Kimberly Corinne Deriana

Tribe: Mandan / Hidatsa
Based In: Seattle, WA
Email: kderia20@gmail.com
Social Media: @kimberlycorinne

About the Art
Brings the Medicine Sundial is a temporary public sculpture intended to bring healing, recognition, and awareness of this land’s First People by activating the King Street Station Plaza, starting June 2019. The installation is created by artist and architectural designer Kimberly Corinne Deriana (Mandan/Hidatsa) in collaboration with Coast Salish carvers. Brings the Medicine Sundial is Deriana’s first major public art commission.

Brings the Medicine Sundial features two tripod structures forming a sundial/dais and gathering circle that honor the Earth. King Street Station provides a fitting locale for this artwork, as the area is where Coast Salish peoples originally built longhouses as centers for shelter, celebration and trade. In the Djijila’lete dialect, the longhouse village here, near the tide flats and lagoon that preceded Pioneer Square, was known as Sdzidzilalitch, for “little crossing-over place.” The train station site remains a hub for inter-tribal travel and trade, and many Coast Salish and urban Native people continue to live and work in the downtown corridor.

With the installation of Deriana's sculpture, fir lodgepoles again stand on what is now King Street Station Plaza for the first time recorded since the Treaty of Point Elliott outlawed Indigenous structures within Seattle city limits in 1855. The lodgepoles, sustainably harvested by Skokomish foresters, illustrate a shared cultural reference central to the theme of “lifting the sky” from the inaugural exhibition at ARTS at King Street Station, yəhaw̓. yəhaw̓ is inspired by the Coast Salish story of Indigenous people from many tribes coming together and using poles to hoist the sky above the Earth. The word yəhaw̓ is used across languages to communicate and to form unity in this process.

About the Artist
Kimberly Corinne Deriana is a Mandan and Hidatsa architectural designer and artist who specializes in sustainable, environmental, Indigenous architecture, housing, and planning. Her design methodologies focus on incorporating Indigenous lifestyle practices in relationship to past and present: design for seven generations. Deriana strives to achieve exceptional design by weaving together respect for individuality, honor for cultural identity, and appreciation for contemporary quality, manifested in the shape and structure of sustainable buildings and communities.

Project Credits

  • Kimberly Corinne Deriana (Mandan/Hidatsa) – Artist & Designer

  • Rob Purser (Suquamish), Delbert Miller (Skokomish), Tina Kuckkahn-Miller (Ojibwe), Sayalts Miller (Skokomish) – Carvers

  • Absalom Shantz – Lead Fabricator

  • Christopher C. Shaw – Professional Engineer

  • Tracy Rector (Choctaw/Seminole), Asia Tail (Cherokee), Satpreet Kahlon – Curators

  • S Surface – King Street Station Program Lead, Seattle Office of Arts & Culture