in Denver, during one of the holidays. Everybody's kind of running around in these huge crowds, back and forth, all these places that we would travel to. I was still at the Institute, but I think we were on break or something--

Little Thunder: And you knew that he was into photography?

Fields: Yes. And that was another thing that I had taken out there at the Institute of American Indian Arts, photography with Kay Wiest. She really knew what she was doing in that old-school type of photography. She was a contemporary of Georgia O'Keefe and that crowd, so she really, really knew what she was doing. I remember that about her.

Little Thunder: While you were raising your kids, you kept your hand in art, and you took some classes. Does this include the class at OSU with Richard [Bevins]?

Fields: No, that was later. One of the things I've always done, one of the things that, when my kids were very, very young and I was pregnant, we lived in Pawhuska. Tom was working for the Osage Tribe, and so I made an effort to learn how to do ribbon work. They had these classes you could go to [at] the [Osage Tribal] Museum. I learned how to do ribbon work, I learned how to do finger weaving. I have this time, I might as well learn how to be doing these things. So, I spent some time making traditional Osage clothing for little relatives. And when my kids came along, I started doing that for them. I took a class from Bill Glass one time in Tahlequah.

Little Thunder: When he was the artist in residence for Cherokee Nation?

Fields: Yes. And of course, I knew Bill from IAIA. Bill was another person that was out there at the same time I was. Talented Bill Glass.

Little Thunder: Did you get involved with the Artist-in-Residence program prior to your class at OSU or after?

Fields: After. I had spent all this time going back and forth to schools. But every time I would get enrolled in a school, I would get pregnant and have another child. We lived in Tahlequah for quite a while, and then Tom got a job with the [Oklahoma Department of] Career [and] Tech[nical Education], so we moved to Stillwater.

Little Thunder: Approximately what year?

Fields: Oh my gosh, we've been here twenty-five years. We raised our kids here. They were little when we left Tahlequah. I couldn't find a job. I was really having a hard time finding a job here. I had worked for Cherokee Nation when we lived in Tahlequah. So, I thought, "Well, I'm just going to go back to school." I didn't have much to finish. I had this hodgepodge of classes and different degrees of advanced painting, but no "what they required over here." I had this hodgepodge. Marty Avrett was there at OSU. Marty helped me get through what I needed to take in order to graduate. I think it took me two years or something, and that's when I made the decision to pursue my work, pursue my art, because I thought, "I'm not going to ever know if I don't just pour myself into it. This is what I've always wanted to do but always had to have a job or was taking care of my kids." And I thought, "I'm just not going to ever know if I can make this succeed if I don't just jump in there and do this." So, it was at that time that I made that decision. And when I made that decision, I actually went from a different way of working with clay. Because before, how I was trained, I was trained as a potter, and I wasn't really that good at it. I was adequate. I can throw pretty adequately. You see a lot of people that can just sit down and it's very natural for them to throw. But it took a lot of training [for me].

Little Thunder: When you talk about throwing--

Fields: I'm talking about throwing on the wheel. Making functional cups and bowls and all this kind of thing. When I made that decision to delve into trying to make art as a living, I decided also to just make things that were more narrative in nature than to make things that are functional.

Little Thunder: Were you working with earthenware, ceramics?

Fields: I had always used stoneware prior, so what I use now is kind of the opposite. Sometimes I use porcelain, but mostly I use an earthenware clay, since it's not going to be used for any particular function.

Little Thunder: When you decided you were going to get serious about this, did you set specific goals, like "I'm going to enter such and such show?"

Fields: I had a strategy. I thought, "Okay, I'm going to try to get a show at the Southern Plains Museum," because I knew they did that wonderful catalogue, and that catalogue went out to all kinds of places. They had a huge mailing list. That was my first strategy. And I had a strategy of doing some of the shows and markets. I think the first thing I did was the Kansas Lawrence Show.

Little Thunder: At Haskell [Indian Nations University]? What was that experience like?

Fields: It was great. I think first shows I did, like, just even little bitty shows, like things at malls, those weren't always so great because people aren't really there [for that]. They're there to shop, they're not there to buy art, so it was lean. You didn't sell that much, but you learned a lot. I did a lot of those kinds of things. I don't even know how long I've been doing [Santa Fe] Indian Market. I started doing Indian Market the last year that they grandfathered people in. I'm the next year. So, it's twenty something years.

Little Thunder: What kinds of things were you doing when you started out?

Fields: They were non-functional pieces. A lot of little figures. I did a whole series of these little clay boxes, and then inside the clay boxes would be these little figures or these little animals. A lot of them might be little figures, like a mother and children. It was just based on my life, basically, what I was going through as a mother and a human being and raising your kids. I got into doing these platters, and I still do them today, but they've transformed so much from those first platters I did. I used a lot of ribbonwork designs, and then kind of abstracted them. I had to come up with a palette, so I did a lot of things with terra sigillata, coloring terra sigillata with pigments to come up with a palette that I was pleased with and that would work for me.

Little Thunder: Can you explain that term, terra sigillata?

