Honoring Our Ancestors, mixed media, 2004, 28” x 25” x 12”
Lillian Pitt (Warm Springs Confederated Tribes) graduated from Mount Hood Community College, Oregon, with an Associate of Arts Degree. Best known for her ceramic masks, the artist has exhibited nationally and internationally. Lillian Pitt's works are in the permanent collection of the Portland Art Museum, OR, the Burk Museum, University of Washington in Seattle, WA, the Heard Museum, Phoenix, AZ, the Indian Arts & Crafts Board, Washington D.C., the Westphalian State Museum of Natural History, Münster, Germany, and the city of Oguni, Japan.
Lillian Pitt's Honoring our Ancestors is an homage to the spectacular sight that greeted teh Lewis and Clark Expedition as they entered the territory of the Plateau communities. Canoeing along the Columbia River, they found the shores lined with numerous racks of drying salmon. Her mixed media sculpture translates the life and experience of her people into contemporary form. They represent her interpreation of the ancestral etchings and paintings on the rocks in the Columbia River Gorge between Oregon and Washington and images from Wasco root bags. While a maskette of She-Who-Watches, an image found in ancient petroglyphs in the Columbia River Gorge, reminds the viewer of the presence of Native people in this land for thousands of years, a blue macaw feather acknowledges Indigenous communities throughout the hemisphere. Like much of Pitt's life and work, this piece represents a continuum between the past and present. She reminds us of her culture's vitality, witnessed by the Lewis and Clark expedition throught the breathtaking appearance of salmon.