Oral history interview with Molly Murphy Adams

Little Thunder: My name is Julie Pearson-Little Thunder. Today is Monday, [January 18], 2016. I'm interviewing Molly Murphy Adams for the Oklahoma Native Artist Project sponsored by Oklahoma Oral History Research Program at Oklahoma State University. Molly, we're at your home in Jenks. You are of Oglala decent. Not Oklahoma born, but you've lived in Oklahoma for a while now. You've been working professionally for about twelve years. You describe your artwork as contemporary Native sculptural beadwork, and it's drawn a lot of attention for its strong conceptual basis as well as its technical prowess. Thank you for taking the time to talk with me.

Adams: Thank you!

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

Adams: I was born in Great Falls, Montana, and it's in central Montana. I grew up all around Great Falls, and then when I was about nine, we moved to western Montana to the Missoula area. Then we lived in a variety of places on and around Missoula. I consider the Flathead Reservation to be the home that I think of 1:00when I think of going back. My mom still lives in Kalispell, Montana.

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

Adams: My mom did a little bit of everything over the years but mostly did her best to try to raise us without a lot of resources. My father was a carpenter, off and on.

Little Thunder: How about brothers or sisters?

Adams: Two brothers that I grew up with, and one sister that was raised outside of the home. My parents had lots of on-again / off-again relationships, and the half-siblings are hard to count. I told you it would be complicated. (Laughter)

Little Thunder: What was your relationship with your grandparents on either side of your family?

Adams: My mother was given up for adoption as an infant. She didn't know her biological parents until right around the time I was born. I was lucky enough to know my biological grandparents from my mother, her adoptive parents, and my 2:00father's parents. I had a lot of grandparents. I was especially close to my dad's mother, my paternal grandmother. She was a really strong influence in my life and a source of great stability, and a person with a lot of charm. Her name was Mary Ebba. She taught me a lot about sewing and embroidery. Even later when I got into beadwork and dancing at powwows, she was really supportive of it, which, in Montana, said a lot for a non-Native person to come to powwows and be supportive of that. She taught me a real love of everything that grows, of gardening and flowers. Even as she got older, I knew that everything was all right as long as Nana was excited about the next seed catalog that came along. I was really close to her.

I was really fortunate to get to know my mom's biological parents and understand 3:00that kind of complexity in her life. In fact, I just booked a ticket to go to California here in a couple of months to visit my biological grandmother who is from Pine Ridge [South Dakota]. I don't get to see her as often as I would like, but I've got a ticket to go see her pretty soon. My biological grandparents on my mom's side, my grandmother was from Pine Ridge, and my grandfather was half Lebanese, and he was from Arizona. They met when they were young and then had a fling. My grandmother got pregnant with my mom and ran away to Montana and gave her up for adoption. They ended up getting married and having another daughter. My mom found them later when she was an adult, and so we've had a relationship with them and with my aunt and my cousins and ongoing.

Little Thunder: That's wonderful, wonderful. In terms of extended family members 4:00who were interested in art that you were exposed to growing up--

Adams: My mom had an innate interest and always wanted to pursue it, though her circumstances really didn't let her do that until she was much older. She started to learn beadwork as a way to try to reconnect with her background with being Native. She found a beadwork teacher in Great Falls by the name of Ruby Stiffarm. It was through the Head Start program, and a lot of the Native ladies in Great Falls kind of organized through Head Start. It was a mutually supportive way. Through Head Start, a lot of the older ladies were teaching the younger women beadwork. Ruby taught my mom beadwork when she was in her early to mid-twenties. It was something that she took off with and a way for her to connect back, but she didn't get to pursue it in a big scale professionally until she was older. She actually had a grant through the First Peoples Fund and was doing really well with it, but she has a few disabilities that have 5:00hamstrung her ability to work in it.

The other person that was a pretty strong influence in that respect is my dad's sister Connie, Connie Bergum. She is now a professional illustrator. She went to school, and she actually went to art school. In a family where I don't think any of my other dad's siblings even went to college. She went to college, and she went to art school, which was a pretty gutsy move for a poor Irish kid to make. She talked about even when she was little, using a razor blade to cut out the blank sheets in the front of books at the library to find paper to draw on and stuff. Every Christmas, birthday, any holiday growing up, without fail, no matter where we were, what the circumstances were, she sent me books and art supplies. Calligraphy pens, pastel pencils, paper, she just sent random stuff knowing I would like it, and books, lots and lots of books. She is an illustrator now and also does mosaics and paints. She was a really strong 6:00supporter in lots of little, small ways.

Little Thunder: Great gifts she gave you. Well, what is your first memory of seeing Native art?

Adams: Well, some of my first memories were the pieces my mom actually worked on. She did some large-scale clothing pieces for--Calgary Stampede. She did a couple of full outfits in the ʼ80s that won some prizes. Then, even when I was little, she would go to the library to do research. I think the first time I saw Native art or artifacts in any sense was growing up in Great Falls. The Charlie Russell Museum was the mainstay. Every kid went to the Charlie Russell Museum and did the tour probably every year to the only museum in Great Falls. As a kid, I thought every town had a Charlie Russell, some guy who lived there who 7:00painted and collected stuff and had a house. It wasn't until I got older that I realized that Charlie Russell was important other places. (Laughter) I thought he was just Great Falls and it was just our thing because a lot of the banks still had his paintings up and even in the ʼ80s there were still [inaudible]. He was still our local guy.

I didn't realize he was a big deal everywhere until much later. Every year at the grade school, there weren't that many places to go on a school daytrip. You might go see the place that used to be the Great Falls. They would point at the water and go, "Well, we have a dam, but we used to have falls." Or they would take you to the Charlie Russell. Maybe they would take you to a Hutterite farm or something. There weren't that many options for school trips, so every year it was pretty much the Russell Museum. It was an amazing collection, and you could, as a kid, go there every year and see something new all the time. Now I have a much greater appreciation for how any museum would scramble to have an original.

Little Thunder: I understand you learned tanning at an early age, as well as beadwork. That's pretty unusual. Can you tell us about that?

Adams: It's less unusual, I think, in Montana just because there's a lot of skills that are more common there. I also chopped wood. We had wood stoves. We had oil lamps. There was a lot of things we did that were more basic. My mom wanted to learn hide tanning because brain-tanned hide is the best hide to work with for making traditional clothing. I was also making regalia for dancing, and you want good brain tan. We also spent a lot of time at the Salish [and] Kootenai tribal cultural camp. It's a camp that is kind of in between Arlee and St. Ignatius, way up in the mountains, and an elder by the name of Agnes Vanderburg ran it for years. The idea behind it was that everybody would go and camp away from town and make their own community for the summer in this place, the same spot year after year after year. It was a way to have maybe more of a 9:00natural rhythm throughout the summer. For quite a few summers in a row, my family would go and live there in the summer and pitch a tipi, and for as much time as we could, just live there.

The other thing is the camp hosted classes for the tribal college, but because we were there all the time, a lot of us learned how to tan. George Coffey was an instructor out there. He would rig up the stretchers. All of us kids helped him pull and hold and stretch. He taught us how to make scrapers with a coffee can lid that you cut and fold in half and grind down the edges. My mom became really good at it, and then she became a presenter and would do workshops at the places like the Ulm Pishkun State Park in Great Falls at the [First Peoples] Buffalo Jump. As my mom's physical disabilities became worse, I would often go along to help her so that she could do the presentation of the information, and I would 10:00do all the arm work. It is really labor intensive work, and my mom has a lot of physical ailments and just wasn't able to do that kind of--. We discovered there's a lot of short cuts, maybe longer work but less intensive. We found a lot of cheats and shortcuts. I still know how to do it. I can't say I like tanning. It's smelly, and it's hard, but the results are definitely pretty desirable.

