Gallery exhibit to feature Haudenosaunee raised beadwork

Karen Ann Hoffman, an award-winning Haudenosaunee raised beadwork artist, is bringing her art to Ripon College’s Caestecker Gallery of Art in the C.J. Rodman Center for the Arts from Feb. 28 to April 11. She will host an artist talk Feb. 28 at 7 p.m. in Demmer Recital Hall, followed by a reception. 

The exhibit is titled “Tehotithalúnyu (They Talk): Haudenosaunee Raised Beadwork by Karen Ann Hoffman.”

Haudenosaunee raised beadwork is a rare and beautiful style of Native art originating in the Eastern Great Lakes homelands. The designs draw inspiration from Native origins and simultaneously embrace a forward-looking perspective.

“First etched into stone and shell, later executed in moose hair and hide, I now use glass beads and velvet to explore, inform and express Haudenosaunee worldview,” Hoffman said. “Sitting and learning in the Circle of my ancestors, I slowly and carefully craft beadwork in the Haudenosaunee style to amplify our traditions and our future.”

She creates what she has coined “Legacy Pieces” — “pieces that have an animacy of their own through the power of our people past, present and future.”

Hoffman said each piece often takes more than a year to create, with most of that time spent conversing with elders about the art they created and left behind for others.

“I take seriously my responsibilities to represent [the elders] faithfully,” Hoffman said. “It is my passion to stay exquisitely culturally connected and, while using the finest modern material I can find, ply my needle and thread to comment on contemporary issues through a cultural lens. It is my pride and responsibility to continue to lift up the voices of those who came before me and to lay a table for those faces we have yet to see.” 

Hoffman is an enrolled citizen of the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin. She was a beadwork student of Samuel Thomas and his mother, Lorna Hill, of the Lower Band of the Cayuga Nation of the Six Nations Reserve in Canada. She studied with them from the late 1990s until their deaths – Hill in 2018 and Thomas in 2024.

Her art is in the permanent collections of many museums, including the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C., the Field Museum in Chicago, the Eiteljorg Museum of Indian and Western Art in Indianapolis, Indiana; and the Wisconsin Historical Society in Madison. She is the winner of the Wisconsin Academy, United States Artist and National Heritage fellowships for her work. 

She is the chair of the Woodland Indian Arts Initiative on the Wisconsin Arts Board, a board member of the Living Traditions Network, a board member of the Smithsonian Institution’s Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage and sits on other various committees.

In an effort to raise the profile of Native art, she proposed and coordinated the installations of Native permanent public art around Wisconsin. 

The Caestecker Gallery of Art is open Tuesday, Thursday and Friday from 2-5 p.m. and Saturday and Sunday from 2-6 p.m. The gallery will be closed March 15-23 for spring break. Admission is free and open to the public.