 Our next speaker is Preston Singletary, and he is someone's art that I've admired. His art is featured in the Seattle Art Museum, and whenever I walked into the Seattle Art Museum, like, his art leaves me speechless. It is so incredibly gorgeous and beautiful. And I have fangirled over his art for a long time, so I was like, oh my gosh, I get to introduce Preston Singletary. And I kind of emailed him out of the blue, and I was like, this isn't going to work, and I'm still kind of surprised it worked. I'm going to introduce you. All right, so I'm going to read this from your bio. So when Preston began working with Glass in 1982, he had no idea that he'd be so connected to the material in the way that he is. It was only when he began to experiment with using designs from his clinkett cultural heritage that his work began to take on a new purpose and direction. Over time, his skill with the material of Glass in traditional form line design has strengthened and evolved, allowing him to explore more fully his own relationship to both his culture and chosen medium. This evolution and subsequent commercial success has positioned him as an influence on contemporary Indigenous art. Through teaching and collaborating in Glass with other Native American, Maori, Hawaiian and Australian Aboriginal artists, he's come to see that Glass brings another dimension to Indigenous art. The artistic perspective of Indigenous people reflects a unique and vital visual language, which has connections to the ancient codes and symbols of the land, and this interaction has informed and inspired his own work. His work with Glass transforms the notion that Native artists are only best when traditional materials are used. It has helped advocate on the behalf of all Indigenous people, affirming that we are still here, that we're declaring who we are through our art and connection to our culture. His work continues to evolve and connect his personal cultural perspective to current modern art movements, and he's received much attention for striving to keep the work fresh and relevant. We are very excited and honored to have you join us, and I love having another fellow I'll ask and join us for this day. So, welcome Preston. This is a better mic. Yeah, much better. That was a brief introduction in Klinkit. Very few words that I actually know. I'm not from the Salish region, but my family actually comes from Sitka, so I am honored to be here on the land of the Salish and to learn through this last presentation a little bit about the region. And so, yes, we're from the north, but I grew up in Seattle. This is a presentation which is quite robust. I don't share as much as I can. I might run out of time, but that's okay. I always feel compared to share a lot of information about the journey that I took to become, well, to do what I do today. And so, I grew up in Seattle. This is some of my traditional regalia with my son who was younger. He's 22 now, so. Okay, that's what we look like with our traditional, some of our design work and the button blankets. This is actually my wife. She comes from Sweden, so she comes from the other side of the world, the same latitude as Sitka, Alaska, but over in Stockholm, Sweden. This was my father, so quite, you know, mixed in my cultural background. He's non-native, he was, you know, mixed European. But this was his passion. He was a very famous fly fisherman in the Northwest. And he also dabbled in lots of things, like creative things. He was very well book read. He was a great outdoorsman. He was dabbled in soapstone carving and painting. He wrote poetry and did calligraphy and all kinds of things. Between him and my mother, who was also a musician, played Delta Blues, and she did a lot of handicrafts. You know, basically, I was raised in a creative family. And so I guess it kind of wore off on me. I'm going to be jumping around quite a bit, so you're going to have to follow me through this, but it'll make sense in the end. May 18th, 1980, which I always say, fostered my career as a glass artist because some of the people, some artists took the ash from the glass and they melted it to create glass that they would make glass art out of. But at that time, music was my main passion all through high school. In fact, I went to school, I didn't go to college. I went, fell straight into glass blowing, but thinking that music was going to be my, like, I wanted to check the box, you know, rock star, working musician, you know, in the job application, but so I've always been playing music and I also will talk a little bit about that later. But this is the fellow that got me into glass blowing. This is my friend Dante Marioni. Here we are standing with an Italian master glassblower, and so we had the good fortune of befriending him and watching him and studying with him and assisting, and we picked up a lot of great, you know, ways of working. The Italian process is quite refined and they're considered some of the best glassblowers in the world, and we really had a great time working around him. But this was the main team that I worked with. This was a studio of Benjamin Moore, and so as I mentioned, you know, a year after high school, aged 19, I slipped into glass blowing in a factory and making Christmas balls, paper weights. Then I started to go to Pilchuck Glass School, north of Seattle, and that's where I learned about how artists work with glass. And this man here, Benjamin Moore, was the