This is the first year I've found someone who will sell me hides at a reasonable price. The other hard part about tanning is that while I live in a suburban environment now, I don't have a creek out back. I don't have the luxury of a lot of cold weather which is preferable. I don't have access to hunters who know how to prep hides the proper way. There's nothing worse than going through all that time to have something that's full of holes at the end because it wasn't properly treated. It's something I'm glad I know how to do. It's something I'm 11:00glad I spent all that time doing, but it is an intensive, intensive skill. There's a reason why a lot of people would rather skip it. I don't know if my neighbors would approve of (Laughter) the smell, or the flies, or the whole thing. I don't know how they would feel about that.

Little Thunder: What is your first memory of making art?

Adams: I think it was probably, I would learn to draw--Montana winters are really long. We would get bulb catalogs in the winter. I would have small scrap pieces of paper, color pencils, pens, really basic stuff. I would draw the flowers in the bulb catalog over and over and over until I could draw an iris, or a tulip, or a daffodil or any bulb flower, not so much seed catalogs but the 12:00bulbs, and they were gorgeous. In the wintertime when everything's dark and cold and frozen, here are these big, beautiful, color blooms, and they're verdant and succulent and sensual, and they're just so big and colorful. I drew them obsessively until when I was fourteen decided I wanted to draw an entire garden. I went to the art supply store in Missoula, and I bought what was just the most obscenely expensive piece of paper. It was a five-dollar sheet of paper. It was a full-size, watercolor printing sheet.

My aunt had already given me some dry pastel pencils, and I bought three good pens. I set to work doing an entire garden of irises, daffodils, and tulips, and every color of tulip. I did it entirely in ink and worked on it for months. Then I slowly went in with pastel pencils and added light layers of color over the 13:00whole thing. I ended up giving it away. My mom's friend in college, Mary BigBow, she was visiting, and she always kept asking to see it. In a lot of Native traditions, if somebody asks for something or admires something, then the best thing to do is to give it to them. I gave it to her. Apparently, I'm told she still has it at her office at Salish Kootenai College. I really would like someone to go get a photo of it. I have in my head what I think it looked like, but I was fifteen or fourteen when I gave it to her. I don't know what it would match up to my memory. I thought five dollars for a piece of paper was amazing. It was a lot.

Little Thunder: That was the artist in you coming out. Had you been strongly drawn to three-dimensional work, though, throughout?

Adams: No, first of all, because I didn't know anybody who did three-dimensional 14:00work. The few people I knew growing up, nobody had a college education; nobody reached out past that. I knew people who made traditional clothing for powwows, or I knew people who drew. That was cheap and effective. You could draw on paper. Everybody had ballpoint pens or pencils. It really was not until college that I began to, first of all, began to really fall in love with three-dimensional and think that way. I was already good at thinking spatially, but to think about how to take the ideas of 2-D and wrap it around--. I had a couple of great professors who helped me sort of cross over that into three dimensions.

Also, what naturally led me there is I was trying to, in art school, figure out how to take what I was learning in school, concepts, ideas I was really drawn to, and how was I going to make any kind of art that was authentic to what I 15:00knew. That's the whole struggle with art school, really. You're supposed to take all these skills that somebody is teaching you, and then you're supposed to filter through that what makes your work any different or better than anyone else's. I guess it's a path to being authentic to what your story might be. For me, what that was was this obsession with needle work. The best way to do that was to try to think of it in three dimensions.

Now I'm going back to two dimensions, but at the time, three dimensions was the obvious place to do that in, to take everything I knew about making clothing and parfleche and hide tanning and all these things and somehow try to find a way to make art with that. The first step was to make these sculptural boxes that were influenced by parfleche designs. I ended up getting my emphasis in ceramics. I can't really make a pot to hold water, but ceramics was a place where you learned about three dimensions, and about repetition, and about form, and really 16:00all the subtleties of form. It was also a place where it let go of those ideas that art had to be a painting on a canvas that somebody put in a frame and that that was the way you made art. Ceramics just beat it out of me through trial and error.

Little Thunder: You weren't always on an art track, and we'll talk about that in a minute. Were there any experiences you had in school at any level with art that were significant?

Adams: There was. I had a ceramics professor, Tom Rippon, who really taught me the value of process and multiples.

Little Thunder: Now, is this at the college level or is this at high school?

Adams: This is at the college. I actually did not take a single art class before college. I didn't have an art class, not beyond the two-month time in junior high where they give you a special class, and I had no art classes in high 17:00school. I didn't have an art class until I was in my mid-twenties in college. Everything before that was just self-taught. Tom Rippon convinced me to start working in multiples and helped me through what I called my food phase, which was, for a while, I was convinced I wanted to make giant ceramic sculptures in the manner of Wayne Thiebaud the painter. He indulged me and taught me to indulge myself. I was feeling so much pressure being in college, being a young mom, my mother wasn't stable, I didn't have a lot of support.

Here I was doing this frivolous thing of art. I felt nervous. I had to get it right, first, every time. I wasn't giving myself any space to fail at anything, and that's not a very healthy approach to artwork. I did this project where I made a hundred ceramic cupcakes. (Laughter) They were all different colors, pop colors. It was ridiculous, and it was fun, and it was kind of pointless. I 18:00learned a lot. It was multiples. It really fed my idea of working in these grids and pixels, even if they were cupcakes. That was a really wonderful if pointless moment. He let me figure it out. There was a lecture by a visiting artist, Dick Notkin. He is a ceramicist in Helena and has worked with the Archie Bray [Foundation] studio. He came and did a lecture that was mostly on mold making, ceramic mold making, but he had this moment in there where he talked about distilling what you do that's different and maybe strange and maybe weird, and literally to keep distilling it, to keep finding out--.

You did this one thing, and there's this part of it that you like. Keep crushing it, and remaking it, and reworking it, and going back through it until you find--. If you keep doing this and keep pursuing what is absolutely unique about it, then you'll find what it is that you do that is worth doing and worth doing 19:00differently or worth doing well. He put it better at the moment. I've garbled his quote since then. It was something that resonated with me at that time. Sometimes you hear the right thing at the right time, and at a different time it wouldn't work. At that moment it was what I needed to hear, which was to do what I was doing that was different, even if I wasn't doing it right yet. It started me off on a "find this thing and keep reworking it and refining it until you get it to the point where it is working."

Little Thunder: Now, prior to getting into art, you were on a science track.

Adams: I was. I was.

Little Thunder: So in addition to telling us a bit about that, I wonder if you can tell us how maybe that, whether it provided any kind of base once you changed tracks.

Adams: I graduated from high school early. I was sixteen. I did high school in 20:00three years, partly because I was very determined to get out of a dysfunctional house, and partly because I was ambitious. Everything I did in high school was science track. I really, I loved science. I love the theory, the philosophy. I loved this--I had an ideal about science that science was the ideal. It was rational in a very irrational world, and it had the potential to do documentable good, unambiguous good. I loved this idealism about it. When I started college, a friend of my mom's and a friend of mine who was Blackfeet, Judy Gobert, she wrote a grant, and my very first job in high school was working in a laboratory. She got this grant for more people, for basically diversity in laboratory workplaces, so I was two weeks shy of my sixteenth birthday and going for my first job in a lab coat in a virology laboratory.

