Brian Fleetwood

Mobile Artist in Residence 2023–2024

The Georgia O’Keeffe Museum and Axle Contemporary selected Brian Fleetwood (Muscogee Creek) as the first Mobile Artist in Residence for 2023–2024. Fleetwood’s project, Place/Holding, focused on community identity, jewelry-making, and plastics.

Place/Holding was a community-centered initiative designed to engage and to collaborate with diverse communities across various Northern New Mexico locations. At its core, Place/Holding sought to obtain valuable resources without being extractive or transactional, which fostered a sense of inclusivity and shared ownership. Place/Holding’s primary focus was on the transformation of waste single-use plastics, collected from the communities it visited, into meaningful, collaboratively designed small objects meant to be worn or carried on the body.

To achieve this vision, Brian Fleetwood utilized the Museum’s Art to G.O. Truck, and traveled to different regions of Northern New Mexico to collect plastic waste from local residents during the winter of 2023.

Place/Holding culminated with an exhibition hosted by Axle Contemporary, a mobile exhibition space, in the spring of 2024. Axle Contemporary’s role was pivotal in showcasing the final art creations, which emphasized the project’s commitment to engaging communities in a holistic and inclusive manner. With the return of these artistic creations to the communities from which the materials were sourced, the project completed a full circle of resource utilization, creativity, and community empowerment.

About Brian Fleetwood

Brian Fleetwood is a multifaceted artist, an Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) faculty member, and a proud member of the Muscogee Creek Nation. Informed by traditional stories and making practices, a youth spent in rural Oklahoma, a background in biology and ecology, and lived experience with autism, Fleetwood’s work examines jewelry’s ability to mediate between a body and the space it occupies. He uses collaboration and experimentation with material and process to create work that aspires to behave in similar ways to living things, as a way of exploring parallels between the way ideas and living organisms grow, spread, and evolve. This work investigates the connections between different ways of knowing, acts of making, and the unexpected and complex kinship between ourselves and everything else.