Kenneth Johnson (Muscogee/Seminole)
Chair

Kenneth Johnson is a contemporary Muscogee/Seminole jeweler and bronze sculptor living in Santa Fe. He transforms copper, silver, gold, platinum, and palladium into wearable art in his downtown Santa Fe studio. Johnson’s work was recently worn at the Grammys in October by Reservoir Dog’s director Sterlin Harjo who rocked a signature silver Woodpecker gorget necklace while presenting awards. He has created custom jewelry for notables such as U.S. Supreme Court Justices Sandra Day O’Connor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Sonja Sotomayor, Canadian Chief Justice Beverley McLachlin, and British House of Lords Baroness Emma Nicholson.

His professional service includes teaching jewelry workshops for the Creek Council House Museum, SWAIA board of directors Co-chair; and Council of Artists chair where he represented the interests of over 1000 artists to that board.

Vanessa Elmore (Colombian-American)
Secretary

Vanessa is a professional art appraiser, advisor, and collections manager specializing in the Art of the Americas, and holds a Master of Arts degree in Art History from the University of New Mexico. Based in Santa Fe, she has been in the art industry for over twenty years and has handled countless artworks spanning ancient history to now. Prior to starting her appraisal business, Vanessa held long-term positions at Morning Star Gallery (Nedra Matteucci Galleries) and Blue Rain Gallery. Most importantly, Vanessa had a long friendship and professional relationship with the founder, Ted Coe and his family, and because of that, she is very familiar with the Coe Center’s art collection and takes this stewardship with the utmost respect and honor.

Randy J. Brokeshoulder
Director

Randy J. Brokeshoulder is of Hopi, Navajo, and Absentee Shawnee heritage. He is a third-generation katsina carver and the great-grandson to Guy Maktima of Hotevilla—Third Mesa, Arizona. He currently resides in Santa Fe, New Mexico, as a finance banker and artist.

Jessa Rae Growing Thunder (Dakota/Nakoda), Ph.D.
Director

Haŋ mitakuyapi. Suŋgina Duzaham Wiŋyan emakiapi. Mnisda Wakiyaŋ Iŋga tiwahe etaŋhaŋ ouhepi. Damakoda nakun Nakoda, de Tatanka Oyate. Cante waste yuha, ciyuzihapi. (Greetings our relatives. My name is Jessa Rae Growing Thunder. The Growing Thunder family comes from Bald Water Place. I am Dakota and Nakoda, from the Buffalo Nation. I shake all of your hands with a good heart.)

I come from a family who has raised me to uphold our Oceti Sakowin values; to have compassion for others, to know and honor family, and to be humble yet brave. Who I am is justified by the deep roots of my family; I am a product of my grandmothers. My unci (Dakota for “maternal grandmother”), Joyce, was born and raised on the Fort Peck Reservation in Montana. Her grandmother, Josephine, taught her the importance of being a woman through ceremonies, cooking, beadwork, and quillwork; and in turn, my unci taught these knowledges to my ina (Dakota for “mother”), and eventually myself. The foundation of who I am as a young Dakota/Nakoda woman, is my identity as a third-generation traditional beadworker and quillworker. My life’s work strives to guarantee the perseverance and survival of these traditional knowledges and the wealth of opportunity they provide.

Over the years I have focused my time and energy on fulfilling positions that have the potential to provide positive experiences for our communities. In 2012-2013 I had the honor of serving as Miss Indian World, in which I traveled throughout the U.S. and Canada focusing my efforts on the promotion of cultural preservation programs. In the summer of 2014, I held the privilege of being a liaison for the U.S. State Department. I traveled across the country of Ecuador, with three associates, creating dialogues with Quechua peoples regarding ancestral technologies and preservation. In June 2017, I was honored to be a guest instructor at the Oscar Howe Summer Art Institute at the University of South Dakota where I taught Native youth the importance of traditional Native art forms, like beadwork and quillwork. In 2018 I had the esteemed privilege of working as a Native American traditional artist for the U.S. State Department’s Arts Envoy Program in Saudi Arabia. Our trip consisted of traveling the kingdom promoting North American Indigenous arts and culture.

