I gave a docent tour at the Frist Art Museum this past Sunday of our current exhibition: Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists. It is a beautiful exhibition curated by the Minneapolis Institute of Art which will travel to the Smithsonian in Washington, DC and the Gilcrease Museum in Tulsa, OK after it closes here in Nashville next weekend. One piece stood out this past Sunday: Idiot Strings: The Things We Carry by Sonya Kelliher-Combs an Athabascan and Inupiat artist from Alaska. It is a series of goat and sheep hide pouches attached to strings, forming floating pockets. They cast shadows on the ground, creating an ethereal effect. The piece is, in part, the artist’s response to the suicides of three of her relatives. The strings invoke “the idea of tethering,” she said, “to not forget about these people.” I talked with my tour group about the empty pouches and how they represent the burdens that we carry with us that we need to empty out from our lives. We have all been ha
