Anything Can Be Art
Mikayla Patton (Oglala Lakota) grew up on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. She works primarily in printmaking and painting through the use of mixed media.
Mikayla has exhibited work at the Heard Museum in Phoenix, the Dahl Art Center in Rapid City, and The Heritage Center at Red Cloud Indian School in Pine Ridge. In 2017, she was honored with an Emerging Artist Award from the Native POP: People of the Plains show in South Dakota. Her work has been showcased at Chiaroscuro in Santa Fe, and she was featured on the cover of Pasatiempo Magazine. Mikayla is a 2020 First Peoples Fund Artist in Business Leadership Fellow, living in Santa Fe.
Standing at the sink, Mikayla dips her hands in water that is filled with scraps of paper and fabric. It reminds her of washing dishes as a child, being with her grandmother, doing everyday things. A sewer and quilt maker, Mikayla’s grandmother used scraps of anything and everything lying around to create quilts to give to her family.
“I remember her always being calm and quiet, but she really showed affection,” Mikayla says. “It was usually by the things she did with me, which was just hanging out and helping her around the house.”
Pulping paper out of scraps like washing dishes; sandwiching the paper with sheets to press it out like doing laundry — the process of creating the piece, Unci’s Love, is like a memory for Mikayla.
“After the paper [making] process was finished, the paper organically cradled the fabric,” Mikayla says. “I recently started making my own paper using leftover paper scraps in order to recycle and reduce but also to make a point that anything can be art.”
Several years ago, Mikayla relocated to New Mexico to continue her education at the Institute of American Indian Arts. Unable to afford college after the first year, she spent three years working to pay for tuition bills, then returned to IAIA in 2015, receiving her Bachelors of Fine Arts in Studio Arts in 2019.
Mikayla relies on presses to produce her work, a labor-intensive process requiring that she stand and hand-crank the press for hours at a time. She uses non-toxic inks, oil pastels, pencil, stencils, and found materials such as cereal boxes, string, fabric, plants, and beads.
As a printmaker and painter, Mikayla is exploring matriarchal ideology by navigating its complexities through Lakota artistry, design, and geometric forms. She also focuses her time on jewelry making and digital designing, at times combining the two processes to produce her own unique artistry.
It is still moments of sensory experiences that truly motivates Mikayla to continue pushing herself to share and express. Her grandmother showed her that everyday things can be art.
