New Work in Progress at Sculpture in the Wild: Bently Spang explores native presence

When visitors arrive at Blackfoot Pathways: Sculpture in the Wild, the installation they are likely to see first is a cluster of lodgepole tripods created by Northern Cheyenne artist Bently Spang.

"There will be at least 25 forms brought together to call attention to the number of peoples that are still here," he said. "Rather than seeing us in the past, it's symbolic of setting up a lodge, the beginning of setting up a lodge. It's kind of saying we're still here; we're still setting up our lodges and still have a presence in this place and a long history here, too."

Spang said the tripod forms are characteristic of the first step in putting up Northern Cheyenne lodges.

"They're kind of grouped not in a pattern, but kind of randomly. Wherever they criss-cross, I'm tying them together to talk about how we're all interrelated as tribes,' he said, noting that though he is registered as part of the Northern Cheyenne tribe, his bloodline included several different tribes, including Lakota, Little Shell and Metis.

Spang, whose residency at BPSW was delayed for two years as the result of the COVID-19 pandemic, had initially considered creating a war shirt form.

Spang gained renown with his Modern Warrior Series based on the form of traditional Cheyenne war shirts. He began creating them using photographs of his family and the important landscapes of the Northern Cheyenne Reservation. His more recent war shirt forms are installations made up of multiple screens that display a video of significant areas and themes across the screens.

After spending more time at BPSW, he felt a war shirt form wouldn't have the right kind of effect in the space.

"When I come in to a space I like to negotiate with it to see what the space wants, too; the different kind of indications I get from the space," he said. "The install is kind of that moment of giving me the chance to interact and communicate with the space."

Spang said he thought about the fact that the native people's footprint on the landscape has always been a very subtle one.

"A lot of time the native layer of existence is not sort of known. That's what I'm bringing to this," he said. "I played with the notion of this place now that I've addressed it as a native person, that I'm sort of 'uncolonizing' it with this effort; that I'm taking off those layers of colonization to sort of bring people this information here.

The cluster of tripod forms was also a way to create a piece that has presence in the forested space.

"You're really at the mercy of that scale. Anything you're going to bring into it is going to shrink it down automatically," he said. "These forms have the kind of presence I was hoping for, and proportional to that space. It's coming along nice and feeling like a good fit."

The basic tipi forms also gave Spang the chance to provide a different perspective on the nearby Delaney Mill Teepee Burner. He said the form of the burners was utilitarian and his town had a sawmill that had one, but he explained that the term 'teepee burner' has a negative connotation for native people, given the fact that many of their lodges were destroyed during the battles of the late 19th century.

"The people who came after us were tipi burners in a way. It's an interesting counterpoint to that," he said. "I don't think the intention was to draw on the term in that way, but it's sort of the history of that terminology. There's a subtle kind of interaction. It's almost gives back that sort of correctness to that term, brings out that difference in terminology, in language that we grapple with."