The dress takes center stage in Laura Youngbird's prints at All My Relations Arts Gallery

Artist Laura Youngbird is obsessed with the dress. She first saw the dress in a photograph of her grandmother when her grandmother was a child in assimilationist boarding schools, her face scratched out of the photo. The image stuck with Youngbird, and for 20 years it has been a central component of her printmaking.

An enrolled member of the Minnesota Chippewa, Grand Portage Band, Youngbird explores familial themes in her art, primarily printmaking. Much of her work probes continued questions around forced assimilation into non-Indian culture. In her exhibition "Inde Wiisagendam (My Heart Hurts)" at All My Relations Arts Gallery that includes 35 works of art, the dress stands in as a symbol for ongoing questions about the effects of colonialism.

Youngbird, an adjunct professor at Minnesota State University, Moorhead, lives in Breckenridge, Minn., and she is a caretaker for her husband, Felix Youngbird.

This conversation has been edited for brevity and clarity.

There are so many layers to the dress as metaphor. Why has the dress remained a symbol for you over the past 20 years?

It's something I didn't think would last for as long as it has, but I still love using it. It's like, we all wear clothes. Especially the connection with my mom and teaching us how to sew and making regalia, and making something for someone you love. Although I'm not drawing regalia, it's similar, like making an outfit for someone. My mom used to sew her clothes, and now it doesn't make sense to sew because you could buy something on sale for what it costs for a spool of thread. …

There's the other side to it — people can try to pretend they're something. Especially during the boarding schools, it's like 'You have to wear this,' 'You have to assimilate,' 'You have to conform.'

Your "Blood Memory" series made me think of art that specifically addresses maternal lineage transference, whether it's intergenerational trauma or knowledge, or language.

There's also the mitochondrial DNA that comes from your mother, passed on to the female lines. They can track that back to like, Lucy in Africa [the 3.2 million-year-old fossil discovered in Ethiopia in 1974]. I know my mother taught me a lot even though she said 'I don't know anything, go read it in a book,' about Native stuff. She could understand the language but didn't really speak it, she couldn't. I'm happy because my daughter is more fluent in it — I know only a tiny little bit — but she's made that effort to study it.

With "Blood Memory," I also loved the color of iron oxide and our blood has iron — we have a lot of iron in our body. I was even painting with rust for a while, like iron oxide.

In the show, the oldest and the youngest works, a 2003 print, "Assimilationist Dress," and a 2023 piece, "Sister Cousins," were hung next to each other. Was that on purpose?

I gave them free rein to do their thing, but I think my work connects over time and seems to be a lot about, you know, just those family connections, the family roots. Everyone could understand that because they have their own families and you know that they bring that to the artwork when they see it. I'm really grateful for that. I've heard so many people say like, 'Oh, this reminds me of when my mother made me this dress.' That's what a lot of it is. My mother taught me to bead. I just have beads now, just like I have fabric, collections of fabric, collections of beads. I like the fabric, but I am drawn to printmaking.

You used to be the director of Native American Art Programs at Plains Art Museum in Fargo. How did that role sort of inform your art?

No matter what I'm doing my art is, you know, from life experience. That was an awesome job — I loved it. It was really wonderful seeing how interested the public was and also the Native people that came to the museum and they didn't necessarily feel like they could be a part of the museum before. It was seeing all the amazing things that people were doing and I was like, I participated as much as I could, but I wanted to [make art] all the time.

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'Inde Wiisagendam (My Heart Hurts)'

When: Ends Sept. 9.

Where: All My Relations Arts Gallery, 1414 E. Franklin Av., Mpls.

Cost: Free.

Info: allmyrelationsarts.org or 612-235-4970.