From Gold: Monica Gilles-BringsYellow and the Reclamation of Living History

by Megan Crawford

Monica Gilles-BringsYellow fell into her artwork. The act of creating had always been there— some classes in high school and college, a go at ceramics, supplies always at the ready. It was necessity that allowed the space for her to develop her style. After grad school in 2019, she began looking for a piece of art for her therapy office, but everything either wasn’t right or was too expensive. So, she set out to teach herself how to paint and make her own piece instead.

It was art for the sake of art— making because you want to, because you need to. Gilles- BringsYellow’s work started out with abstracts, and sure enough, friends started asking if pieces were up for sale.

“If I was selling it, how much would you pay for it?” she laughs.

As Gilles-BringsYellow continued to explore new techniques and work in landscapes, the 2020 pandemic began. Navigating lockdowns and work as a child therapist lead to a twomonth pause from art. “I went from painting every day to not painting at all,” she recalls. But, that hiatus cultivated space to develop new ideas and techniques and led to the style that Gilles- BringsYellow calls 3D collage. “There’s no time but now, I might as well— I don’t want to go out not knowing what happens if I combine resin with alcohol ink!” We laugh again, me knowing all too well as a fellow artist that some creative ideas are itches you have to scratch.

Minnie Hollow Wood

Mixed media. Acrylic Paint, Resin, Marker, and Liquid Gold Leaf. 10"x20"

Layers of resin, ink, gold leaf, photographs, text, and marker create the pieces in Origin Stories. Portraits of the Native and Indigenous women who sit as proud subjects of her work are encircled in halos of her creation: the resin creates depth that a canvas otherwise lacks, alcohol inks create swirls of stormy atmosphere— it’s like looking at a diorama, except the surfaces are still flat. Pieces like The Exchange look like they’re floating, suspended in space, going on forever, as if they could burst forth from the canvas at any moment.

Origin Stories began as a traffic box art piece in Missoula, where Gilles-BringsYellow lives. After being commissioned to create a piece to cover its otherwise industrial surface, Kalico Art Center in Kalispell reached out about the possibility of an art show— her first solo show. “I just started thinking about what I wanted to present and how I wanted to present it, because in this new iteration of my art I wanted to honor Native people.”

Inspired by her and her husband’s ancestral Salish roots and stories, teaching history in Missoula, and seeing a lack of representative histories of Montana, Gilles-BringsYellow set out to create these pieces of living history. “I have a connection to everyone in the show,” she notes— from the Flathead Reservation, Northern Cheyenne, relatives of family and friends alike. That connection is clear in the reverence with which each subject is treated. Living, breathing Origin Stories.

“When you do see Native and Indigenous people represented in the art world, they’re represented as background actors— especially women.” As Gilles-BringsYellow and I talked, I was reminded of turn-of-the-century photographers like Edward Curtis and L.A. Huffman, who both captured images of Indigenous people, often with little to no information— nondescript titles like “Cheyenne maiden,” “Navajo weaver,” “Hopi mother.” And more often than not, Curtis embellished the dress and props, as well as the settings in which subjects were presented and offered nothing in exchange for the time of those sitting for a portrait.

Qlispel/Kalispell

Mixed media. Acrylic paint, Resin, Marker, and historical photographs of Kalispell and Dusty Dress. 12"x14"

For Gilles-BringsYellow, this historical erasure was a subject to confront in her art through empowered representation. “I want to bring historical figures into the present day— they weren’t just people that lived 100 years ago… these are people’s grandparents, their ancestors, and their descendants are living today.”

Each canvas comes with the subject’s name and story, providing important context of each subject of the artwork. Gilles-BringsYellow empowers her subjects, from Dusty Dress of the Qlispel Tribe to Minnie Hollow Wood, who was present at Greasy Grass (colonially known as the Battle of Little Bighorn)— something that those 19thcentury western photographs often lack. She gives names and stories to those who had otherwise been photographed without either.

