Join Lanesboro Artist-in-Residence Sequoia Hauck for an interactive Community River Painting on Wednesday, September 27th from 3– 6 p.m. at Sylvan Park. Community members are invited to contribute to the river installation by adding fabric, painting on the river, and/or attaching poetry. Participants can come anytime during the window of 3 – 6 p.m. and stay as little or as long as they’d like. Note: this was rescheduled from it’s original date on Tuesday, September 26th due to rain. 

The notion that water is integral to life is prevalent in almost every indigenous culture and community. Dakhóta peoples have a saying: Mni Wiconi (water is life) and Anishinaabe peoples have the same phrase in their language: Bimaadiziwin Nibi. For Indigenous peoples water is an ancestor, water is a teacher, water is a guide, and water is life. This project is a large-scale installation of a cloth river.

The community is invited to journey along the cloth rivers and interact with the teachings of water. We consider this project a gesture towards remembrance. We invite audiences to participate through witness, exploration, and contemplation. Together we ask ourselves: What is our connection to water? How can we remember the significance of water in our lives?

About the Artist: Sequoia Hauck (they/them) is a queer, non-binary, trans, two-spirit, Anishinaabe and Hupa filmmaker and interdisciplinary performance artist and director who creates work that explores ways to indigenized the process of art-making. Their work weaves Indigenous epistemologies, queer identity and the exploration/possibilities of Indigenous futurism.  They make art surrounding the narratives of continuation and resiliency among their communities. They are a graduate from the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities with a B.A. in American Indian Studies. Sequoia has worked on and offstage with organizations such as Aniccha Arts, Art Shanty Projects, Exposed Brick Theatre, The Jungle Theater, Māoriland Film Festival, An Opera Theatre (AOT), Pangea World Theater, Patrick’s Cabaret, Poetry and Pie, Rosy Simas Danse, The Southern Theater, Taja Will Ensemble and Turtle Theater Collective.  Sequoia is a 2023 Jerome Hill Artist Fellow and First Peoples Fund Cultural Capital Fellow as well as an Aniccha Arts Artistic Associate. www.sequoiahauck.com

During their residency, Sequoia plans to install a cloth river installation that will invite the community to remember and reconnect with the ancestor water. They will offer opportunities to contemplate and explore the personal and collective meanings of water through both conversation and artistic elaboration on the installation.

This event is free. The Lanesboro Artist Residency Program is supported by the Jerome Foundation.