Lita Fontaine: Winyan

Fontaine’s work centers and celebrates the beauty of Indigenous femininities as a resistance to heteropatriarchal and colonial practices that often relegate them to the periphery and render them vulnerable to violence.

Adopting a critical Indigenous feminist lens, Fontaine’s work appropriates symbols of assimilation and gender-discriminatory policies while mobilizing her love for her sisters, matriarchs and Dakota culture to create collage, drawing, dresses, and large medallion-shaped paintings embellished with berry and floral motifs, the Morning Star, and allusions to Sky Woman.