First Friday Grand Opening: Brenda Mallory’s “The North Star Changes”

This First Friday, we celebrate the opening of the Heard’s latest exhibition, The North Star Changes: Works by Brenda Mallory, by welcoming the artist (Cherokee Nation) and author Joseph M. Pierce (Cherokee Nation) to the Heard Museum.

Schedule:
5 – 9 p.m. Heard Museum Open for Free to Everyone
6 – 7 p.m. Free Artist Talk

At 6 p.m., join Mallory and Pierce in the Heard’s Encanto Room to hear a free discussion about the exhibition along with live readings from the author. Then head into the museum to experience a deeper understanding of the Heard’s latest exhibition.

Brenda Mallory lives in Portland, Oregon but grew up in Oklahoma and is a citizen of the Cherokee Nation. Her mixed media sculptural works are comprised of a variety of materials including cloth, fibers, beeswax and found objects. By creating multiple forms that are joined with crude hardware that imply tenuous connections or repairs, her work addresses ideas of interference and disruption in long-established systems of nature and human cultures.

Mallory’s Heard Museum exhibition, The North Star Changes, is based on the idea that humans perceive the North Star as permanent. Currently, Polaris is the North Star, but over the course of thousands of years, different stars assume the position and the name. Permanence becomes impermanence, and Mallory notes, “The idea of things changing has always been in my work.”

Mallory invited scholar and curator Joseph M. Pierce to compose a new essay to accompany her exhibition. Pierce is Associate Professor at Stony Brook University, where he teaches Indigenous studies, Latin American studies, visual culture, and queer studies. He is the author of Argentine Intimacies: Queer Kinship in an Age of Splendor, 1890-1910 (SUNY Press), and with SJ Norman (Wiradjuri) he is co-curator of the performance series “Knowledge of Wounds.”

The Heard Museum will be open for free to everyone from 5 – 9 p.m.

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