The Michener Art Museum in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, recently acquired a large-scale mixed media piece by Delaware Nation artist Holly Wilson. Bloodline, which measures 22 feet across, depicts the elongated forms of bronze figures walking across rough-cut slabs of locust wood.
Holly Wilson (Delaware Nation), Bloodline, 2015, unique cast bronze with patina and locust wood, 29 x 264 x 9"
“It is the stories of family, history and identity that brought me to Bloodline. It is a long trail of my Native American history, my bloodline,” says Wilson. “To be ‘on the Rolls’ as a Native American, you must prove a quantum of blood verified through birth and death records until you match up to a name on the official ‘Dawes Rolls.’ As I began walking through the past to document my blood, with the names and some faces, I wanted to hear them speak and tell their story. I wanted them to be counted.”
Wilson explains that the figures walk across a locust tree base that came down during a storm. “It is cut lengthwise, exposing the rough center, revealing the lines that show its life and history. I de-barked the exterior but kept the curve of the tree and its raw surface. You see the figures walking through time—their life above and the tree’s life below,” she says.
Made from real cigars and found sticks cast in bronze, the figures were inspired by stories Wilson heard as a child. “The ‘Cigar Figures’ come from a childhood Native American story that my mother told of the ‘Stick People’...[who] would run through the night and call your name. If you went with them, you were never heard from again. She never described the figures, and I was always drawn to the idea of what they looked like. The Cigar Figures are my reimagining of that story, now a story of family and my past—a complicated narrative of loss, survival and resilience.” The faces of each person capture Wilson’s ancestors, as far back as the artist can trace.
Bloodline was also a part of the Michener Art Museum exhibition Never Broken: Visualizing Lenape Histories, which concluded in January.
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