Marie Watt’s “Companion Species (Cosmos)” in an installation view of Storywork at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts. Image by Hannah McBeth.

On view through June 21, 2026, Storywork: The Prints of Marie Watt at the Utah Museum of Fine Arts brings together more than three decades of the artist’s practice in an exhibition that approaches storytelling not as illustration, but as structure. Drawn from the collections of the Jordan D. Schnitzer Family Foundation, the exhibition traces how narrative moves across mediums and communities, emerging through collaboration rather than individual authorship. For Marie Watt, a member of the Turtle Clan of the Seneca Nation, storytelling exceeds the written or spoken word. It unfolds materially through printmaking, textile construction, sculpture, and collective participation, operating as a multi-sensory system in which meaning is handled as much as it is read.

A teaching Watt frequently invokes quietly structures the exhibition: one person’s story changes when placed beside another’s. Installed prominently within the gallery, a quotation from National Poet Laureate Joy Harjo reinforces this understanding of narrative as relational knowledge: “We gave thanks for the story, for all parts of the story because it was by the light of those challenges we knew ourselves.” Despite its emphasis on story, Storywork abandons chronology. Works placed across adjacent galleries echo one another, asking viewers to make connections through proximity rather than timeline.

The exhibition’s opening movement introduces storytelling as fundamentally multi-modal. Collaboration with master printers, participation in sewing circles, and the reuse of domestic textiles all become forms of authorship and printmaking becomes both image production and a translation between sensory systems. In “Blanket Stories: Continuum (Book 1),” bands of text move horizontally and vertically across the surface, recalling threads crossing on a loom. Language behaves like fiber, interlacing to form a field rather than delivering a linear account. Reading becomes analogous to weaving: meaning assembled gradually through repetition and tension.

Marie Watt, “Three Ladders,” edition 12/20, 2005, lithograph and chine colle, 14 x 18 in. From the collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer, © Marie Watt, Photography Credit: Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation

Nearby, “Three Ladders” extends this spatial logic. A ladder rises toward an opening at the upper edge of the composition while geometric forms descend from above, mirrored below by stacked blankets reaching upward. The image suggests reciprocity between grounded labor and cosmological imagination, collapsing distinctions between earthly and celestial knowledge. Movement occurs simultaneously in opposing directions. Stories travel upward through aspiration and downward through inheritance. Watt’s imagery often holds this dual motion, refusing hierarchy between intellectual, spiritual, and domestic forms of knowledge.

Throughout the galleries, printed works converse with textile installations that expand two-dimensional imagery into physical space. The transition between media feels intentionally porous: a printed line becomes stitched thread; stitched thread becomes sculptural mass. The exhibition encourages viewers to recognize storytelling as embodied practice rather than symbolic representation. This idea becomes especially visible in an interactive station inviting visitors to “Print Your Story.” Tables filled with stamps and paper transform spectators into participants. Families gather, negotiating composition together, layering images according to personal logic. The activity is modest, even playful, yet conceptually central. Watching multiple generations discuss which images belong together reveals the exhibition’s underlying premise: stories are not preserved objects but evolving negotiations shaped through collective decision-making.

The exhibition’s second thematic movement shifts toward Watt’s Companion Species works, where animals function as carriers of relational and social knowledge. Wolves appear repeatedly across textiles and sculpture. In “Companion Species (Field),” reclaimed army blankets are stitched into a monumental surface bearing the embroidered outline of a mother wolf positioned to nurse her young. The animal’s body emerges through spare lines of thread, its vulnerability emphasized rather than concealed. The choice of military blankets introduces quiet tension: materials associated with conflict and protection are transformed into sites of nurture.

