Meet 2022-2024 RedLine Resident Artist Chelsea Kaiah!
Chelsea Kaiah (b. 1995) is Ute and Apache/ Irish settler, born on the Northern Ute reservation. As an artist, she currently resides in Denver Colorado.
She is a passionate activist for Native rights, awareness, and sustainability. Chelsea earned her BFA at Watkins College of Art and Design in Nashville Tennessee. Today, she learns traditional practices of pine needle weaving, beading, porcupine quilling, buffalo hunting, and hide work. Incorporating her interdisciplinary skills to meld a perspective of culture and artistic practice.
For Kaiah, storytelling has always been an integral part of her up-bringing. Storytelling is a connection to her relations, community, past, and hopes for future. Even objects (hide bags) that just carry belongings become cultural carriers that bring knowledge by creation, and carriers of visual storytelling.
By adapting traditional materials and techniques to engage a mindful space for honoring subjects that discuss resilience, mental health, system reformation, and means of healing, traditional work becomes more than tradition—it becomes cultural experience.
Chelsea presents human forms often masked to have ambiguity if it’s her world, their world, or for viewers to reflect themselves in our world. She believes reflecting the human condition is an important connection to reignite nature-based relationships between cultural and physical environments.
Watch the video of Chelsea in her RedLine studio below to learn more about her and her practice!
"Hello, my name is Chelsea Kaiah. I am White Mountain Apache and White River Utes. I am from the Northern Ute Reservation, located on the border of Utah and Colorado. I moved to Denver mid-COVID in 2020.
"Right now, my practice mainly consists of doing bead work, quill work, and hide work. I've really been trying with my practice to introduce traditional skills and have them consistently done in my practice. Not only am I getting better at those traditional skills, but I'm also really bringing something unique to contemporary art and bringing those into galleries, exhibitions, and museums.
"It's really fun to experiment with the contemporary imagery that I use and try and find a way to adapt traditional skills like quill work or hide work, and really challenge them and change them into what I consider my traditional contemporary art.
"I applied to RedLine because of the community. Just even being in the art community since 2020, in Denver, I have heard so much about RedLine, the artists that go through RedLine, just the overall support that RedLine offered.
“To me, not only is that something that I wanted to contribute, but also find that support in my practice as well and see what I could learn from surrounding creatives, artists, working artists, and everything in between."
Meet Resident Artist JayCee Beyale
Meet 2022-2024 RedLine Resident Artist JayCee Beyale!
Beyale’s connection to his aboriginal culture is grounded in his artistic practice. His personal identity, background and pride in who he is and where he comes from have always been at the heart of his work.
