Crystal Renée Drake is a queer artist and descendant of the Burt Lake Band of Ottawa and Chippewa Indians. Deeply rooted in fibers and textiles, their work has expanded to include zines, photography, installations, and socially engaged projects that encourage reflection and empowerment. By engaging in processes that emphasize play and wonder, Drake explores how imagination invites us to embrace possibilities. Through techniques like folding, stitching, and layering, they collaborate with materials to blur the lines between everyday life and make-believe. Their creations serve as an invitation to trust our imaginations and embrace moments of curiosity.
Drake received a Master of Arts in Art Therapy from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) in 2018 and is currently enrolled in the low-residency MFA program at the Institute of American Indian Arts (IAIA), where they are deepening their studio practice. They also work as an art therapist in hospitals, schools, and community settings throughout Chicago, offering relational, art based practices that provide care and amplify voices of the 2SLGBTQIA+, BIPOC, and disability communities.
My work is an act of reclaiming connections to my home, my ancestry, and my identity. As a Native navigating displacement, my practice examines how memory and disconnection inform the ways we understand ourselves and relationship to place. Wonder guides my practice, allowing me to reclaim narratives and reimagine belonging. Through these intentional acts of curiosity, I position myself in a place of empowerment that opens possibilities beyond what I once imagined.
Textiles carry stories and memories, forming the foundation of my work. Engaging these materials as collaborators and keepers of knowledge, I challenge the gendered labor that has shaped how we value and understand them, reimagining them beyond functional use. Color influences my decision making and informs how I build relationships between material and memory. Through stitching, weaving, and layering, I work with repetition and tension to create surfaces that connect fragments of memory. I am drawn to flexible materials that can hold both softness and strength, allowing complexity to live within the surfaces that emerge.
Water informs my practice, both through process and memory. She generously offers space to imagine, listen, and remember. My relationship with her shapes how I value memory and guides my understanding of belonging. By slowing down and listening to her with intention and care, I deepen my relationship with her as a living presence that carries ancestral wisdom. By including sound waves of her voice within my work, I invite others to wonder and listen, bringing attention to her presence and our responsibility to care for what gives us life.
Along the water, bait and tackle shops, fish hatcheries, and Lake Superior were the first spaces I knew as home. They were cared for through the labor and knowledge of my grandparents, and I carry them forward with me in memory and through this work. My work holds space for the intentional act of imagining beyond limitations, expectations, and narratives that have been placed on us. It invites wonder as a way to shift how we understand who we are and where we belong. Through acts of listening, we build reciprocal relationships with place that carry ancestral memory forward, bringing us into a deeper relation with the world we live in. By slowing down and giving attention to what evokes memory, wonder becomes a way of thinking and making that moves us beyond limits and into possibility.