Fields: Terra sigillata is a Greek word that means stamped earth. It's a clay slip, a very fine clay slip that you just mix--earthenware clays--and then you let it set. You put a defloctant in it. What I used was Calgon. It will separate the clay, so after about four days, you take a siphon, and it'll be a watery, very clear mixture. And you siphon that off--that's kind of like all the decay--and everything comes to the top. You siphon that off, and what's left in the middle--the clay actually goes to the bottom. It's real thick down there, so that middle layer is a real fine, fine clay. It's like milk almost, and you can take that and put pigments in it. And then you can put that on when [the clay's] leather hard, or you can spray it on after you fire it. But when you look at Greek pots, that red and black, that's what terra sigillata is. It's a real ancient technique, which most of the clay techniques are. They're things that people have been using forever.

Little Thunder: I think the first thing that I saw of yours were parfleche bags.

Fields: Oh, I did those for a long time. Yes, I did the parfleche bags for quite a while.

Little Thunder: But even the platters you made [were] always non-functional?

Fields: Yes, but the parfleches--I have this interest in things we carry and things that you put inside things. And my interest is really more than just the purses or the dresses or the things that have kind of evolved out of those early years. What I'm really interested in is how people carry things. I use those for a metaphor, actually, that you are carrying. Like these parfleches, we use them to carry and to store, and it was more of a metaphor of our culture during those times, and what we made to take care of ourselves.

Little Thunder: One, you're showing us that these traditional cultural items are works of art when you're translating them into clay, but it also reminds me that everything [people make]has a spirit.

Fields: I believe when you work with clay--and it's pretty deep, but I don't intellectualize it every single day that I go to the studio. If I have to start thinking about it, it's a really deep thing. Because clay, of course, it's the earth, it holds us up. That's why, when I work with kids, they know exactly what to do with clay. I just have to stand there and provide the clay. I don't really have to show them anything. Now, of course, I do. I have my own little agenda with them, but they still are very close to the earth. They understand that connection to the earth very well. Somewhere along the line, that's where we forget it. So, when you work with clay, it's like the earth has this ability to allow you to use it. Or we're allowed the ability to use the earth and to transform it into something else. I don't really know how to verbalize it, but there is some transformation that takes place when the earth allows you to create with it. And if I'm at the studio for days on end, really making something, and touching the clay all day long, sometimes when I come home, I still have the feeling in my hands of, "I'm touching this material, this moist earth." It doesn't go away when you stop working. It's very close.

Little Thunder: I'm glad you shared that. Thinking about the stories, or the narrative element, is it important for the piece to tell the whole story or part of the story?

Fields: I don't believe it's important for me to show everything. In fact, I do a lot to kind of distort exactly what I'm trying to say, because sometimes it's so very personal. As a human being, I'm kind of quiet and keep things to myself. I'm a private person, is what I want to say. And unless you really know me, unless you know me really well or I'm very close to you, I'm not the person to just tell all. So actually in my work, I think of myself like that, too. I don't have to let you know everything it is I'm trying to say. I may even take pains to distort that message a little bit, so that I'm still the person who the secret belongs to. And if you can kind of jump online with me somewhere and understand what it is I'm trying to say, that's great. And people usually do. I think people are very insightful. They look at it, especially people who love art and love work and love looking at artwork, they can get that gesture, that expression that you're trying to make. They understand that.

My oldest son Yatika is a painter. He left Oklahoma when he was eighteen, when he graduated high school. He's twenty-nine now. He's been in the East a long time. He went to Boston to art school, but he got real involved in a graffiti crew. (Laughter) And he was young, so I went out there. I thought, "I'd better go check on him." And I said, "Oh, my gosh. You're so lucky I'm an artist." They have these just wonderful--him and his crew, these guys that he ran with--they'd have these notebooks full of documenting, not just their work, but work of [others]. It was amazing. So, I was influenced by those guys. When I came back, I started writing distorted messages on my work. And those guys will tell you, at least, Yatika will tell you, that it's not about actually what you're putting on there, but it's a lot about movement and energy. He describes it like a dance. I'm always open to learning. I want to be a life-long learner. I want to learn something, I want to know something else. And I think we can learn a lot from these young people. So, I'm influenced all the time by all kinds of things. What you see, what you hear, what's going on where you're at. But what I'm really interested in is that gist of what information I'm taking in. It doesn't always have to be exactly what I see. It's just what's really happening here? I ask a lot of questions.

Little Thunder: When I think about ceramic cultural items I remember Bill Glass doing some rattles. I don't really remember seeing a lot of translation into clay of traditional clothing. Do you think you were one of the first artists in Oklahoma to be doing that?

Fields: Well, I know Karita Coffee made leggings out of clay. I think we'd have to give that credit to Karita in terms of footwear and all that kind of thing.

Little Thunder: She was doing those in the mid-'80s or early '80s?

