Community art project underway for Sesquicentennial Celebration
Chris Lutter-Gardella, Welana Queton, Russ Tallchief, Candice Byrd and Daposka Ahnkodapi students are working on a community art performance for the Sesquicentennial Celebration and need community volunteers
Russ Tallchief instructs Daposka Ahnkodapi student Edward Gray Jr. for a Sesquicentennial Celebration project. LOUISE RED CORN/Osage News
In about six weeks, children and adults will take to a stage at the tribal museum to perform the Osage story from creation to the present day – in 25 minutes.
But there is much work to be done before those performances on Oct. 21 and 22.
On Sept. 6, under the tutelage of Chris Lutter-Gardella, a Minnesota artist who upcycles waste such as plastic bottles and bags to create puppets and public art installations, children in the Daposka Ahnkodapi school program started crafting puppets and props for the play.
On Sept. 8, the children and a few helpers from the community were using papier mache to form bison horns, coat hangers and plastic mesh to make dragonflies, and plastic water bottles to make a galaxy of stars.
But they cannot do it alone, said Welana Queton, who is among the visiting artists collaborating on the project with Lutter-Gardella.
Chloe Bickford cut a lot of water bottles into stars. LOUISE RED CORN/Osage NewsCindra Shangreau marks water bottles with a pen so the kids know where to make their cuts. LOUISE RED CORN/Osage NewsA pile of water bottles that has been transformed into stars. LOUISE RED CORN/Osage NewsDaposka Ahnkodapi student Camden Bickford takes instruction for the Sesquicentennial Celebration puppet project. LOUISE RED CORN/Osage NewsChloe Bickford cut a lot of water bottles into stars. LOUISE RED CORN/Osage News
Queton said that she needs hands to help. “This is a community project,” she said, stressing the word community. “There’s a lot of stuff to do. We need to make a giant papier mache squash, a giant elk, a swan.”
She said the project will also need help staging the play, tentatively called Sky Grandma and her Nikashe, next month. She and fellow artists Russ Tallchief, Candice Byrd and Lutter-Gardella will be at the Osage Nation Civic Center on West Main Street in Pawhuska from 1:45 p.m. to 7:45 p.m. Sept. 12-16 and helpers can show up any time during that period or call her at (505) 377-6222 for more information. The project also is in need of brown paper grocery bags or newsprint for the papier mache.
Lutter-Gardella is a well-known artist who creates spectacular interactive art, usually animals, that delight both children and adults. One exhibit that received a lot of press was a Monarch butterfly installation at the Mall of America; people could pull on a rope to make a 30-foot butterfly, surrounded by 300 smaller brethren, flutter.
On Sept. 8, a few community volunteers turned out to help with the project, including Cindra Shangreau, the chair of the board that oversees the operations of the WahZhaZhe Health Clinic.
“This,” she said with a big smile as she helped children turn bottles into stars, “is so much fun.
“And there are a lot of stars.”
Daposka Ahnkodapi Superintendent Patrick Martin and student Henry Gray make horns with paper mache. LOUISE RED CORN/Osage NewsCommunity members work with paper mache for the Sesquicentennial Celebration performance. LOUISE RED CORN/Osage NewsDaposka Ahnkodapi 4th grader Lenora White takes instruction from Russ Tallchief. LOUISE RED CORN/Osage NewsWelana Queton shows Mocs Primeaux how to form a papier mache bison horn. LOUISE RED CORN/Osage NewsWelana Queton usines her phone to show what the water birds in the creation story will look like when they are done. LOUISE RED CORN/Osage News
Languages: English, Italian, rusty but revivable Russian
Louise Red Corn has been a news reporter for 34 years and a photographer for even longer. She grew up in Northern California, the youngest child of two lawyers, her father a Pearl Harbor survivor who later became a state judge and her mother a San Francisco native who taught law at the University of California at Davis.
After graduating from the U.C. Berkley with a degree in Slavic Languages and Literatures with no small amount of coursework in Microbiology, she moved to Rome, Italy, where she worked as a photographer and wordsmith for the United Nation’s International Fund for Agricultural Development, specializing in the French-speaking countries of Africa.
When the radioactive cloud from Chernobyl parked over Rome in 1986, she escaped to New York City to work for the international editions of Time Magazine. She left Time for Knight-Ridder newspapers in Biloxi, Miss., Detroit and Lexington, Ky., During nearly 20 years with Knight-Ridder, she was a stringer (freelancer) for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Parade Magazine.
In 2004, she married Raymond Red Corn and moved to Oklahoma, where she worked for the Tulsa World before she bought the weekly newspaper in Barnsdall and turned a tired newspaper into the award-winning Bigheart Times, which she sold in 2018. She hired on at the Osage News in early 2022.
Throughout her career she has won dozens of state, national and international journalism awards.
Red Corn is comfortable reporting on nearly any topic, the more complex the better, but her first love is covering courts and legal issues. Her proudest accomplishment was helping to exonerate a Tennessee man facing the death penalty after he was wrongfully charged with capital murder in Kentucky, a state he had never visited.
Languages: English, Italian, rusty but revivable Russian
Louise Red Corn has been a news reporter for 34 years and a photographer for even longer. She grew up in Northern California, the youngest child of two lawyers, her father a Pearl Harbor survivor who later became a state judge and her mother a San Francisco native who taught law at the University of California at Davis.
After graduating from the U.C. Berkley with a degree in Slavic Languages and Literatures with no small amount of coursework in Microbiology, she moved to Rome, Italy, where she worked as a photographer and wordsmith for the United Nation’s International Fund for Agricultural Development, specializing in the French-speaking countries of Africa.
When the radioactive cloud from Chernobyl parked over Rome in 1986, she escaped to New York City to work for the international editions of Time Magazine. She left Time for Knight-Ridder newspapers in Biloxi, Miss., Detroit and Lexington, Ky., During nearly 20 years with Knight-Ridder, she was a stringer (freelancer) for The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and Parade Magazine.
In 2004, she married Raymond Red Corn and moved to Oklahoma, where she worked for the Tulsa World before she bought the weekly newspaper in Barnsdall and turned a tired newspaper into the award-winning Bigheart Times, which she sold in 2018. She hired on at the Osage News in early 2022.
Throughout her career she has won dozens of state, national and international journalism awards.
Red Corn is comfortable reporting on nearly any topic, the more complex the better, but her first love is covering courts and legal issues. Her proudest accomplishment was helping to exonerate a Tennessee man facing the death penalty after he was wrongfully charged with capital murder in Kentucky, a state he had never visited.
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