Delaware Public Media Kelli Steele interviews Delaware Art Museum chief manager Heather Campbell Coyle and neighborhood engagement expert Iz Balleto.
Native culture is being celebrated in a summer season exhibition at the Delaware Art Museum in Wilmington.
“In Discussion: Will Wilson”opens this weekend.
“And the title tells you a lot,” said Heather Campbell Coyle – the chief curator at the Museum. “So this is the work of professional photographer Will Wilson; he is a Native American photographer – he’s Dine or Navajo – working out of the Santa Fe (New Mexico) area and he is producing a series of pictures of Native Americans all across the U.S.”
Campbell Coyle says Wilson went to the First State in May to photograph members of the Lenape Indian People of Delaware and the Nanticoke Indian Association.Thirty eight of those
photos can be seen through September 11, before heading to the Nanticoke Indian Museum in Sussex County. The exhibit is being paired with a pow wow
of arts and culture arranged for later this month according to Museum’s neighborhood engagement expert Iz Balleto.” With the assistance of the Nanticoke and Lenape Tribes doing this together, it took about 2 years to put this(one)event together-uniting various people and different dancers. We’re going to have more than 50 dancers here-participating in the Pow Wow; we’re going to have the Red Blanket Singers of the Lenape People boiling down from New Jersey -Bridgerton. And we’re going to have a day of culture-even among the Aztec culture – the Parroquia.”The pow wow is set for Saturday, July 23 from 11 a.m. to 4 p.m. There will likewise be a program offering
neighborhood members’stories on September 8,, called My Land, My Roots. In Conversation: Will Wilson is signed up with by Indigenous Faces of Wilmington, an exhibition by regional photographer Andre’L. Wright, Jr., The national tour of In Conversation: Will Wilson is supported by the Art Bridges Foundation.Delaware Public Media’s arts coverage is made possible, in part, by support from the Delaware Department of the Arts, a state firm dedicated to nurturing and supporting the arts in Delaware, in collaboration with the National
Endowment for the Arts.