Nevada State Museum Commissions Gregg Deal to Complete Dat So La Lee Mural

Over the weekend of September 27 and 28, 2024, as part of the Carson City Murals and Music Festival, Gregg Deal completed a mural of Washo weaver Dat So La Lee (about 1829-1925) on the Nevada State Museum. Deal is a member of the Pyramid Lake Paiute Tribe and also has Washo ancestry. Western present-day Nevada in the area around Carson City, Reno, and Lake Tahoe, CA are the groups’ historic homelands.

Deal, who lives in Colorado, was contacted by festival organizers to take on the project. He currently has three murals up in Denver and one in Colorado Springs. Another just came off the Minneapolis American Indian Center. In addition to murals, Deal works in traditional canvas painting, installation, performance, and is a punk rock musician.

While he was familiar with Lee’s name and baskets before starting work on the mural, he relied heavily on the Museum’s archives, which include Lee’s baskets and photos of her.

“I did find a close up (photo) of her face, and they have the very famous image of her standing – it's in black and white – it looks like a white dress with a belt and a basket on either side of her and a scarf around her head,” Deal said. “I was able to get the detail on her face, which is the most important part, and then I was able to use the other image to finish off the body.”

Washo weaver Dat So La Lee (Louisa Keyser) standing between two of her baskets, LK 44 and LK 69, ca. 1916. Photographer Abe Cohn. Courtesy of the Nevada State Museum.

Deal’s finished mural intricately details Lee’s face, with symbolic color highlights to the scarf and belt she’s depicted wearing.

“(I) decided to go with purple for the scarf because it's a nice pop around her face,” Deal explains. “The belt around her waist ends up being a cyan blue, which was a Paiute nod for me, for my tribe, something subtle, but something that was there. I wanted the focus so much to be on her face and my hope was to make sure the scarf was helping amplify that.”

Throughout planning for the mural design, the Museum served as go between for Deal and Washo leaders and elders, receiving their blessing on the finished product. The Museum had already established these relationships through its preparations for a future exhibition for Lee’s baskets. As an added treat, Deal was permitted to handle some of Lee’s baskets from its collection.

“To hold those baskets is a privilege, of course; as an artist, what an incredible piece of art,” Deal said. “In the collections too, I saw a 2,000-year-old basket from Pyramid Lake, just knowing that these things exist… there's a lot to say about museums and the way they held collections and how much has been changing over the years in terms of accepting their responsibility for these cultural items, but there's few opportunities for me to see and to hold a basket that's 2,000 years old that came from my homelands. It's overwhelming.”

Gregg Deal holds a Dat So La Lee basket from the collection at the Nevada State Museum. Photo courtesy of Gregg Deal.

The scarf Lee wears in the extraordinary photo taken between two of her baskets from the Museum archives itself has a story to tell.

“The scarf might not look Indigenous, but it was not uncommon for Native people to adopt those types of things into their wear because it's pretty,” Deal said. “You see beadwork and you see ribbon work and things like that, those things are all pretty, and (Native) people like to have nice stuff, just like anybody else.”

As with almost all Native art, there’s a great deal more meaning behind the work than initially meets the eye.

“Especially when you start getting past the reservation eras, and you start getting into boarding school eras, and you're sort of in this no man's land of the 20s, 30s, 40s, 50s and 60s, where there's not a lot of (Native) identity, and in fact, there's a lot of suppression of identity,” Deal said. “You can find little embellishments (on clothing) here and there on some of those older images. It's not until the 70s, with the American Indian Movement, that you start seeing people outwardly wearing things that were clearly Indigenous embellishments in their dress. So, her belt is really important in that way, because it is actually an Indigenous informed belt.”

The mural’s background includes basket designs used by Lee. Their colors are significant as well, a muted off-black and maroon.

“Those are the colors that (the Washo) use on actual textiles which are coming from berries, or they're coming from burying them with ash and other things over time; the tribe wanted to keep those colors. They said all the extra colors, that's what the Plains Indians do, we keep with these simple colors that are a part of the environment of our homelands,” Deal explained. “I thought that was so important, and I was excited that they did that because that was my intent. For all of the – I suppose lack of a better word, the sexiness of Plains Indians tribes and textiles and wares – ours are more subtle, but they're there, and when you find them, when you discover them, when you realize that these images exist on these utilitarian items, there's something really beautiful and subtle about that.”

Gregg Deal Dat So La Lee mural, 2024, at Nevada State Museum in Carson City. Photo courtesy of the artist.

Native Representation

Whether its Deal’s mural, “Reservation Dogs,” Lilly Gladstone (Siksikaitsitapi and NiMíiPuu (Blackfeet and Nez Perce) at the Oscar’s, Jeffrey Gibson (Missisippi Band of Choctaw Indians) at the Venice Biennale, the “Prey” movie, the “Echo” miniseries, Jaune Quick-to-See Smith (Salish member of the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Nation) at the Whitney Museum of American Art, or any of the other prominent recent examples, representation of Indigenous people is at an all-time high in American popular culture.

“I’m seeing things I never thought I would see in my life,” Deal, who’s in his 40s, said. “One of my cousins came by and we were standing in front of the mural talking about it, and we had this kind of epiphany together where I said that we're old enough to remember when it was commonplace, if not justified, for a white counselor in high school to tell you that you're not going to amount to anything, and that you should learn a trade, and that you're not the type of person that can go to college – where people could say those things out loud, where Indigenous excellence wasn't a given, it was the exception.”

For 100 years, America has told white children to dream. That they can be anything they set their mind to. That was not an experience shared by everyone.

“How far we've come. My oldest is in college, right out of high school, finished with over a 4.0 (grade point average), and I can't help, but think what a healthy family and a healthy sense of self and identity has done for my kids in understanding what they can do,” Deal continued. “We are the generation, us, and the elder Millennials, are the generation that are pushing this representation that you're seeing right now; that representation is happening in spite of our circumstance, which I think speaks to our strength. I've always moved forward with hope, but I never had expectation. Every time I see (more Native representation) it makes me excited because I find it to be exceptional, because I remember a time when we were told outwardly that we were not exceptional.”

The exceptional Gregg Deal’s exceptional mural of the exceptional Dat So La Lee will be on long-term view at the Nevada State Museum.