The ZACC is delighted to present Reclaim | e? x?lx?ilt: Works by Monica Gilles-Brings Yellow in the Blackfoot Communications Gallery for the month of December.

Monica Gilles-Brings Yellow is a self-taught Indigenous artist based out of Missoula, Montana. She prefers to work in mixed media (resin, acrylic, gold leaf, marker) in a process that she calls 3-D collage. Her work focuses primarily on Native American people. She uses historical images of Indigenous people in the hopes of offering a platform to discuss the resilience, importance, and impact Native people’s lives have had on present day society.

Monica hopes that her representation of actual Native American people and discussion of portions of their lives will help the viewer begin to move beyond the romanticization of American Indians in Western culture and to understand the subjects of her paintings as humans who exist in the present day (rather than caricatures of people who live solely in the past). She hopes to create a dialogue regarding Indigenous people that brings to light a history that is often unknown, concealed, or disregarded by broader American society.