Marie Watt (born 1967) is a contemporary artist living and working in Portland, Oregon. Enrolled in the Seneca Nation of Indians, Watt has created work primarily with textile arts and community collaboration centered on diverse Native American themes. Background Marie Watt was born in 1967 in Seattle, Washington. She majored in Speech Communications and Art at Willamette University in Salem, Oregon. She also explored museum studies at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. She holds an AFA degree from the Institute of American Indian Arts, a BS degree from Willamette University and an MFA degree in Painting and Printmaking from Yale University. Watt is a member of the Turtle Clan of the Seneca Nation and her father's family were Wyoming ranchers. These two factors in her background have influenced her artwork; Watt describes herself as "half Cowboy and half Indian." Artwork Watt works primarily with blankets as a material in her installation and collaborative works. She also prints lithography. For her sculpture and installation, she uses a variety of materials, including everyday objects, as well as textiles, alabaster, slate, and cornhusks. She cites Pop art, Abstract Expressionism, and indigenous visual traditions as sources for her work. Watt had a studio in Portland, Oregon and started experimenting with materials, such as corn husk, then began experimenting with woven blankets. In 2002, her stone sculpture Pedestrian was installed along the east bank of the Willamette River in Portland. Her work has appeared in several exhibitions in the Pacific Northwest. Watt involves community effort when creating artworks. Her project Blanket Stories: Transportation Object, Generous Ones at the Tacoma Art Museum involved creating large-scale installations out of blankets donated by the community. Not only are the blankets the medium but "Watt believes that blankets provide access to social connections, historical traditions, and cross-cultural meanings." Watt hosts sewing circles, groups who gather and work such as with the piece Forget me not: Mothers and Sons in which they constructed portraits of servicemen (and one woman) from Oregon killed in the Iraqi war. Career In September 2004, as part of the Continuum 12 artists series, an exhibit of her work opened in New York City and the George Gustav Heye Center of the National Museum of the American Indian. The exhibit included Blanket Stories, a sculpture made of two towers of wool blankets, with each stack sewn together with a central thread. She