Monica Gilles-Brings Yellow
Arist Statement
Monica’s work attempts to celebrate the lives of Native American people, with her primary focusing being Indigenous women. Monica uses her art to provide a visual history and culturally authentic glimpse into the lives of into Indigenous people.
Through the use of portraits and historical photographs as reference Monica hopes that her art acts as a biography for each person, giving them back their names and providing a platform to discuss their lives and stories. The act of which directly combats the continual erasure and dismissal of Native American people in the modern cultural landscape.
About Monica Gilles-Brings Yellow
Monica Gilles-BringsYellow is a Missoula, Montana based self-taught artist who did not start teaching herself how to paint until the summer of 2019. Monica had just finished graduate school for her Master of Social Work degree when she decided to start painting as a hobby and began experimenting with different mediums and techniques. Monica originally started creating abstract landscapes via forms of fluid art, but then quickly moved on to the incorporation of collage and portraits.
Being a student of history and having a heavy interest in Indigenous cultural knowledge, Monica started researching Native American women and their stories through institutional archives and Tribal historians. She then started to combine portraits of the women she had researched with her experiments in various mediums (inks, resin, gold leaf, encaustic) creating a style she refers to as 3-D collage. Monica continues to paint in this style and has also continued to use art as a medium to educate and inform others about Indigenous people and their cultures.
Since 2019 Monica has been featured as an artist in numerous group shows, public art installations, and exhibitions in principally Montana. Notable group exhibitions are the “We Are Still Here and This Is Our Story” at the Emerson in Bozeman, “No More Stolen Sisters” in at the Walker’s Point Center for the Arts in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, and the “Homelands” Traffic Signal Box in Missoula, Montana. Monica has also had solo exhibitions at KALICO Art Center in Kalispell, Montana, The Emerson in Bozeman, Montana and in Missoula, Montana at the ZACC.