Margaret Jacobs: Steel Medicine
Margaret Jacobs celebrates Indigenous culture with a bold, powerful aesthetic. Her steel sculptures depict medicinal plants alongside tools associated with early twentieth-century Mohawk Ironworkers. In this unique coupling, Jacobs explores the tension and harmony between forces of nature and forces of man, addressing ideas such as natural cycles of decay and growth. Drawing on her metalsmithing techniques as a jeweler, Jacobs uses stark lines, organic forms, and intricate links of steel to emphasize the resilience and fragility of nature. Her Steel Medicine and Survival Medicine series are on view, as well as new artwork created especially for this exhibition at the Boise Art Museum.
Margaret Jacobs grew up in New York and is an enrolled member of the St. Regis Mohawk Tribe. She has received numerous awards, including the Perspectives on Design award at Dartmouth, a Native American Fellowship through the Harpo Foundation, and the 2019 Artist in Business Leadership Award through the First Peoples Fund.
Organized by the Boise Art Museum
IMAGE: Margaret Jacobs, Steel Medicine, Courtesy of the artist.
Hear from the Artist
Artist Website: www.margaretjacobs.com
NATIVE VOICES EXHIBITION SERIES
This is the fourth of five exhibitions in BAM’s Native Voices series celebrating Native American artists. The United Nations declared 2019 the International Year of Indigenous Languages, and this suite of exhibitions highlights Native voices, expressed through the language of visual art, in tandem with this important international declaration. The series also includes the following exhibitions: Crow’s Shadow Institute of the Arts at 25, Ceramics and Textiles from the Southwest: Gifts of the Carley Collection, Sarah Sense: Cowgirls and Indians, and Wally Dion: Current.