artistic director of Pilchuck, and he ran this studio. It was a very specialized studio that we made work for lots of different people. The one thing I have to say about glass blowing is it's such a team effort. It's a real amazing process. I mean, everybody's really working together to make larger, more complex pieces. You must work in a team. One amount of people that I work with is always two, but sometimes I have like five, four or five people helping me in the studio. So here we're down in Tacoma at the Museum of Glass. And so this whole time, you know, being a glassblower and working and training with, learning from other people, and going to Pilchuck School, I was looking for the Klinkett Way. This was the street sign up in Sitka. And this is my great-grandmother, who in the center, she was the one that grew up in Sitka at the turn of the century. She was born in the late 1800s, and she moved to Seattle in the 20s and she was widowed in 1919. And she had five children and then moved to Seattle with a man right here, pictured here. This is Dionysio Gubatayo. He's a Filipino man who traveled to Alaska and worked for the canneries and the fisheries. And they fell in love, got married, had some more kids, moved to Seattle. And that's what I, who I knew as my great-grandmother. So jumping into a little bit, I've tried to kind of structure this. I'm still working with the flow of the story because I'm preparing for my potential TED Talk. So I'm going to be able to strut around without my visual aids here. But so I've tried to equate the idea of raven in the box of daylight with the story of my career. And so that's how I'm kind of paralleling it. This is an exhibition that I put together at the Tacoma Museum of Glass. And it's traveled, it's traveling, it's currently at the National Museum of the American Indian, the Smithsonian Institution. So this is raven in the box of daylight. So this is basically raven in the beginning of time and raven is a white bird. And so he is looking for the daylight. And he goes to this old man, or he goes to the fisherman of the night first and he asks, where's the daylight? And this old man, they tell this old man who lives at the head of the Nass River. And so he goes to the, so this is the fisherman of the night scene here. And he goes to the old man and says, you know, can I come inside your clan house? And the old man shoes him away, you know, he presumably has lots of treasures inside of his clan house. But he also learned about his, the old man's daughter who is transparent. So there's a lot of symbolism inside this story and the transparent or the white bird, usually white animals in native culture are thought of as being special or having some kind of spirit significance to it. And the same with this daughter who is transparent. I don't know why she was transparent. So now we're switching to some of the early work that I did in the sort of the foundation of the things, you know, learning to be a glassblower, learning how to control the material. These are the earliest things that I did to kind of develop my skills. And these pieces are kind of large, you know, for blown glass, but these were what I was making based on the people that I worked with and worked around. And then one day I said, okay, I want to explore this native side of this clinkett design work. And so I started to work on these pieces and it's an upside down cedar hat form, you know, so you turn it upside down, it becomes a bowl. I discovered these shadows just purely by accident. One day my aunt came to a holiday open house at Benjamin Moore's studio and she knew that I was getting into this design work and she said, can we put the hat on this nice pedestal with the beautiful light and all this? Usually the assistants, we have a little card table over in the corner and so I said, sure, so we put the hat out and about 10 people followed to see what was going to happen and they saw the shadows and he was like, oh, look at that! And it's like, well, yeah, that's what I intended all along, you know? Of course, that was like the Eureka moment. I kind of felt like, you know, okay, there's something here that I need to kind of follow this thread. And kind of a little bit about part of what brought me around to this was, you know, this kind of notion of spirituality. I wasn't raised with any religious instructions, so this was something that when I read this Carlos Castaneda books, they were very popular in the 80s and there was something that kind of alluded to some kind of spirituality and this kind of ability to navigate within your dream time and it was quite fascinating, even though it's been, a lot of it has been debunked because, you know, it might have been falsified, but there was also some degree of, you know, inspiration in those books that I found fascinating. And because that led me, you know, since I didn't go to college, I started to, you know, seek out things. Art and philosophy, you know, Joseph Campbell was a natural one because he talked about the power of myth, talked about symbolism and that's what I'm getting into with this Raven story and we'll get back to that in a minute but this is kind of, this is what led me to start to think about these things in different ways. This is, you know, his, Joseph Campbell's kind of archetype of the mythology in general about the hero's journey about, you can see it common in pretty much every movie, you know, you might look at Star