Babe and Carla Hemlock facts for kids

Babe and Carla Hemlock are a husband-and-wife artist team from the Kahnawake Mohawk Nation Territory in Canada. Babe is a talented woodcarver, and Carla creates amazing textile art, especially quilts. They also work with many other art materials. Carla's award-winning quilts are so special that some have been bought by the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington, D.C.

About the Artists

Carla Hemlock was born in 1961 in Kahnawake, near Montreal, Quebec. Babe Hemlock, also born in 1961, grew up in Brooklyn, New York. He comes from a family of Mohawk ironworkers. His family has been involved in building tall structures for four generations!

Their Art Journey

Babe and Carla use their art to share stories about Mohawk culture and history. They often work together to create art that also talks about important social and political topics.

Babe carved and painted a piece called Walking in Two Worlds. Carla made a quilt called Tribute to Mohawk Ironworkers. This quilt uses beads and fabric pictures. It was inspired by a famous 1932 photograph of Mohawk men working high up on a steel beam. These artworks honor the Mohawk construction workers from the late 1800s and 1900s. These brave workers helped build many tall buildings in New York City, like the famous Empire State Building.

Carla's quilt, Haudenosaunee Passport, talks about the independence of the Haudenosaunee Nations. These nations existed long before Canada and the United States of America were formed.

Babe also creates wooden cradleboards. These are traditional baby carriers that he carves and paints with his own designs. A museum director, Bruce Hartman, said that Babe's art helps people think about different ideas of identity. In 2013, Babe and Carla worked together on a cradleboard about the traditional Indigenous game of lacrosse. This piece won a "Best of Classification" award at the Santa Fe Indian Market for Diverse Art Forms.

Carla says her art is meant to "start conversations" about issues that affect her people's lands. For example, she addresses concerns about "fracking," which is a way of getting natural gas from the ground. She hopes her art, like her cotton quilt Turtle Island Unraveling with glass beads, will make people think about how this might affect the land in the long run. Carla has also used special "treaty cloth" in her art. This cloth dates back to the 1700s and has the original words of the Treaty of Canandaigua. By using it, she shows that her people still honor their part of the treaty, even if the United States government did not always keep its promises.

The couple won another "Best of Classification" award at the Santa Fe Indian Market in 2014. Carla Hemlock's artwork, Our Destruction, was bought by the Smithsonian American Art Museum. It is now part of the Renwick Gallery's collection.

While the Hemlocks use art to discuss important issues, they also use traditional Iroquoian images. For example, Carla often includes images of turtles in her beautiful quilts.

Where Their Art Is Kept

• National Museum of the American Indian, Washington, DC
• Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art, Overland Park, KS

Major Art Shows

• Changing Hands III: Art Without Reservations, Museum of Arts and Design
• Iroquois Artistic Visions: From Sky World to Turtle Island, Iroquois Indian Museum, Howes Cave, New York
• Walking With Our Sisters, a traveling exhibit