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Wendy Red Star, "Last
Thanks," Pigment Print, 2006. Image courtesy of the Artist.
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Pop culture and design loves to appropriate grossly stereotypical
elements of percieved Native American cultures (do I really need
to bring up Coachella?), learned from normalized racially insensitive
media portrayals such as the "Piccaninny Tribe" in Disney's
Peter Pan. Contemporary multi-disciplinary artist Merritt
Johnson, a descendant of the Blackfoot and Kanienkehaka Tribes,
writes that most people think of beads and feathers
when they hear the term "Native American art." This pigeonholing,
among being immensely generalized and demeaning, fails to the acknowledge
unique individual expression between and within Native American
communities. There are 567 federally recognized Native American
nations in the United States. Amongst those tribes exists a great
deal of diversity in culture, language, and elements of day-to-day
life such as food preparation and dress. Conflating Native American
cultures disregards this diversity, and effectually silences Native
American voices.
This is what makes the Jimmie
Durham controversy so complicated. In case you missed it: Durham
has long been regarded as the central, or at least the most well-known
figure of Native American Art. He has historically identified with
Cherokee descent (along with a bizarre slew of celebrities including
Johnny Depp, Cher, Miley Cyrus, and Johnny Cash), and this identity
is a central aspect of his work. Durham's recent retrospective at
the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis has sparked a massive controversy,
as multiple Cherokee artists and curators claim that Durham is not
in fact recognized by any of the three Cherokee nations. In an article
published on Indian Country Today, contributors write that
"Durham continues to misrepresent Cherokee language, history,
and culture. Throughout his career, he has misrepresented others
tribes practices (giveaways, vision quests, Trickster Coyote,
feasts of the dead) and said they are Cherokee. His fabrications
insult not only us but also the other tribes whose cultures Durham
has misappropriated."
The controversy is complex, as Durham was a fervent activist with
the American Indian Movement in the '70s, and his work has always
relied on themes of Native American identity and the destructive
nature of colonization. In a recent New York Times article, Durham
admits, I am perfectly willing to be called Cherokee.... But
Im not a Cherokee artist or Indian artist, no more than Brancusi
was a Romanian artist. (Brancusi was born in Romania.) But
it also sounds a whole lot like that time "Iron Eyes Cody,"
the actor in the infamous 1970s "Crying Indian: Keep America
Beautiful" PSA video who earned a number of roles on the premise
that he was Native American, was "outed" as second-generation
Italian.
It's about time that Native American artists start getting recognition
and support for their work, apart from the media representations
by non-Native folks. Meet these eight groundbreaking artists of
Native American descent, working in a variety of mediums, who are
making moves to counter the stereotypes of Native American art and
culture in contemporary society.
Nicholas Gallanin
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"The American Dream is Alive and Well",
2012
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Born in Sitka, a borough of Juneau, the capital of
Alaska, Nicholas Gallanin is a conceptual artist and a musician
of Tlingit and Unangax descent. Gallanin has a way of making artworks
that mix completely contemporary-looking aesthetics with historical
or traditional elements of his culture. For example, a series of
prints use images of Native Americans overlaid with text, rendered
in the style of Pop Art, with bright colors and Warhol-eque graphics.
For his video Tsu Heidei Shugaxtutaan 1, which won the 2008
ImagineNative Film Festival, he paired video footage of a break
dancer and audio of a traditional Tlingit song. In another video,
he paired traditional Tlingit dance with sparse electronic music.
Gallanin often repurposes objects like handcuffs used to remove
Indigenous children from their homes, and makes clear society's
tendency to bury historical truths. He writes "culture is rooted
in connection to land; like land, culture cannot be contained."
Wendy Red Star
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"Fall" from
the series "Four Seasons," 2006
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Wendy Red Star, a Native American artist of the Apsáalooke
(Crow) lineage, born in Billings, Montana in 1981, is known for
her funny, surreal, but biting self-portrait photographs that poke
fun at white American culture's tendency to misrepresent Native
American history. Red Star's photography practice is her way of
navigating her experience growing up on a Crow Indian Reservation,
juxtaposed with her experience of mainstream contemporary society.
