Post Pilgrim — a new gallery for Native American art in Sioux Fallls — is kicking off a Final Fridays series to get art enthusiasts “off the beaten path,” (and across the river).
"It’s going to be a celebration as opposed to a quiet event,” says Post Pilgrim founder Jennnifer White. "I think the way the public interacts with galleries needs to change. It needs to become fun.”
The new gallery occupies a lower-level space at Last Stop CD Shop, next door to where Last Stop houses “The White Wall Sessions,” a local live-from-the-studio TV series, which will soon have a live audience.
White opened Post Pilgrim in April with exhibitions by Paul High Horse, Galen LaRoche, Robert Martinez, Don Montileaux, Melanie Kae Ratzlaff, and Dwayne Wilcox, as well as her own work.
White has a history with Last Stop. "Right when I got [to Sioux Falls], I decided to try to be represented by a gallery, and I got turned down by every single gallery I applied for. In their defense, I seriously did not know what I was doing then, [I was] kind of at that naive: ‘I’m going to blow them away with my talent’ status. But it didn’t really work out that way. That’s when I approached Last Stop CD Shop and asked them if I could do an art show and they said they’d been wanting to do one for a very long time. And this is where I really to got pushed into the scene."
"Here, you can be artistically free to do whatever you want. I’ve shown all over the country but this is my home. This is where I want to really shine, and where I want Native art to really get the credit it deserves."
She hopes that the gallery can be a space for interaction and a conversation starter. “By opening up this line of communication with all kinds of different people, with all levels of education and backgrounds, it’s a nice way to create a way to talk about uncomfortable issues, in a very relaxed, cool setting.”
For May’s Final Friday, she'll debut her own series of nude Native women for a night of “Naked Women and Naked Wine.”
“It’s kind of risqué for a Native painter to do nudes,” says White. “But that's just like a lot of other customs and rules that are slowly changing but changing for the best.”
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Listen to the DAKOTA MIDDAY interview with Jennifer White.
