“My mom is like, ’You need to clean up your mess! I’m stepping on beads all the time!’” This is what Jontay Kahm says life is like for his mother, when her adult son — who happens to be a futuristic fashion designer — visits during the summer from New York and uses her Albuquerque home as his personal studio. Kahm (Plains Cree) is a 28-year-old creative phenomenon originally from Saskatchewan. The Institute of American Indian Arts BFA graduate and current MFA candidate at Parsons School of Design in New York is the son of late abstract painter and IAIA professor Jeff Kahm, who died two years ago.
He is also the son of a very patient mother. Kahm returns Sunday, August 18, to the SWAIA fashion events at the Santa Fe Community Convention Center to present his second collection, Ethereal Realms . He will also take part in a two-artist panel with Kent Monkman (Cree), a legendary artist from Canada.
Amber-Dawn Bear Robe (Siksika Nation), SWAIA’s Fashion Coordinator and faculty member in the Art History Department at IAIA who introduced Kahm and her other students to Monkman’s work — will moderate the conversation. The Memoirs of Miss Chief Eagle Testickle: Vol. 1 and Vol.
2 — A True and Exact Accounting of the History of Turtle Island by Kent Monkman and Gisèle Gordon; Penguin Random House (McClelland & Stewart); November 2023; 264 pages. Monkman is a painter and performance artist best known for his gender-fluid alter ego, Miss Chief Eagle Testickle, whom .