Wars and say, okay, Luke Skywalker was, you know, his parents were killed, he was thrown into this situation and he has to struggle and fight and he finds Obi-Wan Kenobi and then that's his mentor and then he learns and he emerges on the other side, you know, victorious and, or you could say it's the same thing with the Wizard of Oz. I mean, Dorothy is thrown into this, you know, into this world and she has to follow this path and all of a sudden she learns things along the way, she finds her helpers and all these things and so this is, you know, if you break it down into almost every story you can find these symbols or these archetypes and so in a way it was kind of like my own hero's journey, if I want to call myself a hero, but this was the call to adventure. So this, when I started coming up with my career I had an opportunity to work at the Pilchuck Glass School which is where I had been attending for several years. We, it's only a workshop in the summer, it's a very short workshop and there's like five or six of them sessions and there's five classes to every session. Anyway, so we decided to, we pitched the idea to make a totem pole for the founders of the Pilchuck Glass School and so this is David Spencer and this was one of my first mentors and he was, lived up in Alaska, he was a very skilled carver, or he is, he's still, we still kind of work together a little bit but he designed this totem pole with some folks up in Haynes, Alaska and so we wanted to make this tribute to the Pilchuck School at their 30th anniversary and it was John Halberg who was the heir to Warehauser so a cedar monument seemed like really appropriate to represent him and as well he had this dagger here that we were, that was owned by a family of an Angoon and so he repatriated it to them and most of John Halberg's collection is in the Seattle Art Museum and it's quite spectacular, a really, really beautiful collection so he was celebrated by the native community, he was given a clinkett name for giving this dagger back to the Jacob family and Angoon and it was given a clinkett name so that's where we saw it be fitting to make this, tell this story because by tradition totem poles tell a story so here we're working together right by the glass studio so there's a lot of cool energy going back and forth and the carvers from Alaska came down and they worked with glass and here's a class that we created kind of helping the finishing of the totem pole and this is actually the only thing that I really contributed to it other than helping drive the project I didn't carve it but I made this hat and so everybody was kind of enamored well when's the hat going to get done? how's it going? so the carvers were like well next time you need a hat stand let me know because anyway, so this was like for me a rite of passage being at the school where I learned and I kind of discovered myself as an artist and working with these master carvers from Alaska was amazing some details of the pole here this represents Dale Chihuly's face this mask and you know that Dale Chihuly has only one eye so he has a patch so we didn't represent it literally but we gave this glass slash which sort of like Chihuly had this vision of glass and he's holding onto the wings of the raven with the sun bringing like the idea of him bringing Pilchuck into the world so this represents John Halberg with this dagger that he had repatriated we had elders coming down from Haines, Alaska to help with the installation ceremony so it was a really amazing moment at the time it felt like all the stars were aligned and I have to mention too this was days before September 11th this was like so at that time we were like on this absolute high only a couple weeks later feeling like wow what's happening in the world but this moment for me was amazing and it kind of put me on the map so to speak in many different ways this is you know some if I failed to mention we actually David Spenson is a neon artist too so we hollowed through the totem and we backlit it with neon with multicolored tubes so it's like an abalone inlay that is illuminated at night so it's quite spectacular these pieces and so it's been 21 years now and it's still standing we just actually gave it a fresh coat of paint so the bottom figure is John Halberg then you've got Dale Chihuly with the raven with the sun in his beak and then you've got Annie Halberg on top who is a patron of the arts so as I'm getting into this whole process you know from Carlos Castaneda to Carl Jung I was interested and fascinated with dream dream analysis because Jung actually had done a lot of studies around the Native American vision quest and analysis of dreams and so this was something that's really really difficult to follow you know his readings so I read some layman's books about you know this whole idea of this psychology so that kind of ties into my work along with Aikido which is a martial art that I studied for several years but it was... so all of these things coming together is what really kind of informs my perspective on this the... and like Aikido has a lot of roots in Zen Buddhism and it's often our instructor always referred to it as a moving meditation and but for me this was the fascinating part what really clicked for me was the idea that as you're grappling with somebody and somebody comes at you it's this force and you have to learn how to turn it and deflect it but when you're working with glass you're