Fields: '70s even, I think. But clothing, when I was learning how to sew when I was so young, and then learning how to make Osage traditional clothing. And when my children were at an age where I started making traditional clothing for them, those kinds of influences-- [it's] what I was talking about earlier. "What's really going on here?" "What's really happening?" Yes, I'm making something traditional for my clothing, but it's so much deeper than that. I mean, I understood totally what my grandmother went through her whole lifetime of acquiring Osage traditional clothing for us. Or having it made when I was able to do that for my own children. That was very clear to me, it's wanting you to participate and know who you are. It's wanting you to be able to be involved in the dance. It's an expression of love for our children and our families and our extended families and the relationships that we have with one another, and they even signal--

In Osage clothing, my grandmother had this wonderful collection. Her most prized possessions were these Osage traditional clothing. I would ask her, we would look at them and we would talk about them, especially hand blankets. I would say, "Where did you get this?" and, "Tell me the story of how you got this." "Well, my. . . . . ." [The blankets] have relationships. We have our clan relationships and you have relationships with your extended family. Your first cousin is actually your brother, and your aunt and uncle are actually your mother and your father, so she would talk about members of her extended family like that. She said, "Well, they had that made and they gave that to me." Or, "When someone passed on, this was given to me in this way." Again, there's just more going on there than this actual exchange. It's defining a relationship. That is the part that I find so interesting. It's all a very beautiful thought, how that manifests itself into an article of clothing. That's the part that I find really fascinating about it.

Little Thunder: You devised a finish that works especially well for the buckskin dress series. Can you talk about how you get the effect that actually looks like buckskin?

Fields: Yes. First of all, when the piece is leather hard, I take a clay slip and a series of sponges and just dip them into that clay slip, press it all out, and then press it on, so it has a texture that's similar to buckskin. Again, I don't think I would know what the texture of buckskin really was unless I had actually made a pair of moccasins, or my grandmother had a little buckskin dress made for me when I was very young. I wouldn't know what the texture of buckskin is unless I had that closeness to wearing buckskin or making buckskin leggings for my children or those kinds of things. Then, once I had fired it, I would build a little outdoor kiln, either with bricks or dig a hole, but most of the time just do it in a trashcan. It's a sawdust firing, where you add sawdust in layers, and then you ignite it. After a while I could kind of control it. In the beginning, I didn't really know what I was doing until I did it several times. Then I got to the point where I could control it with paper, and with different layers of sawdust and different kinds of sawdust. And adding different things that ignite, different materials that ignite or different organic materials that I could ignite. Then I could kind of control it. I don't know if you've seen pictures of it. They're kind of waves, they go up and down like this. I could take that flame to exactly [that point to create that.] That was still very surprising, but I, at least, had a little bit of control over it, where I could kind of make these layers start happening. So, they were sawdust- fired.

Little Thunder: Tom has always helped by photographing your work. Does he help with the art business side in any other ways?

Fields: He's accompanied me on a couple of bigger exhibits in the East and markets that we did a couple times in the East. Everybody's helped me. It's a big deal to move ceramics. (Laughter) Especially the older I get, I have to really rely on everybody. All my kids help me in Santa Fe, help me set up, help me take it down. But I tell them also, everybody benefits from this. (Laughter) The trickle-down effect. Everybody needs to do your share. So they've all helped me. My whole family's always helped me in terms of getting the work there, getting it set up, helping me stay there for several days, photographing it, all that kind of thing.

Little Thunder: How important have museum shows been in terms of your career?

Fields: I think they've been really important, extremely important. Getting the opportunity to show in a museum or show in an exhibit that's important has been really a jumping-off point in terms of significance. Having people look at your work, critique your work. Having the opportunity to show with so many wonderful other artists. When you're in this business, and you're just making your work, you're going to the studio, you're doing the work, you're immersed in it, it's hard work. Physically, it's hard work. Working with clay is really physically very hard. So, when you arrive at the gallery or you arrive at the museum, and everything is all beautiful, it just takes you aback when you walk in there. Because it's presented in such a beautiful manner--

Little Thunder: You see it anew?Fields: Absolutely. Several times I've had the opportunity to visit somebody's home that my piece is [in]--especially something that's a big, major piece. [I want to go back to your earlier question], "How important is it for you to show what it is that you really--the expression you're trying to make?" Well, sometimes I walk into somebody's home, and I'll look at my piece and I'll think, "I know what that was about." It becomes very clear to me what I was really trying to say, that I wasn't really even aware of at that moment I was creating it.

Little Thunder: It was just a big shift, when everybody was looking for three dimensional work.

Fields: I guess I've never really thought about it that way. I've always kind of made a living doing several things like galleries, museum shows and the markets. And I never have done that many markets because I couldn't keep up with the inventory. If something got real popular, I was like, "Oh, my gosh. This isn't the Anita factory." I would feel that way sometimes. And I thought, "That's no fun, really, to kind of reproduce this, in a different manner." After a while, it just wasn't fun anymore. It was not the original idea. It had done its time. I found trying to do the markets it was really hard to come up with that kind of inventory on a regular basis.

