This project is an intergenerational collaboration between Maggie Thompson (Fond du Lac Ojibwe) and her mother, Peggy Thompson. Their work brings together weaving, painting and shared observation of land. Using the grounds of the Arboretum as their common point of reference, they explore how two distinct visual languages – Ojibwe floral design and painterly depictions of ground – interpret the same environment.

Maggie created woven textile works using ribbon and beads to create Ojibwe florals, inspired by flowers growing in and around the Arboretum, while her mother painted a series focused on the ground, dirt and earth found at the Arboretum. Rather than depicting flowers directly, her work centers the soil that sustains them, emphasizing texture and a mother’s role as nurturer. Her paintings function as both physical and conceptual foundations for Maggie’s woven and beaded pieces. 

In this way, the project reflects how knowledge is passed intergenerationally, and how, as children, we grow from those familial foundations. By layering her woven and beaded florals in relationship to her painted surfaces, Maggie’s work highlights differences in how we each see, translate and honor the land. This collaboration brings visibility to Ojibwe floral design as a living, evolving practice, while situating it in conversation with another generation’s way of making. The works emphasize relationships to land, lineage and to one another, positioning the Arboretum not only as a site of study, but as a shared teacher. 

The Native American Artist in Residence program celebrates the intersection of art and nature at the Arboretum. It is funded by the 2024 Gala in the Gardens Fund-a-Need, which raised funds for co-curated art programming with historically excluded communities in 2025 and 2026.

This exhibit will run alongside the Stratigraphy exhibit in the Reedy Gallery for the month of September. 

This exhibit brings together two Ojibwe artists who create contemporary work about Native life. "Stratigraphy" (/strəˈtiɡrəfē/) spirals through the cyclical nature of generations, land and time. The word stratigraphy refers to the structure and order of a particular set of strata, or layers of earth. Geologists and archaeologists alike use stratigraphy to understand the passage of time. The exhibit showcases the way that these three artists conceptualize time: through generations. This exhibit complements artist Maggie Thompson’s intergenerational collaboration, Inherited Ground. 

In the words of artist Racquel Banaszak (Bad River Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe, Bois Forte Band of Ojibwe), visual art allows the viewer to “navigate between the past, present, and future simultaneously.” Her layered, stratigraphic collages portray Ojibwe lifeways of time immemorial. She uses modern materials like beads, velvet and gold leaf, and traditional materials, like porcupine quills, and ink. Faceless figures, like corn dolls, wear clothing and take actions that elude time.

Eliza Klarer (White Earth Nation Direct Descendant) makes ceramics that have a literal stratigraphy: layers of Waabigan or clay covered by layers of glaze, some accented by additional layered appliques. Her Woodland ceramics echo back 2,500 or more years. Her contemporary work speaks to the uppermost layer of the Earth’s crust – the buildings and fungi that cover the newest stratum we interact with every day. Her paintings feature layered meaning. Migizi (eagles) swoop down to Minnesota’s state flower, and waawaashkeshiweshkan (deer antlers) appear alongside modern objects.

These works invite you to consider time as a cycle, with layers of generational ancestry beneath, behind and all around us.

This exhibit will run alongside the Inherited Ground exhibit in the Reedy Gallery for the month of September. 

There is still more outdoor fun to be had this year. Step out of the "white cube" gallery and into the tall grass. The Brightness of Being is an invitation to leave your serious art-critic hat at the door and rediscover the world through the eyes of  Anne Spooner, Leigh Bauer, Liya Oertel and Nicky Torkzadeh. This is a curated celebration of the light that resides within the playful, the small and the spirited. In a world that often feels heavy, this exhibition serves as a sanctuary of illumination — focusing on the literal brightness of the sun-drenched sky and the figurative brightness of the human and animal spirit.