This program continues a series of artists’ conversations focused on the thematic threads of Making Their Mark. Featuring artists Melissa Cody and Tau Lewis, the discussion will consider the ways their works express identity, power, lineage, and the self through materials, making, portraiture, and abstraction. Curator and writer Jenelle Porter moderates.

Melissa Cody is an enrolled member of the Navajo Nation whose work is featured in Making Their Mark. Her dynamic, vibrant, and bold weavings follow in the Diné (Navajo) tradition, drawing on techniques Cody learned from her grandmother and mother, both respected weavers in their communities. Cody melds these traditional methods with the “Germantown style” developed in the nineteenth century in Germantown, Pennsylvania, and also draws inspiration from digital graphics from early Nintendo video games and other cultural phenomena from the 1980s. She is a graduate of the Institute of American Indian Arts and has exhibited widely, both in the United States and in Canada.

Tau Lewis is a New York based artist whose work is featured in Making Their Mark. A self-taught artist, Lewis has crafted her education through communion with peers, like the queer Caribbean collective RAGGA NYC, and pilgrimages to meet the artists and institutions that inspire her, such as Atlanta-based artist Lonnie Holley and the Gee’s Bend Quilting Collective. Once a student of journalism, the artist channels stories through material constructions. Using labor-intensive techniques like hand-sewing, applique, carving, and assemblage, she transforms recycled materials into large-scale figurative works.

Jenelle Porter is a Los Angeles based curator and writer who has organized numerous exhibitions on modern and contemporary art and craft. She has organized monographic exhibitions on artists including Barbara T. Smith, Kay Sekimachi, Kathy Butterly, Charline von Heyl, Jeffrey Gibson, and Mary Reid Kelley.