CLAY SCULPTURIST AND FABRIC ARTIST

ANITA FIELDS

Born in Oklahoma, Anita Fields is a contemporary Native American multi-disciplinary artist of Osage heritage. She is known for her works which combine clay and textile with Osage knowledge systems.

Fields explores the intricacies of cultural influences at the intersections of balance and chaos found within our existence, explaining that “The power of transformation is realized by creating various forms of clothing, coverings, landscapes, and figures. The works become indicators of how we understand our surroundings and visualize our place within the world.” In this way, the early Osage concepts of duality, such as earth and sky, male and female, are represented throughout her work.

Her sculptures have been featured in many solo and group exhibitions, including the 2020-2021 Weaving History Into Art; The Enduring Legacy of Shan Goshorn, Gilcrease Museum, Form and Relation: Contemporary Native Ceramics, Hood Museum, Dartmouth College, the 2018-2020 Hearts of Our People, Minneapolis Institute of Art, and the 2018 Art for A New Understanding: Native Voices, 1950’s to Now at Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art.

Her work also included Who Stole the Teepee? at the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian, New York, and the 1997 Legacy of Generations: Pottery by American Indian Women at the National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington DC., Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Arkansas. Her work can be found in several collections, such as the Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian, the Museum of Art and Design, New York City, the Minneapolis Institute of Art, Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, and the Heard Museum, Arizona.

Fields was a 2017-2019 fellow with the Kaiser Foundation Tulsa Artist Fellowship program and is currently a 2020-2023 Tulsa Artist Fellowship Integrated Arts Grant awardee. Fields was the invited artist for the 2021 Eiteljorg Museum of Contemporary Art Fellowship. Fields was recently named a 2021 National Endowment of the Arts Heritage Fellow and a 2021 Anonymous Was A Woman award. In 2022 she received a Francis J Greenburger award.