Paiute Painter Melissa Melero-Moose Wins $15,000 Native Arts Grant for Work Made From Willow and Pine Nuts
Native-led nonprofit Walker Youngbird Foundation's grant supports the development of a new body of work for public presentation this fall
Melissa Melero-Moose doesn't just paint the Great Basin, she gathers it. Willow, tule, cattails, and pine nuts collected from her Northern Paiute homelands are embedded in the layered, abstract surfaces of her mixed-media paintings, alongside acrylic washes and rice paper.
That practice has now earned her the Walker Youngbird Foundation's Emerging Native Arts Grant, a $15,000 award given twice a year to Native artists developing new bodies of work. Melero-Moose, an enrolled member of the Fallon Paiute-Shoshone Tribe based near Reno, Nevada, is the fifth recipient. She will use the grant to create a new series of paintings for a public exhibition, with venue and dates to be announced this fall.
"Her work belongs to the Great Basin, not simply as subject matter, but as material and method," said Reid Walker, the foundation's founder, of her work.
"My proposal for this new series of work is to translate and create new imagery, in mixed media painting creations, that would accompany some of the traditional stories from the Numu (Northern Paiute) in my region. In my current work, the Basket Series, I present place, through color and textures, the feeling of the Great Basin region and Paiute culture with abstraction and design. I use organic objects like willow, pine nuts, cattails, and earth to create the textures that tell the story of place. These new works would be guided by those similar elements," said Melero-Moose.
Melero-Moose traces her practice to making her son's Paiute basket cradleboard with family members, an experience that drew her into weaving and, eventually, into working gathered materials directly into her paintings. It also made her an advocate for Native weavers losing access to traditional gathering sites on tribal and public lands. Her recent series "Access Denied" renders that loss visually: basketry designs that transform into barbed wire, cutting Indigenous people off from the willow, food, and water their traditions depend on.
She curates the Great Basin Native Artists Gallery at the Stewart Indian School Cultural Center and Museum in Carson City, an outgrowth of the artist collective she co-founded in 2014 to counter the invisibility of Great Basin Native artists in the broader Native art world.
Awarded bi-annually, the Emerging Native Arts Grant provides direct funding, mentorship, and visibility to Native and Indigenous artists at a pivotal stage in their careers. Native artists are often underrepresented in mainstream arts funding and gallery systems, and this initiative offers the resources to complete a proposed project, whether an exhibition, installation, publication, or other.
High-resolution images of the artist and her work are available upon request.
ABOUT WALKER YOUNGBIRD FOUNDATION
Founded in 2024, the Walker Youngbird Foundation is a Native-led 501(c)(3) nonprofit dedicated to advancing contemporary Indigenous artists across North America. Through grants, mentorship, exhibitions, strategic partnerships, and institutional collaboration, the Foundation supports artists at pivotal moments in their careers while helping expand the presence of Native art in museums, collections, and public life. Learn more at walkeryoungbird.org.
SOURCE Walker Youngbird Foundation
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