I was support staff there for the remainder of high school. It was also my job in college. I worked in a high-function laboratory. That was my job in high school instead of flipping burgers or washing cars or something. I loved it. By the end of my first year of college--I started college right before I was seventeen. By the time I was finishing college, my first year, I was seventeen. I was completely burned out. I needed to take some time away from school. I really was quite sure that I didn't want to have a career in virology. The downside of working in the laboratory is I had a real window into their lives and their careers, and sometimes that can be a dangerous thing to see how someone's life will turn out if you pick this path. It might be better to be naive and just go with it, and maybe give yourself a chance to remake it in a 22:00different fashion. I saw this life, and I didn't want it.

I thought, "If I pursue this, this doctorate in virology, I'm either going to be at a university dependent on NIH grants for funding, or I'm going to have to go to Atlanta and work at the CDC in some capacity," because there's not that many job avenues for epidemiologists which is what I was fascinated with. I still read about it in my spare time for fun. (Laughter) I quit school and did a variety of things for a long time. I had this ethical debate about what I was working on. People go into it with these ideas of what they're going to work on, but they're really working on somebody else's ideas who was there fifteen years before and who got the position of power and is writing the grants. I was a little disillusioned, and at seventeen it's very easy to be disillusioned and dramatic.

Little Thunder: Right.

Adams: That was part of it. I was just really young for the decisions I was 23:00making. Whether I knew that I needed, whether I was taking the time off for the right reasons, the time off was really necessary. When I went back to school five years later, I wanted to go into the architectural design program at MSU [Montana State University], but I found out my credits wouldn't transfer. In kind of the path of least resistance, I thought, "Well, I'll stay here and get my BFA and then go on to do my master's in architectural design." It would actually be less time. By the time I was finishing my BFA, I really loved it. I thought, "I think maybe I can do this." I thought, "I really don't want to go to grad school," and I'd had a child in the meantime who probably was not also very excited about me going to grad school.

Little Thunder: What did you do after you got out of college, then, with your BFA?

Adams: Right when I was about to graduate, I was originally planning to go to 24:00Albuquerque and pursue a doctorate in art history. I ended up not pursuing that partly because my mom had had this grant with the Native Peoples Fund, and it had exposed her to a lot of people in the art world and exposed me to a lot of people in the art world. As a result of those connections and of the work that I was doing, my senior thesis show was scheduled to travel before I graduated. I just rolled the dice and said, "I'm going to keep doing this for as long as I can." Also, my daughter Anna has Asperger's. She was still very small and needing a lot of really intensive attention from me, therapy and appointments, and work, and stability.

College hadn't been as stable as I would have liked. I decided to at least put 25:00off grad school and at the time to pursue art full time and pursue mothering full time and to see if maybe the art couldn't make it work. Every time I would do the math over art versus grad school or a regular job, it just didn't quite add up. Art was making enough of a living and improving quality of life a lot to where the math just kept working out to stick with it, so I stuck with it. My mother's connection to the First Peoples Fund made a huge difference. It opened up this big door to an art world that at that time I didn't have a lot of contacts in. I had few, very few.

Little Thunder: What was your thesis show?

Adams: I did a series of four sculptural boxes that were influenced by parfleche designs. They were geometric beadwork on wool. I created this method where I 26:00have these wool panels that are mounted over aeronautic plywood, real thin, thin, used for making model airplanes, and then using edge stitch as the closing system for these panels and the hinges between the panels. I did four different kinds of boxes. One, tall and narrow; one with double doors; one that completely tied with ribbons and opened up into a flat piece; and then another one that was a long, low box. Different types of boxes with different types of designs but all with the trade wool cloth basis and then geometric designs and beadwork on the top of it. That four boxes was the first series that I did for that, but for quite a few years after that, boxes of all different kinds and colors and shapes, becoming more sculptural, open, no lids, multiple lids, magnets. I just 27:00kept expanding that form as much as I could. That's really what I was known for for a long time.

Little Thunder: They were being purchased both by individual collectors and by museums?

Adams: Both, but they also had a traveling show obligation, so they were getting seen. The first year out of college, I had decided to try for the Heard [Museum] Indian Market and was accepted. I knew that I wanted to make one big piece, one show-stopper piece, to try to get noticed at that show. I made a courting-style blanket with a horse motif on it. Instead of the blanket being repeating rosettes and then geometric strips, I took the rosettes, and I made those be the front shoulders of horses. Instead of the geometric strips, the rosette would be there, and then the horse head would come out of it. It would meet another horse 28:00head coming from the other rosette, and they layered over each other.

It was asymmetric and kind of moving across, half red and half blue. Further that by bringing the red and the blue opposite in a landscape and sky design at the top and the bottom. The beaded strip across the middle was entirely beaded. I didn't do it in traditional geometrics. It was all free form beadwork, so I broke a lot of rules. It was like an opportunity to try every single color of bead I had, and every finish and every kind of stitch. It was a real tour de force. It was a lot of fun. My only regret is the blanket was six feet, three inches wide, and the booths at the Heard are six feet wide. (Laughter) I was lucky to have an end booth because I kept creeping out into the lane. One of those small practical details that you don't pay attention to.

Little Thunder: Did it sell?

Adams: It won and Honorable Mention which is a big deal for your first time at the Heard. It got me on the list; it got me in the award show. That was 29:00incredible. I chose not to sell it because it was asked to be in a traveling show: Ellen Taubman asked to put it in Changing Hands. I said yes. I felt it was more important that it traveled than it sold. We had a seller lined up for it by the end, but it was working for me as it was traveling.

Little Thunder: Right. I think I read it was not too long after that that you did a show. There were some t-shirts there, Tribal Size Me, and I wondered if you could talk about that show.

Adams: Yeah, I can. There was a summer Arlee powwow where we went every summer and camped and stayed up there. There was one summer--no, it was at Kyiyo Powwow. It was in the spring. I went to go get a t-shirt. I wanted to buy a 30:00powwow t-shirt. I asked for a medium or a small. They said they didn't have any left; they just had tribal size left. It was one of those moments where I looked around at powwow. First of all, I was completely insulted at the term. I thought that's really grotesque. I don't like to hear that. I looked around, and I saw something that I maybe hadn't noticed, and a lot of us hadn't noticed is that Indian country had gotten really big. I looked around, and that's when I noticed how the obesity epidemic, and with it the diabetes epidemic, the health issues. The next powwow in a few months at Arlee, I had this idea. I noticed a lot of--I hadn't noticed how it had happened.

I went to the next powwow at Arlee, and I went to all these different t-shirt 31:00vendors. I was amazed how many double-X and triple-X and quadruple-X t-shirts you could buy. This is a niche market. This is not a small powwow, but I was surprised at that. Finding smalls and mediums was hard. I bought a selection of these t-shirts, of all these different idea and concepts on these t-shirts, and one of them I loved. Here's this triple-X t-shirt with this graphic design of this totally cut, muscly, Native guy playing basketball, and it's a quadruple-X t-shirt. It's like the Native baller, and it's like those basketball dreams of back when. The person wearing it would be barley ambulatory. I thought this is really--. At that same powwow that year, I saw that a woman who is a wonderful beadworker that I admired, her leg was amputated, and she had lost a foot. I was 32:00like, "This is an ugly thing that we're all going to have to look at."

I took these t-shirts, and I created these sculptures by doing beadwork on them that resembles traditional beaded war shirts, nineteenth century beaded war shirts, strips going down the sleeves and the front and embellishing them. I called the series Tribal Size Me, 1-4. When the t-shirts are laid flat and they're mounted on the wall, there's foam core behind them, but you can't see it. They look like just the shirt, flat-mounted on the wall with the beadwork on it. First of all, it strikes you how enormous the shirts are. Then it's these war shirts by warriors that can't be warriors. It's really hard to be proactive about your community or your future when you are in fear of your own health every day. Since then, the issue has become so mainstream.

