May Kineyetums and Micah Lexier, Okki (og gee) - Let’s go, temporary tattoo, 2026.
MAY KINEYETUMS AND MICAH LEXIER | ASTERISMS: SAY THE WORD
MAY 9, 2026 - AUG. 1, 2026
OPENING: MAY 9, 2026 AT 3 P.M.
OFF-SITE: VIEWABLE AT ANALOG BOOKS (322 6 ST. S.), NECTAR FINE TATTOOING (329 5 ST. S.), AND COFFEE NEWS ACROSS LETHBRIDGE AND COALDALE.
Asterisms are easy to spot. They are familiar star patterns like Orion’s Belt or the Big Dipper that are created, shared, and recognized by people all over the world. As opposed to officially recognized constellations, anyone can chart their own asterism. As they shift over the seasons and years, one way of relating to the unending field of stars is to create patterns and stories from them.
In 50 years of the Southern Alberta Art Gallery Maansiksikaitsitapiitsinikssin, countless stars in the form of artists, staff, volunteers, funders, and visitors have come together to create their own asterisms in the relationships that continue to shape the Gallery. In this way, a gallery is not a building. It is an ever-evolving series of relationships where many versions of the same gallery overlap and coexist.
Asterisms is a four-part exhibition series presented across the Gallery’s 50th year that sees past exhibiting artists working in a peer-mentorship model with early-career artists of Treaty 7 Territory. The exhibition series is a non-hierarchical learning opportunity for artists at different stages in their careers to develop an exhibition together.
For the first Asterisms exhibition, artists May Kineyetums and Micah Lexier take their project outside of the gallery space. Titled Say the Word, their exhibition engages with language-learning, sharing, vulnerability, and joy, in a trio of unexpected sites across the city.
In developing their project together, Lexier brought his years of experience crafting artworks that incorporate letterforms, word games, and scavenger hunts while Kineyetums, who is currently learning to speak Blackfoot, brought their experience learning the original language of Treaty 7 Territory.
During the exhibition, the artists share six, easy-to-learn Blackfoot words of positivity and kindness through Coffee News, a free weekly publication available at restaurants and businesses across the city. Words such as Nitsiniiyi’taki (I’m very appreciative) and Iiyika’kimaat (Try hard!) will rotate during the exhibition’s twelve weeks in the new “Blackfoot Word of the Week” section of Lethbridge’s Coffee News.
The wide circulation of Coffee News invites everyone to participate in the exhibition, while also playing a role in language revitalization as treaty people. Alongside each word is its definition and an invitation to “say the word” at Analog Books in downtown Lethbridge. By speaking the word of the week to the staff at Analog Books, Blackfoot language learners will be rewarded with one of many rotating prizes in the form of artist-made multiples visualizing the spoken word of that week.
Also within the Coffee News, nestled amongst the ad spaces, drawings by Kineyetums and Lexier alternate weekly. Each artist’s small line drawings connote the essence of that week’s Blackfoot word. The drawing is also an invitation. The first reader to visit Nectar Fine Tattooing that week, can receive the same drawing as a complimentary tattoo. For those that happen to stop in at Nectar, or for those who maybe do not want to commit to a tattoo, the artists have stocked Nectar’s capsule vending machine with temporary tattoos for purchase.
In learning Blackfoot culture, Kineyetums was taught from Blackfoot Elders that what you learn you have a responsibility to share with others, including the language. By mixing elements of a participatory game, relational artwork, and vending machine prizes, Say the Word aims to do just that. To be like a friend telling you something new that they learned over the morning newspaper.
Asterisms: Say the Word is generously supported by Coffee News.
Thank you to Analog Books and Nectar Fine Tattooing for their support of this exhibition.
Blackfoot language consultation by Elder Mary Fox and John Chief Calf
Curated by Adam Whitford, Curator & Exhibitions Manager
Lead Preparator: Arianna Richardson
May Kineyetums is Cree-Metis; born in Mohkinstsis; raised in Mohkinstsis; and stayed in Mohkinstsis. They are currently pursuing an education at all intervals. Kineyetums’ art practice exists to demonstrate the irony of an institutionalized art world and to question their own participation in that world as an Indigenous person. This sometimes takes the form of performance; Performing capitalist actions for survival, or carrying out decolonial actions within a colonial world such as playing outside or quietly slinking between loopholes in the industry; Sometimes it is simply enjoying and documenting Kineytums’ relationships with the world around them using objects.
Micah Lexier is a Winnipeg-born, Toronto-based artist whose activities include making, collecting, and organizing. He has a deep interest in measurement, increment, the passage of time, found imagery, geometry and display structures. His projects range in scale and permanence from printed ephemera to public sculptures. He has presented over 120 solo exhibitions, participated in more than 250 group exhibitions and has produced seventeen permanent public commissions. In 2015 Lexier was honoured with a Governor General's Awards in Visual and Media Arts. Micah Lexier is represented by MKG127, Toronto.
We acknowledge the support of the City of Lethbridge, the Canada Council for the Arts, and the Alberta Foundation for the Arts.