Little Thunder: For Santa Fe, you take how many pieces [typically]?Fields: I have always had a low end kind of thing that helps me get there and helps me get home and helps me pay for my hotels. But I take--excluding that kind of small thing--maybe six or seven pieces. And it's really hard to balance your life and your studio work. I don't think the general public really has any idea what goes into making something out of clay, the time that is involved in it. The drying process, the firing process. And then you can go through that whole process, and it may not even make it out of the kiln. It's a very involved process.

Little Thunder: And balance is really important to you.

Fields: Yes, because I have a family. I'm very involved in the Osage community. I serve as a cook for our current drum keeper, and I was a cook for our drum keeper previous to him. That's a commitment during all of June that I love doing. Our kids all come home, so pretty much June--I don't do Red Earth anymore. I haven't done it for a long, long time because June was out of the question.

Little Thunder: Backtracking a little bit to your artist-in-residence work, what was one of the benefits of doing that? I understand you don't do it as much anymore, but you're still on the roster.

Fields: It's very rewarding experience to be able to work with young people and excellent teachers. It's just a really wonderful experience. I think I get more than the kids get from me. I get rewarded by them because--what I talked about earlier. They have this connection to the earth and they understand it. They haven't lost that, and it's very close to them. So, it's just a joyful experience to be able to watch them create things out of clay. One of the things that I'm very interested in them knowing is, art is not make-and-take. And it's not that you do exactly what I do here. It's an expression of who you are, and how you see the world, how you see things. I try to accomplish that in a number of ways by just reading a story to them, or we go outside and have an experience, and then, "Take this lump of clay and just tell me how you felt about that or what you saw."

I used to do six-week residencies over at Edmond, so I'd see those kids a lot. And it got to where I was just running out of ideas. What are we going to do here? So, sometimes on Monday morning, I would just give them the clay and say, "Show me what you did this weekend." It was amazing what they would make out of clay. It was so beautiful and so touching. It's a good learning experience for everybody. Then teachers can see that it's not always about make-and-take. There's a place for make-and-take. I'm not opposed to a teacher standing up there and showing somebody how to make something. There's a place for that, too. But I think it's really important that young people know what the act of creating is all about, what making art is. And there's so many aspects to that they can plug into for a little bit. In school, it's just so demanding of them. For them to have this time where they can make those decisions, how I want something to be, is important. So, it's very gratifying to be able to do that.

Little Thunder: You have described yourself as a kind of quiet person, but I notice you have been doing a bit of public speaking lately. You gave a keynote address at the American Indian Studies Conference in 2009. How do you approach that?

Fields: It's hard, and I am asked, if you're at a museum exhibit. Or to write about your work. All of the above is hard for me, because as an artist, I make that expression through my material. That is my expression. That's how I do it. I'm not going to ask a writer to explain to me what you wrote about through making something. So, that part of it is very difficult. Sometimes it just takes days to pull those words out of yourself, and to try to be exact, so that it will be very clear what you mean. That's very difficult. But I also look at it as a great opportunity to be able to tell people about yourself. Not so much about myself, but what it is that motivates me. Why I do this? That can be really hard to do, but for me what works best is just to be honest. And if people are interested in that, then they are. And if they're not, that's okay, too. I can only be honest, I can only talk about what it is I do, how I do it, why I do it, what's just right there in my own backyard.

Little Thunder: You are working on a commission for one of the Quapaw Casinos at the moment. Can you explain what that involves?

Fields: Well, it involved doing some research about the Quapaw people. I knew a little bit because my grandmother had some extended family members that were Quapaw, and I have quite a few friends that are Quapaw. I've spent some time up that way. But it involved quite a bit of research. Luckily, I had the opportunity--as an artist, I'm so thankful that I've been given the opportunity to have some just really wonderful experiences that I wouldn't have had in any other job. And some of those include a lot of recent trips with the Osage Nation up to our original homelands, and doing some work in Missouri and getting to visit some sacred sites for Osage people with the Cultural Preservation Office out of the Osage Nation.

Like that Lewis and Clark [Bicentennial Celebration]. There was a lot of activity going on out there, and I got an opportunity to be a little part of that. So, those kinds of experiences just add to how I see things and how that information percolates inside of me. How am I going to use that at a later date? Or travel--being given the opportunity to travel to some place absolutely wonderful that I never would have got to go unless I was an artist. So, out of some of those experiences, I've had the opportunity to actually see a huge collection of [Quapaw] pottery. I spent a long time in one of their collections before this opportunity ever came up. They have some books that they actually loaned to me, very wonderful old books that they loaned to me to be able to do some research. And it took me quite a while to come up with two or three projects that I thought would be appropriate for them, one that we could all agree on.

Their pottery's a very powerful expression of how they can see their past, this collection of pottery that exists today. And of course, how that was acquired--all of that goes into what I'm trying to say. As we know, that wasn't always the best, how these things were acquired and who got them and where they went. Those are still things that people are dealing with. So, that all goes into that mix of how you see this. It's like everything else in this life, it's the good and bad and it's a balance of everything. I thought that was a good way--I didn't want to take their designs just verbatim, kind of going back to what we were talking about earlier. But they are very basic designs in there that people have used all over. They're just very basic human designs that are used in all kinds of cultures, throughout history, throughout time. But they're unique to them in that they came up with these certain designs.

