Denise Emerson - Sovereignty: Tradition, Heritage, and Culture

June 4 - 28, 2026

First Thursday Art Walk - Thursday June 4th, 5-8pm

Artist Statement

Being born into two tribes, Diné (Navajo) and Twana (Skokomish), my Twana mother taught me our family history. The terms “Tradition, Heritage, and Culture” are terms that she actually used while I was growing up. My Diné father also had an effect on my interest in illustrating Native American people. He brought home Native American magazines that had historical drawings of tribal people. As an art-focused teenager, I sat at the dinner table drawing the images in the magazine. The combination of my mother’s terms and my father’s magazines guided my interest in being Native American, and expressing my tribal heritage through art. I continued illustrating and painting historical Native American people by creating posters for my bedroom walls.

At the age of ten, I attended summer beading classes with my mother on Rainier Avenue in Seattle. When I walked into the community center and saw elders beading regalia, necklaces, chokers, barrettes, earrings—all body ornamentation—I realized I was home. I began designing beaded jewelry that I wore to school throughout junior and senior high. My art teachers in those years also guided my art by giving me the choice to change my art projects to fit my Native American heritage.

My method of creating bead designs is unique (I use Microsoft Excel) and I consider the completed Excel designs as a piece of art separate from the executed bead project. Using unlimited spreadsheets, I like the freedom of determining the height and width of cells that can fit the type of beads to be used for any given project. Multiple parts of a composition are drafted in separate worksheets where I experiment with colors until I merge the multiple worksheets into one composition. There are limitations, but the limitations of the application are its strongest attributes in the work that I produce because I am striving for simplicity yet with strong design principles at play.

The innate connection of belonging to the Native American community led me to attend the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA) after high school graduation. My bead art became more finished and had design innovations that reflected my culture through color and symbology. I decided that I needed a four-year college experience and I applied to the Graphic Design program at the University of Washington. It was difficult to be accepted into the School and the program was not as accommodating to my cultural aspirations; I had to learn to subdue my design aesthetic to successfully graduate from a traditionally grueling program.

After graduating from the University of Washington with a BFA in Graphic Design, my creativity included creating digital art, traditional graphic design and fine art. My inspiration: I recently learned that I am Duwamish from my mother’s side and that we are originally from what is now known as “West Seattle”. I was born in Shelton, WA, and I lived my first year in what is now known as Georgetown near Boeing Field where my father worked. Not incidentally, my grandmother’s birthplace is at Black River, which is basically Georgetown. I am rooted to this specific place and to the many, many generations of Native people that I descend from.

I find that as I have been exposed since birth to Native life here in the Pacific Northwest and Southwest, all those images and connections to traditions, making fashion and implements and even lodging—we have been in “design and produce mode” for generations. Even more, I have been a part of that creation through childhood and high school (in West Seattle) as I experimented with my beading techniques and created analog designs with graph paper.

In the present, everything is digital and I want to thrive in that environment as well. Yet every day, I practice my art and half of that is still taking a needle and a bead and making something three dimensional and available to wear with pride.