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= Sara Siestreem =

Sara Siestreem (Hanis Coos ,born 1976) is from the Umpqua River Valley in southwestern Oregon. She is a Master Artist, Educator, and Theorist. Her art practice branches into education and institutional reform. Her approaches include painting, photography, printmaking, drawing, sculpture, video, and traditional Indigenous weaving. She lives and works exclusively in Portland, Oregon .She is currently represented by the Augen Gallery.

Heritage and early life[ edit]
A Hanis Coos tribal member from the Confederated Tribes of Coos Lower Umpqua and Siuslaw Indians, Siestreem grew up in the Lower Umpqua River Valley and in Portland. Every member of her family practiced the arts in the home and professionally, and Siestreem wanted to follow the family path.

Education
Siestreem enrolled in art school at Portland State University for her undergrad degree in 2005 and graduated with with honors (Phi Kappa Phi). In 2007 she completed her MFA with distinction in Pratt Art Institute located in Brooklyn, NY. She is the recipient of numerous grants, scholarships and residencies.

Teaching and Current life[ edit]
Sara Siestreem teaches studio arts at Portland State University, tribal museum studies at Northwest Indian College in Washington and pre-college painting at Pacific Northwest College of Art. She also serves as a consultant for art institutions in contemporary indigenous fine art, education, and theory and professional arts practices.

Painting
"'A lot of my painting activity is an effort to transport myself to the place that is containing me through my life experience and also hoping to share that with the viewer because I think we all as human animals have an innate attachment and reaction to a deep natural privacy. – Sara Siestreem"Siestreem creates abstract paintings. Her painting process is based on observations of Nature combined with a formal structure and improvisational practice. She recognizes that Nature generates new life through rhythmic cycles of elemental interaction. She sees this in biological life cycles, geologic and hydrodynamic events, and in the astronomic elements that affect the seasons. Siestreem's second observation of Nature is that basic designs repeat themselves from one form to the next structurally; matter organizes itself in predictable and repetitive ways. Informed by the first observation, she follows a formal structure in her painting practice. She combines color field painting, gesture drawing and color theory. These three elements symbolizes a natural system, a rhythmic cycle. Through combing these elements, she is seeking her second observation. As she create a visual noise through this improvisation she is looking for basic forms from nature to emerge. When something elemental shows itself to her, she refines the picture plane to support that event, The hope of Siestreem is that in the same way people receive an energetic charge form contact with the land, other animals or a natural event, these paintings will affect the viewer. The reduction in her painting is color. Siesment believes the color has a prevalent voice. She is thinking of color in two parts. The first part is about psychological reactions to color which are physical sensations that we read as emotion. She is focusing on how colors relate to each other and how humans interact with those colors. The other part is considering historical and symbolic relationships to color. She believes color contains different kinds of historical and social relationships.

Weaving
Weaving has been an important element in Siestreem’s culture. During the 1850s, Siestreem’s tribe suffered tremendously through contact with the U.S. Government, and the weaving practice was terribly impacted as well. Young people were historically taught to weave throughout the lives. Inspired at an induction ceremony for a raven’s tail robe. She started to study traditional weaving practice in a collaborative experience in 2011. studies and weaves during weekly classes at a Grand Ronde center in Portland with teachers Greg Archuleta (Grand Ronde) and Greg Robinson (Chinook).

Siestreem now runs a weaving program for her tribe. Supported by a number of grants, she studies with her mentors and goes with them into museums so they can reverse-engineer how the Coos baskets were originally made.

Major works
For Children in Cold Climates (2012) contains oil and graphite on paper. This painting was painted in the week when a teenager Trayvon Martin was killed by George Zimmerman in Florida. However the painting is not related to its event yet Siestreem was devastated and continued to work in her way. The circular black shapes on top of the piece was mean buttons play in some of our regalia. The buttons are gazing down at a landscape which represent bird dropping fire from an apocalyptic sky scene. She had terminated the figures’ bodies with the end of Ovid, which is a fishtail. She presented her tribe as a salmon tribe; she thinks salmon people were coastal tribes and so salmon is a critical part of our culture and therefore identified coos as avenging minion. In her view, a kind of apocalyptic sky in this painting is an eagle dropping fire. Siestreem claimed this piece is eventually as a statement to say that “we are watching, and we don’t approve of this and the red white and black goes into that…” It is her own way of summoning "avenging minions" of injustice through her art.

