PORTFOLIO

Rena Detrixhe
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Rena Detrixhe makes large-scale works using everyday materials or objects, often with a ritual element to the making. We are featuring her Red Dirt Rug Monument in this issue, a large-scale temporary installation that Detrixhe made for ArtPrize Nine at Western Michigan University in 2017. Since 2016, Detrixhe has created iterations of her Red Dirt Rug in a number of galleries and museums across the United States. She uses dirt collected from Oklahoma, a soil soaked with the rich and difficult history of indigenous people and of European colonizers. Detrixhe then transforms this red dirt into a patterned plane using the soles of different shoes. Scholar Louise Siddons of Oklahoma State University writes: “The process—and result—is disarmingly akin to building sand castles, and Detrixhe uses that sense of play to beguile us into a more profound consideration of the ongoing and intersecting histories of social and environmental (in)justice—without giving up the corresponding senses of wonder and beauty that come from our power to transform the world around us.” As novelist Rilla Askew writes for the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Overland Park, Kansas, “The act is meditative, the work ephemeral. Like the sand paintings of the Dine, it can be medicinal, healing. Like those of Tibetan monks or celebrants of Dia de los Muertos, it may be spiritual, too.” 

Detrixhe received her BFA from the University of Kansas in 2013. She has completed a two-year studio residency with Charlotte Street Foundation in Kansas City, Missouri, and spent the past two years as a Tulsa Artist Fellow in Tulsa, Oklahoma.
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Rena Detrixhe
Red Dirt Rug Monument, 2017
Loose red dirt from Oklahoma imprinted with modified shoe soles; 25 x 40 ft
Installed at West Michigan University for ArtPrize Nine, Grand Rapids, MI
Courtesy of the artist
Photo(s) by Mark Andrus