I wanted to think of those designs in terms of that, that they're these basic designs that are used everywhere, but I kind of wanted to abstract them a little bit, so that I wasn't exactly using their designs. Because I don't know what their designs were utilized for, and what their importance was for them. I didn't want to just exactly use some of the designs like that, but I know when I showed them certain parts of it--because there's over one hundred pieces to it--in some of our meetings that we've had recently, they saw it. They saw those elements of their designs and I just used the basic colors that are, again, used like from Greeks to Quapaw pottery to Pueblo pottery. They are the colors of the earth. They are what's available to us, in whatever geographic region that we come in. I wanted to stay on that, but I also wanted to be true to myself and add that I made this. I don't want it to be just a replica of something that you would see in a historical setting or a museum or an anthropological collection or archeological collection. So, they're all going to have gold on the back of them and on the edges, so that that gold can reflect. Because these are very precious to them in their history.

Little Thunder: I look forward to seeing that.

Fields: I do, too. It's just kind of part imagination. That's another thing. I have to sometimes go to a place that I'm not sure how this is going to look, but I have to rely on that part of me. I have to always go to that place where I believe in this process. I believe in this process and I believe where it's going to take me is right.

Little Thunder: So you order your clay. Do you ever dig any of your clay?

Fields: No. I do use the red clay here in Oklahoma for slips and surface slips, sometimes, not all the time. We have such beautiful red earth here, it's hard to ignore it. But I make my clay. Actually, my son Nokose helps me--I would say in the last couple years, Nokose makes my clay. The bags are fifty pound bags. I have a recipe of clay that I like to use. [It is a combination of different clays. Each element] comes in fifty pound bags. There's this huge mixer over there at the studio that you pour them into. It's a very lengthy process. I actually can still go in that storeroom, but it's hard to lift a fifty pound bag. So, I just thought, "When Yatika comes home--" Then Nokose and I, we finished, we made about six hundred pounds of clay a couple weeks ago. That will last me for quite a while. When I was making that clay, even with the mixer, it was like a whole day process for me. I would make the clay, and then I would have to rest, and then I would have to sack it up, sack the clay up. And then I'd have to rest after that, and then that night, late at night, I would go in and I would clean the mixer. It would take me a couple hours to clean that mixer, but with my young son there, it's just nothing to him.

Little Thunder: You've touched upon the fact that you have not ever been interested in doing any straight pottery, but you have mentioned that firing is kind of this act of faith. Are larger pieces more of a gamble than the smaller pieces?

Fields: I think so. You've invested a lot of time into them, but you go ahead and do it, and it feels absolutely wonderful when--I think last summer, I made the biggest platter I've ever made.

Little Thunder: How big was it? Three feet?

Fields: It wasn't quite that big, but there was not a flaw on it. I turned it over and I thought, there's got to be something here. There's got to be--because also, you'll come up with these little, they're not a crack all the way through, but they're called surface cracks. You just stretched the clay too much when you're using some of those tools, or you've just gone over it too much, and it'll just cause a little tension there. So it's just, like, very small, but I didn't see any. I thought, "Oh, I just can't get over this." Because this is the biggest thing I've ever attempted to do in terms of those platters. I can make something that big, I could do the surface decoration or whatever it is I'm going to do to it, and most of [my work] requires two to three to four firings. You put one surface on, then you fire it, then you put another surface on, then you fire it, then you put another surface like that. So, I know in my heart that when you do this, you're not intending for anything to happen to it at the end, but yes, this could totally crack into two pieces or three pieces. Or there could be something so horribly wrong with it that it's not going to be usable at the end. But you do it anyway. I'm not going to stop doing this process because it may not make it through. So what you said, it is absolutely an act of faith to do this.

Little Thunder: I noticed it's kind of difficult for ceramic sculptors because they want you either to be in the sculpture category or the ceramic category. Have you run into that in competitive shows?

Fields: No, I haven't. I think now, they have them, it's pretty clear what is what.

Little Thunder: At Santa Fe Indian Market, they've got some very--

Fields: There's just some tough competition out there. (Laughter)

Little Thunder: Very well-defined categories. Can you explain the process of slips, if you want to deepen a color? Is that a process of going back again with the same color slip and it'll get a little darker?

Fields: I use a lot of commercial underglazes, too, because they're very stable. I have one slip that I really like, that for me is very stable. It's a white base, and I can mix these pigments into it. Some of them are commercial pigments, some of them are not. Some of them are just raw materials. But to come up with a palette--it's like an experiential type of thing. You have a certain amount of this slip and then you add a certain amount of this oxide. But you do that in a series of ten experiments with the same oxide to see exactly what you're going to come up with, and then you label that. And you have a notebook, and so it's going back to that notebook going, "Well, if I want it to be this--" You also have the sample. You fire it and you go, "Well, this is what I want," but that doesn't mean that's what you're going to get. It depends on the batch of oxides. In addition to that, I use a lot of underglazes, commercial underglazes, because they're very stable.

