As a photographer and enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, Sharon Hoogstraten has created a permanent record of present-day Potawatomis wearing the traditional regalia passed down through the generations but modified to reflect the influence and storytelling of contemporary life. Traveling to all the Potawatomi Nations, ranging from Ontario to Oklahoma, she has been photographing regalia and listening to personal stories.
Through her portraits, she shows Potawatomi descendants living modern lives, while reflecting deeply upon the ancestors on whose footsteps we all tread. They are both preseving and evolving ceremony, handcrafts, and with their hand-written statements, leaving a message for the seven generations going forward.
We peer into portraits past and present looking for details of culture, but even more compulsively, for clues about that particular human being. In her work Sharon strives for an honest, revealing, enduring revelation of each individual. Suspended from bands of cedar wood, the canvases reflect the fluidity of regalia and the movement of the dance as they 'continue to move in the rhythm of the ancestors'.
In this program Sharon will discuss her work to create Dancing for Our Tribe: Potawatomi Tradition in the New Millenium and how photography is her dance.
FREE, registration required.
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Photographer Sharon Hoogstraten spent a decade portraying contemporary Potawatomis in regalia and as an unexpected dividend, discovering her own roots. A Michigan native, she traveled to Chicago for graduate study and then stayed having no clue that she was literally walking in the footsteps of her Potawatomi ancestors. Beginning with Citizen Potawatomi Nation, her home reservation in Shawnee, Oklahoma, she called on all nine nations of the scattered Potawatomi tribe, producing photographic proof that in this new millenium "WE ARE STILL HERE". Hoogstraten previously published Green City Market: A Song of Thanks, a pictorial retrospective of the groundbreaking farmers market that boosted Chicago's culinary reputation as a nationally acclaimed food destination. A longtime resident of Logan Square, she and her husband Robert Gray raised two fine young men and rescued a 1908 landmark house.
The program will begin in the special exhibition Dancing for Our Tribe: Potawatomi Tradition in the New Millenium at 6:00pm, followed by a presentation at 6:30pm in the North Shore Gas Education Classroom.