Using materials like Target-brand Halloween costumes and inflatable
animals, Red Star counters the stereotypical trope that all Native
American people are "one with nature." In her Four
Seasons Series, Red Star photographs herself dressed in traditional
Apsáalooke clothing against four different richly saturated
panoramic Western landscape backdrops (which she is careful to leave
with creases and wrinkles to exemplify their artificiality), reminiscent
of dioramas one might see at a history museum, populated with artificial,
store-bought materials such as fake plants, cardboard cutouts of
animals, and astroturf. Her photo series Home is Where My TipiSits
features collections of photographs from the reservation she grew
up on after she returned from UCLA, where she received her MFA.
The photographs are grouped by category, and feature broken down
cars, churches, and decrepit living structures covered in blankets
that stand in opposition to the stereotyped romantic perception
of Native American life.
Post-Commodity
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"Coyotaje",
Installation, 2017, Image courtesy of the artists
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Postcommodity is an interdisciplinary activist/arts
collective consisting of Native American artists Kade L. Twist,
Raven Chacon, and Cristóbal Martínez. You may recognize
Postcommodity from the collectives contribution to the Whitney
Biennial earlier this year: a dizzying four-channel video sped up
and slowed down in conjunction with sound, tracing the fences that
line the US-Mexico border. The installation, titled A Very Long
Line, demonstrates the "dehumanizing and polarizing constructs
of nationalism and globalization through which borders and trade
policies have been fabricated. In their artists's statement,
the collective writes "Postcommoditys art functions as
a shared Indigenous lens... to engage the assaultive manifestations
of the global market and its supporting institutions, public perceptions,
beliefs, and individual actions that comprise the ever-expanding,
multinational, multiracial and multiethnic colonizing force that
is defining the 21st Century through ever increasing velocities
and complex forms of violence." Borders seem to be a recurring
theme; Repellent Fence (2015), an ephemeral land-art installation
comprised of 26 enlarged replicas of an ineffective bird-repellent
balloon, hovered 50 feet above a two-mile long stretch of land connecting
the US and Mexico. The group hopes to incite a constructive conversation
about social, political, and economic forces that are destroying
communities globally.
Duane Slick
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"Accessing the Moment
of De-Materiality," Triptych, Acrylic on Glass, 2010
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Duane Slick is a Native American painter and storyteller
of the Meswaki Nation. His photo-realist paintings on glass and
linen have a dream-like, spiritual quality, using subtle shadows,
light studies, and layering. His series Disagreeable Coyotes
(2015-2016) consists of nine acrylic-on-panel minimal paintings
of coyote heads, layered in bright reds, blues, and yellows, reminiscent
of a full color 3D film watched without the glasses. Of the paintings,
Slick writes, In narrative traditions, to tell the story of
tragedy one must always begin by telling the ending first. I once
believed that the weight of such expectations functioned as a cultural
given for the artist of Native American descent. Its rules stated
that we cry for a vision and place ourselves in a single grand narrative
of history and representation... but the laughter of Coyote saturated
and filled our daily lives. It echoed through the lecture halls
of histories and it was so powerful and it was so distracting that
I forgot my place in linear time and now I work from an untraceable
present. Slick is represented by Albert Merola Gallery in
Provincetown, and his work appears in a number of collections across
the United States including the National Museum of the American
Indian in New York City. He teaches printmaking and painting at
the Rhode Island School of Design, and has taught at the Institute
of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Merritt Johnson
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"Open Container",
Sculpture, 2014-2016
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Merritt Johnson is a multi-disciplinary artist of
Blackfoot, Kanienkehaka, Irish and Swedish descent. She works in
sculpture, painting, and video, but has a special affinity for performance
art, for the way it allows her to embody the past, present, and
future all at once. Her work speaks to the relationship between
Native American history and "American" history. She comments
on the boundaries that humans create (borders, fences, state lines),
as juxtaposed with the natural boundaries of nature (airflow, waterflow).
In her performance Clouds Live Where, viewers watch from
above as Johnson delineates space using tape, wood barricades, and
fabric. The artist attempts to navigate this barricaded space, transporting
water back and forth from clouds to land. Says Johnson tongues
and knives cut the intersections of land, culture, sex, and body,
so I weave together seen and unseen; looking with closed eyes open,
breathing in and out. Another recurring theme in her work
is camouflage, illuminating the complete disregard of indigenous
people as part of American society. Her work plays with the unseen,
exploring its precarious possibility (of) endless creation
and destruction. She is interested in the ways that indigenous and
non-indigenous people's interpretations of her work differ, specifically
with regards to the treatment of land and nature: on the one hand
respected and imbued with spiritual qualities and on the other looked
at as a resource. Without judgement, she says, humans can feel that
all things are ultimately intertwined.