Little Thunder: I was going to say, you were in advance, I think, of--.

Adams: That was a while ago; that was 2005, 2004. Since then, almost every tribe has a health center and a workout facility. The Salish tribe has a shuttle system that drives elders into the very large gym facility they have. Tribes are aware of it. They're proactive. The community is proactive, and it has, I think, changed for the better. Small things, Arlee powwow used to throw candy to kids, and now they pass out fresh fruit and water bottles to the drummers. Small things like that, trying to make the spiritual and social healthy activities also physically healthy. It's a wonderful step that they've taken, and in hindsight, as obvious as banning alcohol from powwows. It wasn't that long ago that powwows had beer gardens. At some point everybody, as Maya Angelou says, 34:00you do your best until you know better. Then when you know better, you do better. I think this is a case where tribal communities are saying, "We know better now, and we're going to try and do better so that we don't have elders missing feet, and we don't have people who can't work or participate because of diabetes, and we're not subjecting kids to the same conditions."

I was incredibly worried that the piece was going to be received poorly because I was taught very specifically that beadwork should be a positive thing always, and it should never be something you approach with a negative attitude or mindset. The traditional way of doing beadwork is to think of it as something that you're doing as a part of your community. To think that you're going to use this skill to be critical of people was a real question for me about, "Can I use this skill to be critical of my own community, or is that a negative thing?" I 35:00didn't receive any negative feedback from it. I think especially after the first year that I exhibited them, the momentum and the public awareness was there and has continued. I don't think anyone would bat an eye at it now. I don't think it would be seen as anything out there at all. That was probably one of those moments that was far more in my head than about my own concerns about how it was going to be received than the reality was.

Little Thunder: You mentioned a couple of shows that were important: the traveling show and this particular show. What was another important museum show for you early on that Changing Hands--

Adams: The Changing Hands was really important on a national level. The way that the Museum of Arts and Design did the catalog was gorgeous and thoughtful and really respectful of Native artists, and where they might be, or where they might have come from. They did some unique things which they published. Instead 36:00of saying where you were from, they published where you lived, as though where you are is more important than where you've been. Logical, but not something usually afforded to Native artists. It projected my work from being someone that was just trying things out in Montana to being on a national level really fast. A lot of people heard my name and saw my work.

That was an amazing show. At the same time, I had an offer from the museum in Missoula, Montana, where I lived. They asked me to have a solo show at the museum there. That put me on the scene locally, regionally. I had to prepare a solo show, myself, from scratch. I had to learn--I had to make bigger pieces. I thought they were going to give me one of the small side galleries which was about fifteen by ten, and I thought, "Great." Then we walked into this massive gallery. I kind of started to stop breathing, and I asked the curator, I said, 37:00"Do you know how small beads are?" (Laughs)

Little Thunder: Oh my goodness, yes.

Adams: I said, "I can have a hundred-hour piece that would fit in my purse." I had to think differently. I had to make some very large, large pieces that could fill that space if not physically, mentally, critically. I did two really big pieces just for that show that were more conceptual, less beadwork, meant to be seen from fifteen feet back, and really different from the super tiny, precious work that I had been doing up to that point. Probably the most important piece I did for that was I did a topo[graphic] map of the Missoula County area on red wool, and I did the topo lines in black beads. Then I did the rivers in blue. It 38:00was a map of an event. Then I did the route that Chief Charlo and his band took when they were expelled from the Bitterroot Valley which is south of Missoula. They were expelled from there finally by the military for the last time in the 1890s and forced north, up into the reservation where most of the tribe already was, but Chief Charlo had been holding out.

I charted their route. It turned out really well. It was on hand-dyed wool. I was really playing with materials, and it was a wall hanging for starters, so it wasn't functional. It was a topo map, and it looked great from a distance and up close. The Missoula Art Museum ended up purchasing it for their permanent collections, which is wonderful because it's a map of that place. It was four feet by five feet. It was enormous. I still made everything in that show. My mindset was still so much that everything was made and it folded and wrapped. 39:00Nothing was really big or bulky or permanent, so when I dismantled the show I packed everything in my show into the trunk of my Honda Accord.

Little Thunder: That's amazing! (Laughter)

Adams: Everything rolled or folded. I was like, "We've got a real nomad here."

Little Thunder: Nomadic way.

Adams: At one point, I loaded it all up in my car, and the staff came up, asked me if I needed a trolley. "No, it's all in my Honda outside." I might have had to use some of the backseat. Yeah, an entire solo show of boxes and wall hangings and t-shirts and everything just collapsed and folded and multi-layered over everything into basically one big tinker's bundle.

Little Thunder: Now, at this point, how much of your work is coming from individual commissions?

Adams: Well, in some respects I've actually slowed down on artwork. I--

Little Thunder: No, I mean at this point early on, a bit earlier in your career.

Adams: Oh, at this point, probably it was about 30 percent commissions and about 70 percent sales, most of that coming through the Heard Market. That was a major event for me for a quite a few years. It was at the right time of year for me. It was something, the time was right to travel every year to there. The market was good. Also with the issues surrounding my--because I'm not federally enrolled, I was not welcome at Santa Fe. In some respects that was okay because I really didn't have the time to do two shows here. The Heard was a really good show for me. I kept winning larger and larger and larger prizes every year. I hit the Heard show at a good time. The market was actually hitting a downturn. The greater economy was, but I was new, so I was priced lower than a lot of established artists. Collectors that were wanting to add to their collection on 41:00a smaller budget could afford me. My stuff was novel. It was actually not a bad time for me. I kept my prices relatively low and was happy to be there and working. It facilitated me being able to stay at home with my daughter. It worked out really well for a while.

Little Thunder: Now, do you still do the Heard Museum show?

Adams: I do not.

Little Thunder: When did you--

Adams: Seven years ago, I believe, was my last time there. I won Best of Show. In the controversy after I won Best of Show, it came out that I was not enrolled. The Heard knew this, but I guess the audience a lot of times glossed over it or didn't hear it. The Heard Museum was put into a really tough spot. They received federal funding, and that federal funding has become more and more tightly enforced to only support programs that all the members have to be federally enrolled. I'm not, and I can't be. That was a problem. The Heard 42:00Museum had every year reviewed my application and was aware of that and had been okay with that, but with the added pressure, they had to disinvite me the next year even though I was the Best of Show winner. It was both the better thing to happen to me and not so great. In the end, what it was is that it kind of set me free.

The way that you succeed at the market shows is making the pieces that succeed at the market shows. Doing things that are too far out there or unmarketable isn't how you win, it isn't how you sell, and it isn't how you move forward. You can also get caught in the endless spin cycle of "I have to make a big piece for the show, and then I only have time to finish my commissions. Now it's time to start the next big piece." It can be really hard for an artist to take the time 43:00to try new work or (which I think is even more important) to build up a body of work so that you could show at a gallery show or a museum show so that you can show progression or a theme, work through ideas. Single stunning pieces are really fun to do, but they don't tell your story. They tell a snapshot. It's also a very competitive place. At that point, I didn't really need to do it anymore, either. The better thing about it was that after that, I needed to and I wanted to rebrand myself not just as a Native artist but take Native out of it and say I'm a fiber artist.

