Born in Oklahoma, Anita Fields (Osage/Muscogee) creates works of clay and textile that reflect Osage worldviews, including notions of duality, earth and sky, and male and female. In an effort to understand our shared existence, Fields asks viewers to consider other ways of seeing and being, and she employs heavily textured layers and distorted writing to reference the complex layers and distortion of truths found in the written history of Indigenous cultures. Landscapes, environment, and the powerful influences of nature are themes found throughout her work, reflecting how we understand our surroundings and visualize our place within the world, time, place, and how the earth holds the memory of cultures who once called a specific terrain home.
Fields just received the prestigious 2021 Eiteljorg Contemporary Art Fellowship, and is currently 2017-2020 fellow with the Kaiser Foundation’s Tulsa Artist Fellowship. She has been included in many exhibitions including the recent Hearts of Our People and Art for A New Understanding. Her work is in the collections of the Minneapolis Institute of Art; Crystal Bridges Museum; Museum of Art and Design, New York; Museum of Contemporary Native Arts, Santa Fe; Heard Museum; Eiteljorg Museum; National Museum of the American Indian; Osage Tribal Museum; Hood Museum; Fred Jones Museum of Art; among others.
Fields will give two presentations at UVA.