Waterline features a simple painting that express Siestreem's a deep loneliness of natural environment. Her present lives in a city reminds her early childhood on the Umpqua River Valley in the South Coast of Oregon. The painting contains a color theory, how red and green work. The green field on the back, red field on the middle and a line below give the viewer horizon where water and the land meet. She concluded this work as a home piece, the realm of deep visual pleasure and a three-stroke painting. The big thought in her work is the importance of thinking about grief and living somewhere that is possible and peaceful.

Ballast Siestreem is interested in wordplay double meanings that are contained in the same word. This painting is a handout in solidarity to the African-American population from the native culture. She is thinking about the historical relationship between groups. In this painting, Siestreem is thinking two things; a ballast in a ship is the thing that keeps it balanced and other side of ballast that keeps afloat through space and time. Siestreem lined the painting wall into two big pieces of paper which represent residue or the aftermath of all other paintings she did. On the bottom, there is incredible rain that happens this drip which she attracted to. For Siestreem, implicating rhythm creates the painting peaceful and has a compositional device that can quiet down and resolve an area. The white circular forms on the top of the painting creates quiet mood, in contrast red and green in the middle is very active. The piece contains all the different elements including her graphite.

Days and Days referring to the continual occupation of Chinook people. This installation is a monolithic print, comprised of multiple square cells and arranged in the plaiting pattern used in Red Cedar bark Weaving. The work is an endeavor of our inner tribal relationships, education strategies and traditional presence as contemporary and sophisticated people. There are two different reference materials; the black and white images are a continuation of Siestreem's work with Xerox machine, they are depicting the weaving process of work showing in crow shadow. The color images are photographs of root bundles.

In scale and through the organization of imagery, she is making a geologic reference. The top row is about power, joy and the grand elements; she is identifying our original occupation of this region with reference to my teachers and my own tribal group. The second striation refers to the Red Cedar in the power, in the process and the interaction with the hands. The third row (center striation) recognizes Indigenous people's suffer by the United States government. In the fourth striation, she is pointing to violent strategies of resistance and survival. Indigenous people on this continent have been in a constant state of engaged warfare with the United States Government since contact.The fifth striation represents to non-violent strategies of resistance, revitalization, and reclamation. She postulate weaving culture as a non-violent militant act that combats genocide through economic, educational, institutional, technological, intellectual, spiritual, natural, feminine and masculine empowerment. Siestreem have stretched the wall of her huckleberry basket until it transformed into an image of the river and the canoe. Here, she is referencing her teacher, Greg Robinson and the Chinookan metaphor contained in his work. The last image is Siestreem's hand trailing in the water with the cedar strands as if over the side of the canoe. This is her way of cleansing grief and letting go of pain, healing through the soothing beauty of our natural life.

OG (2014-2015) is Siestreem's first large Spruce root piece. It is modeled after historic baskets made by the Katy Tom, a Coos- Lower Umpqua weaver, identified by Patricia Whereat Phillips (Coos) and one of her teachers, Nan MacDonald (Biloxi, Chitimacha, Choctaw). In the title, she is making a play on words. The yellow dye she used to create the contrast in color was made with Oregon grape root, OG. In contemporary culture OG is a slang term used that means Original Gangster. It is a term of respect for someone who has been around a long time and is an innovator. She is linking this with her thematic mentioned in the Days and Days piece stating that traditional weaving is a militant pacifistic act to fight against genocide.

Boy Huckleberry Basket (2014) is the third huckleberry basket in the Chinookan style made with Red Cedar bark. It is the one she uses the most. It is a versatile basket that she uses year round. So far she has used it for chanterelle, Oregon grape root, cotton wood buds, sorrel, huckleberry-both red and black, salmon berry, black berry, thimble berry, my lunch, camera, and tools.

Boyhood-Antiwar (2014) is a hat that belongs to Oliver Crazy Horse Currin Logue (Klamath-Modoc) for the occasion of his seventh birthday to celebrate his sixth year in which he visited India and saw monkeys running wild in the streets and rode a motorcycle. The flicker feather he found outside his house in Portland, Oregon. It is a wildly experimental basket and the second piece Siestreem made with spruce, the toughest of the weaving materials.

Childs Work Dance Cap (2015) is Siestreem's first attempt to find shape of the traditional dance cap. The materials are included with tule basal leaf warp, cat tail, bur reed, and sweet grass sedge weft. She used experimental and green weaving materials. She claimed that it will be interesting to see how it changes over time.

Girl Huckleberry Basket (2013) is the first Chinookan style huckleberry basket that she wove. It is a gift for her tribe for the community to use at culture camp. It was put to use in summer every day by a different member of the community. She used Red and Yellow Cedar bark.