Gail Tremblay (December 15, 1945 – May 3, 2023[2]) was an American writer and artist from Washington State. She is known for weaving baskets from film footage that depicts
Native American people, such as Western movies and anthropological documentaries. She received a Washington State Governor's Arts and Heritage Award in 2001.[3]
An Iroquois Dreams That the Tribes of the Middle East Will Take the Message of Deganawida to Heart and Make Peace (2009),
Smithsonian American Art Museum
Tremblay described her work as combining historical Native American techniques and materials with mainstream artistic expression.[11][12] Her poetry and art were inspired by the cultures of
Indigenous peoples of the Northeastern Woodlands.[7]
Tremblay says she learned basketry from her aunts, but "update[d] them for a contemporary audience" through the use of modern materials such as film stock and film leader.[13] Tremblay's art draws from Native American history, Indigenous cosmologies, along with literature, Western movies, and other pop culture references. She created a basket using red and white film leader entitled, And Then There's the Business of Fancydancing, inspired by
Sherman Alexie's film, The Business of Fancydancing (2002), in which the main character, a Spokane man, is
lovers with a white man. Tremblay describes the work, saying, "I chose to use Porcupine Stitch because there are so many difficult and prickly relationships between characters in this film.”[13] The film influence on her baskets also includes When will the Red Leader Overshadow Images of the 19th Century Noble Savage in Hollywood Films that Some Think are Sympathetic to American Indians (2018), a basket woven using
35mm movie film from the movie Windwalker (1981), which was acquired by the
Smithsonian American Art Museum in 2021.[14]
Artweek reviewer Marcia Morse writes, “And Then There is The Hollywood Indian Princess (2002). Using the
Northeastern Woodlands fancy-stick basket weaving, Tremblay wove with, not
brown ash and sweetgrass used by Northeastern tribes, but recycled 16 mm leader and film on sexually transmitted diseases, elegantly subverting multiple stereotypes.”[15]
A Note to Lewis and Clark's Ghosts (2004), Hallie Ford Museum of Art, Salem, Oregon;[23] and National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.[24]
An Iroquois Dreams That the Tribes of the Middle East Will Take the Message of Deganawida to Heart and Make Peace (2009),
Whatcom Museum,
Bellingham, Washington[27]
When will the Red Leader Overshadow Images of the 19th Century Noble Savage in Hollywood Films that Some Think are Sympathetic to American Indians (2018),
Smithsonian American Art Museum, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.[14]
When There Is No Category for a Film in a Native American Language on Oscar Night, Clearly It Is in a League of Its Own (2021),
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York[32]
Publications
Night Gives Women the Word (Omaha Printing Company, 1979)
Close to Home (University of Nebraska, 1981)
Indian Singing in 20th Century America (CALYX Books, 1990)
Farther From and Too Close to Home (CreateSpace Independent Publishing, 2013)
References
^
abcVigil, Jennifer C.
"Gail Tremblay."Museum of Contemporary Native Arts: Vision Project. (retrieved 10 May 2011)
^Tremblay, Gail (October 29, 2021). How I Gained the Skills to Team Teach, Was Asked to Come to Evergreen, Got to Work in the Longhouse, Sit on Its Advisory Board and Teach the First Academic Program in the Paimārire Fiber Arts Studio on the Indigenous Arts Campus. Artist Papers, Gail Tremblay Estate: unfinished and unpublished essay on the history of the Longhouse. p. 36.