Little Thunder: How do you think your approach to working with clay has changed over the years?

Fields: I don't think about that too much. I think that I have experimented with this material enough to have a pretty good idea of what it is I want to say, and to be able to do it in a way that I'm real comfortable with. At the same time, I wish that I would be more experimental and maybe find another way of working that I'm not so comfortable with that may bring me some delightful surprises. But I'm also comfortable enough with what I do, that I can have an idea of what it is I want. I can have an image in my imagination. I can think, "I want to say this, so I'm going to do A, B, and C to get there." But then when C actually comes, I'm sitting there with my squirt bottles and my underglazes, and it's time to actually put that image onto the clay canvas or whatever I have prepared for myself to be able to do that, I feel comfortable enough to just go with it.

For instance, that happened a couple weeks ago. I was so happy with what came out. I was just like, "This is better than I even imagined it to be." At the same time, the next night, I wasn't so happy with what happened there at that time. So the piece that I was so excited about turned about to be not the piece at all. It was this other one. So, I think this evolution that takes place with you as an artist can be subtle, and sometimes it can be very bold, and sometimes it can be just this evolution process. I've always really enjoyed it when there's an artist I love that I can follow their work. Visually, you just see that over the years. You see how they develop from that to this. I think, sometimes, when I can go through my own--starting with slides that we don't even use anymore, to images on the Internet--I can see that within my own work. It's not something that you sit down and think about too much because we're always so busy with other things. But it's a combination of that process, the physical process, the materials, understanding them, knowing them, these techniques that you pick up along the way. And also that process that we were talking about earlier, of information that has come through you and to you, from that moment of taking the needle and thread and sewing with that material. I can tell you it was blue and white and gingham little checks and learning how to sew. Every experience that I've had of being a mother and having children and being a granddaughter and being a daughter and being all of these things, all of this information wells up within you, and then you're able to make this expression. It's all of those experiences up to this very moment in time.

Little Thunder: You've sort of drawn an outline for us of your creative process, but I wonder if you can just review that a bit from the time you get an idea for a piece. Do you keep track of those ideas in a notebook?

Fields: I do, and I also, I'm a terribly disorganized person, I just write on scraps of paper.

Little Thunder: And then you put those in a certain place?

Fields: I try to, but sometimes they just get all jumbled up. (Laughter) I have all these little notebooks, and I keep a notebook in my purse. I am really bad [with] scraps of paper. I keep extensive notes, especially if I travel. It's about, like, where I'm at, the landscape, I'm real interested in the landscape. I've had the opportunity to go to some really wonderful places, and I think it's real interesting. To me, the landscape holds a memory, and then as a culture, as modern culture, what do we do with that landscape? Here in the United States, I've found it's pretty typical of them to want to obliterate these landscapes that have this really important information about our indigenous cultures that have been here. When you go to someplace like Mexico or even places in Europe and other parts of the world, that indigenous landscape is maybe in ruins, but it's there. It's very notable and it's appreciated. So, you get this kind of layering of information and landscapes. You can soak that in. I find that very interesting, so I try to make note of that when I'm somewhere. How did that make me feel? Notes like that that I can try to use at a later time, in addition to some sketching. Those kinds of thoughts will come to me, and they'll stay there for a long time, maybe a couple of years. And I'll think, maybe I'll work on those ideas that I've been taking note of for quite a while and try to do like a series of pieces like that. I also do a lot of figurative work. I try to incorporate that kind of thought with trying to make this expression of being human, with these little figures or this figurative type work. It varies. It's like that information is all stored there, and it could be endless what you could do with it. Sometimes it's hard to even zero in on that. Then also, I take great pleasure in just making things. It doesn't have to be about anything. It just has to be about pattern and design.

Little Thunder: Sometimes that's preparatory to doing a piece?

Fields: Yes, I take great pleasure in that. My youngest son and I have these great conversations, and he's a great person to bounce ideas off of. And of course, he's very young, and I share so much of his ideas, but he'll be like, "You should do this, you should do this real experimental [work]." And I love that kind of work myself, but one time, I just looked at him, and I said, "You know, there is nothing wrong with making something beautiful. There is nothing wrong at all in making something beautiful." Because I was really, like, defending. I thought about that for such a long time. I thought, "Oh, my gosh, people have made beautiful things all throughout our history. Where would we be without people making beautiful things to inspire the world?" We have to see beautiful things. As human beings, we have to see beautiful things, I believe. There's enough ugliness in the world that we have to have our beautiful things, too.

Little Thunder: I had a question about whether you've ever collaborated, for example, with Yatika.

Fields: No, but I think we're getting really close. I think maybe the timing has just not been totally right. Yatika and I really have been talking about it lately. And then, Welana and I--this just happened the other day. I had a dream--well, my daughter came home about three nights ago. She's a student at Fort Lewis in Durango, and she's getting ready to graduate. She came home to do some field work for a paper, her senior thesis. She's doing some interviewing up in Osage County this week. So, that first night that she came home, I had this dream. I dreamed that--Tom and I have been to the Banff Center for the Arts. We were there with other indigenous artists from Mexico, the United States, Canada. There were some Maori people there. There were people from several different nations. The theme was about Christianity, and how it's impacted our communities, and however you wanted to, good or bad, address that in your work. That's what we were doing. I was there for like five or six weeks. Nokose was twelve, I believe, so Tom brought him. We took him out of school for a week and Tom brought him and we all stayed there for a week together. And then I brought Nokose home and Tom stayed for a while.

