Gold Rush, Sacramento

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Sarah Sense has pursued the direct integration of maps and other archival materials into her work since she began her fellowship at the British Library’s Eccles Center for American Studies in 2019. Gold Rush, Sacramento continues in that style of working. The picture includes maps of Northern California featuring the cities of Grass Valley, Sacramento, San Francisco, and Santa Rosa. These are intermingled with the artist’s own landscape photographs of Lake Tahoe National Forest and “Squaw Valley,” a valley within the Sierra Nevada Mountains named with a derogatory term for a Native American woman. The name also extended to a ski resort and a hotel. The name of the resort has recently been changed to Palisades and the valley itself has been renamed Olympic Valley. While positive, these changes might also obscure elements of the region’s history, which are highlighted and made visible in Sense’s work. Gold Rush, Sacramento effectively combines many elements that are deeply personal for the artist—her concern for history and storytelling, the history of the region where she was born and raised, and the craft techniques of her forbears. By literally interweaving maps made to aid colonial expansion and resource extraction with traditional Native craft and the personal perspective of her own photographs, this work allows Sense to expose the texture of history and show the deep layering of meaning that has occurred in a single region.

Keywords

Heritage
Harmony
Ancestry
Basket
Craft
Tradition
Tribe
Tribal
Photo-weavings
Interpretation
Storytelling
Heritage
History
Remembrance
Colony
Climate
Decolonize