This is the second installation in a series of profiles and Q&As with Indigenous artists with roots in, or connections to, the Pacific Northwest.
Brenda Mallory is an artist, sculptor, and citizen of the Cherokee Nation of Oklahoma, who lives in Portland. Although she didn’t attend art school until her forties, Mallory considers herself a lifelong maker. In her work, Mallory gives new life to discarded materials, like recycled fabrics and metal scraps, while exploring themes of connection and disruption. In addition to her own practice, Mallory also mentors young artists.
Mallory’s work will be on display at an upcoming installation at the Russo Lee Gallery in Portland in May 2023. She also has an upcoming solo exhibition at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona in April 2023. Pieces of Mallory’s work can be seen at the Hallie Ford Museum in Salem or at the Russo Lee Gallery in Portland by request.
Street Roots sat down with Mallory to discuss her work.
This conversation was edited for length and clarity.
Melanie Henshaw: How would you describe yourself as an artist?
Brenda Mallory: I describe my work basically as 3D sculptural work, although mostly based as wallhangings, and sometimes I do installations. Most of my work, and it has been for many years, is created from either found or reclaimed (materials) or post-industrial waste.
So, I'm very much interested in working with reclaimed materials because I feel like they carry a lot of embedded meaning, and for me, conceptually, I'm interested in this idea of things that are broken or considered unworthy and how actually there is another life in those things or a further function.
A 2019 piece by Brenda Mallory titled “Proximate Parcels” made from thread spools and cores.(Photo courtesy of Brenda Mallory)
Or I'm interested in things that are broken, and I put them back together. And for me, that's metaphorical for the same ways that all our tribes, even though we were decimated and taken out of our original homelands, we are not destroyed. We may be very different from what we originally were, but we're still very much functioning entities.
Henshaw: How did you begin your journey as an artist?
Mallory: Well, all my life, I've been some kind of maker. And I think I sort of modeled after my dad and my aunties, everybody was just doing things with their hands all the time.
But I didn't actually go back to art school until I was in my 40s. I had a degree in linguistics and English from UCLA from years ago. I'd always dabbled in art and ceramics and drawing, but I had never felt like I had a full-out foundation and knowing what I was doing. So when I was about 40, I decided to go back to art school, and I've been very glad I did.
It's really made a difference in the foundation of my career and feeling confident and being able to know why I'm doing what I'm doing and where it relates into history. At least, and here's a big aside, at least, how it relates into Western art history and the Western canon. Because, of course, that's really all I was taught in school. And anything I know about Native art, you know, that's kind of come from a self-taught place, or not self-taught, but like a program of self-education, because it's not what you get taught in school.
Henshaw: So as a Cherokee person, as you said, living as a citizen at-large in Portland, how would you describe your relationship to the Pacific Northwest, and how, if at all, does it influence your work?
Mallory: Well, I love the Pacific Northwest, I feel more at home here than I did in Oklahoma. I grew up in Oklahoma all my life ‘til I was 26. I think I left Oklahoma, and then I was in Los Angeles for a while, but I just find myself super, super comfortable in the area here. The rain, the mountains, the closeness to the coast.
So yeah, I think genetically, you know, Cherokees come from the Southeast of the U.S. where there's mountains and something a lot closer to the Pacific Northwest and then my settler (ancestors), they're all Irish and English. So this landscape and environment up here just suits my health temperament somehow better.
… I have my whole immediate family here with me. But I actually do have a lot of cousins and nieces and nephews back in Oklahoma still. So I still think of Oklahoma as home, but in a certain way, now this is truly my home here in the Pacific Northwest.
You know what’s kind of cool? For almost the first time ever, last October, I ended up going back to North Carolina and doing an artist residency in basically the homelands of the Cherokee. And that was so cool. So I set it up with four other Cherokee artists or art professionals. And we all had time on this residency together in our original homeland. So that was super special.
Henshaw: What was the most powerful part of that experience for you?
(Photo courtesy of Brenda Mallory)
Mallory: It truly, for me, was just like, feeling in this land. And like, the view of the mountains and the plants and just feeling like ‘Oh, my God, this is home,’ And then going to, you know, our mother town, to Kituwah (Mound). That was great.
Then we met up with the director of the Museum of the Cherokee and hung out with her and the director of education. And it's just very welcoming, I’m in western Oklahoma, and I'm thinking, ‘Oh, no, these eastern Cherokees, they're gonna think ‘What are y'all doing back here?’ But no, they were so welcoming, so great. I just loved it.
Henshaw: What would you say are some of the most important characteristics of your art?
Mallory: It's full of bits and pieces. Everything I make is always constructed of hundreds, hundreds of pieces that are all joined together by some kind of connector.
And I think they're usually pretty large, and I think sometimes they need to be that, for variety and rhythm to develop across the piece. Because basically, even though I say everything's the same, all these units, they all kind of look different, because there'll be color variations or shape variations. So it's very clear, there's an artist's hands there.