It was just the most fabulous experience in the whole wide world. It was beautiful there. And then just having that opportunity to be able to work with other indigenous artists. This center is just really wonderful. They also have studios. Every medium is available to you there, so they have a fiber studio, also. And when I was there doing my clay work, I kept thinking, "It would be so cool to come up here and do some Osage ribbon work." And the only thing you have to do is--you don't have to worry about your [daily mundane routine]. You don't have to be running to the grocery store. You don't have any commitment to anything outside of your work and the beauty of nature around you, and exploring all of those things. That's what's so wonderful about these residencies.

So I dreamed that [Welana] and I went up there to make ribbon work blankets. And I told her the next morning, "I think we need to apply for a residency up there." Because in my dream, I told her, "When we leave here, you will know how to make a ribbon work blanket." Because through me and other ladies, she's been learning to do some ribbon work. But I just thought, "You would know how to do it, from start to end. That process." Because we've been wanting to do that for a while. And I thought, "That would be so wonderful!"

Little Thunder: I hope you follow up on that.

Fields: We were talking about collaboration--he's a musician, our youngest son. He's a very talented musician. And Yatika asked me not too long ago, he emailed me and said, "I'm applying for this thing. Do you want to collaborate?" I said, "Let's do it."

Little Thunder: You've incorporated photographs in your work. Have you collaborated formally with Tom?

Fields: On a couple of pieces. I think that that influence is really [there]. The last one-woman I show that I had, when I walked into that gallery after everything was set up, I just thought, "This looks like a black-and-white photograph to me." Every tone, the greys, and all the hues that go into a black-and-white photograph, were evident in my work. It was at that time that I really felt this huge influence of photography onto my work.

Little Thunder: You enroll at OSU and do studio hours. What is your creative routine if you have to plan it around when you can use the space?

Fields: Well, I work at my home quite a bit, too. This is what I require. I require that I don't want to be interrupted. It was really hard when my kids were teenagers and having to go places and needed to do things. It was really, really tough. I try to clear the calendar so that I can have at least three or four days of, I'm just involved in this process and that's where I need to be. And I have to tell people, "No." I've gotten way better at that. I wasn't so good in the beginning, or when I was younger. My time is really precious to me. I usually listen to music. I have an iPod. Got some music on there and listen to it.

Little Thunder: What kind?

Fields: I listen to all kinds of music. I listen to the oldies, I listen to rock-n-roll, I listen to indigenous music, I listen to Ponca War Dance, I listen to peyote songs. I listen to some music I picked up in Africa. The blues. It's all over [the place]. And then, just get to work. I try to work on two or three pieces at the same time because of the process of clay. Things have to have a time where they're drying before you can go to the next step, so I try to have two or three pieces in process. And that might include firing and spending a couple hours doing that, and then go back to those pieces that I'm working on. I think the biggest part of that is just having to say, "No." That includes my family in Osage County. I have to say, "I can't do that because I'm working." And then there are those times when I'm not working. That's when I do all those other things.

Little Thunder: What was one of the important fork in the road moments when you sort of chose to go this one direction, but you were looking at another direction?

Fields: I don't think there's ever been any other direction that I wanted to go into but to be an artist and to make art. I think even when I didn't, could not do that, it was always there. There was really no other thing I really ever wanted to do, except maybe be a poet. I mean, kind of like, secretly, I've always thought it would be wonderful to be a poet. But I don't have the talent to be a poet. I know that, so it's just kind of a secret longing, and this admiration that I have for poets. But in terms of a fork-in-the road, that was really self-imposed, like I explained earlier. This longing was so big, and the realization the only person that can make that happen is you. So, you either try it or you don't. That was very clear to me, that you have this choice to make, and I did that. I just went for it.

In terms of opportunities that have come my way that I'm so very grateful for and thankful for that exhibit in Washington, D.C. It was "Legacy of the Generations: Pottery by American Indian Women." Susan Peterson was the curator of that. She's not here anymore, but she was a very influential potter, writer, curator. She wrote a lot of the books that are used as texts in the academic world of learning the techniques of pottery. She wrote those books, the text books. Susan Peterson had a long-standing relationship with a lot of Pueblo women potters and came up with this idea that she wanted to show American Indian women's pottery from the aspect of, "Where did they learn this? Where did this legacy come from?" And how that is passed down in these women, in their families. Along with that, she was very interested in the avant-garde. She called them the avant-garde--what contemporary women who are rooted in their communities are doing also. Being asked by Susan Peterson to be a part of that exhibit was really a jumping off point, I believe, in my career.

Little Thunder: What year was that?