I come from a variety of backgrounds. I'm Irish, I'm Lebanese, and I'm Native. I'm a lot of things, but I'm a fiber artist. Once I took away the necessity of 44:00being labeled and put into Native-only shows, I found that I can go a lot more places. I can show and apply to galleries that, as a Native artist, would never have shown me. I don't have to only make work that looks Native for a specific audience. I can do whatever I want now. You know, it means that you're cut loose from the reliability of the Heard shows, those market shows, which are very comforting. They provide a lot of income to a lot of amazing artists, and they need that place to show their work. It's true that as a Native artist, most mainstream galleries will never touch your work. They just won't do it. It's just too ethnic, (it's too something) and they won't touch it.

A lot of Native artists absolutely have to have those venues to show in, or there won't be any place to show in at all. In my case, it was better to step out of that and to step away and say, "I'm going to take off some of these labels without changing who I am." The downside about that is that in the 45:00aftermath of that, hearing how people were talking about my mother and my grandmother, their choices of partners, it's a really ugly thing to let people talk about you like a dog breed. It's a really awful thing to let people talk about you in fractions. Nobody is a fraction of a person. To allow yourself to be sort of diminished literally by fractions and pieces until somebody says whether or not you deserve to be participating in this conversation or not, that's a very detrimental thing to somebody's physiological wellbeing, much less to your artistic future.

As painful as it was to hear those things said about me, that I didn't deserve to be there, that I didn't belong, that I wasn't really Native, and to have people questioning my childhood and my background and my family, it was also really freeing to just have to say, "Actually, I don't care, and I'm going to 46:00have to step away from this completely and not have this conversation. At the same time, I'm not going to have to worry about whether or not the next show decides I'm not Native enough because I'm simply going to tell them what I am and what I do. They're either going to except it or not, but I'm not going to have to worry about that anymore." It's been freeing, and, honestly, it's been a pretty good career move. As uncomfortable as it was at the time, it's been a really good career move.

Little Thunder: What are the more important galleries to you today?

Adams: I've worked a lot with the Lovetts Gallery here in town. They've made a point of supporting Native artists whose work they like. They're very specific. They choose to support what they like, and they don't necessarily feel like they need to justify it one way or another. They're pretty brave about that. The All 47:00My Relations [Arts] gallery in Minneapolis has been really supportive of region-wide, even greater region-wide, shows. I don't know that I'm working with any one gallery, although I will say the 108 [Contemporary] gallery here in Tulsa, as someone who's working towards this different idea of seeing myself as an artist who works in fiber, it's been a wonderful, wonderful venue. I found that a lot of, instead of specific galleries that support my work or show my work, it's been contacts with people, and there's a lot of independent curators right now.

Then they build relationships with the institutions that they work with. Then they bring in the artists, and they provide the opportunities. Rather than just one place, it's more about right now than the people who are making the connections between the artists and the places. Sometimes the place might, through that curator, be receptive to my work where if it had been presented to 48:00them alone, they might not have had the person there to have that conversation and say, "No, really, you ought to look at this. This could work with what you're trying to do here." The people that have been working towards that have been Tony Tiger, Bobby Martin, Troy Jackson, Roy Boney, Candessa Tehee, Heather Ahtone. They're just this amazing group of artists and scholars and writers and curators.

Sometimes they're all of the above, and they're all really working together. The mutual support in this region is amazing. It's something I hadn't anticipated, but it's been really spectacular that all these artists really have this attitude of everybody's boats are going to rise together. They're curating shows, and everyone's working together to create opportunities, rather than just waiting for opportunities to come knock at the door. They rarely do. There's 49:00some wonderful collaboration and inclusion. I haven't seen the slightest bit of a good-olʽ-boys club here. It's really wonderful.

Little Thunder: I'm glad you brought that up. I was going to ask you how you got to Oklahoma, and then clearly this is--.

Adams: I have a good story of how I got here. I was living in Montana, and the downside about being in such a gorgeous, remote, rural place like Montana is that is has an incredibly small population base, fewer than a million people in the state. Don't tell anyone. Every piece of my work sold out of state, every major show. I had a solo show at the Yellowstone Museum in Billings and the Missoula Art Museum in Missoula, and that was about it. There's a couple of other venues, but it's a real small population and place. I was already 50:00traveling a lot. I was already thinking about my future and my daughters future, being unwilling to stay in Montana, because it's a very poor place, seeing a lot of other really talented successful people there, still living in poverty and wanting something different. I knew that my work was not going to go well on the West Coast because my work looks very Western. It has a very Western feel to it.

The West Coast definitely, even though Seattle is an eight-hour drive away, they have a very narrow ideal of what their artwork should look there, and I simply wasn't going to work well in Seattle or Portland. I don't do Northwest Coast. I don't do carved wood. I don't. I had visited Tulsa for a couple of shows, for the Cherokee Art Market and for another--for two years and was surprised at how much I liked it here. First of all, Tulsa was green and gorgeous, and it was 51:00also a place where I could wear cowboy boots to an art opening. It was important to me. I was from the West. I wore cowboy boots and liked that, and I didn't want to be in a place where people couldn't be like that. I had the piece in Changing Hands, and the Changing Hands exhibit came to Tulsa. Christina Burke was the curator; she was a new curator at the time.

She asked if I would come down and bring some more of my pieces, and do a little mini-exhibit, and a lecture, and a masters workshop for teachers. We focused on printmaking and using their collection, drawing out geometric designs, and showing teachers how they can facilitate this in classroom exercises. After three days of all these obligations, lectures, and Christina driving me and toting me to and fro, all my obligations were done, and I wanted to go see some live music at the Cain's Ballroom I had heard about. Christina was exhausted, 52:00and she bagged out. She said, "I just can't do it." I said, "I'm a big girl with a credit card and a cell phone. Just drop me off, and I'll go listen and find my way back to the hotel." I ended up meeting a really great guy that night.

Little Thunder: Oh, my goodness, that is a great story!

Adams: It is! As he reminds me, I wouldn't give him my phone number. He got my email address, though, from my business card. I met him, and he was wonderful. I went back to Montana thinking, "I'm in really big trouble." We started a long-distance correspondence, and eventually I let him have my phone number. A year later, just over a year later, we were married in Missoula. Put all my stuff in a U-Haul and drove here. I was already thinking about this place. I liked everything about it. Tulsa was, there was financial opportunities here, and it was pretty, and it was the West. I could still wear cowboy boots. There 53:00was so much happening here. You could just feel the buzz of Native artists. That surprised me because everyone assumes the Southwest or the Northwest or somewhere else is the hub, but I really think it's here. It was intriguing how much was happening here. All these factors and being in love and everything, so we got married, and he convinced me to moving here.

Little Thunder: Tell us a little bit about your upcoming show at the Great Plains Museum in June. Do you know--I think it's called Contemporary Indigeneity II? I read about that online, maybe.

Adams: I don't think I'm in that.

Little Thunder: Okay. (Laughter) Sorry about that. Sometimes there are--.

Adams: Was that on my website?

Little Thunder: No, it was on theirs, I believe. It was something I googled in connection with you.

Adams: I think the Contemporary Indigeneity, which is the hardest word to spell ever, is an ongoing juried show, either annually or biannually. I've applied to 54:00that and had pieces. Actually, I think one of the pieces we're going to look at later is one of the pieces from that. That's a group juried show that happens. I think it might be biannual now. With the Great Plains Museum, I was also their artist in residence one year. Traveled there because they saw my work in the first Contemporary Indigeneity and liked it and invited me to apply. That was a wonderful experience because I worked with the Great Plains Museum. Had a solo show but then also created a specific commission piece for them to have in their permanent collection. Worked on site on the piece for two weeks, and did tours and talks with kids and all those good things.

