Monica Gilles-BringsYellow
Monica Gilles-BringsYellow
Beauty, Representation, and Respect
Art has always been a part of Monica Gilles-BringsYellow’s (she/her) life. Her father shared his appreciation for art with her at a young age, bringing her to art shows when she was just nine years old. Now, she is a self-taught Indigenous artist who lives and works in Missoula, Montana. By day, she is a therapist, working with kids who live in group homes. About three years ago, around the time she graduated with her Masters in Social Work, she started teaching herself to paint by experimenting with different materials and watching tutorials on YouTube and Instagram. Since then, she has developed a unique and brilliant set of techniques, launching what she calls her “accidental art career.”
A few months after Gilles-BringsYellow started painting and posting her work on social media, fellow artists from Missoula’s Indigenous art community reached out asking her to get involved in art markets. She credits this group of artists for taking her in and inviting her to become a member of their community. Around this time, she created art for a traffic box in Missoula titled Homeland, commissioned by the City of Missoula and the Public Art Committee. Homeland was inspired by Gilles-BringsYellow’s husband’s Salish family. She says, “they had a lot of stories about the Bitterroot, about Missoula, about elders and ancestors that used to live here and none of that was represented in broader society.” In response to this erasure, she created paintings featuring Salish people for the traffic box to remind those who see it that they are on Salish land.
Painting by Gilles-BringsYellow that is featured on the traffic box Homeland. Courtesy of the artist.
In 2021, Gilles-BringsYellow participated in the exhibition We Are Still Here and This is Our Story at Emerson Center for the Arts and Culture. For this exhibition drawing awareness to the Missing and Murdered Indigenous People epidemic, she created a painting of her husband’s grandmother who was murdered when she was in her 40s. With permission from her husband’s family, Gilles-BringsYellow created a work honoring her memory. Through the exhibition at the Emerson, Gilles-BringsYellow met artists from Bead Night, which eventually led to her joining the group.
While the practice of making art is a mostly solitary process for Gilles-BringsYellow, it has also brought her closer to a community of Indigenous artists: “My art is a way to be meditative about things and be fully present in an activity without thinking about anything else. It’s a chance to just be. It’s also been a chance to connect with other Indigenous people and provide representation that I felt like I didn’t get.” Joining Bead Night has been a way for her to be part of an Indigenous art community even in the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. While she has a deep appreciation for beading, mixed media painting is her preferred medium. Through a unique and time-consuming process, she creates 3D collages from acrylic paints, resin, historical photos, and gold leaf.
Painting titled YaYa by Gilles-BringsYellow that honors her husband’s grandmother. Courtesy of the artist.
Painting by Gilles-BringsYellow that is featured on the traffic box Homeland. Courtesy of the artist.
“My art is a way to be meditative about things and be fully present in an activity without thinking about anything else. It’s a chance to just be. It’s also been a chance to connect with other Indigenous people and provide representation that I felt like I didn’t get.”
Fort Berthold Girls by Gilles-BringsYellow, featured in this exhibition. Courtesy of the artist.
“I add additives to ink and to paint to make paints flow over each other. The way I get designs when I'm working with acrylic is by having an understanding of opacity and density. Paints will rise or sink according to the order I put them in. With the ink, I add heat and air and different solutions to get ink to roll over a synthetic piece of paper to make the background…Then from there, I also start layering resin, which gives it an actual 3-D effect. I start painting in between the layers of resin and over the layers of resin so that light and shadows also come into play with the painting. ”
In her recent work, Gilles-BringsYellow often adds portraits to her collages, usually her husband’s family members or Indigenous people, often women, from archival photos. As part of her process, she works to identify people in old photographs: “Sometimes when you go into archives and you look at pictures it will just say ‘Native woman’ or ‘squaw,’ and it doesn’t say what tribe. It doesn’t say what their name is, or what their affiliation is. So I do some research on who you are, who your family is, where you fit in if I can.”
Placing Indigenous people, who have been erased in settler archives, in beautiful, fantastical backgrounds, is an act of care by the artist. She says, “My goal is always to make the most beautiful thing I can come up with. Giving people something beautiful is my way of giving them respect.”
Artist Biography
Hello! My name is Monica Gilles-BringsYellow and I am a self-taught Indigenous artist based out of Missoula, Montana and the Flathead Reservation. I earned a BS in History and Secondary Education from the University of Montana, and then went on to earn an MSW from Walla Walla University. In the summer of 2019 I began teaching myself how to paint and started experimenting in mixed media forms, particularly inks and resin. Since then I have participated in various exhibitions including at the Emerson in Bozeman, MT, KALICO in Kalispell, MT, the ZACC and Allez! here in Missoula, MT, The Russell in Great Falls, MT and the Jailhouse Gallery in Helena, MT. Currently I have paintings displayed at the Montage Hotel in Big Sky and in Missoula at The Meadowlark (YWCA), as well as Traffic Signal Box in Missoula. When I am not painting, I am a therapist for children who live in group homes.