Fields: I think Yatika was about sixteen, because he went. We took him. Mobile Oil funded that exhibit at the National Museum of Women in the Arts in D.C. They brought us up there for about a week and took us on tours, and there was this whole series of events, this huge black tie dinner. It was like being in a movie or something. So it's been--if he's twenty-nine, I guess probably about fifteen or sixteen years ago.

Little Thunder: How about one of the low points in your career?

Fields: Well, there's lots of those. There's everything from, "I didn't sell anything," to, "I didn't get that grant. I got turned down." I have kept all of those letters because that's all part of it, too.

Little Thunder: It is. It's time-consuming, grant applications.

Fields: Yes, and it's really a blow when you don't get awarded something. But I don't know, it's just part of it. What are you going to do? You're not going to quit doing it.

Little Thunder: Is there anything that we've forgotten to cover in our conversation that you'd like to talk about?

Fields: One of the things I was thinking about, that I kind of want to touch on because it's something that I'm working quite a bit on right now in my current work. I did touch on that about the landscape and my feelings about landscape and the earth. But along with that is the Osage thought of how we look at the world, which comes from our Creation story. I'm working quite a bit in that thought of duality. In our Creation story, we came from stars and we came to this earth, and there was this division of the earth and the sky. And out of that division came all of the clans. But I think what's interesting is today, how that thought is still here, that perception is still here. And then, what do we do with that? What do we do with that information? I find that very interesting.

So, where I'm at with that now is when I think about my grandmother or my aunties or when I was a young person, people, my grandmother and her contemporaries, they still spoke to each other in our language, in our Osage language. I feel very fortunate to have kind of got in on the tail end of that. When I was a little girl riding around with them or going to social events, they still spoke our language. I would ask them, "What are you saying?" or, "Tell me what you said." Even as a teenager, I would ask my grandmother, "Tell me what you said." And it was very poetic, it was very beautiful, it was very expressive. I found it to be very expressive. So, when I think about all of those kinds of things, that kind of philosophy, I think that we're left with a way of thinking. I have a way of looking at things and seeing things, and it's a way of thought. It's hard to explain, but that's how I see it all at this time. So, when I'm making these pieces about the landscape or I'm making this person, I'm trying to put that [Osage thought] in there and have that be expressed some way. It's not always easy to put your finger on it. It's kind of unobtainable almost. It's not exact, but that's how I see it at this time.

Little Thunder: Well, we are going to take a look at a couple of your pieces.

Fields: This piece is called Changing Thought in Black Dress. This is from the exhibit at TU [Tulsa University] called The Black Dress. This is all clay up here, but then down here we have fabric, and then oil pastel. I created this piece when I came back from--I had the opportunity to go to Italy and paint for three weeks in Tuscany. So [the piece] has this distorted writing which I was talking about earlier, which are my thoughts about women and their clothing and how clothing transforms us. This article of clothing can not only make an expression of who you are on the outside, but also, clothing has the ability to transform us, again, with that thought of, "When we get dressed up, what is it [we're doing]?" We're going to something special, something important to us, or an event or a situation that's very important that could be very happy. Sometimes it's even a sad event. What is it we're really doing when we attend these functions? And what is it that information that you take home from something like that? So, I had this opportunity to go to Tuscany and paint for three weeks in the hillsides of Italy. It was really wonderful, and they have these trees over here, cyprus trees. People [at the exhibit] kept thinking they were feathers, but I said, "No, they're part of the landscape," again, kind of doubling that information about the landscape, and how thought can be transforming for us as well. Putting yourself into a new environment and a new place, and then taking that with clothing, and translating all that information into what we wear and how we see ourselves. That's what this piece is about. I'm actually making a white one now that's going to be about the sun. And I think it's going to have lily ponds on the dress.

I think this is a good example of what I've been saying about the landscape. I have two of them. These pieces, they're actually about the Mounds and our original homelands, so this is specifically about what I was talking about earlier, my feelings for the landscape and how the landscape holds a memory of the past cultures that were there. When you're able to visit those kinds of places, being able to tie into that and get a feel for the cultures who were there, how they affected us and how we're still here and have survived all that, I think it's just very interesting how the landscape can hold that. So these forms were made specifically after being able to travel to some of those places.

Little Thunder: And you're talking about some of the Osage sites, specifically?

Fields: Yes.

Little Thunder: We can see the stamp work on the bottom, which is really wonderful. On the top you've got a different type of texturing.

Fields: Yes, I made that with these little squeeze bottles of slip. The red is the terra sigillata that I was talking about earlier. These also kind of reference that Osage thought of the sky and the earth. That's why there's such a different technique on the top as opposed to the bottom because I'm thinking about that thought process. How we see things from the sky and how we see things from the earth, so you have these little droplets of rain coming, these little bitty things that are kind of falling. Those are supposed to be indicative of rain. Even though this all is one landscape piece, I want to have that delineation of thought. The earth and the sky.

Little Thunder: That polarity. These are wonderful. Thank you so much, Anita, for taking time to talk with us.

Fields: You're welcome, Julie. It was fun.

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