It's a really interesting museum because it's interdisciplinarian. They talk about farming, and they talk about the landscape, and they talk about art. The 55:00museum is meant to be the art venue where a lot of these ideas get expressed. The institute itself, the Great Plains Institute (maybe I'm saying that wrong) combines everything from cartography to geology to ethnology. They combine all these disciplines to study. What is the Great Plains, and why is that a unique place or unique idea? The downside was beadwork is not very exciting for people to watch. For two weeks I was beading, which in beadwork is pretty much me hunched over with terrible posture, doing tiny work. The other thing was that I had to time it so that I had this commission piece ready for the end of the show.

Little Thunder: Whoa!

Adams: Yeah, I had to try and time it so that I had enough to work on in front of people. I had easily forty-five minutes to spare at the end of two weeks as I was finishing, before the final. We put it on a pedestal, and it was done. That 56:00was the first piece I ever did with QR codes. That was my experimentation, was to bring (because they are interdisciplinary in that institute) to bring this element of science. I had worked on science pieces before. I did a solo show at Lovetts Gallery with all science pieces, but to bring this element of map making and history and ornithology, each panel had a bird species on it and a plant species. There was a QR code that would give you the latitude and the longitude and the name of the location where that biosphere would be found. I really love that I can bring my love of science into the beadwork pieces.

Little Thunder: Is that the first time that you used the Japanese beads, the--.

Adams: No, I had really liked the delicas before that.

Little Thunder: There is a connection between being able to do the QR Codes and--.

Adams: Yes, I had liked the delicas before that. Most beadworkers frown on delicas. They're considered not the right kind of bead because delicas are a perfect tube, a cylinder. European beads or the Czech beads are--I'm trying to remember the exact name of it. They're shaped like a donut, so they're round, but they're round on all the sides. That's really great for working on curves and lines. I have an affinity for the precision that comes with it. I had already been working with delicas in a lot of small ways because I like that precision, but when I did the piece that won Best of Show at the Heard was a cradleboard. It was a Salish-style cradleboard with a fully-beaded headboard up above the baby. I did the florals in all different kinds of beads, but I did the background entirely in delicas. It was excruciating and problematic, but the end 58:00result was so crisp and so clean that I thought it was worth it.

When it comes to the QR codes, the delicas are what make the QR codes possible because while they're a three-dimensional object, they're shaped almost like a can, like a can of food. If you were to lay a can on it's side and look straight down, it would really be a rectangle. That way, I can bead this pattern, and then from straight above, it actually can be flattened into two dimensions of black and white. It can be read as a binary, as a positive and a negative, as long as I get it right, (Laughter), as long as all the beads are in the right spot. It happens more than you would think. I'm better at it, but I do have to take a lot out and count. The QR codes are my way of embedding text into pieces and making beadwork literally readable for modern audiences.

Little Thunder: Well, let's talk about your process and techniques a little bit 59:00more. Do you do all your bead shopping online or material shopping--

Adams: I do the majority now. I used to shop locally, even as a teenager, and as a kid, there were always local shops. I'm finding more and more that I like to order online. I know the colors that I like, and I tend to buy them that way. Every now and then you find a great bead shop and go a little crazy. I think the biggest bead shopping I ever did is there was this small shop in Blackfoot, Idaho. On the way back from the Heard one year, I had heard that the woman who ran it was in her nineties and she was going to close it. I think I spent a thousand dollars on beads. I walked out with a package that was smaller than a sandwich (Laughter) because they were microbeads, tiny amounts, and vintage. I went a little crazy. Every now and then you find something because of its rarity that you probably couldn't find online. Now the internet has leveled all that out. Every little antique store that finds beads at such and such estate can 60:00sell them on eBay. You can go on eBay and find amazing vintage and antique finds. It's really leveled that all out.

Little Thunder: Some of the boxes where you were working on the hand-dyed wool, were you dying your wool?

Adams: I wasn't. I found some wonderful women in Montana that were running a quilting shop, and they loved it that I wanted to use this--they were getting the raw, white, woven wool and dying it themselves. I could work with them and say, "I want it extra streaky. I want it this color." Most of the women who came into their shop, oh, they wanted little tiny pieces. I wanted yardage, and I wanted it with streaks and variations and mistakes and stuff in it, lots and lots of it. I found that even a solid black, hand-dyed has more depth to it than a commercial simply because of the way our eyes read those variations. It's like the fabric literally gets to drop back and provide a real background for it.

As soon as I found them and the small-scale art they were doing, I pulled away from using commercial wools and was exclusively using theirs. They closed shop, and I'm devastated. I may have to learn how to now. I try not to add more skills. I already have enough skills, and I am also my accountant, and my photo archivist, and a lot of other skills. When somebody says, "You know how to tan," I'm like, "Ah, but I really don't want to." I don't want to dye wool, and I don't want to knit. I don't want to--. I can only have so many time-taking and supply-driven skills before I have maxed out. I don't want to be an expert in wool dying. I just want to find someone who's really good at it, and I can pay them to do it. (Laughs)

Little Thunder: Maybe they'll listen to this interview. (Laughs)

Adams: Yes.

Little Thunder: Your work seems pretty much split between geometric and figurative.

Adams: Yes, in the beginning, it was all geometric. Then I started to add in elements of animal figures, more stemming from ledger-drawing styles. The horse heads were kind of coming out of ledger drawings, also older pictorial beadwork. There's a strong element of pictorial beadwork. I wanted to do things a little more realistic. Jackie Larson Bread was a good friend of my mom's because of her work. She does photo realism. That's mostly what she's known for in her beadwork, and it is amazing. She also does a lot of pictorial-style beadwork, taking that older drawing style from ledger drawings and hide counts and converting it into a real graphically-dominated beadwork style. Seeing some of her work when I was starting out--. She was friends with my mom, and I didn't 63:00know she was famous. (Laughter) She would probably still say she's not famous, but she is. She was a real encouragement when I was first getting started. Actually, my thesis show, my junior review was not well received. Jackie sent me a letter and told me to keep my head up and keep on keeping on and it would figure itself out.

Little Thunder: When you're working on a piece, are you working on one piece straight through, or are you working on different pieces simultaneously?

Adams: If I have my way, I try to have about three pieces. I try to have one large, long-term project that's really intensive that I'm working at in sections. Then I try to have some other medium-size piece that I can pick at, and then I try to have something small, jewelry or edging, that I can do that requires a lot less thought, also that I can finish quickly because the long projects can zap your staying power. When you've worked on a project for three 64:00or four months, you start to feel like it'll never end. There's no sense of accomplishment, so sometimes the smaller projects help clear the palette a little bit and help you stay motivated. Even though you're taking time away, it's helping to recharge a little bit. On the bigger projects, you can work with one color for so long that you never want to see that color again. You fill in background, and you go, "I never want to see light blue ever again." (Laughter)

Little Thunder: What kinds of research do you do for your pieces?

Adams: I do a lot of figurative work with birds that are rendered realistic. I do a lot of reviewing and looking at nature photography. I also do a lot of--the internet has changed research. When I was starting off, the internet was still this proto, almost-kind-of-there, and I did all my research in the libraries. I 65:00would look up everything from kitchen design books trying to get ideas for graphics. Obviously I would look up beadwork books and photos and some of the early online discussion groups that discussed northern plains tribal art, things like that that were good sources of photos and museum collections. Really quickly, the internet outpaced those things. I can literally sit down and research a project in ten minutes if I want now.

I can also go online, and I can talk to other artists. We talk to each other. We ask questions, and we share new projects. Now the rate of inspiration and information has gone up exponentially, and now sometimes it's harder to sort some of that out and have time to actually get away from other influences and step back. I really like modern design. I spend a lot of time on Pinterest looking at everything from rugs to dishes. I really like contemporary design of 66:00those types. I look for ideas in a lot of those places. Paint shows where they show color palettes and stuff, those are great, great sources. I tend to create these little research files on my computer where I have everything from paint chips to pictures of birds, to someone's kimono that's the most amazing colors, or a flower, and put that all together, then figure out what I'm thinking about when I'm looking at all those things.

