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ABOUT the Artists:

Jeremy Dennis (b. 1990) is a contemporary fine art photographer and founder of Ma’s House. A member of Shinnecock Indian Nation, a federally recognized tribe in Southampton, Long Island, who’s work  explores indigenous identity, assimilation, and tradition from the lens of a millennial.

Brianna Hernandez Baurichter (b. 1991) is a Chicana artist, curator, educator, and death doula guided by socially-engaged practices. Her background includes experience working in community organizations, gallery, museum, and higher education settings, and as a consultant with public health researchers.

Kelly Dennis (b. 1984) is a Shinnecock visual artist, attorney, Shinnecock Council of Trustees elected tribal leader, and Primary Member of the First-Ever Department of the Interior Secretary’s Tribal Advisory Committee. Her visual art practice confronts histories of colonization, misconceptions, stereotypes, racism, historical trauma, and challenges she faces personally as an Indigenous woman.

Hope Sandrow's (b. 1951) art practice is her ‘way’ of life. In the mediums of still, video, mixed media, installation, sculpture, new media, performance and social practice. Exhibited in her artist-in-residence interdisciplinary project open air studio Shinnecock Hills spacetime, sited on ancestral lands.

(above, l to r) Hope Sandrow, Portrait of a Chicken as an Egg (Candled) within A Golden Rectangle open air studio spacetime 231pm Aug 27 2017  Unique Pigment Print on Cotton size variable 2019 Private Collection; 

Jeremy Dennis, The Moon Person, 2017 24” x 30”  Digital Color Print  Collection Hope Sandrow

(below, l to r) Kelly Dennis, Medicine Wheel Musháyu, 8’ x 12’  Mixed Media, “mushayu” meaning large in Shinnecock Algonquian language dialect 2003;  Brianna Hernandez Baurichter Aquí Descansamos , a living cemetery realized in a Mixed Media installation size variable  2020 ongoing

(June 2022, Shinnecock Hills). We are excited to announce Nourishing Reciprocity: Artists in Collaboration. “Our new interdisciplinary project is in the beginning phase, stemming from a relationship of reciprocity and gratitude as artist Hope Sandrow has shared well over 6,000 of her Padovana flocks hens eggs with the Shinnecock tribal community,” according to Kelly Dennis. Shinnecock tribal member citizens and artist siblings Kelly Dennis and Jeremy Dennis delivered Hope’s chickens eggs to their tribal community at the emergency food tent during the COVID-19 pandemic and continue to share eggs with the tribal community today. This collaboration will bring a new communal resource of chickens and eggs to the Shinnecock Reservation at Ma’s House. Here, a new Padovana chicken flock born from Hope’s flock inhabiting her open air studio, will live within a sustainable art installation to be created by Ma’s House founder artist Jeremy Dennis and his partner, fellow artist Brianna Hernandez Baurichter. With Hope sharing knowledge and experience of open air studio, a living record of climate change and restoration; a micro environment reflective of important aspects of macro environments within the Shinnecock Indian Contact Period Village Fort Critical Environmental Area. The genesis was a Chance Encounter (Surrealist doctrine of objective chance) of Hope with a Padovana white cockeral (2006) on ancestral lands. His appearance (chance or destined?) portents of things to come: chickens named (2018) a defining species of the Anthropocene, symbolic of the transformation of the biosphere.

Kelly will research historical records, from territorial land-use to pre-colonial significance of chickens and birds in Shinnecock culture and agriculture to environmental protections for healthy chicken keeping, and gift sharing for survival with plants and animals. The intended social impact is to express gratitude for and expand on Hope’s gift of chicken eggs to the tribal community that also encourages sustainable living practices. Identifying effects on the lands and waters resulting from fertilizers, pesticides, and temik chemicals used by potato farmers on leased Shinnecock Territory (1970s); necessary remediation efforts while pursuing tribal food sovereignty projects. “Excited to have chickens at Ma’s House, Jeremy states. Chickens will eat the ticks that overrun our environment. Traditionally we did controlled burns to manage overgrowth but the large density of modern-day houses, along with our natural environment being a sanctuary to wildlife, has also brought ticks that can cause lyme disease which many tribe members suffer.”

“In open air studio, (re)consideration of our relationships to nature and the natural world unfold on ancestral lands,” Hope states. “And, soon to be realized in a new installation on site Ma’s House, the groundbreaking project founded by Jeremy. Last fall, I was honored by the invitation to collaborate; inspired by each of my colleagues illuminating practices and perspectives. Gratified sharing hen’s eggs with Kelly, Jeremy and the Shinnecock Community. This spring, Kelly accepted to become the inaugural artist-residency in my open air studio, a structure that was originally plein air painter William Merritt Chase’s carriage house (1891-1914) when he lived, painted, taught nearby. My founding of and chairing on the Town of Southampton Arts and Culture Committee in which Jeremy is a member, highlights the important role of artists in our community.”

ABOUT: open air studio Hope’s “home” site (2006) for creating art and engaging in timely matters thru the lens of history making and remaking itself within the continuum of space and time. A laboratory for experimentation during critical planetary change in climate, society and culture. As artist-in-residence, her intent is to present the natural history of everyday life while regenerating discourse on the subjects of nature and art. Issues of identity, gender, science, climate and the politics of power and myth are also at play, representing a sustainable collaboration with the more-than-human-realm reflecting the inter relationships of living organisms to one another and their physical environment. Her interdisciplinary art installation illustrates the central premise of Michael Pollan’s seminal book The Botany of Desire.

ABOUT Ma’s House & BIPOC Art Studio  Since June 2020, Indigenous visual artist and photographer Jeremy Dennis has endeavored to restore the Silva family home he grew up in to make Ma’s House & BIPOC Art Studio a communal and safe space for Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) artists to create work, participate in artist residencies and be offered a place to exhibit their contemporary work on the Shinnecock Indian Reservation. Hosting an array of art and history-based programs for tribe members and the broader local community. Inspired by the rise of social justice activism against police brutality, bigotry, and systemic racism and considering the unprecedented challenges artists who identify as BIPOC now face to follow their passions and have their work supported, Jeremy hopes that Ma’s House will be a space for creativity, healing, imagining, and liberation.

A free public engagement will be facilitated in June 2023 at Ma’s House to coincide with the Shinnecock’s annual traditional celebration of June Meeting and the Strawberry Harvest. Our presentation will include a panel discussion with Hope, Kelly and Jeremy speaking about the findings of this collaborative project. Hope’s chickens, known as Shinnecock Family Flock, will be streamed live from her open air studio via an online feed Happening Live Now as part of an exhibition and open studios at Ma’s House. That will also include Kelly’s art works completed at Hope’s open air studio during her residency, with other artist contributions that are bird-themed to promote the newly completed installation, chicken coop and communal resource of eggs and other mediums that Ma's House will offer to the Shinnecock community. Kelly and Jeremy will share how chickens were first kept at Ma’s House when their mother artist Denise Silva Dennis was a child, how other relatives have had chickens on the Reservation - and discuss the “Chicken Dance” at Pow Wow that originates from the Northern Plains tribes. Kelly states: “I look forward to participating in Indigenous cultural expression that highlights the environmental benefits of food sovereignty, decolonizing our diet, sacred nourishment and eating mindfully, sustainability, and connection to Shinnecock ancestors whose traditional relationship with the land and all living things is reciprocal as part of the public engagement events.

Read more about the history of chickens in a June 10 2022  NY Times article by James Gorman.