Whether you live here or are just passing through, this crazy state called Florida often seems bewildering and chaotic. Florida’s First Nations artists, many from the Panther Clan of the south Florida Seminoles, express their own relevant views on the Sunshine State, on themselves and on the future in a show at the Albin Polasek Museum titled Yaat Ya Oke (translated as “Welcome, Travelers”), a friendly invitation to see Florida and the Seminole tribe from a less chaotic viewpoint.
Artist Tara Chadwick, of the Papalotl (Butterfly) Project, co-curated the exhibit. Papalotl engages Indigenous youth and elders in an art- and science-based cultural knowledge exchange. Home base for the artists she worked with is the Ah-Tah-Thi-Ki Museum, the Seminole Tribe of Florida’s museum in Clewiston; they have exhibited in South Florida, Tallahassee and at the Smithsonian Museum.
More than 20 artists contributed to this exhibit, ranging from the late Jimmy Osceola (1939-2021) to Shonayeh Shonie Tommie, age 9. Osceola’s “Camp Life 2,” a landscape glowing with one of Florida’s legendary sunsets, shows a reverence for our natural state which still exists underneath all the asphalt and concrete.
Exquisite beadwork and weaving are on display, and the artists formally explore current mediums such as digital art with the same spirit that their ancestors showed when confronted with change. Corinne Zepeda’s three crisp digital prints each depict Seminole figures in traditional dress. The figures titled “Waach” and “Taat” are startlingly fresh, easily gaining spatial equity for these Seminole characters amid our post-Warholian sensibilities.
This push-pull between tradition and modernity gives Yaat Ya Oke an edge that feels sharper, and bigger, than even the Polasek’s high-ceilinged galleries. Forced by colonizers into a hybrid existence, Florida’s First Nations live, like all of us, in a machine-ridden world where the computer is the second soul. Yet these artists maintain a strong identity and spirit arising from a culture where binary definitions — such as art versus craft, or modern versus traditional — are superficial.
Instead, there’s a respect for nature and for previous generations that comes through the art. Wilson Bowers and Gordon Wareham collaborated on “Clan Mothers,” a digital print of a small central figure facing six larger animal spirits, all of whom stare fiercely in a kind of architrave of ancestor figures. They impart a sense of responsibility to the viewer.
What is that responsibility? Well, each viewer may take a different impression from Yaat Ya Oke: the ability to appreciate the world from which these artists come, or a tribute to previous generations for what they have passed down to us. Or: a responsibility to our future generations to try not to fuck it all up.
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