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Zoë Marieh Urness (born 1984) is a photographer of Alaskan Tlingit and Cherokee Native American heritage.

Biography

Zoe Marieh Urness is a Pulitzer Prize-nominated and internationally recognized Tlingit and Cherokee photographer who creates portraits of modern Indigenous cultures in traditional regalia and settings to convey the message, "We are here, and we are thriving through our traditions." Drawing on her own childhood experience as a performer and cultural ambassador for Tlingit tribal heritage, Urness is masterful in sharing Indigenous narratives. Her signature style fuses documentary and fine art to create a seamless merging of past and present, and depicts ancestral ways being practiced by modern Natives in their full integrity. "As I evolve as an artist I feel as if my entire body of work is braided together as one story being told through my lens... I choose to use my camera as a tool to link the past and present through visual stories." -Zoe Marieh Urness

www.zoeurnessphoto.com

Life

Urness was born in Washington, adopted at the age of four and raised by her great-great uncle and aunt. Her guardians fostered her education in tribal arts and history with the Alaskan Native Cultural Heritage Association in Seattle from kindergarten through high school graduation, ensuring that her Indigenous education was an integral part of her upbringing. While her non-native schoolmates had soccer practices on school nights and games on the weekends, she and her twin sister gathered with other Tlingit youth and elders to don their traditional regalia, learn, practice and share their traditional songs and dances. With her tribe, she traveled the state of Washington, the United States, and even overseas to Europe performing and sharing their stories with the world as a cultural ambassador. The experience left a lasting impression that would later become the foundation of her photographic work.

At the tender age of seven, Urness received her first camera from her grandmother. "The camera allowed me to relate to people," she says. "Subjects were endless and I explored them through the lens." More than just a fleeting hobby, photography became her passion and professional pursuit. She attended college and earned art degrees from Skagit Valley College in Mount Vernon, Washington and the Brooks Institute of Photography in Santa Barbara, California.

Early career

After college graduation in 2008, she initially thought she would become a magazine photographer and began freelancing in Santa Barbara and Seattle shooting for Outside and Trend magazines, but an "aha" moment took her in another direction.

Somewhere in her early career, she began studying the work of Edward S. Curtis, a world renowned documentary photographer of European descent whose mission was to document Indigenous peoples as a 'vanishing race.' His black and white and sepia toned portraits of Native subjects in their traditional regalia comprise some of the earliest and most revered photographic records of Native Americans in existence. In viewing Curtis' images, something clicked for Urness. Rather than seeing the works as relics of the past, she saw herself and her own tribal members in those images. She felt an instant calling to pick up her camera and be the one behind the lens, a modern Indigenous woman, capturing and telling the visual narrative of Native peoples and cultures not vanishing, but very much alive today.

In 2014, she catapulted her own career with a Kickstarter campaign for her first photo project, 'Native Americans: Keeping the Traditions Alive', "to emphasize critically endangered languages captured with video and still imagery." In this project she photographed tribes across the US, including visits to the Havasupai at the bottom of the Grand Canyon, the Hopi at Second Mesa, the Apache Crown Dancers at Monument Valley, and Alaskan natives at the Biennial Celebrations in Juneau. From this first project forward, Urness has been continuously fascinated by documenting and exploring the nuances of each tribe's expression of their culture and traditions in connection to their ancestral landscape and habitat.

Career honors and accomplishments

From humble beginnings, Urness has grown to be a globally acclaimed Indigenous artist. She has shown her work in international and domestic US art exhibitions, been published in major media publications, had her work acquired by museums, hung her work in galleries in the US and overseas, participated in many Native art shows and markets, and received astounding awards.

Her greatest honors in the art market circuit include showing her Alaskan work at the Indigenous Fine Art Market and Santa Fe Indian Market for many seasons, winning Best in Division and Best in Category at Santa Fe Indian Market for multiple years, and being recognized by the California-based Autry Museum of the American West, the Art Basel fair in Miami, the Native Treasures Indian Arts Festival, and the Heard Museum Guild Indian Fair and Market in Arizona.

