(rushing water) (sewing machine whirring) - For some reason, it just came naturally to me to be a storyteller, even though I never would've described myself as that.

I am creating pieces that don't look like anything anybody's ever seen.

They were like reading tea leaves for me and how they captured the essence of my child and what that meant, and I quickly realized that I was a storyteller.

My name is Blair Treuer and I call myself a textile artist.

I make portraits out of fabric.

I've been engaged in this process of making artwork professionally for about five years now.

And I really wanna be clear to not call myself a quilter, I feel like that is a different skillset.

Being a master quilter means that you've mastered a lot of specific quilting techniques, and I have not.

I instead approach my work more like a painting, and they don't look anything like your typical quilt.

All of my children and my husband are Native American, and we have a ceremony that is the pinnacle experience of my children's spiritual life.

For that ceremony, I'm required to make blankets as part of their offering.

So it is the only contribution that I could make to this incredibly important spiritual journey that my children are on.

And so after all of that production for ceremony was over, I decided to see what I was really made of with this work.

It didn't take me too long to realize I actually love exploring art through fabric.

So to practice this craft, I did a portrait of each of my nine children and my husband and myself, and that was my very first solo show.

I usually have a vision in my head of what the piece should be, and the first thing that I do is I create the face.

All of my pieces are portraits, so the face is the most critical area for me.

I prefer to just feel it out in real time with my fabric as I go.

And the way that I work, I cut small pieces and then I attach it with just a little bit of glue from a glue stick so I can change my mind really easily.

And so I can be really playful that way with my work in a way that I couldn't be if I were painting or drawing.

They're all a labor of love.

They take days to sew after I've created the image.

Up until recently, the longest I'd worked on the same piece was about four months, and right now I've been working on this same piece for about a year, so I've taken a lot of time to just explore new techniques, to try new things, to hate it, and rip it up and start over.

One of the greatest joys about working with fabric is I am not creating anything that has to be functional so I can pair fabrics together that do not belong.

They have velvet, they have upholstery, they have my kids' old Halloween costumes cut up in there.

Fabric brings out so much in me as I'm working that I don't think I would be able to connect to as readily with paint.

A lot of my work ended up being a reflection on what life has been like for me as a white woman in a Native American family.

What that has done is it has really made me analyze my worldview.

Being confronted with a belief system that is not what I was raised in, has forced me to ask myself questions about life and about how I see the world.

My second body of work was essentially about my daughter getting her period.

And one friend was like, are you sure your daughter's gonna be okay with you doing a show about her period?

Isn't she gonna find that horribly embarrassing?

And I asked her and she was like, why would I be embarrassed?

Embarrassment was not an emotion that she had ever attached to that experience.

The reason I wanted to express that story through art is because she had an incredibly beautiful experience.

There was a beautiful ceremony for her.

She was completely empowered.

All of the men in the room were crying.

It was so beautiful.

I want people to understand the story.

I would love for my work to be interesting enough that they will see what that piece is actually about.

Helping people think differently about our interconnectedness, about our relationships to each other, that greater narrative is really important to me.

My hope would be that people who see my work have the opportunity to lean into that narrative.

(gentle music) - [Narrator] Funded by the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund with money from the vote of the people of Minnesota on November 4th, 2008, and by the members of Prairie Public.