Why are those interesting to me, and why am I picking them out, and then try to reduce it down, and then I draw. I never draw in color. I only draw in black and white because I don't think there's hardly any point to drawing beads. You can't pick your colors. You can't mix them, so you have to work with the colors that you're given. Sometimes the texture is more important than the color. If 67:00something's red, there's red, but there's red matte, there's red luster, and there's red glossy. When I pick beads out for a project, I actually get them all out. I'll get, like, a hundred and fifty colors out, big trays, and lay them all out and put them next to each other. The other thing is, they do strange things next to each other. They play off of each other; they bounce off each other. You might love this green and this red, but they can't do much besides, and one color is an outline versus a background. Again, there's a lot of trial and error, and you'll buy a lot of beads.

I do jewelry as prototypes, so if I'm researching a pattern, if I think I'm going to like this pattern, I might do a really small version of it as a pair of earrings to jumpstart it and go, "What these two colors look like next to each other?" Do little versions. I hate to throw it out, so I do earrings. They might be a little sampler of what I think I'm going to do and try it out. I'm also 68:00working with different backgrounds. A beadworker that's filling in the plain completely is a different process than when you're dealing with this negative space behind it. Whether it's a print or a photo or something I've hand drawn, or wool, there's always this other factor to cooperate with. That's a little bit different than just filling it in completely.

Little Thunder: You have kind of made a bit of a shift away from fabric and towards paper.

Adams: Yeah, I have. The shifting to working on paper started with working with a few prints. I intentionally made a series of dry points. I'm working at Bobby Martin's studio. I left these lines, these gaps in the dry point etchings where I wanted to put in a row of lane-style beadwork and try it. That was my first endeavor in that, was to use that process of intentionally leaving gaps where I 69:00meant to put beadwork. Those turned out really, really well. I really liked the effect. The logic behind it was that I was not able to make as many projects as I wanted, and certainly not in price points for collectors or friends that I wanted, because each piece involved so many hours that by the time I finished it, I was priced out of my own work. I couldn't afford to have one.

Also, I found that people who were interested in my work were not interested in the construction. They didn't really care the way I did about how a purse was sewn together or the structure behind the box. They wanted to see the image, the color, the composition, and beyond that, it really didn't--. Most of my larger projects are probably half construction. If I made a complicated purse with beadwork and construction, and the entire thing is handmade and bound in silk, 70:00they might never even open it. It's, "To who am I making all this endeavor for?"

Trying to back away from that and to make art that had all the same qualities as the other pieces I was working on, but didn't require a month for each project, to be able to work through things a little faster, to be able to make enough for a show or some gallery inventory. Sometimes to move on to a new idea. For now, I've been working on paper in a variety of ways, sometimes printmaking and sometimes ink and pencil work, sometimes now collaborating on photographs, and sometimes with solid beadwork on paper where the entire thing is on paper. That's the matrix that I'm starting on. Working mostly two dimensional would be like 2.25 dimensional.

Little Thunder: Right.

Adams: They come off the paper some, but they're mostly on these wood panels, and then working with wood panels, too, as the delivery system. They are pretty 71:00fragile, the way I'm installing them right now, but I like the space.

Little Thunder: We'll see them in a minute. What's your creative process from the time you get an idea?

Adams: I generally use sketchbooks and idea books to write the idea down usually in words, and try to brainstorm out from that. I start making rough sketches and my little computer files with all my inspiration photos and ideas. Then I start drawing it and thinking about it. I also tend to think about it at night. Often, early morning wake-up times is when I do my best idea thinking about it, and running through different possibilities, and trying to trial-and-error adapt before I actually start. Then if it's on the boxes, what I generally do is I 72:00take graph paper, and I measure out the exact dimensions it's going to be. Then I draw out each side. I don't have to tape it together like a mockup.

I'm pretty good three dimensional that I can make it in my head, and I can turn it. I can make it and spin it, and make it taller or wider, do whatever, and that is about sitting and thinking about it. Then I do the graph paper to see if the dimensions I'm thinking about how the numbers would really work out. From there, I make a graph paper template for each side, for each panel. I cut it out in wool and Pellon and in wood, and cut the wool much larger so that I have a lot of edge. I use quilter's tape or painter's tape. I use a real low-adhesive tape to outline the graph paper size so that I know what the interior size is 73:00going to be. From there, I generally use thread and make halfway marks, so I make this grid of reference points with that. The downside of working with a negative space background is that I draw on it.

If I were filling in the background, I could just draw it, then fill in all the colors, but with a negative space background, I have to leave it as-is. There's nothing really that's safe to draw on silk or wool. What I usually do is I create the outline and then create the grid. Then if I'm doing figurative work, I draw the figure out entirely and in as much detail as I can on tracing paper. Then I baste stitch the tracing paper into the surface. Then I use a needle, and I carve out the tiny little area I'm going to bead. I fill in the gap. Then I carve out the next tiny little area I'm going to bead, and I fill that in. I 74:00keep doing that reductively until I've filled in all of the space. Then I can rip off the tracing paper against the background and see the edges.

On all my realistic birds, that's how I do it on wool is through that reductive method and figuratively trying to figure out how to make it look semi-realistic. I know they're not looking realistic, but it should have enough motion and stuff to evoke what it looks like realistically. If it's not a figurative, then I actually work out the math on graphing paper, and I just start in the middle. I just start counting because there's a lot of math. If it's geometric beadwork, it's counting and counting and counting and figuring out the math of the reduction and the expansion. The beads are not perfect squares, so you have to figure out your math. Your lane is going to be an even or an odd number, and 75:00that will differentiate what kind of angles you can make.

Little Thunder: Thank goodness for your science background.

Adams: Yeah. There's this idea in art school that that's where students who don't want to go math should go. That's where they should major. Maybe there's other kinds of art where you don't have to do a lot of math, but I have to do a lot of math and sort of symbolic thinking like that. (Laughter) I don't know if it was the safe haven for math a lot of other students thought it was going to be.

Little Thunder: Well, looking back on your career so far, what has been one of the high points?

Adams: That's kind of tough. Honestly, I think having the piece in the Museum of Arts and Design, having the piece in the Changing Hands, was definitely a high point. It was early, and it was a really big step for me to step out of my 76:00region, my [inaudible] start, to think, "I think I could really do this. I think this might happen." Another random point was to meet someone and to have them tell me that they used photos of my work in their class at a college class. They were using photos of it to teach. I was in shock. You don't think anyone knows about you. You are constantly banging on the door, trying to get somebody to care who you are. I think I was pretty wide-eyed about that. The idea that you want to make something that lasts and that matters, and then the idea creeps in that maybe it does and that maybe it is right now, lasting and mattering.

That would be, that would be a very high point. A personal high point, I made a piece probably seven years ago. In the center of it had, three Salish women 77:00digging bitterroot. It was a wall hanging, rather small but pretty intensely worked. They were standing in front of this mountain in Missoula that's now developed. They were wearing a lot traditional Salish silk head scarves and some of this other stuff. Victor Charlo, who's Salish and a playwright, someone I've known most of my life if not all of it, he was there at this art function. It was a fundraiser for the Montana Artist Residency, and we were both associated with it. His daughter April was there. He looked at it, and he got a little choked up. He said it reminded him of his mother.

