User:Atakra/Melissa Melero-Moose

Melissa Melero-Moose is a Northern Paiute/Modoc mixed-media artist and founder of Great Basin Native Artists from Nevada. She is enrolled in the Paiute-Shoshone Tribe of the Fallon Reservation and Colony.

Background
Melissa Melero-Moose was born in San Francisco, California, in 1974.

Art career
Melero-Moose developed a style of abstract, mixed-media paintings that reference the landscape and culture of her Northern Paiute people. She painted with acrylic washes with layers rice paper and natural objects, such as willow, tule, cattails, and pine nuts. Great Basin landscape, petroglyphs, and basketry inspired her work.

She has frequently exhibited at the Santa Fe Indian Market and Heard Museum Guild Fair & Market in Phoenix, Arizona.

Great Basin advocacy
To address the invisibility of Indigenous peoples of the Great Basin in the Native American art world, Melero-Moose founded the Great Basin Native Artists (GBNA) collective in 2014. She has curated numerous group exhibitions of Great Basin artists, including Great Basin Native Artists (2016) at the Carson City Community Center.

Beginning in 2018, the Nevada Museum of Art gave Melero-Moose a fellowship to research and create a directory and archive of Great Basin Native artists.

Selected exhibitions

 * 2019: Stories from the Land: Indigenous Voices Connecting within the Great Plains, Birger Sandzén Memorial Gallery, Lindsborg, KS
 * 2017–18: Connective Tissue: New Approaches to Fiber in Contemporary Native Art, IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe
 * 2017: Great Basin Artists, CN Gorman Museum, Davis, CA

Awards and honors
Besides winning several awards at Santa Fe Indian Market, Melero-Moose was selected by SWAIA as its Santa Fe INdian Market Discovery Fellow]] in 2016.

In 2015, the School for Advanced Research chose Melero-Moose as its Ronald and Susan Dubin fellow.