Joe Baker

Three Sisters

Joe Baker’s painting, Three Sisters, weaves together symbols of great importance in Lenape culture, history, and mythology with a deeply personal family story. In this work, Baker—an influential artist, curator, and advocate of Indigenous art—meditates on the history of his maternal grandmother and her two sisters, whose affluence after discovering oil on their Oklahoma property did not protect them from violence or murder. On the canvas, the women are represented by three blue leaves rising from the forest floor into the heavens. A rumination on memory, mourning, and celebration, the work recalls the environs of the Lenape ancestral woodlands on the East Coast, the mythological significance of the sassafras tree, and the Lenape creation story of the Pleiades star cluster, also known as the Seven Sisters.