Harmony DeVaney is a local Iñupiaq Alaskan Native artist. Harmony started beading during lockdown in 2020, what initially started as a way to pass time, quickly blossomed into something much bigger. They believe Art is inherently political, and seeks to create art around themes of Indigenous joy, resilience and identity. The pieces for this show were carefully crafted over the course of a year.

These collage pieces were created by intentionally splicing and cutting “Middle West Country” By William Carter. This old book is riddled with American Nationalist Propaganda and erases true Indigenous and American History. Harmony merged collage with erasure poetry, erasing text that violently and systematically erased Indigenous Peoples from the narrative.

My name is Esther Gallahar, and I sell my art under the name Zionartistry. I’m a local artist here in Bellingham, Washington. I was born in Cap-Haitien, Haiti. Adopted at a young age and raised in Coupeville and Anacortes by white people who were practicing Evangelical Christianity. I spent the first half of my life on a big farm, with a lot of siblings, in a heavily religious family. Being the product of a transracial adoption and growing up queer in a religious rural environment would result in a deep struggle with identity and place. At thirteen, art became a refuge for me, a way to see my inner turmoil reflected at me in a way I saw as beautiful. It was a place to explore my desires, fears, and insecurities.

I learned to draw faces by sketching women I found beautiful, Marilyn Monroe and Angelina Jolie were my favorites. Their heavy lids and sultry gazes have stuck with me and every single painting I have made since. At the time, however, this idolization was not acceptable in the home I grew up in. When I stopped doing those sketches, my feelings and the world's about who, or what I was, started to bleed into my art. From the beginning, I rejected accurate representations of the face. If I were aiming for feature realism, the face would be blue. If I were drawing eyes, they would fill the page. To this day, using heavy distortion, evocative color use, and religious iconography-like composition, my art seeks to share the internal experience of external pressures. Specifically, religious suppression, identity erasure, and emotional displacement.