KSHB 41 reporter Lily O’Shea Becker covers Franklin and Douglas counties in Kansas. Lily has kept in touch with Marina DeCora since February, when it was first announced federal funding cuts would impact Haskell Indian Nations University. Share your story idea with Lily.
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When Travis Campbell, director of the Haskell Cultural Center and Museum, approached Haskell Indian Nations University student Marina DeCora about doing an art exhibit, she didn’t know all it would entail.
“I didn’t realize he had meant in the cultural center, a solo exhibit,” she said.
She’s the only current student at Haskell to have had a solo exhibit at the center, which tells the extensive history of the university that opened as an assimilation boarding school for Native students in 1884.
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“To be able to incorporate contemporary student work into the same space as our history is really an amazing opportunity,” Campbell said.
I first spoke with DeCora through emails and texts after federal funding cuts impacted the university in February.
“Rough year,” DeCora said. “It’s been ups and downs pretty drastically.”
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We’ve stayed in touch and met for the first time on Wednesday to talk about a plan she sketched.
“I turned to my art,” she said.
Her exhibit, titled “ReVision,” includes work from January through July of this year. While her art captures a time in her life impacted by federal orders that altered her education, it mostly reflects her feelings on a more personal note.
“A lot of my art pieces also include masks,” she said. “You know, removing masks to see the true nature of what’s underneath.”
Haskell student turns to art to process turbulent year, plans to invest in campus art scene
She hopes her art will inspire other artists on campus, and she plans for it to help in more ways than one.
“We’re looking at $10,000 for the cultural center and $10,000 for the start-up foundation,” DeCora said.
DeCora is working to establish her own foundation in honor of her ancestor Angel DeCora, a well-known Native American artist who taught art at the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in the early 1900s.
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“I have the opportunity here to do kind of what my aunt did,” DeCora said. “I’m not going to try to change the world or anything, but what I can do is help others. Hopefully, help others process what it means to be a Native in what we would say is an outsider community.”
She’s raising funds by selling prints of her showcased artwork, and after the exhibit concludes in May, she plans to sell her original pieces. DeCora said she already has $6,000 in offers.
Half of the funds will go toward her foundation, and she’ll invest it into the art scene on Haskell’s campus.
The other funds will go to the cultural center.
“We will utilize that funding to help sponsor student workers here,” Campbell said.
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