But it's about connections and showing these ideas of things being held together and repaired. When I make things that are sewn, I sew them so that you see the seams, and you see what holds them together. So things like that, just ideas of connection and networking and holding together.
Henshaw: What are some of your biggest inspirations?
Mallory: Well, that kind of runs a bit of a gamut. I'm very inspired by just nature in the way nature grows and things that just add on to themselves and keep growing out.
In my early career, I was really inspired by how like Monsanto, the company that makes all the RoundUp and that Terminator seed technology, how that is interrupting systems of agriculture and natural growth, because that's what some of their chemicals do.
And then lately, more, I would say, this broader idea of just interrupted systems in general. Again, taking that back to systems like our tribes that were removed, or their lands stolen, that disrupts what has developed over millennia, and then suddenly, it's disrupted and has to adapt. So that idea of adaptability, and change and repair, those are some of my big things that inspire me.
I'm making a piece right now, or thinking about it anyway, based on land allotments in Oklahoma. I have a few pieces about that already. Again, when I say “about that,” you might not know that unless you really studied it, or you talk to me, because all of my work is definitely abstract.
I am not working with any icons or symbols that are figurative or readily identifiable maybe. So I'm very much a fan of abstraction, I think it's a place where the viewer gets to make meaning. And there's not just one way of looking at a situation or interpreting a piece, and that is also important to me because I feel like that is also how the world is. I think there's so many ways to look at a situation. Not much is really, truly black and white.
Henshaw: Is there a particular material that is your favorite to work with, or one that you gravitate to as just the most pleasurable to create with?
Mallory: Yeah, I would have to say it is this waxed cloth that I've been using for years. And it's scraps of flannel that I sew together and then I dip them through a beeswax mixture.
Just everything about that whole process I love. I love the beeswax. When I was a kid, my grandfather was a beekeeper. So there's something about bees and the hexagonal form in that material; it's my go-to. I often work with stuff I find from the dump — all kinds of crazy, disparate materials. And sometimes those are a big challenge. Like, well, how do I work with this thing? How do I cut this? How do I problem-solve how to work with it? But the wax cloth, I really, really know it.
It's like a clay artist; that's my clay, I know what I'm doing with it. So that allows me to then do all kinds of things with it. And I'm not stuck.
There's a whole section on my website called, I think, “works with wax” or “wax work,” something like that. And everything in that whole section is made with this process of sewing little forms up and then dipping them in wax, or sometimes it's maybe bigger sheets of fabrics that I sew pleats into and coat it with wax then by brushing it. There's a whole section of my website of those works.
Henshaw: Since you use a lot of reclaimed materials, what are some of your favorite places, or places that you frequent most to source your material?
Mallory: Well, my most fun place ever was when I had the residency at the dump.
This is a Portland residency called GLEAN. It's five artists, (we) get to go for five months to the transfer station, basically the dump, and pick materials. And then at the end of those five months, you have a show.
So that was just the best. I love that. It's both wonderful and also kind of sad because it says so much about our society, of how much really amazing stuff just gets thrown away. So it could be its own whole sociological study, like at the dump. But that was super fun. And I still have materials I collected from that, and I did that way back in 2015.
But I also get supplies, fabric supplies, from a company here in town, Glad Rags, that makes cotton menstrual pads, so I get their off-cuts sometimes and a company here called School Town, I get stuff from them. And then there's also, you probably already know about, this place called Scrap. It's over in northwest Portland, I think right on 19th maybe — not too far from Burnside. I get stuff there sometimes. And people know I collect junk, so they just give me stuff.
Henshaw: What would you say, in terms of your personal history, has been some of the most influential aspects in your work? Do you work to incorporate your identity as a Native person into your art?
Mallory: I think that does come through, because I've worked a lot with stuff from my childhood.
My dad was a farmer, and we didn't have a lot of money. So half the stuff around the farm was held together with baling wire, and maybe in some slipshod way. And some of those methods of binding and tying up stuff, that still informs my work to this day. And while I feel like, culturally, my family, we weren't in like the super traditional area of Cherokee Nation — not near Tahlequah, we were kind of outliers, we didn't really have ceremony or anything like that.
So I guess, for me, it's more of like this connection to the land, and our way of food gathering and being close in family, so a lot of that stuff does inform my work.
Sometimes people have very specific ideas of what a Native person is, and, well, I'm a Native person, but I don't have any ceremony or anything, but what I have comes through in my work, and I guess it's Native art, because I'm Native.
And the other thing, I do think this idea of systems and trying to figure out what's going on in systems — that I think comes from my linguistic background of trying to analyze how a language works. Like I don't really speak a bunch of languages or anything like that.
But I do understand how languages work and how there are rules that a language has within itself and how things change and morph. So yeah, I would say both my childhood growing up and my degree in linguistics are two things that affect my work.
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