also moving and manipulating your body and you're turning this pipe and it's the same kind of feeling I had around that so it became like this kind of universal physical thing that was the connection that I had with it and so that was quite fascinating to learn... to find these correlations and these connections through all of these things so all of the... I mean working with the glass on a large scale too it's quite heavy so you're really kind of using your whole body to move everything so this is Joe David this was my mentor or my helper in the archetype of the Joseph Campbell hero myth and so he was a guy that introduced me to the sweat lodge in the summer of 2000 now this was the year before we did the totem pole so we went up to Pilchuk Glass School we started doing sweat lodges up there and he was... he was... you know... he's a very standoffish guy and finally I convinced him we have to make some plans we're going to be on the campus and we have to do this we're going to play around with glass and I get to help you and I want to build a sweat lodge up there and he said well okay I don't know because it's built on a tree farm actually the school but we got permission to do it and he told everybody it's going to be a suffering and sacrifice ceremony and those who want to know about the ceremony come and talk to him and by looking in their eyes he would tell you what you needed to know and then he would be ready to do the ceremony and I had never done one and I was kind of getting a little nervous about it and I said finally we were building the sweat lodge and I said come look into my eyes am I ready to do this? he goes well let me put it this way he says you better be and I said okay you know I said he goes you know okay and so I said okay okay so in four days time we did 11 days time we did four ceremonies and after that final ceremony he shared his name with me which is something that used to happen or still happens on the northwest coast where you assume new names if you maybe are growing as a person or you grow into for instance you might assume an ancestral name or something like that so Kakao and Cheeth was a name that is known on the coast it's from the new Chanulf tribe west coast of Vancouver Island so moving on when I'm starting to think about this Raven show back to the Raven show I was working with this man he was I called him the clink at Joseph Campbell he kind of shared with me these perspectives on the story and so back to the story actually we were going to work on this exhibition together but then he passed away before we could actually realize it so I had a look for another curator her name was Miranda Ballardi-Lewis and she's actually university and she's a curator and a writer and a doctor of native sciences so Raven back to the Raven story Raven asked to come into the clan house he's denied access to the clan house and so Raven has transformational capabilities so he changes himself into a speck of dirt and he floats down this natural spring where the daughter goes out with a ladle and she scoops up the water but because she's of high status in the family her whole family is of high status she has attendance to it with her so they take this feather and they draw this feather through the water and they see this little speck of dirt there's a little clear droplet which is supposed to represent water and then there's a little speck of dirt inside so they cast out the water and so Raven then has to reformulate his plan and this time he changes himself into a hemlock needle so this is Raven kind of in this mobile that's kind of moving illustrating the idea that Raven's transforming into this hemlock needle so this time she scoops up the water she swallows it and she doesn't see it the needle because it blends in with the ladle so she swallows it now Raven's inside of her and so he transforms inside of her belly into a human child so this is the idea of Raven inside this pregnant woman and in the old days they would dig a pit out behind the clan house and they would line it with furs and she's having trouble giving birth born on these fine furs so this medicine woman comes and says take the furs away and replace it with moss and so so he so when they do that then the child is born easily and so this child comes out is born this is a piece that is kind of animated this is supposed to animate or create the idea that Raven is transforming now and still a little bit of Raven detail there but this is how he gets into the clan house ok so now he's in the clan house so a little bit jumping back into my my studio practice my accomplishments are not my own but those are many partly that's some of the folks that helped me in my studio to execute my work to varying degrees and yet the Mallory Bravo I think talks about this ancestral lineage there are people that developed the art form that I practice in this new material in this new medium and there were people that would come after me so I'm just in between this ancestral lineage and continuation a few of the objects that I've made and some of these range from being traditional objects that I try to replicate in glass and so a lot of exploration about form and then trying to transform the design work to the glass and that's all that in a sand casting process so after the glass is formed then I'll do the carving away the black to expose the red in this case so it's carving through layers of color and create the contrast this