Portland Community College | Portland, Oregon

Building community with her art

Photos and story by James Hill

In an age when email and cell phones can make communication impersonal, PCC visual arts instructor Marie Watt has brought people together to socialize and build unity in a way that a chatroom can never do. "Braid," the focal point of Watt’s recent solo show at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian in New York City, is the end result. For the large fiber arts project, Watt enlisted dozens of people to help her stitch it in her home. The recently completed intensive art exhibit involved dozens of wool blankets. The show runs from September 2004 to January 2005 and then will then be on exhibit through March 13."It made sense to use the wool blankets," said Watt. "In Native culture, they are given away to people who witness important life events like marriages and retirements. It is just as big of an honor to give them as it is to receive them. They are objects we generally take for granted in our lives but they have a relationship connected to them."Watt, 37, first started searching for old blankets from friends or family. Then she took it one step further by scouring thrift stores. That led her to stacking the found objects into a column, which eventually became the piece on exhibit at the Smithsonian."I had no history of working with fiber," she explains. "Painting and sculpture on a small scale has always been my forte." Watt became fascinated with the concept of using the blankets as a record of time, that these blanket bindings become a document of human existence through the stitching and eventual wear."Braid," a 22 feet wide by 10 feet tall wool blanket, consists of two panels covered with sections cut from other blankets. Once she started the projects for the Smithsonian show, it became apparent that she wouldn’t finish the stitching. So, she recruited family and friends and soon strangers, to help stitch pieces to the quilt, which turned into a six-month project."It was friends who wanted to get together to stitch and help," she said. "The act of sitting down and stitching – it’s easy to lose track of time and it naturally evolved from there."They would bring their friends and more came back asking if they could help. I finished the blankets and it was amazing to learn things about other people as you stitched next to one another. It was a different kind of learning than what you’d get from sitting down in a coffee shop and chatting. There was something nourishing being in that sort of atmosphere," she added.Watt is a graduate of Willamette University, the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, N.M. and holds a master’s degree in fine arts from Yale. An instructor at PCC for eight years, her background has been primarily painting. But it was a fascination with her mother’s Seneca dolls, fashioned from cornhusks, that led her to exploring ways to express cultural experiences and a sense of history.This isn’t the first time that the eight-year PCC visual arts instructor has tackled a grand project. In 2000, Watt constructed a temporary, six-ton stone bridge in her garage that later was lifted onto a flatbed truck via a crane and installed on the east bank of the Willamette River by the Steel Bridge. It is now permanently on display at the Sylvania Campus. In 2001, she worked to commission a 30-foot cedar totem pole by Richard Hunt, a renowned Kwaguilth artist from British Columbia.But it’s the Redmond, Wash. native’s blanket project that has been the most dazzling in scope and execution. It has involved more than 75 people and thousands of hours of stitching, sometimes hosting 18 people at once in shifts of one to three hours. Her living room was filled with her "sewing bees." Even artists from the Warm Springs Indian Reservation in central Oregon and Watt’s students got involved."I compare it to thrashing a field or raising a barn," she said. "It is where people come together to make something happen. The more people help, the stronger they become because of it. It’s a pretty special thing."