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aprile 14, 2021 - Moma

MoMA Celebrates 50 Years of Projects with Gabrielle L'Hirondelle Hill

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NEW YORK, February 11, 2020, Museum of Modern Art presents Projects: Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill, the artist’s first solo museum exhibition in the United States. On view in the Museum’s street-level galleries from April 25 through August 15, 2021, the exhibition also celebrates the 50th anniversary of MoMA’s #elainedannheisser Projects Series. Hill, a Métis artist and writer, has assembled multiple works in which her use of tobacco as a key material alludes to the plant’s complex indigenous and colonial histories. The exhibition features sculptures and drawings, including several new works, constructed primarily from tobacco along with other sourced and found materials collected from her Vancouver neighborhood. Projects: Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill is organized by #lucygallun, Associate Curator, Department of Photography.

Prior to colonization, tobacco was among the most widely traded materials in the Americas. Later, tobacco became the first currency in the colonies of North America, before the dollars in use today. English settlers established a system in which promissory notes representing amounts of tobacco— “Tobacco Notes”—could be used to purchase goods, as well as to leverage wages, taxes, and fines. Today, “the Indigenous economic life of tobacco continues, despite colonialism, criminalization, and the imposition of capitalism,” Hill observes, “it’s evidence that our economic systems survive and continue to offer an alternative.

” Occupying the gallery’s central tables will be Hill’s ground-tobacco-stuffed sculptures—the largest and newest of which approximates the size of the artist’s own body. Some of these rabbits and hybrid human figures will stand proudly or playfully, while others languidly recline. Borrowing their proportions from the dimensions of the current US dollar bill, five flags will hang high on the gallery walls. Three flags are sewn directly from gradually disintegrating tobacco leaves, while the other two are constructed through a laborintensive process in which Hill coats paper in homemade tobacco-infused Crisco oil and applied pigments, which must dry over several months, after which additional materials are sewn or glued to the surface.

Made through the same process as her tobacco-oil-soaked flags, Hill’s Spells take the form of small, delicate, richly colored drawings adorned with charms, wildflowers, beer tabs, and other collected ephemera. These spells, some of which have been made for Hill’s friends, represent the power of reciprocity, interdependence, and dispersal, attributes also central in a gift economy. Hill’s use of tobacco as material at once critiques settler colonial economic systems and celebrates the Indigenous history of the gift economy, in which tobacco remains a key component.