Cover Art

Cover Artist

Born in Oklahoma, Native American artist Anita Fields creates works of clay and textile that reflect the worldview of her Osage culture. Her work represents the disruption of balance found within the earth and our lives and, more broadly, early Osage notions of duality such as earth and sky, male and female. Fields’s sculptures were exhibited in Changing Hands: Art without Reservation in New York City. Her work was featured in the 8th Native American Fine Art Invitational at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, Arizona. Her work was also included in Who Stole the Teepee? at the National Museum of the American Indian, Smithsonian Institution, New York; and the Legacy of the Generations: Pottery by American Indian Women, National Museum of Women in the Arts, Washington, DC. Fields has been awarded numerous residencies, including the Eitelljorg Museum’s RARE program and the Andy Warhol Fine Arts Residency at the Heard Museum. Fields was one of forty-seven Native American delegates funded by the Kellogg Foundation and the Institute of American Indian Arts to travel to South Africa for The Answers Lie Within. Fields is a fellow with the Kaiser Tulsa Artist Fellowship program. Fields’s work has been published in Southwest Art magazine, American Craft, Ms. Magazine, American Style, and Native Peoples. Her work can be found in several collections, such as the Museum of Art and Design in New York City; the Institute of American Indian Arts Museum, Santa Fe, New Mexico; the Crystal Bridges Museum, Bentonville, Arkansas; and the Heard Museum, Phoenix, Arizona.

About It’s a Bucket with a Lid on It

Sometime during the 1940s my Wah Zha Zhi (Osage) eko (grandmother), whose first language was Osage, and my aunt Margaret were traveling in Colorado. They were shopping in a store in Colorado Springs when my eko spotted a piece of enamelware, an item frequently used during feasts and ceremonies in our culture then and now. Eko asked my aunt in Osage, “Ha non tze?” (How much is it?). Before my aunt could reply, a salesman said very loudly and close to her face, “It’s a bucket with a lid on it.” Not one to shrug things off, Eko slowly responded with deliberate sarcasm in English, “I know it’s a bucket with a lid on it!”

My eko and aunt achieved great pleasure in the retelling of their experi- ence; it is a story we heard many times growing up, and we never failed to laugh, all of us imagining the bizarre scenario, knowing in our hearts that it was dismissive and dehumanizing. Though to some this story may seem meaningless and inconsequential, I have always thought of it for what it was, an assault on the integrity and intelligence of my precious eko and aunt. Sadly and all too often, this incident and others like it represent experiences that continue to be commonplace and a definitive reality for Native people.