Ma's House & BIPOC Art Studio finding its footing, after loss of pandemic funding

When tribal citizen Celeste Syas drives around the Shinnecock Territory in Southampton, her camera is always by her side.

“It’s beautiful here,” Syas, 28, said. “If I see something, I stop to get photos.”

But while she has sold her photographs online, a new exhibit at Ma’s House & BIPOC Art Studio featuring 27 Shinnecock artists marks the first time she has shown her work publicly.

“It’s a great opportunity for tribal members to showcase our work and talents,” she said of the show, which opened this month. “We have so many talented people on the reservation and you would never know it without something like this.”

Providing a platform for Black, Indigenous and other people of color — better known as BIPOC — artists is why Jeremy Dennis, himself an Indigenous artist, founded Ma’s House on the reservation in 2021. In the past three years, the community center and art gallery has hosted dozens of artists; put on numerous workshops, exhibits and performances; and collaborated with other East End organizations to spread awareness of and highlight BIPOC artists.

The nonprofit’s efforts were buoyed by a pandemic funding program that paid the salaries of four staff members for two years. But now, Dennis, 34, said the center must find its footing after the funding was phased out in June.

“After some of these once-in-a-lifetime grants, we’re going to need to tap into local donors and do fundraising like many other organizations,” he said.

ROOTS OF MA’S HOUSE

Before her death in 1998, Dennis’ grandmother, Loretta Hunter-Silva (known as “Ma” by her family), had said that she would like her home on the Shinnecock Territory to become a museum. So when Dennis, a fine-arts photographer, found himself unable to travel to artists’ residencies during the pandemic, he decided to make his late grandmother’s dream a reality. He refurbished the large, red house on Old Point Road and Ma’s House opened to the public in August 2021.

In 2022, the center was awarded funding from Creatives Rebuild New York, a private initiative that provided guaranteed income and employment opportunities to 2,700 New York State artists and arts organizations — including 23 from Long Island. The money paid for a base salary of $65,000 plus benefits to four staffers — Dennis; his mother, workshop coordinator Denise Silva-Dennis, 63; curator Brianna Hernández, 33; and Dennis’ cousin Hunter Begun, a 26-year-old videographer who produces podcasts featuring visiting artists.

Being able to draw a salary, said Dennis, afforded them the opportunity to focus on their work.

If we didn’t have that support, we’d be much smaller today.

Jeremy Dennis, Indigenous artist and founder of Ma’s House & BIPOC Art Studio

“If we didn’t have that support, we’d be much smaller today,” he said.

But the loss of funding means Ma’s House can no longer pay Silva-Dennis, Hernández and Begun. Dennis, recently named executive director by the center’s nine-person board, said he hopes to be able to fund part-time staff positions. Artist residencies, workshops and exhibits are planned through the end of the year.

And though they will no longer have backing from Creatives Rebuild New York, others have stepped in with assistance.

Dennis said the center has received a $500,000 award from Suffolk County’s JumpStart investment program that will go toward fixing the main support beam in the basement and building a separate 1,700-square-foot space with a kitchen that will be accessible to all, including tribal elders, so they can easily use a dedicated workshop area.

The center also got what Dennis called a “transformative” $135,000 grant from the Mellon Foundation for its operating expenses, and a $10,000 Sustainable Arts Foundation grant in honor of Hunter-Silva.

43 ARTIST RESIDENCIES

In three years, the center has hosted 43 artists in residence, most of them BIPOC artists from across the country, as well as one from South America and another from China. Resident artists generally stay at the center for two weeks and offer a workshop, exhibit or performance for the community before leaving. Some Indigenous artists stay for three weeks, Dennis said. Residencies come with a $250 weekly stipend.

There were 70 applicants for residency spots this year, Dennis said, with 14 accepted. To date, most have been artists at the start of their careers, but Dennis said he hopes to eventually offer spots to more established artists. He also plans to add more residencies to increase opportunities for networking and experiential learning through a satellite program run by conceptual artist Hope Sandrow in Shinnecock Hills.

When curating shows for Ma’s House, organizers try to be mindful of what’s important to tribal members, said Hernández, who is also the center’s board secretary and an assistant curator at the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill.

“Having it be top-down on a sovereign nation informs everything you do, so it’s being respectful of that and making space for conversations about what’s important to native people,” she said.