Eats No Meat (Cayuse)

Mixed media. Alcohol ink, resin, gold leaf, and paint on Yupo and cradled birch panel. 10"x14"

“As a history teacher, you don’t really get the [woman’s perspective]. It’s few and far between that you get women included in the narrative.” In both history and art, women are often excluded, minimized, or forgotten— they’re present as tropes or tokens, there for the sake of being there, without relevance or intent. I was reminded of the iconic artists that represent the American West and its image. Like Curtis and Huffman, Montanans are fiercely aware of C.M. Russell’s work. But, I am reminded of how pieces like Waiting and Mad and Keeoma completely take Indigenous women out of context. It’s a representation of Indigenous women from a White male perspective devoid of the context needed to tell us who these women really were.

In the canvases of Origin Stories, every subject is placed in the past, present, and future. They are acknowledged for who they were, they exist now in art, and their stories will continue to be carried on. They breathe as the ribbons and waves of resin and ink breathe.

The Wolf You Feed

Mixed media. Alcohol ink, resin, gold leaf, marker on yup paper and canvas. 18"x24"

Backed with gold leaf and encircled with gold marker that mimics Byzantine art, the women of Origin Stories are front and center, reclaiming back that narrative. “It’s a way of giving them respect— you don’t normally see that. You don’t normally see murals of Native women,” Gilles- BringsYellow points out, alluding to the ornate gilded murals that grace walls and ceilings of the Byzantine era. “[Gold] is a precious metal. To me, it’s saying— when I include it in my paintings— that these people are also precious.”

Born and raised in Great Falls, Montana, Monica Gilles-BringsYellow is aware of the historical disconnect presented in the communities we live in. “You have someone that’s coming in from out of state to a place like Missoula, and the way Missoula presents itself, for the most part, is that people just kind of moved in here. They don’t really always acknowledge that there were people here before them.” The same goes for cities like Bozeman, Kalispell, Billings, Helena; mountains renamed after White men, stripped of their true names and histories (the Bridger range; Reynolds, Cleveland, and Grinnell, among others, in Glacier); Montana’s valleys, plains, rivers, lakes. There is a deeper, richer history beneath the names we are so often familiarized with.

Pretty Nose

“I look at Missoula, and I think, ‘oh, my husband’s great-grandma was born over there, by the footbridge; my husband’s family used to pick bitterroot, and now there’s a Shopko there’— our presence here has affected others, even though we might not necessarily realize it,” she acknowledges.

Gilles-BringsYellow’s painting of Dusty Dress, for example, shares Kalispell’s history. Before the signing of the Hellgate Treaty in 1885 and the following creation of the Flathead Reservation, Kalispell was Qlispel, named after the tribe that lived on this land.

“It’s history that’s unseen— I didn’t know that until I was an adult, right? It’s named after a people!”

The Exchange

Mixed media. Acrylic paint, resin, and marker. 10"x20"

That’s what Gilles-BringsYellow wants people to take away from her work. These places have histories— and we should work to know them. To know the names, the people, and the land, for the names and the people that existed here before the settlements that became our cities did. Monica Gilles-BringsYellow encourages us to learn about where we live and to acknowledge its living past. “Look into the history [and] understand the fuller experience of Natives in the United States.”

And likewise, seek the history, art, and stories from Indigenous people. “Seek them out! There’s a lot of talent in Indian Country and Native America. See what their perspective is… everyone has a unique perspective and an interesting story to be told.”

Agreements

Mixed media. Acrylic paint, resin, marker, portions of the Hellgate Treaty. 20"x20"

As I wandered through Kalico Art Center, I was drawn from piece to piece of Gilles- BringsYellow’s. The stories of the women on the canvases seemed to reach out, asking me to engage, to read, to know. Each piece lifted off the white walls— a mirror at one angle, deep water of the lake one way, inky night another. Layers of resin, gold leaf, ink, history, all gathered in a canvas home. Origin Stories is more than a collection of work showcasing Indigenous women— it’s a call to action for us to learn the stories hidden from us for so long.

Monica Gilles-BringsYellow

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