In the gallery and museum sector she has shown at Photo L.A. SPECTRUM and several other galleries in New Mexico, Arizona and the UK, including the ZOHI Gallery in Santa Fe, NM (which she co-owned). Her print "December 5th, 2016: No Spiritual Surrender" was acquired by two museums, the Autry Museum of the American West, and the Birmingham Museum of Art. She has also been in six national and international traveling exhibitions at various galleries and venues in Russia, Washington DC, California, Tennessee, Minnesota, New Mexico, Georgia, Arizona, Oklahoma and more from 2017 to 2020. A group of her photographs is a part of the Tia Collection in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

Her strongest acknowledgement to date may be her photograph "Dec. 5, 2016: No Spiritual Surrender", at the Oceti Sakowin Camp on Standing Rock Sioux Reservation at the Dakota Access Pipeline Protests being nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in Feature Photography by World Literature Today, and appearing on the cover of the magazine's May 2017 issue, "New Native Writing: From Wounded Knee to Standing Rock." However, she bears even more decorations than this, having received several awards from the Autry Museum and SWAIA Santa Fe Indian Market from 2015 to 2017.

In March 2022, Urness received the Sony Alpha+ Female Grant for her "Indigenous Motherhood" project, and is currently in the process of producing this body of work. This monument in her art career reflects a major landmark in her personal life as well; the birth of her first child in winter 2021.

Awards

Acquisitions

"Raven Tells his Story in the Fog"

"December 5th, 2016: No Spiritual Surrender"

Galleries

  • 2018: Webster Collections- Santa Fe, NM
  • 2017 to present: Altamira Fine Art, Scottsdale, AZ /Jackson Hole, WY
  • 2017: Zohi, Santa Fe, NM
  • 2016 to present: Mountain Trails Fine Art, Santa Fe, New Mexico
  • 2015 to 2017: Rainmaker Gallery, Bristol, United Kingdom
  • 2015: Manitou Galleries, Santa Fe, NM

Exhibitions

"Hearts of our People: Native American Women in the Arts", Traveling Group Exhibition produced by Minneapolis Institute of Art

  • 2020 Fall: Renwick Gallery / Smithsonian Institution Washington DC
  • 2020 Summer: Philbrook Museum of Art, Oklahoma
  • 2020 Spring: Fowler Museum UCL A, California
  • 2019- 2020 September to January: First Center of Visual Arts Nashville, Tennessee
  • 2019 May to August: Minneapolis Institute of Art Minneapolis, Minnesota

"Borrowing the Earth", Russian Traveling Group Exhibition (10 images provided by artist)

  • 2019 February to March: Orenburg Fine Arts Museum
  • 2019 March to April: Ufa Fina Arts Museum
  • 2019 May to June: Izhevsk
  • 2019 July to August: Noviy Urengoy
  • 2019 August to September: Noyabrsk
  • 2019 September to October: South Urals History Museum in Chelyabinsk
  • 2019 November to December: Tyumen Fine Arts Museum

"Beyond Standing Rock", Group Exhibition

  • 2019 February to August: Santa Fe, New Mexico

"Zoe Urness: Keeping the Traditions Alive", Solo Exhibition

"Standing Rock: Art and Solidarity", Group Exhibition

"Untitled", Joint show with Navajo Painter Tony Abeyta

  • 2017 March: Altamira Fine Art, Scottsdale, Arizona

Art fairs

  • 2015–2018: Heard Museum Guild Fair & Market, Phoenix, AZ
  • 2015–2018: SWAIA Santa Fe Indian Market, Santa Fe, NM
  • 2015–2018: Native Treasures MIAC Art Market, Santa Fe, NM
  • 2016–2017: Autry Museum of the American West American Indian Arts Marketplace, Los Angeles, CA
  • 2016: Art Basel, Miami Beach, FL
  • 2015: Photo LA, Los Angeles, CA

Public speaking

  • 2017 November: Artist Lecture Series at the Booth Museum
  • 2017 November: Educational Outreach – Cartersville High School, GA
  • 2016 April: Americans: Featured speaker at Museum of Indian Arts and Culture – Sharing the Native Keeping the Traditions Alive
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