Marie Watt, Companion Species (Mother), edition 7/20, 2017, softground etching, aquatint, and drypoint, 16 1/2 x 22 1/4 in. From the collections of Jordan D. Schnitzer, © Marie Watt, Photography Credit: Jordan Schnitzer Family Foundation

Nearby, “Companion Species (Listening)” presents two wolves facing one another across a geometric field rendered in blue and teal thread. The embroidered form suggests both mountainous terrain and shared perceptual space, as though communication occurs through attention rather than speech. The title redirects interpretation away from dominance or hierarchy toward reciprocity. Listening becomes survival strategy. The wolves neither confront nor submit; they attend to one another.

Sound enters the exhibition through “Companion Species (Calling Back, Calling Forward),” a suspended textile work composed of layered iridescent fabrics embedded with metallic bells. The bells recall elements of Indigenous regalia designed to produce sound through movement, activating space through rhythm and presence. Even in stillness, the work implies motion. Viewers imagine the fabric shifting, ringing softly, extending storytelling into auditory experience.

In “Companion Species (Ancient One),” a bronze wolf rests upon a reclaimed blanket inherited from the artist’s grandmother. The juxtaposition of enduring metal and softened textile collapses generational time, grounding mythic animal presence within familial lineage. The sculpture reads simultaneously as monument and resting body. Another work, “Companion Species (Cosmos),” situates the maternal wolf within a deep tartan field referencing Watt’s Scots ancestry. Surrounding stitched forms—airplanes, birds, crescents, abstract symbols—collapse mythological and contemporary imagery into shared visual space. References to the she-wolf of Roman origin myths coexist with modern technologies of travel and migration. Across the Companion Species works, motherhood emerges less as sentiment than as organizing principle: survival structured through collective care, teaching, and transmission across generations.

Marie Watt, “Mound Builder,” Reclaimed wool blankets, embroidery floss, thread, 94×81.5 in. Image by Hannah McBeth

The exhibition’s final movement returns to blankets themselves as Watt’s most persistent material language. Wall texts describe the artist’s longstanding interest in blankets as objects that accompany the full arc of human life. They swaddle newborns, warm bodies in illness, and cover the dead. Sized to human scale, blankets mold over time, absorbing evidence of use and touch. Watt treats these materials as archives: each carries histories of trade, labor, migration, and domestic care.

Large-scale works such as “Mound Builder” demonstrate how blankets transform through communal making. Created through sewing circles organized within the artist’s studio, the work exemplifies what Joseph Beuys described as “social sculpture,” in which the act of gathering holds equal significance to the finished object. Participants contribute labor, conversation, and presence. The resulting form records relationships as much as aesthetic intention. The vertical stacking of blankets evokes multiple traditions simultaneously: the Douglas fir forests of the Pacific Northwest, Coast Salish totemic forms, modernist sculpture such as Constantin Brancusi’s “Endless Column,” and the serial clarity associated with Minimalist practice. These references coexist without hierarchy, reflecting Watt’s refusal to separate Indigenous knowledge from art historical discourse.

Works including “Threshold” and “East Meets West (Summit)” extend this vocabulary of accumulation. Stacked textiles rise like architectural forms, suggesting passage, encounter, and negotiation between cultural worlds. The blankets are frequently reclaimed, bearing traces of prior ownership and domestic life. Frayed edges, fading dyes, and repaired seams remain visible, resisting the erasure often associated with museum display. Watt’s Indigenous and European lineages are neither blended into uniformity nor presented in opposition; instead, they remain in dialogue, held together through material coexistence.

Storywork ultimately proposes that storytelling survives not through preservation alone but through reuse. Stories endure because they are retold, handled, repaired, and placed beside new ones. Leaving the exhibition, what lingers is less the memory of individual works than the sensation of participation in an ongoing process. Watt’s practice reframes authorship as collective responsibility. Stories are sustained through attention, through listening, through acts of care enacted across time.

Marie Watt, “Companion Species (Remembering Song)”

Storywork: The Prints of Marie Watt, Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City, through June 21.

Hannah McBeth

Hannah McBeth studied art history, classics, and Mediterranean archaeology before getting a Master’s at Cambridge University. She enjoys writing, hiking, and traveling to far-off places. Follow her on Twitter @hannahmcbee.