Join us on November 19, 2024 at 04:30 PM for a Corn Husk Weaving Workshop led by Elizabeth James Perry, Aquinnah Wampanoag. This event is co-sponsored by the Harvard University Native American Program, Natives at Harvard College, the Black Arts Collective, and the Women of Color Collective.

About the artist:
Elizabeth James-Perry is enrolled with Aquinnah Wampanoag tribe, and is a Native whaling descendant. She has a dual background in Marine Science and Northeastern Native Art. Her watercolor Bear Map series features the land as a Black Bear to emphasize earth has agency and deserves respect. Her wampum shell-carving often blends with textile arts, as exemplified in the intricate Wampanoag Leadership Medallion for Interwoven Power at Montclair Art Museum on buffalo wool; another is Weatchimun a wampum belt on milkweed cordage commemorating the shell-edged Raven Reshapes Boston planting. The Tufts exhibit and outside mural Double Arrows encouraged reciprocal relationships with Nature and restorative gardens supporting Native self-reliance and sustainability. Blue Shark mounded garden with Emerald Necklace Conservancy followed, which again pushes against cultural/environmental erasure in Boston.

Her recording about King Philips Sash for Wampanoag Voices Beyond 2020 at Peabody Harvard Museum, Cambridge links a Native powderhorn strap with the story of colonization. She designed authentic wardrobe for The Great Gatsby and Moby Dick at Harvard A.R.T., and centered tribal homelands as B-roll Producer for As Nutayunean, a Wampanoag film. The 2020 exhibit Another Crossing, and film White Heart co-produced with Dutch designer Christien Meindertsma, looks at Indigenous wampum beadmaking and Czech glass beads. James-Perry was a Native Advisor for the New England Foundation of the Arts Native Symposium 2020, the TEK collaborator for Seals and Society and consultant for the Smithsonian Institute’s Shifting Boundaries that questions assumptions embodied in historic landscape paintings.