The Haunting Call of The REDress Project
The REDress Project, created by Jamie Black, is a public art installation that was created in response to the missing and murdered Indigenous women (MMIW) epidemic.
The REDress Project
By Jamie Black
The violence against Indigenous Women is appalling. The U.S. sexual assault statistics, Indigenous women, Native American, and Alaska Native women are more than 2.5 times more likely to be raped or sexually assaulted than other women in the country. In the rest of the States, one in three women are survivors of sexual abuse and sexual violence.
The government tends to think this is a criminal problem, not a social-economical one. The Native communities feel a sense of urgency but at the same of hopeless. Because of such disregard for the Native American Women’s rights and vulnerability that the artist Jaime Black created The REDressProject.
The REDress Project is a public art installation that was created in response to the missing and murdered Indigenous women (MMIW) epidemic in Canada and the United States. The REDress Project is an Aesthetic Response To the More Than 1000 Missing and Murdered Aboriginal Women in Canada.
The Art Project began in 2010 and honoring and memorializing the missing and murdered indigenous women from the First Nations, Inuit, Métis (FNIM), and Native American communities by hanging empty red dresses in a range of settings. The project has also inspired other artists to use red to draw attention to the issue of MMIW and prompted the creation of Red Dress Day.
Created by the artist Jaime Black, The REDress Project attempts to create a dialogue around social and political issues, mainly through an exploration of the body and the land as contested sites of historical and cultural knowledge. The artist Jaime Black identifies as Métis, an ethnic group native to parts of Canada and the United States of America, which traces their descent to both indigenous North Americans and Western European settlers.
Black was working at the Urban Shaman Contemporary Aboriginal Art gallery in Winnipeg when she attended a conference in Germany where she heard Jo-Ann Episkenew speak about the hundreds of missing and murdered women in Canada.
Jaime Black says the image of an empty red dress hanging outside came to her while listening to Episkenew speak but has since identified an influence from the book cover of Métis author Maria Campbell’s novel The Book of Jessica.
To date, more than 400 dresses have been donated by women across Canada. Families of missing or murdered women have contributed dresses and attended some of the exhibitions.
Art installation inspired by Métis artist Jaime Black at Seaforth Peace Park, Vancouver, Canada on the National Day for Vigils for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women 2016.
Black chose the color red after conversations with an indigenous friend, who told her red is the only color the spirits can see.
She says: “So (red) is a way to calling back of the spirits of these women and allowing them a chance to be among us and have their voices heard through their family members and community.”
The artist has also advocated the color red “relates to our lifeblood and that connection between all of us,” and that it symbolizes both vitality and violence.
The dresses are empty so that they evoke the missing women who should be wearing them. Jaime Black has said: “People notice there is a presence in the absence.”
Some of Black’s art installations have been done indoors, but the ideal space for the installation has been on the outdoors. Outside, the dresses interact with nature, evoking an eerie element, and drawing the eye of onlookers and introducing them to the MMIW issues ( Organization Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women) through information panels.
In 2011, Jaime Black installed the first REDress exhibition in her own city at the University of Winnipeg.
Since then, the critically acclaimed REDress project has been installed in the Canadian Museum of Human Rights, in the National Museum of the American Indian, and various campuses across the United States.
You will also enjoy The Protection of Indigenous and Tribal Societies and Peoples
About Jamie Black
Jaime Black is part of the Organization Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, an international coalition movement working against violence towards First Nations, Inuit, Métis, and other Native American communities.
Learn more about the Red Dress Project at http://www.redressproject.org/