is sort of an homage to basketry and these forms these rattles are inspired by traditional rattles that would be probably shaman rattles that were used for healing ceremonies masks and kind of exploring this whole realm of trying to make it look like the actual traditional form these spoons are trying to make every curve and integrate that design in such a way so inside the clan house now so Raven is inside the clan house and he's looking around at all these treasures these are the objects that are owned by the old man this is called what we call it's kind of an heirloom that's passed on through generations and kept together we had the same system of potlatching we were talking about from the previous presenters that was the way to elevate your status within the community but in this old man was hoarding these objects in his clan house so Raven is now this boy in child form he's kind of precocious mischievous so he's always rooting around and trying to find stuff he comes upon this box this is the box that contains the stars so he starts to play with the box he starts to when no one is looking he opens it throws it through the smoke hole in the clan house into the night sky and so everybody's like wow could you do that why would you do that so he's scolded reprimanded he was punished and after a couple of days they kind of forget about it so he's found this next box and this next box contains the moon and so again he's kind of playing with it and he's moving around and eating his food off it and then finally when no one's looking he opens it up and he takes the moon and he tosses it through the smoke hole and this time the old man's pretty disappointed with them and says you know gosh this is no good you're not following my instructions here so when Raven finds the third box the box that contains the son the old man's like no way can't have that one so Raven starts to fuss and cry and he refuses to eat and he's carrying on for days and days and driving everybody crazy and finally the daughter comes up to the father and says is there anything more important than your grandson and he says no of course you're right half wonders what's going to happen Raven transforms himself back into a bird he takes the son and then the old man immediately realizes that he's been duped and so he grabs on to the tail of Raven he grabs his tail and he holds them over the smoke hole and he instructs the man to throw a pitch on the fire and so he he takes off with the son and he flies through the smoke hole but he's turned black at this point so that's how Raven became black and so with the breaking of the daylight the people who are living in the darkness their whole life finally get to see what's around them and some of them are startled and some of them run off into the forest they become the forest animals and some of them jump into the water and become the sea life and some of them jump into the sky and they become the birds and the people that either stood up bewildered or some people say they stood up strong and proud and it became the human beings or they were too bewildered and didn't know what to do so that sums up mankind in a lot of ways so this stayed where they were and they became the clink at the human beings and then they started to adopt these animal symbols for their family crests and so all of these objects are adorned with the animal symbols from the different realms and so the metaphors of the Raven story in a nutshell is like out of, you know the world is in darkness and Walter used to love to use theology he would say the Bible reference he would say Jesus is the light coming out of the darkness into the light and also kind of talking about the idea of myth the word myth means something that's untrue it has two meanings it can mean it's an ancient mythology but it's also say people would say oh that's a myth, that's not true so we have this problem of sort of fighting our way outside or past this terminology that we use for our ancient stories Joseph Campbell talked about how important storytelling is and Walter also had different stories symbolism within the stories and shared them with me which he asked me to continue to share as broadly as I can the process of imaging was something that when you're hearing these stories I rely on all these visual aids to get my point across but Walter was really really good about talking about holding people's attention but without any without any pictures I need my pictures but so he said that in the old days that the potlatches would be listening to these stories over and over and over and it's the same thing as if our kids are growing up we found this this movie that we really liked I mean what would we do we would watch it over and over and over because it was telling us this story we getting it kind of down in our heads well in the old days we didn't have the visuals and so that the elders had this they had this that's where all the imagination comes from for these objects they had this process this imaging power in their brains that didn't require a lot of moving pictures so people start to think in pictures making art is a very meditative kind of process and so when you do that you spend a lot of time with doing something it becomes you unlock the creativity in your own imagination so light is a metaphor it's very universal so you start to look at these stories and you can see you can start to imagine the symbolism behind it we asked our teacher