This is Tongass Voices, a series from KTOO sharing weekly perspectives from the homelands of the Áak’w Kwáan and beyond.
Xixtc’ i see Ruby Hughes won the Sewing Division of the Juried Arts show at Celebration earlier this year with her piece “Raven Transforms into Marilyn.” That’s right, Marilyn Monroe.
The button robe features a raven lined with crystals, with a likeness of the blonde bombshell on its chest, and a diamond-like rhinestone in its mouth. As Hughes explains, her inspiration for the piece was decades and generations in the making.
Listen:
This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.
Xixtc’ i see Ruby Hughes: So at my salon, which I opened in 1986 — so way back then, someone gave me a really nice lithographic postcard of Marilyn Monroe. And I put it up on this window, along with several others — it was just kind of like a little collage of things I was collecting.
For some reason I remember when Marilyn died, and I was really sad about it, and I thought she lived out in this little cabin that was right before you took a turn to Fritz Cove Road. Don’t ask me.
Yvonne Krumrey: How old were you?
Xixtc’ i see Ruby Hughes: Oh, gosh, three. You know that I had quite an imagination.
So, yeah, my name is Ruby Hughes. My Lingít name is Xixtc’ i see, which is “daughter of the frog.” And the clan I belong to is the Raven Coho, and we are from Dry Bay, which is just about 50 miles south of Yakutat.
And so the two white frogs in my Raven, on the shoulders represent my name and the seaweed designs represent the location of where I’m from, and each clan has ownership of different designs, so you can tell where they were from, and that’s what Lingít art is about. It says where you’re from, and who you’re from, and what, what your name is, and and what you own, what you don’t own, where you’ve been, where you’re going.
So I got the inspiration for my Raven from a project I was going to do for a vest, and I decided once that I made the design and I enlarged it a little bit, you know what? This would look good on a blanket.
And then I was playing around with the inside of the body, and decided to put a female face, like humanoid and, and then I thought, well, it means, kind of represent somebody, you know, and, and I first thought about my mother, and then I thought, well, you know that I, I kind of was playing around with it, and I did Marilyn Monroe, just because I was etching, and I went, ‘you know what, that would look really cool, I think the blonde hair.’
And then I kind of started thinking about transformation, the power of transformation, and the power that Raven had when he transformed into a woman, because there’s several stories about that that I really liked. So that was what inspired me to do the female image in the middle.