At that moment, I thought I made something that matters not just to the audience out there telling me where it's good or it's bad, but I made something that made somebody feel something. It evoked something for him about his mothers, what 78:00they wore, digging bitterroot, and their tools. I worked really hard to get the tools right and their head scarves right and everything right. There's a moment where it works, where somebody that's important to you feels something important and that it might last a little bit. It might be a little part of that record. That was a personal moment where I thought, "Whether it sells or doesn't sell, it matters a lot in this moment." That's a highlight for me.

Little Thunder: What about one of the low points?

Adams: I have two low points that are different but pretty similar. They both ended up well, so they're good stories. (Laughs) The first one was in college my junior review. BFA program as a junior, you have to have a formal review process before you're a senior. The idea is not to let students who aren't prepared have the distinction of a BFA; they would have to get a BA instead. I did the junior 79:00review. About half of it was work that was leading towards the parfleche, but they were in ceramics, actually. I was painting parfleche on porcelain, which I thought was interesting. Then the other half of my works were the food, the ceramic food, very pop arty and silly. It's what I had as a junior, so I presented it. Then I got anonymous comments from the faculty.

They literally said, "Leave the parfleche to your mother. Stop doing this." They were anonymous, and I asked the faculty if they would please talk about this, if they would let me come in and talk about it. I had almost nothing but negative comments on the comment section of my review, but I was passed with flying colors as far as numerically. And to actually say my mother? There was incredibly demeaning and insulting. It was derogatory is what it was. It was 80:00meant to be a slam at the heritage, at who I was, and that they knew that this was influenced by my background and by my mother's participation in Native culture. It was definitely a slam, and they wouldn't address it. I decided--I found a loop hole, and I found that if they pass you in the junior review, they can't tell you what it's going to be on.

You can get reviewed in one style and do a different style. You don't have to do one thing, so I decided they were going to have to look at parfleche for another year. (Laughter) I did my entire senior thesis in parfleche patterns and designs. The downside was, because I was working in a nontraditional fiber art, I had to forfeit my studio. I was only allowed to have a studio space in the ceramics department. They just could never seem to find any space for me to work on campus in any other medium. I ended up working out of my home, which was ostracizing to a degree because I wasn't working with other students, like you should be as a senior. I had to work at home. I's literally marginalized. Here 81:00is the outline, and you are going to have to be outside of it even though you're a senior and you've worked towards this up until this time.

That was demoralizing. When I had my solo show two years later, not one professor came to see it even though it was a mile from campus. That was demoralizing, but my senior thesis show was scheduled to exhibit, the very one they didn't want to see. I had the solo show, so whether they showed up or not, I had it. It was well received. That lack of support in the end, it was a little bit of a stumbling block. A lot of other people encouraged me, and it went well. The other low point was definitely the aftermath after the Heard, after winning the Best of Show. Again, the realizations coming out about that and the opportunity to redefine myself was one that I took and profited from. Even 82:00though that was a low point to hear some of the criticisms or to hear some of the negative talk, it's been far better in the long run to be really, really honest about where I come from and what I want to do, and to have that openness with all of the curators and other artists I work with.

I think it makes it easier for other people to talk about what diaspora is, and what creating a new definition of yourself when you do come from multiple backgrounds, and I think more people stop feeling that they have to segment themselves out or pick one or the other. It gives you an opportunity to talk about "What is the new breed," instead of just being a breed, and being a whole person. I did feel a little trapped before that, that I had to be one thing or another and only talk about one part of my background and leave other things out because they were disadvantages to my career. Definitely a low point, but on the 83:00other hand, I walked away, and was like, "I won." I won Best of Show. I'm probably not going to win it again, and I don't need to. I did it. I'll take my award and go home. If that's how it has to be, that's how it has to be, but I don't have to stop. In the long run, it has turned out to be an opportunity.

Little Thunder: Is there anything we forgot to mention before we take a look at your work?

Adams: I can't think of it. I've covered a lot in a rambling fashion. If there's any other questions that you think we've missed, but I can't think of it. Otherwise, we can look at--.

Little Thunder: Yeah, we're going to look at some pieces of art here.

Adams: Okay.

Little Thunder: Molly, you want to tell me about this piece?

Adams: This is a combination of beadwork and photo etchings. It was a collection of photo etching trials I actually did in college and didn't use at the time and saved. The center one is a portrait of me in my traditional outfit when I was 84:00eighteen. The photo on the left is my great-grandmother and her outfit, getting ready for powwow. The one on the right is her family when she was away at boarding school, her siblings, and her mother and father. I took all these photos and wanted to highlight them as a triptych and put them together and use the beadworks almost as saint imagery and draw the outlines around them.

I used the fire color scheme on the two older portraits and then the blue for the image of myself. This is a little bit of a family piece about our photos and the beadwork that goes throughout. --my great-grandmother is wearing a fully-beaded dress top and getting her hair braided. Then in the center, I'm wearing my dress. Then on the right, my great-grandmother's brother has a beaded 85:00boy's suit. It has the floral patterns. It was usually a vest-pant combo worn over a commercial fabric. He has that old-style suit floral design on his outfit. His mother was a wonderful beadworker.

Little Thunder: All right, so how about your box here?

Adams: This piece has two Scissor-tailed flycatchers on the front in realistic poses, flying. On the back, on the verso, there's an abstract geometric rendering of the same birds of my own design. The interior opens up to an orange interior with geometric designs. I am just in love with the Scissor-tailed flycatchers after moving here.

Little Thunder: Yes!

Adams: They're such an emblem of this area, and I had wanted to do a piece about 86:00them. The outside is this bright blue sky with the two different versions, the geometric and realistic flycatchers. Then the interior is this really orange which I think of the Oklahoma soil and the red orange that comes out, then some of the beadwork designs inspired by the some of the beadwork I've seen since I moved here, some of the Kiowa and Apache styles with the blue and white candy striping moving through it. It was a contrast of earth and sky, literally the ground and hide, and the yellow and orange stain that's put on a lot of moccasins here, some of the collection of impressions.

Little Thunder: That's wonderful. Okay, we're looking at some works on paper here.

Adams: Yeah, these are a combination of ink drawings, color pencils, and thread work, and beadwork on paper, so a combination of a lot of different techniques. I was wanting to play around with some more spontaneous, interdisciplinary 87:00stuff, and really feeling an urge to draw again. The birds, the Scissor-tailed flycatcher is really a fun motif to play with. They're so lyrical, the way that they move and their tails. These two different pieces, one more flat and symmetrical, and one more in motion, referencing a lot of modern design and pop culture colors and some things like that, but also working with thread to create texture, so trying to draw with thread. The one on the right has blue and red accents in thread embroidery. The one on the left, a lot of what looks like black lines that are drawn are actually black thread. A combination of black ink and thread and gold beads on a colored background. Just trying to play with color and design but really enjoying working on the Bristol board paper, and mounting these pieces out from the wood panels so that they float in front of 88:00the form they're mounted on.

Little Thunder: That's a nice presentation. All right, and how about this piece?

Adams: This piece is beadwork on a photo, and it's a collaboration with Roy Graff, a photographer that I met. I'd been wanting to incorporate photographs of landscape and then work geometric designs over the surface. Loved his photography and thought this was an opportunity to work directly with the photographer. He's supplying the photographs and having them printed on this beautiful paper. Then I'm working the geometric designs over the surface and mounting them in the same manner that I'm doing some of the other paperwork. Working on a series upcoming, more pieces of landscape photography. He's able to produce images with the rich deep colors that I want, and then I can do the geometric designs over the top.

Little Thunder: Very powerful images. Well, thank you so much for your time today.

Adams: Thank you.

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