Teri Greeves
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"Deer Woman as Lady
Luck," Beaded Tennis Shoes, 2004
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Teri Greeves (b. 1970), originally from the Wind River
reservation in Wyoming, is known primarily for her use of the traditional
Kiowa art of beading, which she learned from her grandmother. She
writes that her grandmother expressed herself through beadwork,
and despite working menial jobs as a dishwasher and a cleaner, she
was always primarily an artist. Greeves has been working with beads
since she was 8 years old, and for her, being an artist is about
giving a voice to her ancestors before her. She writes, "I
am compelled to do it... I have no choice in the matter. I must
express myself and my experience as a 21st Century Kiowa and I do
it, like all those unknown artists before me, through beadwork...
and though my medium may be considered 'craft' or 'traditional,'
my stories are from the same source as the voice running through
that first Kiowa beadworkers needles. It is the voice of my
grandmothers." Greeves merges her cultural history with contemporary
objects, as in the case of her tennis shoes series (shown above).
She blends traditional geometric traditional Kiowa styles with figurative
elements of the Shoshone, while also commenting on the derivation
of American modernist abstraction from traditional Native American
designs. Her figures are adorned with both traditional and contemporary
clothing items, as a commentary on being a Native American woman
in the modern world. Her work appears in numerous public collections
including the Brooklyn Museum, the Denver Art Museum, the National
Museum of the American Indian, the New Mexico Museum of Art, the
Heard Museum, and more.
Matika Wilbur
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Photograph from Project
562: "Changing the Way We See Native America"
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Matika Wilbur is a photographer and storyteller of
the Tulalip and Swinomish Tribes. She has been traveling across
the country for over 5 years, taking portrait photographs of Indian
Tribes across the country to reclaim the Native American image,
and to effectually change the way that Native Americans are represented.
Wilbur has a background in fashion and commercial photography, and
despite being very successful in her career, she knew in her heart
that she had to use her voice to expose the diverse, unique individual
personalities amidst Americas indigenous communities, who
are too often either neglected or misrepresented. She began her
portrait photo-series titled Project 562 in order to communicate
the lives of neglected and/or misrepresented peoples. Her portraits
capture a sense of intimacy and genuine raw emotion, likely because
of Martikas process. Her subjects choose where they want to
be photographed, and Martika spends up to multiple days with them,
bringing gifts and sharing songs and prayers. She seeks to bring
the individual to life in her works, placing her photos side by
side with text from the subject. She views herself as a creator
and messenger, and her project is a form of re-education,
offering a comprehensive visual curriculum of contemporary Native
culture. She writes "while holding true to my heritage and
tradition, I aim to empower contemporary visions. I believe that
my work is the answered prayers of my ancestors, as I walk the path
they fought to pave. Wilbur has travelled to over 300 sovereign
nations so far, and her photographs capture the vast diversity within
and between indigenous communities.
Frank Buffalo Hyde
In his vibrant, richly saturated, satirical graphic
realist paintings, artist Frank Buffalo Hyde (b. 1974) juxtaposes
21st century pop culture signifiers with symbols and themes from
his Native American heritage. Born in Santa Fe and raised on his
mothers Onandaga reservation, Hyde seeks to dismantle stereotypes
of Native American culture with his work. He takes imagery from
pop culture, politics, films, television shows, etc. and overlaps
the references to replicate what he refers to as the collective
unconsciousness of the 21st century. In his painting series In-Appropriate,
Hyde paints satirical portraits of people wearing jacked-up
portrayal(s) of Native American imagery that are at once funny
and revolting. Hyde overtly defies the aesthetics of what people
might think Native American art should look like, including
subjects such as selfie-sticks, iPhones, cheerleaders and plates
of buffalo wings. His narrative series I-Witness Culture explores
life as a Native American in the digital age. Hydes work addresses
contemporary Americas fear of the other, and the
tendency to homogenize indigenous cultures to counter this fear
(which ultimately materializes as racist mascots and costumes).
Hydes work has been exhibited internationally, and he was
artist-in-residence at the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts in
Santa Fe.
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