Evie Lovett Four Days
Evie Lovett, Suzanne Kingsbury
- Feb 2010
On July 5, 2006, Evie Lovett and Suzanne Kingsbury left at dawn from Brattleboro, Vermont and arrived twelve hours later in the town of Browning, Montana. They were in Browning for North American Indian Days, where lodges are pitched on the powwow grounds and for four days Browning is filled with the sound of drumming, singing, contest dancing, rodeos, parades and celebration.
This show is a collaboration of the photographs of Evie Lovett and the writing of Suzanne Kingsbury. Evie’s large black-and-white images are shot with a 50-year old Rolleiflex camera and printed using traditional darkroom printing. She is a documentary portraitist; her past exhibitions have included portraits from a hospital in Rwanda, and images of drag queens preparing for a drag show in Dummerston,
Vermont. Her work has been shown at Gallery Kayafas in Boston, Reeves Contemporary in New York, Civilian Art Projects in Washington, D.C. and the Brattleboro Museum and Art Center. This is Evie’s third show at Vermont Center for Photography.
Suzanne Kingsbury’s first two novels, The Summer Fletcher Greel Loved Me (Scribner, 2002) and The Gospel According to Gracey (Scribner, 2004) have been optioned for film and translated extensively in foreign markets. Her new novel, The Peace of Wild Things is set in Panama during the time of Noriega. Suzanne’s writing has appeared in Atlanta Magazine and Glamour magazine, among many others. She won the 1999 Oxford Town Fiction Prize, has been an artist-in-residency at Yaddo, and was the recipient of a Fulbright Scholarship in Sri Lanka. She is one of the principal organizers of The Brattleboro Literary Festival.
These two friends traveled to Browning together, each with her own objective. Back home in Vermont, they decided to combine Evie’s images and Suzanne’s words in order to paint the richest possible sense of the place, the people, the wind, the endless sky, the faces of North American Indian Days.
Images are 14 x 14” and priced $500 unframed, $650 framed. Also available are sizes 9.5 x 9.5,” $300 unframed, $425 framed; and 19 x 19,” $600 unframed, $800 framed.
20% of all artist’s proceeds will go to the Piegan Institute in Browning, Montana, a school which instructs students in the Blackfeet, or Peigan, language.
Evie’s statement:
North American Indian Days is a time for the celebration of Blackfeet identity, what it was and what it is today. These photos show what I saw during three four-day visits to Indian Days, four days each year that are unlike any others in Browning.
At first my attention was pulled right into the center, the circular arbor that is the nucleus of the action of North American Indian Days, where the dancing and drumming take place. As the days rolled on, I realized that much of the life of Indian Days takes place outside the arbor, in the encampment, where families gather in lodges, tents, around picnic tables, coming to be together from as close as two blocks away and as far as Canada.
I was struck by the comfortable coexistence of iconic images of Indians in feathers and buckskin with images of 21st century reality.
I am an outsider, a descendant of the white culture that very nearly decimated the Blackfeet. And yet I don’t think I’ve ever been met with such warmth and openness while photographing. I was invited into lodges and fed potato salad. My interest was welcomed. That was heartwarming, as I’m uncomfortable photographing people unless given permission.
Thank you, Browning, Montana.
Thank you to our hosts, Darrell and Roberta Kipp. Roberta is a long-time fixture at the Browning Middle School. Darrell, a descendent of one of the few survivors of the Baker Massacre in 1870, started the Piegan Institute, which instructs Blackfeet children in the Blackfeet or Piegan language.
Thank you, Suzanne, for enriching my photographs with your writing and making the energy of Indian Days alive for this Vermont audience.
Evie Lovett
Suzanne’s Statement
On the fifth of July, 2006, Evie Lovett and I left at dawn from Brattleboro, Vermont and arrived twelve hours later in the town of Browning, Montana on the Blackfeet Indian reservation, thirteen miles east of what the Blackfeet call the “Backbone of the World”, in the foothills of the magnificent Rockies. Acknowledged as one of the most powerful tribes in the American northwest, the Blackfeet, or the Piegans, are part of a confederacy of three independent tribes, living in Montana and Alberta, Canada.
We were in Browning for North American Indian Days, one of the largest gatherings of the United States and Canadian tribes where tipis are pitched on the powwow grounds and for four days Browning is filled with drumming, singing, contest dancing, rodeos, parades and celebration. During that time, Evie documented what she saw with her camera, and I documented my own observations in a little black notebook.
Why were we drawn to Browning to do this project? Why is the wind drawn in a certain direction? Perhaps we were drawn by the simple fact of celebration, the mystery of medicine bundles, the high tessitura of Blackfeet singing, the ancient gravesites with carved names that tell a story: Kicking Woman, Comes at Night, Old Person and Scabby Robe. Perhaps my best answer is that we were drawn there because our culture lost something sacred long ago, and each of us, in our small way, is searching to reclaim it. And in that seeking, maybe we were able to answer an eternal, constant question: What does the power of the human spirit look like?
Suzanne Kingsbury
A selection of images from the exhibit
Show Sponsored in Part by an Anonymous Friend of the VCP