Along with these amazing opportunities, I have been blessed with an abundance of possibilities as a traditional Northern Plains artist. My work, alongside my ina and unci, speaks to the intergenerational knowledge of our traditional arts. Most recently our work has been shown in, Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists, shown at Minneapolis Institute of Art, the Frist Museum, the Renwick Gallery of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Philbrook Museum of Art. My family’s work has also been featured in the exhibition, Identity by Design: Tradition, Change, and Celebration in Native Women’s Dresses, curated by the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. My soft-sculpture work gave me the honor of being one of five artists featured in the exhibition, Grand Procession: A Collection of Contemporary Native American Soft Sculpture, at the Denver Art Museum, the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian, and the Heard Museum.

I am currently a Ph.D. Candidate in Native American Studies at University of California, Davis. My research is rooted in the practice of history as an Indigenous tradition of Dakota/Nakoda peoples. With this project, I am conducting a Dakota/Nakoda tribal history study with my unci who is a renowned beadwork artist. This work applies both recognized (archival and oral history) and traditional creative forms of knowledge transmission through analyzing her beadwork as living testimony to Fort Peck history. It is important to note these two threads of my project are not separate nor disjointed, but rather tightly woven together. By conducting a tribal history project using creative forms of knowledge transmission speaks to the decolonization of Indigenous history and the reinforcement of cultural/tribal sovereignty. Furthermore, this project empowers the women of Fort Peck and in turn contributes to the empowerment of our culture and community.

To assist in my analysis of how oral history work can contribute to the contemporary Fort Peck voice, I assert that Fort Peck Dakota/Nakoda women have always been historians. Through traditional beadwork, Fort Peck women have encrypted our/their histories into every stitch. These beaded histories, though seemingly voiceless, have “spoken”—and can be read as texts—with precise articulation via traditional forms of knowledge transmission throughout colonialism. Dakota/Nakoda women’s use of traditional creative forms of knowledge transmission, specifically oral testimony and beadwork, are key to understanding and advancing Fort Peck sovereignty. My in-depth study of such creative historical forms contributes to an overdue recognition of Dakota/Nakoda women artists, such as my unci, as agents of decolonization through the generative beaded histories they create and disseminate to kin and tribal members. I argue that positioning and engaging with these traditional creative forms as authoritative sources asserts our sovereign right to history. Colonial perceptions of our sovereignty have diminished these rights through non-Dakota/Nakoda lenses and definitions. By centering and privileging Dakota/Nakoda ways of history, this research offers a template for future studies that will ultimately contribute to and strengthen our sovereignty.

As a young Indigenous woman, I carry the responsibilities of living a good life that promises a future for our traditional knowledges. At the foundation of my community work are the knowledges and gifts that my unci and ina have given me as a beadworker and quillworker. No matter what every day brings, whether it is writing my dissertation, teaching University students, instructing museum workshops, I end the day doing exactly what my grandmothers have done before me; at the end of every day, after my daughter goes to sleep, I pick up my needle and thread.

Laurence A. G. Moss, MCP, MA, PhD
Vice Chair

Laurence A. G. Moss was raised in western Canada, Dr. Moss has lived and worked principally in western North America, Pacific Asia, and Central Europe. His North American base was Santa Fe, New Mexico from 1986 to 2006 when he returned to the Pacific Northwest with his family by the Kootenay Lake in Kaslo, BC, Canada. In 2017 he resettled in Santa Fe.

After studying political economy, art, and Asian studies at the University of British Columbia, he undertook graduate studies in socio-cultural change & economic development, applied anthropology, ecology, urban and regional planning, and art and environmental design at Keio University and the Advanced Center for Japanese Studies in Tokyo, Japan, and the University of California – Berkeley (degrees: MA, MCP, Ph.D.).

In his professional work, he has focused on regional and local change and sustainable development. During the past twenty-five years, he has targeted cultural and environmental sustainability and equity issues in mountain regions, particularly the effects of amenity migration, tourism, and related global socio-cultural forces.

Essential in his work is a multi-disciplinary and ecological approach, and the use of alternative futures analysis and planning. He is an innovator in theory and practice in these areas, and most recently focuses on cultural and political-economic constraints to implementing sustainability strategies and plans. He has worked for local communities, regional and national bodies, and through a number of international organizations in some thirty countries.