to shed light on a subject in the old days this is probably too old for you guys but there were comic books there was a character who would get an idea a light bulb would pop on top of their heads and getting back into the daughter that is transparent to the actual being it signifies a spiritual being and the whole idea that she gives birth to this child that's like the immaculate conception myth and sometimes people get upset when I use that and say we have the same stories we have the same it's right there how can you deny it you know Walter would say I just don't want people to think they can hug Jesus all of themselves so we're going to use that because everybody understands it and it's not unique to the Bible every mode of spirituality has some kind of origin of a virgin birth so it's really something that we should understand on a much deeper level I talked about the birth and how she was having a hard time giving birth and so the idea that take the fine furs out and replace it with the moss that was like symbolizes a virgin or I mean I'm sorry a humble birth a humble birth like again the Jesus metaphor so anyways there's a lot of metaphors and teachings within this you're teaching forgiveness there's stories about the cycle of revenge there's stories of other kind of cautionary tales about the cannibal giant there's so much in here and as I mentioned I have a lot of stuff here to share so I'm just going to kind of blast through these a little bit you know the metaphor of the sun and the moon and the stars you know the stars give us direction and guidance something that we look up to the stars we worship movie stars we think these are very simple trigger words that we understand and we can use the moon is not illuminated by itself it's the sun is reflecting upon the moon so the idea that there's this higher power somewhere or creator spirit that is also shining showing us that you know we have a spiritual presence in the night time anyways we breaking daylight this was another kind of aspect of my art side that surrealism modernism primitivism surrealism was the first thing since I didn't go to art school I started to look at books and I found it fascinating you know they they had regard for you know for Northwest Coast art the surrealist did and there's a lot of psychoanalysts you know around the symbolism in surrealist painting so I found that really fascinating but this is basically an African sculpture and I think it's I forget a Russian artist on the right but so you have a lot of these these you know in the era of modernism there was a lot of looking at work from at Native American African art oceanic art and so you know there was it led to this genre called primitivism which was looking at older forms of art and then bringing some of that meaning into the modern art so this is a Brancusi but then I started to sort of turn the tables on the modernist this is like my little Brancusi fish this is Picasso and and a Haida mask from Alaska and so a lot of these things you start to wonder like you know this issue of appropriation and of course it was from a natural appreciation of what they were seeing but there's also like an unlearning of what they were you know what the modernists were trying to do they were seeking something new and so they were trying to deconstruct their way of thinking to be able to create something different and so I went on this whole sort of this is another side of what I do I showed you the representational kind of stuff but these are pieces that are more based on amulet forms and spare organic forms but of course they're ornamented with Northwest Coast art and sometimes they try to get into the symbolism and tell aspects of different stories or just sort of create you know something I give it a poetic name that it becomes people can read into it what they wish but this to me you know represents the idea of a modernist piece of art kind of this Henry Moore or Isamu Noguchi and so a lot of this was just kind of playing you know with new directions and trying to illustrate certain things you know this is kind of like a raven sculpture two sided raven and then these are often inspired by shaman's amulets which you know could be little fetishes that are carried with you or worn as a necklace what have you so these are some of the newer pieces and then really touching on the modernism thing this is like Calder was the very well known for doing these mobiles and so a little bit about indigenous artist gatherings have traveled around quite a bit working with Maori and Hawaiian Australian Aboriginal so here we are down in New Zealand with the Maori people you know incredible people of course you know the haka so here's me doing the haka there looking very fierce but the yeah the Maori are just incredible people really really unified really really education educated progressive and unified as a people and it's amazing to see what they are accomplishing down there sometimes you get to blow glass and I can share my technique with them but it's led to a lot of collaborations this is Jodi Naranjo Santa Clara Pueblo so each time when I collaborate with somebody I usually let them kind of take the lead in what the imagery is going to be and so these potters you know it was perfect because coming from a glass blowing background I was able to just have an easy time to make the form and they have to put the designs on it so these are all done with the same technique of