ART CITIES:N.York-Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill

Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill is a Cree* and Métis** artist and writer. Hill’s sculptural practice explores the history of found materials to enquire into concepts of land, property, and economy. Often, her works emerge from a curiosity about how land becomes legal property, and what the vulerabilites of this relationship are. Hill creates her works through weaving, tying and binding materials, which are all actions associated with casting spells. Hill is a member of BUSH gallery, an Indigenous artist collective seeking to decentre Eurocentric models of making and thinking about art, prioritizing instead land-based teachings and Indigenous epistemologies.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: MoMA Archive

In his first solo exhibition in a U.S. Museum Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill has assembled multiple works in which her use of tobacco as a key material alludes to the plant’s complex indigenous and colonial histories. The exhibition features sculptures and drawings, including several new works, constructed primarily from tobacco along with other sourced and found materials collected from her Vancouver neighborhood. Projects: Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill  is organized by Lucy Gallun, Associate Curator, Department of Photography. Prior to colonization, tobacco was among the most widely traded materials in the Americas. Later, tobacco became the first currency in the colonies of North America, before the dollars in use today. English settlers established a system in which promissory notes representing amounts of tobacco (Tobacco Notes) could be used to purchase goods, as well as to leverage wages, taxes, and fines. Today, “the Indigenous economic life of tobacco continues, despite colonialism, criminalization, and the imposition of capitalism” Hill observes, “it’s evidence that our economic systems survive and continue to offer an alternative”. Occupying the gallery’s central tables are Hill’s ground-tobacco-stuffed sculptures, the largest and newest of which approximates the size of the artist’s own body. Some of these rabbits and hybrid human figures will stand proudly or playfully, while others languidly recline. Borrowing their proportions from the dimensions of the current US dollar bill, five flags hang high on the gallery walls. Three flags are sewn directly from gradually disintegrating tobacco leaves, while the other two are constructed through a labor-intensive process in which Hill coats paper in homemade tobacco-infused Crisco oil and applied pigments, which must dry over several months, after which additional materials are sewn or glued to the surface. Made through the same process as her tobacco-oil-soaked flags, Hill’s drawings that she calls “Spells” take the form of small, delicate, richly colored drawings adorned with charms, wildflowers, beer tabs, and other collected ephemera. These spells, some of which have been made for Hill’s friends, represent the power of reciprocity, interdependence, and dispersal, attributes also central in a gift economy. Hill’s use of tobacco as material at once critiques settler colonial economic systems and celebrates the Indigenous history of the gift economy, in which tobacco remains a key component.

*Cree:  one of the major Algonquian-speaking Native American tribes, whose domain included an immense area from east of Hudson and James bays to as far west as Alberta and Great Slave Lake in what is now Canada. Originally inhabiting a smaller nucleus of this area, they expanded rapidly in the 17th and 18th centuries after engaging in the fur trade and acquiring firearms.

**Métis: indigenous nation of Canada that has combined Native American and European cultural practices since at least the 17th century. Their language, Michif, which is a French and Cree trade language, is also called French Cree or Métis. The first Métis were the children of indigenous women and European fur traders in the Red River area.

Photo: Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill. Exchange. 2019. Pantyhose, tobacco, cigarettes, thread, tobacco flowers, aluminum can tabs, spider charm, and plastic metal hair clip, 17 5/16 × 20 3/16 × 31 3/8″ / 43.9 × 51.3 × 79.7 cm. Courtesy the artist and Unit 17-Vancouver, and Cooper Cole-Toronto, © Gabrielle L’Hirondelle Hill

Info: Curator: Lucy Gallun, MoMA, 11 West 53 Street, Manhattan, New York, Duration: 25/4-15/8/2021, Days & Hours: Daily 10:30-17:30 (by advance timed ticket, book here), www.moma.org