The steel in Margaret Jacobs' sculptures is not neutral material. When she bends and welds it into the shapes of chives, ash, and medicinal plants, she is working in the same substance that her Mohawk ancestors climbed into the sky to raise. The Akwesasne Mohawk artist's new exhibition, "Rooted in Land, Shaped by Fire," opens at Middlebury College's Johnson Gallery on October 8 and runs through November 20, 2026, with a reception in the Johnson Atrium from 5 to 7 p.m.
The show gathers recent work exploring stewardship, cultural continuity, and environmental change, themes Jacobs has been circling for years. Her sculptures place tools associated with early twentieth-century Mohawk ironworkers alongside depictions of the plants her family once relied on, forcing a conversation between the industrial and the organic. In her "Old Growth" series, she intertwines recognizable ironworker tools with influential plants and found objects, modifying chain and hardware so that each piece seems to hold "an old and established history full of adaptation, resilience and endurance," as she has described it.
That pairing is the heart of her practice. Jacobs grew up in a family that valued the physical craft of making and fixing things. Her interest in object-making, she has said, stems from watching the self-sufficiency of the matriarchs around her. Her grandmothers on both sides lost their husbands but kept their families going; her mother was constantly doing carpentry and refinishing. Snowshoes were not ornamental in that world, they were how you got from the farmhouse to the mailbox. Baskets were for laundry and harvest. Within Indigenous communities, she has noted, art, craft, and culture are intertwined rather than separated the way Western society tends to divide them.
She studied mixed-media sculpture, photography, and scenic design at Dartmouth College, graduating with high honors and the school's Perspectives on Design award. It was immediately after college that she discovered steel, and with it the thread that would define her career. "I soon fell in love with the material alongside its connection to the Mohawk Ironworkers who built skyscrapers through New York City," she has said.
That connection is one of the great, under-told stories of American construction. Mohawk ironworkers, sometimes called skywalkers, have been traveling from Akwesasne and Kahnawà:ke to build the skylines of New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Detroit, Toronto, and Montreal for more than 140 years, a history that reaches back to the 1880s. They helped raise the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, the Brooklyn Bridge, the George Washington Bridge, the United Nations Building, and the Twin Towers. Mohawk workers joined the rescue efforts at Ground Zero and later the rebuilding of the new World Trade Center. In 2015, the United States Mint issued a one-dollar coin honoring Kahnawà:ke and Akwesasne Mohawk contributions to high-iron construction. Akwesasne itself, the Mohawk Nation territory that straddles the St. Lawrence River across the New York and Canadian border, is home to roughly 14,000 people.
Jacobs' work honors that legacy without romanticizing it. "I'm really interested in dealing with the contradictory nature of making this really heavy strong material look really light and organic and airy," she has said. Her "Steel Medicine" series, which has traveled to the Boise Art Museum and elsewhere, asks a question she returns to often: as we work to protect water and land and move toward sustainable living, what do we carry with us physically, emotionally, and spiritually to guide our choices? The sculptures answer partly through form, using the jeweler's techniques she also practices to build stark lines, organic shapes, and intricate links of steel that emphasize both the resilience and the fragility of nature.
Her resume reflects a steadily rising profile. She is a 2019 Artist in Business Leadership Fellow through the First Peoples Fund and a 2018 recipient of the Rebecca Blunk Fund Award through the New England Foundation for the Arts. She has held residencies including a Native American Fellowship at the Vermont Studio Center in Johnson, Vermont, supported by the Harpo Foundation, and was named one of Art New England magazine's 10 Emerging New England Artists. Her work has appeared at the Shelburne Museum, the Hood Museum of Art, the Heard Museum, the Autry Museum of the American West, the Smithsonian, and many others, and has been featured in Elle and Harper's Bazaar.
The Middlebury exhibition has a distinctly campus-rooted origin. It was developed with contributions from students in two Winter Term courses, ART1037A and ART1035A, and the opening reception is being led by a coalition of student organizations: Voices of Indigenous Peoples, M Gallery, MiddCat, MiddMyco, the Knoll, New Perennials, EcoReps, and the Studio Art Department. The event promises catered snacks and student art workshops alongside the gallery viewing. The show is sponsored by the Studio Art program and the Middlebury College Museum of Art.
The Johnson Gallery sits inside the Johnson Memorial Building at 78 Chateau Road, a studio art and architectural studies facility originally completed in 1967 and later renovated into modern work and gathering spaces.
What makes this opening more than a routine campus reception is the way its themes overlap with the place hosting it. Middlebury's New Perennials project, one of the groups helping lead the event, has spent years exploring agriculture and education as feedstocks of culture, work that began with a collaboration involving The Land Institute in Salina, Kansas. Set that beside Jacobs' sculptures, which ask what knowledge is carried across generations through adaptation, and the pairing feels less like programming than an argument. The plants in her work are not decoration. They are the medicine her family used, rendered in the same steel that built the skyline, holding both hardness and fragility in a single object.
The opening reception runs from 5 to 7 p.m. on Thursday, October 8, 2026, in the Johnson Atrium at 78 Chateau Road. The exhibition remains on view in the Johnson Gallery through November 20.