Oral History Interview with Anita Fields Interview Conducted by Julie Pearson-Little Thunder February 14, 2011 Spotlighting Oklahoma Oral History Project Oklahoma Oral History Research Program Edmon Low Library ● Oklahoma State University © 2011 Spotlighting Oklahoma Oral History Project Interview History Interviewer: Julie Pearson-Little Thunder Transcriber: Ashley Sarchet Editors: Julie Pearson-Little Thunder, Latasha Wilson The recording and transcript of this interview were processed at the Oklahoma State University Library in Stillwater, Oklahoma. Project Detail The purpose of the Spotlighting Oklahoma Oral History Project is to document the development of the state by recording its cultural and intellectual history. This project was approved by the Oklahoma State University Institutional Review Board on April 15, 2009. Legal Status Scholarly use of the recordings and transcripts of the interview with Anita Fields is unrestricted. The interview agreement was signed on February 14, 2011. 2 Spotlighting Oklahoma Oral History Project About Anita Fields… Born in Hominy, Oklahoma, earthenware artist Anita Fields spent many of her growing up years in Denver, Colorado. Her early interest in three-dimensional media expressed itself in sewing, making clothes for her favorite doll. After high school, Fields attended the Institute of American Indian Art, where she experimented in multiple media, including painting. However, once she started her family, she put her art aside, and only when her children entered school full-time did she seriously launch her art career. She studied ceramics with Richard Bevins at Oklahoma State University, and soon found her specialty: creating non- functional earthenware. Soon she was winning awards and attention for her clay translations of parfleche bags and buckskin dresses. Other formats include masks, platters, and more recently, abstracted figurative work. Many of Fields’ art pieces are stamped or ornamented in deeply personal ways, and reflect her feelings about her family, life passages, and her Osage/Creek tribal backgrounds. The Heard Museum, the Cowboy and Western Heritage Center, and the Museum of Art and Design are among the museums that have collected her work. Her art was also included in an exhibit at the National Museum of the American Indian at the Smithsonian called “Who Stole the Tepee,” as well as “Legacy of the Generations: American Indian Women Potters” at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, both in Washington, D.C. Fields is married to Cherokee/Creek photographer, Tom Fields. Besides talking about her artistic techniques and subject matter, Fields discusses seeking jobs or situations that would allow her access to art, long before she was able to do her art full-time. She explains her appreciation for traditional clothing as an expression of love and extended family relationships. She emphasizes the physical demands of working with clay, and explains the artistic and intellectual exchange she enjoys with her children. She details the opportunities for travel, research and new experiences that have come to her through her art, and the growing prominence of landscape and Osage thought patterns in her work. 3 Spotlighting Oklahoma Oral History Project Anita Fields Oral History Interview Interviewed by Julie Little Thunder February 14, 2011 Stillwater, Oklahoma Little Thunder My name is Julie Pearson Little Thunder. Today is Monday, February 14, 2011. I’m interviewing Anita Fields for the Oklahoma Native Artists Project, sponsored by the Oklahoma Oral History Research Program at Oklahoma State University. We’re in Stillwater at Anita’s house. Thank you for taking time to speak with me, Anita. Fields You’re welcome. Little Thunder You began your professional career a bit later in life, but your unique approach to ceramics, including your renderings of cultural items in clay, has made you very sought after. You’re a member of the Osage tribe, but you’re also Mvskoke Creek. Is that on your mom or your dad’s side? Fields I’m Osage on my dad’s side, and I’m Creek on my mother’s side. Little Thunder Where were you born and where did you grow up? Fields I was born in Hominy, Oklahoma, and I grew up until about eight to ten [years old] in Osage County in Hominy. We lived on my great- grandfather’s allotment. My dad built a home out there, but then we made a move to Colorado, and back and forth. There was a couple of years they couldn’t get quite settled in Colorado and they were very homesick. We kept moving back and forth to Oklahoma, and we finally settled in Colorado, lived there until I was about eighteen. Little Thunder You didn’t happen to know the Grays while you were there? Fields The Grays are my relatives, so we made that move, we were all up there together [in Denver]. Little Thunder What did your folks do for a living? 4 Fields My dad was a guide and outfitter, but he was also a welder, and my mom was a housewife. Little Thunder What are your earliest memories of art? Fields My earliest memories of art are in Oklahoma, out there on my great- grandfather’s allotment that I was talking about earlier. Memories of very hot Oklahoma summers, playing in the dirt and making mud pies. My mom would save those little tins, you know, the little bitty ones like Bama Pies. And I would mix water and the earth and grass and pebbles and put them on a board and let them dry in the sun. Very much like what I do today. (Laughter) But also just memories of being creative, of creating things with natural materials. Little Thunder In three dimensions? Fields Yes. Another thing that I talk about quite a bit in my earliest memories of making things are that my grandmother on my mother’s side sewed. She was a really, really wonderful seamstress, and so she would sew. I don’t even know how young I was, but I think I was like six, six or seven, and I asked her to teach me how to sew. She gave me some scraps, and she taught me basic sewing. So, I started making these little doll clothes for a favorite doll of mine. They’re very vivid in my memory, what they look like. I have, still today, a fondness for material and textiles and sewing. I still incorporate a lot of fabric into my work and clothing. It’s just an extension of things that I learned early, early on. Little Thunder What kinds of art experiences did you have in primary and secondary school? Fields In Oklahoma I don’t recall much except what I was talking about, what I did at home. But in Colorado, we went to parochial schools. There was a really elderly nun—when I was in third grade, she came once a week and taught us art. Today, as an adult, when I think about her, I really enjoy these memories because she was really, really quite passionate about artwork. She taught us how to make a fresco, a real fresco, the way that it’s been historically done, which is really kind of amazing for third graders. She was just very passionate about her love for art, and one of the things that she asked us to do was to create ourselves in a collage. She taught us what a collage was and how to make a collage, then she said, “I want you to create what you see yourself being when you grow up, in collage form.” And I made an artist, and she had a little tam on and she had a smock on and she was holding a palette. She taught us some techniques that you just don’t learn in third grade, 5 normally. I remember that pretty vividly. Unlike today, when people have lots of opportunities inside communities to make artwork, or to go to a place that has classes, those were not so available to us when we were young. There was a place that taught kind of crafty things, some kind of community center, and I remember going to that a couple of times. But I was the kind of child that got real immersed when I was making something, creating something. It was just kind of a self-taught activity. I would get whatever we had at home and start making things, whether that was sewing, making a costume to wear to a party or just making things. My dad was a pretty good painter, so I watched him paint. I think that the activity of making things, of creating, that language was real comfortable for us. Nobody told you, “Don’t do that,” or, “Spend your time doing something else.” We were just kind of left alone to explore those activities, the activity of creating something, of making something. But I do remember—and this awareness came to me after I started doing the Artist-in-Residence program here in Oklahoma many years ago— watching children who never had the opportunity to work with clay, but it just came very natural to them. Out of a hundred kids that you’d see in a day, there’d be two or three kids that [were] just, “I can’t leave this material, I don’t want to go back to the classroom. I’m all immersed.” And I thought, “Oh, that’s the kind of kid I was.” I saw myself in them. Little Thunder You went to school at the Institute of American Indian Art [IAIA] in Santa Fe for a while. Were your parents in favor of you going there? I know Gina had to talk her folks into it.