covering the piece with the rubber stencil and then cutting out the areas that are going to be sandblasted here I am in Australia and then this Aboriginal artist came up to work with me in a cold middle of December from the hottest one of the hottest places on the earth and this was some of the work that they had done here again Joe David was of course my mentors I told you so we worked together doing a lot of this kind of stuff and interpreting different symbols around his art work or his cultural art Louis Gardner Jerry Jade Carver so these green elements are a jade stone we conjoined our you know cultural styles and put them both into the piece to work with people like this so Marcus is from Choctaw and then there is Raven Sky River who is also a really talented sculptor doing these naturalistic kinds of you know sea life so I get to put my design work on them and we collaborate in that way killer whale mother and calf Lisa Telford is Haida Weaver and then just kind of ending on the the music that I still do this is a group called Kuik it is means potlatch in the clinkett language actually oh it was out of order see I just had this I have too much to have too much to share this is just a little bit about some of the large scale castings that I'm doing this represented my great grandmother who had a pet grizzly bear as a child and about 2,000 pounds of glass so I made a collaboration with some squallum carvers a little bit out of order here this is actually in the bony courthouse I thought I had a picture that completed clearly I have to look at my presentation again a little closer this was the latest piece we did for the time at pledge arena so you can see that piece outside of the arena at the time we didn't know that it was going to be the kraken and so was the mascot for the team so we were kind of it was fun to hear that actually they probably knew and that's why they chose that design because we had a raven as well but they said no the octopus is going to be just fine this is in a cultural art or cultural art center in Juno, Alaska so I got this piece back into the home community this was an interior of a presentation room this looks very much like a clan house like a traditional clan house no but then there is back to the music so these are all these group this is all the music that I've come up with are collaborated with several different musicians there is about 10 piece band that we worked together I was working with this fellow named Bernie Warrell he was actually a famous person who passed away in 2016 but he was a keyboard player for parliament funkadelic and it was pretty much the main music that a lot of the rap musicians were using in the 80s and 90s Ice Cube and all these musicians sampled his sounds but I met with him he played my 50th birthday party this was a while ago and so he made an offer to collaborate with me so I got together with my clinic friends and we were using traditional songs to kind of create this undertone of music with or for and so we actually it resulted in four triple LPs we actually make vinyl vinyl albums but we're also on Spotify and all that stuff too so these performances are quite fun you know it's kind of like a three ring circus you get so many people on stage and this is Sandra she's Haida this Kachung is from he's Yupik and this is the newest member of our group Air Jazz he's a clinkit and African-American but anyway it's a lot of fun because it's my sort of another part of my artistic artistic expression I have a little video I think we have time to just flip if you guys have to split go right ahead but oh so we lost we lost a couple members too over this time Clarissa was a really skilled Chillcat Weaver she died in 2016 as well as Bernie died in 2016 so we carry on with new members let's see questions I'd be happy to address them there's one over here the raven exhibition yeah I mean the raven it started in Tacoma at the museum of glass and then it went out east and now it's the closest it might get back is towards the end of the run and maybe 2025 in Spokane potentially we're hoping it might get up to Vancouver but you know since it was in Tacoma it probably wouldn't come to Seattle yeah I mean there's a lot of at one point the art form came to a very thin threat where there wasn't many people doing it keeping it alive but then there was it sort of started coming back in the late 70s, 80s but there is such a distinction about Northwest Coast Native Art because it really does have like these elements are very recognizable they're very distinctive and it's been there's always a lot of questions about it like is it because it was so conservative as a culture that it didn't change or it's so strong a tradition that it didn't change I mean there's still something I strive to make it look just as close as I can even though it's not a traditional material of you know or what have you and so yeah those elements are very there's a real system of design that is that really makes it look like the very best pieces you can see that they're really strong you know that I mean there's a lot of you know there's a lot of chainsaw totem pole totem pole is out there too but they yeah there's something about it and it's not easy to answer all right well I did show you a lot so I'm not surprised there's no questions I like to share as much as I can but anyway thanks so much for being here I appreciate it have a good rest of your Indigenous People's Day