Mni Sóta: Traditions & Innovations
Fiber and Material Culture of the Indigenous Landscape
Delina White, Curator
Joan Mondale Gallery
April 14 – July 11, 2026
Artist reception Thursday, June 4, 5:30 – 7 pm
Mni Sóta: Traditions & Innovations honors Native textile and fiber arts as living knowledge held in the hands and shaped by place. For the Tribal Nations of Minnesota, textiles are teachings, protection, identity, and relationship, formed through artistic skills guided by water, forest, prairie, and season, and carried forward across generations.
Featuring distinguished Dakota and Anishinaabe artists working today, the exhibition highlights practices that extend ancestral forms through contemporary expression. Beadwork, cloth, fiber, hide, quilting, weaving, and mixed media reveal technical mastery, material understanding, and cultural responsibility.
Curated by Delina White, the exhibition brings together Minnesota artists whose work invites close looking and thoughtful appreciation. Each piece carries labor, intention, and story, affirming Native textile arts as a living presence, continually becoming.
Participating Artists: Lavender Doris, Red Lake Anishinaabe Nation; Valerie Whitebird, Fond du Lac Band Anishinaabe; Cole Redhorse Taylor, Prairie Island Dakota Community; Adrienne Benjamin, Mille Lacs Band of Ojibwe; Kent Estey and the Nayatahwaush Community, White Earth Nation; Georgina Drapeau, Lower Sioux Indian Community; Fern Cloud, Upper Sioux Community; Melvin Losh, Leech Lake Band of Anishinaabe; Delina and Gerald White, Leech Lake Band of Anishinaabe; Marcie McIntire, Grand Portage Band of Lake Superior Chippewa