Last year, the gallery hosted a show about the Thomas Indian School, located south of Buffalo on the Cattaraugus Territory, that was curated by Seneca Nation’s Onöhsagwë:de’ Cultural Center. The boarding school has been accused of forced assimilation of Indigenous children. Initially founded by Presbyterian missionaries, the school was taken over by the state in 1875 and closed in 1957. About 2,470 students from across the state were sent to the school — including 25 Shinnecock children, according to Dennis.

Shinnecock members were able to contribute photos and scans of letters from children who were sent to the school. It was a chance for people to understand what happened, Hernández said, as well as boost inter-tribal dialogue.

“It’s so important to have that freedom and have that space to expand into what’s important to the community,” she said.

Friday evening beading workshops have also helped the center engage with the Shinnecock community, and residents can borrow from among 450 volumes of donated Indigenous literature, including reference books, novels and children’s books.

EXHIBITING AND TEACHING

The center’s current show, “Shinnecock Speaks,” opened July 7 and includes jewelry, photography, beading, paintings, wood sculptures and leather work. Dennis said he offered featured artists a stipend of $300 for participating in the exhibit, and an additional $275 for leading a workshop to extend the conversations generated by the exhibit.

One of the artists whose work is on display is Madeleine Rogers, who spent her childhood summers visiting her grandmother on the reservation. Rogers, 69, said she moved from Atlanta, Georgia, to the reservation with her mother, Rosemary Rogers, 94, four years ago and began making art then.

In the show, Rogers is exhibiting a painted thunderbird in honor of Henry F. Bess, known as Chief Thunder Bird, who was integral to starting the Shinnecock powwow in the mid-1940s.

“I’m touched that I have a piece of art on the wall in a gallery,” she said. “It makes me want to keep creating.”

Shinnecock tribal council chairwoman Lisa Goree was among those who attended the show’s opening reception.

“I was very impressed by the different artists and range of crafts, jewelry, painting and works on display,” she said. Regarding Dennis, she said, “He’s showcasing Shinnecock talent — where else would we be able to display that?”

COLLABORATIVE WORK

Board member Maureen McMahon, of Sag Harbor, said Dennis has built relationships with many East End arts organizations over the past three years. McMahon, a former fundraiser for two arts organizations — the MacDowell arts residency program in New Hampshire and the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council — is in her second term as a board member.

“Jeremy has forged deep relationships with every arts organization,” McMahon said. “He’s a great self-advocate and he keeps in contact with the local arts community out here.”

One collaborative example is an exhibit by 16 BIPOC artists titled “Reclamation: Narratives of Space, History, and Culture” that is on display at the Southampton History Museum’s Rogers Mansion. Curated by Dennis, the exhibit explores themes of identity and belonging. The artists seek connections to their cultural roots and explore family legends, often through an indigenous perspective.

The location is significant because Rogers Mansion was the 19th century summer house of Samuel L. Parrish, a lawyer who founded the Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill. He also handled land development projects, including one for the Shinnecock Hills Golf Club. Members of the Shinnecock Nation have said the land for the golf course was illegally taken from them and Indigenous burial sites were desecrated. (A federal suit to reclaim the land was dismissed.)

Sarah Kautz, the Southampton museum’s executive director, said the exhibit fits with the organization’s mission to preserve and promote the history and culture of Southampton.

“One of the things we’re trying to do is bring those stories back into Sam Parrish’s house and start to try and think about them, grapple with them, reconcile if we can,” she said.  

DIVERSIFYING THE EAST END ARTS SCENE

What sometimes gets overlooked because the art itself is so important, Kautz said, is that the physical space of Ma’s House is also significant.

“It shows you don’t need to have a really formal historic building; it can be a place that’s more recent, but it has some tremendous value for a very particular reason and a very particular community, and that makes it historic and significant and worthy of preservation and celebration,” she said. “It’s great to see a building on the reservation being used in that way.”

Ma’s House gives artists of color the opportunity to have their work seen and to foster their skills in a community of other BIPOC people, Kautz said. It has also helped diversify the East End arts scene and reach different audiences, she added.

And its advocates remain committed to the center, despite the loss of pandemic funding.

Hernández, the center’s curator, said she is working on the fall show and the team is looking ahead to plan next year’s calendar.

“We’re all dedicated to Ma’s House. For all of us it’s a personal investment,” she said. “I hope we can maintain the momentum.”