The artwork of Native American artist Juanita Growing Thunder is more than just a form of expression. It's a celebration of family tradition.
For Native American artist Juanita Growing Thunder, art is a family tradition and responsibility. Renowned for her traditional Plains Indians beaded artwork, she was born into a world where beaded belt buckles, shoes, and clothing were as common as milk and eggs. The daughter of a Sisituwan/Wahpetuwan Dakota and Wadopana Tuwa Nakoda (Assiniboine) mother, Growing Thunder says some of her first memories are of being surrounded by art and watching her mother weave colorful little beads into patterns that had meaning for her tribe.
“I remember my mother doing beadwork in the car when we traveled all over the West to go to art shows and museums,” Growing Thunder says. “I think that if you grow up this way, and you see someone doing this every day, and that’s the way they live their life, then it becomes the way you live your life, right?”
Nature, nurture, destiny.
Walking This Good Way of Life Together, 2022, smoked moose hide, rawhide, otter pelt, wool, porcupine quills, beads, bells, thimbles, silk ribbon, ermine skin, horse hair, brass sequins, and pigment, hide, beads, wool, cloth, and yarn, 1995.
An award-winning and honored artist who has shown at dozens of galleries and museums throughout her career, Growing Thunder is second-generation Dakota and Nakoda from the Buffalo Nation. Her work consists of traditional Northern Plains clothing and accessories adorned with beadwork and porcupine quill embroidery, as well as soft sculpture figure dolls. Immersed in the art of her people, Growing Thunder and her family are culture bearers.
Growing Thunder was born in 1969 in Castro Valley, California. Her Irish father, Jim Fogarty, was a Western art painter studying at the California College of Arts and Crafts (now California College of the Arts) in Oakland when he met and fell in love with Joyce Growing Thunder, who was living at the Dakota and Nakoda reservation in northeast Montana.
“When he met my mother in Montana and brought her directly from the reservation to California, she said she didn’t know what a taco was. She grew up very impoverished on our reservation and went directly into the 1960s Bay Area lifestyle,” Growing Thunder says. “She was immersed into the art world right away, and I grew up spending the summers in museums and going to art shows and Western art shows.
“We got to know a lot of Native American Indian art collectors, and my mom was beading every day.”
Growing Thunder began beading with her mother and making her own little beaded items starting at age 6. But it wasn’t until some friends convinced Joyce to enter the Santa Fe Indian Art Market in 1985 that the art world opened up for her and her mother.
“Until that time, my mother had never sold anything or made anything like that for sale. She always made things just for friends and family — she made like 300 to 500 belt buckles for friends,” Growing Thunder says. “So we went to the [Santa Fe] Indian Art Market, and she won Best of Show that year.”
Hismasma, 2021, buffalo and deer hide, sinew, trade cloth, glass seed beads, porcupine claws and human hair.
For the first time, Joyce Growing Thunder realized she could sell her art; that same year, Juanita joined the Santa Fe art market as a youth entrant alongside her mother. By submitting her own beadwork in the youth category, she gained valuable experience not just as an artist but as a representative of her culture. “That just opened up the whole Native American Indian art world to us, because Mom realized she could make a living and help support me and my four brothers. The art market was good for me, too. Some of the judges were so helpful with me as I was learning. They would say, ‘You really need to get this right — you’re representing your people.’ That really helped me grow.”
Since that first show in 1985, Growing Thunder has earned numerous awards at the Santa Fe Indian Market. Her work has also been included in museum exhibitions, most recently, Hearts of Our People: Native Women Artists as well as Identity by Design: Tradition, Change, and Celebration in Native Women’s Dresses and A Song for the Horse Nation, both curated by Emil Her Many Horses from the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian. She created the Growing Thunder Collective to showcase the work of her family, which now includes her daughters, granddaughter and nieces. Their work was shown in the traveling exhibition The Plains Indians: Artists of Earth and Sky.
In addition to traditional Plains Indian beadwork, Growing Thunder is known for soft-sculpture figure dolls that emulate historical Oceti Sakowin attire. While the traditional dolls have soft bodies, Growing Thunder says she has evolved the style over the years, through circumstance, to become free-form standing figures and a new art form. Her soft-sculpture work earned her the honor of being one of five artists featured in the exhibition Grand Procession: A Collection of Contemporary Native American Soft Sculpture.
“My work enables me to practice our women’s traditions that embrace artistic expression,” says Growing Thunder, who still lives with and beads alongside her mother in Northern California.
“I’ve learned from my mother, who learned from her grandmothers and their grandmothers stretching seven generations back.” In turn, she has instilled these teachings in her daughters, Jessa Rae and Camryn, both of whom have become award-winning artists, as well as her niece Paytyn Growing Thunder. Her oldest daughter started creating and selling her pieces when she was 3 years old, and now Growing Thunder’s 3-year-old granddaughter, Nuna, is already stringing beads and making things.
Beaded Pad Saddle, 1995, hide, beads, wool, cloth, and yarn.
“Everything is usually just focused on my mother and me, and that’s not what it’s about. Our entire family has fantastic artistic skills, and we want to be able to showcase them. We also hope that we’re encouraging young people to do the same thing and firing up our people to carry on the traditional arts.”
Growing Thunder will be showing for her 38th year at the Santa Fe Indian Art Market this August, surrounded by her daughters and nieces, who have also taken up the mantle of beaded Native American art through the Growing Thunder Collective.
It’s a huge honor to be a culture bearer, Growing Thunder says. “That was something that my mother has always stressed to me and my daughters and my nieces and my nephews. It’s very important to represent our people as well as we can and do the best that we can with that. Being a beadworker and quillworker is who I am. I spend every day creating work that honors our traditions and culture in hopes that my work will help preserve future generations’ connection to their culture.”
See Juanita Growing Thunder's work at the 2023 Santa Fe Indian Market, August 19 – 20. Her soft sculptures are also on view permanently in Grand Process: Contemporary Plains Indian Dolls from the Charles and Valerie Diker Collection at the Heard Museum in Phoenix.
This article appears in our August/September 2023 issue, available on newsstands or through our C&I Shop.