The House of Dust by Alison Knowles
INHABITED BY PEOPLE WHO LOVE TO READ
Alan Michelson, Cherokee Phoenix Printshop, 2012, and Home in the Wilderness, 2012
The larger of the two sculptures was based on the print shop that housed the Cherokee Nation’s press for its bilingual newspaper, The Cherokee Phoenix. The sculpture’s roof consisted of the signed but unauthorized Treaty of New Echota, which catalyzed the Trail of Tears—a brutal march in the winter of 1838 in which approximately 4,000 dislocated Cherokee people perished. The smaller was inspired by Thomas Cole’s his 1847 painting Home in the Woods, which depicted a frontier family in their log cabin. The sculpture’s roof consisted of the 1809 Treaty of Fort Wayne that, despite objections from the nations involved, conveyed some three million acres of Indian land to the U.S.